Gathering #8.

The Gathering of May 2015

Because Mother's Day is the second Sunday of May, the Intermountain Tangler Gathering met on the third Sunday, because most of us are mothers. (Dave is a dad, and his day is coming). We had a nice turnout of some familiar friends.




busy practicing and creating and visiting and laughing

Barbara, Leslie, Lisa, Christiana and Elyssa (Stacy's girls), Dave and HeidiSue were all there. As always, we shared tips and ideas, and Dave told a little bit about his CZT seminar last month. He was at CZT #19 and says it was awesome. He got to meet many wonderful artists (he was the only man there, besides Rick, the host. (Hopefully it wasn't TOO painful being surrounded by nothing but women.) He was very impressed by the ladies from Taiwan who were there. Also at the CZT #19 Seminar were Susanne Durville, and Antonine Carlo of the "I am the Diva" weekly Challenges.

We were utterly stunned by the work from Christiana and Elyssa's pens.
What amazing attention to detail. These young ladies are developing into genuine artists, with favorite styles, supplies they prefer, and opinions on different tangle patterns.




Christiana is a Dr Who AND a zentangle fan!



Christiana working on her dalek.


















Christiana is using the outline of a Dalek for a string, and filling in all the various shapes with an array of tangle patterns. This is a larger piece, probably 24" long by 18" wide. Hers was the largest art piece of any of us. She used the time of the gathering to finish filling in the black background behind the flowers in the dome of the Dalek.



Elyssa's creation was stunning





This Tree of Life that Elyssa is working on was striking for many reasons. Elyssa said she loves working on the colored paper because of how beautiful the white highlights look.



 


Elisa loves the gray tone paper

Her work is inspiring to say the least. A few people said they were going to play with toned paper and see what they could do with white highlights. This brought up a discussion of white charcoal pencils. A few of us were familiar with General's White Charcoal pencils, and in fact Elyssa mentioned how nicely it blends with a stump.

Speaking of supplies, HeidiSue brought along her set of glittering gel pens:

Heidi Sue's sparkly gel pens

 

finishing touches on a bookmark

Heidi likes these pens for putting in a bit of sparkle, especially on colored tiles. For instance, when you have a dark purple background, it's really pleasing to see a bit of purple glint in a few places on your design.


We learned/practiced three patterns: Hi-bred, Artoo, and A-fog and Leslie started right away making a Trio-Tangle using only those tangle patterns. It was looking pretty good before we finished.

One of the more impressive things we saw was Leslie's pattern library. She uses ATC sized tiles, putting the pattern on one side, and the step outs on the back. They are stored in baseball card sleeves, nine to a page, and all kept in a looseleaf binder.



Impressive work!

Lisa, Barbara, and Leslie busy creating.

                                                                         


a sunburst of brilliance!

Leslie told how, as she was finishing inking this piece, her son said it needed some color. Well, didn't she just take his advice? What a beautiful work of art this is!

The star of this show is Mi2, but you can also see b'tweed, shattuck, onomato, black perls, and lots of lines, curves, V's, and other shapes.

Barbara brought along a set of tiles that she has framed. It is an elegant piece, perfect for a wall in the front room. She found the frame at Michael's, so this isn't even a custom framing job. Quite inexpensive, yet look how appealing it is.

Each tile is unique, and together they make a unity of form

The tiles are all done in black ink on white tiles, and then matted with white, and a black frame. it comes together very nicely, giving the eye interesting things to look at in detail, or very pleasant to take in from a distance.

This is a piece HeidiSue created for a Facebook challenge page, where the only rule is, your patterns must stack, any one direction. The chief purpose of this was to practice Dave's pattern, putki. It is SO COOL how it looks like planks propped up. It sorta looks like a stroll out in the country.

Dave's pattern putki runs across like a curvy railroad track

sharing ideas

Heidi, Leslie, Lisa, Barbara, talking about strings? Tiles? Tangles? Who knows! But one thing is for sure, the ideas and creative energy in these Gatherings is wonderful. As always, a great way to spend a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon.

As a PS to HeidiSue's great Blog Post. 

Here is a little technique that I came across on LonettA's Post for Laura Harms' Diva Challenge #218. The challenge was to use white on a black tile. LonettA had a chalk shading in one corner of her challenge Tile, and it had a pattern drawn in it. I looked at it for a long time and hoped that later in the comments it would be explained how she did it. At that time there was no explanation available. So I just experimented. Here is the result. (It was drawn on a Bijou size Tile.)

Can you believe it? I was so surprised to see the pen draw in this chalk shaded corner. First, I did use the blending stump, (a clean stump dedicated to white blending only,) to smooth out the shaded chalk area. The pen, a Sukara .01 black, did not hesitate, skip or ball up in the drawing of this example. This was a very quickly drawn Tile as it was meant to be just a test. 

I am happily amazed at the result. Give it a try, and I think you will find uses for this technique in your future white on black Tangling projects.

When I had finished this test, I did spray it with a fixative, as one should always do at the completion of a tile that has had chalk, or pastel media applied. 

See all of you wonderful artists next month....David