Gathering #12

Our One Year Anniversary!


We had a terrific Intermountain Tanglers Gathering this September, and it's hard to believe, we have been going at it for a full year! With our one year mark in mind, we thought it would be fun to tell how things got started.



When HeidiSue started participating in various online tangle challenges, she noticed that there was a very friendly and kind person who kept making the most interesting comments on people's blogs. David Hunter. With a very hip and cool looking photographer as his profile picture, she thought "Wouldn't it be cool to meet this guy!" but really, on the internet, you so rarely get to meet people you are interacting with, right? So she just kept on participating in the Diva Challenge, and everywhere she went to see other people's entries, she found interesting and insightful comments by this David Hunter person.



Well eventually she figured it out: you can check a person's blog profile to learn more about them, and when she checked on Dave's blog, she found that he is located in Salt Lake, her own home town! So, a few clicks later, and a few minutes of keyboarding, and she had sent him a message by way of his blog.



Within two weeks, we had our first meeting. Dave's sweet wife Linda was there, and we spent a couple of hours sharing techniques and enjoying each other's sketchbooks and completed tiles. We began putting out word by way of library bulletin boards, and Dave got in touch with Marie English, a CZT here in Salt Lake. The next month, we were on our way, with two gals who heard of us thru Marie. You can read about that meeting at this link.

And of course, you can see what we've been up to every month. Just click on any link in the archives to the right.



So here we are, a year later. We had a wonderful get together.
  

Leslie Burge and her sisters Judy and Deb came, along with Lisa and Barb who have become real regulars. Lorraine, HeidiSue and David, along with JoAnn that Dave met recently.

The entire crowd, happy at work

Heidi and Barb admiring Lorraine's
work. She has been tangling for a little while and found our info on tanglepatterns.com.




Dave brought a "date" :) a lady friend, JoAnn, who was interested in trying her hand at this art form, and she did AMAZINGLY well for "her first time ever." It was sure nice meeting her.






We always have such a fine looking jumble everywhere

Leslie and Judy visiting

Taking phone pics of some pieces



HeidiSue broke a long dry spell when she ran with an idea: Tangled Hair. With the outline of a face, penciled in hair-looking "string" all around it, and then fill in all the hair with various tangles. It is a fun and really interesting way to create.

A rococo look to this wild haired gal.

Leslie, Judy, Deb, and Lisa creating madly!

This Month's Practice sheet showed the Step-Outs for:

Antique by Kathy Barringer

4 Corners by Barbara Finwall

2/8's by Helen Williams

Gathering #11

New Post for the Fun Gathering on Aug 9, 2015

Our August Gathering was fun, as they always are. We had a couple of newbies: Deb who is Leslie's sister, and Katie, who is Heidi's daughter.
Lisa, Dave, Ivory, Leslie and Heidi were there too.

From the right: Leslie, Deb, Heidi, Katie, Lisa.

Leslie brought inks, and we blotted them onto paper, then tangled over the colors. Fun stuff!

sometimes working on a piece you don't like, turns things around

A little tin, found at JoAnn's Fabrics, is the perfect size.

Ivory caught some zzzzz's

Notice the three ring binder here. It is the perfect size for 5x8" sketchbook pages. Heidi bought hers at Target, with a couple sets of page protectors the right size. This way, you can choose your favorites for glancing through. It's much less cumbersome than a dozen scrapbooks with pages of random playtime between the good stuff.

the focus is so good

Leslie and Deb visiting

What a fun group we've got here. Nearly every time, there is someone new, and we have had repeat visits many times.

 

Here are links to the two Practice Patterns in this weeks handout:

BB

Ditto

Next month, will it be a full year that we've been doing this? Hard to believe! 

Gathering #10

July Gathering.

This was such a fun get together, including another local CZT, Tanya, who went to the 20th seminar. She found the Intermountain Tanglers online and joined us for the first time when we last met, July 12.
Welcome, Tanya!

Starting front/left, going counterclockwise: Lisa, Ivory, Dave, Leslie, her sister Judy, Tanya, and Heidi Sue. (Didn't I say that Dave WOULD be in this group pic? A JoAnn's worker took the pic for us.)

You sassy girls!

Dave got busy with his camera, as always.

Dave's granddaughter Ivory

This is Tanya!

Leslie brought alcohol inks and glossy cardstock to play with

Leslie's ink card was so warm! She started tangling on it right away. We want to see if the pigma perma pens work better on the glossy finish, because we found the regular pigma microns smeared. The glossy paper just doesn't hold onto the pigma ink well.

HeidiSue and Tanya enjoying each other's work

Judy checking out a pen

Ivory kept at it, making one piece after another in pencil

A bold piece with strong patterns and an eye popping palette.

We shared a lot of our pieces together. This colorful spiral mandala is Judy's creation.
Not quite finished, but a good start, to be sure.

like a rose window in a cathedral

 
Leslie worked on this zendala and brought it. The precision in her lines is impeccable! Very impressive work. Her inspiration for this piece was PeterDraws on youtube. He has many videos depicting his process, methods, thinking, and his amazing style of art. Similar to zentangle, but definitely with his own flair.

Good stuff, Leslie!

A little bit like a landscape?

Heidi Sue had a piece in her sketchbook, done in black ink, with a few sections of green ink, shaded in various hues of green. 

Dave has been very busy with organizing and tidying up his home, along with a pretty big project involving the sidewalk and a local scout who is fixing up that sidewalk for his Eagle Project. so Dave hasn't produced as much art as is his usual habit. Next time, there'll be something from him. At least, we sure do hope so!

Gathering #9

IT Gathering: The June Edition

We had a terrific get together this month, though attendance was a teeny bit less than we've gotten accustomed to.

Leslie, Lisa and her little girl Sophie, Dave, and Heidi Sue were there.



Hi Sophie, peeking out from behind your momma!

 Next time, David Hunter WILL be in the picture. (May be.)

We all worked on a fun project called Flextangle, with varying degrees of coolness. It ends up being a very fun little gizmo to fiddle around with, and if you match up your lines with the tickmarks, the patterns are neat when they connect as you fold it. You can check out the link to this cool little project in our resources tab.

Leslie put some really neat connecting patterns in hers



Tangling in the flextangle template...  and the template, folded and ready to assemble




folded and ready to play with





a page from HeidiSue's sketchbook

As always, we had our materials and supplies, and favorite pieces from our sketchbooks. Sometimes we get more than just ideas sketched in our sketchbooks and end up with actual pieces of art. 

Leslie had a very pretty ZIA in her sketchbook


Once again, a most wonderful couple of hours. It's so much fun, being in a room with a lot of creative people. It's exciting to have Lisa join us, who is very new to Zentangle type art, and she is busy learning patterns and trying things. It will be great to see some of her stuff completed.

What are they talking about? Tangling, maybe?



The practice Pattern worksheet this month had three pattern step-outs. 

      1- BeeLine - Zentangle

    2- Baton - Carole Ohl

         3- Akoya - Sandy Hunter

Dave attempted to use the three Practice Patterns in this drawing

from his Sketchbook.

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