Hello one and all! I’m actually posting challenges from the last 2 weeks because my life has been so crazy lately. I suppose I’ll start with the more recent ones:
Diva Challenge 268
This challenge was called “A bit-o-black.” I decided pretty quickly that I wanted to do something with a lot of black pearls. so I focused on orb-y patterns. The string, randomly selected from Tanglepatterns.com, is number 142. It was fun, because I got to play with some of my favorite tangles — Boo*Kee, Oybay, Purk, and Onamata. I also worked in some Quibble, Akoya, and one non-orb pattern, D-Vine. The part that was less fun was filling in all the orbs. My ultra-fine-tip black sharpie was all like, “ha ha, nope,” so I ended up using a gel-ink pen, which I think ended up okay. For shading I went with a darker pencil than the HB I usually use — I think it was a 3B.
Made by Joey 113
This one was a lot of fun. It’s based on a Roman Numeral XII; the number is a lot more obvious than it is in a lot of my others I’ve done for this challenge series. The tangles were Chemystery, Cruffle, Garlic Cloves (really they look more like watermelons or beach balls to me, but I like the pattern anyway), Ipso, and Verdigogh. All of these are fun except for Verdigogh which I’ve never gotten along with for some reason. I think it ended up working for me this time, though. The real fun was the coloring. For the atoms or whatever they’re supposed to be in Chemystery, I used my Sharpies. I wasn’t actually expecting them to be so translucent, but I kind of like how they look like multi-colored bubbles. For the “ladders” of Chem and the “stalk” of Verd I used some metalic Crayola markers, and I’m pleased with how they turned out. For the rest I used my favorite colored pencils: before I started Zentangle earlier this year, I was on a real coloring kick. Looking at this now, I realize that I never really shaded it, but I actually kind of like it this way.
Now let’s step in the wayback machine:
Diva Challenge 267
This one is a duotangle of Drupe and Pokeroot. I’ve never been a huge fan of Pokeroot, to be honest, but I like a good challenge. Once again, the coloring was the real fun here. Oh, and yeah, some of those are actually Pokeleaf instead of Pokeroot.
Joey Challenge 112
This one is a Monotangle on Knightsbridge. It’s one of those basic patterns that I actually try not do too often so that I don’t get too much in a comfort zone with it. I took some inspiration from Margaret Bremmer’s expanded guide to the tangle — if you haven’t checked those out you really should. I made an attempt at Knightspeek, which I thought was really cool since it resembles a pattern I learned and loved in elementary school — and I kind of screwed it up made it uniquely my own through unplanned variations. I also attempted some mashups of my own — Knightsdox (Paradox with alternating Black and white — needs some work) and K’nzeppel, which should be self-explanatory. I also did a “Knightsbridge inside of Knighstbridge” I’m calling “Knightsception” (and yes, I know that’s not really what “Inception” means). And since this was all otherwise black and white, a little color up top.
Tangle with Dr. Tutt 