Materials needed:
· Every black pen you can find in your house
· Draw, trace, copy a hand on your page
I touched on zentangling in an earlier post but now we are really going to get into zentangling that is an artistic activity that will take you into sweet solace and peace as you work on a zentangled peace. Zentangling reduces stress or anxiety and gives you a place of peace and calm. Zentangling is all about creating beautiful patterns. You can do it right in your art journal and do many pages once you do one. I am starting you on a hand and will give hints as I go along with doing it with you.
Zentangling was created by a calligrapher and artist who found ways to have mindful and meditative ways of dealing with life, really. When you get into zentangling you will find it very meditative. I could not meditate for the life of me. I have such a busy mind and yappy inner voice that at has given me that space and place to go to to get relief. When we are focused in doing repeated mark making slowly and mindfully, it is truly good medicine for the soul.
The marks and drawing that you do in this activity, when you are doing the tangles, dots, lines, curves, are all about finding Zen. Thus “ZENtangles”. It is never preplanned so you simply begin a some point on the paper and you simply begin and slowly go through the project and wait to see what happens. Do not listen to your critical voice. Just keep repeating patterns until your project is full.
Draw trace, copy a handprint. Outline the handprint with a thicker nibbed pen.
Then choose one digit to start on and begin doing repeating patterns until you get to the palm.
As you begin, your mind will begin to fall into the mark making. You will begin to allow your creativity take over (eventually you will want color and your mark making will become more and more sophisticated with practice).
Change up your patterns to be different on each digit. You can fill in with some dark, but I would wait until you get the hand all done before adding dark spaces.
Once you finish all the digits, decide on a central focus on the palm. It might be a heart, it might be a face, it might be anything you choose. Freestyle it! Then begin filling in that before moving on to rest of palm.
Once you get the hand filled in, then you can go in and add your dark space. Leave space for color we will add later.
Now we have that done, something needs to happen to the background. We can either have it busy or less busy. We can collage bits and pieces or draw and color it. We could do straight lines on the background or we can do swirly lines. I will do a both of collage, I think, and then straight lines.
Of course, I changed my mind after letting this sit for a few hours. I decided to do the background plain for now. I recognized that the eye in the center of the palm needed to be turquoise so… turquoise it is for the background.
Once I got that down, I simplified the background by simply putting three circles of dots to later write words in.
I hope you try this. It is really good to find the peace that zentangling can bring. Be sure and share your expression of Life’s a Tangle.
©Carol Desjarlais 4.13.21
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