learning on the job

I really like the thing Rick and Maria did with their new official tangle Rixty. They decided to show it to us, but not tell us how to draw it. Obviously a cynic would say it's to make us pay to take a class, but I like to think there's more to it than that, as they suggest themselves. It's for us to find our own way to draw it, to work out what works for us.

And that's what I've done. I played with it a couple of weeks ago. I had an idea in mind, of a rusty chain, so I laid down some watercolour tracks - but then forgot about it. Well, rust does take time to develop even when you live by the sea!

But today I went back to the tile, and laid Rixty over the colour. And I learned a few more things about the tangle as I did so -

• that it's hard to keep the central 'spine' line even
• that I'm not yet feeling confident to tackle the closely bunched Rixty
• that I'm okay at dividing the line to take the chain in two ways, but it got messy when I tried to join two together
• that my links tend to splay at their base, which makes it look like one long reticulated object rather than individual links.

At the moment I'm wondering if these will be problems that are ironed out by the eventual step-out - or if they are just those individual quirks, the unique Zentangle handwriting as it were, that each and every one of us has?

But surrounded by a little Tipple it certainly catches the image I had in mind. An old chain laying across a beach. The rust is spreading and staining the stones that touch it. Each link and stone has a slightly different colouring, making it stand out from the millions of others that surround it.