one for the wall

This week the Diva has invited us to play with our fragments and reticula.  I don't have the official Zentangle Primer yet.  I was lucky to find a second hand copy of The Book of Zentangle on Amazon so avoided hefty shipping charges, and was happy to give it a home!  Maybe the same will happen one day with the Primer (it feels a bit like Wonka's Golden Tickets - which is fine by me) but until then I can still enjoy the concept of grids and seeds under their new names without the official rule book right?

I designed a fragment based on my Sati tangle - pictured above.  I drew a basic reticula - a 4 x4 grid - on paper coloured with very bright yellow streaks.  Then I started to add in the fragments, turning it this way and that to make the pattern fit together.  This is one of those places where in-progress images tell the story better than I can.

As I've seen a few others observe, this is a different type of tangling that the more freeform string filling thing.  This feel more planned, more methodical, controlled.  But no less pleasurable for that.  It's more akin to working on a Zendala, with repetition and symmetry.  I can see this really being what I crave sometimes, but not always. 

Back to the tile.  For the final stage it's time to fiddle about - this is the bit that makes it come to life for me.  The shading, the blobs of gold paint (I had it out anyway and couldn't resist), making some of the black dots larger (as they looked lost), dotting those with white gel ink.  And then the dreaming.  If I were a ceramic artist - think of the tiles I could design and paint... but then again no!