Merely…Auraknot?

August 11, 2016August 11, 2016 ~ CharkatTangles ~ 8 Comments

Ok…I am spent. But its been a great week so far. It did involve a trip to San Diego, with a Poke-Walk through Balboa Park…

And for a little history lesson…those beautiful buildings were put up for the 1915-1916 World’s Fair. I know by European standards, they are practically new, but for California standards, they are quite amazing! They are in use and beautifully maintained, and the park is really beautiful.

And finished off the day with some oysters at Beerfish (that place is amazing, too!)

But, I digress from what brings you here! This week’s Diva Challenge (#279) was a Duotangle featuring Meer and Auraknot. It did take me a couple of days to get my head wrapped around this, because I could only see it the same way I think everyone else saw it…but you know me, I had to be different. So I grabbed a dyed tile, and my compass (gasp!) and put in the basic flowers shape. I thought I would monochrome it, but it was looking really bland, so I went back in with the black Micron and finished it. Shaded with a chalk pastel.

Not quite as exciting as I had hoped for, but hey, sometimes things don’t work out like you want them to.

I also finished this gem this week…watercolor and Twinkling H2O background using the plastic wrap technique…I was playing with shading using Prismacolor Premier pencils, and not entirely sure I would do that again…but I do like how it turned out.

That’s all for now, I need to jump in the shower and go shopping…groceries need to be acquired!

Stay Crazy My Friends…and Catch them all!

(Actual step counts from last week are unavailable, but the FitBit is back and another 2 pounds is gone.)

The Night of the Dead FitBit

August 2, 2016August 2, 2016 ~ CharkatTangles ~ 11 Comments

So…not sure if anyone remembers an old US television program from the 1960’s called The Wild Wild West. They did a movie one off of it a few years back with Will Smith, but the original series featured Robert Conrad. He was rather like William Shatner in Star Trek, he always got to make out with the girls, shirtless scenes, and really questionable acting skills. So, what made me think of this was that all of the episodes of The Wild Wild West all started with “The Night of…” for at least the first 2 seasons.

So on Sunday night, I woke up to a strange light in my bedroom. Mike was off being Flyboy, so I was alone…and it was a bit creepy. Then I realized that my FitBit was stuck in update mode…and thusly, died that night. I was sad, because I had become really used to having that. It was my light (literally,) and the one thing that kept me honest about my walks (and justified that playing Pokemon Go was worthwhile for exercise.)

But…it was still under warranty, and they are sending out a new one post-haste.

So the second night of this week is actually a Knight(star). This week’s Diva Challenge (#278) was to use Daniel Lamothe’s tangle Knightstar. Daniel is one of our newer, and probably youngest, CZTs. He came up with this whilst in math class, and I think its pretty keen. He did a video for it you can see here, and as you can see, I did some step outs, of a sort, for it. Cool stuff!

Lots of fun things going on at the shop this week. Saturday was a Zentangle 101 class, which was a lot of fun. We had time to explore a “what if” with Crescent Moon, and did that on some ATCs at the end of class.

Also got a few things finished (but not framed…) This one is a study of Printemps with Sepia Micron on Fawn Stonehenge. Shape was a stencil. (you may see a theme this week…lol)

Sparkle does not photograph well, but this one has an iridescent background sprayed through a stencil on black paper. Use the Moonlight 06 to draw on top of it.

And this was hibiscus tea, sprayed through a stencil. Tangled with purple LePen and Metallic Gelly, shaded with purple Chalk Pastels. On Garza Papel and I am not sure why it looks yellowish, but it is very white.

And I started this one…on a day when I was a little down in the dumps, but it made me happy when I got at least the basic outline done. Designed with Margaret Applin’s Medallion Master Series stencils. Laid out on Stonehenge White 24 x 24 inches.

So…I think that’s enough to entertain you for this week. I’m off to further lament the death of my FitBit…at least it updated for the day before it died, so have last weeks totals.

Stay Crazy My Friends…Catch Them All.

(Last weeks totals: more than 42 miles walked, and 1 more pound gone)

Walking ’round in Circles

July 26, 2016July 26, 2016 ~ CharkatTangles ~ 10 Comments

Seems to be a moving kind of theme this past few weeks. I have been a lot more active, and seems like the Diva Challenge (#277) is right there with me. This week’s theme is Running ’round in Circles. But…I am a walker. I loved to run, and missed it a lot when I had to stop because of joint and back issues…but…I still walk. And I can do circles. I found tile in my bin that looked like it had a circle on it for my string (Twinkling H2O background!)

And I decided to stick with an “orby” type theme…

It is so sparkly in person…one of these days I’ll figure out how to photo the sparkles.

I also got this one in during yesterdays private lesson. I love working on Kona paper. It has such great tooth for using the General’s Multi Pastels on. The glow is amazing! (5.5″ square)

Over the weekend, I did a new weekend crafters market at Vail Headquarters. It was super hot, so there weren’t many people out. I will be doing this once a month and then a bit more frequently right before Christmas. Here is our little set up:

And now, I’m off to practice calligraphy, since I have not done that all week.

Stay Crazy & Catch Them All My Friends!

(Last weeks tally: 75,259 Steps, 38.03 miles, 4 pounds gone!)

Moving On Down the Road

July 21, 2016 ~ CharkatTangles ~ 9 Comments

It has been a week for moving…mostly moving my feet! I have caught the Pokemon Go bug, and have been clocking more than 10,000 steps a day, which has really gotten me back on track with my exercising. I know, I know…its a silly little game, and isn’t really all that important, but any little trick I can use to get my butt off the couch and moving works. And…this week I hatched our new tangle mascot…lol.

We have become rather attached to him, so I was inspired by this weeks Diva Challenge (#276) entitled “Space Trucking – Moving Tangles” to do my interpretation of this cute little ball of Hollibaugh (which I am calling variation PG114.)

And Olivia, my step-daughter and shop minion, joined in the tangly fun too:

While I don’t normally tangle in a vehicle, I do tangle a lot on the road, at my local Starbucks or on longer trips as well. I spend a lot of time, killing time, in airports, working in a cute little 4×6 Midori MD journal. I still need to tangle/decorate the plain cover (it also has a protective plastic cover,) but here are some of my musings from a few of my trips:

I also have an affinity for coasters, especially when they have a “doodle spot,” like this one from the Garage Brewing Co.:

Oh, and by the way, don’t tangle on coasters with your Microns…its a good way to bleed them dry. I always carry a few Pentel G2’s or other Gel Pens in my purse for this.

We had an awesome Zentangle 101 class last Saturday evening, and the class was nice enough to let me capture their mosaic so I could post it. Everyone had a blast.

The words were from a meditative focus from the leader of this particular group. I think they fit in quite nicely!

The August Schedule is up…be sure to check it out!

Stay Crazy My Friends!

Give Peace a Chance?

July 13, 2016 ~ CharkatTangles ~ 8 Comments

I sit here writing this with a lot of turbulence in my brain today.

I’ve just come off a very awesome week of working at the Major League Baseball All-Star Game Fan Fest as a volunteer. It was a lot of fun helping people get the most out of their visit to beautiful Southern California. The weather was perfect and there were only a few negative folks around. All in all, everyone, including me, had a good time. (Excuse my bright, shiny forehead, but it wasn’t easy taking a selfie at the world’s largest baseball with all the crazy lights they were using.)

And I carried on having a great start to this week, with a guest Diva (#275), Suzanne Fluhr, CZT. Suzanne is an awesome blogger, and I enjoy reading her travelogs very much, so when she wrote this week’s challenge, she did so with a heavy heart over all the hateful things that have been going on in our beautiful country as of late. Suzanne wanted us to Give Peace a Chance. I love that song…and it played over and over in my head while I was working on this:

I wish that everyone on the planet would take a minute and step out of their own lives and just be nice to other people. I trust that this can happen. I meditate on it frequently.

The conflict in my brain today comes from my desire for peace, and my desire for safety in my community. In the past couple of years, the homeless population in our town has increased quite a bit. Well intentioned people give them food and money, instead of directing them to the social services that can help them, and now suddenly we have a problem. I’m sad for their plight. I truly feel for them (and its been a bit on the warm side here, so that makes their comfort here a bit uneasy.) I know there are many programs here set up to help them, but as we all learn the hard way, you have to want help to seek it. But what do we do? It is a bit of a conundrum.

Just Trust Peace.

On the shop notes for this week, we have some fun stuff on the schedule. Rock and Tangle is Friday night (the 15th) from 4-9 pm. Regardless of what you are working on, come on down and play! I have all kinds of fun things to try if you are in a slump. Making stuff always makes you happy!

Black and White Summer is shaping up to be a great time too. Saturday, the 23rd, from 10-3, I have an awesome technique to share with you. Bring your basic tangle supplies, I will supply the rest. My good pal Karen did hers ahead of time since she will be out of town, so here is a preview:

She says it is not done yet, but I think it is shaping up quite nicely! I am working on a small set of my initials, so far I finished K. Hopefully will have the C done soon!

I should have the August schedule up by the end of the week.

A parting shot from the traveling exhibit from Cooperstown (The Baseball Hall of Fame.) There be Giants there. Say Hey Willie Mays!

Stay Crazy My Friends.

Bang…Boom…BLAM!

July 4, 2016July 4, 2016 ~ CharkatTangles ~ 12 Comments

Yep, that’s right…it is Independence Day here in the United States. I also like to call it the day we find out which of our neighborhood kids are not that smart and got illegal fireworks. (Disclaimer…Southern California is VERY dry and we have a really wicked fire season here, where many of the fires are human caused…)

But…all in all, it is a good day to be American. As a veteran, I know what it took to get here, and while I worry about the future of my country, I do celebrate it with the traditional baseball (Giants won, 3-1 over the Rockies,) hot dogs (bacon wrapped and baked, with mole aloi, chopped onions, and dijon,) and tangling (in support of this week’s Diva Challenge #274 entitled My Country Tis of Thee.)

The scanner never picks up the glitter and sparkle, but I think sometimes less is more. I sprayed the background through a star stencil with my eBrush and Spectrum Noir markers, then tangled with a blue Micron, clear Stardust Gelly Roll, Silver Gelly Roll, and indigo and white chalk pastels. Seems more complicated when I type it out (kinda like those hot dogs…lol.)

Been doing some other finishing this week, and this ultra cute elephant (or elephunk as I call him) emerged.

I seem to use an awful lot of pens for something so small…lol. He is Brusho paints dabbed through a Dreamweaver stencil. I decided I liked the paint bleeds and didn’t cover them up. I think it makes him look artsy.

I also finally finished this great up-cycle project for a display frame.

I had 2 frames left from a reframing project, and used a piano hinge to join them, and installed eye screws and picture wire in copper and silver. The clips are quilting clips. I did learn the importance of drilling pilot holes for the eye screws after one of them slipped and left a nasty gash in my left palm. But other than that, I think it came out really CUTE!

I am going to be a bit busy this week, with classes and I volunteered to work the Major League Baseball All-Star FanFest in San Diego. For anyone that knows how much I love baseball, this is going to be a very memorable event for me, and I get to be involved for free! I don’t get to see the game (except on TV) but just being around so much baseball stuff is awesome!

Stay Crazy My Friends!

Making Old Things New Again

June 30, 2016June 30, 2016 ~ CharkatTangles ~ 7 Comments

Wow…another whirlwind weekend and right into a busy week! Time flies when you love what you do! I am blessed and grateful on a daily basis to be able to do what my heart tells me to do.

In my early days of Zentangle, I would start a tile and if it did not go the way I wanted it to, I would banish it to a pile of Forgotten Tiles (rather like the Island of Misfit Toys in Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer.) I just could not seem to figure out, at that time, how to make them work, and I would not toss them out because they held some value for me.

So, for this weeks Diva Challenge (#273), I dove into that pile to find one that needed some love and a bit of a “Tangle Remix.” I picked this tile, that I was not happy with the Betweed on, but I had done such a nice job on the gold I did not want to toss it.

And I used the adage “When in doubt, black it out.”

And once that was dry (I left it overnight) I went back to work on it, with the gold pen on the black areas, and a little Rick’s Paradox. I thought briefly about putting more, but I t think it really needed a little white space.

See, all better now!

I spent this past weekend up in Big Bear, California at a retreat called Dancing with Petals and Leaves: Mixed Media and Color Play put on by Sharla Hicks, CZT and artist of unbelievable talent. It was an intense weekend (Thursday – Sunday) of color theory, tangling, print making of all sorts, and outstanding food.

By the end of Thursday, we had done color theory and alcohol printing and I made this awesome piece.

We did a lot of tangling, using the “What ifs” and exploring different forms…

And we played with print making on a larger scale, using big tools!

And lots and lots of other fun things…

Oh, and did I mention food? We ate VERY well.

And I will leave you with this…my pile of things that need to be worked on or finished is so much larger now!

And be sure to join me in July for some fun stuff! Stay Crazy My Friends!

Red Hot in Black and White

June 20, 2016 ~ CharkatTangles ~ 10 Comments

So, I’m not going to wax all poetic about the state of anything this week except the HEAT WAVE we are experiencing here in the Southwest (and I dare say, other parts of the country. Staying inside and tangling sounds like a great alternative to going anywhere, but I did have to go into the studio today for my monthly session with my “kids” (11 year old girls!) I made a pit stop on the way home to pick up some groceries and stop into Michael’s (for my foreign friends, that’s a large arts and crafts store here in the US.) Everyplace was like a ghost town, I was only one of two customers in Michael’s. Rather eerie.

This week’s Diva Challenge (#272) was titled “Black and White and Red All Over.” I had a bit of fun with this with the girls today, as we learned a few new tangles and used stencils to make strings to tangle.

So…while that was cute, I wasn’t sure that “qualified” for my weekly Diva entry, so I had to do another tile when I got home…

I have been hard at work this week, finishing up stuff and things, and shop samples, and putting together the schedule for July!

If you are in the area, I have a little creative time management going on this Wednesday, with Pocket Journals.

And later in July, this awesome Black and White Summer.

So if you get a chance, come on down!

Back to work for me! Stay Crazy My Friends!

Courage in the Wake of Adversity

June 15, 2016 ~ CharkatTangles ~ 8 Comments

Yes…I know that waxes rather profound as a title. This week has been a rather sad one all over the world, but one thing the tragedy in Orlando has done is bring people together in the face of adversity. I would like to think that, as a world, we can be, stronger together. And that would take some courage for a lot of people, to put aside their prejudices in the name of peace and just downright accept EVERYONE.

Pointing fingers, blaming, and looking for scapegoats accomplishes nothing. But we all know that. I’ve recently read a lot on the Responsibility Foundation. Their main goal is to Educate, Engage, and Elevate the ideal of Responsibility, especially in today’s young people. Everyone takes accountability for their actions…there is no blame for the things that “happen to you.” I like this idea, and its ideals. I’ve long thought that people take too little responsibility for what happens in their lives, and constantly look for someone else to blame for their woes.

But these things all take COURAGE. And in the Army Values, that means to me, Personal Courage.

Personal Courage as defined by the Army, is to face fear, danger or adversity.

It’s not always easy. But then, life isn’t easy either. All we can do is take responsibility and have compassion. These things are free.

I know you don’t come to my blog to read, but you do come here for my art, and for that I am grateful. I use Zentangle and other art forms to calm my mind when things are in a state of adversity and that is often reflected in my work. So when The Diva sent out this weeks Challenge (#271) to interpret Beads of Courage, I meditated on that for a while.

Beads of Courage is an arts in medicine program that helps kids with chronic or life threatening illness tell the story of their medical journey. Each bead represents something different. A different procedure or appointment, or special circumstance. For example, when seeing a doctor or getting a poke instead of getting a sticker when they leave, they are given a glass bead for each thing. (blue for doctor, black for poke… some other beads are yellow=night in the hospital, pink=respiratory support, magenta=trip to emergent care, teal=tube insertion or removal, rainbow=therapy; physical, speech, occupational, respiratory) and every child’s string is different and unique to their story.

This has been very personal to The Diva, as her ADORABLE little Artoo has Moebius Syndrome, and spends *lot* of time in hospitals and at doctor visits.

So this week, I combined my meditation for Orlando with Beads of Courage, and came up with this:

I hope the sun shines on the families affected by this, and any other adversities.

I should have the July Schedule up by the end of the week. I have air-conditioning! Come in to escape the heat and relax. Rock and Tangle this Friday Night!

Stay Crazy My Friends…Make Stuff…You will feel better!

And one final note…To quote Rush, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

Blue Skye

May 30, 2016 ~ CharkatTangles ~ 14 Comments

This week’s Diva Challenge (#270) is using Margaret Bremner, CZT’s new tangle Skye. I have admired this tangle since she first introduced it, but I am a bit intimidated by it, so I have not tried it, until today.

I generally do not have to practice tangles…I can see them once in step outs and just do them…this was not the case here! I had to practice this one…more than once…I was vexed!

And it took me the better part of a few hours to get through them…I worked through this on both sides!

But, I got through it, as you can see with the white one on the left, and finally got up the courage to grab one of my Twinking H2O tiles that I painted at TangleU. I love what Margaret does with the monochrome colors she uses, so I decided to give that a whirl. I used a Stabilo Fineliner in blue, for the first time, gold Gelly Roll, and General’s Chalk Pastel in Indigo.

Just as an FYI…the Stabilo bled when I sprayed it with my usual fixative. Fortunately, I like the effect and the lines stayed ok. Lessons learned! (By the way…I spray most everything because I lot of my work gets handled a lot…when I teach and such…)

Had a fun class with 2 of my regular students last Saturday, where we explored some single element tangles on Bijou tiles. I think we did some pretty neat work!

And…I have a 3-Part class coming up on preparing backgrounds and tangling on larger formats, and here is a sample of what we will be doing.

10 x 10 inch watercolor paper…was playing around with Color Bursts by Ken Oliver. The paper is actually much whiter than it photographed…not sure what is up with that!

Lots of fun things on the schedule in June, be sure to check it out!

Have a Crazy Art Filled Week!