Wallpaper on a Spaceship and Monkey Anesthetization

A lot of people have asked me about my 'artistic process'.  How do I come up with the ideas to draw?  I laugh...to myself so as to not be rude of course. I don't consider myself an artist. I don't have a process. I learned about repetitive drawing by reading about Zentangles online. My process is this: I have a head full of mind monkeys, swinging from the mental chandeliers and flinging their own poo.  I draw repetitive patterns to lull them into a banana-sated siesta in their little hammocks among the limbs, twigs and branches where they otherwise spend their time maniacally jumping to conclusions and teetering precariously the edge of reason. That's my  entire 'process'-monkey anesthetization!

Case in point, I've been more than a wee bit angsty over the last week or so, so I wanted to start a project that would take a while. It should be repetitive but not too repetitive, large but not too large, detailed but not too detailed, difficult but not too difficult. And before you know it  I was angsty about what to draw.  Cause that's how I roll. Friggin' monkeys! So to break the mental 'gridlock',  I got a 12 x 12 sheet of white paper and drew a 1/2 inch grid in pencil. Too repetitive. So I drew circles all over it. Initially I thought that they would be orbs floating over a repetitive background. Lately I've been enamored by the pattern '8s' by Jane over a the 'See Jane Run' blog so I just started filling in the grid background with that.

Before long, one of the monkeys raised his drowsy head and decided that the circles weren't orbs but portals and so I drew the frames and rivets. He settled back into his slumber and I continued on with the '8s'.  I had worked on a smaller study of 8s the week before, experimenting with all of the designs I could use to 'fill in ' the basic '8s' pattern, so I used the one I like best; little shields with a gem in the middle connected by cables with porch door screens in between. This kept the monkeys down for several days. Every time they sat up in their hammocks, stretched their arms over their sleepy little heads and tried to yawn themselves awake, I grabbed a pen and lulled them back to Dream Land.

After I got the background all filled in, I filled the portals in with black and then filled them with stars. This is my very favorite pattern to do . I finished it and posted it to my Doodlers Group on Zentangle for constructive criticism. Someone said that it looked like 'wallpaper on a spaceship' but 'in a good way'. And so, there you have it, even though they are sleeping, sometimes little monkey dreams sneak into the very design of the thing created to lull them, and I end up with 'Wallpaper On A Spaceship'.

PS-I'm not crazy. My mother had me tested.