Zentangle Retreat

I spent the weekend in beautiful Mineral Point, WI at a Zentangle weekend retreat. The teacher was Diane Knaff from Madison. I encourage you to go over to her website and take a look at the beautiful things she's done.

It was a wicked rainy weekend so it was perfect weather to snuggle into a little studio at Shake Rag Alley School of the Arts and doodle away. I have pics of Mineral Point itself but will save them for another post. For today, I'll just show you the work we did over the two days worth of classes.

The morning of day one was a Beginners class where we learned the basics or tiles and strings and some different tangle patterns. In the afternoon we learned shading techniquest to make the tangles pop.

The last part of the afternoon concentrated on drawing with white ink and charcole on black tiles.

I love the way the jelly pen feels when it glides over the black paper.

On Sunday morning we learned how to 'deconstruct' the patterns that are all around us every day to make our own tangles for our work. On Sunday afternoon, we worked on Zendalas (Zantangled mandalas).  The first bit of the class concentrated on drawing our own mandala string to tangle in. I failed miserably as you can see below:

 

I even used a ruler, protractor and compass and still couldn't get it even!

In the afternoon, we worked on a prestrung tile; one that already has a lightly penciled mandala outline drawn on it. Much better! I tried to incorporated a lot of the techniques we'd learned over the weekend in one place. Better.

If I thought I was reved up last week in anticipation of this class, I'm twice as wired now. I have so many new ideas that I want to try out!!! If you ever get a chance to take Diane's class, I highly recommend it. What a stellar weekend!