One Zentangle a Day

today’s patterns and any previously learned patterns but add a twist: Try to create a Tangleation of your favorite pattern to add to this tile.
    Tat was used in a rounded form in the pattern at the top of the tile and in a spiky form in the lower side of the tile.

Your Watercolor Palette
    Almost every boxed set, whether it is pencils or paint, comes with both a warm and cool selection of each of the primary colors. For example, the colors in the Sakura travel watercolor set can be divided into a cool and warm color wheel. For the primary warm color wheel I used cadmium red, aureolin yellow, and ultramarine blue. For the cool color wheel, I used quinacridone rose, lemon yellow, and cerulean blue.
    I chose cadmium red over vermilion because the amount of red to yellow was more balanced in cadmium red. I chose quinacridone red over alizarin red because there was a greater balance of red to blue in the quinacridone red.
    ON A PAGE IN YOUR SKETCHBOOK, create warm and cool color wheels using watercolor, gouache, or colored pencils. Experiment creating color mixes with the leftover colors from your mixes. Label them so that you can reproduce the colors.

DAY 23 PAPER BATIK
    MATERIALS
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Micron 01 pen
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white Glaze pen
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2B pencil
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sketchbook
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white tile
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tile from watercolor paper
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watercolors
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small round paintbrush
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small bucket of water

Daily Tangles
    Try these two patterns. Today’s official Zentangle is Kathy’s Dilemma. This fun tangle fills any shaped area of the string with triangles. I love how this pattern lends itself to altering. If the triangles are drawn large enough, a pattern can be drawn in them. If the background is spacious, a pattern can be added there, and so on. As much as Flux shows up in my work, I am sure you can tell it is one of my favorite patterns. Flux is also one of my favorite patterns from which to create Tangleations. Flux in vine form can be used as a great border, a broken line pattern that stops and starts through other patterns, entwined around itself to fill a whole area of a string, or used to transition between two patterns.

    Practice these patterns in your sketchbook until they are familiar. Using today’s patterns and any other pattern or Tangleation of previously learned patterns, create a Zentangle tile. Remember to practice the eleven-step process as you create your tile. Periodically stop to look at the tile from a short distance. Turn the tile as you examine the possibilities from every direction.
    This tile contains a Tangleation of Mysteria and Bales.
    THE GLAZE GEL PEN gives us a lot of options for use in art. We were first introduced to this pen on day 9, and as we saw, it creates a great tone-on-tone drawing when used on dark paper. Today we are using it on white paper. Batik work will often have a repeating pattern throughout the piece. For this exercise, it is fine to stick to using one or two repeating patterns or several different patterns. You will want to work in good lighting on this project. When you use the pen on white paper, the ink will appear on the paper as a milky light blue color. When it dries it will be clear. Remember this ink takes a couple of minutes to dry, so be careful not to smudge the wet ink as you draw.
    We will not draw a string with a pencil for this piece, as the pencil will show through the ink and watercolor. You can draw a thumbnail sketch of one in your sketchbook to follow, or just pick up the Glaze pen and start drawing in one area of the tile. When there seems to be enough of that pattern, stop, cap your pen, and while the ink dries, examine your tile from arm’s length. Turn the tile in all four directions, examining the possibilities your art piece can go. When you are ready, draw in the next pattern. Continue this way until you are satisfied with the tile and feel it is finished. Let the ink dry.
    Decide on a color palette for painting the background of the tile. The paint is going to make your drawing pop out. When mixing the watercolor paint, you want to make strong washes of color. The bolder the background color, the more the white line drawing will pop. Once your palette colors are mixed, you are ready to paint. You can mist the tile with water to work with a wet-on-wet technique. In a wet-on-wet technique, the paper is wet and the medium being used on the paper is wet. This technique is great for getting wonderful natural color mixes because the water on the paper allows the paint to