I have always enjoyed quotes and have occasionally used them in pieces of art or inspiration for a piece of art. In Sandy Steen Bartholomew’s article in Cloth, Paper, Scissors she used words and journalling with her zentangles and I thought that could be the perfect next step to explore where I could take my doodles. At this point I also wanted to go larger. The small size was easy to finish and fun to do but would I enjoy taking it larger? If I was going to include quotes then I would want a larger format to explore this more.
So where do I start? Which quote do I choose? Since I am a bit of a Christmas music fan ( I have purchased 11 new Christmas CDs this year) and I have been listening to Christmas music on and off since July I had recently listened to a song on Windham Hill’s “Winter Solstice On Ice” which has the Jim Brickman's song “Your Love.” I included the lyrics to the song in my post for Wayne and my anniversary.
I started out with making the strings for the piece which I placed on a 11” x 14” sheet of paper. I used the lyrics to inspire how the strings would look. Since it was a love song I included a heart and some stylized wings for the “You could give me wings to fly.” After the strings were finished I added the lyrics writing them so that they followed the lines of the strings. I wasn’t worried about the whole thing being written in order or upside right. I did keep the individual verses together. I contained the lyrics with lines on either side of them so that I would not put the tangles too close so that you couldn’t read the lyrics.
Then it was time to play. Many of the tangles are just regular tangles that I had found through Sandy’s article, blog and the Zentangle website; I also let the lyrics inspire some of the tangles including feathers, flowers, rings, hearts, the sun, moon and stars. In this piece some of the tangles are my own ideas and others are variations of the ones on the various sites. You can find inspiration for new tangles in the patterns that are all around you in everyday life; they are repetitive patterns.
After the “Your Love” piece I wanted to try using some quotes about creativity and so I chose several that I find inspiring.
“The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.” ~Alan Alda
“Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow talent to the dark places it leads” ~Erica Jong
“To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage” ~Georgia O’Keefe
More strings and words and time to play again with tangles. I was working on this one on the couch next to Wayne and he came up with the ideas for a couple of new tangles for me. He has since come up with a few more tangle ideas for me which is kind of fun.
Although I do not like this piece as much as my previous piece I still learned a lot and tried new things and I don’t dislike it I just don’t think it is quite as strong a piece.
The next piece was also 11 x 14 but no quotes this time. I wanted to see what happened if I took some stylized images and combined them adding strings to join the images and further divide the piece. With Christmas approaching I thought I would try using a theme. I also wanted to see what happened if I added some selective color to the piece. I made a circle to represent a wreath and a Christmas tree with a star on top. Some of the tangles here were representative of the season like Christmas lights and poinsettias and other were just regular tangles. I really liked how this piece turned out. It has a graphic feel to it.
1 comment:
Your Zentangles are great
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