Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Zentangles

The art of zentangling has been an amusement of mine as of late. It's a type of meditation drawing, where you draw differet patterns inside spaces of a picture. Many of them use circles and circles within circles, and each space has a unique and fun pattern.

Zentangle example from Greeley County Library's Website and Zentangle Class


Usually they are done on zentangle tiles, and there are kits and books out there that help you get an idea on how to do certain patterns and what products to use. A lot of that can be found on Zentangle's website http://www.zentangle.com/ .

However, if you're like me, you know how to search the internet for some free pattern ideas and there are A LOT out there. You do need a few things to get started:


  • Paper or zentangle tiles (I use a drawing pad)
  • A pencil
  • Micron markers in different sizes (I bought this pack on Amazon)
  • Oppotional: Micron markes in different colors (I bought this pack on Amazon)

You start with drawing a pattern that you want to fill in.
Here's the first one I did:

  1. I started with drawing the three lines and decided to break it up into different sections. Each section was filled in with a pattern and I shaded using pencils.



2. Then I filled in the left section with circles, patterns and shaded.

3. Then finally I filled the right section with squares and each square had it's own pattern and shade. 


I did this while listening to mediation music and just focused on the drawing. It helped me keep my mind at ease, forget about everything ahead of time, and required no pre-planning just doing. It's a fun little project that costs less than $15 to start (if you don't get the kits and tiles from the website).

Show me some of your zentangles!