Zentangle Cards

Well hi... thanks for stopping by! I wanted to share a story about inspiration today.

Within the last year, I found an online friend, from an online friend, from an online friend... lol... did that ever happen to you? I started "following" someone on Facebook and before I knew what happened, I became really interested and inspired by some of her work.

Arwen is the lady I am talking about here, and her page is Tarot By Arwen... she's into a lot of tarot cards and happy hippie chick stuff like that, that I really dig. :) She's got such a positive message every day. Definitely something nice to see and a good way to start out my mornings when I am Facebookin' with my coffee at sunrise.

Arwen started posting these little doodles. At first they reminded me of something that I used to do on my book covers and notebooks in high school and college. I really liked what she was doing and sharing but I didn't know that there was a name for them until I started digging around!

Isn't that fancy? Come to find out, the "Zentangle" is really trendy right now. It's a form of doodling and I've really enjoyed the research that I've been doing to learn more about how and why.

Apparently, there are those who claim that "Zentangling" can be a form of therapy and that it can help relieve stress or even do things like helping people to overcome anxiety or substance abuse. Interesting... they say it also helps to spark your creativity (makes sense...) and can relieve stress. (Sure! Why not!) Thus... the "Zen" in "Zen- Tangle" I suppose. I did really love it but I wasn't sure where to start. Off to Google I went.

First, I found a ton of zentangle art on Pinterest. From there, I ran into quite a few sites with "how-to's" and even more than a couple of places that were offering online classes to learn how to do this. I'm more of a  do-it-yourself type, and found some sites like tanglepatterns to be more helpful to me.

I really enjoyed learning how to make dots and lines and connect them to make pretty patterns. These little "how to" sketches were pretty handy and I saved a whole ton of them on my iPad for future reference. I used quite a few tools from my scrapbooking stash along the way. I used pens, flourish stencils, and even my stitching template to mark patterns and dots that I connected with lines. I enjoyed dabbling with different markers pens and patterns. I decided to start small, and cut a few pieces of white cardstock to an A2 size.

Here are the first couple that I came up with. I worked on these while watching TV. They actually took me a couple of days each to complete. I DID find the experience to be very relaxing and enjoyable. I'm not sure how much good it did for my addiction to ink and rubber stamps, but hey, maybe I will work on that in the future.

Finally, I was super excited to see what popped up in one of my first "Google Searches" for zentangles. It's a card, by Jenny Gropp! (Love me some Jenny!) She was kind enough to allow me to link to her own tutorial and this beautiful card that she created with her own zentangle art. Who knew??

Finally, I decided to see what I could do with my own zentangle, using it as a background image on a card. I think that I really like what I see, and I think that I'll make some more!

Thank you, Lady Arwen and Ms. Jenny for allowing me to share your expertise today!