Hi and welcome back to the Chrissie Murphy Designs Blog. I thought I’d share a tile from a recent meetup with the Yintangles Group I’m a part of. On Sunday 17 October, 2017, Tegan Nielsen CZT lead our little group in tangling a Foundations Based Tile that I absolutely loved. Let’s have a deeper look at it.
Tegan provided us with a couple of different styles to consider for the class. A traditional black and white tile, a grey and blue tile and a Renaissance styled tile. I chose to work in the Renaissance colours using foundational tools.
What’s a foundation based tile?
Tegan began by sharing how much she’d been enjoying going back to basics with tangling recently.
She began by leading us in the foundational principles of Zentangle. The 8 steps of Zentangling are:
- Step 01 – Gratitude and Appreciation
- Step 02 – Corner Dots
- Step 03 – Border
- Step 04 – String
- Step 05 – Tangle
- Step 06 – Shade
- Step 07 – Initial and Sign
- Step 08 – Appreciate
We followed these steps throughout the class.
The tangles she incorporated were foundational tangles too. They are all ones that Zentangle have developed over the years.
So what patterns did we use?
Tegan had prepared some power point slides to guide us through drawing each tangle. These were presented throughout the class and I thought they were great if you hadn’t drawn the tangle before. They were very helpful to deconstructing them.
We used
- Flux
- Hollibaugh
- Nzeppel
- Huggins
- Garlic Cloves
I have used all of these tangles before, but it has been forever since I’ve used Nzeppel! I really enjoyed playing with it again.
What tools did I use for this Foundations Based Tile
I chose to do a Renaissance styled tile, so I used a tan tile. I worked in two browns, a very dark black-brown and a Sepia. Both using Signo Uni-Ball Gel Pens.
Shading is where I’ve tended to move away from the foundations of tangling. Over the years I’ve moved into using Copics for my shading, but for this Foundations Based tile, I didn’t use them.
Instead I used a graphite pencil in HB and 2B, a Pitt Pastel Pencil in white and a Conte a Paris Pencil in sanguine. All of them were blended with the tortillon.
What does it mean in terms of my artistic work as a whole?
Since the Yintangles seminar, I’ve worked on two Foundations Based Tiles. It’s been so important for me to set aside all I’ve added to tangling over the years and come back to basics.
I have been so convinced of it’s importance that I intend to keep this up for the foreseeable future. Once a month I want to come back to basics. I see it as an opportunity to ground myself. I never realised I was lacking it, til it I started doing it.
How can you take this idea and be more Expressive?
How often are you coming back to basics? What are you doing regularly to ground yourself?
You know thermometers need to be regularly calibrated. Over time they shift from the truth of zero degrees and as a result, the temperature you read can be wrong. For an accurate read and a honest result, calibration is needed.
Coming back to the basics of Zentangling by doing a Foundations Based Tile is a bit like that. You don’t realise how far you’ve deviated from the heart of Zentangling.
I’m not saying using Copics is a bad way to shade. What I am saying is Zentangling has a heart, and it’s heart is good for us. For me, Zentangling has always been more than just tangling.
I’ve always seen it as an opportunity to practice and live Psalms 46:10.
“Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”
Psalm 46:10
How great it’s been to recalibrate and come back to this again.
Do you already do this? If so, I’d love to hear how you’ve worked grounding into your expressive life. Leave me a comment with your tips for coming back to basics.
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Until next time, listen to your heart and sharpen your coloured pencils. A masterpiece awaits!
Bless you my friend
Chrissie xx
