Diva Challenge - first of 2016! 249 Auraknot and Diva Dance

Happy New Year to you all!!
A good one had by all in our little world, thank goodness, after a bit of a shaky start when my dearest husband was extremely lucky in a little fight with an electric saw....no lasting damage done! Puts everything into perspective....


Here's a lovely challenge for the new year from Laura, our Diva of the Challenges! A combination of Auraknot and Diva Dance, celebrating 5 great years of challenges. Mine might not be the most original but it was great fun to do and seemed to just draw itself. Lovely Zen.

Looking forward to a new year of inspiration and challenge in the world of Zentangle - can't imagine life without it, to be honest. Thank you to all those who inspire and challenge!
Axxx

Diva Challenge 247 - UMT: African Artist by Tina-Akua Hunziker

Ooh, I'm so very busy at the moment and Tina's tangle is new for me. If I'd more time, I'd have another go and make the smaller sections alternate. As you can see, mine ended up at the same level as each other and I don't think that's quite how it's intended. Never mind. I really enjoyed the Diva's Challenge - as always - and I rather like the 'strangeness' of how mine turned out, like some undersea creature not clearly visible....

White on black with a little shading using what looks like a piece of my son's chalk...needs must sometimes! Is anyone else rather concerned how quickly the Christmas holiday seems to be approaching?

Diva Challenge 246 - Plant a Tree with Dilip!

This week, the Diva - shivering a little in the snow and, with her family, beginning to look a lot like Christmas - has invited the lovely Dilip Patel, whose story was hugely inspiring. He and his wife have - Indian CZTs no less-  a number of websites which are definitely worth a visit.

Z-inspiration, Things Often Speak to Me, Xplore & Xpress

And I heartily approve of his urge for us to plant trees - indeed, we have planted many, many trees in our garden here in the south of Spain. We have the ubiquitous olives, of course, plus almonds and cherries which proliferate round here, along with fig, walnut, apricot and plum. Plus we are growing a little mini orchard of apple trees which my husband has grown from seed. I am not sure they'll survive our incredibly hot and dry summers but we're doing our best to keep them going.

The challenge is to make a tree-like string and then fill it with just one favourite tangle. I thought about Pokeleaf, obviously...and Dilip showed us some lovely trees he did and I was particularly taken with the Catkin one.* (See below!) Sigh...what to do?

It's heading rapidly for winter. The leaves have fallen from the trees here and many are looking bare and shivery in the morning light. Apart from the huggings of birds. Not on a wire - though they do that here too - but on the naked branches.

Birds on a Wire tangle on a simple tree string with - couldn't resist - a Wud trunk.
Thank you Dilip - thank you Laura. As always, a pleasure to take part.

Thanks for passing by. Axxx

* I went back and had another look at Dilip's trees and found that the one I though had Catkins, didn't! So I did one!

Diva Challenge 245 - Hollibaugh

Every so often I do a tile that I really like. It possibly happens less these days as I become more critical of my own work. But this week, I felt very inspired by the Diva's Challenge to go back to basics and concentrate on what she calls, and I agree, one of the foundations of tangling - Hollibaugh. Such a lovely tangle and so versatile.

I started off by making some Hollibaugh lines but used a thick pen (Micron 0.8) for the 'underside' or shadowed lines and a very fine (0.05) for the upper or non-shadowed line. Then I drew an aura line inside the spaces left where the lines crossed and finally, filled each additional space with more Hollibaugh. It was intensely 'Zen' and I was utterly engrossed for going on an hour. And pleased with myself and my tile at the end of the period.

Thank you so much yet again, Laura.

Thanks for stopping by - wishing all my transatlantic friends a very Happy Thanksgiving. Axxx

Diva Challenge 244

I´ve just returned from a flying visit (literally) from the UK. I travelled on Friday 13th which is not always an auspicious day and one which many superstitious people choose to avoid. No problem for me and cheap flights too. Not a good day for the folk of Paris though....pause for thought, commiseration and a desperate hope for some resolution somewhere along this awful direction of travel.

But I was lucky.
On Sunday, after a wonderfully nostalgic visit with my bestie in Oxford - whom I haven't seen for almost six years and where we were joined by another friend that we haven't seen for 30!!! (oh my, we really are OLD!) - I travelled to my parents and we all went out for lunch together. I couldn't believe that the pub where we had an excellent, typically English Sunday Roast Dinner also thoughtfully provided 'Zentangle tiles' on the table for their customers to use!! I nabbed a handful but did leave a finished one just to say thank you, of course! (And if anyone has no idea what I'm talking about, then what I remember as 'beer mats', which always had photos and pictures of beer or similar on them, now are plain white and exactly Zentangle tile size!)

At my sister's, before we began our real live 'Scrabblefest' - (we usually play online together) - I began a tangle to test out the 'tiles' and I liked them very much. And then I logged on to the Diva Challenge to discover it was one of my favourites - Tripoli - and so finished off the tile with that tangle for this week's entry.

Here it is with Hanny Waldburger's Abundies. I had bought myself a Sakura 0.05 pen, so it's all done very finely...

The tiles, whilst they didn't make the ink 'bleed' have a rough surface that's not quite white and which looks a tad 'grubby' but I can heartily recommend them and may be asking my sister to go to the pub again for lunch very soon - and to grab another handful for me!

On my journey home, I tangled on the flight and chose four tangles with the letters 'H O M E'. I had been 'home' to England, and was now going back 'home' to my husband and family and I felt very lucky.

Hamail, Opus, Mooka and Echoism - HOME!

Here's thnking of those caught up in some of the world's problems.

Diva Challenge 242 - Gourdgeous! New tangle

I was a bit worried that time had suddenly speeded up in a reckless manner. Then I remembered that the last Diva Challenge, I was late in posting and this week, I am early. That just about explains it. I think...although we're also now in November and I have no idea how that happened....

This week, on her blog, Laura directed us to the new official Zentangle that Maria came up with recently - it's Gourdgeous. Yes, based on the shape of a Gourd and following the Diva's own dancing principles, I found this a simple, easy and fun tangle to do.

The background is a rather hasty homage to Maria's original inspiration - Bead boards - which don't quite line up as I was drawing with the new addition to our family sitting in between me and my tile. She's so gorgeous I don't like to push her away - and if I do, back she comes and settles down again to watch my pen and listen to the gentle noise. I understand her well. I would do the same if I were a cat.

Here she is next to a finished tile for Square One - Purely Zentangle, which has Verve as the focus this week.







Hope I'm excused my wonky bead boards now! Here is Gourdgeous - a lovely Autumnal tangle with lots and lots of possibilities. I may have to play a bit more with this one! Thank you Laura.

Diva Challenge 241 - Stones and Ceremony Guest blogger, Paula Bramante

I was very excited by this week's guest post over on I am the Diva's blog. It was a particularly interesting post for me because I have recently been fascinated by the image of balancing rocks.

I'd been trying my hand at balancing stones on the beach when we visited during the summer. But we'd reached September before a really special thing happened. My family and I spent a beautiful day at the beach making our own stacks of stones. It was both meditative and theraputic. The link to my blogpost about it is here and it includes the lovely photos I managed to capture that day.

It was the day we collected my husband as he returned from a very difficult and emotional week with his parents having found out that his father has terminal cancer. We went straight down to the beach to spend an afternoon focusing on things that are important to us....and family is pretty much number one, followed very closely by good health. It was also the week when the terrible images of Syrian children being found on the beaches of Greece and Turkey were shared around the world - children and families drowning just a short distance from the coast and in dreadful, unimaginable circumstances. Parents feeling that taking to the sea was a better alternative for their children than staying on dry land.

So, we were in thoughtful and mindful mood. It was possibly one of the most precious afternoons I can remember.

My original photograph
- taken as the sun was beginning to set

And so it was without hesitation that I turned to this post for inspiration for this week's challenge. As it seemed we were not to be limited by tile size or shape, I printed out one of my photographs of balanced stones in black and white and set to work in tangling it.














And my tangled version - I LOVE it!!

Tangles - from the bottom up: 'Cloudfall' by Lily Moon, 'Sand' - Adele Bruno's new tangle,
Japanese Leaves, Purk, Printemps, an official Zentangle pattern whose name I can't remember
and Sand Swirl.

Thank you so much Laura and Paula for making my week with this wonderful challenge that I feel so perfectly captures my feelings about stones, ceremonies and the importance of being mindful.

Axxx