Materials Used
Transcript
Hey guys! I’m back with another Tangled Talk episode. Today I’m learning three more Zentangle patterns. So grab a piece of paper and something to draw with if you’d like to draw along with me.
First, info about the patterns. Again, I found these on TanglePatterns.com, which, if you haven’t checked it out yet, it’s a really great resource. Links for all three of these will be in the decription below. A couple of people have wondered if I am going through the alphabet. Yes, I am trying to learn a new Zentangle for each letter, if you picked up on that too. It’s not an accident. Linda Farmer, who maintains TanglePatterns.com, has them organized alphabetically over there, so I find what letter I’m on, scroll through until I see one I think I’d like to use in a future Zentangle, and start practicing.
So let me tell you about my week. I had a couple of better than average days this past week. (Yay!) It started with, oddly enough, election results in Wisconsin of all places. That’s when I noted a pretty significant shift in my mood. The news that people turned out for in-person voting after being denied a vote by mail extension, it was really troubling, don’t get me wrong. People should never have to risk their lives to vote. But at the same time, it gave me the slightest bit of hope for the future to see how seriously people took their right to vote that they would stand in line for a primary even. So that one news story restored a bit of my faith in humanity (if not our Supreme Court) and gave me a desperately needed dose of optimism.
Having a positive outlook definitely makes me more productive. For one, I was able to get this month’s mystery perk out for Patrons on time! (cheering) The deadline of posting those Mystery Perk on the 15th every month is entirely self-imposed, but I like to have some semblance of a schedule for getting things posted there, just so I don’t get behind on fulfilling my promises to people, and just so that my supporters can rely on getting their perks at least close to the same time every month if not always on the exact date.
For April I did a digital and printable coloring page. So what’s exciting for me about the coloring page this month is that completing a coloring page was on my list of goals for 2020 that I had set back in January on my blog. I’m one of those people who gets a real kick out of marking things off my to-do list. So this was cool for me. So the printable is from a freestyle Zentangle page that I made, I actually started out just doing this random zen doodle in my dot grid sketchbook. The same notebook I’m using here in this video.
After I’d filled the page, I had a pretty strong urge to color in everything and that’s when it dawned on me that I should turn it into a coloring page for Patreon. I used Krita – I think that’s how you’re supposed to pronounce it – to turn it into a downloadable file.
(Side note, Krita is a free digital painting slash art program for Mac, Windows and Linux I think – in case you’re looking to make your own digital art. I’ll also link that website for you too.)
Making the coloring page took a little work just because I’m a complete noob when it comes to this. First I had to scan the original. Then I had to do some, like, manipulating the image a little bit to get it to fit the new page size, which I assume people will be printing on 8.5 by 11 mostly and I set the… adjusted the image as a background layer, then created a new layer and traced over tha image with my digital pen on my touchscreen tablet PC. That got rid of the dots and the coloration from the notebook paper, and let me turn the sketch into clean black and white line art. And yeah, I’m sure there’s a more efficient way to accomplish what I did, but tracing was actually a good way for me to get used to using the digital pen and find out how it works. Plus, I’m not trying to mass produce anything, so, you know, I can take my time and kind of do these slow. And it’s not really a big deal if I end up doing things the hard way.
I also fiddled around a bit with doing a screen capture of my workflow. So I recorded it as a time-lapse video. There’s a short snippet, actually, of what I’m talking about on my Instagram if you want to see it. Seeing how that turned out has given me some ideas for maybe adding digital art videos here on my channel at some point in the future, of course alongside the traditional pen and paper stuff.
This week’s brief reprieve from like absolute mental fog also got me thinking about some logo ideas for my website. I’m not satisfied with what I have. I just knew I needed to have something when I started out, so I used a graphic design site, Canva, to pull that little brain image in alongside my name. But I really need to create something that would at least be recognizable across the different platforms I use. But I really want to try and incorporate some of my own doodles.
The problem so far has just been that for all this time I’ve literally had zero ideas. But, you know, now that I’m experiencing an uptick in creativity, I am making some progress there too. I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but at least now I have an inkling few ideas and I’ve got some place to start. So you know, I’ve just been doing some thumbnail sketches here and there. I’ll be trying to work on that in the background as I keep writing and posting new chapters of Who You Gonna Believe on my website and of course uploading Zentangle videos here.
All of this progress still comes with an eternal caveat that even though more neurons might be firing for me right now, they are still doing so very, very slowly. I don’t anticipate I’ll get the logo things sorted out any time very soon but, you know, eventually. It’s something for me to look forward to
OK, if there was anything else I planned to mention in this episode of Tangled Talk, I’ve forgotten what it was. So it’ll have to wait until next time. Thanks for hanging out with me again. Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe to show your support for this channel, and tap the bell icon if you want to be notified when I post new videos.
Talk to you all later!
[Piano music]
