Diva Challenge #300, Joey Challenge #149, some Travelling Tangles and Sketchbook Fun

Diva Challenge #300

Moebius Syndrome Awareness Logo

This week, the Diva celebrates milestones. The first is an amazing 300 challenges! That is some serious dedication . For 6 years she's managed to inspire a legion of Zentangle fans into creating and sharing little pieces of art every week, but in the process of sharing that art she has nurtured a community which has built some wonderful connections. But she doesn't just post a weekly challenge, she opens up a little window to her world, sharing pictures and stories of her young family's adventures, milestones and struggles.

Her youngest son was born with a very rare nerve disorder called Moebius Syndrome. One in a million rare, where lateral cranial nerves are either missing or broken resulting in partial facial paralysis and some speech impairment, along with other health issues. Laura explains it beautifully on her blog (link above) and I suspect most of you are here from there.  

The most important thing that Laura wanted to share was her frustration at people making assumptions about his intellectual capacity based on his physical appearance. The brain is not affected. He's as smart as a whip, super charming and funny as hell. January 24th is Moebius Syndrome Awareness Day. Here, the challenge is to use the logo as a template and integrate their color purple if one so chooses. I had a couple of purple and blue watercolor zendala's left-over from a swap a while back.

Made by Joey #149

Finish my Tile Alphabet Series

D-featuring "Dicso"

Additionally: Drupe, Demi, Dragonish

Moving on with my Bijou alphabet series. I tweaked Joey's original string and pattern placement to fit my smaller format and font style and learned some new patterns- Demi and Dragonish. The focus pattern is Dicso (not Disco). Dicso represents the 5 basic components of any tangle (most of which can be accomplished with only one or two of these components. (D)ot, line, C curve, S curve and circle (o). The beauty of Dicso is that it's drawn in one continuous movement and  can be enhanced and varied in so many ways.

Here are my latest (and the last of my back log) Travelling Tangles and the link to the Facebook group. If you don't know about this group, please check it out. There's great stuff happening;-)

Now that I'm finally caught up (yaaaayyy) I'm getting ready to start a new round. If there's anyone out there who wants to swap tiles with me, please leave a comment below and if you're not already a member of the group, pop on over and join and I'll tag you when I'm ready to send. My goal is to create 6 starters by Saturday. I'd love to hear from you. I'll give you guys first crack at them and the rest I'll put up for grabs sometime on Saturday.

My finish to a lovely postcard starter by Aleesha Sattva from Thailand

Aleesha started off with a paint "Spill" and lovely pink petals

This is my finish to Mary Dewick's elegant start

This travelled all the way from the U.K.
love her shading!

My finish to Marguerte Samama's little black bijou

I feel like I almost obliterated her elegant start.

Marguerite sent this from the lovely Netherlands. Land of my favorite cheese

and finally a little sketchbook activity:

for the Facebook group, Zentangle: Tangled and Journaled too!

following the Zentangle Primer lessons...

...though I have no Primer. I'm just figuring this out as I go by looking at what others are posting. It's back to basics-Plus. What I love about this that we're prompted to revisit some oldies but goodies that, at least for me, I tend to dismiss sometimes in the pursuit of the next new pattern. The exercises ask us to explore further into these patterns by playing around with line weight, shading and enhancements to create variations of each pattern. Then move into tangleations, combining one pattern/variation with another. It's really enlightening to see the almost endless ways 4 simple patterns can evolve into something remarkably dynamic. 

I continued this approach with my string challenge last week. I finished at the 11th hour so I didn't get it into the blog until now.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog. Your thoughtful and generous comments delight and inspire me!