Zentangles, Zendangles and Zendoodles

Here are some books I've found on line - I think my favorites are dangles - I'll have to pull out the book I bought a couple of years ago so it'll be close by when I'm inspired!

Zenspirations - Dangle Designs:

Shirley and Company - found on Pinterest

Found on Pinterest

This is a book on Zen Doodles - I like looking at these; they are always interesting to me but I'm not a good enough artist to do this very well - yet...

Zen Doodle Designs:

I like this idea too, simple flowers, birds, and probably other simply drawn animals, etc.  It would be fun making fancy lettering to go with the artwork.

Zenspirations - Letters & Patterning

This is digital art - so you can download the file and put the digital graphics in your artwork.  I like doing this and have files and files of digital graphics.  If you are interested in these, I've recently found lots of digital graphics on Etsy.com and some if them are pretty inexpensive.  The link below takes you to Carrie Stevens' Etsy page with four different options of heart doodles - each of the four groups are $5 each.  I haven't bought any of her products, but I liked this one...

FishScraps - Heart Doodles

Pinterest

This link, Doodle Flowers, will take you to a Pinterest site that has a lot of really nice examples - you can see the different types and try your hand at making some of them if you wanted to try it.  This one, Zen Tangles Tutorial Step by Step, will give you precise directions to get started or get some new ideas.   Google those three words in this blog's title and you'll find myriad sites and ideas.

This is the book I have:

So there you go.  For people like me who haven't had an art class and no real artistic ability, this is a great way to get started.

See you next time...  

 

Let's get into some Artsy Stuff!

This might take a little time - I wanted an art blog, a place to collect information and ideas, to list all the artist's blogs that I want to check on from time to time, and to post some of the things I'll sketch or paint. Luckily I didn't have to recreate the wheel; I found an old blog I had already set up for Zentangling and Sketching a couple of years ago.  I'm going to use it as My Art Bag and put anything here that catches my fancy.

I know I don't have any artistic knowledge, I can't draw and haven't really done any painting, but I'm going to take some lessons and see what I can do.  I'll post some of the early works here - they will probably be terrible, but that's okay, it's a way to watch my progress and hopefully I'll see improvement as I take lessons and practice and try different things.

I'm working on creating the header and getting the layout the way I want it - I worked on it today and I think I like the way it looks, so I'll go with the art bag graphic and some of my digital graphics that I put together.  I hope I get good enough to need a real Art Bag like the one in the header.

I did a few little dangles a couple of years ago - I bought some Zentangling books and started copying shapes and squiggles.  I didn't get very far, but these are the three I found in one of my laptop art files:

More to come...