New Zentangle

I have been Zentangling for a few months, using the tiles provided in the beginner kit I purchased from Zentangle.com:

These tiles are 3.5 x 3.5 inches, and while I love the paper - the texture and thickness are perfect for tangling; they are just too small for me. As I noted way back in June as I blogged about my first Zentangle, there are so many tangles I want to try, and the tiles are so small that I was cramming everything into a small space, and it was making me go bleary-eyed, trying to make the designs so small! I even used my optivisor so I could actually see what I was drawing in some of these first tangles.

A couple of weeks ago I perused the art aisle at Hobby Lobby (with my 40% off coupon) and couldn't find any paper that was exactly like the Zentangle tiles, but I chose a pad of water color paper that was pretty close. Nice and thick, good texture - and a generous 8 inches square (more than 4 times the size of one of the tiles I was initially working with!)

I pulled out all my pens, pencils, and other Zentangling doodads, plus my Pinterest board loaded with tangle ideas, and started a new tangle a couple of days ago.

I wanted to try using negative space, and since Valentine's Day is near, I decided to try a heart. Negative space is hard! I'm not 100% thrilled with the result, but it's OK.

Surprisingly, it didn't take any longer to do this (relatively) huge design than it did to do the 3.5" tiles - it turns out that basically all I did was upsize my drawing - in other words, what you see in the pic above is the same design I would have crammed into the 3.5 inch tile! I like this way better!

Here are some of the tangles I worked into this Zentangle: heart chain, Zinger, lupe, fricle, bunzo (my new fave!), basketweave, W2, C-chain, and one I'm calling striped pole, for lack of a better name. I still need to work on my shading and reflection techniques - my reflection line on the striped pole is crooked. I don't know why, but that particular technique is much harder to do than it looks!