I’ve been teaching myself the art of zentangling – which, if you don’t know, is the practise of making little drawings or letters and filling them in with an assortment of patterns to produce something quite eye-catching.  Typically the work is done with pencil and pen, and therefore black and white.  I know some people work with exacting measurements but not I…. Oh no, I must do freehand – and I must introduce some colour also – just to see what it looks like you understand.

Here is a pic showing the page with the first four I did

[Please excuse the quality of the photos, I took them just now, at night, under the centre light….]

Far from perfect – very far! – but quite absorbing to do and almost meditative.

Today, while cat-sitting my daughters boy, I doodled away at this:

Again, as you can see, very far from perfect – but not too bad for just the fifth try – do you agree?

Now while I was playing around with all that, I also took a short [and totally affordable!] on-line introductory course with the one and only Julie Fei-Fan Balzer on lettering.  I’ve always thought what she does is quite eye catching but never quite knew where to start to give it a go myself.

It is remarkably easy and very fun.  She is a great tutor – no airs and graces and makes it up as she goes along, which is just like in real life and completely disarming….

I learnt to make several sets of fonts in my own handwriting [which I haven’t photographed so can’t show you right now] …. but the last exercise was to doodle out a little phrase with full embellishments.  I copied Julie’s example as the phrase fits where we are seasonally and emotionally with my own little twist to it:

I’m really pleased, happy and excited to see where else I can go with this new style of writing, especially in my art journal.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past five days or so – all-in-all a most satisfying week!

Thanks for dropping in – always nice to know you’ve been 🙂