Playing Catch-up

Thanks for checking in on me occasionally. I like that I'm a part of a world-wide community and that you all reach out from afar with lovely notes and anecdotes.
I found spirals at two of the Zentangle challenges I participate in (not so regularly). The Diva Challenge
posed a spiral and I made Bijou-sized with stripes and sparkle:

I thought it was a pretty bold statement. I'll be adding it to my fridge art!
The IAST started with a spiral string:

The spiral is in there; it was getting a little wonky so I called it good rather than overdo it.
This was last week's response to the IAST:

It has a minimalist attitude about it and that suits me just fine. As you can see, I'm upcycling the corrugated boxes that my new kitchen cabinets came in. Sure, I could use nice paper. But I like the mid-tone of the paper. Besides, corrugated boxing machinery put me through college, so I really like it. 

And finally...a big collection of zinchies I've made in just the last two days! If I'm ever going to get through 3,000 of these things, I better get jumping!

Thanks for taking the time to look at my artwork. I really appreciate that you do and your kind comments. And don't be afraid to tell me like it is; I'll just go happily along as I am without some constructive critiques. 

It's a Simple Explanation

I'll start with my zinchies for the week. My first one was "OOF."  I it saw on some other tanglers blogs from last week. I had to do it, as OOF just sounded weird. The explanation of it's origin is interesting enough, but I didn't see it. So I also drew the source material--the window at the Cloisters. They don't look quite a like, but the OOF is for "out of focus," so I guess if you squint real hard...
And a few more. I read on Genevieve Crabe's blog that she has catalogued 3,000 patterns. At my current pace, I'll have that many done in 9.5 years.

I've been playing with the whole Trees concept for the inaugural TwobyTwo challenge. My citrus trees are spitting fruit, so I took a photograph of the harvest last week:

Yes, I played with the image in Photoshop. It's my day job.

In search of inspiration for the EIM word of the day, I found the most confounding explanation of something or other that I cannot even begin to understand...."Lasso and the Least Angle Regression"
yhat=b0 + b1*x1+ b2*x2 + ... bp*xp
from: Stanford, which says it is a "simple" explanation.
Sure! Riiiiiight. Simple. Back in college, I may have been able to wrap my grey matter around that, perhaps, but now?! Not a chance. No way! I can't even help my daughter with her college math classes let alone whatever that is.
From there it was a jaunt through cowboys, horses, spurs and saddles...with a detour to some beefcake and well, it just deteriorated from there for a bit. I didn't realize it's a specialized genre for romance novels--the whole cowboy thing. And I guess the Australian Thunder Down Under show in Las Vegas has disappeared? Bummers.....
As I tell my children, I may be old, but I'm not dead yet.
Well, ahem, back to the task at hand! Here's my "lasso:"

Happy trails to you...until we meet again.

Inchies, Zinchies and Twinchies!

I want to thank every one of you that visited last week and especially all of you who put in a good word with the BIG GUY UPSTAIRS, or however you see all that. For whatever you put forth for my brother and son, I'm grateful. They both have lived to tell their tales and are returning to their regularly scheduled programming. THANK YOU.
Where does the time go? Days have been vaporizing and I don't see how. The days are longer, sunnier. Hmm, that may be it right there--I'm spending more time outside enjoying the very fine weather, gardening. I planted some grapes yesterday in hopes of some fruit three years from now. I have to tend to the fruit trees I have now so I have citrus next year...
Which brings me to this: I started a new blog, a challenge to myself, and if you wish to participate, please join in the fun. I hope it's fun. I felt compelled to have a Twinchie challenge as I really like the parameters. Thus, Two by Two by Tuesday has been born. Please check it out!
Meanwhile, I've been trying to keep up with all those other things I dabble in. Here goes!

Nailed it!

For this week's Inchie, I was all over the place. First I wanted to do a test paper with a giant A+ on it. Then, I was thinking of a fancy manicure but my nails are happily grimy from digging in the yard. THAT wasn't going to be very pretty.
And while I'm not a huge fan, it's March Madness, 24/7 college basketball, so this fits the bill for "Nail."

Last week's Inchie was "Egyptian." I peeked at everyone else's responses and they were all very cool. Serendipitously, there was a news release on a new tomb unearthed at Luxor last week. I thought the images were beautiful and this flower is representative of one of the art walls. Broke out the Spectrum markers on Canson paper for this one.






I have some more Zinchies, including some new patterns I'm working on (if you know of their existence already, please advise, so I can correct them).

I found On Target by Banar on her Flickr feed. Her Zentangle art has a lot of pizazz and contrast. I created what I think is a new one that I've tentatively called "About It," as in it has an aura...about it. The last one, I don't know... There must be somebody in the Weird Wide Web that surely has something just like it already? It's hard to know, there are so many people making this kind of art!

From here I'm working on my first post for my self-proclaimed challenge. The mot du jour is: Trees. Abres. Bomen. Baume. Please check it out!

Life and Art, a Juxtaposition

This past week was a whirlwind and as usual life can be, well, very lifey. I won't go into details, but if it's in you, pray for my brother and pray for my son. God will know why and take care of the rest. Particularly my brother, Craig, as thoughts of him weigh heavily on me this week and I can't be near to him right now. My son, Terrance, moved nearby this year and I can keep closer tabs on him.
In fact, last week he asked if we could do a little road trip together (before his recent troubles fell into place). It's not unusual for us to go to Prescott or Sedona, a mere hour away, when the opportunity arises. But, he had much grander plans in mind. Real Grand.
Grand Canyon Grand.
And away we went on a DAY trip to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I've done it before, I can do it again, right? We had breakfast at the Cameron Trading Post and afternoon coffee at Hermit's Rest and he took me for a lovely dinner at the grand old El Tovar Lodge. (oooh, fancy!)

Brr. The East View from Desert Tower

On the walls in the Dining Room (I told you it was fancy. Capital Letter fancy!) are paintings of various tribes of Arizona. Our table was in front of the fire, a view window of the sunset over the canyon and the paintings of the Hopi and Navaho. TJ remarked that they chose the phonetic spelling rather than the commonly used, "Navajo."

I was rather amused when I set out my plans for my zinchies this week and I saw the pattern, Navaho. I just HAD to do that one. I also had to do Amoeba as my teenie brain thought there should be some such pattern and come to find that indeed there is one of those already. 

I had to try Pinch with my brand new Spectrum Noir markers as I saw a tutorial in a zentangly book where the shading of that pattern was done with markers and with pencils. (If I remember which book, I'll be sure to make a note of it). 

I hardly know what to do with those markers; I'll get to that sometime. 

And I thought I'd better give the patterns for this week's Diva Challenge a go before I actually tried an honest attempt at it. I really found Margaret Bremner's "And then some..." blog entry on Cubine to be very helpful. I like grid- and geometric-based tangles, but she goes a LOT farther with it, so check that out. 

I found Slices on Banar's Flickr feed. (I find her work to be very inspirational). It's similar to Kuke, which I tried out last week (Slices is based on half-rounds while Kuke divides a circle in thirds). I'll be trying out some investigative work on those two patterns and a third I found that follows a line. Could be interesting. Perhaps.

Without further ado, here's my attempt of tangling up Cubine with Pokeroot. Could there have been a more disparate pair?

Over the Cliff

Diva Challenge 208

I actually drew a string line and did some massive shading, all at 3am. As I was saying, I have a lot of corrugated boxing materials from the construction project, so I used some for my drawing this week, including this entry.
NEWS FLASH:
I created a Flickr group for Zinchies! Check it out here! I thought maybe, just maybe, it would be a way to create a wall full of zinchies, a virtual library of patterns and designs from intrepid tanglers who make inchie-sized ZIAs. 

I appreciate your checking in on my ramblings, my drawing and your prayers. We all could use some extra help and inspiration now and again, right?

Such a Slacker

I've been...RIIIIGHT!
In between the demolition and the sanding, staining, procuring (SURELY a day without The Home Depot is like a day without sunshine!), finding out we can't quite do what we set out to do, and now! The wine chiller arrived and that SURELY requires more procurement.
And that's besides being self-employed, doing some parenting of adult children, entertaining friends (who better to understand that this is a construction zone!).
Plus four days of rain in sunny Arizona?!
I still managed a couple zinchies, including the one for this week's Every Inchie Monday:

The word for the week is "love," so I picked the heart pattern Love Line.

I don't know about you, but that Phroz is a real bugaboo. It seems to me I cannot wrap my head around those patterns based on triangles. How hard can they be? Yet, it still took me FOUR tries to get to that one. 

The upside is I have plenty of materials for doodling (cartons from HD and paper--Enhanced matte from Epson, a personal fave for photographs)! 

I also made some fridge magnets and worked on what could be almost construed as a traditional Zentangle (save for the fact I use Sharpies and drew on a a corrugated paper box. Other than that, it's for real, right?!)

Thanks so much for visiting! Can't wait to see what everyone else has been up to this past week.