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?