Diva Challenge #357: Paradox monotangle

When I saw the subject for Laura Harms' weekly challenge (#357) I just had to give it a go - Paradox has to be one of my favourites! I decided to keep it simple - blue micron on a pre-strung Zendala tile, shaded with blue prismacolour pencil, and some rounding. I left a few areas unfilled, but thought it looked unfinished so filled them in with black for a striking look. Too striking unfortunately! So I coloured over the black with silver gelly roll, but that didn't work either. Finally managed to colour over that with midnight blue gelly roll, which I was happy with! Finished off with white perfs in the blue filled areas, and gold perfs around the edge. I find it amazing that a series of slightly curved lines can end up as such a complex pattern - probably why I love Paradox so much! 

More randomness

Here are another couple of goes with using dice to select four official tangles, and using random strings from the Tangle Patterns website.

In this set I think I got quite a good selection - a mixture of 'big' tangles, ribbon tangles and background fills. I've never been fond of Ambler, but I used it here to follow the string line. I started with three curved sections, then drew Rumpus 'underneath' those. Then I alternated the second (top) two Ambler sections with a bit more of Rumpus so it appears to weave in and out. Weighting the Ambler pattern made it a bit more interesting. Then I added Indyrella, and finally Florz as a background. Shading gave the patterns more depth.

The next set of four random tangles were a bit more tricky. I was happy with Noom as a ribbon, and Drawings as a big shape underneath, but Waybop made it a bit too fussy in my opinion (and I don't think the aura-ing worked very well) and again, Vitruvius (nested squares and circles) was too fussy as a background. Not a disaster, but not my favourite tile, and a good exercise in persisting and sticking to the 'rules of the game'!

Random tile

As I now have 125 of the official tangles on Bijou-sized tile stored in A4 plastic sheets, I thought it would be good to try a tile with randomly chosen tangles for once. So I used a dice app to pick four tangles from the six sheets, using a six-sized die to choose the page, then a 20-sided die to choose the tangle on that page. Here's what it chose: Ellish, IX, Jonqual and Printemps. The first three I've never used in a tile before, so it was a good experiment!

Official tangle project

I often find that my mind goes blank when I start a new tile, and I fall back on old favourites like Flux and Mooka. So I thought I'd start a project to create Bijou-sized tiles (2"x2"), each with a simple example of a tangle to use as a quick reference. To start with I wanted to do all the 'official' Zentangle tangles, as there are quite a few I haven't tried yet. Then I'll move on to unofficial ones I've tried and particularly liked.

It's only taken about a week, and I've done 125 official tangles! There are online stepouts for 107 (listed on Linda Farmer's Tangle Patterns website) and the remainder are in my 'One Zentangle a Day' book. There are 167 official tangles currently, but there are quite a few that don't have online instructions. Anyway, here are the first 107 I completed. I'll post a better picture when I've organised them properly. It looks like they'll fit nicely into the plastic wallets used for coin collections and photographic transparencies!

UPDATE: I've added a page to the blog with better photos.