There is something very meditative about the art of Zentangle. I'm not much into doodling - never really have been but every time I put my pen to paper to Zentangle, I find myself totally engrossed in the repetitive nature of this art form. Maybe there is a doodler inside me after all! It is such an inexpensive and very portable hobby: I have Zentangled at the doctor's surgery, whilst waiting in the car to pick up DD from work and in planes (yippee! something to do other than watch movies and read magazines). In fact anywhere I find myself waiting for some one or some thing. All you need is a smooth white surface to work on, black permanent markers and a graphite pencil. So far, I've been skipping the pencil, preferring the cleaner, hard lines of the markers. I use Sakura's Microperm 01 for the detailed work and the IDenti Pen where I want the coverage to be heavier. I usually work on very small pieces like these disks from DIY Bangles that the patterns will fill qu......

Today I'm going in a completely different direction to the bangles that I've created so far in this challenge. Courtesy of Graphic 45 , I have papers to work with. I have always enjoyed the soft, aged appearance of their paper imagery and whilst it's not a style I use a lot, I can appreciate the romance of a more gentle, bygone era. I think that's what draws a lot of people to this style. I'll be working with one of their new releases, On the Boardwalk. This 12 x 12 paper pad has 22 double sided papers in 12 different designs including 2 sheets of pre scored tags and borders. I've selected a stripe, a bottle cap as my feature, and a couple of smaller motifs from a border. So let's get started. Cut a square from the striped sheet and the bottle cap image leaving a small border. Layer them together using a glue stick with the stripes running vertically. Apply a small circle of Diamond Glaze to the centre of the back of a glass pebble. This one is from ecoGree......

One of the newest techniques to surface at Winter CHA was Zentangling. And I've got to say it wasn't something I thought I'd be interested in. But faced with the challenge I'd been given I decided to give it a go because it used a minimal amount of materials: All you need is a white surface, a black marker and a willingness to doodle. Remember at the beginning of this challenge I said I had to do it with the materials I had on hand? Well I didn't have white paint but I did have a light shade of pink so I've already broken the first rule of Zentangle (not that there are any) but sorry to all the purists out there - I have to work with the materials I have on hand, so pink it is! And speaking of using the materials you have on hand, one of the things I didn't have was a paint brush. I didn't have a sponge either. Nor did I have a cotton bud. But what I did have was a box of tissues. Sometimes you just have to make do and become a little bit inventive. So I......