Mixing techniques

 As I posted recently, I am trying some new ideas using Zentangle, doodling and quilting patterns with Notan ideas. 

I cut out some pieces of black paper, flipped the pieces and glued them down. 

These ones are on A4 paper and it takes a little longer to do the doodling, so it is still ok to be doing in bed, helping me to sleep. But ... doing it in bed means that the control of the pen is not as good as it could be at a desk. Luckily, I am not trying to do fabulous art, I am trying to relax and play with ideas - get my mind off the worries of the day, just relax. 

Now I am doing a bit of doodling to fill in the spaces. 

Another idea that I haven't tried is to use a white pen to doodle on the black paper or, perhaps, some coloured gel pens. (I saw this on Pinterest.) Something more to try soon. Maybe.

Something slightly different

 I have been thinking about Notan Art recently and came across a couple of items on Pinterest that had it combined with doodling/Zentangles. So I thought I would give it a go. 

I only used an A5 pad, quite small pieces of paper. So far, I have done a few. As I usually do some of the doodling in bed, just before I go to sleep, I had to prepare the black paper cutout prior to going to bed. That meant it took much less time to do the actual doodling. I'm not sure if I like that or not, I seem to get one piece done each night. Usually I take two or three nights to get one image done, although I usually use a bigger size paper. 

However, I will persevere for a while, see how it goes. It isn't for any purpose other than to calm my mind before I go to sleep, so I don't need to stress about it. As you might notice, the doodling isn't all perfect - doing it in bed, especially if I am very tired, will do that. 

This is more my usual style, just drawing random lines and then filling in the spaces, 

Homework for design course - 'weaving'

Once again, I have returned to one of the activities I used to love doing with my school teaching. It was a fine motor skill activity, paper weaving.

I did a very rough one first, just to see if I remembered all the steps correctly. Not that there are many steps.
It was lucky I did though, as I had tried to do the two pieces of paper the same, by not cutting right through to the edges of the paper. That didn't work!  So I maintained one piece with intact edges and then cut the other piece into strips.

Then I chose two random bits of fabric that I had lying around.  I decided my day needed brightening up, so I chose loud ones.

I ironed on some fusible stabiliser first, then folded the orange piece and cut from the middle, doing random cuts - not trying to do straight lines at all.

Then I cut the strips from the purple piece, once again doing random, unplanned cuts. The two pieces of fabric were not exactly the same size. I had thought about cutting them the same before starting but decided that it wouldn't hurt to have some left over in case I thought of something clever to do with it.

So far, no clever ideas.  I suppose it could be used as a background for more work. I'd probably have to use more muted colours for a background - depending on what I wanted to do.

Actually, it reminds me a bit of some of the Zen Doodling and Zentangle stuff that I have been browsing (here and here) on the internet recently. (I have resumed doing a daily small one in the last few weeks and find myself colouring in alternate blocks, a bit like the colours above do.)

Our homework brief is to do some 'weaving' using fabric and to try to play around with the idea, not do anything textile predictable. I'm not sure this is all that different but it is the start of me giving it some thought.

Surprise!

I couldn't resist putting up this picture. I was walking with Penny today, enjoying the last of the autumn weather, and there it was.

This is a peppercorn tree. It is not a native but they are all around the place, especially along my train line. It is regarded as invasive but I remember years in my childhood when we would find the Emperor Gum Moth caterpillars on them. They were gorgeous. I haven't seen any in years, the cocoons and caterpillars, there are still plenty of trees.

The recent rain, the fact that we are now having decent dew, and the lack of extreme heat, mean that we have bright green grass in all our parks.  Lovely.

Apparently Melbourne is one of the few places in the world that gets the bulk of its rain in winter (no snow, thank goodness) and that, coupled with native trees that are not deciduous means that we have lovely green winters. I remember my first train trip in Europe in winter - it was like looking at a black and white photo, white ground, black trees, no leaves, no colour. So different from winter here.

I am not much of a fan of black and white, they seem such stark colours. Despite this, I have been enjoying my doodling and black line drawing. I even attended a Zentangle workshop at the Embroiderers Guild last weekend. The morning was learning about different Zentangle patterns and then we applied some of them to fabric, using free motion machine sewing, in the afternoon. Our instructor was Lee Vause, an accredited Zentangle instructor and she had some interesting insights into the various patterns.
A few of us also had quilting backgrounds, as does Lee, and there is a very close correlation to a lot of the quilting patterns and some of the designs. So we had fun making up our own patterns and playing.

This is a collection of the designs we came up with, using pretty much the same patterns as each other. 

We were asked to bring fabric that was 12"x12" or 15"x15". I didn't really read this closely and didn't notice the little inch symbols, so my pieces were tiny compared to everyone else's - I did 15cm by 15cm. But I got two done, compared with the others who only did one 12"x12".