Melding various aspects of life

I have been working with a student on her handwriting lately.  How to make this interesting???
Then a brainwave - I used to love doing the fluency patterns (not sure how the kids in my grade liked them, but I loved them).
So I had a play around with that.

Then I realised that some of the patterns had a remarkable resemblance to doodle and Zentangle patterns.
I still try to do a pattern every night before I go to sleep.

Recently I have been trying to do patterns that have the direction and shape that is used for the letters a, c, d, g and q. They all start the same way.

Then I had the brilliant (I thought) idea of making an alphabet for the youngest member of the family (trying to make the exercise meaningful) and that developed into D for Dog.
So I got a picture of our dog,

put it in Photoshop, traced it (because I don't think I can draw - common story), hid the original image, printed out the outline

and then filled it in with patterns.

I decided that I didn't need to do all c-based patterns, I could include some straight lines, as that is something that so many children who are not taught hand-writing properly are not taught - to come DOWN first.
Now I am playing around with different patterns instead of my usual doodling.

Somewhere in all of this we are also playing around with alliteration, trying to make our own tongue twisters.  Sometimes I miss the fun things you could do with rather mundane-seeming learning tasks. 

Doodling and Zen

I have been a bit slack about the black line drawing I wrote about a while ago.  Even though I really enjoyed it and had this (sort of) resolution to do some every week, I haven't done any recently, till the last few days.

I am still working on my bark images and trying to utilise them in my drawing - partly because I have plenty of images of tree trunks to use.

However, I have come across references to zen doodling, zen drawing and zentangles (which seems to be a trademark of the same idea as the other two). There is a whole lot of chatter on the internet about the meditative elements of this doodle drawing.  The recommended way to do it is more freeform than I have been doing but there is a definite similarity.

I also came across an article by Laura Wasilowski in Quilting Arts magazine about zen doodling for designing quilts. It has colour in it rather than the black and white of the zen doodling that I have seen online.  It takes the idea in a slightly different direction, one I don't want to follow at the moment.  But it is worth keeping in mind.