Creative Meditation: Zentangle Drawing

1. Introduction: Hey, guys, welcome to my creative meditation course. Many of you may be familiar with the benefits that meditation has to offer, such as promoted, peaceful, mindful states and reduced stress and anxiety for many of us. Classic, quiet sitting meditation works very well. But for others of us like myself, having something to focus on while meditating helps us meditate so much more deeply and more easily. And that is where creative meditation comes in. Hi, my name is Casey, and I'm a full time artist in Portland, Oregon. I have been teaching art for over four years and have been creating art for over 20 years of all different types and mediums. Throughout my artistic journey, I came across something very interesting, and that was the therapeutic benefits that creating art has to offer. Creating mindful art can offer a lot of therapeutic benefits, but just to mention a few, it can help reduce anxiety and depression, reduce stress, improve your relationships with others, promote free self expression, increase your self awareness and help you work through anger. These are just some of the many benefits that creating mindfully has to offer, and the best thing about it is that you do not need to have any formal training or experience with creating arts. No matter what your level is, you can practice mindful creativity. You can practice creative meditation with just a pen and a piece of paper. You do not need to have a lot of supplies, and you do not need to create a masterpiece in order to experience the benefits that creating mindfully has to offer. If you're looking to increase your sense of well being and prove your relationships with others and decrease stress all while creating a gorgeous piece of arts than this is the class for you in this class you will learn the basics of creative mindfulness. While creating a is entangle our peace. You will learn about which supplies are needed in order to create a Zen tangle. How to gather inspiration for your artwork, how to sketch intuitively how to make yours entangle while meditating through art. How to color your art piece in, and how to reflect on your experience that you can gain the most from this creative meditation. As I mentioned previously, creative meditation is for all artistic levels and the goal of this course is to gain the therapeutic benefits that art has to offer, rather than creating a masterpiece that's meant to be judged and critiqued. That being said, if you feel comfortable and you'd like to share your art piece with others, please feel free to upload it so that others can see it and be inspired by your artwork as they are also taking the course. 2. Supplies: with supplies that you will need for this project will be a pencil. Any sort of regular pencil will work and an eraser. You are also going to want to make sure that you have some sort of paper that you can bake yours entangle on. I prefer to use watercolor paper because I will end up using watercolors to color my eyes entangle, which I'll talk a little bit about in a minute. But whatever paper that you have will work. You can just use regular printer paper. Or, if you have a mixed media paperboard or Bristol board also would work really well for this project. But any paper that you have will work. This is just my preference. You will also want to have some sort of sketching paper nearby. This is just a really old kind of warn sketch pad that I used to make kind of throwaway drawings, and this is just going to be for your preliminary sketches, so some sort of scrap paper or sketch paper nearby will also help. You will also need tohave some black permanent markers. There are many and permanent markers that you can use. I tend to use sharpies. I really like the find tipped sharpies, especially for making all of these and Zen tangle designs themselves. And then I also like to have a medium sized nib available as well so that I can do thicker lines for some parts of those entangle other pens that I like to use our this type of pen, which is a Sumi pen and it is permanent. I've tested it before. You do want to make sure that whatever black marker you use is permanent and this is just another brand. This is an artist loft brand find tip Sharpie. So I just wanted to show pretty much any brand of permanent marker will work just whatever you have. Hopefully you have some, even in your junk drawer or something like that that you can pull out. Another thing that is really fun toe have nearby is something that you can color yours entangle with. So some examples of that would be some acrylic paints like these paints here, and you'll also want to have some brushes. If you choose acrylic paints, you could also use something like gua sh some chalk pastels. You could use some colored pencils or you could do what I am doing, and you could use water colors. I just have this really small travel watercolor set that I got for, like, $27 off of Amazon. So anything simple will work. You can use whatever you have, or you can choose not to color yours entangle. But if you would like to color yours entangled definitely grabbed the colorful medium of choice. Okay, so now let's move on to collecting the inspiration for our art piece. 3. Collecting Inspiration: one of my favorite parts of mindful Create City is gathering inspiration. So one thing that you can do is go out on a walk in the neighborhood and start to collect pictures of different flowers, plants and trees that inspire you. I recommend taking multiple different shots of the same subject so that you could have multiple different perspectives to work from once you are creating your arts. Another way that you can collect some inspiration is by going on Google or Pinterest and gathering photos of things that inspire you. You can even use another artist's artwork as inspiration, such as your favorite painter, where your favorite sculptor, another thing that you will want to look up is sums entangle designs. So Google is entangled designs. Or look up Zen tangle designs on Pinterest and start to clip some that you like and some that you will. Potentially, once you use in your own artwork, you can take a long as you'd like during the inspiration process. Sometimes I take a couple of days to collect different pieces of inspiration before I actually sit down and start the artwork. So take us much time, as you need for this process 4. Sketching Intuitively: So now that you have all of your inspiration gathered, you are going to want to start by making some preliminary sketches before you start your final design. So what you can do is just grab some scrap pieces of paper. Even some lined paper from a notebook would work for this. Just whatever you have, and the way that I like to make my sketches is by first dividing my paper up into separate panels. So I'm not trying to make this perfect. I'm just roughly drawing a line down the center of my paper. And then I'm going to draw a line across the paper here, and that divides it into four separate panels so that I can make four different design options on the page. So I think I'm going to choose to do a maple leaf for this project because it's nice and simple for our demonstration purposes. So one way that you can start to sketch intuitively is by just picking one subject, and it really helps to pick kind of a simple subject for your first project, and then sketch that one subject into four different motifs or designs. So, for example, if I am going to be doing a me believe I could start a design just by kind of making the Maple Leafs sort of sideways on. And this is just a rough sketch, but Ah, nice. Big close up of the maple leaf. And the orientation is sort of sideways here. Okay, so we're just kind of practicing composition. Making it look perfect is not our goal right now. So we're just kind of getting some ideas as to how we want our and results look, So we got our sort of close up, may believe here, and then maybe we want to try to make a maple leaf. That's a little bit further back. So we can try seeing what that would look like just by making a quick little sketch here. Kind of goes off of the right edge. Um, Tora, we could maybe try doing too little. Make belief friends here. So see what that would look like. That's actually pretty cute. Some kind of feeling attracted to that sort of design right now. So maybe that will end up being how I choose to make my finals entangle. And let's do one more. Maybe a leave is upside down on the page, tried to just let the sketches happen and not control what the end result is. Too much. As you can see in my sketches, I definitely did not focus on making them perfectly or anything. I just wanted to get them on the paper and get them in different compositions. So another way that you can make your sketches and try to sketch intuitively is by sketching multiple different subjects and then choosing which one you like the most. And you can choose the one that you like the most based off of which one is the most fun for you to draw or which one is the most aesthetically pleasing to you. So, for instance, I could start out by making my may believe, because I'm feeling inspired by May beliefs. But maybe I'm also feeling inspired by a curvy leaf has, like more curvy pedals. So I might try playing with that sort of design and seeing how that feels. Or maybe it might be cute to do sort of a longer cluster of leaves that are more long and skinny that have sort of serrated edges so you can also practice sketching by trying different subjects. And again, I am choosing all nature, and I'm kind of staying within one category in order in order to keep it a little bit more simplified. I'm keeping things a little bit more simplified and choosing like one. Subjects such as nature does help me get into sketching intuitively a little bit more because I don't have to think too hard about what I'm sketching. I can just think, Okay, something that's nature related. Maybe I want to do a flower that is kind of coming out of the side of the page. So I'm trying not to think too hard about this. Try to let go of what the end result looks like because we're not actually keeping thes sketches. Anyway, this is just a opportunity for us to kind of let loose and draw what comes to mind and hopefully start to tap into that artistic meditation a little bit just through a little bit of doodles and practice. And then once you pick your final sketch that you like the most, if you'd like, you can really hone in on coming in and making your sketch nice. So if I kind of choose to do that corner flower design. Maybe my flower center is kind of reaching out from the corner of the page. And then I draw on a couple of flower petals and there are curvy designs coming down across the page like this. And then I know that once I draw this out on my paper that I will make all of those entangle designs inside of all of these different sections of the overall design. So I picked a sketch that you like the most. If you want, you can make a final draft of your sketch, but that is not necessary. And then once you're ready, it you can go ahead and move on to sketching this on to your final piece of paper. 5. Starting Your Meditation Artwork: So once you're done with your sketches and you're done picking the sketch that you like the most, you can go ahead and get yourself a piece of paper ready that you want to make your Zen tangle on and you will want to grab a pencil. And the first thing that we're going to Dio is go ahead and sketch that design onto our piece of art paper. So I think that for my design, I want to do kind of a maple leaf. So I like to start by just coming in and making the center of the maple leaf and then coming out. And I'm just kind of loosely sketching again because I'm doing this in pencil, and I know that I can always go back in the race, so there's no pressure here. We're just coming in and making our preliminary sketch on your paper. Try to go with the flow a little bit. It's okay if it doesn't look like your first sketch that you made. I love to make nature so much in my artwork is because the organic shapes are so nice that you can just go ahead and be a little bit more organic and natural with your movements, and it will still look like what you were going for. I'm just kind of roughly drawing on a little make believe here, not trying to make it perfect or anything. Just trying to get the general shape down. And again, the reason that we like to do this in pencil before coming in and doing the marker is because it does give you an opportunity to come in and kind of change things up in certain areas. So I feel like this part of the leave here is a little bit not in the place where I'd like it to be. So I have the opportunity now to come in any race, that part of the leaf, and then I can come in and kind of move it over a little bit and place it over here. So now I kind of have a rough outline of the leaf. Definitely take your time doing this. There's no rush, and you can erase and kind of re draw things as many times as you need. Teoh. It does help if you kind of sketch things on light lease of the erase more easily But don't worry too much about getting this perfect on the first try. That's why we do it in pencil. So we have the opportunity to kind of tweak things as we start to map everything out, and then once you are ready, we can go ahead and move on to making it permanent and coming in with the EQ. 6. Inking Fluidly: once you are ready to go ahead and ink in your project, I, like Teoh, make the outline of the design with a thicker nib marker. So instead of using a fine tips marker, I use a small tip. But it's still a little bit thicker than those ultra fine markers like this. And the reason that I do that is because I prefer to make all of these entangle designs themselves with this ultra fine tips marker. And then I like to make the outline of the design or the motif that these entangles are going to be inside of with the thicker markers that you can kind of differentiate between those two parts of the design. So the first thing that I like to do here is go ahead and with the regular size Sharpie, come in and really start Teoh, draw on the outline of this make belief, and again it is okay if, as you are drawing on the design with the permanent marker, if the design again kind of starts to change and tweak a little bit as you are drying, try to let it unfold naturally and organically. It does not need to be perfect. Try to let go and just move fluidly as you apply the ink to your art piece. Here, there's no pressure and making this a masterpiece. Alright, so there's army belief. Once you have your project outlined with Sharpie or permanent marker, you are going to want to come in and start to erase your pencil lines. Make sure that the marker is dry before you start to erase that. You don't smudge any of your marker lines. But you will just want to go ahead and come in and start to erase all of those pencil lines so that everything looks nice and clean just like that. All right, so now we are going to move on to actually making all of our awesome is and tangled designs . 7. Zentangle Flow: There are a lot of Zen tangle design examples online that you can look up. So if you need some inspiration, you can google Zen tangle or legs entangle upon Pinterest, and you will see loads of images that you can use for inspiration for yours. Entangle designs. One thing that you can do before you start to make your sentinel designs is you can go ahead and do more of the sketching that we were doing earlier. But this time four years entangle designs. What you can dio is you can break your paper up into panels just like we did when we were designing the basic motif of ours. Entangle. And then you can come in and you can practice difference entangled designs, and you can kind of get a feel of what it's like to draw in this type of way. So sketching it out really does kind of help warm up your artistic flow a little bits, and it does kind of help you practice and see which types of designs you enjoy making or which type of designs you find to be most attractive. So you want to put in your art piece again. It doesn't need to end up being a masterpiece or anything. But if you particularly enjoy the aesthetic of fish scales like these, for instance, then you can put those in your art piece so you can do circles like this. You could do a fish scale type of design. One thing I really like to dio is overlapping crisscross lines kind of like this so you can start out with some lines and then you can come in and criss cross over them. You can even do things as creative as paisley so you can come in with kind of this rain drops sort of look and you can create a classic paisley design. I like to kind of wrap my paisley designs with these scallops. And again, I'm not trying to make this perfect or anything. I'm just coming in and I am practicing some difference entangle designs that I know that I can use in my final project here. And this is not only helping me figure out which designs I like and which designs I want to use, but it is also kind of helping me get my creative juices flowing. Another thing that you can do is You can kind of make squiggly lines like this and you can put dots along the lines. That's a really fun designed to dio You could also dio instead of fish scales like this, you could make all of the scale sort of pointed so that you have a bunch of triangles or overlaps and some diamonds you could even make flowers within yours. Entangle So there are a lot, a lot of difference and tingle designs that you can try. So go ahead and look up some inspiration And once you are feeling ready and you have some sketches laid out, you can go ahead and start making yours entangle design onto your final projects once you are ready to start making yours entangle design on your final project. If it does help you, you can sketch out all of yours, entangle designs with a pencil and then you can come in and outline all of your pencil marks with a Sharpie, just like we did with the outline of our leaf for this example. But what I like to do is just go for it. And I like to make my eyes entangles just with Sharpie part of the reason I like to do this is because it kind of allows me to let go of what the outcome ends up looking like, because it's just it's permanent. It's there, and it does kind of help me get into my flow a little bit, understanding that it's done and I'm not going to go back and change it. If you are having trouble figuring out where you want to start on yours, entangle, you can start out with the pencil marks or you can do what I do and just pretty much let your hand fall onto the design. And then that's where you start. You can start by kind of making some swirls. That's one thing that I really enjoy doing. My hand just likes to move in a lot of swirly patterns. I've noticed that some of my friends like to make more angular designs when they are making their art, but I tend to make more swirly designs and circles, try to let go of thinking too much about where you are making your designs and what you are making, try to just choose, make those choices and then go for it without second guessing your choice. So if you feel like making a swirl somewhere, don't second guess yourself. Just go ahead and make it. If I feel like making a little flower design right here, I'm not going to think twice about it. I'm just gonna go for it and let it happen. You want to go ahead and do this on your entire design? You can do repeated patterns like these fish scales that I'm doing right here. Or you can change up the patterns a lot and kind of mix and match your patterns. If you ever get stuck, go ahead and move on to a different part of those entangle. So if I'm stuck, I might move over here now and start working somewhere else for a minute and then come back to the spot that you were stuck on. Later, you will just want to keep on building these little designs up on your art project until your entire project is full of these really cute and fun Zen tangled designs. Really try to think about how it feels to have your pen to paper. If any thoughts do pop up in your head as you are drawing go ahead and let them pass, observe them and then let them pass And really focus on the current task that you are in as you are creating yours. Entangle again as you are doing this, really try to let go of any self judgment that you might have about creating your art piece . I do know that every artist is their own worst critic. I see this often in my art classes. Artists will really want to critique their own artwork, and that is not what this practice is about. This practice is about truly letting go of that judgment that we might have on ourselves as we are creating art and accepting that you deserve to create something just to create something, you can even pay attention to the way that the textures and the sounds are making you feel as you are creating your art. You can listen to music, or you can just listen, Teoh, the sound of the Sharpie or the marker that you are using running up against the paper, which I actually find to be very relaxed pain just listening to the sounds that the art makes. All right, so we have our final Zen tangle piece. Now, if you'd like to color in yours, entangle, move onto the next lesson. Or if you'd like to be finished at this step, go ahead and move on to reflecting on your creative meditation experience. 8. Creative Coloring: Once you are ready to color in your piece, you are going to want to gather supplies that you need to color in yours. Entangle. I'm going to be using watercolors, which means that I want to tape down the edges of mice, entangle so that once the water gets on my paper, my paper doesn't get but gold and start toe warp due to the water sitting on the paper. If you are using something like water colors, you might want to think about taping down the edges. Or, if you are using something like acrylic paint, you might want to just make sure that you have everything that you need nearby in order to use that medium, such as a cup of water and some napkins or rags. Now, as you start to color in your piece, really try to pick all of the colors that you are using. Intuitively, there are a couple of ways that you can do. This. One is just by picking whichever color is calling to you at any given time. So if you decide to paint your artwork with that option, just kind of picking whichever color calls to you then if you are anything like me. Your painting is going to come out so rainbow because I love every color and I am always drawn to every color. Or, if you want to, you can pick a specific set of colors that you want to work with. So if you are feeling really connected to the color green today, maybe you would like to use all shades of green and your painting or in your artwork, try Teoh. Change in between colors intuitively. So when you go back four colors, maybe you feel like you want to go back for the same color that you were using previously. Or maybe this time you are being drawn to a different color. And if you do make a plan before you start to color, and then once you are coloring that plan doesn't feel right. Don't be afraid to deviate from your plan. Just go with the flow and let it happen similarly to how we just kind of let it happen. When we were drawing our design and we weren't too worried about making our design look exactly like the sketch or anything same concept here, you do want to try and just go with the flow and let it happen. So if you're feeling called to use green even though you told yourself that you would use purple, don't hesitate to go ahead and switch to green and use whichever color is calling to you. And there are a couple of ways that you can actually color in this entangle as well. You can do what I'm doing and just follow along the outline of the basic design. So, as you can see, I'm kind of following along the outline of the May believe. But I am not worrying about staying within the lines of my eyes. Entangle itself. If you'd like Teoh, you can draw in each little part of yours. Entangle, for instance, If I were here, I could maybe make one of these rows green. And then, um, I could kind of switch in between colors and make some of the other rose yellow so you can kind of color in each of your Littles entangled designs as you see fit. I tend to like to be a little bit more loose when I'm filling in with color, so I like to kind of go out of the lines a lot. It's up to you, though, if you like to stay within the lines. I know a lot of my friends do like to stay in the lines, and they do feel like that gives them more therapeutic benefit in their artwork. Do what feels best to you. Your artwork is nobody else's. It is yours. So you get to make your own choices as to how you are coloring in your art piece. If you want to make yourself a rain, bows entangled. Go for it. That's usually what I dio and also feel free. If you'd like to mix colors to kind of practice, mixing colors as well. You can even test some colors on a sketch piece of paper before you color them onto your final piece if you want. And just like with our previous steps, you really do want to focus more on the process of coloring in yours. Entangle. Rather than focusing on how it's looking as you are coloring it in, or how you are thinking it will look once you are done, try to think in the moment. Think about how it feels to color all of these pieces of yours. Entangle end. Think about which colors air calling to the most right now think about maybe which color is your favorite Has your favorite color changed throughout the years? Do you like to use the coloring medium that you chose? For instance, I do really love painting with watercolor, which is why I choose to paint with watercolor a lot because I find the fluid nature of watercolors to be really enjoyable for me. And I really connect with this particular media. But many of my friends, they actually prefer to do digital arts or ah, lot of them like to do acrylic painting. That's the great thing about meditation. Art is that you can create it with whichever mediums you like the most. Okay, And then, you know you can do some other fun stuff like I'm doing now. Kind of create a couple of splotches here in their of color. If you feel like it, I tend to be a very colorful person. So I like to really come in and put color on a lot of my artwork. If you're feeling crazy, you could even like, splatter some splatters on to a like this. So you know, no need to stay in the lines. No need to follow a certain pattern and you can kind of just let it unfold. Did you go? You can use bright colors. You could use dark colors and go ahead and color in your entire piece. Take a much time as you want or need for this, and that is our colored ands entangle. 9. Guided Reflection: Okay, So now that you have worked through your first creative meditation projects, it's time to sit back and reflect on your experience so you can have a pen and a piece of paper handy. If you wish to take notes during this process, the first thing that we're going to look at is how we felt during the process of creating our artwork. So think back on any sort of recurring thoughts or emotions that you may have had as you were creating your art piece. Feel free to write these down to record them. If you wish. Now begins to observe your artwork as it's finished and completed. Tried to view your artwork with curiosity and interest rather than critique and judgment. Remember, the outs come of this piece is not to create a masterpiece, but in order to just appreciate the artwork for what it is. So think about any sort of recurring emotions or thoughts that you might have while observing the end result of your artwork. Now let's reflect on how we feel after the mindful creative process. Are you feeling any sort of recurring thoughts or emotions currently as a result of creating yours entangle. Do you feel less stressed? Do you feel like maybe you were able to work through something that was causing you anxiety recorded right? This downs that you can see if you gained any therapeutic benefits from creating your mindful art piece today. Thank you so much for joining me in this mindful meditation course. If you would like to please feel free to upload your art piece and share it with others as it helps spark some creative inspiration for others who are also taking the course. I hope that taking this course helps you add some mindfulness in your artistic journey and have fun creating by.