Develop a Daily Creative Habit with Zen Doodle & Zentangle Inspired Art - 45 Exercises Included!

1. Hello!: [MUSIC] Hello, welcome to this course on creatives Zen Doodles and Zentangle-inspired art. Drawing repeat patterns that put you in a Zen state of mind is one of the most addictive activities in the world. It gives you an immense amount of happiness to put strokes on a blank piece of paper and then see a marvelous result in the end. There are a lot of techniques and effects that you can create with just simple pens and basic paper. However, I know that it might be a little overwhelming for someone who is just starting out. I decided to come up with this challenge where I can help you to overcome your fears and enjoy the process of making Zen Doodles and Zentangle-inspired art. With practice, anyone can be perfect. If you make this a daily habit, then you will definitely start looking at everything around you with a fresh perspective. You literally start seeing doodle patterns and design inspiration every day and everywhere. I promise you that it will become a lifetime hobby that you will always cherish. In this class, we will be exploring a lot of topics ranging from tangles, from the original entangle method to taking inspiration from everyday objects and turning them into patterns. We will also be discussing how to create balance, contrast, and harmony in all your designs. Finally, we will also explore ideas on how to bring variations in your designs. Remember that the class is best enjoyed when you work at your own pace. You can take as many breaks as you like in the middle and can always come back and pick up from the point where you left off. The best part is that the class is perfectly suited for beginners as well as experienced artists so that you can get a creative boost on a daily basis. You will especially find this class useful if you been looking for a creative way of engaging in self-care and mindfulness or if you have a creative block and need some time off to indulge in newer techniques. I promise you it's going to be a lot of fun. Now for those of you who are attending my class for the first time, my name is Ridhi, and this is my seventh skillshare class. I'm a filmmaker, a multi-disciplinary artist, an art educator, and a creative entrepreneur. I ran two creative brands, The Color Birdie and Rariro, and with both of my brands, I sell jewelry, home decor products, surface design frames, stationary, wall art, and different lifestyle and gifting essentials. I have been drawing and working with Zen art for over a decade now and today in this skillshare course, I'm going to be sharing some of my most trusted ideas and techniques. If you've been around over here on skillshare for some time and have been following my classes, then you probably know that I had also done a 30-day challenge similar to this one earlier. That challenge turned out to be a huge success. Students were posting their work on a dedicated hashtag on social media and I was so happy to look at the pictures and the amount of progress that they've made over those 30 days. This challenge goes one step further. In the previous 30-day challenge, we had focused more on basic strokes, but it is 45-day challenge, I'm going to be adding a lot more complex compositions, as well as details on how to mix and match tangles from the originals entangle method. All in all, this course is aimed to make you absolutely confident and comfortable with Zen Doodles and Zentangle inspired art. Let's dive in and kick start this wonderful adventure together. See you in class. 2. Supplies : [MUSIC] Let's talk supplies. Now, to be perfectly honest with you, creating beautiful Zen doodle or Zentangle-inspired art work does not require a lot of fancy supplies. You need something to draw with and something to draw on. I'm basically talking about pencils and pens and paper. Now when I first started out, I used to draw with regular ballpoint pens or HB pencils and I used to use printer paper to draw on. If you're a beginner and you have these basic supplies available with you, then you're ready to begin the challenge. But let's say you are a serious hobbyist or you're an art enthusiast who is interested in professional supplies and you want to level up your inventory, then here are some of my recommendations. For the papers, I highly recommend that you use acid-free paper that's at least 120 GSM thick so that the ink from your artworks doesn't cause the papers to crinkle up or buckle up. We're going to be drawing a lot of complex compositions which have heavy inky areas and we're looking for thicker paper so that the paper does not get soggy. Now, standard zentangle square tiles are usually around 3.5 inches in size. But you will a find artist tiles from other brands as well that are anywhere between four inches to eight inches in width and height. Now you don't have to work on a square format. You can, of course, create your drawings in a sketch book, or in a drawing book of literally any shape or size, just as long as you're comfortable with it. Just keep in mind that when you have a really large size of paper, then it might take you longer to complete your artwork on a daily basis and so you might feel tired on some days because of the complexity of the compositions, so try to stick to a size that's comfortable enough for you and it also fits into the time that's available with you on a daily basis. Now for the purpose of demonstration in this course, I'm going to be working with this sketchbook from a brand called, Menorah, which is easily available to me over here in India. This is a six by six inches square sketchbook and it's a comfortable size for me to work on every day. It also has acid-free paper, which means that my art work won't gets spoiled in the long run and I can keep these designs safe for a really, really long time. Now coming to the pens. I usually use these Sakura Micron pens, which are quite popular with illustration artists around the world. These are also the same pens that the zentangle headquarters recommends and they include it as a part of their training gifts. But if this brand is not available to you, then you can look for fine liner pens or technical pens from other brands, such as Snowman, or Brustro, or, Fable Castell. Now here's my pro tip. Regardless of the brand, just make sure that the pens that you're buying have archival ink. Archival ink is a very important feature, especially if you're looking to maintain your artwork for a long period of time. Now all of these pens come in various nib sizes. For example, I have the 08 pen with me. The number says 08, but the thickness of this pen is 0.50 mm. Similarly, this Sakura Micron pen say 01 and the actual thickness of the nib is 0.25 mm. Basically, the numbers that you see on the pen body are not really reflective of the mm size. You have to look a little closer to find the exact mm size, which is going to give you an idea of how thick the strokes are going to be. I usually use the 01 pen to draw my designs and then I use 08 for any large areas that require coloring. It's just faster to work with a thicker nib when it comes to coloring. However, like I said, if you don't want to invest in technical pens or fine liner pens right now, that's completely fine and you can follow along in this class with regular ballpoint pens as well. Now, let's say you want to color your drawings later on, then you can use color pencils, sketch pens, markers, crayons, or any other coloring media that you're comfortable with. However, just a word of caution, that if you plan to use watercolors later on on your drawings, then make sure that your paper is at least 300 GSM thick. Because when we apply watercolors on paper, the paper tends to buckle up a little bit. It's important to have 300 GSM as the people width, because then it'll hold onto that water and the pigment really well and then your people won't crinkle up. Now here is one more pro tip. When you buy watercolor paper that is cold pressed, then you will not be able to draw very smoothly on it and the nib of your pen might get ruined. That is because cold pressed paper has texture on it and so when you try to draw on it, it's a little hard for you to control the pressure because the ink does not come out consistently. Consequently, it causes the nib of your pen to get spoiled. My recommendation is to work on hot pressed paper. It's smoother and the pen glides over it easily. Even if you're using a really thin nib, it won't get damaged because the paper surface will be smooth for you to work on. Now for all the supplies and the tips and tricks that I have mentioned in this video, I have also created a handy checklist that I have included as part of the projects in the resources section, which is right below this video. That's it for the supplies and now we're ready to start our creative challenge. 3. Day 1 - Let's Warm Up!: [MUSIC] Hello, everyone, and a very warm welcome to our 45-day creative challenge, where we are exploring lots and lots of different patterns and drawing exercises to level up your Zendoodle and Zentangle-inspired art. Today is day 1, and I thought we'd begin with a small warm-up exercise just to help you get in the rhythm of things and to help you get started and put yourself in the right frame of mind. I'm all set over here with my sketchbook and my micron pen, and I'm going to be using 01 size today. You're free to choose any other size that you have available with you. Now to begin the exercise, I'm going to pick a random point on the paper and I'm just going to draw an abstract doodly shape. It doesn't need to be too big. This is about two centimeters or about an inch wide. Then we just go in it with another little line inside, just imitating or shadowing the outline of the one that's on the outside. Then we're going to add some straight lines inside of this. These can be in any direction, but try to focus on the lines to make them as evenly spaced out as possible. When you're done, we're going to do another blob right next to it. If you notice, this abstract blob is basically trying to imitate the boundary or the outline of the previous one. Then again, I'm going to do another one over here, and I try to imitate those little crevices and curves. I play around with the sizes of these blobs and I keep on creating lots and lots of these all over the page. Every time you create a new blob, just look at the outlines of the previous ones or the surrounding ones and try to match it accordingly, almost like puzzle pieces which are fitting right into each other or they're placed right next to each other but there's a little bit of empty space between them. Work at your own pace, there's no hurry at all, and just enjoy the process. Then we go ahead and we're going to start filling the lines. Every time you fill the lines, make sure that you change the direction so that it looks a little more interesting. It will also help you to get a proper warm-up. You're free to rotate your notebook and your paper as many times as you like. If you have a preferred direction for your strokes, for example, left to right or top to bottom, then rotating your sketchbook frequently is going to allow you to work in your desired direction. Now, the decision is up to you on how you want to go about filling the page. You can either do all the blobs first and then come back and do the lines later or you can just complete each blob individually as you go along, so do the outlines and then the inner lines and then move on to the next one. You decide how you want to go about this. Basically, just work on building up your concentration and focus and just enjoy each stroke individually. Just breathe and enjoy the process. Now I'm going to speed up the video a little bit to show you what your page is going to look like once all your blobs are done. Remember that every time you draw a new blog, you're basically just imitating the outline of the surrounding ones. Once your page is completely filled up, it's time to add in some details. Now, there are two different variations that we can do for the details and I'm going to show these to you on a scrap piece of paper. One of the variations can be to cover those borders in black ink and basically have a thicker outline and then the other variation can be to play with stripes inside the blobs, so you basically color them alternate. You're free to do any of these variations in your design to bring in a little sense of contrast. As for me, I want to go with the thicker borders. You can definitely switch up to a thicker pen, for example, a 08 nib or even a brush pen, if that's what you have available with you. You can use that to color up the large areas. I am, however, going to continue working with the 01 nib because I like to color at my own pace and I quite enjoy the process of working with a thin nib. Again, these are just personal choices. You're free to improvise any way that you like. There are some days when even I have to switch to a bigger nib size, especially when I have large artworks and large chunks of color that I need to place or if I have a deadline and I need to finish up the coloring quickly. It all depends on my mood and the pace that I'm willing to work at and of course, it also depends on the time that's available with me. Now, once we are done adding the contrast to the outer lines or the inner lines, whatever you have chosen, we are basically done. This is an easy warm-up exercise for day 1, where we are basically indulging in line practice and also playing a little bit with contrast to try and build up your focus and concentration for the next 44 days. I hope you enjoyed this simple, carefree, relaxing exercise that we have done today. I look forward to seeing your work in the project section. Tomorrow we're going to start working on some complex compositions and I will be introducing more patterns and designs to you as we progress further. I look forward to meeting you real soon. Bye bye. 4. Day 2 - Fluxecho Blooms: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to our creative challenge. Today we are on day two of creating interesting, intricate Zen art. I'm super excited for today's exercise because I'm going to be introducing some of my most favorite tangles today. To start off today's exercise, we're going to be picking literally any point on our sketchbook and making a tiny little circle over there. The next thing that we do is basically create a teardrop shape on top of it. Then we are basically creating some echoes. The teardrop shape on the top is actually known as the flux element and what we're basically creating on the sides is basically an echo effect. As you can see, we're basically going smaller and smaller and narrower on each of the sides, creating a blooming effect. This is how we basically build this one tiny element which is called flux echo. Like I said, the teardrop in the center is called flux and then since we are creating an echo effect, it basically becomes flux echo. This is a beautiful tangled design by Lynn Made. I'm going to be adding the details of all the tangles that we use along with the people who've created these tangles in the projects and resources section. In case you want to check out the tangles for future reference, you'll have a handy list with you. Now basically, I'm going to be creating more of these flux echoes in and around the one that we've just created, so some are going to be bigger and some are going to be smaller. The starting point is always the little circle and then we create a teardrop shape and then we keep blooming outwards. You can see that as you're going out, you're basically just hugging the previous element and then just going narrower and shorter on each of the sides. We're also going to be overlapping these a little bit. You can see that every time that I want to take something under the previous one, I basically lift up my pen just ever so slightly to pretend that I'm still drawing and then I bring my pen back in contact with the paper and then it creates a smooth transition to make it look as if the elements are overlapping each other. Keep rotating your sketchbook and keep drawing a few of these flux echo elements. We are going to be making a bunch of these. Let's say about eight or nine of these and all of them are going to be facing different directions and they're going to be of different sizes. Make some of them bigger, some of them smaller and basically by the end of it, they're going to end up looking like a pretty little bunch of flowers all facing in different directions and also overlapping each other slightly. Now it's absolutely okay if you don't get the exact number of echoes on each of the sides. So if you have the teardrop in the center or the flux in the center and you have four echoes on one side and five echoes on the other, that's perfectly fine. Just as long as you're going narrower and shorter on each of the sides, you're doing perfectly fine. The whole point of using the flux echo in this manner right now is to basically pretend that they are like these little blooming flowers. It shares a lot of characteristics with floral tangles or floral designs and gentle because flowers also have a radial pattern. That's one of the reasons why I like to use this tangle, imagining it to be like a little flower. Now, we're basically looking at a composition where these flowers occupy, let's say about 40-50 percent of your page. But they're not going to be placed in exactly the middle of it, so they're slightly off-center. You can see that mine are more on the left side of the paper and they're not exactly in the middle. But yours could be more in the south direction or more up or more right and that's completely fine too. Just as long as you have about eight or nine or maybe 10 of these and a nice bunch of these. Now once I'm happy with the number of flux echos that I've created, I'm going to start coloring the centers and this is just so that we can start adding some details and contrast into our design. After I fill up the centers, I'll come back to the petals and I will start adding some details. I'm going to start with the center petal or the flux itself and I'm going to basically create a small triangle over there using curvy lines. It's almost like writing the alphabet we but in a curvy manner and I'm going to color that black. Then I'm going to create a little line going towards the center so it's going to be like a dot, a tiny line, then a dot and a tiny line again. This is just my way of adding little details. You can choose to do an exact straight line towards the center. Almost how flower petals have veins in them. If you want to do that, that's perfectly fine too. But what I'm going to do is just play a little mix-and-match game here. I'm going to do dots and lines in my center, three petals. As the petals bloom outwards or as they're getting smaller and narrower, in those outer ones, I'm going to do just lines. I'm going to curve them slightly just so that they match the curve of the echo itself. Basically, I'm just adding some details here and there to make sure that the centers don't look boring and that the flowers or the flux echoes over here have a sense of detail to them. Once you're happy with the detailing of the flux echos, we're going to move on to our next tangle, which is called Hollibaugh. Hollibaugh is basically a slightly more structured tangle because it involves creating crisscrossing lines which give the appearance of being overlapped and they give the appearance of layering. We start off by creating a straight line and then I'm going to pretend that this line goes under that floral bunch and comes out on the other side. Again, I'm going to try to move my hand in such a way that I lift it up just ever so slightly once I reach the floral bunch and then I touch it back onto the paper once I reach the other end. I'm basically pretending that it goes under it. [MUSIC] We basically create these little sticks which are crisscrossing each other. The best way to do this is to keep rotating your sketchbook so that you can play with the different directions. One of the things that I'm consciously doing right now is keeping the top left of my design empty or leaving that as negative space because we're going to be adding another diagonal tangle over there. I'm basically creating these crisscross lines more towards the bottom right. You can see that some of these are not coming out to be like perfect straight lines, which is okay, because then they just tend to look a little natural. Now once we have these lines, they are giving the appearance of almost like having a little trellis at the back of these flowers, or like these flux echoes or almost like a creeper plant, which is growing on top of a trellis or one of those bamboo or wooden partitions that we often see in gardens and balconies. So that's exactly the idea that I was going for, and I'm glad that it's shaping up quite nicely. So now once we're basically done with the holly Bow lines, I am adding these little orbs over here, which is basically a tangle called tipple. Tipple is all about adding little orbs of different sizes. So big ones and small ones next to each other, and whatever little space that I have between these little orbs, I'm coloring it black. Just so that, again, there is a little bit of contrast and detail. From these orbs, I'm basically creating these wavy lines, which are going to be looped at the end. And this is yet another tangle, a beautiful flare tangled called fescue. Now you can add as many of these as you like. It all depends on how heavy you want your design to look and how detailed you want it to look, plus the size of your paper of course. Now we're going to be creating these tipples and fescues on most of the meeting points. So I'm basically trying to look for these little corners in these octagonal and polygonal, triangular squarish shapes that are formed between the crisscrossing holly bar lines, and I'm looking for these little corners and filling them up with tipple and creating fescues out of them, and the fescues are going in different directions. I'm not doing it literally all of the corners, because then it would end up looking like too cluttered. So I'm probably doing it in like two or three corners of each of those shapes that are formed inside of those holly bar sections. Again, these are personal choices, and it totally depends on what your paper size is, and how detailed you want your design to look. I'm also adding a few of these details on the outer edge of the holly bar partition. Just so that they don't look as if they're trapped only on the side of the paper and that some of them are also going on the other side. Once we're done with this, we are going to move now to the top-left corner of the page, where we're basically going to introduce another tangle called poke leaf. Poke leaf is a beautiful little tangle, where we start off with two tiny little sticks and add a little cap on them, and then create a leaf around it. Now, your leaf might look completely different to mine, and that's completely okay. Because every person's drawing technique is different, and everyone's stroke is different. But the only thing to keep in mind is that poke leaf is an organic tangle, which means that these leaves can basically be drawn in any direction. So you basically keep rotating your sketchbook, and you keep overlapping these leaves, some smaller and some bigger, and they basically come from behind each other, on top of each other in different directions. Think of it like a money plant, which has leaves growing in all different directions or something like that. Now one of the things that I like to do in my poke leaves is to add these little curved lines at the edges, or only on one of the edges, to make it seem as if the leaf is calling up. This is just a small little detail that I like to add. You can skip it if this is something that you don't want to do. But I think that little element of adding a curve line somewhere on the edge of the leaf creates a nice cooling effect, which brings a sense of detail and again, of course, contrast because we're adding more saturated black inky areas and the design. To create a sense of balance, I'm adding a few little fescues here as well. Because we have a lot of fescues happening on the bottom right of the design, but we don't have any of that on the top left. So just to create a sense of balance, I'm adding a few of these on the top left as well. And that's it. That's our design for today. So we played with some lovely organic tangles to create this beautiful little floral bunch that looks as if it's sort of trapped on a trellis or is hanging from a beautiful trellis. So I quite like this composition, and it's actually a lovely little composition to do on greeting cards, or any DIY project that you're working on. So I hope that you enjoyed this and that you will give this a try. And I look forward to seeing your work in the Projects and Resources section. And if you have any questions, feel free to put those in the discussions tab, and I'd be happy to answer them for you. So that's it for today, and I will see you tomorrow with another interesting composition that I have planned. Till then, keep creating. Bye-bye. 5. Day 3 - Aquafleur meets Akoya: [MUSIC] Hi there, and welcome back to the course. Today we are on Day 3 of our challenge where we're learning how to create zentangle inspired art and creatives zen doodles. For today's exercise, we're going to be working on an abstract composition with one big focal element in the center and then some random flowing lines around that focal object. To begin with, I'm going to draw an abstract doodle like shape in the center of my paper with a pencil. We're going to be erasing this later on, so make sure that you do this with a pencil and not a pen. Now grab a thin micron pen, preferably in of size 01, and make a dot somewhere towards the left side of this shape that we have drawn. Once you have the dot in place, we start making lines. For the first one, I'm going to go slightly above the boundary that we have created and make a small mountain like bump and then bring it down and connect it to the dot. Then I make a small wavy line. Again, this is outside of the border and then connected with a curving line back to the dot that we had placed. Then again I'm going to be making a little bump outside, bringing it like so, and then connecting it with a line and bringing it down. Now those little bumps that we had made we're going to be coloring those off to make it appear as if they're coming from behind the boundary. Then the gap between the two elements is going to be connected by retracing the original boundary line. Once again, we make the original boundary line, then go a little higher, and then color up that bump. Every time that you color up that little bump, it's basically giving the impression that it's like a curvy fold which is coming from behind that original boundary. We continue going further, creating more and more of these curvy triangular like elements, connecting them to the tail of the previous one. As you can see, I'm always connecting the front of the new element to the tail of the previous element. After I've done a few of these elements, I vary the height and then I start to go shorter, purposely making them thinner and narrower, and then connecting them almost as if changing the center point of these new elements that I'm creating, and then they start to give this appearance of being tucked beneath the previous ones. Then once you reach almost to the center, you are left with this little orb like abstract doodle shape in the middle. You have a couple of choices on how to do this. You can either go about creating these little triangular fragments and keep on building it inside, almost creating a spiral, or you could just connect the tail of the last one to the tail of the first one, making this little hollow space in the center that can be filled with another design later on. We're going to be following the second approach, but first I'm going to finish up coloring all these little toxin folds and also connecting each of these elements. Now depending on the pencil outline that you had drawn, there's a possibility that your toxin poles might be looking slightly different than mine and that's completely okay too. As long as you have these alternate fragments where it appears as if one of them is coming from behind the boundary line and then the other one is retrace on the boundary line itself, you will have a decent looking shape, and that's all that we're looking for. Then now again, before we come back to the center, we'll just add a few details on these little triangular fragments that we have created. On each of the fragments where there is a mountain bump, where it appears as if the fragment is coming from behind the shape, we're going to be adding these small little ovals, and you don't need to be very perfect with these, it's okay if they're a little doodly shaped and if they are slightly asymmetrical, that's fine. Just try to be as neat as you can. All that we're looking for is that we go smaller and smaller as we reach the tail of each of these sections. Work at your own pace and take as much time as you need to finish this off. You can pause the video or even slow it down if you want to take some more time to finish up the details. Once you're done adding the ovals, we'll come to the center where we are basically adding small circles or tipple, as you remember from yesterday's exercise. I'm basically making some circles which are of varying sizes. Some are small, some are big. I'm also coloring some of these black and leaving the others white just to create some interest and build contrast within that little hollow space. Once you're done with the center, we'll come back to the empty spaces that we left out, and we're going to be filling this up with lines. Now try to keep these lines as close to each other as possible. Basically I'm just following the curve of the next fragment. That's all that I'm doing. It's almost like creating repeated waves which are imitating each other, and so every new line that you draw is going to follow the direction and the shape of the previous one, just like shadowing the effect of the previous one. You've probably noticed that as I'm going along I'm also re-looking at some of my previous lines and redressing them and drawing over them just to make them a little neater and sharper, so you're definitely free to do that as well. Now at this point even though this design that we've drawn has good amount of detailing, what it lacks is depth. Now to bring depth in this design, I'm basically going to pick the hump side or the curvy side of each of these fragments where we had done the ovals and I'm going to go in with a thicker pen. I'm going to start to make that edge bolder. It will basically add almost like an angle to those fragments, and it'll connect that hollow black mountain bump that we had created on the top to the edge, giving it like a paper fold effect or a paper calling effect and adding dimension and depth to the shape. As you go towards the center of this composition, or basically when you reach the tail end, start to narrow it down. You start taking the top and then you go narrow towards the middle. Take your time with this step because it also acts as an opportunity for you to fix the outer shape or the outer boundary in case it wasn't needed before. It's your chance to really observe the shape and give it all the love and attention that you want to give it to make all of those little fragments stand out. Now here, thanks to the power of video editing, I can show you the before and after pictures. You can see how much of a difference the rounding basically brings to the entire shape. Adding roundings that almost appear like shadows to one side of your fragments or to one side of your design helps to bring in contrast and it also brings in depth. Now going back to our composition, the next step that we are basically going to do is add in a few curvy lines with pencil again, and again we are going to be erasing these later on, so make sure that you do this with pencil and not pen. I've created three of these, and each of them is partially hidden under the main focal aquifer that we have drawn. Now on these pencil lines, we're going to be working with another tangle which is called akoya, which to me almost looks like a beautiful pearl necklace as if like a princess had a pearl necklace and this tangle looks exactly like that to me. To begin this tangle, we are going to be drawing some small circles along that pencil line. Then we connect each of these circles with a curvy line like so. You go from the bottom of the previous one and connect it to the top of the next one. Once you're done with this, then you come back to the first one, take another curvy line, but this time you give it a slight more bend and then once you connect it to the next one it basically starts to look like a little curly leaf or almost like a jelly bean, I think. Then we again come back to the first one and this time we start with circles on the top edge. These are going to go smaller and smaller as you reach the next circle. Then again, you start with the big circle that's already there and you start to go narrower and narrower and all the way to the edge, and then you repeat the process. Basically it starts to look like a string of pearls already. Once you're done adding these circles, you again come back to the first one, and this time you start to add circles the other way round, but the process remains the same. You still go smaller and smaller as you reach the edge. Now when you're drawing these circles you probably noticed that there's a little bit of gap between the circles and the edge of those curvy lines that you had drawn, so we're going to go back and color those in with our black pen, and you can see that it brings a lot of difference already because it starts to add some more contrast into the design and it helps to make sure that those circles or those little pearls stand out more. Now the original akoya step out has circles inside these little jelly bean like shapes as well, but I'm going to be improvising over here a little bit because I want this akoya tangle to be in harmony with the aqua flower tangle that we have drawn. Just like we had done lines in the aqua flower, we're going to be adding lines in the akoya jelly beans as well. Then once you do the akoya tangles on the other two pencil strings that we had drawn, it's going to end up looking something like this. You can see that because of the use of tipple inside the aqua flower, as well as the use of lines inside the akoya, both the tangles are now in harmony with each other and they have similar visual elements. One more little detail that I'm adding as I'm going along is that I'm coloring the original circles black. The original circles that we had created to build the akoya framework, I'm just inking them black so that those anchor poles are darker as compared to the other poles and that helps to add a little more contrast to the overall design. Now in designs like these where there is a really big focal element in the center that's filled with details and is quite overpowering, I like to have a lot of negative space around so that it just creates a sense of balance and that there is a little breathing area around. But if you feel that your design is looking a little empty which is totally possible if your sketchbook is bigger than mine, then you're definitely free to add more of these akoya strings around the aqua flower. Feel free to personalize the design and you're free to alter a few things here in there. It doesn't need to be exactly the same as mine, and you're definitely free to improvise and do your own little touches here and there, and don't forget to erase the pencil lines later on. That's it for today's exercise, and I'm super excited to meet you guys tomorrow with one more interesting idea that I have planned. See you, bye, bye. 6. Day 4 - Drawings & Toodles: [MUSIC] Hi everyone, and welcome back to the challenge. Today we are on Day 4, and for today's exercise, I'm going to be helping you design a cute little floral bouquet using a couple of organic tangles from this entangled method. For the first one, we're going to be working with this tangle called drawings, which is a beautiful, flowery, flowy, feather-like tangle. For this, we basically begin with a tiny little circle and then make a weaving line coming out like so. Then we twist it around and we work in a radial manner to create a few more of these wavy lines. Almost like a windmill, but like a little more flowy version of that. It's almost acting like the center of maybe leaves or petals of a flower. Eventually you're going to be left with a flower like shape. You can do as many of these as you like. I've done five, but you can definitely do four or six or even seven if that's what you prefer. Now, we come back to any one of these lines, and we pick a point somewhere in the middle of that wave. From there, we basically make these little tiny Coby, scallop shapes connecting it to the tip of the next one. Then we repeat the process for the next one. We start with a couple of these semicircular bumps. Then as you go to the last one, it just almost becomes like a little feather, reminds me an angel wing and it becomes this pretty little tip in the end. Now, some of these are going to be bigger and some of these are going to be smaller, and not all of your petals are going to be equally sized, and that's fine because that's what we're looking for as this is a very organic tangle. Now we're going to repeat the process once more and create another drawings of flower under the one that's already existent. Just be a little careful when you reach the point of the previous one. Just as soon as your pen touches that point, lift it up so that it gives the appearance that your petals are going underneath the previous one. Then we basically just pretend that there is a hump that's coming from there. Then we connect it like so. Without really touching your pen on the paper, mimic the action. It's like you're drawing, but you're drawing like maybe a millimeter above the paper. The nib of your pen is not really touching the paper. That's how you can retrace your actions or retrace your hand movements and then touch it at that point where you feel the ink needs to now be put on the paper. That's how we can achieve this effect where it appears as if one flower is under the other. Anytime you're doing any of the tangles when you're trying to create this effect where one is on top and the other is underneath, just lift up your pen slightly, retrace your movements, and then bring it back in contact with the paper the second you feel that the layering is done. Now, what we're going to do next is that we're going to add a few details. There are a couple of ways that you can do this. You can either bring about a couple of curving lines like so and then leave them midway or you could connect it all the way to the bottom. Again, you can either wrinkle the lines or connect them to the bottom all the way. Both of them have their own effect and both of these techniques look really pretty and you can choose whichever one you like more. I tend to like the effect when it goes all the way to the bottom, almost like creating small little sections within the given sections. I like to have these little teardrop shapes, but you're definitely free to do the other approach. Then again, we come to the next one. Either you take the curve and leave it midway, or you bring it all the way down to the center. Then again over here, since there's a little bit of an overlap, I'm going to pretend that there's a hump there and that there's a connecting line. Similarly, I'm going to pretend that there's a hump and then there's a connecting line and bring it down like so. We continue the process for the other two petals as well. Now once you're done creating the lines inside the petals, the next thing that we're going to do is color the centers of each of these tangles. The center circles that we had created are going to be inked black. We'll come back to add a few more details inside the petals, but we're going to do that a little bit later. First, we are going to surround these two flowers with a few leaf-like patterns. For that, I have chosen this tangle called toodles, which is a beautiful little triangle, that looks like a pretty heart-shaped leaf. It starts with a wavy line, and then we go to the tip of that wavy line and bring it down like so, almost like retracing it. Then we basically create a small fescue-like element on the right side. You probably remember fescue from the exercise that we did on Day 2. Then we repeat that same process on the left side as well. It's okay if your fescue is a little more close to the wavy line or far away from the wavy line, that's fine. Now pick a point somewhere on that fescue and take it upwards like so and then bring it down and connect it to the other fescue. It's almost like an inverted heart. You're definitely free to rotate your notebook or your paper in order to get the desired outcome. If you feel that you're more comfortable drawing your heart in the actual direction, like you want to have the curves up and the tip down, you're definitely free to do that. Whatever makes it easy and comfortable for you. Now, for the second toodle leaf, I'm going to overlap it slightly. I'm basically borrowing from the border of the drawings flower petal itself. I'm basically continuing from that same border, almost like both of these tangles are sharing that line and then I create my fescues. Since this is going to be overlapped, there's a high chance that the other fescue might just get hidden behind and I might not really see it, so that's fine. Then we again, create that heart-shaped leaf-like effect. I'm going to pretend that it goes under the previous one, and then comes out from behind it, and comes and touches the tip like so. Now you can always revisit your design. Now after looking at this, I feel like I'm missing the other fescue a little bit, so I will come back and I will add it, just like a hint of it, so that it appears as if that entire toodles leaf is behind the previous one. You can definitely do these little changes in your design. Now we're going to be adding a lot more toodles around the bouquet, but we're not going to go all the way till the edge. I'm just going to speed this up and show you how I've added mine. Depending on the framework and the size of the paper that you have, you can definitely add more or less. Yours don't need to look exactly like mine. You can even make them narrower and shorter. Once you are satisfied with the number of toodle leaves that you have created around your drawing flowers, we'll come back to the centers of these flowers itself. Now as you noticed, we had a little bit of a fescue element inside the toodle leaf. We're going to borrow that idea or take design inspiration from that and use that exact element to fill in the details inside the drawings flower. We're going to basically make it look as if there are a little fragments of pollen coming out of the center. The reason why I'm doing this in this particular order is because I wanted to show you how my process really works. Sometimes when I'm working on a particular tangle or a particular design, and I don't know what else I can do inside of it in terms of details or I don't know how to fill it up, then I move on to the next tangle. When the other triangle is done, I basically look for a particular element that can be added in the previous one so that both of them look in harmony. It's like going a little back and forth in terms of the design. But it definitely works because this way even if you have two completely different looking tangles, you can still make them work together or you can still connect them well together and make it appear as if they are from the same family by just creating some visual similarity between the two. Now here, as you can notice, I'm basically playing with the length of each of these fescue pollen-like details inside the flowers. Some are short and some are long, and some are facing clockwise, some are anticlockwise. You can definitely play around in terms of the variations with this and do your own personal touches. [MUSIC] Now for the next step, we're going to start coloring that center, vein-like element inside the doodles. I think I will have to keep both my pens handy at the same time. I'm going to use 08 for coloring and I'm going to come back with my 01 to neaten out the tips of each of these veins, just to make them look a little more pointy and sharp. Again, at this point, you can decide whether you want the wave or the central vein to touch all the way to the tip of the leaf or you want it left in limbo, somewhere in the middle. You can take these aesthetic decisions even at this stage. As for my design, you can see that I've created a variety. Some of the stems or these middle veins are going all the way to the top of the leaf, while some of them are just left in the middle. [MUSIC] Once you're done with the center lines inside the doodle leaves, we come back with our bold pen 08 or 05, whatever you have handy with you. We start to basically add some dimension and depth to the drawing's flower. I'm basically going to make the outlines thicker. But as we reach the edge of the petal, I'm going to make the corner even more bold and even more thicker, and that's because it makes it look as if the petal is curling. Very similar to what we had done in yesterday's exercise where we created an almost 3D effect by just adding a little bit of an angle to the design. By doing this, the flower now stands out a little bit more. It appears as if the flower is in the foreground and the leaves are slightly behind it. Again, these little details and adding a little bit of contrast help to build depth in your design, because now there is a sense of layering to it and the flowers definitely stand out more as compared to the leaves. Now I'm going to skip a little bit ahead to show you what the next step is going to be like so that you can plan a little bit in terms of how you want to structure your design. Now, once we are done with the flowers, we're going to move on to the next step, which is to basically add these little branches around. This is yet another tangle called Verdigogh. Now, Verdigogh is a beautiful tangle where we basically start off by creating small little stems like so. Then from each of the stems, we basically have more stems coming out. These can be pointy edged or these can be almost like a rectangular or curvy rectangle kind of an edge. You can even have them overlapping each other. You can have some going up, some going down. Basically, once you have the center stem and then some few other branches coming out of it, you can add more branches further and further and make it bigger and bigger. It almost looks like a close-up of a Christmas tree branch to me. When you look at it, it almost has those really thin needles. But it's up to you whether you want to keep them pointy or you want to keep the edge a little more blunt. We basically create a few of these around. You can have some bigger, some smaller, just play around with the sizes, play around with the orientation a little bit. When you're done adding these, it's going to look almost like a top angle view of a pretty bouquet [MUSIC]. Then I'm just going to add a few of these tiny little circles on the branches, almost as if they're like little wild berries or little seeds, or pollen coming out of these little branches. You can just go about placing these randomly anywhere along the edges of those little branches. Since we are basically coloring these circles black, they help to add in a little more contrast. Then that brings us to the next step. For the next step we're going to be adding a few more veins inside the doodle leaves. For this, take the thinnest pen available with you and draw the veins very similar to how they are in real leaves. But when you reach the tip, just flick your pen almost as if just creating a fading out effect. Basically, every time you reach the tip, just try to release the pressure. It's like an airplane taking off the runway, so you just basically have liftoff the minute you feel that you want it to fade out. Basically what I'm doing is that I'm starting close to that center dark vein but I'm branching out as we go further out. I'm just making those strokes lighter and lighter. This is actually one of the things that I really love about Zentangle art. Even though everything starts off in an abstract manner, you can bring in a sense of reality to it and you can borrow from real-life elements and add them onto your existing framework. It's almost like that meeting point or that sweet spot between reality and abstraction. These are very personal pieces of expression because the way I draw something is not going to be the same way that you do it, and so each of us are going to have our own strokes, our own imagination, and so each artwork really becomes very unique in that sense. All right, now for one final step, I'm going to just add in a few more of these wavy, almost tentacle-like branches coming out from behind the center flowers. Now I'm just going to go back to those two leaves and add a little bit of those dark curves that I like to add on my leaves, something that we did with our book leaves on Day 2 as well. This is completely optional, if you don't want to add more inky details in your design, that's completely fine. I personally like to do my leaves this way and this has actually become one of my signature little details in every design that I make. You will always find coiling leaves in my design and not flat ones, but this is purely optional. These are just little ornamental details that you can add if you feel like adding them or you can avoid if you feel that your design is good the way it is right now. With this, we come to an end to today's exercise. I look forward to seeing your beautiful versions and variations of this wonderful, lovely floral bouquet that we have done today. See you tomorrow. 7. Day 5 - Noodle & Springkle: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to our creative challenge. Today we are on Day 5 and I have a very pretty design to share with you all today. We're going to be working with a tangle called noodle and then we're going to be combining it with another tangle called springkle. Both of these tangles are very organic and very flowy and they have a pretty garden-like wipe to them. To begin the exercise, we're going to lay out some circles in a vertical line. They don't need to be very perfect and you're certainly free to rotate your notebook around to draw them in the opposite direction if that's easier for you. Now, once you're done with the first line, we're going to repeat that process somewhere in the center of the page. So you can see I've actually managed to put seven circles or seven of these orbs based on the length of the sketchbook that I'm using. You probably might have more or less depending on the length of your sketchbook so that's completely fine. I'm just trying to keep them as evenly spaced out as possible. Now the next thing that we're going to do is that we're going to start working on some S-shaped lines. I basically start with the first one, touch the second one, and then crossover and bring it beneath the third one. Then I again go to the third one, curve it like so, touch the fourth one, bring it back in the opposite direction, and touch the fifth one. Then I start from the fifth one, touch the sixth one, bring it down and connect it to the seventh one. Then we basically repeat this process for the other two lines as well. Now once you're done with all the three rows, the next thing that we're going to do is begin counting the next set of circles so earlier we did 1,2,3, and then 3,4,5, and 5,6,7. But this time we're basically going to do 2,3,4, then 4,5,6, and so on and so forth. Basically, we skip the top one and start from the second one. I'm just going to show you how this works. We basically go to this second circle. Make a curve like so, bring it and touch it down to the third one and then reverse the curve and touch it to the fourth one. Then again we start from the fourth one, bring down the curve, touch it like so, and connect it to the sixth one. Then for the next one we just wrap it around and leave it like so. Now it's okay if the shapes are not to your liking right now and it's also okay if the shapes are looking a little different from each other. They don't need to be exact mirror images of each other so that's fine. [MUSIC] Now we'll just come back to their tops and we'll just close them like so and then the next thing that we're going to do is that we're going to start building out some echoes. Now, this step is very similar to the flux circles that we had done on Day 2, so you're basically creating almost like a teardrop shape coming from behind that center element and then you add another echo and we do two of these on each of these curvy fragments that we have. Then we do it all the way to the bottom. Now once we are done adding two of these echoes on each of the sides, we come back to the first one and this time we start to add more echoes but we start to tuck them inside the bottom one. Again, very similar to the flux echo effect. We basically start to go in a circular, radial manner and we go narrower and narrower and we tuck them under the next one. [MUSIC] Once you're done placing all your echoes all the way till the bottom, the next step is going to be to add some details in the center, for others, we come back to this little curvy shape that we have in the center and start to add some circles and color all the empty space black. Again, the circles are going to go down in a descending manner. Then we come back to the outer petals that we had created and I'm going to just retrace the first two or first three petals to make them stand out a little bit more. The first two or three are going to be slightly bold as compared to the rest of the petals. Then I'm just going to add a curvy line and put in a couple of dots in there. These are small little details that will just add a lot of value to your entire design. Again, we come back to the next one and we start to add circles in a descending size so they go smaller and smaller and then I color the sections black. Then again, I retrace the outer petals. I make the first two or the first three petals slightly thicker and slightly bold and then the other petals stay thin, almost creating a fading-out-like effect. Then once you're done adding the details, we basically repeat this exact same process for the whole row, and then we do the same thing for the other two rows as well. Now this is a fairly repetitive process and it's going to take you a little bit of time to finish up the detailing so if you feel like you want to pause the video at this point and come back once you're ready, you can do that. In the interest of keeping these videos crisp and productive, what I'm going to do is that I'm going to skip ahead a little further and this is what your design is going to look like once you have finished with all the detailing on each of these three rows that we have created. Once you're at this stage, we will be ready to start with our next step. Now the original step out for the noodle tangle is slightly more compact as compared to the version that we have done today. The reason why I have decided to do a more spaced-out version is because I actually want to introduce another tangle in the middle of these empty spaces. This tangle that we're going to work with right now is called springkle and springkle is a beautiful organic tangle which is perfect to add to any floral designs and it's a great filler tangle as well. Now the way this tangle works is that we basically create a curvy line and then we loop it in the end like so, very similar to creating a fescue. Then we basically make a small curve from beneath that teardrop shape. Take it around and bring it down like so. It almost starts to look like a little curling stem. Now once you have this basic shape ready with you, we're going to add a few caps on top of it and these are going to be small, little semicircular or rounded caps, which are going to go narrower and narrower as you reach the tip. You can add as many as you like. There is no fixed number over here and so what I like to do is that I color them alternate, black and white and then I also add these little dots on top of it. [MUSIC] Then again, we are going to look for another empty space somewhere in our design and create another little fescue and it's okay if the bulb or that little teardrop shape on the top is not exactly teardrop shape, that's completely fine. Yours can be narrower, more circular, more bulky bigger smaller, there are no rules to it. Now, you don't always have to use the top side. You can also make the caps facing in the bottom direction. For example, over here, I'm going to take it down like so. Basically, the gist of this is that once you have that semicircular head on the top, you can use pretty much any side of that semicircular ahead and create your caps on top of it. The gaps can be facing in literally any direction, just as long as they are connected to that head on top. Keep rotating your notebook and keep finding interesting areas where you can add these little springkles. We don't want to add a lot of them. We just want to add a few so that they look like they're coming out of these floral stems. You can have some coming from the edges of the design, almost making it look as if the design is continuous and it's continuing even beyond the paper and you can have them facing any direction that you like. [MUSIC] Then once you're done adding all of these little springkles, the next thing that we're going to do is add a few fescues, and the fescues can be again put in any direction. That's it for today's exercise. This is a beautiful little floral wine design that can be used as a border to any other composition. Or you can simply multiply these wines and create a beautiful pattern the way we have done it today. You can use it for many DIY projects, like greeting cards, or even pin them on top of cushion covers or put them on top of your notebooks or make stickers out of it and put it on top of your laptops. There are many different applications to this design. I hope you loved creating it as much as I love teaching it, and I look forward to seeing your versions and variations of this beautiful little design that we've done today. See you tomorrow. 8. Day 6 -Borbz & Diva Dance: [MUSIC] Hello, and welcome back. In today's exercise, we're going to be working with this tangle called Borbz. The creator of this tangle is Rita. This is a lovely, beautiful bordered tangle. She decided to call it Borbz because she says that it's a border of squished orbs. She basically came up with this wonderful little acronym. I think it suits the nature and the characteristic of the tangle very well. To begin this tangle, we basically start by making some orbs. All of these orbs are stacked one on top of each other, or they are connected to each other in one single row. It's okay if the orbs are not all equally sized, and if they don't look similar to each other, that's fine. We repeat the process two more times, and then we reach the end of the page. Now if you're using a rectangle notebook and you're using it in the landscape mode, then you probably might have to make a few more rows, and that's fine. Just make the number of rows depending on the orientation of your sketchbook and the size of the paper. Now for the next step, we come back inside these orbs, and we start to place smaller orbs. But these are going to be colored black. I've basically taken my 0.8 pen so that it's easier to color, and it's faster that way. As you can see, the inner orbs don't really have a fixed position. You can place them anywhere inside the big orb and you can keep them left, right, bottom, top, just as long as they're inside the big orb. Now step number 3 is going to be to make an outer boundary or an aura around the inner orb. Once you're done with the aura, we basically start to create these lines coming out of it, almost like sun rays. You can go clockwise or anticlockwise, whatever's easier for you. These can be curvy or straight. Both of the variations have their own appeal. They both look interesting. If yours are turning out to be slightly more curvy than mine, that's fine. Now before I finish off the rest of the orbs, I'm going to show you the next step so that you can pause the video and finish it up until this point. For the next step, we basically pick one side of those lines that we had drawn, it can be left or right, and then we start to create a curvy line and color that in. It's almost like creating a curvy tangle on top of those lines that you had drawn. It's like adding a little bit to the edges of these lines. It's going to start to look like this. Now in this particular orb, I have decided to add the weight on the right side of the lines, but you can add it on the left side of the lines as well. You can also mix and match it for the rest of the orbs. You can do some with the weight on the right side and some with the weight on the left side. If at any point you feel like you want to retrace the boundaries of those orbs and make them neater, you're free to do so. Now again, for the next orb, I've picked the right side. I'm just adding a little curvy line and then coloring it in. Now, depending on the distance between each of these lines that you have drawn radiating out from the center orb, you might have a couple of places where there might be overlaps. If the lines are very close together and you're trying to add weight on them, they might overlap and run into the next one. That's fine. This is a very abstract pattern and so there is room for some inconsistencies over here because that's the nature and the characteristic of this particular tangle. It almost has a very futuristic vibe to it. Almost like these are going to be plants in outer space or probably people in the future might wear jewelry which looks like this. This pattern is quite abstract in that sense. Now once you're done with these steps, we basically do the exact same thing on the rest of the orbs. Just to recap, as I'm drawing along, Step 1 was to draw all the orbs. Step 2 was to create the inner orbs, which were colored black. Step 3 was to give each of them an aura. Step 4 was to create all of those radiating lines coming out of those auras. Then Step 5 was to add weight. Now, this is a fairly repetitive process, so I'm going to speed up the video a little bit to show you what it's going to look like once all your rows are done. I'm actually just going to finish the first row entirely and show you what it's going to look like. Here, the first row is completely done. I'm still going to work on the other two rows, but I wanted to show you the next step so that you have a complete picture of what the design is going to look like. Now once your rows are done, the next thing that we're going to do is connect these orbs by adding these semicircular curvy lines and coloring them black. This is going to happen all the way from the top. We basically draw a small curvy line and connect it somewhere to the edge of the next orb. Then we do this on both the sides. Eventually, it's going to start looking like there is a big thick black border and the orbs are stuck on top of it. That is why this tangle works very well as a border tangle. Now you can pause the video at this point and come back once you're ready. Once you're done with all of the steps on each of these little strips or borders that you have drawn, your paper is going to look something like this. Then we'll be ready to work on the next step. For the next step, we're going to be drawing lines which are going to be mimicking each other. This tangle is basically called diva dance. I basically start by tracing the outline of the tangle that's already drawn. I'm basically trying to copy the shape and the curves of the tangle that's already there. Then I do it one more time. Now in the second line, I basically come back and I start to add some black roundings like so. It's almost like creating little bumps filled with color. Then the third line is now going to follow the shape of the second line. Since we added the curves on the second line, the shape of the second line has changed a little bit. Now the following line is going to mimic the effect of the previous line. Then again, I do the fourth line, which is going to mimic the effect of the third line. Fourth line is again going to have bumps in it. Now it's not necessarily that you have to do one without bumps and the other with bumps, so you don't have to go alternate the way I have done these two. You can also have two without bumps and then one with bumps. Or you could have one with bumps, and then you could have three without bumps. Or you could do even do with bumps together. Basically, you can play around with the variations in these lines. You can mix and match. Then we basically use this tangle to fill up the entire empty space on the page. That's it for today's exercise. Today we have actually combined two very interesting abstract tangles. One is Borbz and the other is diva dance. Both of them have a very characteristic to them, which is why they complement each other perfectly. For the Borbz, you can even improvise and not use it as a border tangle. You can just use the orbs separately, not connected to each other, and you can have them floating around in different directions and fill up a space that you have in a larger composition. That's totally possible as well. I hope you enjoyed making this lovely fluid abstract composition that we have done today. I'm super excited to see all your versions and variations of this design. I look forward to meeting all of you tomorrow with yet another interesting exercise. See you. 9. Day 7 - Balldox & You!: [MUSIC] Hi everyone. Welcome back to the course. Today we are on Day 7 of our creative challenge, which means we're about to finish the first week of our creative journey together. I thought that since today we're about to finish the first week of our challenge, this is the perfect opportunity to level things up. Today I'm going to be reaching your only one tangle. Then I'm going to be leaving the rest of the space empty for you to fill it up with your own imagination. The tangle that we're going to work today is called Balldox, and it is created by Karen Frank. To begin this tangle, we start with three dots and then we connect these with these curvy lines, very similar to how we attack the Akoya tangle. Then we again come back at the bottom and connect it to the top. Again, exactly the same process as we had done with the Akoya tangle. Once you have these curvy lines in place, the next thing that we do is to build some teardrop shapes, also known as flux and then we basically just echo them out. Then as you are building more of these echoes, they will start to give an impression that they're getting tucked beneath that circle that we had drawn initially. We can also refer to these circles as anchor points because they're holding the entire design together. Depending on how you spaced out the three dots, you might either have more echoes than me or less echoes than me. That's it. That's how Balldox is created. Now you have absolute freedom to do anything that you like in the center as well as outside. Since we're about to finish the first week of our creative challenge, this is a great opportunity for you to go back and look at all your previous designs and pick up some of the tangles that you either find very interesting or the ones that you want to practice a little more. Now use those tangles in this particular design and build your own composition. Remember, there are no mistakes. Everybody's composition is going to look different and each of you are going to end up creating it with your own personal preferences so there is generally no right or wrong over here. Fill up the page literally any way that you like. During the process, if you face any difficulties or encounter any problems, make sure that you write about it in the Discussions tab where I'd be more than happy to look at your work in progress design and help you carry it forward. As for me, I'm going to show you my complete composition tomorrow so that you don't get influenced by my choices, and are able to make a page which is completely uniquely truly yours. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Bye-bye. 10. Day 8 - Oh well!: [MUSIC]. Hi everyone and welcome to Day 8 of our creative challenge. Before we begin today's exercise, let's have a quick look at what I ended up doing with yesterday's project. I basically kept the wall docs in the center and then I added a few little orbs in the center to just give it some contrast. I also added a little bit of lines and dots. Then I proceeded to adding dividends almost like three sections or three ribbons which are coming out. Then I added some doodles. Now for the doodles, I decided to add in some details by putting in these curvy lines inside and giving them some weight at the end. For all the negative space on the left side, I decided to add pork leaf and decided to color the background black. But I did want to maintain an abstract field overall. I decided to keep the right side of my page as white and just added some fescue over there. Then finally I added some random dots around the fescue just to make that whole thing look a little more full, and that was it. This was my version from yesterday's exercise where I picked up a few patterns from everything that we've done in the last week. Overall, I'm quite happy with the way this whole thing turned out. It was quite a relaxing experience for me and I'm sure it was the same for you. Now that brings us to today's exercise. Today we're going to be working on a mono tangle. A mono tangle basically is the terminology which is used in the zentangle method whenever we work with only one tangle. Today the tangle that we're going to be focusing on is called Oh Well. It's a beautiful tangle by Melinda Barlow. It has curvy lines and straight lines. It's quite an interesting exercise to do as a mono tangle because it really builds your power of association when it comes to shapes on your paper. Now, the way this tangle works is that we start by making a tiny little circle and color it black. Then somewhere under that circle, we create another tiny circle of almost the same size, just a tiny little orb. Now we connect these two by making a curvy line like so. Then we again make two dots. These are somewhere on the right side of the previous two. Now this time when we're connecting these dots, we touch the previous curve just a little bit. Once you have these two curves, we close the top and the bottom by adding another curvy line, like so. Almost like adding a cap on top of it. Then the inside is filled with lines which are parallel to both the sides of the curves. The easiest way to do this is to start with the center line and then just go parallel and parallel to match the shape of each of the edges. Now this tangle almost works like a constellation in the sky. You can just keep connecting and building more and more of these dots and more and more of these patterns by just adding those curvy lines. For example, for this one, I'm using the preexisting curve and I'm just adding another curve and just putting in the dots and connecting it like so. The beauty of this tangle is that you can use the pre-existing curves and just keep on building in any direction that you like. There are no rules as to which direction you should follow. I'm sure you've noticed that both the curves don't need to be of the same size. Of course, if you end up having two curves of the same size, there's nothing wrong in that. But I personally feel that the tangle looks a lot more interesting when one curve is smaller and the other is slightly bigger. Now we just keep building in the same manner by looking for pre-existing curves or looking for dots which are already there in our design and connect them to more dots that we keep on adding or we connect them to more curves that we keep on adding and we keep on building step-by-step. Sometimes you might even find yourself in a position where there's already a dot nearby, probably as a result of the fragment that you have drawn earlier and so you can always connect that existing dot to create a new shape. The reason why I thought that this would be an interesting exercise for today is because by placing these dots and lines, we're actually really building our skills for association. Our mind and our eye really opens up to what's nearby on our paper when we look at our tangle. Especially when we're focusing on one particular design, sometimes we get really absorbed in it and we forget what's around. This is a good exercise almost like a peripheral vision alive inside you so that you can look for more shapes and build more associations as you go forward. Of course, this is a great exercise for line practice because the more you draw these lines, you will build control in terms of your wrist movement and you will have a lot more control in terms of where to end the strokes because you don't want them crossing over the gaps. This is definitely good for that as well. Now I'm going to speed this up to show you what it looks like once you've filled up the whole paper. Of course, depending on the paper that you're using and the size that you are working with, yours might look slightly different than mine, which is completely okay. Now once the whole paper is done, what I like to do is go back to some of these curves, especially the ones that are overlapping. I like to accentuate some of those lines by just going in with a thicker pen and I'm using a 03 this time. This is very similar to us adding the curling edges on Berkeley for the doodles for example, that we've done in exercises earlier. I just basically build contrast by adding some dimension to it. That's it for today's exercise. I hope you found it relaxing and fun. This is definitely a good pattern to use in a lot of complex compositions. Especially when you have odd areas and you don't know what to do with them. This is a good filler pattern to rely upon. I hope that you can also use this in some of your future projects. That's it for today and I will see you tomorrow with another interesting exercise. Bye bye. 11. Day 9 - Shapes Around You!: [MUSIC] Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the challenge. Today, we are on day 8, and I thought that today, we are going to do an exercise in improvisation once again, very similar to what you had done on day 7. But this time, there's a little bit of a trick in wall, and that is that we're going to play with alternate black and white segments in our design. So to begin the exercise, we're going to start by making some wavy lines and you can make them in any direction that you like. I'm currently drawing these from left to right and you can see that most of these are diagonal, but you can choose to do this the other way around as well. Get your sketchbook in a comfortable enough position and draw a few of these wavy lines. As you can see, not all of them are going all the way till the end. Some of them are merging with the previous curve. That's how we're getting good variety in terms of the sizes as well as the thickness of each of these waves. Once you have the entire paper filled up with these waves, we'll come back to the first one, and this time we'll start filling it out with small patterns. Now for today's exercise, I want you to look around you and try and gather some inspiration for basic shapes. Everybody usually know some basic shapes, such as circles, squares, triangles, and even ovals and basic geometric shapes. But I want you to try and go beyond that and look for certain motives or certain patterns in and around your house. They can be on your clothing, they can be on your upholstery, and just try to understand and decode those patterns and use them in your design. As an example over here, I have started with basic circles. What I've done is that I've taken the first wave and color that entirely black, but I've just left the circle inside as white. Then on the second wave, I did the exact opposite. I fill up the circles as black and then I left the background as white. Then in the third wave again, I have kept the background as black and I'm just adding some tiny little ovals which are white. Now similarly when I move on to the fourth wave, that one is going to have white background and then again a black pattern. Basically, we're just going alternate. That's the only rule or guideline for today's exercise. Apart from this, you're free to use any shapes or designs to fill up all the waves. Now if you feel that you're stuck in terms of creative inspiration, you can even borrow some ideas from alphabets and numbers. You can use those to break down into simple shapes and fill them up over here. You can even use some playful shapes like clouds and stars, or you could use more complex shapes, such as drawing [inaudible] or maybe doing some intricate flowers. The choice is totally up to you but the idea today is to basically open our eye, to patterns around us and to gather inspiration from things around us and break them down into simple shapes and use them to fill up our page. I'm not going to show you the complete outcome of my design just as yet, I'm going to show that to you tomorrow. But you can see that I have basically stuck to the black and white alternate waves and I have used simple designs and simple shapes over here to just fill up my paper. That's what we're looking at for today. I hope you'll have fun in doing this exercise where you get to explore design inspiration. I look forward to seeing what you will come up with. Tomorrow, I'm going to meet you with yet another interesting exercise. See you. 12. Day 9 - Reveal: [MUSIC] Hi, everyone. Before we continue with the challenge further, I just wanted to show you my output from the exercise that we did yesterday. As you can see, I continued filling up my page with various patterns. I filled it out with some lines and then I took inspiration from alphabets and did some U-shaped curves, and then I also added some ovals. I also took inspiration from the drawings flower and imagine what the petals would look like if they were plucked individually and added those. Then, I also added some fescue along with some dots, and I also ended up adding a few spirals. All of these elements that I had chosen were basically inspired from objects around me, as well as from some patterns that we have already drawn over the last few days. I basically just played with contrast and went with the flow and just put on paper whatever came to my mind, and that's how I ended up filling up the page. Every few days I like to do an exercise like this because it really makes me aware of patterns around me, it really opens up my mind, and it really opens up my vision to things around me, to design inspiration around me. I would highly recommend for you to also try this every few days. Now if you're done with your exercises from yesterday, I definitely love to have a look at it once you put it in the projects and resources section. But if you feel that you're stuck for design inspiration, maybe you can borrow some ideas from here and hopefully, this will give you an opportunity to finish up your design. With that, we move on to day 10 of our challenge. 13. Day 10 - Pepper in Pepper!: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome to day 10 of our creative challenge. Today, we're going to be working with this beautiful tangle called pepper, which is actually one of my go to tangles whenever I'm out of ideas on what to use next in a complex design. I've already done a little bit of this over here as you can see. It's basically a tangle which is quite fluid in the sense that there is no defined shape to the boundary. You basically have fluid-like shapes inside which we add these thin lines and then each of the lines are basically given a certain amount of weight towards the edges. The way I have placed these is that I've tried to make them almost look like cells, like microscopic cells, which are sort the boundary of the other cells around them. Each cell is fitting in the space which is left out in the middle by the cells around it. So it's almost like fluid puzzle pieces which are morphing into the space, that's how I've placed them. I'm just going to show you a step by step process as to how this tangle works. As you can see over here, I've basically drawn this almost like a dotted dashed line with tiny hyphens are tiny dashes over here. This is the outline of the shape. Now, once you have the outline of the shape, you have to imagine a center, which is going to be hollow, very similar to the centers that I have over here. Now, this center is imaginary, which means that you have to be a little mindful of where your lines are going to come and stop. For example, let's take this particular shape right now. Now, over here, I'm going to start by placing some lines, and I'm going to consciously try to stop at a particular point, such that eventually what is left inside or at the edge of those lines becomes a hollow space. As you can see, what I've basically done is that I have chosen the right edge of each of these dashes, and I'm extending the line from the right side to the center. Once I have all of them placed together nicely, I can just go back to each of the lines and add the width; very similar to how we've been adding the surroundings so far in quite a few of the designs earlier. It almost becomes like a little curvy triangle at the top. Now, if you think this is turning out to be a little tricky for you, then I do have a tiny hack that can help you out. You can always use a pencil to draw an imaginary fluid shape anywhere in the center, it can even be off center, and then now this becomes your boundary or your guideline where the lines need to come and stop. As soon as they touch the pencil mark, I know that that's exactly where I have to stop and then I don't take the lines inside that hollow space. Then that way, later on when I erase this pencil line, I'll get a clean, nice-looking shape over there. This inside orb can be as small or as big as you'd like, there are no rules to it and each of the pepper shapes that you draw can have different sizes of the inner orbs, so that's completely fine as well. Now I'm going to do a couple more over here, I'm going to start by adding these dotted line shapes, then I'm going to pretend that this is my boundary and I'm going to add another one, almost imitating the boundary of the ones nearby. Then I'm just going to repeat the steps. Now, once you have a few of these in the center of your page, then we're going to pretend that all of these collectively together are one shape. We're going to think that all of these together are one giant pepper tangle, or that they're altogether grouped, and that they are basically inside the hollow space or another giant pepper tangle which is outside. To make this idea come to life, we basically need to leave some negative space around these. Again, we can use a pencil to just draw an imaginary boundary around this, and then once you have that negative space, we're going to start drawing some lines which are going to go out like this. Now, this time we're going to treat the edge of the pepper as the edge of the shape. The outer shape is not going to be as fluid as the shapes that were inside, we're going to start adding the weight on the outer boundaries itself. Just like that, we have a beautiful abstract pattern with us. That's it for today's exercise, I hope you enjoyed creating all of these lovely fluid pepper blobs inside another giant pepper. I look forward to meeting you tomorrow, with another interesting Zen art exercise. See you soon. 14. Day 11 - Garlic Cloves: [MUSIC] Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the challenge. Today we're going to be working with a simple and easy pattern called garlic cloves. It's a highly relaxing pattern. Most of the times when people see it in the beginning, they find it to be a little complicated because it appears complex, but once you start doing it you realize it's actually just really simple and once you break it down into steps, it becomes really easy to follow along. There are a couple of different approaches that you can use to make this pattern, but here's the approach that I find to be the easiest. I usually start by placing around dots on my paper. Your dots don't have to be this thick. I'm purposely making mine a little thicker and bolder so that it's visible on the camera, but yours can definitely be lighter and they can just be tiny little points on the paper. Once you have a lot of these around, the next thing that we're going to do is pick any two points or dots and connect them with a straight line. Then once you have the straight line in the center, we basically just start to add curves on each of the sides. These can be as many as you like. You can have three curves or four curves or even five curves depending on how plump you want the shape to look like. Then once you're done with one section, then we basically look for another nearby dot. Again, at the center straight line and start to build the curves. Now again, over here we are looking for interesting areas where we can form associations. We want to try to spread out the cloves in as many directions as possible, so try to look for dots that are at interesting angles so that you can have a good variety. As you progress further, you will also notice that sometimes there's a dot nearby, and if you try to connect another clove to it then it appears as if the clove is getting tucked beneath some other cloves that you've probably designed already. It adds to the depth of the design when you make it appear as if some of these cloves are hiding behind the ones on the top. Don't be afraid in case you feel that some of your cloves are getting partially hidden behind the previous ones. Just keep connecting the lines and try to focus on each line to make it as smooth as possible. This is again, a wonderful exercise to develop control and to build up your drawing skills so that you're able to work with your hands and your wrist in general in a smooth and comfortable manner. As you keep rotating the sketchbook and build the design in different directions, you'll notice that it starts to appear like a complex design. But really even though it looks very complicated, it's actually pretty simple as you just saw. That's it for today. We have a simple, easy pattern for today that helps you to develop line practice and build control and it's a highly satisfying and relaxing exercise. It's really a go-to pattern for days when you're really tired after a long day at work, or if you're feeling uninspired, then this pattern will definitely come to your rescue and it'll help you relax and have fun at the same time. Also, if you're interested in trying another version of this tangle, you might enjoy doing this with a thick pen and a thin pen alternately. Try doing one clove with a thin pen and then move on to another clove with a thick pen and that'll help to bring in some interest and drama into your design. In case you end up practicing both the versions, do let me know which version you like better. I look forward to seeing what you do with this pattern. That's it for today. I will see you tomorrow to continue our challenge. Have a good day. 15. Day 12 - Sparkle Sparkle!: Hi everyone, and welcome back to the challenge. Today we're going be working with a tangle called sparkle, it's a beautiful tangle that can be used as individual fragments or it can even be stacked together. Today we're going to use an approach where we use several sparkle fragments scattered all around that page. The way we begin this tangle is by drawing a curvy line like so, and then we connect it with another curvy line in the opposite direction, so it almost looks like a little eye or like a leaf with a slightly pointy edge. Then once you have this shape, we basically go inside to put a small o or a circle, and from the circle we get a curvy line like so. Then we rotate it and get another one like so, then a third one like so, and the fourth one like this. Basically we're just using the existing curve of the circle and then continuing and drawing four lines from it. Now, once you have these four lines, we go inside each of these sections and start to fill in more curvy lines inside, almost like they're fanning out or they're radiating out. Once you have these lines, we go to the edges and start to add a little bit of it alroundings. Very similar to how we have done in our previous exercises with pepper and doodles. Once you're done with the roundings, we come back to the center, and over here we leave just a little bit of white space in a semicircular manner almost like a little Smiley, and color the rest of it black. So that little white spot that we have left basically acts like a little highlight and it makes it appear as if the whole thing is sparkling, almost like a little gem, and that's how we finish this tangle. Now we're going to draw multiple such sparkle fragments scattered all around our page. You can even have some of them towards the edges where they're only partially visible, and basically we just scatter them around in different directions like so. Finally, once you're happy with the number of sparkles that you have scattered around the paper, we start to connect them with these curvy lines, almost as if they like ribbons connecting each of these fragments together, and we basically just keep building it as if it's some kind of a constellation or almost like a web where these sparkles are caught in the center. Now there are a couple of different things that you can do with the background, so you can either color the entire background black and keep these ribbons white, or you could even color the ribbons black and let the background to be white. You could even add some extra patterns or designs inside these empty spaces, so there are a lot of different variations that you can try to make this design look full. As for me, I haven't really decided what I'm going to do with this, so I think I will have a cup of coffee and then hopefully inspiration will come to me after that and whatever I choose to do with this, I'm going to show this to you tomorrow. I do look forward to seeing all your variations and versions of this design. I will meet you again tomorrow with another interesting exercise. See you bye-bye. 16. Day 12 - Reveal: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back. Before we move on to the next exercise, as promised, I want to show you what I ended up doing with yesterday's project. If you remember while drawing this composition yesterday, I was talking a little bit about how this reminded me of a little constellation and how these sparkle elements reminded me of gems. It just so coincidentally happened that after I finished drawing this, I was taking a little break and I found some stickers with me, journaling stickers, which were basically filled with astral patterns and they had these beautiful constellations on them. Then I just noticed how spaced out they are and how they are very airy with a lot of negative space around. It was actually these little gems which were the vocal elements where everything else was just left empty and these vocal elements were stealing the show. I decided to take inspiration from that, and I also decided to leave a lot of empty space. I did end up coloring the ribbons black. But then apart from that, the only other additions that I did was to add these little floating orbs very similar to the black balls that we had done in the centers of this backlit angle. Then I just added tiny little circles here and there, and then I decided to leave the rest of the composition empty. It's definitely a good change for me because I usually end up doing a lot of design-heavy compositions, and I end up using a lot of inky black areas. This was definitely a change for me and it's good to have this idea in one's portfolio. I think I'm quite happy with this and if you've done any other version or variation of yesterday's exercise, I'd love to have a look at it. Make sure that you put it up in the project section. With that, we are ready to move on to our next exercise. 17. Day 13 - Fun with Mooka!: [MUSIC] Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the creative challenge. Today we are on day 13 of our challenge, and today we're going to do an exercise with one of my favorite tangles called Mooka. Now, Mooka has a couple of different variations, and I've already drawn one of the variations over here for you to see as an example, but I'm going to show you a step-by-step version of this. We're actually going to be playing with both the variations of Mooka in the same composition today. First, we're going to be developing a few different Mooka flowers based on the version that the CCT Stephanie Jennifer had introduced. The way this works is that we basically take a curvy line and we loop it at the end, almost forming a board, and then bring it back all the way to the bottom. Then if you wanted to face the other way, then we repeat this exercise to the exact same steps, but make the board or the top loop facing the other direction. Similarly, now I can rotate my sketchbook and I create one more curvy line. Form a pole at the end and bring it back down. Now, every time two of these Mookas come and meet, they form this little shape, almost a heart shape, and they form a petal of the flower. Now, depending on the size of the Mooka that you are drawing as well as how you space them out, you can create a four-petaled flower or five-petaled flower or even a six-petaled flower, so it totally depends on you how big you want your flower to be. You can also have your Mookas tucked under each other. You can have one on the top and one on the bottom or you could have them both at the same height. Now, for example, the flower on the left over here that I have done, this is with four petals, and as you can see, each of the petals is different in terms of thickness. They're not all consistent. If you end up with a flower like this, that's fine too. One of the things that I did in this flower is that I used another Mooka inside to act as a filler. But if you don't want to do that and use a different filler instead, that's completely okay too. Another filler that we can explore over here is to basically draw some curvy lines and put dots at the end of them, very similar to how the pollen is on real flowers. We're just basically putting in these little stems and then just adding a dot at the end of each of them. One of the things that I really like about Mooka as a tangle is that it has a very lovely ornamental wipe to it. Once you add these little stems inside, the whole flower blooms really beautifully and it starts to look very pretty. Now, I am going to add one more tiny flower over here, somewhere on the top. You're free to add more flowers depending on the size of your paper and you're free to change the sizes and create variations in terms of the number of petals as well. We're just looking to fill up the central space of the people with a few of these flowers. With this one, you can also see that this is partially getting hidden behind the large flower. This layering helps to add depth in the design. If you also end up having overlapping flowers, that'll be really good. Now, once you're done forming a few of these flowers, the next thing that we're going to do is have a few stems coming out of these. These are going to be the other version of Mooka. In this one too, we start with a curve, but we don't really form the pod at the end of it. We skip the pod and we basically just sort the line. We put a little curve and we trace the line parallel to the original stem and bring it back all the way to the bottom. Then again, these can be in any direction. You can have multiple such stems coming out of your flowers, Some can be overlapping, some can be partially hidden. We're basically just going to keep rotating our sketchbook in order to get maximum comfort while drawing these. We basically just branch them out from each other as well as have them coming out of the flowers. Now, from my experience, I have generally noticed that drawing this version of Mooka requires a little more patience and hand control as compared to the previous one. Because with the previous version, if you end up having a slightly thicker stem it doesn't really matter because it eventually looks nice when you put all the petals together of the flower, but with this version of Mooka that we're currently drawing, where we're trying to make them look as if they are winds or creep up lines coming out from behind the flowers, we want to try to be as thin as possible so that they look delicate and dainty as compared to the large flowers that we have drawn in the center. Of course, if these stems are thinner, that also means that the focus stays on your main flowers and the stems don't really steal the attention away from your focal flowers. Once you are satisfied with the number of these Mooka stems that you have created, the next thing that we're going to do is come back to all these empty spaces that we have in the background and we're going to add these tiny teardrop shapes or almost these mini Mookas or flourish elements to just add some drama into the composition and fill it up a little bit more. These are not exactly teardrops, they're slightly curvy and slightly bent, almost like flourish lines. We're just adding them to increase the ornamental value or the visual value of this composition. Finally, as the last step for this composition, we're going to be coloring the entire background black. Now, you can definitely switch to a thicker marker pen if you have that handy and use that to color the background so that it happens faster, or you could even use black acrylic paint or gouache or any other material that you have handy with you to color up the background. This is completely optional, but the reason why I like to do it in a composition like this is so that the flowers stand out a little more and so that they shine bright against the dark background. You can also see that I made a tiny mistake over here while coloring and I, by mistake, ended up going inside the Mooka flower. But that's completely fine because I can always go back in there with a little bit of white paint or even a white Jelly Roll pen and just color that section white and it'll get hidden. With that, we come to an end to today's exercise with Mooka flowers. 18. Day 14 - Mooka & YOU!: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to the course. Today we'll be completing two full weeks of our lovely challenge and since this is Day 14 I again decided to challenge you guys with a partially done pattern and I essentially want you guys to start getting comfortable with the concept of strings and outlines as we will be going forward. As a warm-up exercise today I'm going to be showing you a tiny template and then you're going to be filling that template up with any of the patterns that we have learned over the last two weeks. Also fun fact I realized that I have not been using the left side of my sketchbook at all and I think this happened subconsciously because earlier when I used to fill up my sketchbooks I used to write notes on the left side and I used to draw the pattern on the right side and without me even realizing this I ended up doing the previous 30-day challenge over here on Skillshare with all my drawings on the right side and with no notes on the left side. Essentially the left side stayed blank and that's exactly how I've been doing the last two weeks of this challenge as well but today I thought that I should start drawing on the left side as well. For a change I'm drawing over here on this side. Now coming to today's template I'm going to be drawing a couple of really large mucus over here which are almost going to divide the paper into two sections and these are not exactly halves so they are unequal sections one on top of the mucus and then one on the bottom. Then of course you have an entire section within these mucus as well. Now your job for today is to fill up all of these sections and basically form a composition of your own using any of the tangles and the patterns that we have used over the last two weeks or if you want to experiment and you want to try some new patterns all by yourself you're welcomed to do so but basically this is the exercise for today and I look forward to seeing all your versions and variations of this. I'm going to be showing you my version of this template tomorrow when we meet for our next lesson. 19. Day 14 - Reveal: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back. I hope all of you are doing well and are excited to continue this challenge. Before we move on to our next exercise, as I promised, I'm going to show you how I finished up my page from yesterday. We basically started off with a couple of mookas that helped us to create sections on our page. For my first step, I decided to go inside the mookas and I filled up the entire section with flux and since fluxes and organic tangle, I basically filled it up one on top of the other going in random directions, but mostly facing the top-right corner so that they're aligned with the mooka. The next thing that I did was that I added some dots or orbs on the mooka stem so that it doesn't look so plain. I also covered up the entire background behind the flux with black ink to increase the contrast and the design. Of course, I added the tiny circles on the second mooka as well to match with the first mooka. Then I basically sectioned out the paper, and decided to fill up the bottom half with dividends. Then on the top-right, I decided to add doodles. I graded only one leaf because I wonder if they're designed to look slightly asymmetrical. I did not want to use too much of the doodles tangle over here. For the rest of the empty space, I sectioned it off further by adding some holly bow lines. Then I went inside those holly bow lines and I created some rounding at the edges. Doing this step also helped me to increase the contrast and the design because there was more black ink going on the paper and so it basically started to look a lot more interesting. Finally, I decided to add some fescue very similar to the way we had done it on day 2. I basically put it at random angles coming out from the corners of each of these holly bow sections. That was it. That's how I finished yesterday's exercise. Hopefully you've also finished up your exercise from yesterday, and I would love to see it in the project section. In case you haven't finished it or if you're feeling stuck, hopefully looking at my work has provided you with some ideas or some techniques that you can use. If you're still feeling stuck and you want to discuss it further, you can always put a work in progress picture in the discussions tab, and I'd be happy to help you out. With that, we're ready to move on with our challenge. See you in the next lesson. 20. Day 15 - A web of Betweed: Hi everyone, and welcome back to the challenge. Today, we are going to continue our journey further, and we are going to explore a wonderful tangle called betweed, and we're going to use that tangle to convert it into a wonderful web. Again, I'm going to be drawing on the left side of my sketchbook today. Because, as you can see, I have used my entire sketch book while almost all of it by filling it out, but with patterns from the 30-day challenge as well as some patterns from 100-day challenge, and I have never used the left side at all. Today, I'm going to again draw on the left side just so that I can keep my artworks all compact in one place together. Now, coming to the tangle that we're going to explore today, it is betweed, and I'm going to do a fun twist to this tangle. The first thing that we're going to do is basically draw five Cs and convert them into this star-like shape. It's okay if some of the Cs or those rounded edges are longer or wider than the others. It's completely fine. I'm just basically using a thicker nib to just darken out this edge because this is going to be the starting point of the composition that we are going to build today. Now, the next thing that we're going to do is create some straight lines coming out of these pointy edges of this little five-C star that we have created, and these are going to be radiating out just like sun rays. It's okay. They're a little bit wobbly. Just try to be patient with it and try to be as smooth as you can. It helps to hold your pen from a distance and not hold it too close to the nib, so then you will have a lot more control over your pen and you'll be able to draw the lines with a lot more comfort. Now, once you have all of these lines placed, your page is going to be divided into five sections basically. The reason why I chose to keep that five C shape slightly off-center is just so that the composition looks a little bit more interesting. We can, of course, do the exact same thing with that star in the center as well. But just to keep things interesting, I thought it'd be nice to keep it off-center. Now, the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go inside each of these little sections, and divide them further by making triangles inside of them. Again, these are not exactly equilateral triangles. As you can see, I am basically just placing them anywhere that I like and creating these extra sections within the given section already, and so some are narrow and some are wide, and I'm basically just having fun by placing these triangles randomly. Now, once the triangles are in place, you will notice that you will have some sections which are again triangles, and then some sections will become like this rhombus or squarish shapes, basically four-sided shapes, and we'll have a variety of shapes within the composition. We're going to be working with the triangular shapes first, and then we're going to deal with the four-edged or four-sided shapes later on. Now coming to the triangle sections, let's take this biggest one, and we're going to fill this up with betweed. The way it works is that we basically take the bottom two edges of the triangle, and we start by adding these curvy lines that land somewhere at the edge of the opposite one. Then we basically just keep going, alternate all the way to the bottom. Now, you can of course make this thinner and narrower as well. I'm doing them pretty wide right now, but you can achieve more such lines by making them thinner and narrower. Once you have all the lines done all the way to the bottom, the next thing that we do, is go to the curvy edge, and as you can see, I'm skipping the top edge of the triangle, which is the outer boundary, so I'm not coloring that. But I basically come to the first line or that first curvy line that I had drawn. From there, my betweed actually starts. That's where I'm adding a little bit of this weight or this peppering technique basically that we had learned while we were developing the tangle called pepper, and so now this technique is also called peppering. It's become quite popular in this entangle method over the last few years. I'm basically just going into those curves, adding the surroundings, and coloring them in. Then we do the exact same thing on the opposite side as well. Now, today, since I have a thicker nib size, I'm able to color this faster. But if you feel that you're going to take a little bit more time to finish this step, feel free to pause the video and then come back once you're ready. Now what I'm going to do is, I'm going to take another shape, and this is where things basically start to get interesting because we're now going to change the angle. We're going to take this thin triangle now that we have. But this time, we are going to consider the top of the triangle to be in a different direction, which means that the bottom two edges are going to be these two. My betweed lines are going to crisscross at this angle now. I'm just going to retrace this one because that didn't come out as neat as I had expected it to be. Then I think I'm only going to be able to fit in two such crisscrossing lines over here because it's a pretty narrow shape. Then I'm just going to add these surroundings or the peppering, then I'm going to come to this shape, and so this triangle is already facing in a slightly different direction than the previous ones. I'm just going to take these two edges and keep adding the crisscrossing lines, and just by filling up the three shapes till now, we can see that the entire composition starts to look like a nice complex web. The interesting part about this composition is that when you look at it at the end, or if you show it to somebody who has not seen the process of this composition, you generally feel that it's very complicated and that there is no beginning or end to it. Because it just looks like a whole mesh or a web of interconnected lines. But once you actually start making it, you realize that it was just a simple step-by-step process that led to a complex result. Funny story, I ended up developing this composition as the result of a mistake, so I was working on this entangled composition where I had lots and lots of triangles. My plan was to fill them up with betweed. But then I ended up drawing a couple of the triangles wrong because I lost control over my pen, and I think I just basically ended up messing up a couple of the shapes. Then I realized that they turn into these squarish shapes, which could further be divided into more triangles if I just played with some lines over there. The next thing I knew, I got so engrossed in that mistake of mine that it ended up leading to this step-by-step web pattern, which now I use in a lot of my artworks. It's funny how things just happen and then they lead to such wonderful results. Now this edge that I have on the right side, I'm just going to leave that as is because I can come back and needing that up later once I'm done with the rest of the design. But I'm going to now come to this particular triangle over here. As you can see now, in this triangle, I don't really have a bottom edge at the corner of the paper. I'm basically going to draw two lines, and now my edges are going to be these two corner dots that I have just established as the start of my betweed lines. Technically, this shape is almost like a rectangle or a square, and it doesn't really have a triangular edge to it. But I've purposely chosen to work with these two dots, one which is already existent and another one which is imaginary or created because of that line that I drew from the right side. Now using those two lines, I'm going to build up my triangle, and within that triangle, I'm going to fill up my betweed. Every time you land up with a shape that looks almost like a square or a rhombus or a rectangle, basically any four-sided shape, you can still use betweed inside of it. If you just choose to work with three points instead of four points, you just have to identify what those three points are going to be. Now again, I'm just going to add the weight over here. Then once I reach the bottom of the betweed, I'm just going to leave that extra space empty for now. That's going to remain as my negative space and I'm going to come back to it later. Now again, I have this squarish shape over here. Again, I'm going to pick these two points as the bottom of my triangle, and so this becomes like my three-point shape that I'm going to work with. I'm going to pretend that my triangle is facing this way with the top being like so, and I'm just going to draw a couple of lines over here. Again, I have that little odd space at the bottom, which is getting left out, so I'm just going to leave that as is for now. Then I have this other shape, which looks like a pretty good triangle, so I don't really have to imagine my three points over here, they're quite easily visible. I can just create my betweed easily. Similarly, I have now this tiny section over here which is getting left out near the center, and there's also a similar one at the opposite side. I'm going to deal with those later. I'm just going to try to finish up all the triangle work first. Now again, I have this large triangle where I can choose the direction, and this direction as the top looks nice. I'm going to use this to create my betweed. This is also completely opposite to the triangle which is right next to it, so it's definitely going to add to the complexity of the design. Now sometimes if you feel that a particular area is very, very large you might feel tempted to probably add another triangle over there to create smaller sections and then add your betweed further indoors, and that is also definitely an approach that you can try. If you have a large piece of paper, especially, and you feel that the number of triangles that you have right now are not doing justice to the composition and it's not looking complex enough, you can definitely feel free to add more triangles and create even more smaller sections and build your betweed web inside of that. Really just feel free to customize the process to your liking. Now I've got two of these shapes over here. I'm going to take this triangle first. Then again, I have almost like a four-sided shape over here, so I need to pick my key points for the triangle and the direction in which the triangle is going to be facing North. For some reason, every time that I'm working with betweed it reminds me of tents and canopies, especially if I'm developing a complex composition like this, and it has a lot of straight lines and then triangles and these coby depths. I am always reminded of camping tents and just the way they stand with those rewards and the tents over it. I don't know why, but I'm always reminded of them. The funny part is that I've never even been camping, I have only seen lots and lots of pictures of camping tents on social media sites, and I keep saving them, hoping that someday I will go to a camp site and have fun. I think that's just so embedded in my head that now every time that I'm working on compositions like this, I am reminded of them always. Now coming to all of these empty areas that we've left, you can fill them up with more betweed lines, or you can add curves to them and then put in some weight at alternate edges, like so. The reason why I'm basically adding these scopes at some of the outer shapes as well as some of the inner ones, is just so that the whole composition looks a lot more complex, and there's almost like an optical illusion that's forming over here. You can't really make out where exactly the composition begins and where it ends. Everything looks as if it's getting tucked beneath the layers of the shapes that are around it, and so you can't really make out what's on the top and what's at the bottom. While I'm adding these new lines and roundings, I'm also looking at all the lines nearby, and as I'm progressing, I'm constantly retracing, fixing, correcting some of the previous lines, just to neaten out the edges and make the composition look sharp. Now, with all the line work and the rounding stan, we come to an end to today's exercise. If you feel like you want to add more details into this, you are free to use any of the patterns that we have learned so far, or even any new patterns that you come across and use those to fill up all these spaces over here. You can customize the design to your liking and you can build further on it anyway that you like. Tomorrow, I'm going to meet you with yet another interesting exercise. Till then, keep creating. 21. Day 16 - Fun with Firecracker: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and a very warm welcome back to the challenge. Today we're going to be working with a very interesting tangle called firecracker, which starts off with a simple channel-like grid, and then you build further on it by creating subsections. Now to create the channels, all that we need to do is just create some wavy lines, and as you can see, each of them are different in terms of thickness, so not really paid attention to making them all equal. You can of course create the sections with equal width also, both of the techniques are correct and they give a different visual appeal, so anything is fine. Now we come to the first channel over here, and we start to divide it into small sections by putting in these curvy lines. As you can see again over here, I'm not really paying attention to the thickness, so I'm just making some of them thinner, some of them thicker. I'm purposely trying to keep almost like an abstract field or this whole design. Now the step out for the original tangle, which has been developed by Suzanne McNeill includes all of these sections as equally sized. But I'm basically taking a few liberties over here, and I'm just having fun with the tangle and just adding some of my personal touches. I prefer to have these sections unequal, and that's why I'm creating them like this. [MUSIC] I'm also going back to some of the channels and just making even more small, narrow sections. Just so that there is some visual variety in each of these channels, and so that they all look interesting. Now once you are happy with the sections that you have created, we come back to the first channel or the first row, and now we start filling this up with the pattern. However, now what I'm about to do over here is going to be different from the original tangle. In the original tangle, we basically have small triangles in one of these sections, and then we have straight lines and the next one, and then we have a plane one, and then so basically they are like in the sets of three. We have triangles, straight lines, and then plane. Then triangles, straight lines, and plane. But over here what I'm basically doing is that I'm coloring one of the sections black and then I'm moving to the next one, where I'm creating these small, curvy, U-shaped lines. Almost like a lace or a frill hanging out from the previous section. Then I'm putting the straight lines into the next one, and then I'm leaving one blank. I'm basically following a slightly different approach as compared to the original tangle step out. Now coloring the sections sometimes takes a little bit of time and it distracts me from the drawing process, so one of the things that I like to do is that I just basically put a small mark over there, which helps me remember later on that that's the blob that I need to color, and then I just basically continue with the drawing process. That little mark basically just stays there as a placeholder. Now once I'm done with the first channel, I'll come to the second one. In the second channel, I'm going to start off with a plane section, then I'm going to do some diagonal lines, and then I'm going to put in some triangles at the bottom of the section, forming a little border. Then again, I'm going to leave one blank and repeat the exact same process. You can do this in any order that you like. You can either put the lines first and then come back and do all the triangles, or you could go with each section at a time, whatever makes it easier for you. Now with the second section done, I'm just going to finish the coloring of the first one as well, so that you can see them both together as a pair. Now once both of these are done, we're just going to repeat the exact same process in the other two sections also that we have, so we're going to basically repeat them in sets of two, but while doing so, we're going to do some minor variations in the designs. What I mean is that I'm not going to do the exact same pattern or the exact same order in the next channels that I have empty with me, but I'm going to use similar elements. As an example. I'm going to start off by coloring the first section black, but now in this case, I'm going to make my curvy lace facing the other way. Then I'm going to add my straight lines, and then this time I'm basically not leaving any section blank, and I'm straightaway going to the next one, coloring it black and repeating the exact same process. Even though the design elements are exactly the same as the first channel that we had created, I have made slight tweaks and variations to it. Using the exact same elements, I have still managed to change the look of this particular channel, and I have not left any section empty in this one [MUSIC] Similarly, now when I come to my fourth channel, I'm going to make my triangles facing the other way, and then the next section is going to have my diagonal lines facing the opposite direction, opposite to the diagonal lines that we created in the second channel. Then I'm going to leave one section blank after the diagonal lines are done. Again, it's the exact same elements or the same geometrical shapes that we used in the second channel, just that I have changed the positions and I have changed the orientation of these fillers. Then for the fifth channel, I'm going to start with straight lines, do my lace as a border on the upper side of the section, then I'm going to color one black, and I'm not going to leave any section blank over here. I'm simply going to go ahead and start doing the straight lines again, and then the lace again, and then again, I'm going to color this section black and repeat the exact same process. It's interesting to note that even though we have the exact same geometrical elements or the exact same design elements throughout the design, we have just changed their positions here and there a little bit and that basically changes the look of each of the channels. Even though individually they're all different from each other, they all share certain similarities, which makes the whole design very cohesive. This is actually one of the easiest ways to bring variations in a design. Every time you feel that your design is starting to look a little monotonous, you can simply switch the orientation or change the order of the design elements and place them in a different direction, and that will automatically spice things up and bring in some visual interest. Now of course, the design variations that I have done today over here using this channel grid and the firecracker tangle are basically just my improvisations to the original tangle, but you are free to do your improvisations as well. You probably might have more ideas or better ideas than me as to how you can customize this tangle, and you're free to try out your designs as well. If you want to create your firecracker repetition in sets of three instead of sets of two, or in pairs the way I have done it today, you're free to try that as well. Whatever variation or version you choose to work with, make sure that you put that in the project section so that I can have a look at it. The best part is that, since each of you will be coming up with your own versions and variations of this, when you all put your projects together in the gallery section, you will basically be inspiring other artist, and you will also get inspired by other artist because there'll be this whole library of new patterns that will suddenly bloom in the project section once all of you share your ideas. Now, with the last one, as you can see, I'm basically just putting diagonal lines, keeping one block empty, then doing triangles facing in the top direction, keeping another section empty, and then basically doing that exact same repetition. With this, we come to an end to today's exercise, and like I said, I look forward to seeing all your versions and variations of this tangle. Tomorrow, I'm going to meet you with another interesting exercise to continue our challenge. 22. Day 17 - Crescent Moon: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome to day 17 of our creative challenge. Today, we're going to be working with one of the most classic tangles of all time, which is crescent moon. Crescent moon basically starts off with the semicircular shapes at the edges of your paper. Now, today we're actually working on a dual tangle, which basically means that we'll be working with two tangles. The first one is going to be crescent moon, and then we're going to combine it with paper later on. Now, as you can see, I'm basically placing these semicircular shapes at the edges of my paper and some of them haven't turned out to be very neat, but that's okay because we're going to be coloring these later on. But we basically just start by placing the shapes and then we're going to build up further from there. Now, I'm just going to color these up quickly and show you what it looks like once the first stage of this tangle is done. Now, once you have colored all of these semicircular shapes, the next step would be to build an aura around each of these. An aura in the Zentangle terminology basically means an outline to an existing shape. I'm basically taking my thin micron pen and just adding these outlines around the shapes. Now, you can see that I have spaced out my semicircles quite a bit on the top and the bottom edges, but I haven't spaced them out so much on the left and the right edge. That's because I personally like to have them slightly uneven and slightly asymmetrical, but if you are keen to make the tangle exactly symmetrical, then you can also make all of your semicircles equidistant from each other on all the four sides. Now, the next thing that we're going to do is keep building further on these auras. The first couple of auras are going to be very easy because they're simply just going to outline the previous ones. But as you go ahead further, you will realize that these auras will start meeting each other or that they will basically start coinciding with each other at some points on your paper. When that starts to happen, we basically just merge the curves and convert it into one large shape. Now, this point our focus is to basically keep on building these curves layer by layer, and even if you make a couple of mistakes here and there, it doesn't really matter because whatever next curve that you're going to make will simply match the boundary of the previous one. It will eventually become a part of the design and your mistake won't really stand out so much as a mistake, it'll just get merged with the design and nobody will really be able to make out that it's a mistake. Just breathe easy, take your time, and do these curves as slowly as possible. Even if a couple of them turn out to be slightly thicker than you wanted them to be or if they are not as symmetrical as you expected them to be, it's completely okay because at the end of the day, this is a handmade piece of art and some amount of imperfections are always part of the process. So don't be too hard on yourself and enjoy the process. Now, as you go further somewhere on the corners, you will also notice that it will start to appear as if a couple of the curves are overlapping the other curves and so some will start to appear on the top and the others will get hidden behind. We're just going to basically continue making these curves in an overlapping manner. Finally, once you're almost at the center, we're just going to do a couple of these auras in the middle of the paper as well. Finally, we will have this hollow space inside which we are going to fill up with pepper. What we're basically going to do is that we're going to place the small horizontal dashes, which is the first step of paper. Once we have those dashes, we're going to extend the lines towards the center. Again, the trick to getting a good pepper center is to know where exactly to end your lines so that the space inside stays clean and hollow. Then we just go back to the edges and add the roundings or the weight at the edges of the lines. Once you're done with paper, the next step is going to be to add some contrast or inky details to the outer crescent moon lines that we have created. My favorite technique is to go alternate, where I basically color some sections black and then I leave the alternate ones white, almost giving like a stripe effect. But today, I think I'm going to also play with a little bit of mark-making. I'm going to color some sections black, but on some of these semicircles I'm going to add tiny dots or other little details which are basically just going to bring in some visual interest. Now, these steps are completely optional, and depending on how closely you have drawn the order lines, you might feel that your crescent moon is looking quite detailed already, or it might be looking more intricate than mine. If that's the case, then you probably don't need to add the detailings and you can skip the coloring and all of these other steps. But if you feel like you want to add some details, then you can add any of the patterns that we have used so far or you can come up with new interesting mark-making techniques and add some little details here and there. You're free to customize the design in any way that you like. With this, we come to an end to today's exercise. We will be using crescent moon again at least a couple more times in this challenge and I thought it would be a good idea for me to introduce this in a simple and easy manner today, so that when we include it in compositions later on, it's easy for you to identify the pattern and follow the steps. Hopefully, this exercise has given you a good warm-up on this tangle. With that, we come to an end to today's lesson. Tomorrow I'm going to see you with another interesting exercise to continue our journey. 23. Day 18 - Marasu & More : [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to the challenge. Today we're going to be working with a wonderful tangled called Marasu, and then we're going to be combining it with another tangle called scallops. Both of these tangles have a rounded, curvy nature to them, and they go together very well. They're complimenting tangles and I find them both to be very interesting, which is why I end up using them together a lot of times in a lot of my artworks. Now to begin Marasu, we basically start off by drawing a spiral. Now, once I have this spiral in place, I'm going to go in with my pen and start to make a small sections like so. These are basically sections with curvy lines, and I'm basically placing these curves in pairs. Two curves basically make one unit. I'm also trying to place them in a way that the curves on the outer rings of this spiral do not touch the curves of the inner rings of the spiral. They're going alternate, fitting in between the empty spaces of the curves of the previous line. Now once you have placed all of these curves, we're going to take a thicker pen, and we're going to go in and color these little sections that we just created. After the colorings are done, the next step is going to be to take our thinner pen again and to basically go back and add some other lines to these curves at the top as well as the bottom. This is the reason why I spaced out my curves in such a way that they don't touch the curves of the previous in our rows of the spiral, so that they all stand out alone, independent, and they don't really marge with those sections of the previous inner circles of the spiral. That's why I space them out. With that, we finish Marasu. Now, the next thing that we're going to do is work with another tangle called scallops. Our scallops is a tangle which can easily be stacked one on top of the other, so you can keep building further and further on it with no stopping point really, and you can literally just keep billing it to infinity. But today we're only going to do one row of this. Basically, as you can see, we start off with some semicircles, and then we go inside each of these with an inner aura. Then we leave a little bit of gap, and we come back, and we add three more semicircles towards the bottom edge. Again, keep rotating your sketchbook in order to get the best possible angle. Once you're done drawing these curves, we go to these empty spaces that we had left between the outer auras and the inner auras, and we start to fill them with lines. Now I'm currently doing them as straight lines, almost like sun rays coming out of a center point. But you can also do them as curvy lines, and even they look very pretty. Finally, we go inside these innermost shapes and just color them black. That's how we get one full row of scallops. Now, as I said, this tangle is a stackable tangle, so you can keep building further and further on this. But I have a little challenge for you today, which is to come up with an interesting technique to fill the rest of the space, which is not scallops. I want you to try to challenge yourself and come up with a curvy shape or a curvy design that complements all of these circles and curves that we have just drawn on our paper, and think of an interesting way to fill up this space. Basically, this is like an exercise and design harmony. I want you to try and stay away from shapes that have sharp angles, such as squares and rectangles or triangles. Try to basically work with some curvy wavy pattern that complements these two tangles that we've just put in over here and fill up the rest of the space. I'm sure each of you will come up with a lovely way to finish up this empty space over here, and I look forward to seeing all your versions and variations in the project section. Tomorrow, I will also show you my completed page and the pattern that I have chosen to finish up this empty space over here. Until then, keep creating. Have a good day. 24. Day 18 - Reveal: [MUSIC] Hello everyone and welcome back to the course. As promised, before we move on to our next exercise, here is my project from yesterday. I actually didn't end up doing a lot of detailing on this one. I first divided all the empty space into small sections using these curvy lines and I made them into thick strips of black, and then I went inside each of those sections and I did lines. Then on the alternate ones, I put in these flux leaves. The idea that I was going for over here was imagining Amaterasu to be like a really big flower, and the scallops to be the petals. Then I thought that the flux would look like pretty little leaves in the background. I imagined this whole thing to be in a garden floral like wybie and that's why I went with these patterns. Of course, it helped because flux also has a curvy nature and it went in very well with the scallops and Amaterasu. That was it, that was my exercise from yesterday and I look forward to seeing all the versions and variations that you will come up with. With that, we are ready to move on to our next exercise. 25. Day 19 - Nanalee Improvisation: [MUSIC] Hello, and welcome back to Day 19 of our creative challenge. Today we're going to be working on a mono tangle project again. The tangle that I have chosen for today's exercise is called nanalee. Nanalee is a wonderful tangle inspired by banana leaves, and it has this very nice luscious playful, bouncy quality to it, which I totally love. I thought that this would make a very good exercise for today. The way the tangle works is that we start off by making a stem very similar to how we make our muka stems. Then we just basically go around it, making a wavy leaf and connect it to the bottom of the stem. Then we go inside and we start to add these thin lines very similar to the veins on a banana leaf, and these are not all equally sized, and they also don't really have a specific pattern to them, so you can go random in terms of placing these. Now once these little veins are done, that's pretty much all there is to nanalee. However, in my usual style, I like to add some details, and so every once in a while, I like to make some tweaks to the tangles. For this one, I like to basically go back to those veins and put in tiny little dots over there just so that it has an ornamental quality to it and it just looks more decorative. Again, these decisions are very personal. If you're the person who likes to have tangles, looking like real-life objects or you'd like them to be representative of the source from where they came, then you can totally skip these steps. But I like to push my boundaries and I like to add some fantasy elements or some unrealistic abstract elements to all my tangles. That's how I ended up with this variation of nanalee. I also like to go back to the centers and color those stems black, just so that it increases contrast. In my usual style, every time that I draw a leaf, I basically go back with a thicker pen and add some curling edges just so that they increase contrast and make it appear as if the leaf is curling. That's how I do my nanalee. Now for today's exercise, I'd love for you to apply the Hollibaugh technique with nanalee. When I say the Hollibaugh technique, it basically means that we overlap with the tangles, and we keep some on the top and we keep some at the bottom. I'd love for you to keep rotating your sketchbook and keep creating many such nana leaves. Once you've placed all your leaves, then go back and add the little details and basically just have a conversation with yourself and see the details that you like. Try and take some inspiration from real-life objects or things around you and just try to incorporate some ideas over here and see what all versions of nana leaves you come up with. I'd love for you to try this as an improvisation exercise and show me all the different variations that you come up with. Once you have them ready, make sure that you put them up in the project section so that everyone can see your wonderful variations and so you can also see the variations put up by other students. This way we'll all collectively be able to build a wonderful library of variations from a single tangle. That's it for today. Tomorrow, I will see you with another interesting exercise, which is inspired by sea life. 26. Day 20 - Mystery Eggs & Tearce: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to the challenge. Today, we're going to develop a composition which is inspired by sea life. There are a couple of tangles which I have been playing with for a long time. Every time I work with them, they remind me of sea life and sea creatures and different coral reefs, sea plants, sea weed, and stuff like that. Today I thought we develop a composition keeping that idea in mind. Now the tangle that I have chosen to begin with is called Mystery Eggs. The way it works is that we start with a small oval and then we basically just drawing order towards the bottom of this oval. Then finally we create a plump body at the bottom by just going a little below that order and making a semicircle like so. Then we come back to that first oval and we color most of it black but we just leave that one little section white, which is to act as like a sparkle, and so that serves as a highlight. Now, we're going to be making a bunch of these Mystery Eggs in the center of our page today. You can keep the composition slightly asymmetrical as well. If you want the whole bunch to favor more towards the left side of your page or the right side of your page, that's fine too. Or you could choose to keep it exactly in the central. Anything works. Now as you can see, while I'm drawing these eggs, I'm basically playing around in terms of the orientation as well as the size so that the whole bunch looks interesting together. They almost have this very alien quality. Apart from looking like sea plants or some organic creatures found under the sea, they also remind me of futuristic gadgets or probably maybe some extraterrestrial creature has eyes like these, or maybe there are some plants on some other planets which looked like this. There's a very futuristic space like web also to this. I also use this design often in a couple of my designs inspired by galaxies and just general stars and stuff from the universe. I like how versatile this tangle is. Now once you have a nice bunch of these on your paper, the next thing that we're going to do is add some details. Now there are many different ways that you can add details on these. I have done stripes, I have done a small dots, and I have done small hearts inside of these. I have also done little fescue shapes inside of these. There are many different variations that you can do. But for today, the filler that I'm going to use is going to be these little tiny dots. I'm just going to use these on the edges of the eggs just to add some texture and interests and to again give them that little alien-like or plant-like quality. Then once you're done with the dots, we're going to move on to the next tango, which is called tearce. Now, tearce is a tangle which moves in a radial manner, but I'm going to use it slightly differently today. It starts off by making these thin ribbons which are coming out of your focal point or they could even just be a filler on a plain piece of paper. Then we basically just keep coloring them to make them thick strips or thick ribbons. Then according to the step out of this tangle, you basically draw these thin lines coming out of it. Only on one side of the tangle, which I think they've referred to as the hair, which is coming out of this tangle. Very similar to how we did the centers of the Nana Lee. But I thought that it would be interesting to do the hair on both sides of the ribbon. Instead of doing it on one side, I thought it'd be nice to do it on both the sides, just so that it adds a little more texture. They almost look like little fiber threads coming out of these strips or ribbons. The ribbons themselves look like little tentacles coming out from behind the eggs. Now, the next thing that I'm going to do is use a little bit of fescue over here. Again, this just goes to say how versatile fescue is. Not only is it a great tangle to use in any floral composition or anything to do with a botanical or a floral theme but it also works very well when you're using it in these underwater inspire teams as well. Because it has this nice tentacle-like quality to it. I'm just making a few of these around. Now, once you're happy with the fescue, you can also draw some bubbles around, which can be like tiny little circles just to give it an underwater vibe. You can also fill it up with a few more dots of different sizes, just so that the whole composition looks full and interesting. But again, as always, this is an optional step. If you're the person who prefers nice clean backgrounds and you don't like too much of details in the background, then you can leave it plain as well so that the eggs and the tentacles that we have drawn standout a little bit more. With that, we're done with today's exercise. If you end up trying any different versions or variations with these tangles, I'd love to see them. In case you feel stuck somewhere, make sure that you put up your questions or your queries in the discussions tab, and I'd be happy to answer them for you. Tomorrow, I'm going to see you yet another interesting exercise, which is going to be on improvisation. Till then, keep creating. [MUSIC] 27. Day 21 - Phone Cord Improvisation: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to the challenge. Today we're going to do yet another improvisation exercise and we're going to start off by making some curvy lines like so. Recently while I was developing anesthetic journal spread for myself, I came across this picture with old telephones and I saw these wonderful vintage telephones with phone cords. Somewhere in the '80s and the '90s these landline phones used to be very popular with lovely spiral phone cords and so I got inspired by that little curvy nature of it and I thought I'd convert it into a pattern. I basically did a little brainstorming exercise and I realized that this curvy rope that we're doing right now can be converted into so many different patterns by just adding few details here and there. Just to show you a couple of examples. For the first one, I thought that I'd color all the loops black and then I went back and added some dots at the edges. Then this turned out to be a beautiful ornamental border that I thought would look very pretty on greeting cards or any DIY project where I can put in some ornamental designs and probably even color it with some metallic colors like gold or silver and I thought that this would look really pretty over there. So this was one of the first variations that I came up with. Then I also thought that these loops reminded me of little pendants or little gems hanging from a necklace or earrings. Then I thought it'd be nice to sort like a curvy shape around it, almost like a little frilly border around it and then that led to another variation. Then coincidentally while I was making these variations in the background of my TV goes on with news playing on it and it just so happened that during the time of filming this class, the Miss Universe Pageant was happening and India happened to be the winner and so they were basically doing this feature on all the different crowns that all Miss Universe women have worn over the last few years. Then this variation basically came after I got inspired by looking at one of the crowns from there, which was I think the Mickey motor crown. This was one of the variations that came from there. I basically just played around with a lot of different variations and I decided to show you a few of these in class. But basically you are free to experiment with any other variations using this little phone cord template that I have designed. This is basically like an improvisation exercise like I said and I would love for you to try and get inspired by things around you and use them creatively in your pattern. Later on at some point when you refer to your sketchbook, this will serve as a good resource for you to build borders or even more patterns in the future and this is a good way to keep all your things together at one place. I would love to see all your versions when we meet tomorrow for our next lesson and of course, as always I will also show you a few more versions of mine and I hope you enjoy doing this exercise till then. 28. Day 21 - Reveal : [MUSIC] Hello, and welcome back. As promised, here is my finished exercise from yesterday. I wanted to include a lot of different ideas on the same page, which is why I ended up doing them individually instead of trying to do them as strips. These are all my completed patterns from yesterday. I definitely like the ones with the frilly lace and even this version when I tried to do a little bit of fescue inside. I am not very sure of the one where I did a heart and then I did a little thick border around it and then I added three dots. This was actually inspired by the design on a cookie. [LAUGHTER] I'm not really sure I like this one, but it's good to have this as a reference for later on if I want to improvise on this further. I do like these too. This one was inspired by looking at some Easter eggs, and this one was inspired by looking at a list again, which are these spiky borders. These two definitely are something that I see myself using in the future. This one, I had already shown you guys yesterday and I tried a variation of this where I thought I could turn those spikes, all those little sticks into curves, very similar to fescues and so maybe this is also something that I will use. Then I tried a couple of versions where I thought I could treat the teardrop shape as a flux and then I tried to do the echoes. I did one facing south and the others facing north and I think they're quite nice. Maybe I can do a little bit more finishing and polishing to these, but overall, I think they are quite nice. This one was just a random thing. I thought what if I tried to do phone calls inside as well as outside? I like tiny ones because the whole thing is inspired from a phone cord, so I thought what would happen if I included phone cords in and out as well so this one was that. I don't see myself using this a lot because it's a little more doodly and it's a little more animated. But still, it's good to have it as a reference. This one is inspired by loose threads and so during the process of filming this lesson, I'm also indulging in a little bit of embroidery on the side. I had a lot of embroidery threads around me and then this one just came as an idea out of that. I think I was going for a loose threads wave, coming out of a central gem or a center piece. This idea came from that. Then I try to do another variation of it where I did not do the threads. This one's also okay. This one was honestly inspired by Sunnyside out, just eggs on a banner. But it also reminds me a little bit of the curvy nature of nano leaves and so that's how this came to be. But I'm not really sure I'm going to end up using this, but like I said, it's again fun to just do all these activities and just keep design ideas for future reference. Then this one was again inspired by hearts and this one was just reverses. Out of all of these that I have done, I definitely like the ones which have a slightly more ornamental wipe because I see myself using these in combination with other patterns. The others are slightly more doodly and slightly more animated than my usual style. But I didn't really mind doing this as an exercise because these are good for days when I do want to push my boundaries and I want to work on slightly more animated design so these will be good as a reference for that time. These are all my ideas from yesterday and I look forward to seeing all your ideas as well. If you have any questions, feel free to put them up in the discussions tab. With that, we are ready to move on to our next exercise. 29. Day 22 - Gra-vee Bubbles: [MUSIC] Hi, everyone and welcome back to the course. In today's lesson, we're going to be developing yet another abstract composition using duo tangles. Today's project is again a duo tangle project, and the tangles that I have chosen to work with are gravy and bubbles. Now to begin gravy, we start off with a wavy line somewhere on our paper. It doesn't have to be exactly the same way as I'm doing it, you can do it in any other direction that you like. Then we're going to crisscross this line with another wavy line but notice the difference between the two curvy lines. The second one is more like a roller coaster ride, you can see there are a lot of dips and curves in this line as compared to the first one. Also my line has got a little bit jittery towards the end but that's okay because we're going to fix it in just a few moments. In case you also end up having a slightly jittery line or you're not very happy with the shape right now, that's okay. The reason why I say that we're going to fix this is because we're actually going to come back with a thicker pen, and we're going to accentuate all of these dips and curves that we just created by going inside of them and coloring them in. The idea over here is that the most wavy parts of this new line that you have just drawn are going to be colored in, and they're basically going to accentuate those little curvy crevices and those little dips and bumps that we've just created. That's how we basically develop this gravy tangle. Now you'll probably notice that the tangle is quite forgiving in that sense because when you're doing this step, you're actually getting an opportunity to fix some of those curves and you can actually play around in terms of the thickness of these little colored sections. Even if you ended up drawing a line that you weren't happy with in the beginning, for example, the way I messed it up a little bit towards the end, you can still go back and you can smoothen out the lines by adding these little colored sections and it'll all get blended in. Now once you are done making this first ribbon, we can move on to making more such ribbons on our paper. The number of ribbons really depend on the paper size that you have with you. I think, I'm just going to add one more over here and leave the rest of the space empty to fill up with another tangle. But you're definitely free to add more if you feel like your paper is bigger or if you want to increase contrast in your composition and you want to have more of this tangle, you're definitely free to do that. Now as always, the coloring process can take a little bit of time so if you feel like you want to pause the video and then come back once you're ready, feel free to do so. Now once our gravy ribbons are done, we're again going to take the thin pen and we're going to come back and add another tangle over here called bubbles. Bubbles basically starts off with three concentric circles, and you can make these circles of any size. Once you have the three circles, we go inside the first one, and we just basically make a tiny C-shape over there and add a little bit of color. If you notice that little sectioning that we just created inside the bubble to fill up the color, it's very similar to how we have been sculpting all of these little dips and humps of the gravy ribbon until now. It's very similar to that. Again, even though this entangle method or this entangled inspired art is supposed to be non-representational and it is not really supposed to be representative of a particular scene or a particular plant or an object or anything like that, I still feel that these two tangles basically remind me of ocean waves again, and they remind me of electric currents, and they remind me of water in general. That's why I like to take both of these tangles together every time I'm working on a project, I think they compliment each other very well. One of the things that I also really observe when I'm selecting my tangles for a particular project is to observe the strokes in each of them. If two tangles have similar strokes, or if my hand movements are going to be similar in both of them, then I know that they're going to work well together. Now you don't always have to use tangles in the exact same way as they're given in step outs. Now after I've drawn some of these concentric circles and I'm happy with the way I have used the bubbles, then I'm going to basically just extract the innermost circle and add a few more orbs around, which are just like zoomed in versions of the innermost bubble circle. You can see here in these circles, I'm not adding the outer concentric circles. I'm not adding the outer [inaudible], basically. I'm simply just using basic orbs and just adding that little C-shape in the center. You can always extract parts of a particular tangle and use that as a fragment separately as a filler in your designs, just so that the whole thing is balanced and everything is in harmony with each other, you're definitely free to do that as well. Now to fill up the composition more, I'm going to add a few more hollow circles and then I'm going to add a couple more tiny dots here and there. I'm also going to add some black orbs so that there is a balance between the hollow ones and the black ones. Basically I'm just going to randomly place these all across my paper. Then once you're done with the dots and the orbs, we come to an end to today's exercise. From a distance when you observe this composition, I don't know why for some reason, it reminds me of jellyfish legs. It's almost like this is a zoomed in version of jellyfish tail or jellyfish legs. There a lot of these water bubbles around, probably it's just in my head, it's my imagination but you're free to think of this composition as anything else that you'd like. If you do come up with any other interesting ideas on how to fill up the rest of the space or if you do any versions of variations then I'd love to see them in the project section. If you have any questions as always, drop them in the discussions tab, and I will see you tomorrow with another exercise on improvisation. 30. Day 23 -Fun with Doodah!: [MUSIC] Hi everyone. I'm back with another interesting improvisation exercise for today and the tangle that we're going to be playing with today is called doodah. It is a lovely, beautiful ribbon tangle and it is so versatile that it can fit literally into all compositions. The way that we're going to be doing this is that we'll first study the original tangle and then I'll walk you through some tips and tricks on how to create variations for it. The first thing that we're going to do is we're going to start by placing a line and it can be very curvy straight however you'd like it to be. We're basically just making a ribbon and then we're going to go inside the top and the bottom borders and add the auras. Almost like a little banner. Then we go inside and we start to make these vertical lines. Notice how each of the lines are not touching the opposite edge. The length of each of the lines is almost the same, but they're not touching the opposite edge. Now you can do this in any way that you like, so the method that works best for me is to finish off the lines for one side first and then rotate my sketchbook and do the lines of the other side after that so really you can just follow any process that makes it easier for you. Once you have all the lines in place, that's pretty much it. That's all that doodah is about. It's a beautiful, versatile tangle, which is quite classic and it's quite elegant. But like I said, we're going to be doing this as an improvisation exercise today. One of the things that I like to do is to go back on the tips of these lines and add little shapes over there. As an example, I'm putting these small little squares, which I think adds a little bit of value to the whole tangle. You can of course, change this to tear drop shapes or you can change them to circles or even little hearts, so that's one way to approach this tangle and add some variations to it. Then now to show you the second variation, I'm going to draw another doodah border right under this one and just to save space, I'm basically using the bottom edge of the previous ribbon and reading that as the top edge of this ribbon. Basically that line in the center is being shared by both of these ribbon. Now coming back to the improvisations, the other thing that I really like to do with my doodah ribbons is to go back at the bottom edges, and to add these little round things over there and convert them into small, little rounded triangles. I think by now you can probably tell that the reason why I like this technique a lot is because it comes from one of my favorite tangles of all time, which is paper and I'm obsessed with paper, so no wonder that this was one of the variations that I ended up using. Like I said, this is going to be an improvisation exercise today. I would like you to further section out your paper and divide it into these ribbons and basically fill them up with the doodah tangle. But while doing so, I want you to take inspiration from things around you, objects around you, or any other ideas that you have and basically just put them in over here and improvise on this given template and see what all versions and variations you come up with. Now it's a good idea to remember that the trick behind improvisation is to not let the tangle lose its original structure. When I look at it later on, I should be able to make out that it was doodah and you basically just added some elements to it. The original tangle should not get lost in the versions and the variations that you create and it should still be visible through all the little design improvements that you do. It should not really lose its identity, so to say. That's one of the ways to go about your improvisations and to remember not to go overboard with them and simply just add artistic touches here and there. That's it for today's exercise and as always, I'm going to show you a few more examples when we meet tomorrow. I hope you'll have fun hunting for design inspiration and doing improvisations on this tangle. I will see you tomorrow with another wonderful exercise. 31. Day 23 - Reveal : Hi everyone. Here is my exercise from yesterday. Again, I wanted to include a lot of design variations on the same page, so I ended up doing them half and half, and I didn't really do them as individual strips. For the first one it was actually pretty simple. I just put in a few dots, and then I tried to put an infinity symbol a little above the bottom edge of each of the sticks. For the second one, I just tried to put some semi-circles, and I tried to put them in a way that they don't really touch the sticks, so they are at opposite edge. For the third one, I put in a few dots, and for the fourth one I tried to do like a reverse C-shape again. For the fifth one, I tried to do a little bit of a spike feeling. This was inspired by looking at an Aztec pattern. And so I tried to do it with a little triangle on the top and I made sure that the lines are double and they look like a little arrow now. I like this. I definitely see myself using all of these patterns and all of these design variations in combination with other tangles. In fact, for the semicircle one, I think it might also look nice with an aura. This is something that just came to my mind, so I'm just going to quickly draw this. If I just put a little aura above that semicircle, I think that would also add to the value of the design. I think this also definitely looks like a nice variation. I just have to be a little careful to make sure that the semicircle is not touching the opposite end of the stick. There is a little bit of gap between the stick and the semicircle, but all in all I think this is also a design variation that I like. These are all the versions and variations that I came up with yesterday. I still have a little bit of empty space. In case there's anything new that I came up with during the course of a challenge, I will definitely add it over here and share it with all of you. Meanwhile, I also look forward to looking at all your versions and variations in the project section. With that, we're ready to move on to our challenge. 32. Day 24 - Tunnelvizion + Emo Ball: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome to day 24 of the challenge. Today I'm back with two interesting tangles that go very well together, and both of them, again, remind me of aliens and outer space creatures. They have a wonderful playful quality to them. So the tangle that we're first going to begin with is called tunnel vision. We start off by creating these mountain like bumps at the edges of our sketchbook. It's okay if they're a little wobbly because they're meant to have a little lopsided, playful quality to them. They should feel a little abstract. [MUSIC] Once you have these bumps, we're going to go inside each of them and add some details. So for the first one over here, I'm going to make a tiny circle. Then I'm going to color the whole thing black, leaving just a speck of white over there. As always, this is going to act like a highlight. In this entangle method, we usually refer to these as black pearls, or we refer to them as black orbs. Then there's a little highlight or a little sparkle over there. So this almost reminds me of cartoon eyes, of like Googly little playful eyes. Which is why I feel that it has a very alien like quality. So once you have this circle, we basically just keep on creating these auras one after the other. We try to match the outline. We go all the way till the bottom of the shape. Now in this particular example, I have kept the eye at the top of the shape. But you can place the eye anywhere in the shape. It doesn't really have to be at the top. So as I'm speeding forward through the video, you can see a couple of more examples of how I'm placing the eye at different positions, and then the angle of the auras changes slightly. So we just basically keep on creating them, they'll be fill up the whole space. Now it's important to remember that tunnel vision is quite versatile tangle, even though in today's project we're using it as a boarder tangle, you can use it literally anywhere, even in the middle of your composition. It can even be the focal point of a particular composition where you can have other smaller tangles in the background and you can have this one at the foreground. So it's quite versatile in that sense. It's a very simple tangle and there are not a lot of steps involved. It's not very complicated at all. The trick to making it look pretty is to basically just be a little careful of those auras when you're placing them, and try to be as repetitive in the motion as possible. The best thing to do would be to just keep your wrist at a specific position and keep changing the position of your sketchbook. Just keep rotating the sketchbook instead of your hand, so that your hand can develop muscle memory, and it will keep on creating those repetitive strokes while you move around the sketchbook and position it according to your hand. Now once you're done placing your tunnel vision around the borders, the next thing that we're going to do is use this hollow space to fill it up with another tangle. Now of course, you're free to do any other tangle over here and you don't really need to do the same one as me. But for the purpose of demonstration, I'm going to show you this tangle called EMO BALL, which is again, a very playful tangle and it has an alien like quality to it. I feel that it goes very well together with tunnel vision. So EMO BALL has a lot of different variations. But the variation that I'm showing you in class today is the one where we make this tiny little orb and then we give it an aura. But we don't really close the aura at the edge. Then we just go at the bottom and create a plump body. Now in the step outs of this particular tangle, you'll notice that the body is always drawn almost like a perfect circle. It almost looks as if that little orb is just sitting on top of a perfect circle. But I have chosen to improvise the shape a little bit today. So instead of making a perfect circle at the bottom, I'm basically just making this little jelly bean like shape, which is slightly playful and slightly more abstract. So again, EMO BALL is quite a versatile tangle in that sense, and you can customize the inner orb as well as the outer shape a little bit. There are versions of this tangle where instead of the orb in the center, you can create hearts, you can create an infinity symbol, and so many other different shapes which just basically change the nature of the tangle completely, and each of the versions look very pretty. So as you can see, I basically created some small ones and some big ones and placed them randomly. Once I'm happy with their placement, I will just go back and add a few more hollow circles, as well as floating orbs here and there, just to fill up the whole space so that it almost looks like these tunnel vision borders are like big monsters or big aliens on the edges. Then these little ones inside are like they're babies. At least that's the thing that comes to my head every time I make this composition. Though in reality, if these were some plants or some animals that existed in real life, I would totally adopt them. They're so cute looking. That's pretty much it for the exercise today. You're free to add as many details inside as possible. Just to give you a quick example of what the original EMO BALL looks like. Here is an artwork that I have developed in the past. You can see here somewhere on the bottom edge where I have basically added a bunch of these EMO BALLS all overlapping each other. So this is another version of EMO BALL where the bottom of the body is almost like a perfect circle. And instead of the orb inside, there is this little heart like shape. So like I said, there are many different versions of EMO BALL and hopefully somewhere in the challenge we might end up using them again. So feel free to add artistic touches to your project and customize it in any way that you like. I also ended up adding tiny lines inside the EMO BALL bodies just so that they look a little more interesting and they don't look very plain. Also adding these curvy lines made them genuinely look like little versions of the tunnel vision on the outside. Because they just genuinely look like little babies of the tunnel vision so that when they grow up they develop more such lines. So it was just the thing in my head. Maybe you have a different vision and whatever your vision is, I love to have a look at it. So that's it for today and tomorrow. I will see you with another wonderful exercise. 33. Day 25 - Take a Chill Pill!: [MUSIC] What do you do on days when you're extremely sick and you still want to draw? Well, you make a pattern inspired by your pills, of course. [LAUGHTER] But on a serious note, all jokes aside, today I want to talk a little bit about the importance of Zen art. Regardless of where you are in your art journey, it's important to keep reminding yourself that your art is first meant for you and then for others. It's important to prioritize self-care and remind yourself that the whole point of Zen art is to relax, de-stress, and have fun. Whether you are inspired by this entangled method, Mendelow's, or any other form of Zen art, you will always notice that there is a lot of emphasis on repeated strokes and there's a lot of emphasis on staying calm and being mindful of your strokes and basically just breathing and taking it easy. Of course, every once in a while, the madness of our life can take over even our best-set intentions, and even I am guilty of not giving myself the appropriate amount of rest every now and then which is why I have no shame in admitting today that during the process of filming this class, I fell extremely sick and I literally did not know how to recover from it because I had planned a lot of work and I had taken away from my well-deserved hours of rest and sleep. Of course, life sent me a rude reminder and I felt sick and I was surrounded with a lot of medicines and these capsules and tablets of all shapes and sizes. I guess the silver lining that came out of all of this was that I ended up developing this cute little pattern which I'm drawing as I talk to you guys. As you can see, these are basically just small ovals inspired by the shape of pills. I kept some of them true to how pills actually look, so I kept half black and half white. But then I just decided to play around a little bit and added lines in some of them. Then for the rest of them, I decided to split them again in half but horizontally instead of vertically. I did end up creating a cute little pattern inspired by my life circumstances. I also realized that it serves as a great line practice exercise so it's perfect to include it in this challenge. But like I said, it's important for you to take a break once in a while and even though you're going to be doing this today as line practice, I want you to keep this pattern somewhere in your eye line and keep this as a reminder for yourself on days when you're extremely stressed, to remember that you still deserve rest and that you still deserve a good night sleep. That if you ever need to pause or if you ever need to sit back, relax, re-evaluate, then it's completely normal to do so. It's completely human to do so. You can always bounce back from wherever you are in your life. I hope that this little pattern will be there as a reminder for you to never actually see these pills in real life. You should only just draw them and keep a stack of them on your paper but you should not really have a stack of medicines by your bedside. [LAUGHTER] That's it for today's lesson. In case you end up doing any variations or versions of this pill-based design, I'll love to have a look at it. As always, don't forget to share your projects in the project section and I'd be happy to have a look at them for you and leave my feedback over there. See you tomorrow. 34. Day 26 - Clob and YOU!: [MUSIC] Hello and welcome back. Today we are again going to be doing and improvisation exercise. I'm going to be introducing one tangle, and we're going to have a lot of empty space around on the page which you're going to fill up with tangles of your choice. The tangle that I have chosen to demonstrate today is called clob. A clob is a fairly simple tangle to draw. It's also quite versatile in nature, because you can create a lot of variations with the existing template, and it basically works with the ribbon approach. You can have multiple ribbons either clustered together, or you can have them floating around individually. Basically, we're going to form an abstract composition with these clob ribbons, leaving these odd spaces empty on our paper. Once you have these ribbons either stacked together or individually, we're going to go inside each of these and add curvy lines. Doing this might also remind you of madison, the tangle that we had done earlier in one of our improvisation exercises. In madison, we also did a few of these curves black and then we left some negative space. If you want to do that kind of improvisation where you want to borrow some elements or ideas from the madison tangle and incorporate them over here in clob, even that's possible. Then for the rest of the empty space, you can fill it up with any tangles of your choice. You can either do one tangle in the entire empty space or you can do multiple tangles. I leave the choice to you. Like I said, if you want to do any design variations within the clob tangle also, even that's possible. So feel free to have fun with this exercise today, and take inspiration from all the tangles that we have done so far. Once you're done with it, do post it in the project section so that we can all exchange ideas on this improvisation exercise and see each other's work. That's it for today and I will see you tomorrow with my finished exercise from today as well as a new exercise for tomorrow. [MUSIC] 35. Day 26 - Reveal : [MUSIC] Hi everyone. Welcome back. I'm here with my finished project from yesterday. I'm sure by now you can tell that I am a fan of using a lot of black ink on my art works, and I like to have a heavy saturated inky areas. In this design too, I have added a lot of black backgrounds. But primarily, what I've done for the clothe is that I've basically just sectioned them out, alternate and gone inside and added these little black accents, leaving a little bit of whitespace in the middle, which makes it look a little 3D and then it basically gives it a little more dimension. Then for the rest of the empty spaces that I had, I chose two sections to be with just lines. Then for the rest of the empty sections, I decided to include bulbs over there. There were a couple of things that I did different this time. Instead of sticking the bulbs next to each other, I decided to leave a little bit of space between each of them which made them spread out a little bit more. Then instead of using my usual patterning style, I decided to just match it with these sparkling details that I've done over here. I just decided to match the bulbs with that and decided to color them like so. Another thing that I tried was to skip the aura around the inner block that I have done. Instead of doing the aura around the inner block, in some of them, I decided to skip it and so that gives a different look. This is good to keep as a reference for later on in case I ever decide to do it without the aura because this gives a different look, this gives a different look. I decided to do a little bit of experimenting over here as well. That was it. That was the exercise that I did from yesterday. Hopefully, you also finished yours by now. I look forward to seeing all your wonderful versions and variations of this exercise. 36. Day 27 - Spoolies : [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome to Day 27 of our creative challenge. Today we're going to do yet another mono-tangle exercise and the tangle that I have chosen for today is called spoolies. Spoolies is a wonderful tangle which incorporates one of the most elemental strokes of this entangle method, which is the C stroke. Now using the C stroke, we're basically creating a lot of auras around a center element. As you saw, the central element is nothing but a large C-shape with a little bulb at the end. It looks a little bit like fescue, except that it's not as wavy as fescue and it's just slightly more C-shaped. It's basically just a large curve and then we keep on building auras around it. Now when you're creating these auras, you have two choices. Either you can start the orders somewhere in the middle and let the shape look like an apostrophe or like a really large comma, or also very similar to quotation marks. This is the approach that I'm following right now or the second approach is that you can keep on building the auras continuously. Then you will realize that towards the end of it, it starts to build into a circle. So if you keep on going continuous with the auras, it'll eventually become a really large circle with these little aura lines inside of it. Feel free to experiment with both the approaches and see which one you like better. Another thing that you can experiment with is the direction of the auras and whether you like going clockwise or counterclockwise. Today's exercise is a wonderful way to find out what preferences you have when it comes to drawing C-shapes or curves and you will find out which direction you're more comfortable in. Consider this to be almost like an intuitive exercise or having a conversation with yourself and understanding what artist you are or what movements you like better and these things help you develop your own style. Eventually, you will realize there are certain things that you prefer more as compared to others, and those will become your go-to techniques. This exercise will help you understand what your go-to techniques are. Now, even though this is a mono-tangle exercise, I am going to probably add a few fescues at the end just towards the edges to just balance out some of the elements and also because the inner shape looks a little bit like fescues. I'm probably going to do that. Also, as I'm speeding forward through the video, you can see that I'm filling up all the empty spaces in the middle with black ink. That is just helping to build the contrast. If you like, you can also do some mark-making over here or add some little ornamental details similar to how we did with our crescent moon exercise. If you feel that your aura lines are turning out to be a little too thick and that there is scope to add some details in there. Then feel free to add any little patterns or little marks inside of those auras. Another interesting thing about today's exercise is to practice the Hollybow technique. When I say the Hollybow technique, it's basically overlapping objects. When you have some of these bullies on the top and some at the bottom, you are basically creating depth in your design. That's it for today's exercise and I hope you have fun filling up your page like this. If you are interested to probably add a couple of other tangles and customize the project. Please feel free to do so and try to find some tangles which can go with the C-shape nature of the spoolies and that way you will have a nice cohesive design. That's definitely something that you can try. Otherwise, you can enjoy a mono-tangle exercise today, just the way I did it. When you're ready, post it in the project section and I'd be happy to leave my feedback over there for you. 37. Day 28 - A Freehand Page : [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to the course. Today we're going to be doing a freehand exercise and I'm going to be drawing a few tangles over here on the page. However, I would like you to try and use these tangles in your own way. Unlike other improvisation days where I show you only half of my composition, today, I will show you the full composition. But even within this composition, I would like you to try and change the position of the tangles as well as the arrangement. Basically try to use this set of tangles in your own way. Now for the first angle, I'm going to be drawing m-anning. This is a beautiful tangle that starts with a small spiral, very similar to another tangle called printemps. Then we basically create this little aura, a partial aura. Then we start creating more auras. But we connect them to the first one. It almost becomes like this trail of auras surrounding the center. It starts to bloom into this beautiful little spiral with auras getting bigger and bigger. Then as you're reaching towards the end, they start to get smaller. Then we basically start to tuck them inside that spiral that we started off with. Now I'm going to draw another one over here at the bottom, and I'm going to try to place this in such a way that it goes under the previous one. While making these auras which are more like echoes in this case they're not exactly auras. You will realize that the touch point or the meeting point of the first few of these echoes is going to be the same. Then as you progress further, that meeting point will change. For some of those outer echoes, the meeting point will shift slightly and that's how you'll be able to tuck them inside that spiral that we had started off with. Now I'm going to stick with just two. But you're free to draw as many as you like depending on your paper size. Once you're happy with the placement, we'll move on to the next tangle, which is printemps. Printemps is basically spirals, which can be drawn either way. You can either draw them from out to in or you can draw them from in to out. Once you start making these on a regular basis, you will realize that you have a preference very similar to how we did these Hollies yesterday. You will have a preferred direction. You would either like a clockwise or counter clockwise and so use that over here and try to draw a few spirals around these m-annings things. Then basically we're just going to ink all that remaining space to build contrast. Now once you're done with a few of these printemps, we're going to move on to the next angle, which is inapod. Now inapod is a lovely little wavy tangle, which basically reminds me of jellyfish legs again. But once you start drawing it, it will also remind you a little bit of the pods. We basically start off with one wavy line, and then we criss-cross it with another wavy line, forming these little pod spaces in the center. Then we again come back with another wavy line. That one is going to go parallel to the first one. Then we do another wavy line which is going to go parallel to the second one. Basically you end up having four lines. Now when I say parallel, they are not entirely parallel. You can see that I have taken a few liberties here and there. Also, you will notice that there is this little gap which is forming between these wavy lines. You will notice these small sections. In my case, it's like a little triangle and a little square that's forming. We're going to talk about this in just a few moments. But for now, we're going to start filling up these little pods with orbs, and then we're going to color the rest of this space black. We're going to do the exact same thing and all the pods. Of course you can change the size of the orbs. I have drawn them right in the center of the pods, but you can have them touching the edges of the pods as well. Now once we are done coloring, like I said, we have these little small gaps over here, which are these little triangles or squares, but we're going to deal with that in a few moments. First, I'm going to draw another inner pod over here at the bottom. This time, when I draw my parallel lines, I'm going to make sure that they intersect at exactly those spots where the first two lines are intersecting. What that basically means is that I am not changing the intersection points. This way I basically get very clean pods as compared to the open pods that we had in the first version. Now according to the original step out of this tangle, the bottom one is the correct step-by-step version. However, the top one is my version or my improvisation of this tangle. Both of them have their own unique features and you're free to use any of these in your designs. If you're more of a classic tangler and you'd like to use tangles exactly the way that they are drawn or imagined by the creators of the tangles, then you can use the bottom one. But if you'd like to have some variety in your designs and you want to experiment a little bit more then you can use the top one. The process of the inner pods remains the same regardless of which intersection approach you choose. As you can see, the bottom one is slightly more elegant because you don't have so much of crisscrossing lines happening over here. But with the top one, there is a little bit of an element of fun because you get those little geometric shapes inside of those intersection points. I would say both of these have their own unique appeal. Now I'm quickly going to finish coloring my bottom inner pod. One more thing that you can do over here is add even more intersecting lines. You can see that just as long as the meeting point or the intersection point is the same, the pods can become more and more plump. You can basically increase the thickness or the rounding of these pods by adding even more of these aura lines around. Now coming to the top one, I usually leave the intersection points as is, and I don't really do any changes to them. But since right now, I want to match the top inner pod a little way to the bottom inner pod. I'm just going to merge these inner pods and I'm basically just going to pretend that there is only one intersection point. I'm just going to cheat a little bit over here and just try to match it a little closer to the technique that I've used on the bottom inner pod. Like I said, both the techniques or great, there is no right or wrong over here. But just that when I look at the design as a whole, I want both the inner pods do look a little similar to each other, which is why I'm just adding a couple more aura lines over here and just changing the intersection points. Now with the inner pod is done. The next thing that I'm going to do over here is add a few Hollibaugh sticks and I'm going to use straight lines. Hollibaugh can also be done with curvy lines or any other shape that you prefer. But I'm going to be using straight lines over here just so that they add a little bit of contrast to all the other curvy shapes that we've used so far so that there is some variety in the shapes. Then I'm going to add bubbles inside of this. If you remember, bubbles was basically three concentric circles. Then we go inside the innermost circle, and then we just put a tiny C-shape over there and we color it black. Almost like putting a little rounding over there. Now bubbles can also be overlapped and you can apply the Hollibaugh technique here as well. You can have overlapping bubbles, circles, one on top of each other. But I like to usually have them next to each other with a little bit of black space around. It gives me the impression that they're all kind of floating and they're basically like little cells in this large, gigantic vessel filled with fluids. I like to have that approach, but you can definitely add the layering technique here as well. Now in today's design, I'm not going to do bubbles in all of the Hollibaugh sections, and I'm only going to stick with the opposite ends just so that they add a little bit of variety and contrast in the overall composition. Then I'm going to go ahead and add some details inside the m-annings. One of my most favorite methods of adding details inside spiral patterns is to just place dots in an ascending or descending order. I feel that they suddenly uplift the tangle and give it a very ornamental wipe. But you're definitely free to do any other variation over here that you like. Finally, as the last step, I'm going to go ahead and add some dashed lines over here. These are going to be tiny hyphens or tiny dashes, which are basically just going diagonal. This is one of my go-to fillers for any design or composition where I want to give the effect of water. Or if I want to basically indicate some sea life creatures or anything basically similar to sea life. That's it for today's exercise. Like I said, this is a freehand exercise, which means you can alter the design anyway that you like and you can shift around the tangles or add some tangles or subtract some tangles and basically make a composition of your own choice. As always, once you're done with it, do post a picture in the project section and I'd love to see what you come up with. Tomorrow, I'm going to meet you with another freehand exercise. 38. Day 29 - Another Freehand Page: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to our creative challenge. Today, we are on Day 29 and we're going to be doing yet another free hand exercise, very similar to the one that we had done yesterday, which means that today also, you have the liberty to change the orientation of your patterns, as well as play around in terms of composition, as well as variations. Basically, take inspiration from whatever I'm drawing here today and then do your own thing. The first pattern that we're going to start off with is meringue. It's a beautiful wavy pattern, where we start off by making one single wavy line, and then we basically create these auras and touch it to the tip of the original line, almost like drawing lots and lots of S-shaped curves. Then all of those S strokes basically start to blend in together to make this little feather-like shape. Now, we're going to be drawing, meringue on both sides of our sketchbook. As you can see, I'm basically doing it at the bottom edge for now, but I will also do a similar one at the top edge. I'm basically going to do two chunks of meringue and leave a little bit of space in the middle, almost like they're like leafy patterns with a little bit of space empty in the middle, which we are going to fill up with little orbs. Now, you can take a few liberties over here in terms of your S-curves. You don't have to draw them exactly the same way. If you want to do S-stroke, which is the opposite of an actual S-stroke, you can do that as well. Just as long as you have a wavy line or a line which is similar to an S-stroke that works. Of course, as always, feel free to rotate your sketchbook and get into a comfortable position in order to draw these curves. If a couple of your lines become a little wobbly, that's perfectly fine. Because as you keep on creating these auras, you can simply just imitate the effect of the previous line, and then the whole shape will start to look nice together. Don't worry too much in case a couple of lines go a little here and there. You can see that even in my sketchbook, even though most of the lines that I've drawn right now are nice and in sync with each other, there are a couple of lines where I could've done a better job. They've gone a little wobbly. But they don't really bother me so much because really, there's no right or wrong over here. I feel that having a couple of shapes different to the ones that are already there on the paper, just adds to the whole variety in the design and just makes it look a little more organic and natural. I'm always in favor of shapes looking raw and organic as compared to them looking absolutely perfect. That's just how my style has always been and that's how I prefer my shapes to be. Now once you've done a few of these, as you can see, I basically connected them with some smaller lines. It basically ends up becoming like these three large boards which have these hollow spaces in the middle. We're going to be filling up these spaces with orbs. You can think of these as similar to inner boards, except that these have more number of lines and they're more S-shaped as compared to C-shaped curves. It's slightly more wavy. But once we add the orbs, you will probably see a certain amount of resemblance to in a board with this particular tangle. Now, meringue can be used in many different ways. Right now, I'm choosing to use it as an enclosure, almost like there's a board in the center. Then I'm basically choosing these meringue leaves on either side of the board to just give it a little boundary or to give it an enclosed space. But you can use meringue with stems and make it look like leaves. You can also stack meringue one on top of each other and make it look like a beautiful border. It can definitely make for a nice border on reading cards or any other DIY project. You can also just play around in terms of the orientation and just find them all from a single point. That can turn into a lovely flower. You can use it radially, as well. Basically, meringue can be used in many different ways. Once you've got the hang of the S-stroke, then you can play around with this tangle quite a bit and place it anywhere that you like in your composition. Now, once I'm done coloring all that empty space in the middle, the next thing that I'm going to do is I add a couple of mookas on the left side as well as the right side. Right now, I'm just like placing them in the center. But you can definitely add them diagonally as well, and you don't have to keep it in this orientation the way I'm doing it. Feel free to improvise and change the orientation of tangles according to your sketchbook or according to your preference. Once these mookas are done, I'm basically just going to come inside and add a few details. I'm going to fill up this space with flux. I think you can probably tell by now that I like to fill up all my teardrop or flux shapes with these little lines and dots inside of it. This is my favorite technique, but you are definitely free to use any other technique. Then as always, I'm going to color up all the empty space black, just so that it adds contrast into the design and makes those flux teardrop shapes really stand out. I'm slightly speeding up the video to show you what the process looks like. But you're definitely free to pause the video and do it at your own pace. Especially, if you're doing a slightly different design or a variation to the design that I'm working on, you might need a little more time to work on your sketch book. Once you're done with it, you can come back and replay the video or just resume it from the point where you left off and you'll be able to catch up. Now, the next thing that I'm going to do is add a few roundings to these little corners here and there, which are like the meeting points in our composition. Just adding these little roundings can make so much of a difference to an otherwise mundane composition because it certainly adds a lot of drama and interests into the linework and these dramatic transitions and these little bits and pieces of ink here and there add the contrast, and they really bring in a lot of depth in your design. The easiest way to figure out where to add roundings is to look for sharp corners or meeting points between two tangles and fill up those odd gaps with these little rounded curves and then fill them up with color. Now with this done, I'm going to move on to the next tangle, which is bulk leaf. Bulk leaf is basically a stem with a curvy gap and then a leaf. As always, you are free to play around with the shapes of the leaves as well as the sizes and the orientation. I'm basically just going to add these all around the mookas. Once I'm satisfied with one of my bulk leaves, I'm going to go back, and in my usual style, I'm going to start adding some contrast because I want the leaves to pop out a little bit more. I want them to give the appearance that they're calling a little bit. While I'm doing the contrast work, I'm also going to add a few fescues here and there, just to add to the whole garden botanical vibe that is happening with the design right now. Yesterday's freehand page was more of a C-like inspired page and today's is a little more botanical inspired. You can see that even though the tangles have similar strokes and they look similar visually, they can still be used in combination with other tangles and you can build a composition with a completely different look and a completely different theme in your mind. Mixing and matching tangles is a lot of fun. Then as my final step, I'm just going to go back to all these mookas and just darken the borders a little bit, just making sure that the edges are a little bolder as compared to how they are right now. That'll make them pop a little bit and stand out a little bit against the background, which is full of bulk leaves right now. If you're doing the challenge with the intention of coloring all of your projects later on, then you probably might not need to add so much of thickness and details to the mookas the way I'm doing them right now. Because if you end up choosing a different color for the mookas and a different one for the background, then the mookas will automatically stand out. But even then, I still like to just give thick borders to some of the elements and then borders to the rest of the elements, so that there is a variation in the design. It helps us to emphasize the elements a little bit more. Again, these are small little personal touches that you can totally customize and choose to add or avoid depending on how your design is shaping up. With that, we are done with today's exercise. Like I said, other tangles that I have played with over here today are basically my interpretation of a garden botanical vibe. I have placed them in this free hand composition. But you are definitely free to play around with these tangles and come up with your own composition with a completely different placement of the tangles, if that's how you like it. That's it for today. I'm going to see you tomorrow with another interesting exercise. 39. Day 30 - S Curves with Undling : [MUSIC] Hi everyone, and welcome back to our creative challenge. Today, we're going to go back to basics. Every few days, I like to go back to my elemental strokes and practice them in interesting ways, to make sure that I remain consistent with my work. Today, the stroke that we're going to focus on is the S stroke. As some of you probably know, in the zentangle method, there are usually five elemental strokes. The S stroke is one of them. The tangle that I have chosen for today is called undling and the beauty of this tangle is that it helps you to practice your S stroke as well as a backward S stroke. We basically start off with a channel like grid, very similar to how we had done with firecracker a few days ago. Then we basically start to fill the first channel with S strokes, and as always, you are free to rotate your sketchbook in an angle that is most comfortable to you. Then we basically fill up the first channel with S strokes. Once you are done making these S strokes in the first channel, we do a reverse S stroke on the second channel. Now things start to get interesting when you vary the distance between each of these strokes. They also start to get interesting when you make your channels slightly asymmetrical. Instead of keeping absolutely straight lines, I have chosen to make my channels and curvy lines. You can see that they are merging at a few places and they're getting narrower at a few places whereas they're wider at other places. All this really adds to the drama in your composition, and even though this is a mono tangle, the page looks quite beautiful, just as is even without any shading or ornamental little additions. That's the beauty of undling. It's such a beautiful and simple tangle, yet so powerful because it helps you to practice your S-curve, and it really keeps you engaged as you are mindfully putting those strokes and trying to maintain the distance between each of those curves. I remember the first couple of times I tried to do undling as a practice exercise for myself. I was exceptionally nervous in doing the backward strokes. But then I realized all it requires is to basically switch around the position of your notebook, and then continue drawing in an angle which is most comfortable for you. Just like that, we continue to fill up our page. Now you're probably wondering why I've chosen to do an S stroke exercise today after so many days of doing a mix-and-match of complex compositions. Well, the answer is that we haven't really had much opportunity to practice our S strokes, if we go back and look at all our designs. We've done a lot of work with straight lines, and we've also done a lot of work with C strokes. We've also played around with orbs, circles and ovals, and we've played around with dots. But the S stroke hasn't been practiced much in the last 30 days. Today's exercise is dedicated to practicing this elemental stroke, and going forward, we will be using this in combination with other strokes when it comes to pairing tangles, as well as when it comes to creating freehand designs. Now as always, I'm going to speed up the video slightly to show you what the page is going to look like. Of course, you can vary the distance between the lines. Though personally, I would prefer that you try to keep them as close as possible in order for you to squeeze in as many S strokes on the same page, and for you to get a good amount of practice. Also, if some of you are interested to enhance this mono tangle page further, then you can go in further in the design and add these hatching strokes from the left as well as the right side of the channel, and leaving a little bit of gap in the center, almost like a beam of light passing through, and that's the area where we are basically showing the highlight, and it'll almost give a three-dimensional look to your undling. Making it look like little tubes sitting next to each other, nicely cuddled together, and they will have this beam of light shining through the center. This is also something that you can try. Notice that when I use this particular technique, I am basically leaving the sparkles a little haphazard in the center, so that it almost gives an impression of these being metallic tubes. The glimmer of light, or that shimmering effect is basically a little more natural. That really helps to add some drama and interest in your design. This is also very similar to what I had done with my globs on the day when we did our improvisation exercise, with the lesson that was titled Glob and You. This is the technique that I used over there to make sure that my globs look like tubes. That's it for today and I hope you enjoy making these S strokes. It is my recommendation that you sit in a comfortable position to practice these strokes. S strokes can turn out to be a little more challenging than our conventional I strokes and C strokes, and so it's important to be patient and keep breathing as you go along putting each of these strokes on paper. Take your time, go slow, and I'm pretty confident that by now you've got a decent amount of warm-up, and you will definitely be able to do this S stroke once you put your mind to it. Tomorrow, I'm going to meet you with another interesting improvisation exercise. Till then, keep creating. [MUSIC] 40. Day 31 - Lines & Orbs: [MUSIC] Hello and welcome back. We're going to be doing another improvisation exercise today. But again, just like yesterday, we're going to go back to basics. We're going to be doing an improvisation exercise which is focused on straight lines as well as orbs. Again, lines and orbs are some of the most basic elements and strokes that you will always see in this entangle method, as well as free-flowing and doodle designs. Even if you are someone who loves to draw mandalas or any other form of meditative arts, this exercise will be useful for you because it will take you back to the basics and it'll help you brush up on your line work, as well as perfecting those little orbs and circles. For today's exercise, we are going to be drawing some doodle shapes, very fluid cells, which are basically just imitating each other's boundaries. Very similar to how we had done them on day one. Then we're going to be filling this up with orbs and lines. Now I'm going to be filling this up with this half and half style where I'm going to have half of my shapes are filled up with these lines, and then the other half is going to have slight more contrast where I have the background colored black and then I have these little orbs over there. But as this is an improvisation exercise, I'd love for you to try out a couple of other techniques and see if there is something else that you can come up with to fill up your shape apart from the combination that I'm using over here. The trick to today's exercise is to use a combination of these fluid shapes, which are going to be your outer boundaries. Then the inside of these shapes have to be filled with a combination of straight lines and orbs. Now you can use to do it exactly the same way that I'm doing it half and half, or you can come up with your own technique. Today's exercise is probably going to take you a little bit more time than yesterday's depending on how big you have drawn the shapes and how detailed your pattern inside of the shapes is. Take your time, breathe easy, and when you're ready, put it in the project section. As always, because this is a repetitive activity, I'm not going to be showing you the end of my page today, and I will show it to you tomorrow at the beginning of our next exercise. That'll give you an idea of how my page turned out to be. But I don't want you to be heavily influenced by what I draw. Just using basic lines and orbs, if you can come up with something different, that will be great. Let's have a look at all your wonderful variations and versions in the project section. Tomorrow I'm going to meet you with another fun-filled exercise. 41. Day 31 - Reveal : [MUSIC] Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the course. This is my finished exercise from yesterday, and I had a lot of fun doing this. It was quite relaxing to draw all the lines and then putting in all the orbs and those circles. Of course, the coloring was quite intense because they were like these really tiny areas in which I needed to fill in color. But I quite enjoyed the process of doing that. Overall, this turned out to be quite a relaxing experience for me, and I'm pretty sure it was the same for you. If you are still behind on your project or if you feel that you are short on ideas, then you're definitely free to do the exact same thing that I've done over here for practice sake. Later on whenever you come up with more ideas you can definitely customize the exercise and probably have another go at it. For now, even if you do the same thing that totally works. I look forward to seeing what you come up with and I'd love for you to post it in the project section. 42. Day 32 - Zen with Bricks: [MUSIC] Over the last few days, we have taken a lot of inspiration from this entangled method, and we have created beautiful complex compositions using dangles by danglers from all over the world. However, I just want to point out today that getting into a Zen state of mind is possible even with the simplest of patterns around you. When we look around, there are plenty of opportunities to get into a Zen flow by taking design inspiration from objects around you. Even in nature, you will see patterns repeating themselves in the form of flower petals, in the form of trees, in the form of ocean waves. Any simple motif or any simple pattern which is easy to draw, will instantly put you in a Zen state of mind as long as you keep on repeating it. Repetition is the key to getting into Zen state of mind. That's exactly what we're going to be getting into today with a very simple pattern of bricks. Many times we have inspiration around us, but we never stopped to think how exactly we can utilize it. But with a simple pattern like bricks, I hope to open your eyes to more inspiration around you. Bricks are nothing but simple rectangles which are repeating themselves over and over again. You can have them big, small, absolutely perfect or slightly haphazard. It's totally up to you. In today's exercise, I want you to take a few minutes and draw these simple straight lines and then go inside each of these little blocks and then add roundings on the corners. Once you add those roundings, the bricks will start to look very natural. [MUSIC] Remember, even though we are trying to put some realistic touches over here, we're not exactly aiming for realism. We're not going to go as deep as using illustration techniques to make these bricks look realistic, but we are going to go around the corners, darkening them a little bit and probably adding a few rounding here and there to make them look a little asymmetrical. [MUSIC] How do you like or how realistic you want the bricks to be it's totally up to you. [MUSIC] You will notice that laying down the template for the bricks is not very time-consuming, but going inside each of those blocks and adding those little rounding and putting those little details and the edges is what's going to take more time. Now when you get inside each of those little breaks and you start to add the details, you will get into a Zen state of mind because you'll be treating each brick individually as an element and you'll be adding the details and getting immersed in the process. [MUSIC] This exercise also goes to say that sometimes we get so caught up in looking for inspiration on the internet and they keep searching for tangle patterns online, but we forget that there is a lot of inspiration around us. Simple patterns like these can be used in our compositions to elevate them and make them look different from all the other compositions that you might be drawing otherwise [MUSIC] I remember when I first came across this entangled method, all I wanted to do was go online and download this step outs for literally every tangle possible on this planet, but I soon realized that that's not a healthy approach because even though tanglers from all over the world are spending a lot of time deconstructing these tangles and putting the step-out online, these are not the only patterns available to you. Look for design inspiration on upholstery. You will probably find some pattern ideas by looking at your curtains and bedsheets. You might even find some inspiration for our motifs and for repetitive patterns when you look at buildings very closely and observed the architecture of buildings around you. Always try to be in the moment and see if there is something that you can borrow inspiration from. That is going to be an additional design or an additional element in your toolkit, which is going to be very personal for you because you will have a story associated with it. Here's a fun fact. This class is being filmed on Valentine's Day. I decided to just add a few fun elements here and there and the design. There was so much of pink and red inspiration online. I decided to just add few pink cards today, very different from what I usually do in these black and white challenges, but today, just for fun sake, I decided to add these tiny pink little hats. [MUSIC] Again, as you can see, I'm not really aiming for perfection. I'm just using a very simple brush pen over here and adding these hearts very quickly in just one or two strokes. This is just to add a splash of color over here on my sketchbook. Just to keep things fun and interesting for myself. [MUSIC] If you feel like you wanna do something different, probably want to write something, or maybe draw something else inside each of these bricks, please feel free to do that. I would love to see all your versions and variations in the project section. Tomorrow, I'm going to meet you with another interesting exercise. Till then, keep creating. 43. Day 33 - Lines with B Twixt: [MUSIC]. Hi everyone and welcome back to our challenge. Today, we're going to go back to line practice, and the tangle that I have chosen for today is called B-Twixt. B-Twixt is a fairly simple tangle, which is made up of straight lines, and once you start drawing it, you will find similarities between B-Twixt and B-Tweed. It's essentially the same concept where we start off with a triangle and then we take one of the points and draw a line diagonally, and then we take the opposite end and draw another line diagonally, which lands somewhere on the first one. Then we basically keep repeating this process until we get this little weave-like structure. It's almost like there is a little woven pattern inside the triangle. Now when it comes to B-Tweed, we usually go on these meeting points or the intersection points of these lines and we start to add a little bit of line weight over there. That is really one of the most recognizable features of B-Tweed. But when it comes to B-Twixt, there are a number of different possibilities that can be applied over here. Before we explore the possibilities, the first thing that we're going to do is basically keep stacking up more triangles and keep filling them with this woven pattern. You will also notice that one of the fundamental differences between B-Twixt and B-Tweed is that B-Twixt is more stackable and it's like a more buildable tangle. You can keep building further and further on this. Whereas B-Tweed is more like a structure that has to be placed inside a given structure. You don't really have a lot of opportunity to play around in terms of construction when it comes with B-Tweed. But with B-Twixt you can actually rotate your sketchbook all around and keep stacking these. I like to think of them like little Lego pieces, little triangular blocks that you can keep building one on top of the other. They basically start to make this very beautiful kaleidoscopic pattern and it starts to give a very art deco vibe, and it becomes into this beautiful little maze. Now when it comes to the sizes of these triangles, you're free to keep making them bigger and smaller as you progress across the page. If there are certain places where you feel that there is a huge gap, you can just draw another line in the middle and divide that gap into smaller sections. Basically, you can keep building as many triangles as you like and just keep filling up the page by rotating it, and basically just have fun making these little intersection lines. Now some people like to build this tangle all the way to the edges, especially if they're doing it as a mono tangle exercise. But I personally prefer to leave a few gaps here and there empty on the edges, just so that it gives a sense of balance and there is some breathing space in the tangle. I'm not going to fill it up all the way to the edges. But if you feel like you want to fill it up, you're definitely free to do so. Once you're done with the tangle, if you have extra time today, you can actually take it up a notch by adding some details. One of the things that I really like to do is add in these little tiny dots inside each of these triangular sections. I basically try to put them in ascending order. The smallest dot is near the center point of the triangles, or a point where all the triangles are meeting basically, and then I keep making them bigger and bigger as they bloom outwards. That's one way to add some details in your tangle and make it look a little more complex. Another technique that I really enjoy is to add roundings. But notice that the roundings that I'm adding over here are quite deep, because I'm basically aiming for almost a perfect C at the top of these intersection points. They almost become like this hollow, long, teardrop shape once I add the roundings on the top. Another option is to leave some sparkles in the middle and basically leave some highlights. Again, I basically just put in some black strokes on both the sides. On the edges I have black strokes and then I leave a little bit of gap in the center. I basically try to do this on alternate sections. Again, we're not really aiming for realism over here, so it's not like we are aiming for a perfect light source. We can play around and just consider this to be more like an ornamental detail as against a realistic light and shadow exercise. Then another option that we have is to fill up these little sections with orbs and color the background black. Again, you can do this on one side of the triangle, which is basically one half, or you could do it alternate left and right, or alternate just on one side. There are many different possibilities with this little step as well. These are the different variations that we have when it comes to working with B-Twixt. If you have any other ideas, then I'd love to see those as well, and whatever you choose to finally apply on your sketchbook I'd love to see that in the project section. Tomorrow. I'm going to meet you with another back to basics exercise. 44. Day 34 - Heart Plant: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to the challenge. Today we're going to be doing yet another simple exercise that helps us to improve our strokes. We're going to be working with hearts today and hearts are nothing but a combination of two C strokes. Of course, they're a little pointy at the bottom and a little more plump at the top. But the basic structure of these curves comes from a simple C stroke. Now I thought it would be fun to do a pattern, where the hearts can be leaves. We can add some ornamental details inside of these with curvy lines and some dots. Very similar to how I usually add the details on my flux tangle. Just like we had done on Day 32, I'm again going to have some fun today, and I will play with two colors, red and black. Here, of course, free to choose any other colors that you like or even use just a single black pen. Now, the exercise for today is really simple, we're basically just going to keep connecting these hearts at various angles, stacking them one on top of each other, varying them in size and direction. We will keep rotating our sketchbook to get the correct angle. As you're making these hearts, you will see some empty spaces in the middle, which we're basically going to color in. Now I'm going to color these pretty randomly. As you can tell, I'm not following a specific order here and I'm just going with my instinct and placing the hearts wherever I feel they look best. I'm doing the same thing with the coloring process as well. Today, I'm actually not going to fill up the entire page. I will do this in a diagonal composition, leaving some negative space on the top left and the bottom right. It's almost making it look like a single branch of leaves, so to say. For almost a single branch from a creeper plant or a wine, so that's what I'm going for. But if you feel you want to fill up the whole page, you're definitely free to do that. Now when I'm working on patterns where I usually have some negative space around the focal piece, I like to go back to the edges and add some contrast by making some of these little boundaries bolder. Just like I do with my book leaves and other similar organic tangles, I just like to go back and add some curvy edges to my hearts as well and of course, any other style of detailing is fine too. If you have a different idea for the edges, you can definitely try that. That's it for today. I hope you have fun doing this wonderful, cute little exercise. This is, again, lovely pattern to use on a DIY project, especially if it's a greeting card that you're giving to a special someone in your life, or even if you just want to use it as borders or a filler pattern on any other composition that you're working on. It's easy to make and it definitely looks pretty with multiple colors. That's it for today and tomorrow, I will see you with another lesson. 45. Day 35 - Coffee Beans: Hi everyone and welcome back to the challenge. [MUSIC] Today, we're going to be doing yet another model tangle exercise focused on improving our strokes. The strokes that we're going to focus on today are S-curves and orbs. Today's tangle is actually something that I have come up with myself. As you can see, I'm basically drawing these ovals or orbs with S-curves in the middle, and then I'm connecting that S-curve with another S-curve that almost acts as an aura. My inspiration for this exercise was coffee beans. While there are many different ways in which one can draw coffee beans, I found this to be the simplest deconstruction of the shape. Doing this tangle on a regular basis will definitely make you more confident when it comes to orbs and s-strokes, especially because we often tend to stop short when closing the herbs because of the fear of crossing over the line. But just like any other tangle, if you do this mindfully, you will be able to get very smooth curves and orbs and you will definitely be able to get rid of those odd gaps on the edges. The key is to breath easy and take it slow. As always, focus on each stroke at a time. I'm sure you also realize by now that this is a stackable tangle which has many different possibilities. Either you can go around stacking them one on top of the other or connecting them the way I'm doing it right now by turning your sketch book and finding comfortable positions, or you can also just line them up next to each other and use it as a boarded tangle or as a different tangle, just like we had done with borbs in one of our earlier exercises. You can basically play around with this element and place it in any formation that you like. If you're interested to try another variation of this design, then you can probably also apply the hollybow technique, where you can have some beans hiding behind and some in the front and that will give a very interesting layering effect, and you can actually create a lot of depth to that way in the design. Similarly, even when it comes to details inside the S-curves, there are plenty of different possibilities. You can either color the entire bean black and leave the inside white, or you could color that S-curve black and leave the bean white. You can also go inside the beans and add a few details such as dots, or even straight lines or any other patterns that you feel would complement this particular shape. Sometimes, what I also like to do is go inside the S-strokes and basically create a charcoaled pattern inside, which gives the sense of texture and it also helps to create a little bit of depth in the beans. Like I said, there are many different possibilities when it comes to working on this design. As always, I would love for you to come up with your own versions and improvisations of this tangle. That's the exercise for today. I hope you enjoy making your model tangles spread with these little coffee beans. 46. Day 36 - Baton & Straight Lines: [MUSIC] Hello, and welcome back. Today we are back to some straight line practice. The dangle that I have chosen for practicing straight lines is baton. Baton is a really simple tangle which looks very complex in the beginning, but just like we've discovered with many other complex shapes, if you break it down into simple strokes, you'll definitely get a hang of it. It starts off by making a set of parallel lines and then we basically just twist our sketchbook around to find a different angle where we can create like a mini triangle, and then create another set of parallel lines. Now in order to bring contrast, I personally like to color the little triangles black, just so that they give an impression of being tucked under each other, and so it almost looks like little fragments of triangles which are getting tucked beneath each other. But if you don't want to color the initial triangles black and you have a different approach to stylize this design, then you're definitely free to do so. You'll notice that the trick to getting a perfect baton tangle is to basically keep rotating your sketch book and find a comfortable position so that you're able to draw straight lines in an angle that's most convenient for you. Sometimes you will also notice that as the triangles get bigger, you will have a little bit of trouble making the longer lines. In that case, what I like to do is basically just draw some extension lines which are going in random directions, and they basically bisect or cut through the original triangular space and create too many triangles. This way, I get shorter segments to play with and because the segment becomes smaller, it's easier to manage my strokes. As always, there is no right or wrong when it comes to this tangle, you basically go with whatever's easiest for you. You can have a lot of straight lines or you can have a lot of angular lines. You can either color the triangles black or not color them, you can have the lines closely put together or spaced apart. You can basically just play around in terms of the sizes, the orientation, the thickness, and literally any other possibility that you can think of to make this tangle work for you. Now for today's exercise, you have two choices. Either you can fill up the entire page with baton and consider it to be line practice so that it becomes a monotangle or you can mix and match the tangles and combine baton with any other tangle of your choice, as long as it is also composed of straight lines. You can probably do it with holly bow or you can probably do a checkered pattern or any other pattern that comes to your mind as long as it is composed of straight lines. You can even take inspiration from some of the tangles that otherwise won't go with tangles, for example [inaudible] which was a combination of straight lines and goby lines. You can probably try a variation of that, which is composed entirely of straight lines. Basically, just have fun and read today's exercise as line practice and see what is it that you can come up with and basically just try to push your boundaries, try to come out of your comfort zone and just see what is it that you can come up with. Once you're ready, make sure you put it in the project section so I can share my feedback with you. 47. Day 37 - Ribbons & YOU : Hello, and welcome back. Time for an improvisation exercise today. Today I will be giving you a template and I would love for you to fill it up with some ribbon or border patterns. Now, the template is actually pretty simple. I'm basically just going to choose a point here at the corner of my page. I'm just going to extend some curvy lines from here. Just dividing them into small little sections, almost like sun rays blooming out from one particular point. Just that they are curvy instead of straight. Your lines can definitely be more broad or more narrow as compared to mine. Now once we have these lines ready, we basically have these little strips or sections which are like ribbons. We're going to fill up these ribbons by taking some inspiration from some of the improvisation exercises that we have done earlier. If you remember, in a couple of our improvisation exercises earlier, we had played around with angles like Duda, and then we had also done a phone code improvisation exercise where we have basically come up with different ways of embellishing a given structure. Now imagine these to be like little strips or ribbons floating around. The idea is that we basically treat this template as a mashup of some of the improvisation exercises that we have done earlier. Plus also combine some new techniques today over here. You're free to combine newer tangles and convert them into strips. Or like I said, you can go back to some of those improvisation exercises and take ideas from there. You can even add some organic tangles over here and just make it like a pattern strip. So for example one of the strips could be completely filled with book leaves or it could be completely filled with flux and that way it will basically become like a ribbon which has the same pattern printed all over. I think the easiest way to do this exercise would be to imagine these little strips as small pieces of fabric, almost like swatches from a fabric store. Think of these as little pieces of fabric with various prints and patterns on them and then mix and match them and let's see what you come up with. If you're keen to play with color, you can even try watercolors, crayons, colored pencils, or any other coloring media, and then try to create some variations in your designs. That's it for today, and I will see you tomorrow with another improvisation exercise. 48. Day 37 - Reveal: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to the course. This is my exercise from yesterday. As you can see, I have finished this up with various patterns. Depending on the number of ribbons you drew, you might have more or less patterns than me and that's totally fine. I had a lot of fun doing this exercise. I basically tried to play with some existing patterns and tried to give them a different look. For example over here, I have [inaudible] and I thought, what if I add dots in [inaudible], and this is the output that I ended up with? This exercise is a great way to push your boundaries and see all the ideas that are floating in your head and actually try to put them on paper and see whether they work or not. On days when you're feeling uninspired to do big compositions or you don't want to do larger artworks, or even when you just don't have time to do larger artworks, then just drawing a few of these ribbons can still keep you in that creative moment every day. At the same time, you can practice some of your strokes and just see design variations, and then this acts as a great resource for you later on when you're looking for design inspiration. I hope you've managed to finish up your project as well. If you still have any questions about it or if you're stuck somewhere, feel free to put that up in the discussions tab and I'd be happy to answer your questions for you. That's it for today, and let's move on to our next exercise now. 49. Day 38 - Cadent and YOU!: [MUSIC] Hello and welcome back. Today's improvisation exercise is based on the tangle gerund. Gerund is a beautiful little tangle, which is basically made up of a grid structure. In this entangle method, we have organic tangles like poke leaves, which grow in any direction that they feel like. Very similar to a money plant or a creeper plant, which basically grows and blooms in all directions. Then we have ribbon tangles. Ribbon tangles can be used to divide your paper into multiple sections, or they can be used as a continuous ribbon floating around through your design, connecting various elements, almost like an actual ribbon intertwining with different elements. Then we also have border tangles, which as the name suggests, are basically four borders. Sometimes ribbon tangles can be used for border tangles and vice versa. Then we also have some highly structured tangles, very similar to what we're doing today. These highly structured tangles basically come out of the concept of grids. Now, in this entangled method, grids are often referred to as reticular. Then they are filled up with various patterns inside of them, which are called fragments. Basically, with multiple grids, you can mix and match different types of fragments. That's how you come up with a new design every time. Now bear in mind that reticular and fragments itself is a very vast topic, and I will probably cover that in the future in detail in a separate class. But for today I basically want you to get introduced to the concept of grids. We're going to start with this simple tango called cadent, where we are basically drawing these tiny little orbs and equally spacing them out, almost like creating a checkered pattern. Then once you have these little orbs placed around, depending on the length and the width of your page, we basically start connecting them with a strokes. Now, I like to do all my vertical lines first and then I do the horizontal lines, but basically, I turn my notebook around for the horizontal lines. Technically they become vertical lines again. Basically, just feel free to do it in any order or any direction that you like. But I have noticed that it helps to do all the same strokes in one go or the same line in one go. Then change the position of your notebook once you're ready, and then do the next set of a strokes. But really, this is just my technique. You can feel free to play around and see whatever method is more comfortable for you. Now once we're basically putting these a strokes, you can see that an almost checkered pattern emerges out of this grid. It's almost like little square banners which are interconnected with each other, and you have this beautiful template now with you. Now our job today is to basically fill up this template. Now I don't want to influence you with design ideas right away. I would love for you to take inspiration from your surroundings or from previous tangles, and try to come up with a method where you can actually create a square filler and put that inside each of these blocks. Now if you're keen to experiment, you can definitely do multiple fillers in each of the grids, or you can even do different roles. For example, the top row can be filled entirely with one pattern and then the second row, and then the third row each of them can have separate designs. That's one way to go about it. Or like I said, you can basically just fill up each of these little squared blocks with a separate pattern. I leave the choice to you have fun with this tangle. See what are the different fillers that you can come up with. Try different techniques, try combining the ICSO strokes, and see if there is something that resonates most with you. Then try to put that on this grid and see what all different versions and variations you'll come up with. 50. Day 38 - Reveal: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to the course. This is my finished exercise from yesterday. As you can see, I have basically kept the motifs really simple. The designs are not very complicated, but I did choose to play with colors just to break the monotony of the black and white designs that we've been doing so far. I basically ended up playing with orange, brown, black. This was quite a fun exercise for me. I'm assuming that you guys have done your exercise as well. If not, there's no hurry. You can finish it at your own pace and post it in the project section whenever you're ready. Just now as a side note, while talking to you, I think that I can also go back to some of these orbs, the orbs that we started off in the beginning and maybe just put in some metallic gold or just some other metallic color in there. Just make these orbs maybe pop out a little bit more as well. Again, I'm doing these exercises in a sketchbook is a great way to sort a conversation with yourself and basically just put all your ideas on paper. Then from here you can actually pick out some of the ideas that you think are going to work in larger artworks and you can polish them and refine them a little bit more. Then basically make a lot more professional art works out of this brainstorm exercise that you do on your sketchbook. It's a great way to keep your creative juices flowing and always brainstorming and just getting your ideas on paper. That's it. That's my exercise from yesterday. With this, we are ready to move on to our next exercise. 51. Day 39 - Relax with Gingo!: Hi everyone and welcome back to our creative challenge. Today we're going to do a simple relaxation exercise. Over the last few days, we've been doing a lot of improvisation exercises, and I think we could all use a break right now. So today's exercise is all about relaxation and having fun with this simple tangle called ginkgo. Ginkgo, as the name suggests, are basically ginkgo inspired leaves. These are fan-shaped leaves which have two see strokes at the bottom. Then on the top, we connect them with a wavy line, which is basically like a fan. Then as we go inside, we add lines. These can be as narrow or as thick as you like. As always, you're free to experiment and add your personal touches to the design. Sometimes I even like to add circles or little orbs inside each of these lines or inside each of these sections just to give it a little more ornamental value. But really it's totally your choice on how realistic or how imaginary you want these designs to be. Maybe you want to use this tangle in combination with another tangle. In that case, adding circles or adding little auras around the leaf, or even adding small lines or other details might help you in trying to bring unity and cohesion in your design. Or you could just do it like a mono tangle, the way we're doing it today. You could keep it absolutely simple and just let go of all the stress. Basically just enjoy the process of drawing these shapes and filling them up with lines. One of the things that I really emphasize upon in any of my drawing challenges is to have fun and occasionally indulge in these relaxation exercises. Because, well, if you look at it logically, the words Zentangle and Zendoodle definitely have the word Zen in them. [LAUGHTER] Keeping that in mind, it's important to enjoy that Zen state of mind every now and then where you let go off all expectations where you're not aiming for perfection. You're basically just drawing a project just for yourself, where you're letting go of all the stress and basically just enjoying your time with yourself. That's it. That's the exercise for today. I look forward to seeing your versions and variations of this. Even if you choose to keep it simple and just follow the exact same process that I have done over here. That's perfectly fine too. Whatever you come up with, make sure that you put it up in the project section for sure. Tomorrow I'm going to see you with another interesting exercise. Till then, keep creating. 52. Day 40 - String & ICSO : [MUSIC] Hi everyone, and welcome back to the challenge. Today we're going to be doing yet another improvisation exercise. But the exercise that I've planned for today is a little closer to the originals entangle method. Instead of doing freehand angles or mono tangles today, we're actually going to be working with a specific method. For this, we are going to take a scrap piece of paper to practice a couple of strokes. The goal here is to come up with a string inspired by the first alphabet of your first name. For example, my name is Rethi and the first alphabet of my name is R. When I try to write it in cursive, I'm basically going to write it like so. This is basically the letter R in lowercase. Now imagine if I have to fit it inside this square piece of paper, I will probably just squeeze it in like. Maybe I can accentuate the curves a little bit more and probably make that arc a little bigger. Now once I'm done with this, I basically have these little sections which come out after putting in my alphabet. These sections are what we're going to fill up. Now, let's say if your name starts with the alphabet a then you have these sections that come up. Then similarly, let's say if your name starts with the alphabet h, then we put h like so and you basically have these little sections again. Basically, we're not really sticking to exact cursive handwriting. You can of course accentuate a few details here and there. You can exaggerate the curves and basically the goal is to just fill up your paper with a string. Now, in this entangle method, a string basically lays down the foundation for what you're going to draw next. It divides your paper into smaller sections and it takes away the fear of an absolutely blank paper. Once you have these sections with you, your brain is at ease because all you have to do is fill up these sections one by one. It doesn't matter what you fill them up with, because entangle is supposed to be non-representational and non-figurative at all times. Even if you have tangles which resemble real-world objects, they're not really supposed to mean anything in this entangle method. Now for today's exercise, I would like you to lay down a string in pencil on your paper. It doesn't matter if the shape of your sketchbook is different than mine. It's okay if you don't have a square sketchbook, you can definitely do this on a vertical rectangle piece of paper as well. All I want you to do is just take inspiration from the first alphabet of your first name and put it down in an interesting string. String is nothing but basically just a guideline or a foundation which helps you to divide your paper into smaller sections. We always put it down in pencil. Then I would like you to go into each of these individual sections and fill them up with any tangles that you like. You can even come up with your own patterns. Take inspiration from everyday objects, take inspiration from upholstery, your clothes, anything else that you like and just fill it up. If you like, you can even consider this to be a practice exercise for yourself where you practice the ICES and all strokes. You can basically feel free to put straight lines, curvy lines, S-shaped lines, small orbs, circles, ovals, dots, and basically just practice your strokes. The best part about this exercise is that even if I put 10 people in the same room together and I asked them to make the exact same string and fill it up with patterns, everybody is going to come up with a different result, because each of you will have your own imagination and your own preferences when it comes to filling these sections. Even if I give you the exact same set of tangles to use, you will have your own creativity in terms of using a specific section for a particular tangle. Not all of you will place your angles in the exact same way. So this is a wonderful exercise to understand what your preferences are, what kind of strokes you like, what kind of patterns you are gravitating towards. And basically just to have fun and enjoy the process of making Zen art. In the future, we will be exploring this entangle method a little bit more in detail. But for now, I just want you to get acquainted with the concept of strings and how it can divide your paper into small sections and how you can fill it up. That's the exercise for today and I would love to see what you all come up with. 53. Day 41 - Cloves, Contrast & Detail : Hi everyone, and welcome back to our challenge. Today, we are going to stack up some petals. Now, if you remember, in one of our earlier exercises, we had done a tangle called garlic cloves. When we were practicing garlic cloves, we had basically created these oval board structures and gone inside each of them to add lines. It was a great line practice exercise. I'm sure it helped you to improve your line precision and control. Today, we are going to stack up petals one on top of each other. These are actually very similar to garlic cloves. It's almost as if we are putting one garlic clove on top of the other, instead of linking it like we did earlier. Now, once you place these petals, we are going to go inside each of these with lines again. But today we're also going to talk a little bit about contrast and detail. I'm actually using my thicker pen to make these petals today, I'm using a zero eight micron pen. It doesn't matter if you don't have a thick pen, you can still go ahead and do this with a thin one. We can always make the outlines a little thicker later on. Just start off with whatever is available to you. We'll add in the details later on. The goal is to fill up the entire page with these little petal like structures which are going to be basically stacked on top of each other. We're not really aiming for symmetry over here. Some can be big, some can be small, maybe a couple of them are angled, left angled, right. And that's completely fine too. You can see that I'm basically just going in a random order and filling up my whole page with these flower petal or leaf-like shapes. Now once we have these shapes, we are going to go inside each of these and start adding lines pretty much the same way that we did for garlic cloves. But while making the lines today, I'm going to use a thinner pen and this one is going to be 01. Now you'll notice that when you use a thinner pen, you obviously have to draw more number of times to fill up the entire space. When you put a lot of tiny lines close together, it appears darker because you're putting a lot of ink on the paper. Basically putting a lot of lines close together is going to make the entire shape a little darker. This is going to stand out in comparison to other shapes, which probably have lines which are spaced apart. Those are obviously going to look lighter. Now while you're placing these lines, I also want you to pay attention to the tip. As the lines are converging at the tip, that area is going to look darker. That's where detailing comes into play. Now you can accentuate this by going back onto the tips and highlighting them and contouring them slightly to make them pointy. You can even add a little bit of curl so that they look like they are windswept and that they are tilting a little bit to the left or tilting a little bit to the right. You can basically play around with the outlines and the contours of the shape. Going back and making the outlines ticker also ensures that each of the shapes will stand out against the others. This way, each petal basically has a unique individual identity as against all of them getting merged and mixed together in a bunch of lines. Now you might feel that these little steps are not making too much of a difference on a monotangle. But when you work on a larger composition, these steps are great to keep in mind, especially when you want to create contrast. It's good to have some areas where the lines are put close together so that they appear darker. Whereas some other areas where the lines are not so close together or the tangles are more spaced apart. There is a lot of paper white that you can see through from your designs. That way you'll get a good balance of inky saturated areas, as well as lighter paper white areas. Refining a given shape or tangle only takes a few extra steps. But once you do them, I'm sure you'll love the difference because they automatically elevate your design and give them a very finished and polished look. I want you to take your time and enjoy today's exercise to really observe and study how the proximity of lines work. As soon as you finish a few petals, you'll automatically start noticing certain darker areas in your design because of the lines that are being put close together. In fact, when you see your design from a distance, it might even appear that some of the lines are merging together. That's all the magic of working with a thinner pen and putting in lots and lots of lines close together. This detailing adds a lot of interests and drama in a given tangle. You will notice that the tangle almost appears shaded. Without even picking up a pencil, we are actually able to create a lot of dramatic effects with just our pen. That's the beauty of working with these micron pens because you get them in different, different sizes. You really able to create these wonderful effects of shadow and light by just playing with the techniques and just changing the size of the nib. Have fun with today's exercise. If you make any specific observations about your strokes, I'd love to know about them in the discussions tab. 54. Day 42 - Zentangle Inspired Project I: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to the course. Today we're going to be doing another exercise which takes us a little closer to the originals zentangle method. Now keep in mind that the zentangle method has a very wonderful philosophy behind it, and the steps are quite detailed and I will be diving deeper into it in a separate class. But I wanted to take some bits and portions of it and include it as part of the challenge. Because I really feel that these steps of the original zentangled method can put you in the right frame of mind as an artist, and they really help you to overcome your fears and free you of all judgment and self-doubt. So I wanted to include some parts of it in the challenge and going forward, I think you will find these steps to be very useful. Now the first step in the zentangle method usually is gratitude and appreciation. We basically take a moment to get comfortable and we take a few deep breaths and we just basically take a moment to be appreciative of the wonderful tools that we have with us, the people, the pen that you're drawing with, if you're using color pencils or any materials that you have, we just take a moment to be thankful for the fact that we have these materials with us, and for this wonderful opportunity to be able to create something beautiful. The next step is to put in the corner dots. The corner dots are not really meant to create a boundary, but they're basically supposed to take away the fear of a blank paper. The minute you put your corner dots, you basically don't have a blank piece of paper with you anymore and so you've crossed the first hurdle that most artists face, which is what to do with this blank piece of paper. The next step is to add the borders. We basically connect the dots with a thin, light pencil line and these lines don't really need to be straight. Right from the moment your pencil touches the paper, the zentangle method allows you to embrace mistakes and imperfections. So when you're connecting the dots, it doesn't really matter whether your lines are straight or curvy or wavy, it doesn't matter at all. Then comes the string, and I already gave you an example of this in one of our earlier exercises. In this case, what I'm basically going to do is take it from the top edge and then make a loop over here like so, and bring it back and connect it to the other edge. Then comes step 5. Step 5 is basically to add the tangles or the patterns. Now, in the zentangled method, a tangle is basically a predefined sequence of strokes. Which means that every pattern that you decide to fill up in these spaces will follow a specific sequence of steps, and that's what makes it easy for us to get in a Zen state of mind because you're putting repetitive strokes over and over again and so your brain basically goes in a Zen mode. Now, as I've also previously mentioned, patterns and the zentangle method are usually referred to as tangles. We basically draw the tangles inside each of these sections using our micron pens or any other fine liner pens that you have with you, and the reason why we don't do this in pencil is again, because the whole concept of zentangle is to let go and to basically just give your inner creativity a chance to put things on paper with absolute confidence. When we put things in pencil, then we often feel tempted to go on a path of perfection and we tend to erase things and we basically just get absorbed in the process of perfection, which can sometimes really restrict the growth of an artist. It's important to let go of things every now and then and so when you are basically using a pen, you are actually committing to putting those strokes on paper and if something goes wrong, well, the good news is that there are no mistakes in the zentangle method. If you feel that any stroke that you were putting did not go as you intended, then you can just work around it creatively and we just basically find a solution and either we repeat the same stroke so that it becomes a new pattern altogether, or we basically just work around it with another tangle and creatively find a solution to that little unintended stroke that you've put. Just remember the idea is that there are no mistakes and whatever you draw in your pen is basically the final stroke that you're putting on your paper. I think by now you've figured that the zentangle method is very forgiving in that sense, and it really lets you accept and embrace your imperfections as you're drawing on your piece of paper. Now coming back to placing our tangles in these sections. As you can see, I started off with the first section, which is the loop over here, and I've started to fill it up with flux. I'm basically just filling it up one by one and progressing towards the edge of the paper. Now, keep in mind that the pencil lines that we have over here are not supposed to act as strict boundaries. You can see that some of my flux elements are basically crossing over the boundary and so what that basically means is that the pencil lines are only supposed to be guidelines, and they're not really setting stone, so to say. When you're drawing your tangles free hand, especially when you have specific shapes in the tangle elements, don't try to walk them or don't try to control them or cut them just so that they can fit inside the string. That's not the idea over here. Now as I'm moving forward, I'm basically going to just add a few mucus and I'm going to keep the mucus on two sections. Again, like I said, I'm not really going to follow the pencil guidelines to the t. The string is eventually supposed to become invisible. So I'm going to actually draw the mucus freehand almost as if there are no pencil guidelines to follow. Now, I'm going to go inside each of these sections and start filling them up with different tangles. I think by looking at me, draw right now you've got a sense of the process. Your exercise for today is to basically draw this string, the looped string that I just showed you and fill it up with tangles of your choice. You don't have to do the exact same thing that I'm doing right now. This is just to give you an example of how the zentangle method works, and to show you the process. But now that you've seen me do the corner dots, the borders, and the string, and the tangles, I would love for you to try this with your own set of tangles or with your own preferred patterns. Keep in mind that the pencil guidelines should eventually be almost non-existent or almost invisible when I see the final output. Again, of course, I will see a little bit of the influence of it because when you're drawing it, of course, I'll understand the influence of the string on your particular design. But it won't really be as really take hard boundaries or outlines so to say. That's the exercise for today. You are free to choose any other tangles that we have done over the last few days, or you could even come up with your own tangles or if you know any other tangles from the zentangle method and you'll feel like you want to use those over here, feel free to mix and match tangles of your choice and fill up the string and I'd love to see the composition that you come up with. That's it for today and I will see you tomorrow with my zentangle inspired art project. 55. Day 42 - Reveal : Hi everyone, and welcome back to the course. This is my finished exercise from yesterday, and I think I showed quite a lot of it in yesterday's video itself, but you can see some new additions over here. You can see I've done some of these beaded lines or these wires, and then I've basically done like some abstract shapes on the top where I fill them up with lines in different directions. Overall, I have kept the motifs really simple, but I have played in terms of direction, in terms of movement, and how the composition is flowing overall. For example, if at the bottom I've done a lot of spirals and there's a lot of paper white for just showing through. I've compensated for it on the top by adding a lot of inky black areas. Then because the entire composition on the right side is inky and heavy on black. On the left side, I basically just added a little bit of breathing area by letting most of it be white and then adding these 10 beaded wires, which are giving a nice contrast. This is my composition from yesterday, and I would love to see all your compositions as well. With this, we are ready to move on to our next exercise. [MUSIC] 56. Day 43 - Zentangle Inspired Project II: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to the course. I hope you enjoyed doing yesterday's exercise and I hope that it gave you a gist of the Zentangle method. Like I said, the original Zentangle method has a lot of steps and we've actually done quite a few of them up until the point of filling zetangles inside the strings. However, the original Zentangle method also includes shading. As I said, we'll be covering that in a separate class because it's a wide topic and I'd like to give a complete justice and so we'll be doing that in a separate class. But now for today, I'd like you to try another Zentangle-inspired project where I'd like you to basically start off with your corner dots and then connect them with the borders and it doesn't matter whether they are wavy, they're straight, curvy, it doesn't matter, just as long as we are connecting the dots. Now, inside this, we're going to lay down a string and the string that I have chosen for today is the classic Z string. This is the string that Zentangle beginners start off with it and we basically have four sections once we place the string like so and now your exercise for today is to go inside the string and fill it up with four tangles that I'm just going to show you. The first one is going to be Hollibaugh. We've tried Hollibaugh a couple of times earlier and it's basically a very simple tangle where we put these stick-like structures. This can be wavy or straight and we're basically just understanding the concept of layering as we go along. We layer the sticks one on top of each other. The next tangle that I'd like you to try for today's project is crescent moon. Again, we've done crescent moon earlier, but here's a recap. We basically just put these little semicircular structures and then we start to give them auras and we keep building the auras right up until the middle of the section. The third tangle that I'd like you to try is toodles. Again, toodle is something that we've tried earlier. We basically start off with a stem, put two little fescue-like elements, and then we create a leaf round it and now this leaf can be as plump or as narrow as you would like it to be. We've done many plump versions earlier, so I thought I'd show you a slightly narrow one today. Then the fourth tangle that I'd like you to place in your Zentangle project today is going to be knight's bridge. Knight's bridge is basically like a checkerboard pattern and you can either do this with straight lines where it almost looks like a standard checkerboard pattern, like a chessboard or you can do it with curvy lines and then the curvy lines can be S-curves or C-curves. Here, I'm doing a version with slightly wavy lines. Basically, we just fill them up alternate black and white. These are the four tangles that I'd like you to try today. Basically, the goal is to fill up the Z string with these four tangles. Now, the interesting thing to note over here is that even though I've given the exact same string and the exact same set of tangles to all of you, each of you is going to come up with a different version and variation of this project because all of you are going to place the tangles in different sections. In that way, a Zentangle is basically an exciting art form because everybody comes up with their own version of the tangles that are presented to them. Each of you will come up with your own unique versions and I look forward to seeing all of those projects in the student's projects section. Now, when you're doing this project, I want you to keep in mind once again that the strings are basically not meant to restrict you in any way. Don't let those pencil guidelines stop you or restrict you when it comes to tangles that need to overflow or that need to cross the boundary, so to say. For example, if you're drawing toodles, don't try to warp it or don't try to control it just to fit it inside this Z string. If you feel like your toodle leaf needs to cross over the boundary, please, feel free to do so. Basically, just have fun with this project. Take your time and just enjoy the process and once you're ready, put it up in the project section and I'd love to see what you'll come up with. 57. Day 44 - Composition Hacks: [MUSIC] Hi everyone, and welcome back to the course. In today's lesson we're going to be talking about some simple composition hacks. Usually when I start working on a Zendoodle design or a Zentangle inspired art piece, I allow myself the freedom to do whatever I want without any prior planning. This truly helps me to get into a Zen state of mind, and it takes away my fear of perfection. I honestly believe that any form of Zen or meditative art should be done in the same way. But does that mean that I completely switch off my brain? Well, honestly, no. Just like many of you, even I like to have at least some sense of violence and harmony in my designs, which means that I want to have a free flowing organic field, but at the same time, I want my artwork to look slightly professional and polished. Here are some hacks that help me in the process of achieving a perfectly balanced composition that I'm happy and satisfied with. Number 1, choose a focal point. Now, if you're not working on a mono tangle, and you know that you're going to be working with a mix of patterns in your overall design, then having some tangles bigger than the others is a good starting point. While doing so, I also get ideas on what complementing tangles I should choose. For example, in the composition here, where we did a manning, there was a spiral and circular language to the whole tangle, which inspired me to compliment it with printemps. Also having two big focal elements helped a lot because had there been to many small m-annings floating around, then the design would have probably been a little cluttered and they would have all gotten lost along with the print arms because of their similar nature, and even the bubbles for that matter, since the bubbles are also circular. The design would have looked a lot more cluttered than the way it is looking right now. Number two, play with contrast. Now, very simply put contrast is the arrangement of two opposite elements in the same design such that they look interesting and impactful. For example we can do contrast of color, where we do a white flower against a much darker background so that the flower stands out. Contrasts can also be done with size, very similar to what we were just talking about a couple of minutes ago. When you have one large element against other smaller elements, your larger element is going to stand out. Contrast can also be of texture, e.g. smooth textures against rough textures or vice versa, and while we're talking about that, let's also talk about adding contrasting details. E.g. in the nanole, we did these hairy centers which were a nice contrast to the otherwise wavy smooth borders or edges of the leaves. The bottom line is that whenever you have opposite elements juxtaposed in an interesting manner, your overall design is going to look a lot more compelling. This is the reason why I also like to have a contrast of shapes. For example in this composition, we did a couple of shapes which were more organic, so for example we had the flux echoes, which basically have C strokes, and then we had organic tangles like book leaves, which are basically floating around like money plant. But to give it a certain sense of contrast, we had a structure tangled like Holly Bow, and so the straight lines basically gave us a certain amount of structure while the other designs were organic and so the composition looks a little interesting. All right, now moving on to my third tip, ditch the string. I know I've said this earlier in some of our lessons, but this is a tip that totally deserves another mention. Do not let your string or any template restrict you in any way when it comes to filling up your tangles. Let your tangles breathe and let them cross over the boundaries for your design to have a more cohesive feel. That when somebody looks at your design, they should see a beautifully tangled and connected composition instead of individual shapes. As you practice more, you will notice that some tangles can be connected to each other, and you can actually make the edges of your tangles a lot more interesting. For example, here, I have a work in progress artwork where instead of using the standard crescent moon shape, I actually converted it into black balls. The circular shape makes the overall tangled look very interesting, and so now the string is a little less obvious. Similarly, if you have a mocha somewhere in your design, you can actually use the stems of the mocha to start a Holly Bow pattern. Or if you have a pattern likes spoolies, you can actually go ahead and start giving it some echoes very similar to the way we did it in m-anning. Basically, feel free to transition from one tangle into another by combining elements of those different angles, or you can just come up with your own designs as fillers so that when you move from one angle to the other, the transition is smooth and the shapes or the strings are less of this. Number five, sense of direction. Now here's a heads up. In the pillars and tangled method, the founders have emphasized on the fact that there is no up, down, left, right, top, bottom, well basically no sense of direction to your artwork. They are basically made on square tiles, so that you can actually rotate them in any direction that you like, and you can choose the top, bottom depending on whatever you feel like on that particular day. Basically, what that means is that Zentangle artwork does not really have any correct way of framing it or any correct orientation. However, I know that there are a lot of artists over here who would want to use only certain portions of the Zentangle method and would want to include it in their overall artistic journey, and sometimes it does happen that you have a certain side up or certain side down, or the correct orientation of a particular artwork. In that case, having a sense of direction in your overall design definitely helps. E.g. now, in this particular composition that we made, all the leaves are facing a certain direction. Even though the flux echoes are basically all bunched up right now. There is a sense of direction or a sense of travel for the eye. When somebody looks at this artwork, they would usually start from the bottom right, and basically they would see the direction as going top-left simply because of the way the leaves are put in that particular direction. What this basically means is that whenever you develop a large composition, you should be able to guide the viewer in terms of their viewing journey. They should know what exactly the focal point is, and then from that, their eye should travel to the other lesser important elements. It could also be that the brightest element could lead to the dallas element, and so on and so forth. Of course, when you play with color, then there are even more ideas on how to bring sense of direction, which we will be definitely exploring in some future classes. But for now, just keep in mind that it helps to have a certain trajectory or a certain sense of direction to your overall composition so that when somebody looks at it, they know exactly what to focus on and how their eyes should travel. Now your assignment for today is to basically pick up an old composition and rework on it. The composition can be from this course, or it can be any other design that you have made prior to this course. All you need to do is basically pick one composition and rework on it, keeping in mind, these tips are hacks that I've shared today. Try to have one focal point, try to have some contrasting tangles in terms of shapes and sizes, try to have a decent amount of variety. But at the same time, try to make your design look cohesive and all connected with each other. Basically, just try to rework your old composition with a fresh pair of eyes and try to compare and see how far along you have come in your journey. When you're ready, I would love to see your work in the project section. It'd be great if you could put the original composition as well as the revolt composition. It's easier for me to compare and give you my feedback. If you want to do more versions are more number of reworks. You're free to do as many attempts as you like to that same piece of design, and I promise you, every time you're going to come up with different results. That's the project for today, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow with one more interesting exercise. 58. Day 45 - Mooka Garden : [MUSIC] Hi everyone, and welcome back to our creative challenge. Today we are on Day 45, the final day of our creative challenge. I'm so happy to see all the progress that all of you have been sharing with me on social media, as well as over here in the project section. It is always a visual treat to my eyes to see all the wonderful variations and projects that you keep on posting. I'm so glad that all of you decided to take this journey with me. Now, for Day 45, I want to leave you with something familiar, but also with a little bit of room for improvisation. I thought we could go back to one of our simpler tangles that we have done in the earlier exercises, which is mocha. Instead of using a string today, we're actually going to use lots and lots of different mochas as outlines or shapes that we're further going to fill in with different types of tangles, patterns, designs, whatever you want to call them, and whatever comes to your mind when filling this up. Basically, the goal is to draw lots and lots of mochas all around and keep rotating your sketchbook to create this entangled mocha garden. Then once you have lots and lots of mochas, just go ahead and fill them in with different types of patterns and designs. Again, this is to remind you that on days when you're feeling uninspired or on days when you just want to unwind and relax and don't really want to push your brain to think about a lot of different creative ideas, you can always go back to the method of drawing shapes and outlines and filling them up with whatever patterns come to you intuitively, working with Zen doodles and the Zentangle method should not be forced. It should really come from within you, and it should really happen intuitively. It should happen when you feel that you're in the right frame of mind or urine, a relaxed state of mind. Or even if you're stressed, then the goal is to eventually feel a little better or feel a little relaxed. Basically whatever you put on your paper should come intuitively, and it should be free of judgment, and it should be free of any fear for validation. I hope that you've had some wonderful takeaways from this course. I hope that these thoughts will stay with you as you continue your journey forward. I really hope that you all benefit from these exercises and include them in your daily life. So that's the exercise for today, and as always, I look forward to seeing all your wonderful versions and variations. With this, we finally come to the end of our challenge. Thank you so much once again for taking this challenge with me and I look forward to seeing you in another course. Bye, bye. See you.