New Zentangle Album

After washing my hair, having a bath, curling my hair, changing the sheets on the bed and putting the washing on, I’d more or less run out of energy, so decided to relax this afternoon and draw some zentangles. My original zentangle album, which is a hardback book with plain sheets of paper in it, is filling up now, and as I add more tangles, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find the patterns I want, which means a frustrating waste of time when I want to be creating! Some weeks ago, I was wondering what to do about this, and considered a card index system with a single pattern on each card, but that would still involve a lot of searching, and then I came across Sandy Hunter’s wonderful idea. Thank you Sandy!

She uses coin pages, but I thought these might be a bit small, so I opted for ATC-size, which is good because I already have a few clear pages for storing ATCs in a ring binder, and know I can easily get more of these. I decided to draw the finished tangle on the front, and the step-outs and/or variations on the back, and if there was too much, then I’d cut a piece of card double the width of an ATC and fold it in half, so it would still fit in the pocket, and could be easily removed for access to the inside part.

The advantage of this type of storage is that every tangle on a page will be visible at a glance, and the step-outs would be accessible, too, without removing the card from the pocket. Sandy stores hers alphabetically according to the name of the tangle, which is fine if you know the names of all of them and know what to look for, but I don’t think that would work for me, so I am intending to file mine according to category, e.g. fills, borders, stand-alone designs, linear designs, etc., and not alphabetically within those categories, because it would be a bore to have to re-arrange them whenever I added a new one. For me, it’s not the name of the tangle that’s important, but what it looks like, and what I want to use it for.

I shall decorate an ordinary office ring binder with a zentangle cover. If my collection expands beyond a single binder, it will be easy to start Volume 2, but I think it would take a very long time to fill one whole album!

I shall still keep my original album because it will be useful for sketching new tangles in, and practising drawing them, and when I am happy with them, they can be re-drawn on the cards and filed. Also, I’ve got quite attached to the original album and wouldn’t want to get rid of it!

Today I started drawing the ATC-sized tangles, and so far I have done 9. This is also giving me the opportunity to re-draw them better than I did the first time. Each card is double sided. This is what I have done so far.

Here is the complete set of 9.

These two pictures are straight photographs, with the cards laid on one of my scratch papers, mostly covered with black acrylic paint!

Here are the cards in detail. This time I scanned each card, and edited them in Serif PhotoPlus, and then the pictures were created in Serif PagePlus, adding the text and background. (The background was one that I created from a series of close-up photos of an old oil painting my parents had, and messing about in PhotoPlus, changing the colours – great fun!!) I’ve paired the photos side by side, front and back of each card. You can see that I have added the name of the designer of each pattern. (Note: For copyright reasons, I have removed the images giving the step-out instructions. To find out how to draw them, please click on the Tangle Patterns link in my sidebar, and search for the particular pattern on that site.)

(Unfortunately on the back of the Cadent Variations card, I lost the plot on the last one – it was so random that I got totally confused and it ended up looking like a dropped box of chocolates!! The top one isn’t that brilliant either…)

Not sure when I’ll do any more. This is the sort of project I can pick up when I feel like doing something not too energetic, when I’m not up to sitting at my desk.