Tangential Thinking 

I won’t be too offended if you want to skip down to the first red subheading and get right to this week’s Hump Day Zentangle Challenge. OTOH, friends and family who like to keep track of the tangled (pun intended) recesses of my mind—read on.

I admit I thought today was August 1st, so I had a nice first day of the month, Tangle Choice Day (Hump Day) Challenge all ready to publish. Then, I happened to look at the masthead of the newspaper I was reading, and realized today is NOT August 1st because as we learned in elementary school,  “30 days hath September, April, June and November”. (No mention of July).  This is what happens when one no longer has a day job and decamps to the beach for the summer. The most important things that change every day are the weather and the tides.

In the unlikely case any of you are thinking:

Wait? What? She still reads the newspaper on actual paper? The kind that gets ink all over your table and hands?

I even have The Philadelphia Inquirer delivered when I’m “down the shore” in Brigantine, New Jersey.

• First, when one is a devotee of the Zentangle method, one pretty much has black ink on one’s hands mostly all the time anyway.
• Second, I grew up reading the newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Admittedly, first it was the comics section, but then I became a news nerd, a current events junkie. I even won the “Interest in Current Events Prize” at my high school graduation in 1971. (Yes, that really was a thing at the Philadelphia High School for Girls.) I started my news consumption in the 1960s, a most memorable decade in the United States: the Cuban Missile Crisis; the assassination of President John F. Kennedy;  the Vietnam War; the Anti-Vietnam War Movement; the Civil Rights Movement; the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King; American cities burning; Woodstock; and, the Apollo 11 moonwalk.
• Third, as attributed to the Washington Post’s‘ former owner/publisher, Philip L. Graham, “journalism is the first rough draft of history.” I’m not going to get too political, but I firmly believe in the guarantee found in the very First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, that:

Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.

So, I’m putting my money where my mouth is and subscribe to newspapers (in print and online) to support journalism.

Does anyone else reading this still read a newspaper or other print media? 

Visit the Newseum in Washington, D.C. 

Putting on my travel blogger hat, if you ever visit Washington,D.C., The Newseum, a museum dedicated to the history of journalism is well worth a visit. It’s pricey, but tickets are good for two days, and until Labor Day, up to four children under 18 visiting with an adult can visit for free.

Moving right along, here is this week’s Hump Day Zentangle Challenge:

Hump Day Zentangle Challenge #7: Zentangle and Zentangle Inspired Art Tiles as Mosaics

(If you stumbled over here by accident and are wondering what this is all about, read my post What Is Zentangle® and Is It Habit Forming? )

For the totally uninitiated, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, mosaic is: “1) a surface decoration made by inlaying small pieces of variously colored material to form pictures or patterns…”

I’ve always been drawn to mosaics during our travels, ranging from Roman era tile floors that have withstood the test of some 2,000 years; mosaic covered walls dating from between 786-994 in the Mezquita (Mosque) in Cordoba, Spain; the intricate, ornate tile work in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, Turkey; and a modern floor in a shopping mall in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Tile work in a Roman Villa in Pompeii, Italy that survived the volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that completely buried the town in 79 A.D.

This is a tiny section of the colossal art and architecture of the Mezquita in Cordoba, Spain which has an entire Catholic Cathedral built inside a former enormous Mosque. The Mosque was constructed by a series of Muslim caliphs between 786 and 994.

Just some of the amazing mosaic work on the walls and ceiling in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, Turkey. constructed between 1460 and 1478.

A modern day mosaic tile floor in the Sandton Shopping Mall in Johannesburg, South Africa.

I was introduced to the concept of using Zentangle method tiles as mosaic tiles during my Certified Zentangle Teacher (CZT) training in Providence, Rhode Island in April of 2015. Since then, I’ve enjoyed the looks on the faces of my students when I combine all their tiles into a mosaic. I’ve ventured into using paper tiles as mosaic in Zentangle Inspired Art projects:

For this mosaic, I used 3.5 x 3.5 inch tiles. The piece is 6 tiles x 7 tiles.

For this one, I used both plain and Renaissance official Zentangle® tiles. It is composed of a Zendala (mandala) on each tile with the addition of highlights in gold Sakura Gelly Roll pen on the cream tiles and silver Gelly Roll pen on the Renaissance tiles in the same dimensions as the above piece:

Here, is an example of a mosaic where the design wanders to adjacent tiles. I used bookmark templates and haven’t yet mounted them permanently on anything.

Today’s Hump Day Challenge is to use some tiles in a mosaic. You are free to make your tiles any size and to use as many or as few as you wish. Your tiles may be tangled using the official Zentangle method or some form of Zentangle inspired art. You can draw your tiles contiguously on a piece of paper or on actual paper tiles of some size.

For this challenge, I’ve done four tiles that can be rearranged in at least 2 different configurations.

I once again have a probably age-related need to crowd source the names of some of these tangles: I can identify Paradox and Hollibaugh. I know the one with circles was inspired by African cloth. However, the name escapes me. Likewise the one that looks like overlapping shells and the corner squares. Help!

Here are the same tiles in another configuration:

For the newish tanglers doing this challenge, don’t be intimidated. Your tiles don’t have to be complex and they don’t have to seem related. If you do 4 tiles, using any tangles, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how cool they look arranged together. If doing four 3.5 x 3.5″ tiles seem daunting, you can make four smaller squares, but to fit together, they should probably be the same size.

For those of you who are more experienced and like to work with different shaped tiles—-feel free!

Share Your Hump Day Zentangle® Challenge Creations!

Please share your response to this week’s challenge with us in the Hump Day Challenge Facebook Group and/or on your Instagram, Twitter  or Flickr feeds. Use the hashtag #hdchallenge7.

Note: The Hump Day Zentangle Challenge Facebook group is a “closed” group to discourage axe murderers. So, assuming you’re not an axe murderer, please just search for the name of the group in Facebook and submit a request to join. There are no pre-requisites to join the group — other than relatively good manners and the afore-mentioned not being an axe murderer. I can’t invite you to join unless we’re already FB friends, but if you request to join, I can add you to the group. Other group members can also admit you to the group.

There are other ways to share your work: We also have a Pinterest group board to share our Hump Day Challenge responses. Email me at suzanne@boomeresque.com if you’d like me to add you as a contributor to the Pinterest board or you can mention that in a comment with your Pinterest name below. (PS: The first 2 times you comment, I will have to moderate the comment. After your first two comments on Boomeresque, your comments will appear without moderation.)

If you have your own blog and are posting your challenge responses there, leave the URL to your blog in a comment below so people can paste it into their browser and find your post.

BTW, feel free to share your work for this or any challenge at any time—even next week, next month, next year, ad infinitum.

Tangle on!

Tagged as: hump day zentangle challenge, Zentangle