HUMP DAY ZENTANGLE® CHALLENGE #20 – Circle Game Edition

Those in the Hump Day Zentangle Challenge Facebook group know that last week I did not post a challenge because I was feeling overwhelmed by my 94 year old mother’s situation. She fell and broke a hip a week ago on Saturday. She underwent surgery the following day and on Wednesday, she was discharged from the hospital and transferred for rehab at a skilled nursing facility. As she has told us for a number of years now, “Old age is not for sissies.”.

It is very difficult for our family to see my mother so incapacitated although for some time, we’ve all thought that she had reached a stage of life when fracturing a hip was not a matter of “if”, but rather a matter of “when”.

My mother and our younger son just last year during happier times. She has been a wonderful grandmother.

This week, Joni Mitchell’s song, The Circle Game, has been playing in my brain in a loop. When our sons were born, they had 3 great-grandmothers. Now, they’re in their 30s, my mother, their grandmother, is the last of her generation in our immediate family. Mr. and Mrs. Excitement are 60 something. In The Circle Game, Joni Mitchell muses on the inexorable passage of time in our lives. The chorus goes like this:

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

(My readers who also came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s can probably at least hum The Circle Game. As a memory for us and an introduction for others, you can listen to Joni Mitchell sing The Circle Game here.)

Even when we’re not dealing with a family crisis, Facebook reminds me every day about the life cycle. Births, graduations, marriages, and deaths tumble through my Facebook newsfeed.  I find my dreams and day dreams seem to be wanting to linger in the past these days. Long ago memories pop up in my writing from time to time. If you’re interested, here are links to some of those:

A Memory Lane retrospective.

The year we lived in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico (1963-4) when I was a child.

My return to San Miguel 48 years later.

A memory from when we lived in England in 1969-70.

Our 1982 honeymoon in Peru

A trip down memory lane when our older son was married.

With this theme in mind, here’s this week’e Hump Day Zentangle Challenge:

Hump Day Zentangle® Challenge #20 – Circles

(If Zentangle is a new concept for you, you can read more about it here.)

This week’s Hump Day Zentangle Challenge is either to use a circle shaped tile or to use circles in your work or both! I’m going through a mandala (Zendala) phase again.

I’ve been doing color Zendalas on black and white 6 x 6 inch square tiles. I may add another row. I’m not sure yet and I haven’t mounted these.

Do you think I should add another row? On the black tiles, I mostly used Sakura Gelly Roll pens. On the white tiles, I used both those and Premier Prismacolor pencils. I used a compass and protractor to help my with my symmetry. My technique and product here are definitely not the Zentangle method, but certainly Zentangle inspired art.

Previously I did a mosaic of tan and white standard Zentangle tiles (3.5 x 3.5 inch) which I’ve actually framed and hung on a wall. Frames are expensive! I bought mine online with a mat and assembled it. Does anybody have any other suggestions for frames for larger works?

Here’s the framed one:

But there’s no need to have symmetrical fill in your circles. Here’s an old (I really should date my work) composition that used circles differently:

Here, the outer circles are black and white (with some shading) and are filled with monotangles. The center colored circle is filed with tangleations of 2 of my tangles, Aloha and Shorely.

I look forward to seeing where you take your circles or where they take you!

Please Share Your Hump Day Zentangle® Challenge Creations!

Please share your responses 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 #hdchallenge20. If you’re not a member of the FB group, ask to join and I’ll be happy to add you.

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.

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. (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.)

Feel free to share your work for this or any challenge at any time—even next week, next month, next year, ad infinitum. Participation in the challenges need not be linear!

Tagged as: hump day zentangle challenge, mandalas