Zentangle & alterations

Morning everyone - well the sun is hiding a little bit this morning, peeking around the clouds but it's still there!

As those of you know who have popped by this week, you would have seen my garden bench crafty spot.  I've enjoyed many hours sat out crafting, reading and drawing in the sunshine this week. I've even caught the sun, freckles galore and white bits already.........in March!

Anyway I want to share with you the beginnings of some new projects.  The first is a box, meant to be a pencil case but I'm sure it could be used for many things. I'm going to decorate it to keep on my desk to store bits and bobs. So I thought I'd share the first stages, plus it'll be a record for me to remember what it looked like before!

Pretty boring - plain brown kraft like box which I then applied a coat of Gesso. I've seen many people use Gesso so decided I must need it......right?!

The next project I want to share is inspired by........You Lot!

Every week I snoop around your desk seeing art journals, Zentangles and amazing pages so I thought I want to do that too.  So I bought a boring A4 plain art journal;

The other sunny afternoon I took it outside with me and began to doodle or a more posh name for it is Zentangles. I first saw Barbara Grey doing this on her shows on TV and loved it straight away and more recently I've seen different people creating amazing art work using this technique. So I picked up a pen and started -

I didn't think about it, I just drew and went with what felt right. Then I looked up and saw my neighbours, bird table, table and plant pot stand, which have swirly legs and are decorative in a rustic way! SO I began to draw an impression of them in the centre of my page -

The plan is to portray the likeness but not capture it exactly and then continue to fill the page with dots, swirls, lines and shapes. I've even including my initial and that of my son. I've some beautiful dipping ink that I'm going to use to doodle around the main image to create a divide so the main image doesn't get lost as I fill the page. I will share the finished page once I'm done.

Recently my crafting has moved on from just cards and I am so enjoying playing with new products and techniques, I've even now got a book that I'm going to alter. Something I've always been shy of as I couldn't bear the thought of ripping pages etc, BUT my local library are running a recycle-old-books scheme where you can take a book to do whatever you want with, there's even a competition running, while I'm not sure I'll enter my piece, I do feel OK about using this book to play with, after all if the library are allowing us to do that then it has to be okay!

Thanks for popping by, I do love to read all your comments and appreciate each and every one.
Take care Zo xx