Welcome to the Zentangle® Art Class Video 1

Welcome to the Zentangle® Art Class!

I am so excited you're here. Zentangle® Art is a wonderful meditative art form that can help you to fight stress, focus, be mindful and be creative. It is the perfect way to wind down after a long day at work!

To celebrate Inktober I’m bringing you 13 different blogs that’ll help you learn the art of Zentangle®. I'm a certified Zentangle® Teacher and am really looking forward to sharing lots of fun stuff with you.

My Zentangle® blog posts will also have fun stuff like tangle cards, worksheets and music playlists that you can download. Relevant extra material will be shared in every blog post.

Join me as I share the 8 steps of the Zentangle® method, my favorite supplies to tangle with, lots of tangles, projects and even life lessons that I learnt from practicing the Zentangle® art form. If you've been wondering what Zentangle® is all about then now is the time to learn more.

Each video blog is under 20 minutes and is fun and easy to watch and follow along with. You can master Zentangle® basics in as  little at 30 minutes a day in under 4 weeks!

Before we start with the videos I would like to tell you a little bit about this class. It's going to be divided into four modules.

The first one is the introductory module which has this blog post and then a video class about supplies.

The second module will be all about tiles and tangles. I will introduce you to the Zentangle® Tile, the eight step method and we will also learn a few different tangles.

Then we will move on to module three where I will teach you how to enhance your tile through shading and adding color and doing all sorts of fun stuff.

We will end with a module that has all sorts of projects that have been inspired by Zentangle® Art. So I want to give you a full view of Zentangle® from beginning to end and what you can do with your tiles once you're done with them as well.

There are 13 video classes in these four modules and I will try and keep them all under 20 minutes so that you can watch them in small time increments and it's not a huge time commitment on your part. But what I really want is for you to follow along while I demonstrate the tangles because I want this to be a super engaged exercise.

Now let me give you a few basics about the Zentangle® method. It was founded by Rick Robertson and Maria Thomas. Zentangle® is an easy to learn and relaxing method of drawing beautiful images from structured patterns or as they both say it is a meditational art form. The method and structure help to make this art accessible to everyone even if they don't have an art background. Every tangle or design is made up of a few basic shapes so whether it's a dot or a straight line or a slightly curved line basically if you can sign your name, you can Zentangle®.

Even though I've always been creative and I've never hesitated telling people that I'm creative I've always had a fear of drawing. I felt like I didn't draw well enough, whether it was faces or patterns or landscapes, I was just not confident in my skills as a drawing artist. So when I learned about the Zentangle® method and about the promise that anyone could do it I was intrigued. And so I read up about it and lo and behold the promise is true. I really really liked the tiles that I completed using the tangles that I learned and it was a very structured approach and it really appealed to the mathematician inside of me.

The claim that anyone who can sign their name again can do Zentangle®, I agree with that now.

So I started tangling more and more. And everywhere I went I had this little notebook with a pen that I used to tangle. I was tangling all the time and I started sharing my artwork with my community of followers on Facebook and I started getting a lot of questions. How did you do that? I love it. It's so beautiful. And so I decided that I would put out a short e-book and I called it Zentangle® Inspired Crafts. It went through some of the basics of the method but mostly it was focused on the projects that I did using my tiles.

And so Zentangle® became a part of my life. Recently I traveled to Providence Rhode Island where I became a Certified Zentangle® Teacher.

There were three things that really really stood out to me. One was the sense of family. When I went to Providence Rhode Island we were all greeted by Rick and Maria, who were the founders of the method. It was wonderful to get to meet them and to see what wonderful people they are and how friendly and welcoming. But what was really amazing was that pretty much their entire family was there and the Zentangle® company is the family company. Both their daughters were there. Maria's sister was there. Her niece was there. Maria's grandchildren visited and tangling was really a part of their life as a family. And I loved seeing that because family is really important to me and I love that three generations were actually sharing this art form.

The second thing that I was not prepared for was the wonderful people that I would meet that came from so many different walks of life. There were teachers there, authors, psychologists, therapists, and of course there were artists and everyone was there for a different reason because they felt that the Zentangle® method did something for each of them. Teachers were there because they wanted their students to be more focused and mindful and the Zentangle® method helps with that. Therapists were there because it helps with stress. Authors were there because they wanted to write about it. Artists were there because they wanted to experience it. So it was just incredible.

And that is the third thing that really stood out to me during this whole experience. The Zentangle® method is not just about the art, it is about the feelings and the process of creating the art and all the different life lessons that you learn while practicing the Zentangle® method.

So I hope that I am able to share some of that with you in this video class.

We will be doing a lot of tangles. I will teach you the eight steps of the Zentangle® method and I will also share with you some finished projects but I also want you to focus on the process and not just the end result because the Zentangle® method is more about the process than it is about the end result.

I'm very excited to start this course with you and to end this class we'll do a short exercise where we'll come up with a symbolic signature to finish all your tiles with and to put your mark on your artwork.