pen-zen

About

Hi, my name is Cherie Hartwick. I live in Michigan, about 40 miles north of Detroit. I’m a retired art teacher. I belong to and volunteer at our local Senior activity center. One of my pottery buddies talked me into taking a class called “Zentangle” about 2 years ago. Well, something clicked, and it wasn’t just my creaky , old knees. I loved it!!! If you have never heard of it before, you soon will. It’s one of those things. Or you can go to zentangle.com for a full explaination, history, instructions and beautiful examples. In a nutshell, it’s using repetitive designs to create relaxing works of art. The designs are basically made up from five strokes – . (a dot), ____ (a straight line), C (“C” shape), S (“S” shape) and O (a circle). The work is done on small squares of paper about 3.5″ square using a .25mm fine tip permanent black pen. A pencil is used to mark a frame, about 1/4″ inside the square and to divide the frame into sections to fill with designs. This is called a “string”. You can also use a pencil to shade the designs.

My posts will be mostly my finished designs but sometimes might include some instruction. My teaching background pops up every once in a while.

I now tangle on things other than paper. I teach pottery and jewelry making at the senior center, in addition to zentangle. I have tangled wood, fabric, clay, glass, plastic, eggs, dominios, scrabble tiles, wine corks, wine bottles, paper mache’, tins, embossed it onto copper, a chair (for an auction) and probably a few other things that I can’t think of right now