I've been Zen Doodling!

I've watched alot of zentangle and zentangled inspired sketches and decided to give it a try.I started this in March and carried my sketchbook & pens with me everywhere. Alot of the doodling was done waiting for the bus, bits and pieces created 10 and 20 minutes at a time. There are bits I hated, but now I can't find them. This the most abstract artwork I've ever done and actually like. Zentangle is very definitely "zen", letting you kind of zone out and just doodle. What made this work for me was tracing the half circles all over the page and then filling them with pattern.

I shared this in Las Vegas at Clay Carnival, by printing off a laser copy and transferring the image onto raw clay. I'd had this planned for months, to create inchies to swap, with a technique I had never tried. Good thing it worked, I had no plan B! Here's some pics of the transfer in progress-which I did in my hotel room in Vegas =). (call me a Planned Procrastinator if you will)

All you need to do an image transfer to clay, is a copy of your chosen artwork printed off a laser printer (mine is a HP LaserJet P1102w and I love it) on regular printer paper, a spray bottle of water and a sheet of conditioned raw polymer clay. White or lighter colours would be the best choice for this technique. Lay the image face down on the raw clay and burnish it so that the entire surface of the image is sticking to the clay surface. Spritz it with water, enough so that you can see your image thru the paper. Then rub off the paper. Be more gentle the clearer the image gets, as you are getting right to the ink. This is the messy part, all those little bits of paper, but I was able to sweep them up pretty easily. If doing a larger piece (mine was about 10.5x7 inches) do a bit at a time. If some parts don't transfer, its simply because the image didn't burnish properly to the clay, but no worries, gives it authentic "distressed" look. There are ways to add colour, but I haven't tried that yet. I love this technique and have more doodles in the process to do it with. And pretty sure it will work with other surfaces. Cant wait to doodle and transfer some more!