Zentangle Project Pack No. 17 - Kaleidoscope

Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope - a slight change, and all patterns alter.

Sharon Salzberg

As Zentangle artists, we create art by laying down basic strokes of ink on paper. These strokes, then repeated, are sequenced together with other strokes to form patterns.

If we step back and look at our lives, one might say that our journey through life is similar. We live our life one day at a time, days merge into weeks and months and years and yet we can look back at the whole as one memory. The same goes for celebrations, challenges, accomplishments, friendships, and so on. All these components of our lives are strung together to form ever-changing patterns, ultimately forming a work of art we call life. What is remarkable about the art of life is that it is constantly changing. Much like what you see when you look through a kaleidoscope, none of it stays the same. It’s an ever-changing display of beauty flashing before your eyes.

A kaleidoscope is an instrument that has tiny pieces of glass or plastic encased between flat pieces of clear glass and mirrors that are specifically arranged so that the small pieces of colored glass or plastic reflect and create beautiful patterns. As the bits of colored glass move, so do the patterns, never duplicating the same pattern twice. The kaleidoscope was invented by David Brewster in 1817. He named his invention using the Greek word kalos, meaning beautiful, and the Greek word eidos, meaning shape. What a perfect name. One could use this pairing of words to describe much of the art we create using the Zentangle Method.

Project Pack 17 is inspired by the kaleidoscope of our lives. We will honor the artistry of the patterns they form as they pair and layer with others to form new patterns and create works of art. Taking advantage of the geometric shapes of tiles, we will gradually guide you through adding tangles to the tiles and watch how they interact with other tiles to create meta-patterns that change as you rearrange the tiles, like a kaleidoscope. We will explore a fun selection of tools that allows us to dig deep into layering shades of gray with accents of jewel tones.

Join us as we use this Project Pack to create amazing Zentangle art as well as use it to gain perspective. We will see that even though our lives are constantly evolving, each moment offers us fleeting reflections of beauty followed by another and then another, ultimately reassuring us that there was beauty behind us, beauty within and beauty ahead.