So, when I finished up an old sketchbook, I picked out a few older drawings I liked to photograph for the website, including this doodle of a capital R, which to my eye looked influenced by zentangles. —As indeed it was, when I dug into my records, and discovered I'd been briefly entranced by them shortly before making the sketch.
Calligraphed R with zentangle elements, grapite on sketchbook page, 23apr2013; photographed & heavily image edited, 31mar2021
As I said in the intro, it's a very successful marketing scheme to normalize doodling, which people have basically been doing for as long as we've had fingers—I'm sure our long-distant ancestors were drawing lines and squiggles in the dirt (or on each other), probably before we were even technically Homo sapiens.
I'm thrilled that people are having fun making marks on paper, and discovering that it can be a lovely and relaxing thing to do.[1] —In the same vein, I decided to play a bit with Gimp's colour and mode tools, which is how we got from pencil on off-white paper to the red and green image you see here.
[1]Though certifying instructors and claiming it's your own thing strikes me as roughly equivalent to trying to copyright yoga, I guess.
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
