NUXY

This one is close to my heart and here’s why.  My daughter, much like her dad, is a bookworm.  She’s almost 12 and she is ridiculously logical, focused, and adamant about “not being into art”.  She was about 5 years old when she announced that she wanted to become an astrophysicist.  I don’t know where she heard that word and how she knew what it meant but she’s been obsessed ever since.  She is a STEM kinda girl and her idea of fun is watching Cosmos over and over again on Netflix.

I, on the other hand, am artistically bent.  So when Zentangle became a big part of my life, naturally my daughter seemed like the perfect candidate to be my guinea pig.  So, I started trying.  Real hard.  In vain.  For a long, really long time.  All I wanted was for her to give it a try.  But that was not to be.  She kept insisting that she is “not into art AT ALL!”.

Then CZT Seminar # 29 happened.  I signed up and we made a trip of it.  For three and a half days she heard me talk non-stop about nothing else but Zentangle.  By day three, I’d piqued her interest enough for her to come and see all the art work on display and the mosaics of tiles we’d made in seminar.  When we got back to our room she said she had an idea for a tangle. She drew for me what she had in mind.  I deconstructed it for her.  She loved what we ended up with.  Turns out her inspiration was ‘Merging Galaxies’. She’d managed to combine her passion for astrophysics with Zentangle. Hence the name NUXY; Nu (as in Noo) from her name aNUshka and ‘xy’ from galaXY.  After days of begging, I’ve been granted permission to share it.  So here it is…before she changes her mind!

I find the easiest way to draw NUXY is to put down the orbs first. I usually just throw some black sesame seeds on my tile and draw orbs around the seeds.  That way my orbs are random and well distributed. I then connect them in no particular order using the take-off and landing method as well as the Hollibaugh method (drawing behind) as needed.  Each orb can connect to as many orbs as you want as far away from each other as you like and with as many auras as you fancy. You can connect the orbs using a C- stroke or an S stroke or a really convoluted stroke that connects orbs all the way across the tile.  The resulting negative spaces can be filled with other tangles,  left empty or shaded.  The (tangle and enhancement) world is your oyster.  Shading is not exactly my forte but if you rock at it, I am sure you can do wonderful things with all the nooks and crannies this tangle offers. I am still working on some more tiles and will edit this post (or write a new one) with updates and images when I am done.  I really hope you like this tangle and find uses for it in more ways than I, with my beginner level experience, can.  Oh, and finally my girl wants me to teach her tangling. Yay!!!