Getting Ready for Inktober

Inktober, you may remember from years past, is the celebration of art involving ink for the 31 days of October.  There is a website devoted to Inktober on which 31 prompts are listed and people worldwide enjoy challenging themselves to interpret the words.  If you go to my past labels on the sidebar and hit Inktober you will come upon some I've done in the past.  Fun BUT challenging to be sure.

Since October has come to be a travel month for Greg and me this precludes a very good handle on doing this day by day.  
Last year I chose instead to do the "Zentangle® Inktober" Challenge along with several folks in the Fine Art Club in Florida.  
There is a published list for that too!  So instead of a drawing you are challenged to tangle something in some way using the tangle suggested for that day.  (although I always substitute a few if they really are not my favorite tangles).  I'm not sure if anyone will take me up on it this time around...but I hope so.

In preparation I decided that this year I would tangle in a hand made accordion folded booklet.  Pages about 5 x 5 I think.  The book has 12 pages in it...and then I used one for the cover below and one for the sample page.  So I have 10 left.  I figure I'll do 3 tangles on each page and then sneak one extra on the last page.  Black Micron pens and white Jellyroll pens are all by Sakura pen company.  

Now just to add to the complication and challenge of the project I am also challenging myself to use a fun little experiment that recently came up in the official Zentangle group.  

It all came about when Maria Thomas (one of the founders of Zentangle) had an accident with her favorite Zentangle notebook.  
Long story short, her ink bottle leaked in an art bag and the pages in her book soaked up the ink on the edges.  OH NO.  But in true Maria fashion she found a way to cleverly use the black and white now on the pages to her advantage.  And low and behold the "ink blot series" was born.  Better known as the "no mistakes" series.  

You can even purchase an ink blotted booklet from Zentangle now to enjoy the same game!  Somehow the idea of purchasing an ink blot that I could perfectly well do myself seemed silly.  So...that is why you see big black blots all over my accordion book below...

The blots are not really ink on my book.  They are made with carbon black Golden Hi-Flow acrylic paint.  

So below I am showing the example of how I plan to do the book.
These tangles are Mooka, Jester and Ginili.  But the new list is below.  

So part of my challenge is to use the "ink blot" in the tangling switching from a black pen to white.  I'll probably do many of these in September but then publish them in October as I travel.  

If you are doing the challenge (either drawing or tangling) you can comment about it at the end of this blog post.