The theme of my Zentangle drawing is the Mexican holiday, Dia de los Muertos. I chose a magazine image of a woman sitting nonchalantly on a couch wearing a skull shaped mask. It drew my attention because of its conflicting creepy yet relaxed tone, and I was inspired to continue on this eerie tone for the rest of my drawing.
I began by cutting out the magazine image and mapping out my ideas for the Zentangle on tracing paper. I drew some ideas from images related to the Day of the Dead, and decided to include the elements of flowers, bones, and smoke.
I used the flowers growing out of the pot as well as some flower designs in the paisley to symbolise the fragility of life. Traditionally, marigolds are used in the holiday to guide the spirits to the altar, but I decided to vary the types of different flowers and leaves. I had some difficulty wrapping my head around the concept of reversing the blacks and whites, but I understood and was able to emulate that style after Mr. Laurence showed me an example of a leaf with its colors reversed.
The smoke symbolised the dead and their spirits as well as the more literal smoke from the copal incense that transmits praise and prayers and purifies the area around the altar. I decided to include the element of a more abstract type of smoke on the right side of the image, as its curves matched those of the pot from the magazine image. I contrasted this with the more 'unstructured', but realistic smoke on the top left of the image, which seems as it is a part of the skull that is being 'evaporated', connecting those two elements together.
The skull on the top left and the bones that provide the 'base' for the cutout were inspired by photos I found on the holiday while researching, and also connected more directly to the magazine photo and the skull mask. Skeletons are a very literal representation of death, so I chose to draw the skull more realistically, and did the same with the bones under the cutout by finding real images of vertebrates and copying my design from that.
The drawings below the cutout were unintentionally canted, but I fixed that in Photoshop, so it is more straight in the digital version.
Most of the drawings above the magazine cutout were more rounded, compared to the straighter and more rigid lines I used below the cutout. I also used the contrast of positive and negative space by reversing the standard color scheme. I varied the thickness of the lines more on the top half, to represent the more abstract freedom of the spirit. I chose to include more details on the top half of the drawing, as that was where I wanted to direct the viewers eyes to first, so the design on the bottom was more repetitive, while the designs on the top had more variety and detail.
I left some empty space on the sides so that the viewers were less distracted, and also because I felt that death was best represented by an emptiness, a lack of something, yet Dia de los Muertos is a holiday that seems to be full of life and celebration, so I chose to balance the blank and filled spaces in my drawing.
