Borbz

I ran across Rita Nikolajeva, a Belgium tangle artist on Pinterest.  She is amazing and makes up her own zentangles and gives them fun names.  You can see her work HERE.

A BORB is a squished orb with a border.  Her work is in black and white and here was my first attempt at it.  I used curved lines instead of straight lines on the orbs and shaded to create more depth. I cut these out and glued them to black paper.

Then I thought it would be cool to add color to these fun shapes.  In these examples I painted the orbs in the bright educational Crayola watercolors before adding the black sharpie work in both fine and extra fine.  I used the extra fine for my patterns in the background.  I used vine charcoal to add the shading.

I was satisfied with these and began the lesson with my 5th graders focusing on creating depth with the curved lines and shading.  Here are some of my students getting started and adding their details.

They loved the process of creating these colorful BORBZ!

Check out the finished work!

Here are the steps to create these:

1.  Draw two rows of flattened ovals (orbs) stacked one on top of the other.

2.  Create a double lined border around each stack.  Leaving the white edge helps with contrast.

3.  Add a hole with a border and attach curved lines going in any direction.

4.  Paint the orbs.

5.  Sharpie all pencil lines with a fine point sharpie.

6.  Add a background with an extra fine point sharpie.

7.  Use vine charcoal to shade each orb and hole, as well as the edges of the stacks.

There are all kinds of variations with this!  Have fun!!