The First Video

I've been doodling ever since I could remember. I have two older brothers who have amazing artistic talent. They can draw practically anything. I remember when I was little, I was so jealous that they could draw and I couldn't. I tried...and tried...and failed. I could even draw something as simple as a book.

I did learn little doodles that I liked. I could even draw a few cartoon-like characters that I was quite proud of...(embarrassingly so). That being said, doodling was my artistic expression of choice when I was little. I would get yelled at while in school because I'd be doodling in the margins of my tests and notes. The teacher would accuse me of not paying attention. This used to make me so mad because somehow when I was doodling, I was actually able to focus better on what the teacher what was saying and teaching.

Fast forward a couple decades. I was still doodling, especially while brainstorming for my next novel. I was looking for something to doodle online and saw something called Zentangle. I did a search on Google Images to see more and realized this was basically what I had been doing since I was little. I didn't do any more research beyond that so I didn't really know anything about the restrictive strings and so forth.

I went to YouTube to try to watch some people creating these "Zentangles" and there was only like 2 videos so I decided to create a video. I found some patterns I liked and went to it.

I sat on my living room floor with my coffee table in front of me and my lamp to my left. I chose this spot because my living room had 3 windows  which meant more lighting for the video. I drew this tangle in about 30 minutes and used Zig Markers because I didn't even know what Pigma Microns were! When I was done, I uploaded the video with Piano Man as a background song and I remember feeling very proud of that drawing but I ended up spilling soda on the original drawing which is why the photo at the top of the page is just a screen capture of the video. (After some research I discovered that this video isn't of a true Zentangle but I never changed the name of the video because I thought it was a true Zentangle at the time...I guess you could say this was my very first Freeform Tangle.)

That was October 2012. A couple of months later I saw my video had a couple thousand views and thought how amazing that was! I decided to invest in some Pigma Micron pens and start recording all of my doodles and tangles and drawings.

That's the story of my first Zentangle drawing on YouTube and how my channel was "born." Here's the video for your enjoyment...