I have a friend who is a Certified Zentangle Teacher. She offers classes. I remember that when I first heard this, I felt some inner confusion. On the surface, Zentangle, to me, just seemed like doodling. Are there people out there taking classes to learn to doodle?
The answer is yes. Yes, there are. Not only that, but people are taking classes to learn how to TEACH the Zentangle structured doodling method. And at the time of this writing, the teacher class is in the neighborhood of $2,000 in USD, and is a four-day class.
I can’t report on the teacher class, or hell, even the regular class for students, because I haven’t taken either one. But I did come across one of the dozen-or-so Zentangle-related books that are out there, and gave it a whirl.
I learned a few things on the experiential level. Yes. Drawing repeating patterns and filling a space with them is relaxing and therapeutic. It provided a target for my focus, and the end result is pleasing to the eye. I also noticed that since I hadn’t done anything like this in a while, my hand tended to tense up while drawing, and it was probably a helpful exercise to stay mindful of that and deliberately relax my hand while drawing.
I also learned that the pen I used, a Micro-Line 05, was maybe a bit insufficient. Maybe it had just dried out a bit. The book recommended the Micron Pigma pens, maybe the 08, which is a similar size to what I was using.
Blowing it up to upload here clearly shows the area where better ink flow might have made the image more visually appealing. But you get the point, I’m sure. After working through a few of their suggested (copyrighted? trademarked?) patterns, I branched off a little bit and improvised. It was fun.
Then I started exploring my Zentangle curiosity from the other angle — how did it come about? How did it become an international business, with some 3000 certified teachers out there?
What I found was interesting, and stimulated my innate tendency to look for the dark side of any given thing. Apparently, some people believe that the purveyors of the Zentangle business model didn’t really come up with anything on their own; rather, they applied capitalism, circa 2003-4, to an art style expressed by Nadia Russ, who called it NeoPopRealism. Apparently the initial theft occurred in Rhode Island, where the “founders” and master instructors of Zentangle run their operations.
Of all places, I found these allegations on ripoffreport.com.
Of course, there are many facets to every story. The hard truth is that in a capitalist society, the party with the capital tends to come out on top.