My name is Terry and I’ve lived and worked in Bakersfield for over 30 years. I raised my three kids here, along with my late husband of 38 years. I have always spent much of my spare time on various creative outlets including tole painting, cross stitch, scrapbooking, rubber stamping, card making, creating jewelry, and most recently mixed media and drawing. I have made and sold work at craft shows and boutiques over the last 15 years or so and even owned my own home-based scrapbook business. Art has always been an important component in my life.

In 2011, my daughter, Lauren, showed me some artwork she had been working on with black ink and I fell in love with its bold and beautiful, dramatic look. She was filling pages, edge to edge, with lines and patterns as a form of meditation. She would sit for hours to work on a piece and said it was a way for her to block out everything else. Wanting to find out more and learn how to do this I began looking online and found Zentangle® at www.tanglepatterns.com. This website became one of my best resources for inspiration, then and now, because they showed how to draw hundreds of different tangle patterns step-by-step. I immediately got a little notebook and began creating each of the designs step-by-step. At the time I was happy enough just replicating the step-by-step process and I did this for about two years, until I set it aside for other things in my life. I then picked up my colored pencils and adult coloring books, mostly ones filled with botanicals.

Although I did not practice drawing, these Zentangle® designs were always in the back of my head. I found a peace in the process of breaking down designs into parts and I found myself drawing in my head. I did this often when I was facing stress or pressure from daily life and something about this method allowed me to “escape” some of that chaos. After taking a break for a while I began getting interested in picking the pen back up and there was no shortage of inspiring artists making work to spark my interest again.

Facing some challenges with my late husband and becoming his caregiver for the last few years of his life required me to be at home with him a majority of the time. Zentangle® became a peaceful escape that didn’t require any fancy equipment or lengthy time to complete. It gave me time to relax and refocus while expanding my creativity to find healing. This method shows how to deconstruct patterns one line at a time and that was an important component to allowing myself to relax and let my mind quiet.

In 2017, my daughter and I attended the Certified Zentangle® Teaching Seminar in Rhode Island to become Certified Zentangle® Teachers (CZTs) and be able to teach others about this wonderful artform. It was my desire, as a mother-daughter teaching team to share this “zen” experience with other people because it has been such a blessing in our lives. Since our certification Lauren has received her Master’s in Art and has left the Zentangle teaching to me. She is living her dream as a college professor!

Learning Zentangle® will teach you to focus, relax, relieve stress, become more confident in your creative skills moving past creative “blocks,” find gratitude and a bit of quiet time. I hope that you will allow yourself the time to begin this journey as we did and that it will help you in your creative and life journey: destination meditation.

You can find Certified Zentangle® Teachers in your area by searching on www.zentangle.com. There they have a list of CZTs worldwide.