Heraldic Inspiration

As promised, here is some meat around the bones of yesterday's rambling on about the Joy of Heraldry.
It was not a good day for me today, my confidence was low & my head hurt, but I soldiered on with my current order, as there is more work in the pipeline & I know if I procrastinate at this point I will suffer.
In trying to work out what patterns to incorporate in today's work, I studied the heraldry connected with it & came up with these.

Looking at the B/W Campbeltown Crest, I took patterns in the two right hand quadrants & gave them the Tangle treatment.These are obviously just preliminary musings & have a lot of work to be done on them before they are usable in the work, but you have to start somewhere.

You can see in the top left hand corner of the photo, where I began to deconstruct the pattern to see how it was built, then progressed to the next pencil interpretation, then joined a few up together to see what happened.

This is how it ended up.

Pattern deconstruction did  not come easily to me when I first started to learn about Zentangle, but now it's one of my favourite things to do. It keeps me amused wherever I am, mentally deconstructing patterns on carpets, wallpaper, adverts, manhole covers, packaging.........

As I started to reproduce the other pattern, with the black segments, I thought the dots were random, but they aren't, they are in quite an obvious sequence. You can see the sequence more obviously in my drawing than in the picture of the Crest, because my dots are heavier.

A little metaphor for life with depression came to me whilst I was drawing the diagonals in the boxes. Because you are drawing freehand in Zentangle, it causes you to have to focus if you want a neat result (part of the Zen process I think). Rather than try & draw straight across a square in a one-er, I put a centre dot in the square first, which acted as a stepping stone. I could just make my way as far as the dot, then progress to the far corner. This might all seem pedantic & far too naval- gazey, but to my mind- set it makes sense & it's how I tackle most things in my life, to be able to function effectively. I live by stepping stones, by the hour & by the days & weeks. I constantly break things down into component parts, as with pattern deconstruction.

There is a phrase I heard yonkers ago whilst at a training course with Boots the Chemist. The Area Manager was giving a talk on how we were going to tackle some major new programme in-store, & he said:

                          How do you eat your elephant? .......One teaspoon at a time.

                 It's funny how some things just latch onto a brain cell & stay there forever!