Pencil Shavings and a Zentangle Mandala

I have formed a group of 7th graders at my school to create a Teen Zine. We meet after school Friday and work on art, poetry, photographing stuff, etc. By the end of the school year we will publish our own Wicked Zine. The backgrounds and poetry so far are amazing and I am excited about this project! Our fabulous art teacher, Karen, has been graciously assisting us in this endeavor and last week I introduced her to zentangles. We started a mandala together which she worked on this past week while I was typing poetry into the computer................

Earlier in the day I was sharpening my pink fuzzy pencil, my 2nd favorite pencil next to my mechanical pencil, with my favorite sharpener. I was sharpening it onto a piece of paper on my desk to then throw the shavings into the trash when I realized how colorful and artistic the shavings actually looked! So I saved them and had my Teen Zine crew sharpen the colored pencils onto the paper as we went along and here is just one of the pics I took............

I like this picture because it has the large curly shaving in it. I took many close-ups of different sections of the shavings thinking they would make colorful backgrounds. You never know what will strike you as beautiful!