Shaving tangles

Shaving: removing a small amount or a (thin) slice from the original form.

Almost any tangle you'd care to draw can be changed considerably by shaving it, but I find this idea works best with tangles that are composed of lines, like Emingle at the top here, rather than tangles that already come with black areas. 

I introduced shaved square grids here. Here's an example of a simple square grid (albeit curvy), shaved on two sides of the squares, with added Pearlz:

I introduced shaved Paradox here. Below are tiles done at a workshop I gave.

This technique can be used with lots of other tangles. Sometimes I shave inside the tangle, sometimes outside. Here are more possibilities:

The Zentangle-original tangle Stoic (a.k.a. Twile) shaved.
On the left, shaved at the permimeter of the squares.
On the right, shaved inside the squares.

All Boxed Up, shaved.
You'll need a wonky grid for this to work well.

Jalousie, shaved. Once I had that tilt happening
I decided to angle the "bubble on a stick" too.

Shaved 'Dillo

Shaved Bales, Cubine, and Knase

Shaved Tripoli, Dewd, Copada, and Paisley Boa.
Sometimes I like to make the shaved part look shiny,
or to add Pearlz in the shaved area.

It's also a great way to even things up if something you drew feels too wide, or to darken a tangle if you feel there's too much white (thanks to commenter Ragged Ray for that insight!).

Choose two or three tangles to shave, and see what happens!

Pre-strung fun

Tangles: Bunzo, Ennies, Moon Pies, Pearlz

It's a hashtag, too! #prestrungfun. Have a look on Instagram and Zentangle's Mosaic app.

"Pre-strung" means that there are pale, gray lines provided on the paper so you have a string to start with. Zentangle(R) offers many tiles like this.

This project ("challenge"), the brainchild of three CZTs, is based on one of Zentangle's pre-strung zendala tiles, pictured below. I admit, this is not one of my favorite pre-strung strings, but I had two white ones so I thought I'd do two. Why not?

Sometimes an idea grabs my collar and whisks me away on a wild ride of creativity. Usually when I don't expect it. This was one of those times. I found myself working on one tile while ideas for another one flew at me.

Come along for the wild ride with me...

The first two I did were on white tiles. One is at the top of this post. Here's the other.
I tried using the tangle Kahla as another string, wondering what would happen if I tried to overlay two strings.

Tangles: Kahla (the overlaid string), Moon Pies,
Pearlz, Pepperish, Romanancy, Striping, Tipple, Wud

I wanted to do more! I hunted, and discovered I had some tan and black tiles with this pre-strung string. The first began with smears of copper ink from a leaky pen; the second was going to be the 'mosaic' border and something else in the middle, but you know how things go!

Tangles: Ennies, Pepperish, Printemps, Snail

Tangles: Hmmm... well, it was going to be Seljuk
but it ended up being gradations of gray Moonlight pens.

It worked well with Kahla, so on this tan tile I wanted to try using Within as an overlaid string.

Tangles: Within (the overlaid string)
Apacore, Paizel, Pearlz, Pepperish, Seljuk

Colorful ribbons wanted to play on a white tile.

Tangles: Aquafleur and Tipple

And finally, on a tan tile, sort of paisleys. And more. A lot more.

Tangles: Crescent Moon, Ennies, Purk,
Soul Star, Thumbprintz, Tipple, Within 

I understand there will be another Pre-Strung Fun event. Hope you can join in!

Stoic (a.k.a. Twile) and then some

Stoic is one of the original tangles from Rick and Maria, inspired by the pattern on a rug seen in Stowe, Vermont. 

It's also known by some as Twile which can be found on tanglepatterns.com. Linda Farmer introduces it as, "...instructions for drawing CZT® Lesley Scott-Gilliland’s Zentangle® pattern Twile. Lesley unknowingly deconstructed the Zentangle®-original tangle Stoic."

It has not been shared by Zentangle (to my knowledge) except with CZTs at seminars. I'm a CZT3 so it will always be Stoic to me.

The tile at the top shows Stoic in its basic form. Below are four variations on one tile.

Stoic with Cubine in the middle.
Stoic with a variety of patterns in the 'ribbons'.
Stoic with a simple line through the 'ribbons'.
Stoic with a simple addition in only one direction.

It's always interesting to try a square grid tangle curved into a circular form.

Here are two way to treat the "corners", each of which gives the impression of the tangle being curved. The square grid in A below is drawn as if the square were there; in B the square fragment is converted to a triangle.

In the tile below I had done a variation that I thought was too busy for this tile. I blacked it over entirely, then drew in white ink, and used white chalk for highlights.

Stoic (like Cubine) can take on different looks by varying the size of the "hole" in the middle. Have a look at the diagonal band in the tan tile below. (There is a gold wash in the upper right which looks a little faded here but is quite lovely in person!)

Shaving square grids gives a very interesting effect. Here's an example of some shaved Stoics.

You can read more about shaving grid tangles here. Scroll down a short way.

I had a tile with a blue wash and decided to try to work Stoic through the brush marks. I penciled the pattern and whited-in the central squares. The dark-filled column is one point of interest, while the orange/yellow area becomes the focal point.

What other variations can you think of for this simple square grid tangle?

Crazy Paradox

You've likely heard of Crazy 'Nzeppel and Crazy Huggins and recently Crazy Cadent. I've been experimenting with Crazy Paradox. It really is like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates - you never know what you're going to get!

Here is the first tile I did, and the string it began with.

To do this, I let the string be the 'grid' in which I draw the Paradox fragments. Sometimes I only do two or three sides of Paradox until I meet another pencil line which takes it in another direction.

I liked the tiny section of Pearlz in the tan tile and thought that some variations might be more interesting than just lines. I did a few using Pearlz and what I call shaved Paradox. Here's the original string and the finished tile.

Colored ink is different.

It's difficult to instruct, since there are no consistent steps, other than the square or triangular spiraling of Paradox itself. However, I prepared a page showing the progression of one particular tile to give you an idea of how it works. You will need to go to this link to access the downloadable file.

Finally, this is my favorite tile thus far. I began the gray tile in blue ink but I didn't like it so I cut off the corner. It was interesting, but I tried black behind it, preferred it, and cut a black tile so I could glue a piece behind. No mistakes, right? Just opportunities.

Tangles: Paradox, Pearlz, Rain, Seljuk

I hope you'll enjoy playing with Crazy Paradox!

For more about Paradox and its possibilities check this post from 2011.

About as Crazy as It Gets

This is especially for all you Crazy Huggins fans out there!

I had a piece of eco-dyed paper with 'spots' from eucalyptus leaves:

Here it has a few of the 'spots' outlined in brown ink.

I couldn't see any trees or houses or flowers in the marks. Lots of moons, maybe. I didn't have a clue what to do with it for a loooong time. Suddenly it struck me that Huggins has a lot of circles! No, wait. CRAZY Huggins!!!

I outlined most of the circles, deciding to sacrifice a few. These circles would need to be darker than the connecting curved bands. I thought about what tangles could be dark and would fit in a small circle, and which tangles would work in a long space.

I decided to include a gem for some 'pop'. I eliminated the pink at the top left. I made two screws á la Maria. In the end, there IS one moon! After a lot of shading, here is the finished work.

All the tangles:
Appease, Beadlines, Bilt, Bosch, Crescent Moon, Cubine, Drobbles, Emingle,
Fohbraid, Gewgle, Gneiss, Icantoo, Jonqal, Knightsbridge, Koril, Kuke,
Paradox, Pearlz, Snag, Tamisolo, Tipple, Zewm, Ziabolic, Zonked
Plus: Auras, triquetras, a Chinese coin, and striping with a twist

Here's a detail of one section.

And that, I think, is "About as Crazy as It Gets". :)

Cadent squared follow-up

I've been seeing some wonderful work inspired by my recent post Cadent squared, a simple tangleation of Cadent that creates lots of wonderful variations.

Here's a page from Anita Westin's Tangle-a-Day calendar showing the original curvy Cadent and a number of Cadent squared variations.

If the pattern is drawn large enough, the sections can be Aura'd inside, and another tangle drawn there. Here is an example from Jani Romero, a student of CZT Jan Brandt.

Marguerite Samama, a CZT in the Netherlands, sent me a picture of something she did using triangles for Cadent instead of squares. She's used circles for the initial points of reference and then done the connecting lines with a jog in them, as I showed in my earlier post. Quite a different look!

Here are some different variations from Tomàs Padrós, a tangler in Spain. Going from more detail in the center to less at the perimeter makes a very interesting tile.

I had a few more tries in my Tangle-a-Day calendar.

Floating Cubine

I like the impression of depth that can be achieved with some tangles and Cubine is a great example. It's like looking through little windows, or a sectioned box. But instead of doing Cubine in the classic square grid, you can use a single fragment of Cubine and place it in an empty space on your tile. I also recently referred to this as 'sprinkled' Cubines.

Here's an example of a floating Cubine. There are two Cubine fragments side-by-side creating 'holes', but the floating Cubine looks as if there's another hole through the main white section.

Tangles: Beadlines, Cubine, Knase, 'Nzeppel, Zonked.

Here's another example, amongst a lot of 'normal' Cubine fragments. (The floating one is off on the right side.)

In a Kitchen Table Tangles episode on the Zentangle Mosaic app Rick demonstrated a Cadent variation which quite enchanted me. The square shapes in the resulting pattern struck me as possible floating Cubine fragments so I did that in this tile. Here they are more "sprinkled". :)

Tangles: Cadent, Cubine, Pearlz

Finally, here's a tan tile just for something different. There are four floating Cubines here, well, actually three and a half.

Tangles: Apacore, Black Pearlz, Crescent Moon,
Cubine, Elirob, Tipple.

More ideas for variations of Cubine are in my "And then some" blog post here.

Shattuck monotangles

Another monotangle challenge from the DivaCZT!
Shattuck has thin lines between bands of the tangle and for some reason I decided that two-pencil strings would be ideal for this challenge. I haven't used a two-pencil string in quite some time, so this was interesting.

I prefer Shattuck with rounded shapes and with the two sides matched to create a fan shape, so all my tiles are like that. This first tile is fairly basic Shattuck.

I like doing a series of tiles with the same tangle. It makes me think about the tangle, get a little bored, and come up with variations. This tile includes some very large Shattuck elements in two corners, as well as a variation that just happened: I quite like it, with two sides of the fan shape filled in and the adjacent fan shapes left empty.

I signed the next tile in one direction, then decided I prefered it otherwise. Shattuck is also very interesting 'sideways'.

Finally, still smitten with the challenge to include a metallic element I went to my box of tricks and found a brassy 'O' which fit nicely into a space at the bottom. Here's my "what-were-you-smoking?!" variation of Shattuck. :)

Back to basics: Hollibaugh

The Diva's challenge this week is Hollibaugh, one of the first tangles anyone learns. I love Hollibaugh because of its simplicity, the 3D look once it's shaded, and the possibility of variations.

For my first tile I decided to use Hollibaugh as a string. I wanted to fill the spaces with a Hollibaugh variation I really like. I can't claim it as my own; I saw it way back in my early Zentangle days and unfortunately I can't even credit the original artist.

In this variation the bands are Rain, with auras. The Auras are useful to separate the Rain lines both from each other and from the background. The background is then filled with teeny-tiny circles, a variation of Tipple that I sometimes call Caviar. You can see this in the upper right corner. Then I went on to variations of that!

Tangles: Hollibaugh, Rain, Tipple (Caviar), and Auras

Next I did Hollibaugh over the entire tile, but with wide enough bands that I could fill a few of them. One was wide enough, and curvy enough, that I added a couple of splits.

Tangles: Dex, Hollibaugh, Knightsbridge, Pearlz, Snaylz

I want to use Renaissance (tan) tiles more frequently. I also wanted to try making the vibrantly colored gems I've seen a few people creating so wonderfully. So I put the two together. I love it!

Tangles: Hollibaugh, Pearlz, Snaylz, Tipple (Caviar again),
plus Auras and Perfs

A while ago I developed two variations of Hollibaugh. People thought they were sufficiently different that they deserved to be named and stepped-out. You might like to check out my blog posts about Morse and Windfarm.