February 2016 – A Tangler's Mind

Narwal – Square One Focus

This week’s focus tangle for the Facebook page Square One: Purely Zentangle is Narwal by CZT Sam Taylor. The Step-outs can be found here.

I tried Narwal when the step-outs first came out but never explored it very much and I didn’t feel like I really knew the tangle yet so I did some drawing in my sketchbook to try and get to know it better.

After I felt I was getting the rhythm of the tangle I started a tile. The S curve used to draw Narwal is the same as is used to draw Cadent, so I decided to explore this in my tile. I started with a 3 sided cadent figure drawn in the round and then began adding Narwal.

I continued around adding Narwal coming off the points of the Cadent figure.

When I’d finished outlining the Narwal I began to add some detail.

I added some shading to the tangles but felt it needed more so I began to add an aura around the perimeter. When I got to the tip of the first Narwal arm it seemed like that was enough and I liked the way it looked so I repeated the effect on each of the arms.

This was much better but it felt like it was detached from the background so I added some shading to one side of the aura to ground the drawing.

I liked the sketches I made using Narwal and Dragonair together. Again there was the common element of the S curve and it just seemed right that two such magical tangles should be used together so I drew a second tile.

I am happy with both tiles and in the end really enjoyed drawing Narwal.

As always if you see something in this post that you would like to explore in you own work, please feel free to do so.

Blessings,

Lynn

Heartswell – Square One Focus

This week the focus tangle for Square One was chosen specially for Valentines Day. The focus tangle is called Heartswell by Helen Williams. Steps -Outs can be found here on her blog.

I really enjoyed learning and playing with this tangle. On the top of this page I explored drawing it in a Hollibaugh way. At the bottom I drew it on a Rope string like I used last week. This sure gave different results and it helped me understand why Helen said not to have your initial lines too close together. I also tried out several variations.

In the end I decided to go fairly simple for my tile since this can be a very busy tangle. I started with just two curving lines.

Heartswell is fairly easy to draw and I just continued adding “swells” until they began to run together and off the edges. Then I added an Aura around the entire tangle. I liked the black aura I tried in my sketchbook so I filled it in with black.

I added three hearts as focal points and broke up the rest of the hearts with a couple of variations that were repeated several times randomly. This gave a little contrast but kept it simple.

Finally, I added shading to add dimension and complete the tile.

Happy Valentine’s Day

As always if you see anything in this post that you would like to try in your own work please feel free to do so.

Blessings,

Lynn

Printemps – Square One focus tangle

This weeks Square One focus tangle is Printemps. This is one of the tangles I use all the time so I did not feel the need to explore this tangle in my sketchbook this week.

I have been wanting to do a tile using Margaret Bremners “Rope String” idea though and thought this might be a good time to try that.

I started off with a Rope string and began filling it with different variations of Printemps.

Then I added some black background, line weighting, and sparkles to some of the variations. This added a little more contrast to the tile.

Finally I added the shading to finish the tile. I wanted the section with the large line weighted spirals to be in the forefront and then each section to be on top of the next moving toward the edges of the tile. Each section was shaded only along one edge to help create this illusion.

I like the way the Rope string provided discrete sections for the Printemps variations and also tied them all together (no pun intended or maybe it was).

As always if you see anything in this post that you would like to try in your own work please feel free to do so.

Blessings,

Lynn