The random string that came up for day five of my “back to basics” journey is, well, complicated! I decided to treat this like a patchwork quilt. I figured it would give me the opportunity to practice many differeent tangles, all chosen at random. Perhaps too many!
This tile has 16 different tangles, two of which are new to me: Moon Pie and Floo-ish. I really love that last one! Choosing all the tangles before I started drawing allowed me to arrange the locations for each so that the composition had a balance that I liked.
Day four of going back to basics with my Zentangle practice. For this tile, I chose a string at random from the instruction booklet, and random tangles from the Legend card and the back of the booklet.
While I enjoyed creating the tile, and it worked great for the reasons I tangle, I am not as excited with the end results. I loved the Cogwheels and the Flux ribbon, but when I added the background, it did nothing to enhance them. It isn’t enough contrast, and distracts from the other tangles.
Day three of my back to basics journey along the Zentangle path! Today, I continued following the instructions in the little booklet in my kit. I randomly selected a string from those shown. It was a triangular shape in the middle of the tile, with three other triangles around it to make up the square.
I don’t have the die that belongs in the kit any more, so I just used a random number generator on my phone to select tangles from the Legend Card in the kit. Just by chance, I got three different tangles with rounded designs and a single, angular grid design! The combination worked out perfectly for this string!
Yesterday, I talked about going back to basics with a restart of my Zentangle practice.
Today, I’m showing you the second tile, which I did yesterday. Again, I followed the instructions in the booklet included in my original kit. The only change I made was to color in the background, in the section containing the Hollibaugh tangle, giving the design stronger contrast.
#drawing #tile #zentangle
Zentangle drawn on Strathmore Vellum Bristol using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil.
I am home!
I know that sounds a bit odd, but if you had my life since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, you would understand. The last original tile I posted was May 26, 2020. Certainly a long time ago!
Since then, I’ve moved 4 times. My stuff has been in and out of storage in three different cities, and I now have a teenager and a pet!
Merry Christmas from our family to you and yours. May this day find you enjoying the company of friends and relatives near and far. We wish for you peace and joy!
Tangles: dewd shattuck zailz
The Entanglement library has a few grid-based tangles now: Huggins, W-2 , Ambler and Emingle. But we have limited control over the grid: we can affect the spacing in the x and y directions, and we can add some random fluctuations to where each intersection on the grid ends up. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could warp the grid in some more dramatic ways? Yes, I thought so too! So I spent some time adding some more grid options. This turned out to be harder to do than I thought it would be – I ended up having to rewrite big chunks of the Tangle class, then I ended up subclassing Tangle and creating a special class just for grid-based tangles: GridTangle.
Huggins and W-2 have appeared in the Entanglement library! Huggins and W-2 both look like they have been woven but are really just shapes on a grid connected by lines according to a few simple rules. The difference between them is that Huggins connects circles with curved lines, while W-2 connects squares with straight lines.
In this post, I’ll talk about how I built Huggins (once you build Huggins, W-2 is pretty easy to add) and show some examples of how both are used.
The Entanglement library has a very few (so far) tangle patterns built in which can be used to create Zentangles. New ones get added to the library as I get to them, but you (yes, YOU) as a user can create them too. Warning! This post is mostly Javascript code! If that’s not your thing, avert your eyes now! You need version 0.0.5 of Entanglement to follow along:
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/tektsu/entanglement@0.0.5/dist/entanglement.js"></script> In this post, we’ll create a simple grid-based tangle pattern, then use it in a Zentangle. The tangle we’ll create is not particularly interesting, and is not a “real” Zentangle (as far as I know.) It’s just an example to show the process. The Entanglement library only supports two general kinds of tangles so far: a pattern of tangle elements placed randomly on the canvas, such as Aah or BoxSpirals, or a grid with some kind of pattern, such as Ambler or Emingle. We’ll create a grid tangle in this case. We want it to look something like this:
Up until now, the Entanglement library has provided a few tangle elements and a few tangles, which you could draw onto your canvas. But real Zentangles have a border, and might be round or triangular instead of square. To make this easier to do, Entanglement now has the Zentangle class. This is the top-level class you should use to define what your Zentangle should look like.
Here is an example using it. This program drew the image at the top of this page:
Recently I did a post about the Ambler tangle in the Entanglement library. Ambler uses an element called a box spiral. It turns out, box spirals appear in several tangles, most notably the Box Spirals tangle. In this post, we’ll talk about the Entanglement BoxSpiral class, which implements the Box Spirals tangle.
The box spiral used in Ambler as it is implemented in Entanglement is very specific. It consists of nine lines, and always rotates counter-clockwise. Therefore it can only be drawn in four orientations, with the spiral starting from one of the four corners of its enclosing box.
The Entanglement library now supports Ambler! This officially doubles the number of tangles it can produce! Two tangles! Progress! OK, so two tangles isn’t really all that many, but still! Progress!
Using Entanglement to draw a basic Ambler is easy. Here’s the program that generated the image at the top of this page:
const height = 600; const width = 600; function setup() { createCanvas(width, height); background(255); } function draw() { let amb = new Ambler(width, height, {}); amb.paste(new Point(0, 0)); noLoop(); } So how does it work? Unlike Aah, the other tangle supported by this library, Ambler is a repeating pattern in a grid. So, no need for the collision detection we used with Aah; each pattern has a defined place where it can be drawn. The pattern that goes into each grid square is a box spiral. We build that in each square by dividing each square side into 6 sections, drawing a crosshatch of lines through those points and finding the intersections of those lines. We then use those points to draw the spiral.
In my last two posts , I showed how to draw most of the Aah tangle using the Javascript p5.js library. In this post, the Aah is complete, as you can see from the image below. However, the Javascript code to do so, does not follow directly from what we saw in those previous posts. I have rewritten it and packaged it into a library: Entanglement . More about that shortly.
First, lets talk about how the Aah pattern was completed. You’ll recall that we had successfully generated the 8-armed starburst pattern, and distributed copies of it the around the canvas, with some random variations to make it seem more like it was hand-drawn. We avoided overlapping them by using collision detection: we draw a polygon around each pattern, and then as we create new ones, we check the polygon against those for the patterns we had already drawn to make sure there were no collisions. The final image we generated was nice, but missing something important: an Aah tangle is supposed to have small circles randomly scattered between the starburst patterns.
In my previous post , we came up with a program to generate a single 8-armed component of the aah tangle. In this post, we’ll figure out how to spread them randomly around the canvas, as in the image at the top of the post. We’ll use the program from the last post as a starting point.
As a first try, let’s just generate a draw 20 aah images randomly on the canvas. Our draw() function looks like this:
Any Zentanglers out there who made it through my previous posts on generative art may be wondering whether these techniques can be used to draw Zentangles . Let’s try!
Zentangles are built from patterns, called tangles. We’ll try to create a tangle called aah. This is one of the original tangles from the Zentangle originators . There are many variations of aah. We’ll start with a simple 8-armed design. Tandika’s step-out for it looks like this:
This beautiful, blue Zentangle was created by CZT Amanda Higbee!
Posted with permission from the artist
Tangles: Toodles
Today, I took Eni Oken's Art Raffle app for a spin. This tile is the result! For my first tile in eons, it’s not bad! If you tangle, you should get this FREE app, it’s lots of fun!
Zentangle drawn on an white, official, Zentangle tile, using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil.
Tangles: Antidot Bales Beedz Crescent Moon Emingle Hollibaugh Knase Knightsbridge Perfs Printemps Shard Shattuck Stiritup Tagh
For the first project in the new Zentangle Project pack for grey tiles, we are creating a small, rearrangeable puzzle of four Bijou tiles, all with the same tangles.
These can be assembled into your own mosaic and arranged in different designs depending on how you place each little tile.
This is my first tile. I got carried away with the Diva Dance, on the second side, so I will be redoing this.
I am willing to bet that everyone who tangles for any length of time has those few designs that are just difficult for them.
Showgirl was one of mine. Everytime I did it, I would end up with something that wasn’t quite right. You can see some of my failed attempts in the smaller tests in the image above.
I kept practicing, for several months, on and off. Then, after following a lesson from Eni Oken , the light bulb came on, and I finally got it! I just drew two of them, correctly, easily!
When my MIL passed away, we found the ZIAs and Zentangles she created later in her life. One of the things in these was a box with a tangled alphabet.
Today is brought to you by the letter “Q”, as tangled by Twyla!
Zentangle drawn on white card stock using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil.
Tangles: Quabog Quipple Queen's Crown Quiltz