Leaflet is another lovely tangle from Aussie Helen Williams who shares her botanical illustrations and Zentangle-inspired art on her blog.
Helen’s first pattern on the site was the popular Scrolled Feather and Leaflet is composed with similar S-strokes. Leaflet was inspired by an image that “looks like a wood carving.”
It’s my impression Helen’s drawings are usually a larger format than used for Zentangle® but Leaflet works very nicely at small scale. The challenge for me with this pattern was getting the reflected lines curved to my satisfaction. For some reason my brain wanted to draw the shapes backwards from the way they needed to go. But all the practice runs were fun to experiment with – maybe that was the point.
This tangle also looks great if you make the initial parallel lines wavy and not necessarily parallel, so you end up with a random overall effect with varying sizes of the motif. There are lots of ways to shade this tangle for different effects and Helen illustrates a few with her tangle.
Helen illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Leaflet here on her blog and also shows several possible variations for you to play with.
Check out the tag helenw for more of Helen’s patterns on TanglePatterns.com.
Hi! The link to ‘leaflet’ doesn’t seem to be working!
Yikes! Fixed. Thanks for the heads up.
Very nice, organic tangle. It uses the same backbone as Groovy, but the filler is different! Certainly will be playing with this one.
I have been doing each of her patterns and loving the process. With some practice, I’m getting them. Then I want to color them with my Staedler Mars Crayons. (which are luscious).
Helen does beautiful work. Wonderful artistry