How to draw HOLIDAY ORNAMENTS

Holiday Ornaments is a tangle pattern from CZT Suzanne McNeill’s Zentangle 4 booklet.

Zentangle 4 contains “Fresh ideas for designs and embellishments with templates, stencils and shapes. Add sparkle to your tangles with pens, spritz, watercolors and chalk.”

This festive and pretty tangle is perfect for embellishing your holiday cards, tags, gift wrap, place cards and so on — even actual holiday ornaments. Holiday Ornaments can be attractively varied by changing the shapes of the ornaments and the “beads” linking them together.

If you are attracted to the idea of tangling on ornaments, be sure to allow lots of time for the ink to dry to avoid smudging. You might also want to wear surgical gloves so the oils from your fingers don’t affect the drawing surface. CZT Bonnie Brown, “the quilting tangler”, has this great tip for tangling on ornaments if you want to add a band of design (or color): she suggests using rubber bands to help place your string. Drawing at Zentangle® scale on a curved (and delicate) surface is definitely for the patient and adventurous! Update: be sure to check out CZT Anna Houston’s tutorial on how to tangle on glass ornaments here, you can also find it on the TUTORIALS tab on the pink tangle menu bar.

If you have a tip to offer on the subject of tangling on ornaments, please feel free to share in the comments.

There are a couple of ways of drawing the Printemps-like swirls that fill each “ornament”. You can start in the middle and swirl outwards, or start from the outside and work inwards. For Holiday Ornaments I found it best to start with the outer line and work inwards. That made it easier to place the swirls and fit the ornament’s shape. Your mileage may vary.

With her kind permission for allowing me to post her copyrighted image here, Suzanne illustrates the steps for drawing Holiday Ornaments below.

Image copyright Design Originals and Suzanne McNeill, used with permission. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please feel free to refer to the step outs to recreate this tangle in your Zentangles and ZIAs, or link back to this page. However the artist and TanglePatterns.com reserve all rights to these images and they should not be pinned, reproduced or republished. Thank you for respecting these rights.

Suzanne shows the steps for a variation called Holiday Garland here on her blog.

Check out the tag suzannem for more of Suzanne’s patterns on TanglePatterns.com.

For detailed Book Reviews of all the available books about Zentangle®, visit the BOOK REVIEWS tab on the menu bar at the top of the page.

Related Links

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4. How to use the site — an excellent free video tutorial showing how to use the site as well as pointing out lots of useful features you might have missed.
5. Linda's List of Zentangle-Original Patterns — here is the complete list of original tangles (aka "official tangles") created and introduced by founders Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas, including those not published online. If you are new to the Zentangle Method I highly recommend learning a few of the published Zentangle classics first.
6. "A Zentangle has no up or down and is not a picture of something, so you have no worries about whether you can draw a hand, or a duck. You always succeed in creating a Zentangle." Patterns that are drawings of a recognizable naturalistic or actual object, figure, or scene, are not tangles. A pattern is not always a tangle — here's what makes a tangle. TIP: tangles never start with pencil planning.
   • Un motif n’est pas toujours un tangle — Qu’est-ce qu’un tangle ?
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