While shading certainly isn’t necessary on your Zentangle drawings, it can add real dimension to your creation. And sometimes a ho-hum drawing becomes something you really love after you’ve applied a little shading to it.
For me, there’s as much fun doing the shading as there was doing the drawing. And one of the best guides on shading, especially if you are a total drawing novice like me, is in Sandy Bartholomew’s Totally Tangled book. She discusses “four basic uses and techniques for shading: color, contrast, depth, and roundness.” And shows you how. I found that page alone worth the price of admission.
In all three of her Zentangle books, Zentangle Basics, Zentangle 2, and Zentangle 3, Suzanne McNeill gives tips and suggestions on where and what to shade and relates them to specific patterns.
Loew-Cornell Blending Stumps
When you have completed your Zentangle, and assuming you’ve used permanent ink and it’s completely dry, you can shade sparingly and very lightly using the side of a well-worn soft-leaded pencil.
Then some people use their fingertip (*cringe*) to “smudge” the pencil marks to soften and blend them.
However, I use these great blending tools:
They come in various sizes allowing you to shade broad areas or get into tiny corners if that’s what you desire. And you don’t end up with oily finger greebies (a technical term 
) all over your beautiful creation.
According to Wikipedia, a tortillion (or tortillon) is “an artist’s tool used to smudge and blend drawings made from charcoal, graphite pencil, or pastel. The tool consists of a tightly-wound stick of soft, fibrous paper … A blending stump is similar to a tortillon but is longer, more tightly wrapped, and pointed at both ends. Blending stumps produce slightly different textures than tortillons when blending. They are typically made of paper but can also be made of felt or leather.”
At many art supply stores you can find single blending stumps if you prefer not to get the whole package – but they’re not very expensive anyway and they last forever.
These are great blenders and I highly recommend you use them instead of your fingertip!
Visit more TIPS & TOOLS pages
Check out the other pages under TIPS & TOOLS at the top of the page. There are recommendations if you want to add colored ink to your Zentangle-inspired art, or watercolor, as well as ideas for strings, and much more to come.
And if you have tips to share on shading, please leave a comment or email me (linda AT tanglepatterns DOT com] and let me know so I can add them to this resource for everyone’s enjoyment. Thanks!
A fun discovery re shading, while playing with Nzeppel: quick explanation – I prefer using rolled paper tortillion to the paper stumps pictured above. They have a firm tip that doesn’t need to be constantly sharpened or reshaped (and they’re so cheap I buy them 1 gross at a time on eBay!
On with the story…
I have been doing a ‘one square a day’ tangle calendar this year (my one and only New Year’s resolution for 2011!). A blank calendar, to which I add one tangle a day. On the 2nd January, I decided to do Nzeppel. Wanting a very light and floaty effect for such a small space, I was loath to add in too much pencil shading. I dabbed at the page with my tortillion while thinking – and made a wonderful discovery.
It made a delicate, soft, light grey shading – just by dabbing the tortillion directly on the paper (no pencil)!
So I shaded the rest of Nzeppel using the same technique – with stunning results! There was enough graphite sitting on the end of the paper to leave a lovely delicate shading and, when it began to fade away to nothing, I ‘topped it up’ by running the tortillion tip along my pencil led a could of times.
Initially, I suspected this would work best on the super smooth paper of the calendar… but I tried it on a Zentangle tile and it worked very nicely there too!
I will shortly be putting this info up on my blog (http://kalligrafix.blogspot.com/) with a photograph of the effect, if you’d like to see what it looks like.
Happy tangling!
And thanks Linda, for encouraging me to share. ?
Thanks so much for sharing Kit. Please keep it up (and everybody else too, hint hint)!
I haven’t actually had to sharpen or reshape my blending stumps or replace them yet. So I guess they’re all pretty durable depending on what you’re drawing and the surface you’re using, of course.
Whatever option we choose, it’s way better than the oily fingertip!
Thank you Linda and Kit for this lesson on shading and shading tools. I did find some what I thought were blending stumps at my local art supply store but when I looked for tortillons on ebay I discovered that is what I have! Just have to get used to working with them.
Thanks for the shading tips, excuse the pun… will try this on my next great adventure in my drawings…
OMG why did I not read this before yesterday. I was shopping for a new art supplies when I saw these blending stumps and I almost bought them but was not sure what they were used for. They were super cheap and I was in a discount store. I was using my finger but I thought that was just putting oil on my zentangles so have stopped shading. It will be a month before I go out again to that shop grrr. Oh well at least I know what they are now and will add them to my kit.
For those not used to shading, shade what you want UNDERNEATH. So along the OUTSIDE edge of what you want on top is where you want to shade. It will make the top tangle look as though it is raised above the tangles underneath. If you want an image to look round, shade the edges. I hope this makes sense.