We’ve had a lot of “ink-tensive” tangles lately so I was looking for one that had more air and less ink to it and CZT® Suzanne McNeill’s Tadpoles seems to fit the bill.
Tadpoles appears in Suzanne’s Zentangle 6 booklet about using “terrific stencils and cards” in your Zentangle-inspired crafts.
Suzanne’s post containing the steps for Tadpoles is promoting the upcoming Design Originals title The Beauty of Zentangle, a compilation from 125 tangle artists invited to contribute their art for the book. I was among the invited but declined because I had too much going on at the time to meet the deadline but I’m sure the publishers had no trouble coming up with 125 people thrilled to donate their tangled art for the book. I’m really looking forward to seeing “hundreds of sensational one-of-a-kind designs from around the world” when it comes out in the fall. It is available now for pre-order at $16.81 on Amazon ($19.99 retail).
As simple looking a pattern as it is, Tadpoles presented a couple of challenges to me. The first was to get the dots spaced well enough to have room for the connecting strokes in opposite directions, and the second is it requires focus while you’re connecting the dots if you don’t want the pattern to become random. Although that could look interesting too. I added a bit of pencil to jazz it up a bit 🙂
Suzanne illustrates the steps for drawing Tadpoles here [link removed] on her blog. UPDATE: Early in the Summer of 2014 Suzanne McNeill’s blog was removed and all the posts and images were lost. The site is being reconstructed as much as possible but the links will no longer be the same. Many of her patterns on TanglePatterns can quite easily be figured out. For those that might be a little more difficult, Suzanne has graciously given me permission to post her copyright-protected images on TanglePatterns for your convenience.
Image © DESIGN ORIGINALS by Suzanne McNeill and 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.
Check out the tag suzannem for more of Suzanne’s patterns on TanglePatterns.com.
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- 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.
- "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.
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May 10, 2013 | 
More like this: 
Hi Linda,
Thank you so much for the privilege of being able to access such a great resource as yours. -I’d be lost without it! I just wanted to bring to your attention that when I’ve tried clicking on the link to see the steps for Tadpole, the blog post comes up but no Tadpole! Do I’m not sure what might be going on there. Hopefully it can be fixed soon.
Cheers
Suze
Hi Suzanne,iIt works fine for me in Firefox, you might want to try using another browser if yours is blocking images. Then if you still can’t see the image, please leave a comment on the page for Suzanne so she can fix whatever might be broken.