Checkered Zag is a super simple tangle pattern to start the week, and it has more potential than you might imagine at first glance.
This tangle appears in CZT Suzanne McNeill’s Zentangle 5 booklet featuring Zentangle®-inspired jewelry projects. In addition to Suzanne’s own projects many of the others are contributed by CZTs and other artists resulting a wide range of impressive jewelry to create. Now that Summer’s almost here those of us who are that way inclined might find some interesting projects in Zentangle 5 to get started on your Christmas gift-making. (I wish I was that organized!)
A relative of the official tangle Knightsbridge, Checkered Zag also bears similarity to Charlie, Cracked and others where the basic line drawing’s alternate spaces are filled with solid black producing the checkerboard effect. As I drew my basic example of this tangle I was wondering “what if I changed the ‘non-zag’ lines of Step 1?”, and here’s my first result. As I said above, this tangle has more potential just lurking in your imagination.
Suzanne illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Checkered Zag here 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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June 3, 2013 | 
More like this: 
The last two patterns by Suzanne McNeill I have not been able to see(Tadpoles and Checkered Zag). Is there some other way to see these patterns?
Try using another browser like FireFox, it’s free and rarely has the security and other issues IE has. Suzanne occasionally posts the wrong kind of image for the web and Internet Explorer and some other browsers don’t recognize the format so they can’t display it. You could also leave a comment for Suzanne to let her know.
There’s another CZT’s site that gives me problems (can’t recall which at the moment) and I always have to View Source, search for the .png file, copy the link, then Save As to my hard drive.
For this one, all that came up was a red X. However, when I did a google search for “Checkered Zag”, and selected the Images category (link below), the second image that pops up is the one on Suzanne’s site.
If you click on the image that appears in the search, Suzanne’s page launches with the image hovering above. Right-click on that image and Save Picture As. That’s the only way to get it with IE. The minute you select the page or “full size image”, you get the red X again. (View Source/copy link gave me a red X, too.)
It’s a pain, but it’s a workaround.
https://www.google.com/search?q=checkered+zag&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=VnivUYGgF6zQywG5t4HwCg&ved=0CDgQsAQ&biw=1233&bih=565&sei=rHivUbvLGoqVyQH4jID4Aw
Just learned to Zentangle – have only finished two but I love it so far. Love your site too. Thanks for what you do:)