In Friday’s Tangle Refresher we revisited the official Zentangle® pattern, Eke, which is based on the lower case cursive letter e. Today’s tangle pattern AA’s by Canadian tangler Judy Murphy is based on the upper case cursive letter A.
In her steps Judy shows AA’s as a border tangle but I wondered how it would work as an over-all filler design and my example is where I ended up. I drew this with vertical columns of A’s then filled in the counter. Of course you could also accomplish this with rows, but columns appealed to me at that moment.
After I finished my first example above, I wondered what would happen if I played around with the direction the A‘s “face”. The first column in the variation on the right is Judy’s letter A, the second column is the same shape, but mirrored. I alternated the columns and again filled in the counters. I found that drawing an A backwards is a bit of a mind bender but once I focused on the shape my brain settled down. I also tried some variations with the letters “upside down” and back-to-back — there are a lot of fun and interesting results in this exercise.
Judy illustrates the steps for drawing her AA’s tangle pattern and several very pretty variations here on flickr where she’s known as pawspa1.
Check out the tag judym for more of Judy’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." Thus 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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September 23, 2013 | 
More like this: 
Very pretty as a boarder with a lot of variations. I also like the inverted A’s as a filler. Thank you for sharing.
Linda, Oh Boy. Am I sure glad you included the explination as to the meaning of “counters”! I spent 10 min. trying to “see” your “AA”s, before I realized I had better click on the “other” red links, besides “here”. Ah Ha! Yurica! Now I can “see” your “AA”s! And what a difference the style of a letter makes! I do not make my “A”s in that manner, but I will from now on! What a lovely Tangle, Judy! Very pretty!
I gotta tell ya, I just couldn’t “see” your AA’s either Linda. And that was after I looked up “counter”! In fact I almost passed on it altogether. But I checked out Judy’s flickr page and I fell in love. I had been drawing the AA’s from Judy’s instructions when I tried to look at yours again last night – even tracing the lines, when POW! I got it! What fun! Now I am drawing them in all sorts of directions with all sorts of embellishments and variations. Thank you so much for this fun, beautiful and easy tangle pattern!
I love it! I’m at the airport and already filed a tile. Thanks
this is so cool I love zentangle it is so fun to draw
Very pretty, and fun.
LOL, too, me forever to see your lines .. and the all of a sudden, as someone else said, Eureka!! And I’m off and running with a boatload of A’s!! Wait .. that’s not right, the apostrophe designates possession, so how would you right the plural of A??? Grins