How to draw KNOT RICKZ

Knot Rickz is an elegant tangle pattern from East Hartford, Connecticut, CZT Cheryl Cianci and it’s her first on the site.

East Hartford, we learn on Wikipedia, is home to one of the world’s “big three” aerospace manufacturers, Pratt & Whitney. (General Electric and Rolls-Royce are the other two.)  Ten years ago Rentschler Field stadium was built on the former Pratt & Whitney company airfield and it’s now home for the University of Connecticut Huskies football team. I love learning all this fascinating stuff.

Cheryl writes that Knot Rickz

“was created a long time ago (just before I became a CZT in May 2011) … I was trying to figure out how to do Rick’s Paradox via the internet (and getting completely frustrated), I came up with this pattern. I call it ‘Knot Rickz’ Paradox. This pattern can essentially be done in any shape but like Rick’s Paradox works best in a square or triangle. The very first time I started using it I was drawing it in a grid (that works well too).“

Knot Rickz reminds me of Fiore, Well and several other grid-based tangles that start with a dot or small orb in the center of each grid box and the curved lines reaching to the corners. I tried Knot Rickz in a grid but my effort turned out a little too dense for my taste. In future I’d leave alternating grid squares (“seeds”) blank to create some white space and preserve the charm of the individual “wrapped” grid shapes. In the end for my example I preferred the look of Cheryl’s free form version of her tangle below.

For that version, what I found was if you space dots throughout the section first and then add the number of curved strokes you want to each , it is simple to create a random placement and varying sizes of the floating wrapped shapes. Shading adds the puffy 3D effect that finishes up this tangle.

Here Cheryl demonstrates the steps for drawing her Knot Rickz tangle. Cheryl thanks CZT Kelley Kelly for scanning the instructions for her, as well as her students and CZT Bette Abdu for encouraging her to submit the pattern to TanglePatterns.

Image copyright the artist 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 cherylc for more of Cheryl’s patterns on TanglePatterns.com.

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." 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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