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Linda Farmer, Certified Zentangle Teacher

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Artists for Respect
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How to draw SWELLS

Zentangle pattern: SwellsToday is the first day of class for the 18th Certified Zentangle Teacher Seminar, I can just imagine the excitement in the room at the Hotel Providence in Providence, Rhode Island. By the end of this week there’ll be another 100+ enthusiastic new CZTs launched throughout the world to share the Zentangle® love. And we welcome them all!

Jennifer Hohensteiner is back today with her pretty grid-based tangle, Swells. You may recall Jennifer is an expat American living in Germany and she’s contributed several great tangles to the site including one of my personal favorites, Exis.

While Swells may look complicated, in fact it is supremely easy to draw and makes use of the Zentangle technique of auras.

Swells is one of the first tangles Jennifer sent along and I’ve just come across it again while searching through my tangle archives. When you reach Step 4, Swells takes on a Betweed-like similarity. I added just a bit of shading to my example above. One simple way to vary this tangle is to play with alternating rows or columns of the shapes in Steps 1 and 2. Jennifer shows another variation in her examples.

Jennifer illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Swells below including the variation in Steps 5 and 6. She also features Swells in a lovely Zentangle with the Zentangle-original tangles Hollibaugh and Crescent Moon. I love how she creatively transitioned from Swells to Crescent Moon, well done!

Zentangle pattern: Swells

Image copyright the artist and used with permission, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. You may use this image for your personal non-commercial reference only. Republishing or redistributing pattern deconstructions in any form is prohibited under law without express permission of the copyright owner. For more information, click on the image for a discussion entitled “Artists for Respect” by several prominent artists.

Check out the tag jenniferh for more of Jennifer’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

Related Links

  1. Looking for tangles by Artist or Type? For details visit the ABOUT > HOW TO FIND TANGLES BY ARTIST OR TYPE page on the top menu bar of any page on the site.
  2. What is a Zentangle? — if you are new to the Zentangle Method, start here for the fundamentals.
  3. Zentangle terminology — a glossary of terms used in this art form.
  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.
  7. How to submit your pattern deconstruction to TanglePatterns
  8. For lots of great FREE tutorials on TanglePatterns, click on the TUTORIALS link in the pink alphabetic menu bar below the tangle images at the top of any page.
  9. Strings! Have we got STRINGS! Click on the STRINGS link in the pink alphabetic menu bar below the tangle images at the top of any page for 250 different (free) Zentangle-starters. More than enough for any lifetime!
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