Happy Monday y’all! And Mondays usually mean a super easy tangle pattern to get our week underway.
Blooms is from Texas CZT Suzanne McNeill, publisher of the first Zentangle® publications on the market. Blooms is from her booklet Zentangle 7 – Inspiring Circles, Zendalas and Shapes.
Blooms is simple as pie.
Blooms grows organically from the inside out, much like Arc Flower. It can fill any shape section in your Zentangle by simply working it out to the edges of your string. To my knowledge Suzanne doesn’t add shading to any of her tangles but I think it adds lovely dimension so I used it in my example. In fact I almost always add shading, to me it just continues the pleasurable Zen of the pattern.
Normally what I do to add shading is lightly draw a pencil line almost over the pen stroke. I like a pencil with a well-worn lead for this, others prefer a sharp one for better control. Then I take my paper stump/tortillion and make very tiny zigzag or circular “lines” out from the pencil into the area where I want the graphite to spread. In our TanglePatterns Shading Mini-Clinics, CZT Marizaan van Beek describes using tiny circular motions. So there’s almost always more than one way to achieve the effect you want and it just depends on what works best for you. Experiment, play …
Suzanne illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Blooms here [link removed] on her blog. UPDATE: Early in the Summer of 2014 Suzanne McNeill’s blog domain registration expired and all the posts and images were lost.
Fox Chapel Publishing (who hold the copyright) and Suzanne have graciously given me permission to post her copyright-protected images on TanglePatterns for your reference.

© Suzanne McNeill and Fox Chapel Publishing. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. You may use this image for your personal non-commercial reference only. Republishing or redistributing IN ANY FORM including pinning is prohibited under law without express permission.
Check out the tag suzannem for more of Suzanne’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.
Have a great week!
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Related Links
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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.
- Un motif n’est pas toujours un tangle — Qu’est-ce qu’un tangle ?
- Un diseño no es siempre un tangle — ¿Qué es un tangle?
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