How to draw TRIX

Trix is a fun new versatile and mesmerizing tangle by UK tangler Lucy Farran, and it’s her first on the site.

Lucy is from Welwyn Garden City, in Hertfordshire, England (just north of London), and according to Wikipedia,

“Welwyn Garden City was the second garden city in England (founded 1920) and one of the first new towns (designated 1948).

It is unique in being both a garden city and a new town and exemplifies the physical, social and cultural planning ideals of the periods in which it was built. …

Welwyn Garden City was founded by Sir Ebenezer Howard in the 1920s following his previous experiment in Letchworth Garden City. Howard had called for the creation of planned towns that were to combine the benefits of the city and the countryside and to avoid the disadvantages of both. The Garden Cities and Town Planning Association had defined a garden city as:

‘a town designed for healthy living and industry of a size that makes possible a full measure of social life but not larger, surrounded by a rural belt; the whole of the land being in public ownership, or held in trust for the community.’

The town is laid out along tree-lined boulevards with a neo-Georgian town centre. It has its own environmental protection legislation, the Scheme of Management for Welwyn Garden City. Every road has a wide grass verge. The spine of the town is Parkway, a central mall or scenic parkway, almost a mile long. The view along Parkway to the south was once described as one of the world’s finest urban vistas.”

Sounds positively delightful and of literary note, near Welwyn Garden City is “Shaw’s Corner“, primary residence of the renowned Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.

About her Trix tangle Lucy writes, “Its name is inspired by the fact that an individual segment looks like a shark fin or tooth, and one of the latin words for shark is pistrix, hence – trix. …

I have been tangling for almost a year now. I discovered Zentangle® by accident when I found a book in my local craft shop, whilst shopping for something else. I became immediately hooked.

I was inspired by a swirly pattern in an old colouring book I was flicking through – my attempts to replicate what I saw turned into something quite different, and once I started drawing the ‘s’ shapes, I truly could not stop until the page was full – it was a true tangling moment!

Composed entirely of S strokes, Trix is similar to Fengle but as Lucy notes while Fengle starts the same way it’s generally a stand alone pattern. Trix grows out from the center as far as you have room for and works as a monotangle or even a String to be filled with other tangles as desired. Lucy demonstrates this in her main white-on-black example below. Trix is also similar to the triangular version of Cadent that Maria illustrates in her original steps (and which often gets posted mistakenly as a new tangle) but Trix is formed without Cadent‘s initial orbs and grows without that structure.

Lucy illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Trix below with the String version noted above filled with mostly Zentangle-original tangles.

Image copyright the artist and used with permission, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please feel free to refer to the steps images to recreate this tangle in your personal Zentangles and ZIAs, or to link back to this page. However the artist and TanglePatterns.com reserve all rights to these images and they must not be publicly pinned, reproduced or republished. Thank you for respecting these rights. For more information, click on the image for the article “Copyrights and your blog.”

In this image Lucy shares “some monotangles to illustrate different filling and shading ideas“. Lucy’s second monotangle is the one I used for my example above.

As you enjoy any of the tangles on the site, please do leave a comment of thanks and encouragement to show the artists you appreciate them for sharing their creativity to inspire yours.

Check out the tag lucyf for more of Lucy’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.
   • 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?
7. How to submit your pattern deconstruction to TanglePatterns
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