How to draw XO

Happy Monday, y’all! Here’s our last tangle for April 2018 … and Xo is one from my archives. I’ve been doing one of my regular reviews and unearthed a few that deserve to be featured.

Today Taiwan quilter and CZT Damy Teng shares her cool and super easy Xo tangle with us. Damy already has two dozen great tangles on the site and Xo is another good one to add to our repertoire.

Damy notes that Xo is a combination of CZT Pegi Schargel’s B’Twined, and CZT MaryAnn Scheblein-Dawson’s Chemystery tangles.

It’s another tango! And as it’s name suggests, it’s composed of an X and an O. That’s it.

From experience I can mention that if you don’t leave enough space for the highlight in Step 3, it can get lost when you ink in the orb. (Its size is also a function of how close together you make the opposing bracket strokes in Step 1. Too close = not enough space for a highlight.) But never mind, do what I did for my example and touch it up with a spot of white Sakura Gelly Roll pen! And remind yourself that next time you’ll make the highlight circle larger than you think you need 😉

Xo is another one of those tangles where a touch of pencil shading makes a huge difference to the finished art. Sometimes you can get away with just using your tortillion if it has enough residual graphite on it.

Damy illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Xo below and she features it in a cool minimalist monotangle Zentangle® tile.

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, altered, reproduced or republished. They are for your personal offline reference only. Thank you for respecting these rights. Click the image for an article explaining what copyright means in plain English.

As you enjoy any of the tangles on the site, please 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 damyt for more of Damy’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

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Like some help with shading your Zentangles?

It's fun and easy — forget about traditional "art rules" for shading, this is Zentangle and those rules do not apply!

As we are coached in the chapter on Shading in the Zentangle PRIMER Vol 1, "Ignore the light source ... in Zentangle shading we do not consider the type or direction of the light source. ... More often, shading is a component of the tangle itself that we use to play with dimension, emphasis, and contrast."

Everything you need to know is here in two free tutorials on TanglePatterns.

1. TanglePatterns Shading Mini Clinic, Part 1 by CZT Marizaan van Beek, and
2. TanglePatterns Shading Mini Clinic, Part 2 by CZT Sandy Bartholomew

You can always locate these and many other helpful tutorials by visiting the TUTORIALS tab on the pink alphabetic tangle menu bar as shown here:

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