How to draw UBIKO

Ubiko (pronounced U – B – Co) is a bold, dramatic tangle to explore and it’s from Canadian tangler Cyndi Knapp who recently shared her Jive & Jazz tangle with us.

Cyndi introduces her tangle and explains how she came up with the name,

It’s always interesting where tangling leads you, whether you’re tangling a tangle or creating a new pattern.

Case in point, the inspiration for Ubiko (pronounced U – B – Co) was modern wallpaper with a simple elongated teardrop design but this pattern ended up more detailed, resembling an African design.

I decided the name should start with a “U” and since the pattern reminded me of an African print, I toyed with names I thought sounded African. In doing so, I was reminded of the movie “Cry Freedom”. So when I combined the “U” with the name “Biko”, that was it!

It’s easy and fun to tangle but to get the center lines and pattern as uniform as possible, I had to slow down and take a little care.

Step 6 shows Ubiko in it’s simplest form to give tanglers a blank canvas, so to speak.

The illustration shows some of the ways it can be resized, filled, shaded and aura’d, making it a versatile pattern to use as either a border, ribbon or background.

About Cry Freedom from Amazon:

The tension and terror that is present-day South Africa is powerfully portrayed in director Richard Attenborough’s sweeping story of black activist Stephen Biko (Denzel Washington) and a liberal white newspaper editor who risks his own life to bring Biko’s message to the world. After learning of apartheid’s true horrors through Biko’s eyes, editor Donald Woods (Kevin Kline) discovers that his friend has been silenced by the police. Determined not to let Biko’s message go unheard, Woods undertakes a perilous quest to escape South Africa and bring Biko’s remarkable tale of courage to the world. The riveting, true story offers a stirring account of man at his most evil and most heroic.

Cyndi illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Ubiko below where she features it with some variations in a lovely Zentangle tile with the Zentangle-originals Printemps and Betweed.

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. “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.” ~ C.S. Lewis

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. Your thanks helps motivate them to continue to share!

Check out the tag cyndik for more of Cyndi’s tangles 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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