How to draw ANTHEM

Happy first of March, and it’s Friday too!

Not only that, Spring and Daylight Savings Time are right around the corner! Longer, warmer days ahead …

I can’t believe we’re already into the third month of the year. I’m sure I say something similar as each month rolls over to the next, but it does seem like time hurtles by in our digitally-paced world. There’s always something going on somewhere and we’ve sure had our share of “somethings” in this country.

Aren’t we lucky and blessed to have Zentangle® for maintaining our equilibrium and our sanity.

Today New York CZT Jody Genovese shares her lovely Anthem tangle with us. Jody writes:

“My pattern submission today will at first appear like a crystal, but it is not.

One of the projects we did at ZenAgain this past November had us exploring and reinterpreting the art of 3 famous artists through the eyes of Zentangle. All three had very different styles and while I appreciated each, my favorite was Ernst Haeckel. His claim to fame was combining art and science and creating art based on his observations.

I’m calling this pattern Anthem. This is short for Anthemodes ordinata, a member of the siphonophores family and something Mr. Haeckel observed while on expedition at the Canary Islands.

I bet that clears things up! It didn’t for me either so I kept digging.

To me it looked like a jellyfish, but I wanted to be sure so I turned to Google which said this, “The siphonophores are an order of hydrozoans, a class of marine animal belong to the phylum Cnidaria.” Just as I had suspected, sigh…

More digging turned up an entire website dedicated to siphonophores. This site went on to say the Cnidaria is a group of animals that includes corals, hydroids and true jellyfish. Suspicion confirmed.

Here I show a Zendala on the cover of Haeckel’s Art Forms from the Abyss with the inspiration for this pattern surrounding my tile.

The cover of Haeckel’s book with Jody’s beautiful Zendala delicately “outlined” by Haeckel’s illustration of the inspiration for Jody’s Anthem tangle.

The website above states that some of these creatures are the longest in the world and can be as long as 40 meters.

Just one more reason to stay on land.”

🙂

Ernest Haeckel, a gentleman with a wide range of intellectual gifts, was born in Potsdam, Germany (Prussia at the time). According to Wikipedia,

Haeckel was a biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist, and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including anthropogeny, ecology, phylum, phylogeny, and Protista.

I think many of us today know of Haeckel for his astonishingly intricate and beautiful illustrations of animals and sea creatures. When I became a CZT way back when in 2011, my sweetie Robert gifted me with Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature. IMHO, the works in that book alone could well have been a lifetime’s output for most “ordinary folk”. And its study shows that Haeckel’s influence on Maria’s work is unmistakable.

Jody’s Anthem is rich with possibilities however you choose to tangle it. Her steps and examples demonstrate Anthem, as she notes, as a free-form crystal-like structure. Because my brain just HAS to put things in order, for my example I used a (non random) circular/radiating formation.

Jody illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Anthem below where she features it in two gorgeous tiles with the Zentangle-originals Onamato, Diva Dance, and Rain. Jody’s shading of Anthem on her tiles is perfectly Haeckel-like.

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. “Always let your conscience be your guide.” ~ Jiminy Cricket

Here is an enlarged view of Haeckel’s cover illustration with Jody’s Zendala layered on top.

Jody’s Zendala is so beautiful, it deserves a shining moment of its own apart from the book cover:

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 comment helps motivate them to continue to share!

Check out the tag jodyg for more of Jody’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

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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.
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