How to draw FLISH

Friday greetings, y’all!

Our tangle for today is an easy grid-based one with lots of options to exercise your creativity with embellishments.

Flish is from New Jersey CZT Mimi Topping and it’s her first on the site.

Mimi shares two monotangle ZIAs featuring Flish, This first is on a Renaissance Tan Zentangle® tile.

Mimi introduces herself and explains her inspiration for Flish:

I’m a CZT from class number nine. Covid has given me more time to explore my craft and I’m sharing my latest creation.

I was trying to create a different pattern and stumbled upon “flish”.

It made me think of flying fish at my mom’s back-yard pond in St. Augustine, FL.

{Aside: Wow, I can’t believe it’s already been six years since Robert and I moved back to South Florida from St. Augustine. It was too cold up there for us, and we missed the palm trees 🙂 }

So, what do we know about flying fish?

The Exocoetidae are a family of marine fish in the order Beloniformes class Actinopterygii, known colloquially as flying fish or flying cod. About 64 species are grouped in seven to nine genera.

While they cannot fly in the same way a bird does, flying fish can make powerful, self-propelled leaps out of the water where their long wing-like fins enable gliding for considerable distances above the water’s surface. The main reason for this behavior is thought to be to escape from predators.

Barbados is known as “the land of the flying fish”, and the fish is one of the national symbols of the country. The Exocet missile is named after them, as variants are launched from underwater, and take a low trajectory, skimming the surface, before striking their targets.

The oldest known fossil of a flying or gliding fish, Potanichthys xingyiensis, dates back to the Middle Triassic, 235–242 million years ago. However, this fossil is not related to modern flying fish, which evolved independently about 66 million years ago.

… Flying fish live in all of the oceans, particularly in tropical and warm subtropical waters.

… The flights of flying fish are typically around 50 m (160 ft), though they can use updrafts at the leading edge of waves to cover distances up to 400 m (1,300 ft). They can travel at speeds of more than 70 km/h (43 mph). Maximum altitude is 6 m (20 ft) above the surface of the sea.

That’s a lot more than I did before! To see what flying fish look like, check out the images on this Google search.

Mimi’s second ZIA demonstrates Flish as a ribbon-style tangle. And just as a reminder, most grid-based tangles make great ribbons or borders …

For my example of Flish I wanted to keep it to Zentangle’s non-objective aspect, and so it wasn’t a literal “fish” looking tangle I left out the “eyes”, as did Mimi in her two ZIAs above.

Mimi illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Flish below and she includes several examples of ways to vary and embellish her tangle. You can also find Mimi here on her website.

Image copyright the artist and used with permission, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. These images are for your personal offline reference only. Please feel free to refer to the images to recreate this tangle in your personal Zentangles and ZIAs. However the artist and TanglePatterns.com reserve all rights to the images and they must not be publicly pinned, altered, reproduced or republished. Thank you for respecting these rights. For more information, click on the image for a discussion entitled “Artists for Respect” by several prominent artists. “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! And please share a link to your favorite tangles on social media. Thanks!

Check out the tag mimit for more of Mimi’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

That’s it for the first week of August, see you again next week for more tangling delights!

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.
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