How to draw WHATTHEWELL

Happy Friday everyone!

As is often the case our Friday tangle is a little more challenging than the ones we explored earlier in the week. They’re not difficult, they do require your total focus and it’s fun to give the old brain a good workout 🙂

NY CZT Jody Genovese’s WhatTheWell tangle is a bit like that.

Jody’s inspiration for WhatTheWell was Shoshi’s Y-Ful Power. “I wondered if I could do something like it with a square grid and started playing.” In this Bijou tile example Jody adds Mooka shoots for embellishments.

Jody’s explorations led her to a dot grid as the basis for WhatTheWell.

Jody illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing WhatTheWell below where she includes a variety of Zentangle® tiles – square, Phi, and Bijou – to showcase her lovely tangle and some beautiful ways to embellish it including the enlarged versions above. She even includes a “wonkier grid example too (see below). This way will be more freeing.”

An enlarged view of Jody’s wonky grid version:

I experimented with this tangle for quite a while and I was having issues getting the “legs” in Step 2 and 3 to end up in the right place and long and consistent enough to make the “joins” neatly in Step 4.

In the end I discovered an easier way – for me – to tangle WhatTheWell. After Step 1’s orbs, I skipped to Step 4 and added the sets of alternating “brackets” (or, in Shoshi-speak, eyebrows) in the spaces between the orbs. Then adding the “legs” is a piece of cake because you have a target to land on, I’ve penciled some of them in here in this rough sketch to demonstrate what I mean. Next you would turn the tile and add the legs in the other direction before proceeding to the auras 🙂

Here’s the thing about the sets of brackets: they need to be long enough and have enough space between them to allow the “legs” to land there AND to allow space for Step 5’s auras to fit there as well. The auras in my main example are a little tight and some aren’t even there 🙂 I decided I’d better stop before it became one big black blob. A larger scale would have been useful.

So there you have it, two ways to tangle WhatTheWell, I know you’ll have fun exploring it this weekend!

Have a great one and we’ll see you back here again on Monday …

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