How to draw FLAMETA

Hi everyone! Welcome back.

Recently I was going through my tangle archives looking for a specific submission and in the process Taiwan CZT Hsin-Ya Hsu’s Flameta tangle caught my attention.

Flameta was submitted by Hsin-Ya’s Mom, CZT Damy Teng. Both mother and daughter have many excellent tangles on the site you’ll want to check out.

Damy writes that Flameta was inspired by “the flame pattern of Turkish Floating EBRU“. The tangle name comes from a combination of Flame+tattoo=Flameta.

Ebru is the ancient Turkish art of paper marbling by floating pigments and dyes on a liquid surface then creating designs with various techniques. The masters who study this “aqueous art” learn many different techniques to create a variety of beautiful marbled patterns, including the flame pattern Damy refers to.

Damy explains,

According to the principle of floating dyeing: a pattern is produced when the paint is scraped back and forth, so the color will be symmetrical.

A little about marbled paper:

Marbled paper is the art of floating pigments and dyes on water, and transferring those patterns onto paper. The marbling artist uses the mobility of the water and suspended pigments to create free form shapes or combed patterns. The marbling artist can transfer patterns onto the same paper more than once, thus layering and deepening the marbled pattern.

Not only is marbling an old art, but it is also widespread. While the Suminagashi method of marbling was developing in Japan, a similar but separate form of marbling, called Ebru, was developing in Turkey. …

In the Middle Ages in Turkey, a form of marbled paper called Ebru was developing. Ebru means “Cloud art.” Ebru frequently uses brighter pigments than the inks involved in Suminagashi. Ebru artists also used sticks or combs to drag the pigments in the water. This allows the artist to make a wide variety of patterns, including swirls and criss-crosses.

This site demonstrates some of the beautiful classical Ebru designs and explains generally how they are made. Warning, Ebru is a fascinating rabbit hole!

Damy describes how to tangle Flameta,

The lines are drawn back and forth with slightly curved S-curves, and the spacing can be large or small.

To draw this picture well, the focus is on the slope, it is recommended to draw about 60 degrees.

The S-curve sections are then filled with black and grayscale (this is not a shading~) The grayscale can also have different shades. The black and gray scales should be symmetrical to look good.

After drawing, it looks a bit like feather pattern.

Some people can draw this kind of very streamlined artwork handily,

Some people are not very fluent, but it does not matter, more practice will make you beautiful!

At this point I fall into the “not very fluent” department but I’m aiming for getting more beautiful 🙂

Hsin-Ya illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Flameta below and she includes a simple, striking monotangle featuring her tangle.

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

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Check out the tag hsinyah for more of Hsin-Ya’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

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