How to draw XOXO

Happy Friday, y’all.

And a very Happy Father’s Day weekend to all the great Dads in the world and especially to those now gone but always in our hearts.

With that in mind Xoxo (pronounced Zozo) is a perfect tangle for today: “Xoxo when written in a card or letter symbolises hugs and kisses.”

Xoxo is from UK CZT Lucy Farran and it’s her 7th tangle on the site.

Xoxo will no doubt look familiar because it’s a tangleation of several Zentangle®-originals, as Lucy explains …

The tangle ‘Xoxo’ was created when I was leafing through the Zentangle Primer and spotted a meta-pattern made with a Tripoli fragment.

This is the inspirational image, marked up with this meta-pattern.

I started playing around with how to create this meta-pattern as a tangle in its own right and realised it was like Well without the grid.

I kept playing and discovered that it was also like Huggins, but constructed with just two orbs at opposite corners and two dots.

I also discovered that drawing it was like drawing Cadent overlapping itself.

Like Cadent it is constructed with orbs and ‘S’ strokes, and I added a little rounding in the intersections.

This tangle really has great tangle ancestry! I have illustrated the tangle’s evolution in this image:

It is similar to other tangles other than the ones named, but I think the construction is different enough to make it unique. It is a tangle like Huggins and Cadent that can be filled with other tangles or fragments.

The name ‘Xoxo’ comes from the fact that is made of lots of X’s and O’s and that it developed from the tangle Huggins.

Lucy illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Xoxo below where she includes steps for two random variations as well as a tile and two Zendalas featuring her tangle. “The grey tile shows the standard version. The tan and white Zendala tiles show two Crazy (random) versions of it.”

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 lucyf for more of Lucy’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

Related Links

1. Looking for tangles by Artist or Type? For details visit the ABOUT > HOW TO FIND TANGLES BY ARTIST OR TYPE page on the top menu bar of any page on the site.
2. What is a Zentangle? — if you are new to the Zentangle Method, start here for the fundamentals.
3. Zentangle terminology — a glossary of terms used in this art form.
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.
   • Un motif n’est pas toujours un tangle — Qu’est-ce qu’un tangle ?
   • Un diseño no es siempre un tangle — ¿Qué es un tangle?
7. How to submit your pattern deconstruction to TanglePatterns
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