How to draw EERIC

Greetings y’all! A very Happy Canadian Thanksgiving and also Indigenous Peoples’ Day! So glad to see you again …

Today’s Eeric tangle is appropriately enough from a Canadian CZT. Jenn Brayton became certified at CZT36 and Eeric is her first tangle on the site.

Eeric shares DNA with quite a few spiral tangles on the site starting with, of course, the Zentangle®-original Marasu. Included in the family are Andrea (“Cookie”) Shuman’s Snaylz Trayl, CZT Tina Hunziker’s Hamail, Jenna Black’s Trisnail, CZT Lin Chu’s Rashell, and a couple of CZT Suzanne McNeill’s tangles. (Not a tangle, but there’s also CZT Michele Beauchamp’s great tutorial It’s Spiralicious – A Zentangle Spiral Guide.) Of course you can find all of these using the tag spiral. (Note: for instructions on how to do that visit the ABOUT > HOW TO FIND TANGLES BY ARTIST OR TYPE page on the top menu bar of any page on the site.)

What makes Eeric different is Jenn’s clever way of composing the edges of the spiral, which we’ll get to in a mo …

Jenn introduces herself:

I left a successful career as an associate professor in Sociology in downtown Toronto in December 2017 to move to Perth, Ontario, where I bought my first home and 50 acres of forest. I spent 2018 and 2019 transitioning to Perth and rural life and being a homeowner, with the goal of rejoining the world and the Perth community in 2020.

In early January 2020 I was visiting my sister-in-law and while exploring her favourite art store, she walked up to me and placed a Zentangle® book in my hands, and simply said, “This is YOU. And it’s a gift from me.” I read the book that evening, and the next morning I was on the Zentangle site placing my first order for tiles and tools and already deep into following the 8 step process and creating tiles.

I thought Zentangle would be the perfect way for me to take classes with CZTs and make new local friends in 2020, and then the world changed and so did my goals. Instead, I would up committing to my own Zentangle studies full time at home using books and videos [and TanglePatterns.com, I imagine], and when the offering for CZT 36 training moved online, I joined 500 other students in the first virtual classroom with Maria and Rick and the Zentangle HQ family in November 2020.

Since then I have even made one local CZT friend and we’ve met up in person to tangle! I have digitally attended CZT conferences, taken several Zoom workshops, and registered for ZenAgain 2021. This deep in the woods I have 1 bar cell reception on sunny days, and a satellite internet that is capped and slow (think 1990s dial up!) so joining the Zentangle community online for me has technical challenges, but it’s utterly worth it. Thanks to social media I was able to sign up for the Tangle ON Niagara conference taking place later this month in person, and I’m part of a group of 18 CZTs tangling safely together for 4 days – and this is my first foray outside Perth since January 2020! I am bringing my eeric journal with me 🙂

Jenn explains how her Eeric tangle came to be …

I created Eeric as a gift to my mother who lost her younger brother Eric in August 2021 to cancer. I have not seen my parents since Thanksgiving in 2019 and they are driving from our tiny community of Sandy Cove, Nova Scotia (pop. 64) to rural Perth [13 hr 42 min (1,120.8 km)] so that we can finally be together again in person this Thanksgiving 2021, to which I am truly thankful. I’ll be showing her the tangle, and the journal I have created where I display all my completed art using Eeric.

I drew inspiration from the many shells I have around my home that I have gathered in Sandy Cove and places where I have travelled globally. I started playing with this tangle in July during the heatwave when I was missing my family and the cool ocean breezes. When Eric passed away in August, I thought it fitting to name the tangle after him. My mum and uncle grew up in Sandy Cove and were incredibly close, talking every morning on the phone and laughing.

Tips – I keep finding new ways to explore Eeric! I’ve used it as a monotangle, tangled inside Eeric, played with it as a string, combined it with other tangles, played with different tile types and colours, changed the size and shape of the spiral, the length and curves of the lines, played with line colours and thickness, shading, and adding colours … there’s always something new when I look at Eeric and think what if I tried this and put my pen to paper.

Personal aside: Eeric has special meaning to me because my beloved Dad’s name was Eric, he was a great guy and though now gone for 18 years we all still miss him keenly.

Jenn illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Eeric below and she includes a variety of tiles showing a few of the endless ways to fill and embellish this versatile spiral tangle. One might say Printemps meets Fescu?

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. (Small sidenote, if you look at the legalese in Pinterest, you are legally responsible for obtaining permission to post every photo that gets ‘Pinned’. Giving credit or sharing the source link doesn’t count.) 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

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Check out the tag jennb for more of Jenn’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
8. For lots of great FREE tutorials on TanglePatterns, click on the TUTORIALS link in the pink alphabetic menu bar below the tangle images at the top of any page.
9. Strings! Have we got STRINGS! Click on the STRINGS link in the pink alphabetic menu bar below the tangle images at the top of any page for 250 different (free) Zentangle-starters. More than enough for any lifetime!
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11. If you have questions about the TanglePatterns.com TANGLE GUIDE, visit the BOOK REVIEWS tab on the top menu bar of any page on the site for COMPLETE details!

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