How to draw DDD

Hi everyone, lovely to see you again 🙂

Today’s DDD tangle is from Maryland CZT Barbara Duel Johnson and it’s her fourth on the site.

I love spiral-based tangles even if my wonky thumb (ancient sprain injury) wants to zig and zag instead of making smooth curves. I even came up with a spiral tangle myself a number of years ago and named it Rosé as part of my “wine series”.

If you fancy researching spirals it’s a deep and fascinating rabbit hole.

The spiral motif is a link to nature, representing the ever changing seasons. It represents the cycle of life; birth, growth, death, and re-incarnation. … The spiral represents evolution and growth of the spirit. It is a symbol of change and development.

A couple of years ago we looked at the history of spirals when exploring the tangle Switching. I take the liberty of reproducing some of that here today:

Spirals have been around for millennia. They appear in art and architecture and of course in nature, on every continent in the world as detailed under the “As a symbol” heading on the Wikipedia entry:

A spiral like form has been found in Mezine, Ukraine, as part of a decorative object dated to 10,000 BC.

The spiral and triple spiral motif is a Neolithic symbol in Europe (Megalithic Temples of Malta).

The Celtic symbol the triple spiral is in fact a pre-Celtic symbol. It is carved into the rock of a stone lozenge near the main entrance of the prehistoric Newgrange monument in County Meath, Ireland. Newgrange was built around 3200 BCE predating the Celts and the triple spirals were carved at least 2,500 years before the Celts reached Ireland but has long since been incorporated into Celtic culture.

The triskelion symbol, consisting of three interlocked spirals or three bent human legs, appears in many early cultures, including Mycenaean vessels, on coinage in Lycia, on staters of Pamphylia (at Aspendos, 370–333 BC) and Pisidia, as well as on the heraldic emblem on warriors’ shields depicted on Greek pottery.

Spirals can be found throughout pre-Columbian art in Latin and Central America. …

Spiral shapes, including the swastika, triskele, etc., have often been interpreted as solar symbols. Roof tiles dating back to the Tang Dynasty with this symbol have been found west of the ancient city of Chang’an (modern-day Xi’an).

… The spiral is also found in structures as small as the double helix of DNA and as large as a galaxy.

For those inclined to peek into this rabbit hole, Wikipedia offers some mind-bending mathematics related to spirals and includes example images of the “most important sorts of two-dimensional spiral”.

• Archimedean spiral
• hyperbolic spiral
• Fermat’s spiral
• lituus
• logarithmic spiral
• Cornu spiral
• the spiral of Theodorus, and
• Fibonacci Spiral (golden spiral)

In our Zentangle world, aka the Tangleverse, Australian CZT Michele Beauchamp has shared a great tutorial called It’s Spiralicious on how to use a spiral for a string.

Or a spiral can simply be part of a fun tangle and we have plenty of them on the site 🙂

Barbara writes,

I was playing with my tangle, Deesie, and this just came to me.

I could see what I wanted, but it took me a while to formulate the steps.

Barbara illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing DDD below. She also shows several cool ways to embellish her tangle and how it can be used as a ribbon-style version as well as in a reticulum/grid. Remember to turn your tile for Steps 3 and 4 so your hand is always in the same comfortable position.

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 side note: 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. “We must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.” ~ Albus Dumbledore

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Check out the tag barbaraj for more of Barbara’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

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.
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 ?
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