How to draw TOMMY

Hi all, so great to see you again! Let’s learn and explore more fun new tangles together.

Monday’s easy ribbon-style Tommy is from Maryland CZT Barbara Duel Johnson. It’s her seventh on the site, her most recent was another ribbon-style tangle, Heart Ribbon.

Tommy is a perfect tangle for practicing your auras. We have another excellent related resource on the site: a tutorial exploring the creative possibilities of auras as explained by Zentangle® founders Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. Useful for newbies but also as a refresher for the rest of us …

“In Zentangle we frequently use the term aura, which is one of six tangle-enhancing techniques, along with dewdrop, perfs, rounding, shading and sparkle.”

The Betweed or Arukas-like woven effect makes Tommy an eye-catching addition to our repertoire.

It would also be fun to explore Tommy by varying it with other initial shapes such as circles as well as seeing what it would look like with auras of varying widths.

Barbara illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Tommy below.

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. 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 barbaraj for more of Barbara’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?
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