How to draw U-NICO

Hello there friends and welcome to another week of fun Zentangle® tangles to explore!

Today’s easy U-nico tangle is from Japanese CZT Emiko Adachi and it’s her first on the site.

U-nico shares DNA with several tangles on the site, the ones immediately popping to mind include the Zentangle-original Scena, and JJ LaBarbera’s Verve which are both free-form tangles where Emiko’s is an “orderly” grid-based version for those of us (including me!!) who appreciate some structure. 🙂

Emiko is from Yokohama, Japan. Here she tells us about her tangle,

I have always liked S-curves. So I have enjoyed drawing this pattern using S-curves … One day I was having lunch with my CZT friends, when one of them said, looking at my cellphone on the table, “I’ve never seen this before.”  That afternoon, we drew it together and enjoyed the mosaic. We had a great time chatting and tangling.

As for its tangle name, I named it U-nico (pronouncing “You Nico”) because Nico is an onomatopoeia, or a mimetic word, for smile in Japanese. I want to make everyone smile with this tangle pattern.

U-nico is a repetition of S-curves in grids. By shading (and highlighting), it becomes three dimensional and looks dynamic.

Emiko illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing U-nico below where she features it in a simple monotangle where she rotates the fragment, noting “You can enjoy different meta patterns by changing the direction of the first S’s in adjacent grids.

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Check out the tag emikoa for more of Emiko’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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