How to draw ALEXA

Greetings y’all.

Before we get to today’s tangle, I wanted to check to see if you’ve read Zentangle® co-founder Maria Thomas’s post on their blog yesterday?

Maria shares her inspiring story (and progress on a beautiful Opus tile) about how tangling is helping her recover from nerve damage to her (dominant) right hand and arm, a true testament to Zentangle’s motto of Anything is possible one stroke at a time™. BTW – you can read a variety of similarly inspiring stories shared here on TanglePatterns of how Zentangle has changed lives. You’ll find them by clicking on the STORIES tab in the pink alphabetic tangle menu bar.

Of course we send our prayers and well wishes to Maria for her continuing recovery and thanks for inspiring us by sharing her journey with us.

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Today we have a cool and versatile tangle from German CZT Simone Menzel. Alexa is Simone’s seventh fun tangle on the site.

Simone tells us how she discovered this one and just “had” to deconstruct it:

Recently I saw a dress in a small fashion catalog – I immediately fell in love with it and the patterns on the material.

I could not stop trying to deconstruct the pattern and finally I found a very easy way! I gave the pattern its name: Alexa – that’s the name of the dress in the catalogue.

It can be used as a tangle as well as a string. It has lots of possibilities …

Alexa is another of our tangles composed of rice-shapes – or seeds as Simone notes – always pleasing to tangle. One could say Alexa brings organization to the plant-like growth of CZT Mimi Lempart’s Spangle.

Simone illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Alexa here in German on her blog as well as below for your convenience. Her steps include three beautiful ZIA tiles demonstrating her tangle’s versatility.

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 simonem for more of Simone’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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