How to draw KUSHI

Hello again and happy Friday!

This Columbus Day long weekend we also wish a very Happy Thanksgiving to all our Canadian friends and rellies.

As I’ve shared in the past, since Robert and I moved from Toronto, Canada to the USA (Pittsburgh PA 1980 then Fort Lauderdale FL 1984) we’ve always celebrated two Thanksgivings. As dual citizens, it’s a fine tradition of ours — but then who needs an excuse for gratitude and celebration with great wine and fabulous dining? 🙂

Today’s elegant Kushi tangle is from Japanese CZT Midori Furuhashi. We first learned Midori’s touching story about how Zentangle® changed her life when we explored her tangle Hirari.

You might recall that in addition to being a CZT, Midori is also known for her paintings of our furry feline friends. Her illustrated French book “Mistigri au Japon” was published in 2016.

Midori introduces Kushi and explains how she composed its name:

Kushi is made with V & J shapes. And just continuing to add auras. Fun to add shading.

If you know Japanese Hiragana characters, the V and J shapes are similar to (laying) Ku and (mirror) Shi Hiragana shape.

Ku means 9, Shi means 4. And the day when I made this tangle was September 4th. So, I named this tangle Kushi (means 9 & 4).

If you draw it in a circle, it will be so gorgeous.

Kushi could be considered a more intricate version of Ksenija Vojisavljevic’s All About V from so very long ago or Kerri Love’s more recent Be Vee, but each is constructed quite differently.

Midori illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Kushi below and she also posted it on her blog in Japanese. She includes a lovely monotangle with Kushi shown as a ribbon-style tangle and her gorgeous example “in the round”.

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 midorif for more of Midori’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

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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.
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