How to draw BRAZEN

Hello my friends, welcome back and thanks for keeping me company once again 🙂

Some of us are enjoying a long Federal holiday weekend to honor the late Nobel-prize winning visionary Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. today.

Whether or not you have the day off, I think you’ll find California CZT Jodi Christiansen’s Brazen a fun and super easy tangle to explore. As Jodi notes, it adds drama to your Zentangle® tiles with little effort.

Jodi explains how she came up with the name Brazen,

I looked through all the ribbon tangles to make sure it is actually new because it’s so dang simple I can’t believe I haven’t seen it before. I found “Zedbra”, but that really isn’t similar.

In fact, The tangle name is an anagram of zebra plus a nod to this very simple pattern hiding in plain sight for all these years.

 I love the drama it adds to a tile – lots of contrast with little effort.

It’s interesting how changing the shape of the peppering, for instance the triangles Jodi used in her ZIA example below, and/or the angles of the vertical strokes, creates a different effect in Brazen. Shading makes a big impact too.

Jodi illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Brazen below and features it in two tiles. “The first example tile includes Safflower and a variation of Drawings. The second features Flux, orbs, and wonky Hollibaugh.”

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 jodic for more of Jodi’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

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Like some help with shading your Zentangles?

It's fun and easy — forget about traditional "art rules" for shading, this is Zentangle and those rules do not apply!

As we are coached in the chapter on Shading in the Zentangle PRIMER Vol 1, "Ignore the light source ... in Zentangle shading we do not consider the type or direction of the light source. ... More often, shading is a component of the tangle itself that we use to play with dimension, emphasis, and contrast."

Everything you need to know is here in two free tutorials on TanglePatterns.

1. TanglePatterns Shading Mini Clinic, Part 1 by CZT Marizaan van Beek, and
2. TanglePatterns Shading Mini Clinic, Part 2 by CZT Sandy Bartholomew

You can always locate these and many other helpful tutorials by visiting the TUTORIALS tab on the pink alphabetic tangle menu bar as shown here:

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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
8. For lots of great FREE tutorials on TanglePatterns, click on the TUTORIALS link in the pink alphabetic menu bar below the tangle images at the top of any page.
9. Strings! Have we got STRINGS! Click on the STRINGS link in the pink alphabetic menu bar below the tangle images at the top of any page for 250 different (free) Zentangle-starters. More than enough for any lifetime!
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11. If you have questions about the TanglePatterns.com TANGLE GUIDE, visit the BOOK REVIEWS tab on the top menu bar of any page on the site for COMPLETE details!

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