How to draw KERN

Hello again my tangling friends and welcome back for another week of fresh tangle inspiration.

Our easy texture tangle is named Kern and it’s from Texas CZT Suzanne McNeill who now has about 100 tangles on the site!

Suzanne’s Kern is from Zentangle 10: Dimensional Projects, one of the booklets in her Zentangle®-related series.

From the publisher’s description of Zentangle 10:

The design possibilities of Zentangle extend in many dimensions! Combine the art forms of paper crafts and tangling to create memorable 3D keepsakes and one-of-a-kind gifts for every season. Inside you’ll discover wonderful paper projects for booklets, greeting cards, angels, ornaments, beads, boxes, accordion folds, and more.

The term kern has several meanings, the most common is from typesetting and typography and refers to finely adjusting the spacing between letters in proportional fonts for best visual appeal. It can also be a surname “found in German, Yiddish, Jewish (Ashkenazic), and Dutch”. And it’s another word for grain (kernel) and this seems to fit with our tangle Kern.

Kern is an easy tangle formed on a combination grid of straight baselines and tiny orbs. It’s quite adaptable and fun to tangle and creates a lovely texture on your tiles. Adjusting the line spacing (or making them wonky and curved) and dot spacing affects the size and shape of the Kern pattern. Suzanne’s tangles do not include shading but to add a little spice, this can be shaded in a variety of ways and also inked in wherever your creative pattern muse takes you.

Suzanne illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Kern below. Fox Chapel Publishing (who hold the copyright) and Suzanne have graciously given me permission to post her copyright-protected images on TanglePatterns for your reference.

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

As you enjoy any of the tangles on the site, please leave a comment of thanks and encouragement to show the artists you appreciate them for sharing their creativity to inspire yours. Your thanks helps motivate them to continue to share! And please share a link to your favorite tangles on social media. Thanks!

Check out the tag suzannem for more of Suzanne’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 ?
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7. How to submit your pattern deconstruction to TanglePatterns
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