Greetings my tangling friends!
Today’s Nuba tangle is from Texas CZT Laura Dyson and it’s her second on the site. Earlier this year we explored her fun free-form Figuri tangle.
Laura introduces her tangle,
I realized that many tanglers spend a good bit of time accepting orbs that aren’t perfect circles and lines that aren’t exactly straight and we celebrate the lack of precision with gratitude. I think Squares don’t get that grace with our desire to create good balanced squares.
I found the practice of turning the tile very helpful in drawing my squares as I wanted them to be. They turned out less as kite shaped diamonds when I turned the paper 90 degrees.
With a bit of practice in drawing squares with the tile turning so the lines “line up” I was able to make the rows for Nuba to look more symmetric.
Here Laura uses Nuba as a string or reticula, “Also included on it are SeedwayzXtra by CZT Carla Jooren, Ample by CZT Katie Crommett and Emingle by ZHQ.”
In her introduction Laura offers useful tips for forming the squares/diamonds creating the base for Nuba, and it’s amazing how our minds can work in different ways to find solutions and deconstructions. I found that putting down a dot grid for the even-sided “diamond” shapes (visualize using Step 2) worked the best for me. There are usually more ways to get to the same end result and often for me half the fun of playing with tangles is solving the puzzle of figuring out another way of reaching the same destination.
Laura illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Nuba below and she features it in a tile with the Zentangle®-original Cubine.
![How to draw the Zentangle pattern Nuba, tangle and deconstruction by Laura Dyson. Image copyright the artist and used with permission, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. How to draw the Zentangle pattern Nuba, tangle and deconstruction by Laura Dyson. Image copyright the artist and used with permission, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.](https://tanglepatterns.com/images/nuba-steps-laura-dyson.jpg)
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 laurad for more of Laura’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.
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- 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.
- "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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I always struggle with squares and diamonds and I like how this tangle is very playful with how to get the final step. Took me a few wonky tries which is much of the fun of working with Zentangle as an artistic process! Thank you for sharing <3
Love the creativity in this tangle! It looks like fun (I have not had time to try it out yet). Thank you so much for sharing!