How to draw ULCI

Hello there and welcome back!

Today’s tangle could possibly be a bit of a challenging one, but you know what we say: “Anything is possible, one stroke at a time.™” 🙂

Belgian CZT Ria Matheussen’s Ulci is another tangle rediscovered in a recent visit through the tangle submission archives. Ria now has over 40! tangles on the site and she always finds cool inspiration for her contributions.

She shares the story of her search for and naming of Ulci:

A while ago, I saw the famous series: Medici, Masters of Florence with Dustin Hoffman in one of the leading roles. In this interesting series you’ll see a lot of fantastic Renaissance art in Tuscany.  After watching the series, I thought immediately it would be great to find a pattern of this inspiring, innovative period and began to search …

Finally I have found a picture of an Italian flooring in an ancient Palazzo wine cellar.

Montepulciano is a very good Italian wine and with some letters of this word I formed the name Ulci (pronounced as Oolchee).

Ria gives us detailed guidance for tangling Ulci:

This one is not difficult but asks concentration and must be carefully drawn: in the second step, you have to draw the circles and the distances between them exactly equal to get the same result as on the floor.

In the third step, I used dots to make it easier to go further in the fourth step.

Please pay attention in this fourth step that the lowest stroke starts on the dot in the middle of the circle. The other stripe goes parallel.

Then you see already the tiny little spaces that are going to be little squares in the last step. It is important not to draw these strokes too long!

In the fifth step, you’ ll see that everything fits together. I needed a little time to practice but once I understood, I saw the logic in this pattern.

Ria illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Ulci below. She notes, “I have made two variations but as usual, many other options are possible, in the circles as well as in the strokes. When you draw only one row, you can use Ulci also as a ribbon but I like this pattern the most as a background or in combinations with others. Also a monotangle can be nice and even one big Ulci gives a special string to fill…”

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

Linda’s notes: When considering submissions for publishing on TanglePatterns, as a CZT I’m always mindful of Maria’s philosophy for Zentangle® that tangles must provide a high degree of success for tanglers of all ages. If it’s too complex or difficult, it becomes “a thing to draw” which is not the Zentangle Method™. So when I look at a potential tangle I ask myself: could a 6-year-old do this? If the answer is yes, then we go from there. I have to admit that this tangle gave me the yips and it might not exactly meet those standards but we’re going with it in any case.

FWIW … After several attempts following Ria’s steps, I discovered another way to reach the same destination. I studied Ria’s examples and noticed how the little black diamond shapes stood out. So I tackled Ulci another way as shown below. After adding the evenly spaced circles (Steps 1-2 above), I added pen dots representing the points of where the diamond shapes fell between them as shown on the left tile below. Then I methodically connected the midpoint of the right side of each circle down through the diamond’s dots to complete the top right side of the diamond shape, as shown by the red strokes on the right below. Next I added the strokes shown in blue parallel to them on the left side’s midpoint of each circle, completing the left side of each diamond shape. From there it’s a matter of using the same method to connect the top and bottom of the circles to complete the remaining two sides of each diamond shape. Tidying up strokes and adding shading and/or variations complete the tangle.

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 riam for more of Ria’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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