Greetings my friends and welcome back, good to see you again 🙂
Our super easy Monday tangle is another from Texas CZT Suzanne McNeill.
Her bold, dramatic Board Game comes from her Zen Mandalas booklet. The full title is Zen Mandalas: Sacred Circles Inspired by Zentangle (Design Originals): 60 Creative and Meditative Tangles for Focus, Relaxation, and Inspiration, Plus Tangling, Shading, and Coloring Advice & Examples.
As I wrote on the BOOK REVIEWS > ZEN MANDALAS page when it was first released in 2011:
Suzanne McNeill did a superb job of creating a mini-course in all you could want to know about mandalas. Her illustrations along with those of CZTs Margaret Bremner and Carole Ohl are beautiful and inspiring. I learned so much about mandalas and their symbolism and meanings from this book and I’m totally inspired to create some of my own.
My review of Zen Mandalas gives a pretty detailed outline of the contents and I highly recommend checking it out. It’s a good one to have in your collection or gift a loved one or friend.
While Suzanne’s and my Board Game examples are in the traditional Zentangle® black and white, when you get going with this one I think you’ll be contemplating all sorts of colorful ZIA opportunities as I definitely was.
Suzanne illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Board Game below. Simple tangles are always the best! BTW, when you get to Step 2, keep in mind Maria’s advice that you can draw those diagonals (or X’s) through the squares, “one square at a time”. It’s easier to do and the result is more relaxed than you might get otherwise.

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 suzannem for more of Suzanne’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.
Related Links
- 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.
- What is a Zentangle? — if you are new to the Zentangle Method, start here for the fundamentals.
- Zentangle terminology — a glossary of terms used in this art form.
- 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.
- 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." 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?
- How to submit your pattern deconstruction to TanglePatterns
- 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.
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