How to draw AZTOO

Greetings y’all and welcome to the first day of Fall 2025 (or Spring for those of us in the Southern Hemisphere) 🙂

Wherever you are, it’s lovely to have your company for exploring more sweet new tangles.

Today’s Aztoo ribbon-style tangle is another to add to CZT Angie Gittles’s collection of southwest pottery-inspired tangles. Aztoo joins Hokam, Farrow and Tam in our resource. And Angie has lots more tangles to explore so remember to check them all out.

Angie introduces her Aztoo tangle,

Aztoo was first inspired by an Aztec Tribal Tattoo I viewed online, but the pattern is also found on Southwest pottery. I don’t know who used it first.

Aztoo can be used multiple ways – and can be taken off the border. You can leave it plain or fill each section with your favorite embellishments.

For my Aztoo example I used Angie’s original version and added a bit of shading and ink but her steps show several other ways to play with it, all with interesting results.

Angie illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Aztoo below, “The tile shows the staggered version along with the tangle Tam.” You’ll notice in Angie’s tile that for a variation she draws single lines in Step 1 insead of a pair and then adds the inner aura stroke after Step 2. Makes a nice layered look with a bit more dimension.

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

Here Angie shows the full version of Aztoo and two suggestions for variations:

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Check out the tag angieg for more of Angie’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

Shana Tova to all our Jewish friends!

Sunset tonight marks the beginning of the two-day Jewish New Year celebration of Rosh Hashanah. Best wishes for a sweet new year.

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." 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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