How to draw NUMANCIA

Hello again and welcome!

Our Friday tangle is from Spanish CZT Carmen Muñiz Real, Numancia is her sixth tangle on the site.

Carmen introduces Numancia:

This pattern was born during a visit to the Numantine Museum in Soria, Spain.

While walking through the museum I became fascinated by the Roman mosaics, and especially by the way very simple geometric fragments could generate complex and beautiful structures through repetition and rotation.

I started sketching some of those shapes in my notebook during the visit and later, back in my studio, those ideas slowly evolved into this tangle.

The name “Numancia” also has a special meaning here in Spain, connected with perseverance, resistance and inner strength. Somehow I felt those ideas were also present during the creative process itself while developing the pattern.

What I enjoyed most while creating it was discovering how an apparently simple structure could continue growing organically, almost like a quiet conversation between repetition and variation.

In addition, Numancia can also be understood as a fragment inside a square. Depending on the direction in which it is rotated and repeated, it creates a composition similar to the original mosaics. However, if the pattern is always maintained in the same orientation, it generates a completely different structure. That is why it also works very well as a fragment or repetitive module for creating other compositions.

So I have a confession. I found Numancia difficult for me to tangle without the use of grid lines, I often struggle with judging proportion. And as Zentangle patterns never begin with pencil planning, I decided to use a regular inked grid for my example. In hindsight I discovered another way to go would be to use this “scalloped” grid I’ve highlighted in Carmen’s bottom example in the above image.

We’re all wired differently and when you analyze the final result of many tangles, you’ll often find there’s more than one way to deconstruct them if it makes life easier for your particular wiring ;-).

Carmen illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Numancia below and her tile shows it in a ribbon-style version.

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. “Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.” ~ Franz Kafka

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Check out the tag carmenmr for more of Carmen’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." 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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