How to draw GIFT

Here’s a sweet little Friday tangle inspiration to carry into your weekend. A gift, one could say 🙂

Today California CZT Yoko Kageyama shares her lovely Gift tangle with us, making this her ninth tangle on the site.

As I noted with Wednesday’s Orga tangle, together with CZT Yuriko Kagitani, Yoko generously contributed to the translation of the article What Makes a Zentangle® Tangle for the Japanese-speaking members of our community. (The translation can be found here.)

Yoko introduces Gift and outlines some tips for tangling it:

This tangle was a happy little accident!

I was casually drawing one day, with absolutely no intention of creating a new tangle. I was just playing with lines and shapes when suddenly I drew something that looked like a little bow. I paused and thought, “Oh, I kind of like this!”

My first version had a pentagon-shaped center, and it looked very much like a bow tied on a present. As I continued playing with it, though, I started wondering if I could make it simpler and easier to deconstruct.

So I began tweaking the shape. Eventually, I changed it into a more Flux-like shape, which made the tangle much easier to draw.

To me, it still looks a little like a gift bow, but I can also see a flower, a chrysanthemum, a ribbon, or even something completely different, depending on how it is drawn.

And because it reminded me of a bow on a gift, I decided to name it Gift.

Sometimes, the best tangles are the ones that find us when we’re not even looking for them. 

Tips for Tangling Gift
1. Build the petals around the center. Draw each petal outward. They don’t have to be perfectly symmetrical.
2. Imagine a large circle inside the petals. As you add the next layer, imagine drawing a large circle in front of the petals. Only draw the visible parts of the circle. Skip the sections where there are no petals. Think: “Draw what you see,” not the whole circle.
3. Add slender “V” shapes. From the center, draw slender V shapes growing outward toward each section of the circular curve you drew.
4. Keep building outward!

For my example of Gift I used one of Yoko’s variations, a triangle version. This tangle readily expands outwards as far as you’d like or have room for and its got lots of potential to play with ink and graphite fills. Or ZIA color.

Yoko illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Gift below and on her gray Phi tile “I drew different variations of Gift, original Flux-shape, pentagon variation, and triangle variation along with Sand Swirl and Diva Dance.”

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

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. Any republication or reposting of these images is expressly prohibited. Thank you for respecting this intellectual property and its rights.

Check out the tag yokok for more of Yoko’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. What Makes a Zentangle tangle? 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, and tangles never start with pencil planning.
   • A pattern is not always a tangle.
   • 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
8. 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.
9. Strings! Have we got STRINGS! Click on the STRINGS link in the pink alphabetic menu bar below the tangle images at the top of any page for 250 different (free) Zentangle-starters. More than enough for any lifetime.
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