How to draw HISHIKA

Hi there! I trust your week is going well. With the exception of a pretty brutal allergy season affecting my eyes and eyesight (!), all is “great, grand, and wonderful” here as a dear friend in our past was fond of saying.

Japanese CZT Minako Wada shares her Hishika tangle with us today and it’s her first on the site.

Minako introduces Hishika and explains the origins of its name,

Since last year, I have been studying Japan patterns. I have “Wa” in my name, so I thought it would be nice to make a Japanese-style tangle.

Even in the official tangle of Zentangle®, there are several tangles like Japanese, and I thought that it would be enough to draw using them, so I thought of some original tangles.

One of them is Hishika.

“Hishi” is a pattern that has existed since the Jomon period in Japan. It is a pattern that was also used for textiles and armor.

I drew a drop-shaped flower in a diamond shape, so I named it Hishika. “Ka” means flower in Japanese.

The study of traditional Japanese patterns is a fascinating rabbit hole to venture into, the historic designs each have a specific meaning and sometimes color associated with them. Quite a few of our tangles trace their inspiration to this influence, incluidng as Minako notes, some of the Zentangle-originals. In addition, off the top of my head CZT Jason Lau’s Hollyhock and CZT Sandy Bartholomew’s Hemp spring to mind plus we have a few cherry blossom (“Sakura”) related tangles too (Ying, Yumemi). You might have noticed this particular symbol on the barrel of your Micron pens.

For my example of Minako’s Hishika I added a white Sakura Gelly Roll dot of ink in the center of the “petal” shapes (as she did in her Zentangle below), as well as inked in the teeny squares where the double lines cross.

Minako illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Hishika below. She includes her tangle in a Zentangle with the Zentangle-originals Static (with weighting) and Ynix.

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

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Check out the tag minakow for more of Minako’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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