How to draw WHIRLIGIG

Greetings my tangling friends, so good to see you again!

We begin this month with another deconstruction by Canadian tangler Cyndi Knapp, adding to her notable content in our resource.

Cyndi’s delightfully easy new tangle is called Whirligig and it would appear to share DNA with the Zentangle®-original Printemps.

Cyndi introduces this whimsical and useful tangle:

This wickedly easy continuous line pattern turned out to be way more fun to tangle on a tile than it was to tangle in the air!

Its versatility lies largely in the size, spacing and number of whirls you tangle but also in its application. It’s a great pattern to niche where you need a little something extra and playful. And, it would make a fun border.

After a bit of ruminating over names, Whirligig seemed to embody the pattern’s whimsical nature.

Bronx Cheer, a scintilla of Doodah and an Icantoo/Pokeleaf tangleation

If you’d like to get in the weeds about physical whirligigs, check out the Wikipedia entry. They’ve been around for centuries and have practical as well as playful and metaphorical uses:

A whirligig is an object that spins or whirls, or has at least one part that spins or whirls. It can also be a pinwheel, spinning top, buzzer, comic weathervane, gee-haw, spinner, whirlygig, whirlijig, whirlyjig, whirlybird, or simply a whirly. They are most commonly powered by the wind but can be hand-, friction- or motor-powered. They can be used as kinetic garden ornaments, and can be designed to transmit sound and vibration into the ground to repel burrowing rodents. …

William Shakespeare, in Twelfth Night, uses the whirligig as a metaphor for “what goes around, comes around”.

For my example of Whirligig the tangle I went for something a little different and turned it into a filler type of tangle, alternating direction in columns up and down to fill the space. I also inked in the “counters” just for a little contrast.

Cyndi illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Whirligig below. For the ZIA Cyndi combines Whirligig with Jubilee and Tipple. To create the tile’s background she used Tombow’s Splash Technique with Tombow #098 Green and a Light Cool Grey Micron.

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 cyndik for more of Cyndi’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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