How to draw SLENDER

Hello friends!

Welcome to our first tangle inspiration for 2025, I am so excited to see what fun creative tangles we’ll explore this year!

I hope you’re staying safe and warm and handling this “wintery snow and ice wallop” as well as possible. The Weather Channel has even given this winter storm system the name Blair! Who knew. Yah, please stay safe and warm.

And for our first easy Monday tangle I decided to have a little fun with a play on a popular New Year’s resolution (for some of us!): to “slenderize”.

Slender is from Texas CZT Suzanne McNeill. As many of you know, Suzanne became a Certified Zentangle Teacher™ in one of the very first certification classes. But she was already well known in the crafting industry as publisher of the Design Originals series of craft booklets.

Suzanne published the very first Zentangle® books to hit the market way back then including her own series, as well as one of my personal long-time favorite publications: CZT Sandy Bartholomew’s Totally Tangled. Still a classic.

Each of Suzanne’s own Zentangle booklets focus on a particular aspect of Zentangle-inspired art and crafts. Slender is from the Zentangle 7 booklet, which focuses on “Circles, Zendalas, and Shapes”.  [You can find this series and more on the BOOK REVIEWS tab on the top menu bar of any page on the site.]

Isn’t the “what if” question the most wonderful thing to ponder when tangling? In the case of Slender I found myself imagining all kinds of fun (if minor) variations – including the simple one seen (left) in my example below (what if I leave the middle un-inked?). OR (right) What if I ink the scallops instead of the hourglass shape? OR What if I added a dot of white Sakura Gelly Roll? What if I added metallic auras? What if I added shading? What if … what if … what if …

Many moons ago I wrote:

I find the mindful inking-in of tangles … to be a very soothing and absorbing process. I almost always do them in a methodical sequence because interesting variations can often be revealed that way.

Some years ago Suzanne sold her Design Originals company to Fox Chapel Publishing who now hold the copyright for her publications. Fox Chapel Publishing and Suzanne have both graciously given me permission to post her copyright-protected images on TanglePatterns for your personal offline reference. Reposting/republishing these images is not permitted.

Suzanne illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Slender below. Gotta be the quickest and painfree way to slenderize 😉 I encourage you to play with this simple tangle and see how many ways you can “what if” it – from basic to extravagant.

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 suzannem for more of Suzanne’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

Related Links

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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?
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