How to draw 3SG

Hi there my friends!

Welcome to another week of fun tangles and creative explorations.

Some of us are enjoying our first long weekend of the year because today is a Federal holiday to honor the late Nobel-prize winning visionary Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. – this holiday takes place annually on the third Monday in January.

There are many thoughtful and inspirational quotes attributed to Dr. King, many familiar ones come from his “I have a dream” address. But this one from his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, Norway feels especially apt today …

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

Whether or not today’s a day “off” for you, I bet you’ll have fun with this easy tangle named 3SG from New Zealand CZT Ildica Boyd.

Ildica introduces herself,

I am a CZT based in New Zealand, back in 2015 I came across a Zentangle® book on my mum’s desk given to her by her sister. But my mum said she hadn’t had time to delve into it, so she passed it on, and I was hooked, becoming a CZT in 2017.

I adore the freedom of enhancing and tango-ing tangles and love how with the Zentangle Method you have extra options, tangles to be embellished and enhanced to suit each tangler’s style.

p.s. To finish the start story, my mum was given a second copy of the book, and this time decided someone was trying to tell her something, so this time she found the time and is a terrific tangler and ZIA artist, and we tangle artwork back and forth and with her sister too!

She explains how she came up with 3SG and the meaning of its name,

The other day I was playing around trying to come up with a simple but different orb based tangle for use as a background filler, (instead of always using Tipple!). How might I make it look like a pearl with a pen, not just when it gets to adding the shading?

When I add shading to my Tipple, I always add a smile with the graphite before blending it in, so I thought – start with a smile, then I added another smile back again, then another smile, then I realised if I added a Grin, or a really wide smile, I could join the whole thing up! So hence 3 Smiles and a Grin or 3SG.

For my example of 3SG I followed Ildica’s ribbon-style version below, turning the tile for each so the shapes are rotated. After a few practices and for purposes of getting the overall shape to my satisfaction, I experimented with starting with the G (Step 4) and working inwards adding the 3S’s. G3S? This seemed to work better for me in terms of controlling the overall size and shape. FWIW.

Ildica illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing 3SG below. Her examples also illustrate some ideas for embellishing/enhancing and arranging 3SG in a ribbon-style.

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 ildicab for more of Ildica’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

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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.
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