How to draw MALU

Hi there! Many thanks for joining me for our Friday tangle 🙂

This cool diamond grid tangle is from Virginia CZT Marty Greiner and Malu is her first on the site.

Marty introduces herself and shares her inspiration for Malu:

I have been tangling since 2014 and became a CZT in 2020. In 2023 I retired after 33 years working at the US Treasury Department. I enjoy all sorts of art including needlework, beading, watercolor, collage, Celtic knot drawing, handmade book making, and Zentangle®. 

This pattern is inspired by a patio umbrella I saw at the Kihei Café, Maui, Hawaii. I named it malu – Hawaiian for umbrella.

Tips for tangling: You can draw this pattern individually in one elongated diamond shape, draw a grid of elongated diamonds, or draw elongated diamonds in another pattern such as the star shape in the second example tile.

When you draw this pattern in a grid of elongated diamonds and you match the lines from step 2 across the diamonds, you form an ogee grid on top of the diamond grid.

You can make your auras in steps 3 and 4 the same size or vary the sizes. You can fill the auras with color, shading, or tangle enhancements such as orbs or lines. When shading, you can do so many variations. Shade the diamond grid, shade the ogee grid, shade the auras in the individual diamonds. Have fun with all the variations.

In my example of Malu you’ll notice I left out the top and bottom auras in the diamond-ish shaped space of Step 4. When I got to that stage I liked how it looked so I decided to end there for a little variation. It doesn’t have the prominent ogee effect of the original, but it’s another way to go and no doubt you’ll find others.

Marty illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Malu below and shows us ways to explore some of its variation potential in her pretty Zentangle and ZIA tiles.

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

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Check out the tag martyg for more of Marty’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." 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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