How to draw JOIN HANDS

Greetings and welcome back for another week of creative tangle inspiration.

As is customary we begin our week with a super easy tangle. Join Hands is from Texas CZT Suzanne McNeill and it was first published in her Zentangle 8 – Monograms • Alphabets booklet.

For those new to the Zentangle® art form, Suzanne McNeill was the owner of the Design Originals publishing company and she was not only among the first CZTs but her company also published all the very first booklets about Zentangle. These included over a dozen in her own series of Zentangle-related projects, as well as CZT Sandy Bartholomew’s Totally Tangled and Yoga For Your Brain™, and CZT Marie Browning’s Time To Tangle with Colors – still favorites in my library.

For detailed Book Reviews of the early books about Zentangle®, visit the BOOK REVIEWS tab on the menu bar at the top of the page. This is from the introduction and back cover of Zentangle 8 – Monograms • Alphabets:

“Letters are the perfect way to personalize a greeting card, stationery, or a memorable gift. Turn mundane mail into envelopes that promise something really special. Send special tangled thank-you notes and enclosure cards for showers, weddings, and baby announcements. Using the relaxing process of Zentangle, you can create unique letters with stunning details and sumptuous backgrounds – one tangle at a time.”

Join Hands is an easy dot grid-based tangle, one of my personal favorite types of tangles. There are many ways to vary fills and shading or even changing the scale of the parts of this simple tangle as you’ll see when you start playing with it. And then there’s ZIA color too!

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 Join Hands below and she includes a sample variation.

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

As you enjoy any of the tangles on the site, please leave a comment of thanks and encouragement to show the artists you appreciate them for sharing their creativity to inspire yours. Your thanks helps motivate them to continue to share! And please share a link to your favorite tangles on social media. Republishing images isn’t allowed. Thanks!

Check out the tag suzannem for more of Suzanne’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

Related Links

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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?
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