Happy Friday, everyone — let’s finish up the week with another delightful tangle.
Fellow Floridian and CZT Rachael Schwartz is back today to share her Bataille tangle with us. This is her seventh on the site, as a reminder just recently we explored her Siol tangle.
Rachael writes,
Bataille was born on a River Boat I cruised on the Seine last year. I took a special journal with me and a polaroid camera. As I have found, all trips in Europe bring me inspiration for tangles so instead of waiting until I came home, I used down time on the boat to deconstruct something I saw that day.
While touring the Château du Champ de Bataille, a chateau located in the French Region of Upper Normandy, I was greeted by a glorious stair railing that just spoke to me. I immediately knew it had to become a tangle.
I was surprised how difficult it was for me to deconstruct as there was no clear starting point for me when I looked at it. As I persisted with different attempts, I kept reminding myself “one stroke at a time.”
Two tips, while drawing are:
1- when drawing the 3rd step, imagine a middle horizontal line that divides the middle section in half. The S-curves that end in a printemp-esque curl should stay in the upper half.
2- In the 4th step, imagine the C-curve coming down from the printemp swirl making a belly and tail of a bird that is facing sideways.
I am quite happy with the versatility of this tangle, as well as the different possibilities for embellishing/filling above and below the “bird”.
Rachael illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Bataille below and her tiles illustrate some lovely ways you might embellish it.

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 rachaels for more of Rachael’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.
Related Links
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- 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.
- 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.
- What Makes a Zentangle tangle? 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, and tangles never start with pencil planning.
- A pattern is not always a tangle.
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