How to draw ACROSSTICK

Today’s cool Acrosstick tangle is from Brockport, NY CZT Ed Gucker and it’s his first on the site.

If you’ve been with me for a while you’ll know I usually start the week off with a super easy tangle pattern. I’m not sure Acrosstick can be called super easy, but it is not a difficult tangle to draw. The challenge is in Step 1, getting the squares square and evenly spaced to allow for the remaining elements of the tangle to be added.

Ed describes the inspiration for this tangle and its name, and includes a tip for drawing the squares.

This tangle was inspired by the fabric used to cover chairs in our local Panera restaurant. The name is a play on words: pan ~ across and era ~ period of time ~ tick.

I suggest that the squares drawn in the first step be separated by about half the length of the square’s side. This seems to generate a uniformly dense pattern.

Shading along the diagonals brings out the “drawing behind” aspect.

Ed introduces himself,

I’m a retired physicist who taught physics and astronomy at the State University of New York College at Brockport for 34 years. Patterns and diagrams are ubiquitous in teaching physics and I had developed considerable facility in drawing geometric figures. During the years before my retirement in 2000 I became interested in fractal geometry, particularly as it applies to descriptions of dynamic motion in chaotic systems. I wrote computer programs to display chaotic behavior in graphical form. After I retired, I became involved in long-arm quilting, which again creates patterns (in thread) on fabric. Many of these patterns are “formulaic” as Rick would say and can probably be revived as tangles, although the one I submitted did not come about this way.

When my wife, Judy, became interested in Zentangle, I watched with some interest and even tried a few tiles on my own, without any formal training. Then Judy went off to Providence in 2013 to become a CZT. She came home so supercharged that I decided I had better follow suit, so I completed my CZT training in 2014 (Class #16). We are now setting out to team teach ala Maria and Rick, and have just begun teaching an eight week course through our local school district’s continuing education department. We also have scheduled another three week course through a branch of the Rochester Public Library system, starting in late March. Life is good.

Drawing squares in a continuous stroke is difficult for me because my right thumb is getting more and more uncooperative to the point now that I have trigger thumb and severe tendonitis. And it tends to either lock up or jump around when it wants to, especially “turning corners” with my Micron. Ouch. I have great empathy for those of you with arthritis.

The way I dealt with the thumb issue was to draw all the lines in one direction first in Step 1, then turn my tile and connect them up into squares with strokes all going in the same direction. That way there was no need to force my thumb into a bend it didn’t want to make.

Ed illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Acrosstick and shows it here in a monotangle.

Image copyright the artist and used with permission, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. You may use this image for your personal non-commercial reference only. Republishing or redistributing pattern deconstructions in any form is prohibited under law without express permission of the copyright owner. For more information, click on the image for the article “Pinterest – How could something so right be so wrong?”.

Check out the tag edg for more of Ed’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

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