How to draw TEN-SHUN

Today’s Ten-Shun tangle comes to us from Central Texas CZT Ginny Krauskopf and it’s her first on the site.

I particularly enjoy tangles like this that are composed differently from most of the others, it’s a nice change of pace.

Ginny writes,

I came up with Ten-Shun in 2014, after seeing several things within a few hours. A video about West Point cadets showed their uniforms, which have a lot of braiding on them. The cadets have to stand at attention in a very rigid way.

I had also seen a pic of some smocking, which I did many years ago. The next day this pattern popped into my head! You can make the zigzags narrow or wide … this will give you different looks.

What happens when you’re working with threads and you put too much pressure on it (tension – Ten-Shun); it can break and some of it comes undone. I’d love to see what someone could do with that idea (I tried, but my drawing skills weren’t going there).

I discovered Zentangle in late 2010 and attended CZT training #6 in May, 2011.

Ginny’s mention of smocking brought back fond memories. My Mom used to sew beautiful smocked dresses for myself and my three younger sisters. It’s only years later that I appreciated just how much love and creativity went into those gorgeous garments for us.

For those not familiar, according to Wikipedia:

“Smocking is an embroidery technique used to gather fabric so that it can stretch. Before elastic, smocking was commonly used in cuffs, bodices, and necklines in garments where buttons were undesirable.”

Smocking embroidery has a huge range of beautiful designs. If you do a Google search and look at the “Images” page you will get a small taste of the possibilities of this delicate needlecraft.

You can clearly see how smocking inspired the “channels” of Ginny’s channel-grid tangle.

A smocking sampler demonstrating various stitches. See the Wikipedia article for details by clicking on the image.

For my example of Ten-Shun I used Ginny’s variation to leave the orbs open. To accomplish this I reverse-engineered Ginny’s steps by first drawing the channels of Step 1, then I added the orbs of Step 5 in parallel rows. From there I connected the orbs with the stroke of Step 4. This made it very easy to add the zigzags of Step 3 because they fit right over the orbs. And Step 2 isn’t necessary at all in this alternate way of constructing Ten-Shun.

Ginny illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Ten-Shun below.

Image copyright the artist and used with permission, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please feel free to refer to the steps images to recreate this tangle in your personal Zentangles and ZIAs, or to link back to this page. However the artist and TanglePatterns.com reserve all rights to these images and they should not be publicly pinned, reproduced or republished. Thank you for respecting these rights. Click the image for an article explaining copyright in plain English.

As you enjoy any of the tangles on the site, please do leave a comment of thanks and encouragement to show the artists you appreciate them for sharing their creativity to inspire yours.

Check out the tag ginnyk for more of Ginny’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

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