Today’s easy and elegant Mountain ribbon-style tangle is from Taiwan CZT Ginny Lu who recently shared her Diamond Heart tangle and her daughter Jenny’s Heart Flower with us.
Mountain is Ginny’s fifth tangle on the site.
Ginny’s inspiration for Mountain was this border pattern she photographed from a wall.
This is a classic interlocking band motif from antiquity and frequently seen on pottery, textiles, architecture and so on.
Fret, also called key pattern, in decorative art and architecture, any one of several types of running or repeated ornament, consisting of lengths of straight lines or narrow bands, usually connected and at right angles to each other in T, L, or square-cornered G shapes, so arranged that the spaces between the lines or bands are approximately equal to the width of the bands. Occasionally the system is arranged so that the lines intersect or interlace, as in the common swastika fret.
Because the fret is one of the simplest and most natural of decorative forms, it is one of the most widely spread, found from early times in most art forms and on all continents. Thus, it was a favourite decoration, during and after the 4th dynasty, for the ceilings of tombs in Egypt, where in later examples it was combined with rosettes, scarabs, and the lotus into patterns of great richness.~ Encyclopædia Britannica
Ginny writes,
It looks like the Chinese word “mountain” upside down together, it is a simple and beautiful pattern.
Another way of looking at Mountain: it’s rows of T’s interlocked with “upside down” ones. Mountain is fun to play with by stretching or shrinking the T forms in both width and height with some interesting effects. Another interesting effect is to add rounding in all the corners and tips …
It took a few practice runs for me to get the spacing sorted out, in the end I went with spacing out the alternating stems of the T’s first then adding their top crossbars and serifs. The end result with a Micron 01 was a little “spindly” to my eye so I restated the T/Mountain shapes to make them bolder with an 03 for my example.
Ginny illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Mountain here and she demonstrates it in a simple tile stacked among ribbons of Zentangle®-original tangles.
Image copyright the artist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please feel free to refer to the step outs to recreate the tangles from this site in your Zentangles and ZIAs, or link back to any page. However the artists and TanglePatterns.com reserve all rights to these images and they must not be publicly pinned, reproduced or otherwise republished. Thank you for respecting these rights.
In this beautiful, rather mesmerizing ZIA zendala-style piece, Ginny features Mountain as a classic border with what looks to me like a Gelly Roll Metallic Gold pen. That must have taken some concentration!
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.
Check out the tag ginnyl for more of Ginny’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.
In case you missed it ...
Zentangle is "not just the latest buzzword for ‘that thing I was already doing years ago in the margins of notebooks’."
So if that's what you've been thinking, you don't know Zentangle yet.
For enlightenment on this subject please read CZT Sandy Hunter's eloquent article On Understanding Zentangle.
Related Links
- 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.
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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.
- "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." Thus 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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October 16, 2017 | 
More like this: 
Simply and elegant. Welcome Mountain
Thanks Ginny, I live in the mountains so the name called to me! And it is a fun easy tangle too.
that Zendala is classically beautiful.
This design actually looks like something I might not mess up! I can’t wait to try it.
Thank you, Ginny and Linda! This is so elegant. Can’t wait to try it!
Very nice!
Nice and uncomplicated tangle, another beauty to use as a border.Thank you for sharing!
I love this simple but elegant Tangle. Practicing it puts my mind in what I call the zen zone – free flowing thoughts that surprise me.
A really nice pattern and one of my favourites from the recent additions. Simple and elegant, as a tangle schould be! 🙂
Just rediscovered this one from the “tangle flashcard lineup” that quietly updates across the top border. Mountain in white gives just the right touch of elegance around the edge of your sample.