How to draw WINDMILL

Pinwheels, windmills … fun celebratory images for kids of all ages and a perfect idea for this North American holiday week.

Japanese CZT Hiroko Matsuo returns today with her fun and easy Windmill tangle. She recently shared her lovely Sanaura tangle with us.

Hiroko explains the inspiration for her tangle and its name,

I found this pattern on my way to the place where I was to meet and have a cup of coffee with Emiko Kaneko, CZT. (She led me to this wonderful Zentangle world and I found this tangle when I was going to meet her.)

Where I found this pattern was the small clinic on the street I often walk along when going to the station, but I never really noticed it until that day. I took a picture with my cellphone and deconstructed it while waiting for her.

Before I deconstructed it, I didn’t think it looked like a windmill because the circles caught my eyes more. But once I deconstructed it, the windmill (or in Japanese “kazaguruma”) pattern caught my eyes more, so I named it “windmill.”

Helpful hints that I can share:

Make sure your initial grid design is equally spaced, make all the boxes about the same size.

At step three, try to draw curved lines, not straight lines. then you will have a nice circle.

You can add other tangle patterns on the wings of the windmill or color and shade/highlight to decorate.

I didn’t draw anything in the circle, but you can draw other tangles or add Tipples and embellish.

You can draw the eye to different aspects of this tangle by the way you choose to shade and embellish it. I added a touch of shading in the circular part for my example and it tends to push the Windmill aspect of the tangle forward giving an embossed look to the pinwheels/windmills.

Hiroko illustrates the step-by-step instructions for drawing Windmill 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 must not be publicly pinned, altered, reproduced or republished. They are for your personal offline reference only. Thank you for respecting these rights. For more information, click on the image for the article “Copyrights and your blog.”

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 comment helps motivate them to continue to share!

Check out the tag hirokom for more of Hiroko’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

Happy July 4th Independence Day!

Tomorrow is the USA’s 243rd Birthday, so birthday cake and celebrations all around!!

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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." 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.
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