Merry Christmas from our family to you and yours. May this day find you enjoying the company of friends and relatives near and far. We wish for you peace and joy!
Tangles: dewd shattuck zailz
The Entanglement library has a few grid-based tangles now: Huggins, W-2 , Ambler and Emingle. But we have limited control over the grid: we can affect the spacing in the x and y directions, and we can add some random fluctuations to where each intersection on the grid ends up. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could warp the grid in some more dramatic ways? Yes, I thought so too! So I spent some time adding some more grid options. This turned out to be harder to do than I thought it would be – I ended up having to rewrite big chunks of the Tangle class, then I ended up subclassing Tangle and creating a special class just for grid-based tangles: GridTangle.
Huggins and W-2 have appeared in the Entanglement library! Huggins and W-2 both look like they have been woven but are really just shapes on a grid connected by lines according to a few simple rules. The difference between them is that Huggins connects circles with curved lines, while W-2 connects squares with straight lines.
In this post, I’ll talk about how I built Huggins (once you build Huggins, W-2 is pretty easy to add) and show some examples of how both are used.
The Entanglement library has a very few (so far) tangle patterns built in which can be used to create Zentangles. New ones get added to the library as I get to them, but you (yes, YOU) as a user can create them too. Warning! This post is mostly Javascript code! If that’s not your thing, avert your eyes now! You need version 0.0.5 of Entanglement to follow along:
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/tektsu/entanglement@0.0.5/dist/entanglement.js"></script> In this post, we’ll create a simple grid-based tangle pattern, then use it in a Zentangle. The tangle we’ll create is not particularly interesting, and is not a “real” Zentangle (as far as I know.) It’s just an example to show the process. The Entanglement library only supports two general kinds of tangles so far: a pattern of tangle elements placed randomly on the canvas, such as Aah or BoxSpirals, or a grid with some kind of pattern, such as Ambler or Emingle. We’ll create a grid tangle in this case. We want it to look something like this:
Up until now, the Entanglement library has provided a few tangle elements and a few tangles, which you could draw onto your canvas. But real Zentangles have a border, and might be round or triangular instead of square. To make this easier to do, Entanglement now has the Zentangle class. This is the top-level class you should use to define what your Zentangle should look like.
Here is an example using it. This program drew the image at the top of this page:
Recently I did a post about the Ambler tangle in the Entanglement library. Ambler uses an element called a box spiral. It turns out, box spirals appear in several tangles, most notably the Box Spirals tangle. In this post, we’ll talk about the Entanglement BoxSpiral class, which implements the Box Spirals tangle.
The box spiral used in Ambler as it is implemented in Entanglement is very specific. It consists of nine lines, and always rotates counter-clockwise. Therefore it can only be drawn in four orientations, with the spiral starting from one of the four corners of its enclosing box.
The Entanglement library now supports Ambler! This officially doubles the number of tangles it can produce! Two tangles! Progress! OK, so two tangles isn’t really all that many, but still! Progress!
Using Entanglement to draw a basic Ambler is easy. Here’s the program that generated the image at the top of this page:
const height = 600; const width = 600; function setup() { createCanvas(width, height); background(255); } function draw() { let amb = new Ambler(width, height, {}); amb.paste(new Point(0, 0)); noLoop(); } So how does it work? Unlike Aah, the other tangle supported by this library, Ambler is a repeating pattern in a grid. So, no need for the collision detection we used with Aah; each pattern has a defined place where it can be drawn. The pattern that goes into each grid square is a box spiral. We build that in each square by dividing each square side into 6 sections, drawing a crosshatch of lines through those points and finding the intersections of those lines. We then use those points to draw the spiral.
In my last two posts , I showed how to draw most of the Aah tangle using the Javascript p5.js library. In this post, the Aah is complete, as you can see from the image below. However, the Javascript code to do so, does not follow directly from what we saw in those previous posts. I have rewritten it and packaged it into a library: Entanglement . More about that shortly.
First, lets talk about how the Aah pattern was completed. You’ll recall that we had successfully generated the 8-armed starburst pattern, and distributed copies of it the around the canvas, with some random variations to make it seem more like it was hand-drawn. We avoided overlapping them by using collision detection: we draw a polygon around each pattern, and then as we create new ones, we check the polygon against those for the patterns we had already drawn to make sure there were no collisions. The final image we generated was nice, but missing something important: an Aah tangle is supposed to have small circles randomly scattered between the starburst patterns.
In my previous post , we came up with a program to generate a single 8-armed component of the aah tangle. In this post, we’ll figure out how to spread them randomly around the canvas, as in the image at the top of the post. We’ll use the program from the last post as a starting point.
As a first try, let’s just generate a draw 20 aah images randomly on the canvas. Our draw() function looks like this:
Any Zentanglers out there who made it through my previous posts on generative art may be wondering whether these techniques can be used to draw Zentangles . Let’s try!
Zentangles are built from patterns, called tangles. We’ll try to create a tangle called aah. This is one of the original tangles from the Zentangle originators . There are many variations of aah. We’ll start with a simple 8-armed design. Tandika’s step-out for it looks like this:
This beautiful, blue Zentangle was created by CZT Amanda Higbee!
Posted with permission from the artist
Tangles: Toodles
Today, I took Eni Oken's Art Raffle app for a spin. This tile is the result! For my first tile in eons, it’s not bad! If you tangle, you should get this FREE app, it’s lots of fun!
Zentangle drawn on an white, official, Zentangle tile, using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil.
Tangles: Antidot Bales Beedz Crescent Moon Emingle Hollibaugh Knase Knightsbridge Perfs Printemps Shard Shattuck Stiritup Tagh
For the first project in the new Zentangle Project pack for grey tiles, we are creating a small, rearrangeable puzzle of four Bijou tiles, all with the same tangles.
These can be assembled into your own mosaic and arranged in different designs depending on how you place each little tile.
This is my first tile. I got carried away with the Diva Dance, on the second side, so I will be redoing this.
I am willing to bet that everyone who tangles for any length of time has those few designs that are just difficult for them.
Showgirl was one of mine. Everytime I did it, I would end up with something that wasn’t quite right. You can see some of my failed attempts in the smaller tests in the image above.
I kept practicing, for several months, on and off. Then, after following a lesson from Eni Oken , the light bulb came on, and I finally got it! I just drew two of them, correctly, easily!
When my MIL passed away, we found the ZIAs and Zentangles she created later in her life. One of the things in these was a box with a tangled alphabet.
Today is brought to you by the letter “Q”, as tangled by Twyla!
Zentangle drawn on white card stock using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil.
Tangles: Quabog Quipple Queen's Crown Quiltz
If you recall, yesterday, I showed you a page in my pocket sketch book where I was trying to work out how to draw the tangle, Peanuckle.
As you can see here, I did finally figure it out! This was after doing the “Peanuckle Lesson” from Eni Oken! This lesson was part of her Art Club .
This little page is later on in the same pocket sketch book as yesterday’s page.
I was looking through my little sketch book for other things I use it for, and I found a couple more Emberley sections. So here’s one.
But that’s not want I actually wanted to talk about. I wanted to show you that I use this little book to work out tangles that I’m having difficulty with!
In this case, it was Peanuckle. I tried for a long time to work this one out. I had all kinds of trouble with it, as you can see.
#4 - This is the fourth in my series of fountain pen, shimmer and sheen ink tests.
J. Herbin, Amethyste de l'Oural , a dark, purple ink with a beautiful crystalline-to-silver sheen, is such a deep, royal color. It’s beautiful with any tangle that has some filled in portion which allows the variations to shine when rotated in the light.
I wish you could see here, in the scan, the beautiful sparkle along the bands in the Jetties tangle. You’ll just have to try it for yourself!
#3 - This is the third in my series of fountain pen, shimmer and sheen ink tests.
I think I am in love with this Jacques Herbin ink, , Kyanite du Népal ! It is a beautiful, turquoise-blue with a sheen consiting of turquoise and silver metallic flecks. It’s an ink that will make any mermaid swoon!
Although you can’t see it in the photo above, slightly rotating the tile under good light or outside in the sun causes the droplet ends of the opus to sparkle like a beautiful lagoon!
#2 - This is the second in my series of fountain pen, shimmer and sheen ink tests.
The ink used here, Jacques Herbin, Rouge Hematite is perfect for the second tangle in this series! Pepper reminds me of those red and white peppermint candies that you see everywhere during the Thanksgiving and Christmas season!
While you can’t see the pretty, gold sheen in this gorgeous ink, you can see how it affects the color and variations created when it is used to draw the stripes in the peppermints.