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:
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 tile was done by Amanda. I absolutely love it. She decided to experiment with having both a light and a dark background on the same tile, and I think it worked really well. I love the way it shows off the white “ribbons” of tangles on top of the dark areas. I am also super impressed by the intertwining of all the elements!
Zentangle drawn on Strathmore Vellum Bristol using a black, Micron pen and white, Sakura Gelly Roll pen. Black area colored with a Sakura Identi-Pen. Shading done with graphite pencil and white chalk pencil.
Happy New Year!
This Zentangle was created while going through all of my metallic and glitter gel pens. While they generally all have a reasonable shelf life, I have some that are more than 10 years old. They don’t work, the ink has separated, and some have even leaked. It was time to start fresh in the new year. So I used the tangles Aah and Pepper to create fireworks in the sky, representing the New Year’s celebrations as I tested the various pens. Unfortunately, they don’t all show up well when scanned, but you get the idea!
Happy Hanukkah!
Zentangle drawn on Strathmore Vellum Bristol using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil.
Tangles: Aah Grass Border
Happy Hanukkah!
Zentangle drawn on Strathmore Vellum Bristol using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil.
Tangles: Aah Grass Border
Happy Hanukkah!
Zentangle drawn on Strathmore Vellum Bristol using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil.
Tangles: Aah Grass Border
Happy Hanukkah!
Zentangle drawn on Strathmore Vellum Bristol using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil.
Tangles: Aah Grass Border
Happy Hanukkah!
Zentangle drawn on Strathmore Vellum Bristol using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil.
Tangles: Aah Grass Border
Happy Hanukkah!
Zentangle drawn on Strathmore Vellum Bristol using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil.
Tangles: Aah Grass Border
Happy Hanukkah!
Zentangle drawn on Strathmore Vellum Bristol using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil.
Tangles: Aah Grass Border
Happy Hanukkah!
Zentangle drawn on Strathmore Vellum Bristol using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil.
Tangles: Aah Grass Border
Another’s view.
The tiles above and below were created by my husband. If you remember, from yesterday's post , I mentioned that I had asked all of my relatives to draw Zentangles for my birthday in 2010. Recently, I found them again and got to reminisce about that time and to see all the wonderful tiles everyone made.
For this first tile, my sweetheart used a heart as the central string! I think he did a fantastic job.
Sail away.
I originally created this Zentangle for Columbus Day, 2010. I’m sharing it today because this past Monday was Columbus day for this year, 2017.
I love the half-compass on the right side and feel like all the other tangles tie into the theme nicely.
Zentangle drawn on an Official Zentangle tile using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil.
Tangles: Aah Scallops Bannah Floo Tidal
Patchwork.
The quilt made a strong contrast to the wallpaper in the room. She tossed her jewelry on the bed while she kicked off her shoes. It had been a long day and she was ready to wind down.
Zentangle drawn on Strathmore Vellum Bristol using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil.
Tangles: Aah Amphora Beedle Beelight Bucky Flooka Honeycomb Palrevo Quipple Wildwood Y-Knot
Window box.
As I sit in the chair by the window, perhaps this will be what I see.
Zentangle drawn on an Official Zentangle tile using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil.
Tangles: Aah Bumper Ennies Fescu Keeko Meer Nzeppel
Choices.
She realized, as her ship emerged from the gate that the choice was going to be almost impossible. Hard enough in a single universe, she now had a universe of universes to choose from!
This is the first time that I’ve used Derwent Graphtint pencils on a Zentangle. I like they way they add greyed tones without overwhelming the design.
Unfortunately, the silver of the ship’s structure doesn’t show up well in the image, but it’s really spectacular in person!
Angles.
Apparently, I‘m being drawn to angles and straight lines as opposed to curves. It‘s interesting that I tend to fill those angles with softer, rounder patterns fairly often!
Zentangle drawn on Strathmore Bristol Vellum using a black Micron pen.
Tangles: Aah Antidots Apollonian Waves Ballot Beedz Bulb Lantern Buttercup Jonqal Nymph