May Flowers bring June Bugz!

I’ve been creating short videos for my YouTube channel. I just don’t have the time for the longer videos, especially when the weather starts to warm up. In May I published videos for 10 flower and leaf tangles. It was an April Showers bring May flowers kind of thing. In June I’ll be doing another video series. I’m calling this one is June Bugz, because flowers bring the bugs!

When I’m teaching the Zentangle Method, I encourage students to practice a few tangles until they get comfortable with them, as opposed to constantly looking for new tangles to learn. There are so many tangles, thousands of them, so it is easy to get lost in the searching. And I stand by that advice for beginners!

But sometimes I love to just look through the tangles online, see what’s new, and maybe find one that just calls to me. If you want to know where I look, there are 2 main websites that curate patterns and publish them as tangles. The first one I learned about was Tangle Patterns, which is a product maintained by Linda Farmer, CZT. This is an excellent resource for tangles!

A few years ago, I discovered Musterquelle, a website that is managed by a group of European CZTs, Ela & Tom Rieger, Gildo Sobrino, Sonja Richei, and Nina Dreher-Göddertz. They also curate patterns that are submitted to them and publish them as tangles.

I currently have 4 tangles published. My first tangle, Sprigertz, was published on Tangle Patterns. Unfortunately, the next few I submitted have not been published and it’s been years waiting. One reason I was given for one of my tangles not getting published was that it looked too much like another tangle. And I received no response on the others I submitted. I decided to submit my patterns to Musterquelle to see if I had better luck. So far, they have published 3 of my tangles. My tangle Heartz N Pearlz was published recently, I am grateful.

Both sites are excellent resources for discovering new tangles. And my third source for new tangles is Pinterest. Not all tangles are even submitted to one of the websites for publication. I have several that I have not even submitted yet. And Pinterest, Instagram, and FaceBook are where I find some that are not published on one of the primary tangle sites.

I set out to find tangles that look like bugs. They didn’t have to look exactly like bugs, sometimes they can have the “feel” of a bug and that’s enough. I began by scrolling through all the tangles on the Musterquelle site. I found several, but not enough for my series. I went to the Tangle Patterns site next, and there were no patterns that looked like bugs.

This is a good time to remember that Zentangle is non-representational, or abstract. So, it makes perfect sense to me that there would not be any “bug” tangles. Most tangles are abstract, and I’m looking for the opposite! I want tangles that do look like something, like bugs! I call these ZIA Tangles. ZIA is Zentangle Inspired Art, and often we are creating representational pieces when we create ZIA. I love ZIA! So, when I’m looking for ZIA Tangles, it’s to use them in a ZIA project. Musterquelle includes ZIA tangles, where I couldn’t find any on Tangle Patterns.

I was looking for 10 tangles for my series, and I could only find 8 that I felt were a good fit. I was 2 short of my goal. As I was pondering my options, it occurred to me that I had drawn some lightning bugs or fireflies in one of my paintings from my Watercolor Wings 100-day project. I wondered if they were drawn in a way I could create a step out for others to draw them. They were perfect! I had drawn then all the same except the wings were all decorated differently. So, I created the step-out and some sample tiles for my new tangle Globugz. Now I had 9, but I was still short one.

And then I remembered the little lady bugs I used to add to my botanical ZIA. It’s a super simple bug to draw so I never really considered it a tangle, but I’m OK with it as a ZIA tangle so I created a step-out and some samples for Laydotty. Laydotty is a bit different than what I was drawing. I'd forgotten that I added auras, but It's all good. Both versions are fun! 

Finally, I have 10 ZIA tangles that look like bugs, although a couple are more abstract.

And that is the story behind my 2 new tangles: Globugz and Laydotty. Here are the step-outs. I hope you give them a try and create your own ZIA! And as always, I’d love to see your art so if you post pics on social please tag me so I can see too! And let me know what you think about them.

I hope you'll give them a try and if you want to watch me draw them just check them out in my June Bugz series on YouTube. The videos will post in June. Until then you might take a peek at the May Flowers series. After all, like it or not, flowers and bugs just kinda go together!

Have a great Summer!

Oh, and here are the links to the 2 Tangle websites:

Tangle Patterns & Musterquelle