Yesterday Art Clubbers and I had a super intense class on how to draw the line-art for this advanced design called Vines and Berries. This project uses tangles Mooka, Icanthis, Bronx Cheer (all three Zentangle) and Vynes (Eni Oken) to create an image that resembles an antiqued engraving.

I confess this was not an easy class for Clubbers, mostly because it requires an extraordinary amount of trust to get past the LONG “ugly stage”. That’s the stage when the drawing has still not come together and and some designs can have a longer or shorter ugly stage, which makes suspending disbelief a necessity.

I think my favorite part is the use of the tangle Icanthis — which I have never been a huge fan of and now find myself quite enamored with. I showed students two version of the tangle.

Another very fun tangle is Vynes (my own) which is a close cousin to Ratoon (Zentangle), but more freeform. This is particularly useful to act as a filler.

The secret sauce that really converts all this into a picture resembling an engraving is, of course, the hatching. I’m a huge fan of adding details and hatching to a picture to enhance it.

This class covered only the line-art, we’ll have a Part 2 on November 13 to cover the shading portion.

We had about 70 plus people in class, and I think that even though it started as a difficult class for most, trying to really suspend their inner critics, you can see how the results were pretty incredible and fun.