Zenith Challenge

Learn how to create Zentangle® • enioken.com

Whenever I'm participating in a Zentangle® challenge, I always add an extra little personal challenge for myself: to find ways to make the tangle pattern 3-dimensional, through drawing, color or shading. Zenith is a wonderful decorative border pattern introduced by Maria Thomas, you can find step out here.  It's a very versatile tangle, you can stretch out certain parts or change the placement of others.

Zenith tangle, shaded by Eni Oken • enioken.com

Zenith tangle, shaded by Eni Oken • enioken.com

The issue with making decorative borders look 3D is that they just have too many parts in them, too many details.

So instead of approaching each element and trying to convert it to 3D, I took the approach of making the entire border dimensional, like a necklace:

Zenith tangle, shaded by Eni Oken • enioken.com

I like it!

This is the tile line-art I came up with for the challenge, combined with Zentwining wrapped ribbons:

Zenith tangle, shaded by Eni Oken • enioken.com

And here is the final shaded piece:

Zenith tangle, shaded by Eni Oken • enioken.com

The tile measures 3.5 inches. The line art was created using copic multi-liner 0.1mm, and shaded with pencils 2H, H, HB and 2B.

Copyright 2015 Eni Oken

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