I’ve come to call these ren-tangles. My nickname is Ren and these tangles have stories within them. If you’ve taken my “Tangles” class, you can take the next step and make your tangles into stories.

For the story tangles that have a square around them, I used an HB pencil to sketch the square. For the most part, I have no idea what I’m going to do. There’s no plan. I may add a shape at the corners or perhaps I’ll do some shading or add color to the border. There are no rules here. In fact, there are very few required steps in story tangles. I suppose the one thing I do for pieces like the dragon fly is to lightly draw the outline or contour of the thing. In the case of the dragonfly, I sketched (very, very lightly) the body, two wings on each side, head, and legs. Once that’s established I make it up as I go.

In my class on using Procreate on an iPad, I go into the logistics of doing a tangle on paper and taking a good photo with my phone, and importing the photo into Procreate and taking it from there, using an Apple Pencil.

Materials

Waterproof pens (Faber-Castell, Staedtler, Rotring, or another you come across), color (if you prefer), a pencil, and an eraser.