Earlier this year, Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas, co-founders of the Zentangle Method, published their second book. It's called Zentangle Primer, and the real reason I purchased it was for the chapter called "Reticula and Fragments." There was lots of buzz about it in the world of Zentangle and I wanted to see what it all meant.
As mentioned in the book, the definition of reticulum is a fine network or net-like structure. In other words, at least the way I understand it, it is a grid. But... the grid doesn't necessarily need to be made up of squares. And fragments is the word coined to mean the elements that fill the spaces of the reticulum. Just think of a grid pattern that you like... the fragments are the lines/shapes inside any one square of that grid (if it is, indeed, square.) In the book, Rick and Maria made up a chart showing many sample fragments, and each one has a letter and number to name it. You can fill your reticula with one or more fragments, drawing each one exactly the same, or rotating them.... or alternating them.... or mirroring them.
Here are some tiles I drew recently using this principle of reticula and fragments. This first one uses fragments X7 and F7.
The next tile uses M1 and K5. I like the way these two flow together.
The next tile was not one of my shining moments. I chose fragment B1 as you see in the upper left corner. My plan was to alternate it with the same thing rotated on the diagonal as you see in the first two rows. However, my plan went awry at the end of the third row. I guess I got distracted by something. At that point I decided just to continue doing them randomly. I'm not too happy with the completed tile, but there are no mistakes in Zentangle!
If you like grid tangles, this is a fun way to approach them and you get some interesting results. And if you're thoroughly confused by now, you might want to get the new book from zentangle.com and check it out.
