Official Zentangle® Patterns - Evoke, Fescu, Floo, Mooka Easy & Opus

FIVE FESCU-BASED TANGLES

With the exception of "Opus", there are no publicly published step-outs for any of the tangles that I'm blogging about today. I decided to blog about them together because they all seem to be based on a very simple and extremely popular little tangle called "Fescu". "Fescu" is generally used as an embellishment to add a touch of whimsy to a Zentangle tile. "Fescu" is light and airy and you can see below that it can be drawn in a variety of styles. If you look closely at all of my tiles posted here today, you will see that "Fescu" is at the root of every one of them.

FESCU

"Fescu" is so simple that it really doesn't need a step-out to figure out how to draw it. However, I did find two YouTube videos that show how HERE and HERE. About the closest I've found to a step-out can be seen HERE on Pinterest. It shows how to intertwine the Fescu in a pleasing manner. Maria Thomas drew the tile in THIS very old Zentangle blog post from 2010 and it features "Fescu". Her "Fescu" looks very much like the example on the far right in the top row of my tile above.

In my searches to find information about unpublished official Zentangle patterns, I ran across a lot of conflicting examples of three tangles in particular: "Evoke", "Floo" and "Opus". After finding quite a few examples of those three tangles on Pinterest and several blogs, I think I've narrowed down the basic characteristics of each one. If I'm correct in my assumptions, they really are quite different from each other in spite of the fact that I've seen them labeled as each other on many tiles posted online. I found it very helpful to watch Melinda Barlow CZT's videos and she happens to have videos for all three of these tangles.

OPUS

As I mentioned, "Opus" does have a published step-out and it is posted in THIS Zentangle newsletter. Melinda Barlow's video about "Opus" is HERE and I found two more videos HERE and HERE.

The main characteristics of "Opus" are that the Fescu fronds are quite large and curly (but not quite spirals) and they grow in a relatively symmetrical manner from both sides of a central stem. The key is that the fronds should all touch any adjacent fronds at some point. That's because after an aura is drawn around the entire "Opus", spaces are created that can be filled with other tangles.

When I drew the tile above some time ago, I wasn't sure which tangle I was drawing. I've decided that it's the most like "Opus" except that my fronds aren't all touching each other. I used auras to create the spaces that I filled with fine lines.

Below, and also at the top of this post, is another example of "Opus" and on this one I filled the gaps with "Tipple".

EVOKE

This tangle is called "Evoke" and I probably never would have heard of it, or had any idea what it looked like, if not for Melinda Barlow's video which you can watch HERE. If you take a look at Linda Farmer's list of current official Zentangle patterns HERE, you won't find any information or images of "Evoke" or of "Floo" which I will write about next. Neither of these tangles seem to be popular enough to bring up more than a couple of examples with a search on Pinterest. Having said that, I was eventually able to find a few examples but I suspect that some of the ones that I found are actually "Opus" rather than "Evoke" or maybe a combination of the two. I found several examples of "Evoke" on the blog of a CZT so I guess I can trust them to be accurate. However, some of her tiles are tagged with "Evoke" that looks more like "Opus" to me so who knows?

Based on Melinda's drawings in her video, I believe these to be the characteristics of "Evoke":

1. The Fescu fronds branch off to only one side of the stalk and the tops only slightly curl over. Two side-by-side stalks can give the appearance of branches on both sides but they are most likely two stalks that are very close together.

2. The Fescu fronds are quite short and terminate close to the stalk.

3. Melinda says in her video that the original step-out suggests drawing round bobbles on the ends of the Fescu rather than teardrop shaped ones. Melinda said that she prefers to draw hers with teardrops as shown in her video.

4. An aura is drawn around the entire stalk and fronds.

I love how Melinda gives her "Evoke" the look of Mooka by the way she clusters the stalks together but I have no idea if that is how the original is drawn. I also like how she adds the darker areas of "rounding" in the crooks of the branches so that's how I drew mine.

FLOO

This tangle called "Floo" is also not commonly used judging by how few examples I have seen online. I've found two conflicting versions of it so I don't know which one is the official version. Without realizing it at the time, the version that I drew on my above tile, looks a lot like a new tangle that you'll read about below. However, there is a difference between them which I will explain and show you later.

The main characteristic of "Floo", that makes it different than "Opus" and "Evoke", is that the fronds of "Floo" are separate and not attached to any sort of stalk. Based on THIS video by Melinda Barlow, as well as a tile HERE on my beading friend Carole Ohl's blog (Carole is a CZT), this tangle probably looks a bit like billowing "gusts of wind" rather than like thin strands of aura'd "Fescu" like I've seen in a lot of example images online. There is a rather large spiral at the top and the frond tapers to a point at the bottom. Having said that, Melinda makes a comment in her video that she likes to draw her spirals larger than indicated in the official step-out which only adds to the confusion. As with "Opus" and "Evoke", there is an aura drawn around each "Floo". I found one other video HERE and Jesse draws hers about the same as Melinda's and Carole's.

To add even more to the confusion, I found THIS blog post about "Floo" on Life Imitates Doodles. The way that Sandra Strait describes and draws "Floo" is obviously the other version that I mentioned. Hers doesn't look much like Melinda's or Carole's. I get the impression from her comments that she is not a CZT because she says that she has a suspicion of what "Floo" looks like which implies that she is not sure how it looks in its official form.

UPDATE 9/22/2020: Maria shows how to draw "Floo" at 6:57 in THIS Day 1 video from Zentangle Project Pack 10.

To cover all of my bases, I also drew a tile with this thinner variety of "Floo":

I embellished my tile with some striping and "Tipple".

MOOKA EASY

I only just heard about this tangle, which might be called "Mooka Easy", a few days ago. I think it looks similar to some of the examples that I've found of "Floo". It's apparently brand new and was introduced by Maria Thomas to subscribers of the Zentangle Mosaic app. I first heard about it in one of the Facebook groups that I belong to. Someone simply mentioned that her tile featured this easy version of the tangle called "Mooka" and she called it "Mooka Easy". She said that Maria demonstrated it in a video on the Mosaic app.

I did a Google image search and found three more example tiles that feature "Mooka Easy". You can see one of them HERE on the zenspar blog. It's there on the last tile shown on that page. Although it isn't described as a new version of Mooka in THIS Zentangle blog post, Maria says below her tile that she drew, "...this cluster of energetic Mooka..." and it's obviously the new simpler version. Plus, the article was posted around the time that Maria showed it on the Mosaic app. It's the third tile down from the top of that page.

Although it does look similar to the skinny version of "Floo", I realized while trying to draw "Mooka Easy" for the first time that there is a big difference between them. "Floo" has an aura around it. There isn't technically an aura around "Mooka Easy". After drawing a Fescu stalk you draw an aura on only one side of the Fescu that circles around the bobble at the top.  Below you can see "Floo" and "Mooka Easy" side by side for comparison:

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