Knot

February 23, 2007

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I originally bought an art tablet so I could improve my photo editing and retouching. A mouse just doesn’t have the finesse, and there’s a lot of features in Photoshop that you just can’t get to without a pressure sensitive input. And then, yesterday, I suddenly realized I could do something far better with the tablet that I hadn’t done in years — Celtic knotwork.

I used to be obsessed with it, but it requires a grid and I could never get the hang of transferring something from grid paper to a more artistic medium. I tried lots of ways, including graphite transfer and projection boxes, but none of them worked particularly well. Scanning the art in, dropping out the grid, and cleaning up the scan took piles of time.

I gave up on trying to draw on the computer because the interlacing makes knots quite difficult to describe using bezier curves. But now, with this tablet and the magic of photoshop layers, I can get rid of the grid with a click.

I can also make massive patterns. And who knows what all else. _Then_ they can be printed to an archival medium, if I ever get anything decent out of it.

Posted in Art and Writing