Knotty

Sorry I haven’t been blogging much, folks — too busy with other stuff at the moment. There is, of course, the job hunt (although I haven’t been looking very hard this week). And unpacking and organizing the new apartment. And refreshing my memory of why I hate Gilligan’s Island so much.

I figured a spate of unemployment would not be complete without watching at least one episode of Gilligan’s Island, but I couldn’t get through it.

Anyway, I have started up my Celtic knotwork again. It’s been a little over a year since I seriously worked with knots. Here’s one I’ve been working on the last two days:

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I’ve worked out a pretty good method for making these knots using both the computer and traditional tools. It used to have to draw each knot three times, now I really have it down to one.

First, I print a page of my own custom graph paper designed for knot-drawing. It marks the direction of overlaps (so I don’t have to think about it) and shows _all_ the possible intersections on a well-proportioned knot.

I print this out using light blue ink from my inkjet. Then I plan the knot with a 2H pencil, selecting which intersections to use. The graph paper (and some years of practice, let’s be honest) make this a fairly rapid process — where it once took me several hours to design a knot this size, I can rough one out now in half an hour.

Once the rough is done, I ink the final knot using a 03 or 05 Pigma Micron pen.

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Then I scan the knot into the computer at a very high resolution and use Photoshop to drop the blue gridlines out. I use the brush and eraser tools to make minor corrections to the knot outline, then take a (fairly complicated) series of steps to make the lines solid, print-worthy outlines.

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Usually at this point I would color the knot on the computer — which is much more difficult than you might think — but in this case I printed the knot out again, used my sepia pencils to add color and dimension to the knot, and then scanned it _back_ in.

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Since the white background has become smudged — the sepia pencils are soft — I used the original scan as a mask to turn the background of the knot back to pure white, a process that’s a little tricky but sounds more complicated than it actually is. And the result is:

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The nice thing about this process is that I can print out several copies of the knot to color in different ways — I don’t ruin a knot by coloring over my original!

So. Everyone asleep now?