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Thursday, March 21, 2013

Celtic Cross

I enjoyed my last knotwork project so much that I wanted to up the challenge: connecting a radial grid to a rectangular grid. I'm pretty pleased with the results:


Here's an animated version of the process:


I started by tracing the radial grid off the template I made in Illustrator, then used the points I wanted to transition at to created the rectangular grids. Once the grids were done, I drew boundaries and turning spots to guide the designs. After a quick pass to lay in the over-under weave patters, I penciled in, then inked, the connecting strands. A little grey-tone shading helps add depth to the weave, and some adjustments in Photoshop straighten everything out. It's pretty straight-forward from start to finish, unless you mess up the weaving and have to spend an hour tracing every ribbon to make sure the patterns link correctly. 

The whole process is time-consuming and meticulous, but once you get into a groove it's an enjoyable, even relaxing, thing to do.

2 comments:

Kyu-bum Lee said...

looks siick. there is certain beauty in doing things by hand rather than using computer which ends up being too symmetrical.

Adric Worley said...

Definitely. I don't mind using the computer to make minor corrections (erase stray lines, correct skewed areas, etc.), but I love the liveliness of hand-made patterns.