Followers

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Celtic Knot Tangles

I'm back after a long break. Have been teaching wildflower sketching, preparing for upcoming Botangle/Zentangle classes, and just had to try something new to share. Every September, Estes Park (where I live) hosts the Longs Peak Scottish Irish Highland Festival, and I thought it might be fun to offer a Celtic knot drawing class this September in my new home classroom studio. Sooooo, as if I don't have enough to do, I decided to teach myself to draw Celtic knots. It's really not that different from learning to draw Zentangles, "one step at a time." Here you can see my quick and dirty "step outs" for a super simple basic knot. Then I enlarged it (but incorrectly 5x5 dots instead of 4x4.) However, the results were surprisingly pleasing.

So I took the two basic patterns and did a little tangling on top. It's really fun - obviously endless possibilities. You can see I was using a dotted paper from a pre-dotted "Moleskin" journal. The paper quality is not great so my added watercolor made it buckle. But it's great for learning the knot patterns.

Next I'll try a few with a more refined hand and good paper.

My basic Celtic knot "step-out" notes. Had fun with making a border and adding color.

"Step out" page

My self-taught Celtic knot turned Zentangle.

Close up of the smaller Celtic tangle.

Close up of the larger Celtic tangle (my mistake knot that actually worked!)