Celtic knotwork and computers

Knotwork is just a small part of the repertoire of the early manuscript illuminators, which included interlace and key patterns, spiral designs, stylised creatures and other fantastic forms.

Acknowledgements

These are some of the best and most richly illuminated early manuscripts:

  • Book of Kells
  • Lindisfarne Gospels
  • Litchfield Gospel
  • Book of Durrow

Although computer-aided knotwork can be beautiful, for real inspiration you can't beat a good facsimile of a page from one of these and a powerful magnifying glass. Then try to imagine creating what you see using the technology of a thousand years ago. Incredible!

My sources

  • George Bain: Celtic Art, The Methods of Construction. 1951
  • Aidan Meehan: Celtic Design, A Beginners Manual. 1991
  • Andy Sloss: How to Draw Celtic Knotwork, A Practical Handbook. 1995

Knotwork by computer

Many years ago when I was spending hours and hours re-working knots on paper, I bought my copy of 'How to Draw Celtic Knotwork' by Andy Sloss and realised that if could draw all these crossings into the computer I would be able to cut and paste my knots!

Then it dawned on me that each unit could be broken down into four elements (two in the case of edges) by splitting the actual crossing. That reduced the number of elements significantly, so then I had a sensible number of basic glyphs for a truetype font. I created a couple of fonts in Celtic and Pictish proportions and that's what I still use.

It was only later I discovered I wasn't alone in using fonts and Daniel Isdell had created a much easier-to-use system. If you haven't already - try it!

For those of you who've got this far, these are the progams and techniques I've used to produce the graphics for this site:

Square knotwork

- that's anything based on a rectangular grid.

simple square knot in Pictish proportions
  • open office writer:

    not essential, but if you're using a font it's a quick way to see the overall shape of a design, and easy to cut and paste and edit.

  • paint shop pro:

    paste the final design (or text) into several layers, select and fill parts of the design with gradients and/or textures

  • alienskin impact effects:

    apply different effects to different layers, and combine for the final image


Triangular and other knots

Designing using fonts is all very well, but they are essentially rectangular. You could bend things afterwards using skew and perspective - but there's a much better way: use a knot designer!

One of the best is Knotsbag from Gerard Bousquet. Based on the ingenious graph system by Christian Mercat it automatically draws knots based on squares, triangles or even free-form.
You can even create three dimensional knots using software by Steve Abbott!

  • knotsbag: create a graph, check the interlacing and export in vector format
  • inkscape: import the vector drawing, clean up if necessary and export as a bitmap
  • import the bitmap into psp and apply alienskin effects as before

If you want to experiment, I'd recommend a visit to Knotsbag or try the 'conformal mapping' applet - for some images to play with try right clicking and saving any of the images in my collections.

More www knots

The web is a big place and pages change by the minute so this isn't a long list of extinct web sites. As well looking up the sources listed above, here are a few things to try in your favourite search engine:

  • celtic knotwork
  • celtic interlace
  • pictish proportion
  • celtic font
  • knotwork tutorial

There will probably be thousands of hits for each one - and this is just the start...

... enjoy!