Quick frame I threw together. Continuity was harder than it should have been on this one. Probably because it was the end of a day and I was tired. Knots are often called problems, like a math problem. They often also feel like it. And like any problem sometimes the longer you stare at it the less it makes sense. You just following the same lines around and they keep not matching up. You get stuck in the same logic traps trying to connect everything and you keep getting the same incorrect results. And just when you’re ready to give up something finally clicks in your head and you go “Oh, a line break here fixes everything”. And it totally does! All of the sudden you have a continuous line and everything is wonderful and you feel like an idiot for wasting all that time being stupid.
Also, I really wanted to write “Dolla Dolla Bill Y’all” in it but restrained myself. yay for self control
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Peek Behind the Curtain
Here’s a little something.
It’s not really a tutorial at all but more of a peek behind the curtain to how I do my pure digital knots. This is all done on Adobe Illustrator. Took me about an hour. The knot itself is pretty basic, I was just in the mood to build a “How Things Work” piece.
And although this isn’t a tutorial, if some of you are already building digital knots and would like a pointer or two here are a few thing to note about this knot:
1.) The Polar Grid Tool in Illustrator is one of the least used tools in the program but is absolutely amazing for drawing circular knots. Slap a grid down, turn Snap to Point on and the world is your oyster.
2.) To make things even easier if you divide 360 by the number of Radial Dividers on your Polar Grid you’ll have the number to rotate your line segments by. For this guy I had 12. So all I had to do was draw a single arc, and just rotate it by 30 degrees a few times and I had my outside border.
3.) Shading segments is a lot easier with a radial gradient then a linear gradient. It’s almost guaranteed to shade both sides as the line goes under another line without ever having to change the angle of the gradient.
I’ll put together a more in depth tutorial later but this may give you something to try at home. Or to just stare at and smile. Either way its fine with me.
And because I’m sure someone will want to see it, here’s a finished version.
Welcome to Celtic Knotter!
So, yeah. This is the site. There is still much to be done but it is officially a functioning website.
The front page is set up blog style so I will be able to keep you up to date with the things that I am doing. I at one point had aspirations of posting a knot a day but I’m not sure if I’m that dedicated yet. I am definitely going to start scanning in my old sketchbooks and what-not so you can see how terrible I used to be that this. That’ll be educational…
Anyway, welcome! Feel free to look around. Check back often as I’m going to be working hard to get content up. This site will eventually not suck. I’m looking forward to it.