Knots, Part 3

Knots are also intertwining, and sometimes present a bit of complexity when rendering them. Separate ends may be intertwined, as when we tie our shoes. But loops can also intertwine, and this creates a kind of impossible figure because they are most difficult to actually make. As with Borromean rings and the Valknut, we can also use twists and loops.

In the previous post on knots, I included what I considered to be the simplest intertwining of a loop containing a twist.

Here a gray four-leaf clover loop with twists at the corners intertwines with a brown loop with inside twists. This creates a form of duality because the brown loop is really a four-leaf clover loop turned inside-out. The over-under rule is used on each thread to produce a maximally tied figure. A bit of woodcut shading is also used.

Now I'd like to show a natural extension of the figure eight intertwined with a simple loop. I designed this form a few days ago, but it took me a few days to get to a proper rendering. I used the same techniques to produce this as I used in the examples from the previous post. Except that I used a spatter airbrush on a gel layer to create the shading when one thread passes under another.

I used a simple airbrush on a screen layer to create the ribbon highlights. As always, I wish I had more time to illustrate!

But this figure shows how four loops can become intertwined in an interesting way by twisting each loop once.

Each knot I draw starts out as a thin black line on a page. I don't even worry about the crossings and their precedence. I just try to get the form right. The final result is very complex and simple at the same time.

Knots have their stylistic origins in antiquity. They were used for ornament and symbology by the Celts, the Vikings, and the ancient Chinese.

A purple loop with three twists intertwines with a blue circle in this knot.

The shines were created using a lighter, more saturated color and mixed into the gel layer using the Just Add Water brush in Painter. It's a bit like a Styptic pencil and was one of the first mixing brushes I created in Painter in 1991.

Enjoy!

Drawing On Your Creativity, Part 2

More than anything, creativity comes from our artwork. It is our mark-making capabilities that make us inimitably human (though, isn't it cool that some elephants can paint?).

Of late, I have taken up drawing again, partly for use in this blog, and I have been exploring some old and some new avenues of illustration. Painter, since I wrote it, has been one of my main conduits of expression when drawing. Before that, I used pencil and paper, felt pen, ball-point pen, and whatever I had at hand. I even used scratchboard (a medium acquired when building Painter, at the suggestion of John Derry).

Nowadays I use an Ultra-Fine Sharpie. Usually black, on very thick paper (28#) so it won't leak through. This was the medium I used for the blocks image at the top of this blog. And also for the pyramid image.

Here I draw some blocks on top of each other. I made this image as an anti-minecraft homage, since the blocks do not really line up with each other from level to level. Here you see the original Sharpie drawing, scanned directly.

My usual method for illustration in this blog is to scan the image and read it into Painter. At that point, I clean up all the mistakes and funny ends, and lines that should meet but don't, and also the lines that overshoot. But I usually don't move the lines much. This retains the sketchiness of the original.

I also like to color the illustrations, using a gel layer in Painter.

You can see the effect of this kind of editing here, on a new version of this pyramid image. You can see exactly what I was drawing, for one thing. But it still retains the informal sketchy look that my illustrations need.

I employ hand-drawn and edited illustrations and I am quite sure that none of these will infringe on copyrights. After all, I drew them. I also retain all the original drawings for future reference. If necessary, I could scan them again at higher resolution and use that result for a new illustration. If I wanted a new color scheme, or some substantial edit, for instance.

My work with fabric has led me to do quite a bit of hand-drawn art lately. I even continued this with a considerably-more-challenging follow-up post. In this, I have sought to create a more realistic sketch look. For fabric, I start with a picture, clone it, and then add sketchy shading and highlights. It is an involved process, but it has been tuning up my sketching chops.

When doing work directly in Painter, using a Wacom tablet and pressure-sensitive stylus, sketchwork becomes very interesting because you can capture the essence of human expression, and yet it remains editable and adjustable.

Here I show some work I did this evening using Painter and nothing else. I took a picture of my hand with an iPhone (it was quite blurry) and cloned it, but really I didn't use the clone colors. Instead, I cleared out the clone and used the tracing paper for reference to sketch the outlines. Then I looked at the original to get a better feeling for the shading and put it all in by hand.

So this is a hand-drawn hand, having drawn the pyramid.

When drawing something, it is important to think creatively, and have an intuitive feeling of what you want the drawing to look like.