Celtic Bird by Robert A. Sloan
Celtic line art isn't that difficult. It just takes careful penciling, guidelines and a good eraser to fill any area you want with beautiful knotwork, maze patterns, figures and stylized animals -- "zoomorphs." Learn the way the ancients did -- copy the masters!
Instructions
1. Decide the type of Celtic line art that you want to create and the shape of the design. Think about what it's for -- a card, a flyer, to decorate your website, a border for an invitation. I'm going to fit a bird into an arch shape for my example. I started freehand and then decided I wanted more accuracy with mechanical drawing. I used a pill bottle for the semicircle at the top (and continued a little around) and a grid ruler for the sides and bottom. I didn't erase the goofs on my sketch so that you can see it's okay to make goofs and erase them.
2. Look at your sources. At the bottom I'm going to recommend an inexpensive book, it's usually under $10 from bookstores or Amazon and it is the best classic source for original Celtic designs you'll ever find. Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction by George Bain has thousands of examples all of them centuries old -- which makes it fair to copy and adapt them, the designs themselves are not under copyright. Look up a good Celtic design or study a lot of similar ones to what you want to do. Decide which one would be easiest to copy. You can also look at museum collections online. If you search on Book of Kells or Lindisfarne Gospel, you will see pages of two of the most beautiful Bibles ever created -- and chock full of lovely Celtic designs, most of them very tiny in the reality. Trust me, you want to work bigger and simplify them!
3. Celtic birds and animals get distorted to fill the space. The feet get huge. The tails and necks bend around in funny ways, beaks and muzzles curve, and they are stylized. So in this step I'm going to create a Celtic bird design that you can copy for your first one if you're too lazy to search online for good examples. Do a teardrop shape for the wings. Draw the neck coming up from the top and bring one line down around the teardrop to make the body. Do the tail coming out from under the wing and bend it around the bottom of the space, ending it rounded off loosely. We will refine these shapes, this is a sketch. In the space between the body and the tail, draw one foot. Sometimes both feet show, sometimes just one, we're keeping this bird simple. Draw a round eye with a dot in it in the head and draw the beak as shown.
4. We have the bird placed and have filled most but not all of the space. Let's get fancier here! The toes are scrunched up into the space, but they could curve down and interlace with the tail feathers. Then we can have long wing feathers come up from the tip of the wing to curl around and interlace with the beak. It's looking better now. Detail the wing. Put a rectangle around it so it'll fit on a card. Add three circles in each corner to fill the rounded corners, threes are sacred and traditional in Celtic art.
5. Carefully erase the two areas you have crossings in and redraw them so that they basketweave. If you erase most of the lines and then go over the right lines, it's easier to use the old lines as guidelines. This is tricky, be very careful to get the crossings right in the pencil stage! They need to go Over, Then Under consistently. Put the pointed ends on the bird's eye (that can be done earlier). Birds and animals often have human eyes in Celtic art. Check everything carefully for mistakes. Check it again and get a friend or family member to check it.
6. Use your kneaded eraser, sometimes called a putty eraser. Squish it in your fingers and stretch it and flatten it, then press on your pencil and lift. Stretch and fold and do this again till you lighten all the lines till you can barely see them. Use the pen to ink carefully. I usually make any last minute changes in the inking, smoothing lines and combining lines if they run next to each other. I also sometimes add details after the inking when I can see the final version. Let the ink dry for a while before erasing it completely clean. If you are planning to use water media to color it, use a waterproof pen for the lines. Then erase all of the penciling. You will find out fast if you forgot to ink something!
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