Cari Buziak - Creating Celtic Animal Designs: A Fresh Approach to Traditional Design

Copyright

Copyright 2020 by Cari Buziak

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

Creating Celtic Animal Designs is a new work, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2020.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Buziak, Cari, author.

Title: Creating Celtic animal designs : a fresh approach to traditional design / Cari Buziak.

Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, Inc., 2020. | Creating Celtic Animal Designs is a new work, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2020. | Summary: Many instruction books focus on how to duplicate a given set of designs, but this unique work shows how to create your own. Cari Buziak presents simple, step-by-step directions for incorporating animal forms into Celtic designsProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019028501 | ISBN 9780486837314 (trade paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Decoration and ornament, Celtic. | Decoration and ornamentAnimal forms. | DrawingTechnique.

Classification: LCC NK1264 .B887 2020 | DDC 745.09364/0166dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028501

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

83731901

www.doverpublications.com

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2019

Dedicated to Liberty. With all my love.

Photo Credits

All photos are from Getty Images.

Contents

How to Use This Book

Celtic animals have decorated many beautiful stone, metal, and embroidery creations and are featured in the old illustrated manuscripts. This book provides the tools to create traditional animals like hounds, lions, snakes, and birds as well as less common animals.

The first chapter teaches the basics of Celtic knotwork interlacefreehand style! I used a grid method in my previous book Creating Celtic Knotwork Designs, but this freehand method is more useful for creating animals.

The early chapters cover drawing animals step-by-step in great detail. In subsequent chapters, the instructions speed up and build on information covered in previous chapters. After learning the basics, its easy to create variations of these animals and animals that have never been drawn in a Celtic style. Mix and match elements, adding manes, tails, toes, and inner details to give the animals personalities and unique looks.

Each chapter begins with a single version of the animal that presents its characteristic elements. There are complex designs with more than one animal plus guidance on how to combine them in the most interesting ways and develop them into more complicated patterns. No special drawing skills are necessary. With a willingness to experiment and a bit of practice, youll be making Celtic animal designs in no time.

Freehand Knotwork

Celtic animals have one thing in commontheyre all tangled up. Elongated ears, tongues, tails, and body parts act like accessories and can be woven like Celtic knots, as can the bodies themselves. Dogs might be intertwined with birds or lions, making a complex panel of knotwork and animals that are all woven together.

Lets look at the basics of Celtic knots and how to draw some simple, interlacing knot designs. These can be used to embellish the animals.

Freehand knotting is a bunch of looping lines that first overlay each other and then weave together. Any squiggle of lines can be made into a freehand knot by following two simple rules:

Rule #1: Only two lines can cross over each other at any given point or intersection.

Rule #2: Enough room must be left at each intersection so that the line can be woven later.

Incorrect	Correct
In the left example, all the lines cross each other in the center, which breaks Rule #1. In the second example above, the lines cross together too closely, which breaks Rule #2.	In the corrected versions above, the circles and figure eights are spaced out so that no line passes too closely to another and only two lines cross in any given place.

Freehand Example 1

To weave a knot, expand each line into a ribbon or strip that can be woven. The easiest way to do this is by drawing the guidelines of the design lightly in pencil. Using the first line as a guide, add another set of lines to either side of it, as shown in red.

Offset the original line by a little or a lot. The distance determines how wide the final knotwork strands are. It doesnt matter how wide they are, but dont forget Rule #1 or Rule #2. If the lines are cramped in an area because there isnt enough room, redraw that part so its spaced out a bit more.

After doubling up all the lines, youll be able to see how the knot will look. If working on scrap paper, leave your original light pencil marks. If working on final good paper, erase them.

Heres the design with the initial light pencil lines erased.

The next stage is to weave the design. Pick any intersection of two lines, and erase it so that one line appears to go over or under another. Continue along that strand and the rest of the strands until theyre all woven.

Pick an intersection randomly and erase it so that one strand appears to go over the other, as shown in red in the upper left intersection.