Swaggitude

The holiday season, for me, extends more or less from my birthday on October 30 through Christmas and its surrounding celebrations. This year, considering my constant focus on improving my art, people were not at a loss for what to get me. (Nor was I at a loss to get myself. I bought a few of these things, much to the chagrin of people shopping for me.)
My art supplies:

Additions to my collection include:
-3 new Bristol pads of varying size
-A big sheet of parchment
-A pound of scrap vellum (goat, sheep, deer, and calf, for comparison)
-A book on the Book of Kells, a book on the Lindisfarne Gospels, and a Celtic art instructional book
-Five tiny little synthetic sable brushes with differently shaped tips
-An imitation gold leaf starter kit
-A gold leaf kit
-Wood carving tools (chisels, sanding sponges)
-Jewelry-making tools (bezels, epoxy, exacto-knife, a smoother/flattener thing, tape for laminating)
-Metallic paints in a variety of colors
-Refillable calligraphy brush
-calligraphy quill pen set
-Extra ink refills for my technical pen

I've gotten so much swag this year, I feel compelled to find a big pirate treasure-chest to keep it in. Maybe I'll ask for that next year. Thank you Mom, Katie, Caitlin, Cheryl, Joe, Jake, Marcess, and Self. Your contributions will not be wasted.

Songs of the Hunt (line-art)

I've been away from the blog for a while, and this is why. About a month ago, I drew the following template/outline:

I wanted to start putting together an insular-style piece using the kind of columnar layout that can be found in the Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and a few other insular manuscripts. I like the look of that layout, and though I still don't know what the words will be, I've thought that it's a really nice design for framing a small amount of text in a larger illumination.

So, school ended and I went to work.

As is my habit, I went through my process of filling in each space, first designing and redesigning the animal-patterns that were to form the bulk of the image with a pencil, and then going over the final pencil designs with a technical pen (my wonderful Signo bit 0.18).

In the columns, and the circles above, you can see dogs and birds, as well as traditional Celtic spiral patters and basic interlace. The people at the bottom, with their flutes and their books, represent the scribes and bards relating the glory, the madness, and the humor of the hunt, with the spirals representing their music and the clearer images of the dogs and birds representing the tales. I don't usually go for themes or particular motifs in my work, but when you're doing traditional Celtic illumination, dogs, birds, and people tend to be most of what you have to work with and the theme kind of emerges on its own.
At the top, you can see more animal patterns (including the big oafish head of my own St. Bernard, Darwin). Also, at the bottom of the image above, you can see in the little circles a different kind of Celtic patterning called "steps," which were common in insular art, though completely new to me. Actually, along the sides of the outer columns, I used a so-called "fret" pattern, which is also traditional, but a novel thing in my art. I was full of experimentation with this thing.
The chest (so-called because I think it looks like a big traveling case) at the bottom of the design was...mixed. I wasn't terribly happy with how the three sections at the top came out, but the derivations from the Lindisfarne Gospels on the left and right came out really well, and the circular area in the middle is something I'm really pretty pleased about, mostly because it's simultaneously very different and also very me.
So the line-work is finished. All in all, I have no idea how many hours it took me. Not more than 70, but not less than 50, I should think. And it's not over yet. Once I feel ready, this will be painted, which will take...god, I don't even want to think about how long. A long time. But if it goes well, it'll be worth it.
Here's a scanned copy of the design, with much higher resolution. If you do a right-click and say "View image," you should get a (very) large view of the line-work, which makes it a bit easier to see the details.

(p.s., Because I have no life and am a dork, I counted: including the 6 humans, this thing contains 169 animals. Pretty remarkable when you consider that the whole thing is 5.5"x10.5")

More jewelry practice

Greetings, subjects of Earth. I've returned from my working hiatus, and have more goodies to post.
I've been practicing with the jewelry equipment my sister bought me, and I've actually put together a couple of new pieces that I've been pleased with. The first is a pendant for my lovely wife, Caitlin, complete with her first initial and some Gerber Daisies (which she quite enjoys):
My inspiration for this piece came from this amazing tutorial: Illuminated 'P' by ~somk. Obviously I've got a lot of work to do before I can produce work of that quality, but I've taken a few baby-steps on that road, beginning with buying myself a wonderful set of tiny itty-bitty brushes, and receiving a bunch of varied Celtic art supplies for Christmas (which I'll probably be posting about on Friday).

The second and more recent attempt was this pair of earrings for my sister, for Christmas and also to thank her for sending me down this jewelry-infested avenue:
They came out pretty well, I think. Quite simple, but pretty and very homemade gift-looking.

I've learned a couple of lessons from these projects that might be useful to any of you looking to try this at home:
1) Make sure to laminate both sides of your image, otherwise the epoxy seeps into the paper and dulls the colors.
2) If you mix the epoxy more slowly and gently, you end up with fewer bubbles and better visibility. As the inimitable Katie Cragoe put it, you're not making a souffle.
3) Make sure to mix the epoxy thoroughly. If it's not fully mixed, it won't dry all the way, and you'll have to apply another layer on top which takes an extra day of drying, and sometimes doesn't work if your bezel is already too full.

That's it on jewelry. More to come on the recent illumination project.

I would walk 500 miles

Just, so you know I'm not completely slacking off, this is what's happening around here:

Yeah...I'm not a prolific artist, but it's not for lack of trying. It just takes me forever and ever to finish these bigger pieces.

Thor Mjollnir Tattoo design

Hooray for finals being (almost) over! It's pretty satisfying to be back in the saddle. I'm still working on the other illumination piece, but that's going to take me forever and ever, so I figured I'd so something a little simpler in the meantime.

I'm calling it "Thor: Norse God of Looking Sinister and Pissed."

A Pendant!

So, in the weeks preceding this blog's birth, I'd been trying to figure out how to move toward professionalization in my art. My sister, a professional artist in the making, gave me some good advice. Art on paper is not hard to find, and especially with design-work like mine, people are much more interested in art on things - carving, sculpture, etc.
So for my birthday, she made me a jewelry kit. It contained all the basic tools I'd need to start putting my art into pendants and earrings. I was crazy busy in the weeks following my birthday, but finals are almost over, and having a bit more time on my hands, I finally got around to trying out my kit.

Step 1: draw the thing.
Step 2: Color the thing, and laminate it with clear packaging tape.
Step 3-5ish: Assemble the tools. Cut the thing out to the proper size. Mix the epoxy in a disposable container, and put a little epoxy into the bezel, followed by the thing, followed by more epoxy.
Step 6: Let it sit for at least 12 hours, probably longer. Don't touch it. My sister was adamant about this.
Step 7: Appreciate the thing you made. Except...I think I did something wrong with the epoxy, because it came out all bubbly, and you can't really see the design from more than a foot away. Oh well. Live and learn.

Busy time

Hey, Internetites. I'm sorry to say, I don't have any art to post today. I'm in the midst of finals, and haven't picked up a pen in days.
I did want to point out a couple of cool things, though:

1) In order for a piece of art to be properly called an "illumination," it must be painted at least partially with actual gold. I've gotta learn how to use gold leaf...
2) The monks who painted the old Celtic manuscripts actually put together the pages based on a process that is surprisingly similar to my own, using almost the same tools. (Except for photoshop, obviously.) They started with empty vellum, which they punctured to create the borders and general shape of the designs. This was followed by pencil (sort of) sketches of a grid on the vellum, so that the designs could be created symmetrically and carefully in terms of space distribution. Then they did the designs in pencil, painted over them with small pens made from feathers or reeds and dyes from tree bark, minerals, berries, etc., and then applied the gold overlay to the important bits. Most importantly for me: none of this is prohibitively difficult, or lost to antiquity. I could do this, today.
3) All the animals in the Celtic manuscripts are drawing with big, circular eyes, so they all look constantly surprised.

I'll try to get back on the ball soon. Final paper and exam happening on Tuesday, and then my schedule is (slightly) more my own again.

Tryptich Time!

My wife is nuts for IKEA. Just loves the place. For me, IKEA is akin to some Alighieri-esque torture cavern, in which my claustrophobia is subjected to the ultimate in designer terror. But loving my wife, as I do, I accompany her into that awful place.
A couple of years ago, we walked out of the Swedish hell with a tryptich picture frame. We didn't really know what we wanted to do with it, but we were certain that upon arrival at home, we would be struck with inspiration and would have a nice little sparse-art piece to decorate the walls of our then-apartment. Two years and 3000 miles later, we'd moved to Illinois, and the picture frame was still in its original packaging. I decided to do something about it:
Ignore the text in the middle, it's not important, and it didn't stay.


IKEA and I are no closer to being friends today than we ever were, but at least I found something to do with that damn frame. It's a start. An intrepid step toward peace.

Veritas ab Candidas project

My "Veritas ab Candidas" project was my first major foray into extensive illumination work.
I'm really not sure how the old monks in Ireland and Scotland went about the process of putting together illuminations. I know they used paint, not ink, and I know they didn't have access to ultra-fine-point pens.
I start with a template, and the slowly fill in one section at a time:

More sections, and more division of smaller subsections within the larger piece:
Doing this kind of work was really a big departure for me from my normal pieces. Celtic art, for me, is largely about precision, symmetry, and order. The illumination pieces sometimes have a sort of symmetry to them, as with "carpet" style pieces (one of which I'm currently tinkering with), but one of my favorite things about them is that it often seems like the art is just spilling out of the mold, and taking on a kind of untamed life of its own. Asymmetry and free-form style is a big part of that.
I've also always been a sucker for old-looking pieces, so it absence of any color, a parchment or animal hide background is preferred to make the design look sort of antiqued:It's possible that I'll add color to this piece in the future. The original black-and-white is around here somewhere, and if I have a spare week with nothing to do, it may just happen.

Recent Commissions

When you're a freelance artist and art isn't your main professional pursuit, work can be kind of sparse. I have gotten a couple of commission recently though, and they've been fun to work on.

In backwards order, because I have more pictures of the second:

This first set of designs was done for a guy named Jared. He's looking to start a craft business making Viking-style drinking horns, and he wanted to be able to brand both a personal design and a business logo on each horn. His family crest animal is a Northern Goshawk, so he wanted something that would reflect that tradition. These were what we came up with:
Somewhat earlier in the year, I was contacted by a young woman on DeviantART who wanted to commission a tattoo design for her friends. They wanted to get matching tattoos of Celtic wings on their backs, and had seen this design elsewhere:
...but they wanted something a little more traditional Celtic-looking. And for my part (no offense meant to the original artist), I would never ever allow a friend to get anything that looked this sloppy tattooed on their skin.
...I guess that did sound a little offensive. Sorry, anonymous other artist.

Anyway, I came up with the design piece-by-piece:

And finished with the whole thing together.

(By the way, if your interested in using this design or anything like it, contact me first, and I'll put you in touch with the person who commissioned it. Same goes for the logos up above.)

Spin Spin Spin

Last Christmas, my in-laws bought me a couple books of Celtic designs and modern knotwork. One of the books was "101 Celtic Spirals," by Courtney Davis. It includes spiral designs from early Celtic stone carvings and metal work (2nd-8th century AD), the (relatively) more modern stuff from the illuminated manuscripts (Book of Kells, Book of Durrow, Lindisfarne Gospels, etc.), as well as contemporary Celtic motifs from sources around the world working today. It was really a great resource for working on a new style of art for me.

I started out with basic spiral designs, and liked them so much, I haven't stopped playing around with them since.
The ones above I liked a lot, but the image was too low-resolution to order a print from my DeviantART gallery, so I decided to make a similar set with my watercolor pencils (also a gift from the in-laws):
The colors are sort of washed out, there, but it actually looks pretty good in real life.

As I got more acquainted with the traditional Celtic styles, my interest turned toward the illuminated manuscripts. If you've never seen pictures of the art in these books, go look up "Book of Kells" on Google Images. The detail work is unbelievable. I honestly don't understand how a person can get the kind of precision with paint-and-brush work that these monks were achieving. I can barely make lines that small using a specialized extra-fine pen! This was one of my illumination-style attempts at spiral work:

My goal, more or less, was to see how closely I could fit lines in next to one another without actually touching. My specialty Uni-Ball Signo bit 0.18 gel pen was very helpful.
Not a great picture, but it can give you some idea what the detail work is like. the circle is about 2.5" across.
And sometimes you've just got to combine traditional techniques and modern technology.

Ring Knot Tutorial

As mentioned in a previous post, there was a period of a couple years when all I did were what I call "ring knots." These are circular knot, usually (though not always) comprised of one continuous line weaving over and around itself in a symmetrical pattern.
After getting quite a bit of practice with these pieces, I got to a point where I had a specific process that I would go through to create each one. Remembering what a pain in the ass it had been to learn how to put them together in the first time without any form of instruction, I thought it would be helpful to others to put together a tutorial detailing my process. As the tutorial itself says, there are any number of ways to go about creating these kinds of knots - mine is a good way, but it's by no means the only way, and I'm sure there are benefits and drawbacks to the others. If you're going to do this kind of methodical, geometric art, it pays to fiddle around to see what works best for you.

(The thumbnail below doesn't expand to a size that is readable. Check out the tutorial at my DeviantART site, here: Ring Knot Tutorial)

Celtic Cross

At the time that I made it (about 2 years ago), this piece was by far the most complicated and labor-intensive thing I'd ever done. Something like 38 different interweaving lines and 35 hours of work.


Still not my absolute favorite, but it really turned out pretty well in the end:


By the way, if anyone is interested, this is another piece where the original black-and-white is just sitting in a stack of papers around here. I'd be happy to part with it - if you're interested, contact me and make me an offer.

Knots are Gifts. That's just how it works,

While I love making the Celtic art nonsense, when it hangs around my house it just collects dust, so I usually end up giving it away as gifts. I recently realized that this was the case, and decided to starting using it to my advantage - now I make pieces specifically to be gifts for particular people.

A gift for my father, who perseveres:

A gift for my mother, lover of all things big and clumsy (most particularly pelicans and moose):


A gift for my mother-in-law, musician, speech pathologist episcopal-enthusiast, and keeper of a team of giant cats and a dog. This one got a little over-specific in the symbolism, but it was still fun:

doodles and scraps

Just a few things I put together in my spare time recently:

The first couple of bands are nothing, but I did enjoy the fish. I like how befuddled they look:
I've never been a person who practices. I'm not a practicer. Practitioner. Whatever. I tend to start drawing, and I either like what I'm doing, and consequently keep working until I have a finished product of reasonable quality, or I decide I don't like it, and I throw it on the floor.
With some of my art stuff, however, practice is just a requirement. These are the product of that necessity:





As of about a year ago, Celtic spirals were an entirely new concept to me, and while it's not difficult to learn how to freehand them, it's not something that came to me intuitively. Practice was inevitable. The same can be said of Celtic/Norse animal motifs. Making an animal design usually involves being able to imagine a body/limb/wing/head shape and formation that could never and should never actually occur in the natural world. I'm still getting the hang of it.

For the record, spirals are easier than animal designs. With the spirals, there's really only four or five different tricks to choose from - perhaps more to the point, there are definite and finite tricks to choose from. With animal motifs, the only rules seem to be:
1) There should be an animal in there, the general phylum of which should be identifiable.
2) That animals limbs, and probably its torso, should not contain any bones or limited length.
3) Alcohol.