Tag: reference

thatsmeimmanfers:

DO YOU LIKE CELTIC KNOTS???

YEAH???

HERE’S HOW TO MAKE THEM!!


A’ight, a’ight,

What you need:

  • Graph paper
  • Pencil with a good eraser
  • Patience!

Got those things?? Good.

To start with, draw out some dots in the shape of the knot you want. Want a square knot (like the example above)? Make a square out of dots. Want a rectangle? Make a rectangle. Get good with basic shapes and you can go on to more complex shapes like borders, circles, etc. I’m going to do a rectangle one for the sake of the tutorial.

Important things to remember when making your dots:

  • No closed corners. Make sure all corners are 2 dots diagonal from each other, not a single dot.
  • Make sure the edge dots are 2 squares apart. ie: Dot, skip a line, dot, skip a line, etc
  • Fill in the entire shape with dots, but make sure they’re in the right places. This is most easily done by drawing your dots diagonally.

Next, draw short lines through every edge dot, but do not let them connect. These lines are called “splits” and are points where a section of the knot will end or split off. Your corners should look like this:

And your whole shape should look like this:

Next, add splits inside the shape wherever you’d like! This is how you’ll “design” your knot. After a lot of practice you’ll have a good feel for how your knot will look just by adding these splits.

I like symmetrical knots, but your knot can look however you want! Don’t add too many splits though. A few will go a long way. Here are the different kind of splits and how they will look:

  • One split line: A simple arc. These will be your edges and are the easiest splits to incorporate inside your knot.
  • Two split lines: These make a U shape. They will be your corners and are useful for when you want the “rope” of your knot to make a U-turn.
  • Three split lines: These are my favorite (but there aren’t any in this tutorial knot). They make cool loop-da-loops and add a splash of fanciness to your knot. However, if you’re not careful about where you place them, they can look strange.

One more type of split, which isn’t really a split at all:

Making a square of split lines, like this one, will make a hole in your knot. No “rope” will pass through these. Likewise, if you square off a smaller shape inside your main shape (leaving no openings into the small shape) the knot inside the small shape will be an entirely separate know from your main knot. (I may do a tutorial about super fancy knots that will include this concept later on). SO if you want holes in your knot, include a couple of these.

OKAY now to the tricky part. Draw short diagonal lines between all the dots that ARE NOT CONNECTED BY SPLIT LINES. If a dot is even remotely connected to a split, leave it alone. These diagonal lines represent parts of your knot that will be straight. Any other space will be filled by a curve in your knot. Here’s sort of what it’ll look like:

Now you need to add the curves. Connect the remaining dots according to their split lines. Refer to the close-ups a couple steps previous to see what I mean. It should look like this:

Notice how all the edges are arcs and all the corners are U’s, but that there are arcs and U’s inside as well. Here you can also see the how the hole in the center will look. This is the step in which you should fix any issues with your knot and add/remove splits you want/don’t want.

Next is probably the most confusing part. From the top row, choose a direction, left-to-right or right-to-left. In the top row (not the edge) draw lines connecting each intersection in the direction you choose. I usually choose left-to-right for my top row. On the next row down, go the opposite direction all the way across. IF A ROW DOES NOT HAVE ANY INTERSECTIONS, DO NOT JUST SKIP IT. TREAT IT AS IF IT DID. This means if you do a row of LtR and the next row doesn’t have any intersections, you treat it as a RtL row anyways and the following row will be LtR. If you simply skip it, the knot will not flow correctly and won’t connect in the right places. Your knot should end up looking something like this:

Now you can see roughly what your knot will look like when completed! Awesome! This is a good time to check and see if your knot is continuous. Follow your line from one point all the way around and see if you pass through every section of your knot. If you see that some of your knot was left out, there is an inconsistency in your knot. While this is fine and you can still make the knot and it will probably still look good, it’s notable that to be considered a “true” celtic knot, the knot must be continuous. But there are no celtic knot police who are going to bust down your door if you prefer to have a rad knot in pieces. If you are happy with your knot, move on! To flesh it out, outline the knot as if it were a rope. Follow the lines. If an intersection has a LtR line through it, the the topmost layer of the rope will go LtR. The picture explains this better:

Finished up, it should look like this:

Now, erase those pesky inside lines, get rid of the outer edge split lines, clean everything up and….

BLAMO!! You’ve made your very own celtic knot!! GO YOU!! You now have a mostly useless, but impressive skill that you never knew you needed!

Edited for typos…

Source: winsomeswimly

costumefilms:

Game of Thrones Season 3 – Embroidered details on Sansa Stark’s wedding dress. 

For Sansa’s wedding dress the designer Michele Clapton wanted to have an embroidered band that wrapped around which symbolistically told Sansa’s life from the Tully and Stark beginnings to the entanglement with the Lannisters.

Her story starts at her lower back where the Tully fish and Stark direwolf entwine; as we move round to the front the Lannister lion is becoming dominant over the direwolf and at the back neck the lions head is stamped onto Sansa. The dress colour was still very much Sansa Stark and the embroidery had pale golden tones but woven through the story are ripe red pomegranates, the red colour symbolising the growing Lannister influence over her.

Source: michelecarragherembroidery.com

art-of-swords:

Dagger – Low Bind from a Reverse Strike

Fiore dagger work. Attacker coming from reverse strike. Defender goes for a hyper-extension, attacker bends the arm to break the counter, defender then forces the “Low Bind” or “Strong Key” to disable the attacker from break free.

Source: YouTube

likeafieldmouse:

Edward Burtynsky – Rock of Ages and Quarries

Artist’s statement:

“The concept of the landscape as architecture has become, for me, an act of imagination. I remember looking at buildings made of stone, and thinking, there has to be an interesting landscape somewhere out there because these stones had to have been taken out of the quarry one block at a time. I had never seen a dimensional quarry, but I envisioned an inverted cubed architecture on the side of a hill. I went in search of it, and when I had it on my ground glass, I knew that I had arrived. I had found an organic architecture created by our pursuit of raw materials. Open-pit mines, funneling down, were to me like inverted pyramids. Photographing quarries was a deliberate act of going out to try to find something in the world that would match the kinds of forms in my imagination.

I was excited by the striking patinas on the walls of the abandoned quarries. The surface of the rock-face would simultaneously reveal the process of its own creation, as well as display the techniques of the quarrymen. I likened the tenacious trees and pools of water to nature’s sentinels awaiting the eventual retreat of man and machine – to begin the slow process of reclamation.

Often my approach, the compression of space through light and optics, also yields an ambiguity of scale. I think that people are always trying to put a human scale on things. We need to put our human perspective into these images, and our presence is dwarfed by the spaces we’ve created. It’s an interesting metaphor for how technology seems larger than life, larger than our own lives.”

diseonfire:

I wanted to write something intelligent about this character but I can’t think of anything poetic or dramatic to say.

She was tortured, she survived. She’s been shot, set on fire, dropped from heights and she’s run into more blades than any sane individual ought but here she is, still – and having yet not burned fate. She is now mostly quite happily going about being an acolyte of the Inquisition doing whatever it is Inquisitorial acolytes do.

Someone walked in on her training, I suppose. Their next choice of action may well determine whether or not that saw on her utility mechadendrite does more than waggle threateningly.

This took me little over a week and I’m still really unhappy with it but I just don’t know what to do to improve it anymore so I might as well release it into the wild.