A submision to The Knoters and anyone else who is interested in drawing celtic (or arabic, nordic, irish, etc) knots. This is the most basic of all meathods an I know what it was like to be interested in knots and not be familiar with the technique. My first three days of knotwork were more labor intensive than any since. I, having only seen celtic knots but not how they were developed, invented my own. I had to plot two sine curves and two cosine curves spaces half a pulse apart and 90 degrees out of phase. I spent hours slaving over the simplest of knots. Glad I came across this meathod.

1. Build your grid. You can fill spaces, curve it, make circles, make the grid twist and winde if you like. Just be sure that there are are rows in an X Y grid which could be unbent to form a flat grid. For tattos try to find shapes and spaces naturaly formed by the curves and contores of the body and use this as a guidline when warping a grid.

2. Add walls. Walls lie across segments of your grid. They CAN NOT be crossed by any segment of "rope". When curving a grid for tattos or similar make your warped grid, then make a coppy using the same boxes and rows to match your planed knot. use this grid to experiment with different wall combinations before drawing on your warped one. Speaking from what little experience I have I find that it is better to use the minimum number of walls because they afect large areas and adding so much as two extra walls, even on a big knot will drasticly change it's apearence. Walls are by no means nesisary, but they can be used to create hundereds of truely one of a kind patterns. Don't be intimidated by walls either. Many of the knots that I have, and plan to download are drawn for the simple pleasure of toying with the posibilities.

3/4. X and Y diagonals. This part is easy. at the middle of each segment plave a small dash at an angle as shown. Be sure that the dash is angled to intersect the middle of box sides that it is "aimed" at. DO NOT place them on the walls you have already drawn. That's whole point of having walls. Make sure that the hatches are all oriented one way on the X lines and the other way on the Y. These hatches show you that this line has "right of way" and pases over the rope beneth it. When finished each strand should go over, under, over, under...

5/6. Extend these hatches so that each will line up with it's counterpart on the other side of the right of way rope at intersections. Curve the lines away from edges and walls so that they line up with their counterpart. You can stop right here if you want, I often do. These solid line knots can be left as is for pattern archiving. They also should be used when the tatto is going to be small and contrast is needed.

7. For the hollow look simply trace the outdide of each line and erase the middle line. This techniqu works well with mediums of different indelibility. Most of the work is done in pencil that way walls can be erased. Do steps one through six with 2H (light) penciles if you have them. Do your outline in light pencil as well. When you are happy with it go over the outline in a non-erasable medium. When you are SURE that it is dry erase your pencil marks and Presto your finished! I did not bother to be as careful in this step for the tutorial since I was in a rush.

Hope this helps.
Apothacer