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Knotwork in spades

Posted by MT

I did a series of 4 masquerade masks paintings a few months ago that each had as a theme one of the suits from playing cards. While doing them, countless more ideas came to mind for others series of paintings that would complement these original 4.

One of these ideas was to create 4 more pieces, each having one of the suits of playing cards as a theme (just like the masks) but painting them either all white or all black and having them be super cool intricate celtic knotworks! Something I absolutely love!! The idea is to paint them to look 3D, as if they’re carved in stone or whatever other substance.

This will be interesting, because the painting of the knotworks will be relatively fast and easy (for painting) and most of the work will be in the designing of the knotworks themselves. So pretty much the opposite of most paintings I do.
I’ve starting with the spade (because I felt like it). And after several sketches I finally created something that felt right.

With knotwork you only need to create 1 section and then either rotate and copy or reverse and copy or reverse and rotate or… you get the idea…

I use to use a light table to do this but ’tis the era of technology and my preferred method is now to scan it and do all that reverse/rotate stuff with the computer.

Have you met my good friend Photoshop? He’s been a dependable, faithful, extremely useful buddy for many years.
Alright so I then print out the result.

It’s close to what I want (we’re looking at the black one on the left). I feel it should be a bit edgier. Also now I see it’s not filled out enough and doesn’t have enough of a spade shape on the foot part.

I resketched it based on the printed out version and changed it up until I got exactly what I wanted, which would be the blue version up there. Knotwork can be tricky. Usually it either works right away or takes forever to adjust. Today we’re pretty lucky. I’m pleased with it now so let’s get that back to my buddy Photoshop so he can test one last thing for me.

I quickly slapped some color on it, just to give a general feel of what it will look like. The end product will look much MUCH better of course but this will do for now. Now I’m not sure if I should go with a straight version or an angled one… Show me Photoshop, show me!