 Why hello and welcome to my YouTube channel. I'm Sandy Allknock and today I want to talk about not being Irish because I am not Irish. I have this red hair, it's out of bottle, but I am going to pretend that I am Irish because St. Patrick's Day is coming up. I thought I would tackle trying to draw a Celtic knot and I found a way to do it that is much easier than what I started out with, so I'm going to show you a little of the process that I began with, but I'm going to give you the secret mathematical formula to draw your own Celtic knot and then show you how you can customize it and then I will paint mine. So let's get started. My process started by drawing one really loosely on tracing paper and then I took another piece, made a tighter drawing over top of it, but then I wanted to transfer this to my watercolor paper and I was going to just give you this drawing and then you could print it out and then mark these three or these four spots with your compass. I just poked it through and then used like just lifting the paper up so I could see my little marks again and mark them with a pencil, but then I realized this was going to be easier. If you make a grid that is four inches by four inches, mark the center point at two inches and then at the top section mark one inch, then the place where that one inch mark hits your outside circle, that is where your other two points are going to be because you need to divide your circle into three in order to make the tray foils that go around. So if you use this grid, it's going to be a whole lot easier than using my little tracing idea that I had done, so I offer that up to you. It's for free, go grab that and once you have your three marks along with your center point, then you want to make that outside circle, which you will already have since you have marked it according to the way that I recommended you do it and then from each of those three points, you're going to draw kind of a half circle because those are just going to crisscross into the center and start your three tray foil pieces. If your measurements for those three dots are in the right places, then the points free to those tray foils should stick out the same amount or approximately the same amount. If it's slightly off, it's not going to be a really big deal. Your whole thing will be off by, you know, a sixteenth of an inch and that's not going to kill anybody. So next, I increase the width of my circle and made the tray foils thicker. You can make it as thick or as thin as you want. You can put as many lines around there if you want. And then I also made a thicker circle to go around my design. The first one that I made wasn't quite thick enough, so I had done it in very light pencil the second time when I was more sure I made it in a little heavier pencil. And then it's a matter of customizing the design in any way you want. You can make all of the tree foil pieces sit on top of the circle or what I decided to do was intertwine all of it. So I picked one and in my brain, I said, okay, for the point of that tree foil piece, this is going to be on the right hand side, the right half of that tree foil. And one, I'm going to erase the lines going one direction. The other, I'm going to erase the lines going the other direction and then go back and forth. I had to keep thinking through it to see which one pops up and which one goes down. But I will have all this on my blog so you can see it and maybe follow that. But if you're going to be making your own custom design, you'll have to think through that a little bit that you can turn your paper a third of the way around so that you are always working with one point up at the top. I think that's a little easier than what I've done here, which is trying to keep the paper paper still and, you know, tracing around in my brain, okay, this is the right half of that tree foil. This is the right half of that tree foil. And I wanted all three of those to be the same because when they crisscross, they will kind of go up and down and intertwine with each other properly. So then it was a matter of going through the left half and doing the opposite. So the left half of the tree foil goes down under the circle, comes up in the middle. And I would also recommend if you're going to do this, then do like one thing all the way around. I was trying to jump from tree foil number one, number two to number three, and then I would lose my place because it's not all that easy to follow through. And I was just constantly like with my eraser taking my little brain and making little racing track paths around this to try to make sure that I could tell whether I was going down and under or up and over because I wanted all those to intertwine. So I finally got that worked out. And then it's a matter of adding any embellishments that you want. I mean, you can add really complex designs in here. I decided just to show you how to approach that, I'm just going to add a simple leaf. And I chose a spot on the side of one of the tree foils and drew a very simple leaf shape in there, erase the lines that are on the inside of it because that's going to pop up to the top and then turn the paper and drew the next one. And I just looked at where it crisscrossed each of the points and how far it came out at the end. But when you're talking about these small embellishments, those could even be different. You could do three different flowers or three different clovers or, you know, whatever kind of design that you want on yours. And I know there's probably some purists out there who say, no, that's not a technically Celtic way to do it. You know, I have said, I'm not Irish. I don't know anything about being Irish. I just wanted to do one of these designs because I thought they were beautiful. And I really wanted to paint it. So once you get any kind of, you know, embellished imagery on it, like if you're going to put a leaf or something out over top, then you can start designing anything that goes on the inside. You can look for inspiration on the internet for how to embellish these. There are some that have really intricate little designs in each one of these spaces, each one of these shapes. I decided to just put an outline or an inline, I guess, around the inside and outside of each of these shapes because that's going to allow me to make a beveled look to mine, which is what I wanted to do. But you can do whatever you want at this point. And you can do it in pen and ink. You can do this in different mediums, whatever medium you like. Get your markers out, get your crayons out, whatever you like. And just have fun with it. So I am going to use watercolor for mine. And I've started with ultramarine turquoise. I wanted to make this something that almost looked like a rustic sort of coloration. So as if it were green, but turned a little bit on the turquoise side in the highlight areas, but then goes a little more of a deep dark rusty kind of green in the darker areas. And that allowed me to just play with color as I was moving around each of these sections. I left some highlights, mainly concentrating in my brain on the upper left types of areas of each shape. But I had to think about each shape and which way it's facing so that I could kind of decide which area the highlight was going to be on. And the great thing about something like this is that if you miss one and you get the highlight in the wrong place, nobody's going to care because you just have to get a couple of them right for it to look dimensional. And it'll be just fine. For my green, I started using some of the sap green and mixing a little bit of it with the turquoise color when it's up at the top section. And as it gets down to the bottom section, I started pulling in some transparent red oxide, which is giving it more of that rustic brownish green kind of feel. So it looks a little on the vintage type of side of the colorway and just continued moving around all the different shapes and letting the colors transfer from one to the other. Now with watercolor, it's transparent. So I can just keep changing the color and the value as I go. I knew I was going to get darker with the color overall, but then I can take one of the colors like if I wanted it to be more green. I just painted some a different kind of green color that was the sap green mixed with the turquoise over top of the brown areas. So I have the kind of rusticness of the brown sections now transformed into more of a rusty green and then pulled in a little bit of that rusty green into the highlight areas. So I wouldn't end up with quite that much of a big difference between the different colors on each section. So as I go, I just keep layering until I'm happy with it. The small leaves, I used a brighter green. I mixed some of the sap green with a bit of yellow so that it's a little on the happier side of the colors. And then went in with a darker version of the color, put in more of the sap green and more of the turquoise. So I create shadows. So the highlights on the upper left, shadows bottom and right side of each one of the shapes. And when you've got something that's all these twisted shapes, just isolate in your brain each one of the shapes individually and then start adding the shadow to that one as though it was an isolated item. Don't think about it as part of the whole because then you'll lose track of where the shadows should be. So the shadow color on this one is sap green plus some of the a little bit of the transparent red oxide and a bunch more of the turquoise so that it starts to build a darker color because then I wanted to go in and add more green over top to kind of pull the whole thing together. I had sketched in a smaller tree foil shape underneath in case I wanted to put more color in there and I used the same color that I used for the leaves but just dabbed off some of it so it wasn't as strong and would allow the leaves to be the brightest part. And then I mixed another green and painted over basically everything with one green so that all of it has those under layers and you know the kind of the more brownish greens on one side the more turquoise greens on the other side but when you put that one glaze over everything it starts feeling like it's at least all one object even though the color shift moves across the whole thing. Now you could easily decide to add some pen and ink to this you can add some gold foil to it or gold ink so much you can do with one of these kind of designs and I really hope that some of you will try it you've got over a week until the St. Patrick's Day holiday so thank you so much for joining me for this video if you hit the thumbs up button I would be so appreciative because it really makes a difference YouTube shares more things when they are more watched and more liked and you can help with that. I have just updated by the way the art venture calendar with two brand new zoom calls and you're welcome to join in either one they are completely free one is educational and one is more just hanging out and making art together so join me for those and I will see you again very soon with a new video take care bye