How To Draw A Celtic Knot Border

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betsyillustration's avatar

How to Draw Basic Celtic Knots

Published: Feb 23, 2016

I had to research Celtic Knots for my day job and so I whipped up this tutorial for you guys summarizing the information in one sitting which is why it gets so sloppy at the end.
Hopefully it still all makes sense!

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This is a great tutorial...thank you! I'm a Zentangle artist and will loudly attest to the fact that meditative art is incredible. There's none better in my opinion than Zentangle. There is a YouTube video from TheTirelessTangler showing how to do a freehand basic triangle knot. She also has another vid for one slightly more advanced. Both very worth watching 😁

Wow, great tutorial, I never thought of it like that!

I didn't think of it either, I had to watch dozens of boring/unhelpful/super slow youtube videos to learn it. Then I just put it into an easy and quick tutorial format to spare the rest of you guys having to watch all those videos.

this'll be really useful in a project I'm doing! Thanks for putting it together!

This will definitely beat trying to freehand these things!

I know, right? I always thought you had to draw a single line looping around a million times, then draw lines on either side of it to make the rope thicker— just whoa, too many lines. The grid method made much more sense to me.

Definitely! This is the first time I've seen it explained in a way that actually makes sense to me, so thank you for that. ^^

Gotta try this! Was in a very bad mood this morning, this made it a little better (:

Aww, hope your day/mood gets better after you doodle some Celtic knots.

It did! Those are surprisingly calming to draw. Are you gonna do more tutorials on celtic knots, like, fancier ones?

If you can show me an example of a fancier one, I'll do my best to figure it out.

Oh I just thought because it said "Basic Celtic Knots" that there was such a thing as "advanced celtic knots" or something, haha. I figured out one extra but it's not really special, it's just taking one of the curves at the border and adding a bow, it's super simple but it actually looks pretty nice in the right places

There are definitely more advanced knots, but since there are many different kinds, I was just double checking to see which style you meant. I'm personally really interested in learning how to do ones that have two different "rope" sizes like the yellow and green one here:
Flash - Celtic Knots 1 by sidneyeileen
The triangle ones are pretty too, but I think the grid would be more difficult to set up. Hmmmm...