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Underwater wave photo with Celtic knot overlay

I’ve been playing about with paint-shop pro again and taking some of my old sketches and trying manipulate them and see what I can do.  Tonight I used a sketch I did a couple of years back when I was on a flight back from Vegas after a conference.   ’The fantastic 4′ movie was on (total rubbish), I couldn’t sleep and was properly hung over, the buffet champagne breakfast is a stupid idea.  Some fatty business guy had slipped off his shoes and bagged most of the row of seats.  I really wanted to sleep but couldn’t, so I drew a wave knot for most of the long flight home. 

The idea I had was to put a Celtic knot within a knot, I did the drawing in a little A5 notebook, so it’s a pretty tight space to work in.  

Knot in a knot sketchbook photo

1. I took my ‘3 simple curls design’ and drew it out with nice fat bands. 
2. I then divided these bands into 3 and marked dots at equal intervals along the 3 lines within the original knot.  This formed the grid for the inner knot. 
3. I applied a simple repeating unit to this grid to form a network within the knot.  I counted up the number of units to make sure it would be a single line.
4. I thickened the network of the inner knot and the outer lines of the ’super’ knot
5. I tried out interlacing but it wouldn’t work… why? 

By now it’s like 6am and I’ve been up for 20 hours of something stupid like that!

It didn’t work because the thickened lines forming the ’super’ knot edges are not a single or continuous entity entangled with the inner knot.  To the single knot it’s just like having random short lines crossing it’s network.  This means when you come to interlace the knot there’s not an equal number of overs and unders so you get interlacing errors.  Doh.  Oh well still looks pretty cool, I was still happy with the design, it looks complex and has a nice shape. 

I was thinking the inner knot could be painted like the foam that colours the face of a wave when a second wave breaks closer to the shore than the first.  Patterns within patterns kind of thing.

Anyway the paint shop work I did was as follows:

1. Photo the sketch
2. Adjust lightness and contrast
3. Airbrush out some shadows and unwanted pencil marks
4. Reduce to grey scale
5. Re adjust contrast
6. Paste as layer over a random picture I took from under a breaking wave (at Putsborough… AKA slush-borough)
7. Deformed the layer to make bigger
8. Set to about 50% opacity
9. Made the layer a ‘burn’ layer

I think it has a quite nice smokey effect… will probably try and make some other effects soon, it’s been fun using this old design… it took me away from a pretty rubbish flight I suppose that’s the beauty of pencil and paper over paint shop pro!!