The plan of this week was to check out how to make shrinks dinks from #6 plastic. The shrinking worked fine but the sharpie didn’t stay (possibly because I used Goo gone to get rid of a sticker) so more on that at a later date. Before I could test the procedure, I needed a design. Sigh. This is always the part where I stutter to a halt and nothing gets accomplished for several days. This is the point where my own inadequacies get to me. You see… I’m not an artist. No matter how many beautiful creations I turn out, if it has a pictorial element, I probably adapted it from someplace else. So this weeks creation, while it may not seem as impressive as designing a three dimensional figure from a drawing of a fish, for me, it is actually a much bigger accomplishment.

I started off with an idea. I wanted to do something with a squirrel to go with the blog. I have also been toying with the idea of doing squirrels in various historical knot work styles. That didn’t happen this time, but it was an influence. I’ve always been partial to Pictish animal carvings. I am giving you this image as a cultural reference. My inspiration actually came an image here:  AvacadoArt on deviantART. (A quick side note on the use of images in blogs etc. It is really easy to surf the web these days and lift pictures for our own use. I love Google image search, but it does make it very easy to forget that the images we find that way are frequently under copyright. If you are a blogger, I encourage you to include proper attribution in your posts.) Sorry, little rant there.

I had my style, now I needed a pose.  I wanted to go with a running squirrel, not a sitting one.  Since the idea of the name for my blog is chasing squirrels, I figured it should be in motion.  I found a motion study of a squirrel running and chose the pose from that.  The stretched out squirrel showed a little more motion, but I thought that the one I used lent itself better to the style.  Here is my first draft, done by… hand! This almost never happens as I am not very good with a pencil.

You can see where I had already started to play with the knotwork in the tail.  It was reasonably simple.  The chest was more difficult.  I have taken classes on knotwork at Atlantia University with the SCA, but they were pretty basic and didn’t cover drawing on a curve.  To help me out, I turned, as I do with most things drawing, to the interwebs and found a wonderful program for generating complex knotwork designs.  Knotsbag is sparsely documented but very powerful program.  It is also freeware.  For ~$20 you can upgrade to the full version which will allow you to export your knots to svg and illustrator format.  I will be purchasing it soon.  Here is the hand drawn version of the squirrel.  But here is the problem with hand drawn.  I can’t use it in a digital environment.  So one more step to go.  This time on my new iPad.  The iDraw app (at ~$10, it’s expensive for an iPad program but way cheap for a vector program)  for the iPad allows you to create vector drawings.  I used the photo here and imported it into the background of the iDraw program.   I then traced it using a stylus.  Hey presto!  a vector drawing is created.  It needed a little tuning up to create the image at the top of the page, but not much.  The only think I haven’t been able to figure out with iDraw yet is how to color in closed areas.  It may not be possible, but I have other programs that can do that.  So shortly, Squirrel!  will have a new logo.  Just as soon as I can figure out how to make WordPress display it.  🙂