Creating Celtic Animal Designs: A Fresh Approach to Traditional Design

Creating Celtic Animal Designs is a new tutorial and design work for animal knotwork designs by Cari Buziak. Due out 15th Jan from Dover, it's 128 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats.

I liked the layout of this book. It progresses from very general basic freehand knotwork shapes through specific example tutorials. The author's method doesn't use set dot grids to draw designs and instead uses a 'ribbon' method which allows for a lot more freeform design and a more flowing, organic finish. The author then builds up this basic freehand method further to incorporate specific animals in later chapters. The same method would work very well to incorporate whatever other designs the student/artist wished besides the animal designs.

The animal designs are all ones which can be found in period examples in manuscripts, stonework, wood and metalwork, etc. There are 9 different chapters with multiple animal tutorials, plus the basic knotwork chapter, a general chapter on tools and supplies, and a short author biography.

Dover has, throughout the years, published a number of good books for Celtic drawing and art. This is a somewhat niche one, but solid nonetheless. This would make a great selection for woodworkers, carvers, metal artists, jewelers, calligraphers, graphic artists and the like.

This is a useful and well presented book full of appealing material.

Five stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.