Cover for Celtic Knotwork Book

This is the cover design for my book "Celtic Knotwork Borders in Repeating Sections". there's actually a lot of information about the book itself right here - [link] - so I won't clutter up this description with too much of that. Briefly, it's a collection of original knotwork patterns broken up into their essential parts, in various sizes, and including arc sections for circular borders.

One of the unusual things about it is that all the patterns were created digitally from start to finish. Thats unusual for me, anyway - I've almost always worked out repeating borders on paper first. So this book is more than one kind of milestone for me.

The book's a clip art or pattern book resource - so unlike my other work, readers are free to incorporate the borders into their own work. I think a digital version of this would be pretty great but I don't have a timetable on that, or on Volume 2, yet.

Anyway, I've used a couple of those patterns in the cover, and you can see how in about half the patterns I've included inner border designs that branch from the main rectangular borders. This is a neat way to subdivide a frame horizontally, or vertically, or both.

I assembled the black-and-white line art for the cover and set that layer to "Multiply" blending mode, so it'd just darken whatever was underneath. Then I did the color work in layers below that one - pretty much like my "Tanglewood" Deviation, which started as an ink drawing - and that's a way of working that I'm enjoying at the moment. I'm getting a slightly different style out of it that reminds me of tinted ink drawings.