Description

Skip the Steep Learning Curve and Master the Ringerike Style Quickly!

 

This book gets you familiar with the essential concepts of the Ringerike style, and at the end, you’ll be able to create an authentic Viking Age design from start to finish.

 

What You’ll Learn

• How to create knotwork patterns.
• The essential characteristic features and shapes of the style.
• How to create variations of the features to personalise your design.
• How to analyse historical references and sample from them.
• How to create an authentic design from start to finish.

 

 

Master the Ringerike Style

The Ringerike style (c. 1000-1075 CE) is one of the quintessential styles of the Viking Age. Its abundant and elegant knotwork patterns are demonstrably appealing to a modern audience.

But how do you recreate the style in accordance with its original historical principles? For the contemporary artist, the concepts of the intricate interlacing patterns can seem incomprehensible and daunting to understand and replicate.

The Ringerike Style Essentials unlocks the secrets of the enigmatic craft of knotwork creation and makes it approachable for you to create your own unique designs.

 

All the Elements You Need to Create Your Knotwork Design

The Ringerike style employs a very particular selection of simple visual and graphic elements and concepts like, for example, acanthus leaves and pretzel knots to compose the intricate knotwork compositions.

This handful of simple compositional elements is combined, repeated and reconfigured over and over throughout a composition. Knowing these components allows you to create any Ringerike-style composition imaginably.

 

 

 

Reconfigure and Combine Elements to Create Your Own Unique Designs

 

All the essential principles and concepts you need are broken down through clear illustrations and graphics in an easy-to-understand manner to help you quickly acquire a good grasp of the individual building blocks composing the style.

Furthermore, you’ll learn how to create variety and personal touches by reconfiguring and combining the ornamental elements to create your own unique designs.

 

 

A Step-by-step Process for Creating Your Knotwork Design

The iconic great beast motif comprises a lion or wolf-like creature engaging in combat with a serpent or vine wrapped around its body. The motif is known primarily from the Greater Jelling stone. It is a stable design throughout the late Viking Age, featured on numerous runestones throughout Scandinavia and the surrounding Norse-influenced regions.

You’ll learn how to assemble all the ornamental knotwork components and principles into a fully-fledged Ringerike-style great beast design.

 

 

 

A Manageable and Straightforward Approach to Creating Complex Compositions

 

Step-by-step, I’ll walk you through the process of constructing an intricate knotwork-based composition. From analysing the references to laying out the composition’s main lines and shaping the ornament’s details.

You’ll acquire a manageable approach to the otherwise complex and daunting task of composing intricate knotwork patterns. This straightforward process can be applied to any of your next Viking Age-inspired designs to reduce the difficulty of wrangling the knotwork ribbons, giving you more capacity to focus on crafting the design you have envisioned.

 

 

Tools and Setup

A basic understanding of illustration is preferable. You’ll definitely be off to a much easier start if you know how to operate a pen, as I won’t go into the basics of illustration.

This book’s principles and concepts apply to virtually all visual media and crafts. You can replicate the process digitally or traditionally with pen and paper. If you have a personal preference and a medium you are comfortable with, stick to that.

I hope you’ll enjoy your time getting into the Ringerike style in the company of this book and that it will serve you as an excellent compendium for revisiting and referencing long after you’ve created your first design.

 

Table of Content

Introduction

Part 1: The Building Blocks

Core Features
Ribbons

Ornamental Motifs

Serpents

Beast Heads

Beast Bodies

Knotwork
Figure-of-eight & curly loops

Pretzel and Triquetra knots

Double pretzel-knots

Offshoots Knotwork-based Compositions

Motif Variations
Acanthus leaves

Union-knots

Fleur-de-lis

Feathering

Palmette from Union Knot

Palmette from Ribbon

Beast Head Variations

Beast Feet

Part 2: The Design Process

Prepare
Analysing the References

Breaking down the Composition

Sketch
Arranging the Primary Ribbons

Arranging the Secondary Ribbons

Arranging the Tertiary Ribbons

Shape
Adding Ribbon Widths

Sculpting the Ornamental Motifs

Carving out the Contours

Render
Weaving the Ribbons

Inking and Colouring

Next Steps

References