Welcome to the Graphics section

All these examples are taken from illustrations on the ProScribe CDROM, and there is an example of how to draw the Snake section provided here.

Designs like this were common in the most highly decorated manuscripts such as the Books of Kells, Lindisfarne and Lichfield. The latter has a lot of interlaced bird designs, including a stunning carpet page where the areas are filled with interlocking bird patterns, while Lindisfarne mixes them more with other animal designs and Kells has by far the widest range of zoomorphs including all sorts of birds, dogs, snakes and people. They seem to have come from a common source as there are a lot of similarities between them, despite the widely differing designs. The Celtic artists seem to have taken to bird designs more than any other zoomorph. It has been suggested, and I suspect that there is some truth in this, that the monks who drew these books were mainly from island or coastal monasteries and would have spent a lot of time contemplating the divine scheme of things while staring out to an empty sea and a sky full of screaming seabirds. I have marked the main similarities on the design to the left: The beak (in yellow) was always drawn with a small lower half and a large, curving, overhanging top half; The eye (in light blue) was always drawn in the same way as the snake's eyes - two concentric circles with a 'v'-shape coming from the larger; The topknot (in dark red) always came from the back of the head, and its length depended on how much space had to be filled. These three components meant that the birds' heads were all very similar, it was in the body that the variations tended to appear; The edge of the wing (in dark blue) was always there, but usually the circle denoting the elbow (shoulder? I'm never sure which) is usually further up, much closer to the neck; The tail feathers (in red) varied in number from one to about five, and their length was again dependant on the space to be filled. Some had both/all the feathers the same size, usually short, while others, like this, have one short and one long; The feet (in purple) were almost always drawn like this - two talons, thin at the heel and bulging towards the end, to the front and one to the back with curving teardrop-shaped claws.

Snake patterns are simply knotwork designs with a snake (or dragon) head at one end and a curved fan-shaped tail at the other. They are useful embellishments for knotwork borders with a loose strand at each end. The heads and tails are always seen from above and are very simple to draw. Click here The heads are mainly made with circles - the Celtic scribes loved their compasses! If you want some step-by-step instructions for changing your knots into snakes, just click here. It seems likely that apprentice scribes would start by learning to write the basic scripts, then they would be taught to draw the basic step and key patterns. This would introduce them to the diagonal grid pattern, peculiar to the Celts, which they would need for learning how to draw knotwork. Once they had mastered these skills, they would study and develop the more complex, and alien to the Celtic traditions, skill of drawing of zoomorphic designs. Because they are the simplest, the snakes would be the obvious place to start, with the dogs and birds being left to the time-served master. The origins of the snake patterns are somewhat hazy, but they can be seen as a natural embellishment by the celtic artist, used to fill blank spaces around knotwork designs. They may have been picked up from the Scandinavian style, where they were used extensively. In the last years of insular Celtic art (the Urnes style), snakes appeared often, but in the Scandinavian style, where the bodies of the snakes formed much thinner lines than those found in more traditional knotwork. This was due entirely to the influence of the Vikings, and significantly changed the look of knotwork. People have also pointed out the similarities between traditional chinese dragons and the celtic snakes, saying that as Ireland had no snakes, where else could the idea have come from, but this seems a bit far-fetched, and I suspect coincidence has more to do with it.

Dog designs, like most of the zoomorphs, came late to Celtic art, and can therefore be seen as a development from the Byzantine manuscript designs. The problem with this is that while the dog was an animal of great significance and importance to the Celts, Christians of the East held them in very low esteem. It is likely, therefore, that they were an invention of the Celtic scribes, based on earlier pagan representations. Furthermore, unlike the other zoomorphs there does not appear to be a standard model for dog designs, which implies that they came neither from the Byzantine manuscripts, nor from an earlier pagan tradition. This is a little suprising as there seems to have been a general symbolic style for quadrupeds before the arrival of Christianity whose most obvious trait was the spiral curved shape denoting the shoulder blades. If the designs in the manuscripts come from these pagan originals, they have lost a lot in their conversion to interlace. The similarities between the dog patterns tend to be those between all the zoomorphs - eyes made from two concentric circles with a 'v'-shape coming from the outer, ears extended to form knotwork patterns to fill space (as with the snakes' eyepieces, the birds' topknots and the men's beards and hair), the curved teardrop-shaped claws. The feet tend to be as in the design on the left, with a bulbous heel and as many as three toes extending where this design has only one.

People

Designs like this were common in the most highly decorated manuscripts such as the Books of Kells, Lindisfarne and Lichfield. The latter has a lot of interlaced bird designs, while Lindisfarne mixes them more with other animal designs and Kells has a wide variety of birds, dogs, snakes and people.

Tree of Life designs definitely came from the East, where they had a long history. The Celtic scribes of course added their own touches, twisting the trunk into interlaced spirals, but the original designs are still easily recognisable. These seem to be of Roman, and later Gothic, sources and appear to have joined the Celtic repertoire from England with the formation of the Augustine church. The unusual aspect of the Celtic version is that they almost always come from a similarly-shaped pot, which does not appear in the Roman (supposed) originals. As with the other zoomorphs, they only appear in the later, more highly decorated manuscripts, and carved on stone crosses of a later date. The Book of Kells has very few examples, while the Books of Durrow and Lindisfarne have none at all, despite the variety of their other ornaments. In Christian terms the Tree of Life was the vine, from which came the wine which turns into the blood of Christ at Communion.