Drawing the Ulbster Cross

The drawing shows the culmination of Bain’s studies of one of the crosses on the Pictish stone from Ulbster. The interlaced knotwork design clearly fascinated him. Some ten years later he created a set of posters that unpick and then re-use the pattern.

Here, Bain emphasises the single continuous line of knotwork in the design. He sets out six stages for building up the fill of the cross, which is made up of five interconnected square units. At the bottom left Bain also shows how to create a more complex single square design. Its self-contained interlace is derived from the arms of the cross. It is remarkable how much ‘instruction’ he built into a single drawing.

This illustration is one of four that introduce how to draw knotwork panels in Bain’s Celtic Art, Methods of Construction. Although he prepared it in 1937, this drawing wasn’t published until 1951.