Since I don’t have my quilt wall up in my studio yet, I turned to my laptop last night to practice some of the composition ideas picked up at the workshop. I worked in Adobe Illustrator, drawing this shape:
My goal was to create a symmetrical design using just this shape in theforeground. I reflected it against itself to get started. As I worked the pieces into each other, I allowed intersections of the shape to become a new shape that could be colored differently…kind of like the instructions given by NC when we were constructing the white/black pieces into neutrals. I didn’t vary the size of my shape in the foreground. I placed a few background shapes that are not my original shape. I used a limited fall pallette to choose colors:
More or less happy with my sketch, I was now ready to move on to using this image as the basis for a more fluid, skewed design. (Again, shades of what I learned at the workshop, but applied using tools of my own.) I used warp tools to play with the image and cropped to this:
I like this image. It reminds me of the border designs on vintage
plates, and the “handles” remind me of cake plates. I can see how it
could be pieced with a combination of curvy and straight lines:
Finally, I moved the image to Photoshop so I could more easily
manipulate colors. I’m not done here, but this is the latest iteration:
The emphasis on symmetry was not part of the workshop exercises, but I like to work that way. Now I really need to get that design wall up to see if I can eyeball the shapes and free-cut them…more or less.