My hand-drawn sketches are usually limited to one or two colours, and my EQ8 sketches aren’t so different… I can manage maybe three or four colours at most (as long as one of those is white*). I think this is due to a combination of things: I’m not confident enough yet to play with different colours; I find that too many colours distracts me from the design itself; and multiple colours just overload my senses.

But it’s surprising what you can achieve with only a few colours. This week’s sketch uses a whopping four (or three*) and takes advantage of a single element on repeat:

This is the sort of quilt design that’s MUCH easier to do in EQ8 than by hand. I had to recolour it a few times to ensure that none of the adjacent background squares were coloured the same way and that there was a fairly even distribution of each colour.

I love the idea of a quilt design based on a single motif, with the variation coming from colour rather than design. I’m going to try and design more of these.

In the meantime, this design could be made into a quilt using rectangles, half-square triangles and squares. Because it’s block-based, it’d be fairly easy to put together.

 

* yes, I know white isn’t a colour 🙂