Happy New Year! I hope 2025 is treating you well so far. Let’s get going with another year of Sunday sketches!

The basic building block of this week’s designs is a single diamond unit. Each unit features concentric diamonds, which I’ve coloured differently in the version above. Group four similarly coloured units together, and you’ve got a larger block – in this case, a star-shaped block and a squircle-y block (for lack of a better description).

I’ve shown the multicolour version first, just because I think it’s been awhile since I posted a multicoloured sketch on Instagram. The design works well in a three-colour palette too.

In the version above, I’ve alternated the colours in the diamond units; some are blue-white-black (starting from the inside and working outwards), whereas others are blue-black-white. Each centre is the same colour though.

In the next version, I’ve replaced the inner blue diamond with a black one in the squircle-y blocks. This makes the design a little heavier, but the blue star in the centre of those blocks still helps to keep things relatively light.

I can keep mixing up the palette and colour placement to change the look and feel of the design.

    

    

I also really like the two-colour version. Although the diamond units and the blocks that they create are all square, the slight angles within the units (and the way the pieces are coloured) give the impression that the blocks are squeezed against one another, advancing and withdrawing gently. I really like designs where adjacent blocks interact with each other like this.

   

In these next versions, you can see the basic unit a bit more clearly. It started out with more pieces; what appears as the inner diamond in the versions above is actually two pieces that I’ve just coloured the same.

So, by alternating the colouring across each unit and then rotating the units, the four-unit blocks end up having different outer colours. It’s a subtle difference from the two-colour versions above, but I kinda like the extra movement it adds to the design.

   

   

In all the versions I’ve shown so far, the units (and blocks) include some of the background colour, which helps to keep some consistency (and lightness) across the designs. The next two versions avoid that*; the units are in two colours and the background is a third colour. (* Well, not quite: an outer sliver of each unit is still in the background colour.) In these versions, it definitely feels (to me, at least) like the units are laid on top of the background rather than being integrated with it.

   

There are plenty of other ways to colour the units…

   

…and to arrange them. This next version uses a layout of 6 × 6 units, without a border (the designs above are all 8 × 8, with a border); the end result is a grid of 3 × 3 squircle-y blocks. The only difference between the two versions is how they’re coloured. Well, actually, that’s not really true; it’s more about how the diamond units are rotated. On the left, they’re arranged so their light pink corner is facing inwards to create a light pink centre star; on the right, they’re arranged so their dark orange corner is facing inwards. Of course, slide one unit over and down on each version, and you get the other version.

   

The best way to make this unit would be to paper piece it. Each diamond unit could be made from four paper-pieced sections that join across the short axis and the long axis of the diamonds. (Depending on the colour placement, some of these designs might need only two sections per unit, I think.) I designed the unit so that the pointy ends of the concentric diamonds don’t all meet at their corners – who could be bothered with so many seams in such a small space! So you’d have a few points to match when joining the sections together. I think it would be achievable though. I’d probably draft a few templates and try sewing them to see how well they come together and if they needed a bit more tweaking to avoid bulky seams.

Anyway, it turns out that the diamond unit’s a versatile block! I’ll share another design using it next week.