It’s been a while since I posted a sketch featuring both curves and straight lines – I seem to have concentrated on one or the other in recent months.

I started playing with a grid of one block on repeat, with alternate blocks coloured in reverse to differentiate them. The block is made up of four quarter-circles and is outlined with a thin border. I like how the addition of a border around the whole design obscures the border of every second block, making the arrangement seem slightly wonkier.

   

Anyway, I feel like the regularity of the squares hides the circles that are formed between the blocks, which is something that I wanted to be a little more obvious. I tried extending the layout to the edges of the canvas, but that didn’t really address the problem.

   

So I tried subtracting blocks instead. I quite like these versions, although I’m still not sure the circles are apparent.

   

Maybe I just need to make them really obvious? In these next two versions, I’ve only coloured part of the outside blocks to make the ‘hidden’ circles a little clearer. Now the 5 × 5 layout of blocks reveals a 4 × 4 layout of circles. Ahhh, that’s better.

   

Maybe it’s just the colour palette of those versions above, but that layout felt a little heavy. So I tried removing some elements of some blocks – enough to lighten the load, but not too many that I’d lose those hidden circles again.

   

I really did like the wonkiness of the earlier versions though. Some of the blocks have borders in the same colour as the outer border, making them effectively disappear and giving the whole layout a slightly off-kilter feel. I think there’s potential to play with that concept a bit more too.

   

I tried a bigger palette too (borrowing once again from Curated Colour from Tara Glastonbury / Stitch & Yarn). This is a six-colour palette, which is perhaps a bit too many colours for such a simple/small design. It feels a bit chaotic to me, but there are probably ways to ameliorate that by changing both the palette and placement (I was just too lazy to try!).

   

In the end, I prefer a simpler version. I’ve retained the alternating arrangement of blocks in a reverse colourway and just tweaked the colouring of some of the outer blocks to maintain those circle shapes.

Note that I also flipped the colours so that the four corner blocks are not enclosed by a border (whereas previously they were, which I think added to the heavier feel of those versions).

So this week’s sketch could be made into a quilt using drunkard’s path (or quarter-circle) units, some thin strips for the block borders, and wider strips for the quilt border. Straightforward but effective!