Sunday sketch #92

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:

Geometriquilt: Sunday sketch #92

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 🙂

Sunday sketch #91

More playing around with EQ8 this week. Can you tell I haven’t managed to develop many good colour palettes yet?

 

Geometriquilt: Sunday sketch #91

This is a block-based pattern: follow the horizontal and vertical lines until they lead to a black square, and that’s where four adjacent blocks meet.

I made a bigger design, then cut it down to this size (slicing some blocks in the process). It’s a pretty busy design (even in only three colours), so I thought it was better to have fewer blocks.

There are a few different ways you could make this – as is, or on point; and with squares, rectangles and triangles.

 

Sunday sketch #90

I haven’t had a lot of time to sketch lately, but I’ve been playing around with EQ8 more (which is probably one of the reasons I haven’t had a lot of time to sketch lately…).

But I miss sketching, and I miss the time it gives me to really think about my designs. In EQ8, it’s fairly quick to try something new and discard it, try it again in different colours, mess around some more and find an entirely new design… I don’t think I put the same amount of thought or effort into my design process. It’s definitely given me a lot to think (and maybe blog) about.

But enough about that. This week I’m revisiting a recent sketch. It’s certainly not a new design – you’ve probably seen something similar before – but I like the idea of supersizing blocks and featuring only a handful of large shapes in a single quilt design. And how lovely are my long sketch lines?! 🙂

Geometriquilt_SS90-1

I played with this image to try and reduce a dark shadow along one edge, and ended up inverting the colours. (Did I mention I’m no expert in graphics..?!) I just love the look of the new version!

Geometriquilt: Sunday sketch #90-2

And then I wanted to see the two blocks together. Because I already had EQ8 open, I just dropped each image in as a new fabric, scaled the blocks in a new quilt layout to the same size, then dropped the ‘fabric’ into each block. I’m sure there’s an easier/better way, but sometimes the rough/ready way is good enough!

Geometriquilt: Sunday sketch #90-3

These designs are all half-rectangle triangles. You’d only need three fabrics to recreate the look of this final design. Wouldn’t it look great in some Kona solids and Essex linen?