Normally I sketch on a plain square grid using a Rhodia dot pad. I like the absence of lines; it frees up my design mind a little more. But lately I’ve been trying to sketch more designs using equilateral triangles, and the easiest way to do this – short of drawing up my own triaxial grids – is to use Grid Paint. It’s a free online resource with different grids for painting, including two types of triaxial grid (one that runs horizontally and one that runs vertically). The design features are pretty limited, but they’re enough to get rough ideas down on the screen for exploring later.

I’ve made no secret of my love of transparency and (paradoxically) my aversion to using colours in my designs. A hexagonal colour wheel is the perfect way to achieve both:

The design above is a ‘subtractive’ colour wheel – the main/primary colours are cyan (I’ve used a darker blue), magenta and yellow. If you mix all three equally, the light is subtracted, giving black in the centre.

You can make an additive colour wheel by mixing red, green and blue (which looks more like a purple here), to get white in the centre.

If you look closely in both designs, you can see the faint lines outlining the triangles. These designs would be so easy to make into quilt patterns! Fewer than 100 equilateral triangles, arranged into only 8 strips to make the hexagon. I’m so tempted.

If you want to print out your own triangle grids, try Incompetech’s free graph paper PDF generator. I use the triangle or variable triangle grids.