Recently I created a bunch of designs in response to a specific brief: design a quilt using only circles, squares and rectangles. This week’s sketch is not one of the designs I submitted in response to the brief (for a project that I’ll be able to talk about more soon), but it’s one that I like so I’m sharing it here.

This approach of bisecting circles to create new shapes is one that I’ve used before: see Sunday sketches #224 and #275 (and, kinda related, #288).

This kind of design lends itself to transparency effects. You can also play with the colour palette and placement to emphasise different parts of the design. In the second version below I’ve filled in those empty spaces at the top right and bottom left, although I don’t love this version – it feels too crowded.

Back to a bit of negative space. Just changing one area of the design alters how you perceive those overlaid shapes… on the left, my first impression is of two lighter rectangles and one smaller square laid over those green circles. But on the right, I see two green squares overlapping over white circles.

These designs could be made into a quilt using lots of quarter-circles, half-circles and full circles. I’d probably just make a million quarter-circles rather than trying to wrangle half-circles or full circles, but that’s only because I’ve never made a half-circle or full circle. I know there are ways to do them, but I’ve just never tried them.

I was fortunate enough to have 2 designs selected for this project, which means I need to make 2 quilts by mid-November. Both of which feature lots and lots of circles (which means even more quarter-circles!). One of the designs also plays with transparency using the supplied colour palette, so it will be interesting to see if my design looks as good in fabric as it did on screen.