Tagged: drunkard’s path

August 7, 2022

Sunday sketch #319

This week’s design is a little bit related to Sunday sketch #313, although with lots of differences too. I guess they’re related more in concept than in execution.

The design features a square block, set on point, in a standard layout. The blocks are made mostly from half-rectangle triangles, with two half-square triangles and a single quarter-circle (or drunkard’s path unit). That first colouring, above, makes me think of cactus flowers. The ones below are more like wheat stalks.

Note that the first three versions have sashing between the blocks; the version below doesn’t. There’s enough whitespace in the blocks themselves to not let the design feel too busy, although I think I still prefer the versions with sashing. I do like a lot of ‘resting’ space in designs though.

The previous versions have coloured all the blocks the same, but of course you could use a different colour per block. And I’ve used gradating colours within each block, but that’s not necessary either. I avoided trying that though (see comment on busy-ness, above!).

This week’s design could be made into a quilt using half-rectangle triangles of different sizes/ratios, squares, half-square triangles, and quarter-circle (drunkard’s path) units.

I think this is the sort of block that you could mix in with other flower blocks for a more random garden-y feel. The same block on repeat is maybe too much for a whole quilt? But it would work well to break up other botanical blocks. I guess I need to design a bunch of flower blocks to test that out! 🙂

July 24, 2022

Sunday sketch #317

I’ve been having fun with lots of basic shapes lately, and this week’s sketch is no exception. It’s another one featuring half-circles, quarter-circles and half-square triangles.

This design feels a bit celestial to me… those inner stars combined with circles that look like they’re straight out of a moon phase calendar.

There are so many minor variations possible with this design – for example, by alternating the colours of the inner stars or the half-moons.

I also like to treat some blocks differently from others. In the next version, I’ve filled in the outer half-moons for the outside blocks. This means the half-moons are only created when two octagons come into contact with one another.

And I can fill in all the internal shapes so that only the squares created from the 4 corners of adjacent blocks are white.

Or add more whitespace – this time filling in both sides of the half-moons so they become circles, and then colouring some of the stars white too. This changes the design quite a bit.

I also used that dark blue as a background for one of the earlier designs, but didn’t change the colour of the dark blocks. Now it looks like there are blocks floating in space, connected only by stars.

This Sunday sketch would be relatively easy to make into a quilt; you’d just need quarter-circles (drunkard’s path units), half-circles (if you want to save yourself making double the number of quarter-circles) and half-square triangles. And some versions don’t even use the half-square triangles.

July 10, 2022

Sunday sketch #315

It’s probably pretty obvious that this week’s Sunday sketch is a direct evolution of last week’s. I didn’t even bother changing the colour palette!

I made one minor tweak to last week’s block design, then played around with colour placement. Although this first version is somewhat different from my usual designs, I really like the movement and sorta oddness of it. It’s like a spacey kind of treble clef mixed with a fleuron in a lava lamp.

If I colour the blocks differently, you can see the connection to last week’s design more easily. I’ve just replaced the half-square triangles from last week with larger curves. The columns of half-circles are still there.

This version makes me think of phases of the moon, or of light and shadow changing the appearance of the same object throughout the day.

The previous version uses different colouring for each row in the design; the next version uses the same colouring across the whole design (much like last week’s sketch).

Changing the colouring again – using just two colours per block – removes the horizontal and vertical lines from the design and emphasises those curves instead. Ocean waves?