Tagged: half-circle

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.

 

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?

This week’s designs could be made into quilts using just quarter- and half-circles (or drunkard’s path units) and rectangles.

The fact that I can’t decide which version I prefer means I’ll probably never make this one, even though I love it to bits. Such is life!

Sunday sketch #314

This is one of my favourite Sunday sketches in a long time. It combines two of my favourite things: a simple yet effective design, and an understated palette that I’ve used before. It feels a little retro, a little modern. I love it.

Colouring the blocks slightly differently introduces horizontal lines and makes it clearer where blocks begin and end.

And then rotating the blocks introduces new shapes and movement.

That last one’s maybe a bit too trippy, but I love the first two designs! Although I can’t decide which I prefer… I like the simplicity of the first one, until I see the second one and realise I like the added horizontal lines… but maybe less is more?! Arrghh. (This indecision is probably the main reason I don’t make more quilts!)

These designs could be made into quilts using quarter- or half-circles (or drunkard’s path units), half-square triangles and rectangles. I love the limited palette of just three colours, but perhaps the design is simple enough that it could work with a broader palette?