Tagged: half-rectangle triangles
Sunday sketch #124
I have a pretty big backlog of EQ8 designs to share, which is probably one of the reasons why I’ve felt less urgency to hand-sketch lately. I did pick up my dot pad recently though, which always feels great and makes me wonder why I don’t do it more often.
This week’s sketch arose from another series that I haven’t shared here. Sometimes a design is nothing special, but it leads to something else that’s more interesting. This design is an example of that… I started with some long skinny rectangles set at an angle, but they were kinda boring. But then I cut each one in half diagonally, and created this spiky block.
Repeated in a 4 x 4 layout, the last spike in each block meets up with the first spike in the next block, which lends some continuity to the whole design. Emphasising different sides of each block – through the use of dark and light colours – also helps to make new shapes.
There are a million and one ways to colour this design – and to create new shapes through colour. Of course, I usually settle on the obvious: a gradation from dark to light. Reds seemed like a good choice for such a dynamic design.
This design would be easiest to translate into a quilt pattern using foundation paper piecing. I’m not normally a fan of FPP, but in this case I think it would be super-easy way to get the crisp lines and angles needed to make this design pop.
Sunday sketch #115
Remember the ‘comb’ shapes from last week (and previous weeks)? Here they are again, only shorter and fatter, with some extra lines thrown in for good measure.
There are so many potential ways to connect the combs, but I opted for half-rectangle triangles. Then I decided to add some cross-hatching to see what other elements popped out.
This sketch would be easily translatable into a quilt pattern using half-rectangle triangles.
Sunday sketch #114
There are only so many shapes to choose from in quilting. One of the design elements that I keep coming back to is the half-rectangle triangle and – more specifically – lines with a 1:2 gradient (that is, they go up or down 1 unit with every move sideways of 2 units… as if you laid a 2:1 HRT on its side). I’ve stacked up lines like this in previous sketches (look at Sunday sketches #102 and #103, for example), and I’m revisiting them again this week.
I started with a ‘comb’, which is basically just a series of those diagonal lines, joined up vertically on either side. Then I overlapped another one, and another one, which created these funny little cat faces in the middle.
I decided that maybe I should see what the same design looked like with the ‘combs’ facing different directions. So I redrew the whole thing, alternating the angles. Instead of up-down-up, now they’re down-up-down.
Not a huge difference, although the first column of cats is now upside-down. But somehow I do prefer the second sketch. It has a slightly different feel to me, although I can’t quite put my finger on why.
Anyway, then I decided that I wanted to see more of these combs overlapping, but instead of arranging them vertically, I thought I’d try them horizontally. Time to pull out the A4 Rhoda dot pad for some larger sketching!
Again, this has quite a different feel than the previous two sketches, despite being based on the same core design. The scale is a bit smaller (assuming the overall quilt dimensions were about the same) and there’s a bit more movement. I like them all, but for different reasons.
I love the look of the clean black lines in this sketch, but colour would add another dimension. And there’s obviously some real potential here for transparency in colour play.
