Tagged: squares
Sunday sketch #92
My hand-drawn sketches are usually limited to one or two colours, and my EQ8 sketches aren’t so different… I can manage maybe three or four colours at most (as long as one of those is white*). I think this is due to a combination of things: I’m not confident enough yet to play with different colours; I find that too many colours distracts me from the design itself; and multiple colours just overload my senses.
But it’s surprising what you can achieve with only a few colours. This week’s sketch uses a whopping four (or three*) and takes advantage of a single element on repeat:
This is the sort of quilt design that’s MUCH easier to do in EQ8 than by hand. I had to recolour it a few times to ensure that none of the adjacent background squares were coloured the same way and that there was a fairly even distribution of each colour.
I love the idea of a quilt design based on a single motif, with the variation coming from colour rather than design. I’m going to try and design more of these.
In the meantime, this design could be made into a quilt using rectangles, half-square triangles and squares. Because it’s block-based, it’d be fairly easy to put together.
* yes, I know white isn’t a colour 🙂
Sunday sketch #91
More playing around with EQ8 this week. Can you tell I haven’t managed to develop many good colour palettes yet?
This is a block-based pattern: follow the horizontal and vertical lines until they lead to a black square, and that’s where four adjacent blocks meet.
I made a bigger design, then cut it down to this size (slicing some blocks in the process). It’s a pretty busy design (even in only three colours), so I thought it was better to have fewer blocks.
There are a few different ways you could make this – as is, or on point; and with squares, rectangles and triangles.
Sunday sketch #89
Another nine-patch with a twist this week. Well, two twists. One of the nine-patches has half-square triangle corners (like Sunday sketch #88), while the other one isn’t really a traditional nine-patch. I mean, it has nine patches, but… four of them are made from quarter-square triangles.
Alternating the two blocks creates squares that seem to float above the design, and diagonal strips that join the stars. Lots of unintentional movement!
Creating this design was a natural progression from the nine-patches I’ve been playing around with for the past few weeks, but the elements are so traditional, so well used, that I find it hard to believe someone hasn’t put these two blocks together before now. I checked my Pinterest boards and couldn’t find anything… but if you know of something similar out there, please let me know and I’ll update the blog accordingly.
