Tagged: strips
Sunday sketch #175
Even when I go through periods of sketching with pen and paper, I still use EQ8 to test ideas and create quick designs. Very often, the first idea leads to another, which leads to one more… and I end up with multiple iterations under the same general theme.
This week’s design is part of a series. It’s not even the most interesting part, but I felt like sharing it for a few reasons.
First off, who doesn’t love a bit of Mondrian? These black lines and rectangular shapes just lend themselves to primary colours à la Piet Mondrian’s grid-based paintings.
Second, this design scratches an itch I’ve had for awhile. I’ve often thought that I’d love to create a series of quilt patterns based on the work of famous artists. The Mondrian pattern could be something like this. The Dalí pattern would be all weird curves and unusual shapes. The Monet pattern would be based on the same basic block repeated, with the colours changing slightly (think of his Haystacks series). All the different yellows of Sunflowers could form the basis of a van Gogh pattern. And some combination of geometric lines could represent da Vinci’s art and work (like Vitruvian Man). What other artists or works should I include in this imaginary series?? I’ll probably never have the time or inclination to pursue this, but I like the idea. 🙂
This week’s design is all rectangles, squares and strips. A really easy design to translate into a basic pattern.
Mondrian’s work is such perfect quilt design inspiration that I did a quick search online to see if anyone else had used this idea as the basis of a quilt pattern. And I wasn’t disappointed – check out the Mondrian Quilt Block from Twiggy and Opal (note that the pattern is no longer available in Jayne’s Craftsy shop, but you can find it on her Etsy site). Fantastic!
Sunday sketch #174
I’m still stuck on the same theme as Sunday sketches #173 and #172… folded strips creating interesting shapes.
I love how this design brings two fairly hefty groupings of strips together at a single point, right in the centre of the design.
The vertical black strips meet in the middle, as do the diagonal orange strips. And then they shoot off in the opposite direction, leaving a bold diagonal line in their wake.
I tried recreating this design in EQ8, but I don’t love how it turned out.
(It might’ve helped if I’d put a border around the whole quilt so you could clearly see where the edges are.)
Somehow the difference between the line weights was more obvious in EQ8… the vertical lines are skinnier than the diagonal ones (because geometry!), but I could live with that in the hand-drawn sketch. In the EQ8 version, the design just ended up looking too sparse. Maybe it was my colour choice? I dunno. I ended up adding 2 more lines, but that didn’t really help.
I would’ve liked to extend the diagonal red lines all the way to the corner of the top and bottom edges, but that would’ve made the quilt very wide, which I felt was unbalanced and left too much negative space. So I kept playing, and came up with a square version…
…which I like, but for different reasons. I think the fact that the pink lines are now fully overlapped (or ‘underlapped’?) with red lines fundamentally changes the design. I liked it when they had a bit of space on their own. Still, I like the boldness of this design and the fact that all four corners are (almost) occupied by a strip. Half of the quilt is still negative space, although I don’t think that necessarily matters.
I played around a bit more with the colours in EQ8, which is so easy to do.
And how about this one, for a very 80s vibe…
But after all that, I think I still prefer the original hand-drawn sketch!
These designs could be translated fairly easily into quilt patterns using the same approaches as suggested for the previous weeks’ designs: long strips, lots of half-square triangles, and/or paper piecing for accuracy.
Sunday sketch #173
Another variation on the same theme as last week’s sketch: folded strips.
I kinda wish the strips in the foreground were wider than those in the background, but I couldn’t quite get that to work out. Of course, I could just push those white vertical strips to the background, so that the thicker diagonal lines came to the foreground! Problem solved.
I tried recreating this design in EQ8 and didn’t like the way it turned out. I’m not sure if it was my colour choices or the design itself. It’s funny how some sketches just look better hand-drawn.
This design could be made into a quilt pattern using lots of half-square triangles and rectangles, or a bunch of long strips (and maybe some paper-piecing for accuracy).
I’m still stuck on this theme, so expect more of these designs in the weeks to come!
