A brief start on composition 2

Remember when we talked about the fear of trying out ideas?  One of the ways this manifests for me is wanting to avoid wasting fabric with an idea that doesn't work out.  In essence, I am afraid to cut into my coveted fabric, and the fabric becomes an object rather than a medium.  I managed to step through that fear this evening, and I was glad I did.

I keep wanting to do something with that fabric I talked about last week, but nothing seems to work out when I lay fabrics together.  This evening, I noticed some zebra looking fabric in my black and white fabrics.  These two fabrics are below.

Elaborate fabric that keeps drawing
me in, and the zebra fabric that
helped me see a way out.

Feeling frustrated with the more elaborate fabric, I got to thinking about what I could do with cut-outs of the zebra pattern.  (This urge is probably from the collages I did today with friends.)  It was easier to see how the zebra motif would work, so I cut out some of the motifs in the zebra fabric.  As with my first composition, I'm using a checkerboard background for this piece.

The zebra fabric didn't look very good on my cream background (too busy), but the motifs were fine on the black background.  I then went back to the elaborate fabric and started cutting out shapes, which are these funky curvy things.  These shapes seemed to have more constrast on the white background, and got washed out on the black background, which is calmer.

The next problem was what to do with these motifs.  I've been wanting to consider radial symmetry because it doesn't appeal to me as much as asymmetry does.  So I started working in this direction, and here's my start.

The beginnings of a radially
symmetric design

This isn't really the 2 bar motif I started with, but I've decided to try and make the rays roughly linear in that spirit.  To do that, I'll have to put a couple of motifs together to make extended rays on the radial design.  This seems to create some interesting textures and patters.  I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out next weekend.

That's all for tonight.  Happy playing to you all!

Motif

OK, I've never posted to a blog before, but here goes!

So far I only came up with a motif, which is "vertical things".  I took a few photos.

I like  ones where both vegetation and built items are vertical.  I hope I'm more successful in placing pieces of paper where I want them than I am with moving the images around in this space!

The road suggests simple left-right symmetry but I also plan to try asymmetric balance on either side. 

 

First composition

Well, it's been a nutty week, but I did finally manage to get back to working on things this evening.  Since my last post, I decided to keep things pretty simple and explore the black-white world in fabrics.  I pulled some fabrics and picked on a few that I would try playing with ...

1.  Cream with gold scrolly things
2.  Cream with black vines and brown leaves
3.  Birch tree stem motif (unfaded and faded)
4.  Black/grey with different gold scrolly things
5.  Oriental with mixed white, grey, black gold

Somewhere in the week of percolating, I gravitated to a simple 2 bar motif.  I think that was partly because of the design of the bed quilt I mentioned last week, and partly because it keeps the composition and construction simple.  

When I started up tonight, I went back to the fabrics to look at them.  I really like the bottom oriental fabric (5).  I am still trying to figure out how to includee this one in a composition, but it's really active and I'm not yet sure how to deal with that.  I also like the cream with gold scollies (1), but I don't have much of it, so had to leave it behind for now (maybe I can use it in some small motif?).  That left the black (4) and the cream (2) for basic square backgrounds, and use the  birch trees (3) for the motif fabric.  I liked how these fabrics work together, so I was ready to move on to trying a composition.

I didn't really want the angles to be sqaure on the 2-bar motif.  I tried to noodle around with angled piecing based on a technique I learned a few years back.  I couldn't quite remember what I needed to do to achieve the effect I wanted, so I eventually just cut pieces the size and shape I was interested in and laid them on squares of cream and black.  That was a lot easier, and a reminder to stay simple.  After playing around a bit, here's what I came up with ...

I still have to fuse the fabrics together, but I like what happened for now.  At this point, I am going to leave this one and try to work on another form of balance.  I have a super crazy week coming up, so I doubt I'll get there for another week.

But in the couple of evenings I'll be home, I hope that I can take a bit of time to stare at what I've done and at the fabrics that are awaiting the next composition.  Taking a little time to play with ideas in the evenings seemed to help me this past week when I finally had some time to focus on the assignment.

Here's hoping everyone has a moment to think about their own compositions!

Greetings to my friends!  I have been toying with the idea of sharing thoughts in between meetings via a blog.  Well, I'm taking the plunge and am trying to see if I can figure out how this might work.

This weekend, I started working on my motif ideas, which is probably the hardest part of this for me.  I liked my 1/2-page rotational design from the exercise, so that seemed a good place to start.  Here's the photo ...

I was also interested in exploring the basic block form of a quilt I'm getting ready to sew (see below, but think muted blues, greens and tans for something much calmer to put on our bed).

I tried a couple of other things (including the letter E inspired by Sarah's I), but kept getting drawn back to this, so I guess this is where I'm going to explore my designs.

I'm not much of a sketcher, so to explore some ideas, I cut a 5" black square and made 3 white bars to mimic the basic block of the quilt I'm working on.  Then I started playing with them.  Here are some images of the stuff I was playing with ...

Basic bock of future quilt

Working towards a radial
design, liked the negative
space of the bars

Working towards a radial
design, divided into 8 parts

A second try - more
visual motion in this one,
nonoverlapping bars
seem like a better design

Starting on asymmetry,
but this seemed too
circular

Asymmetry again,
liked this one better

Another option for
asymmetry, but not sure
where this would go

Next, I explored design options with different bar lengths, borrowing from my rotational symmetry exercise.

Seemed like too much
negative space

This might create some
nice negative patterns
in a block design

Decided to play with 3rd
bar, but this creates too
much weight on 3 bars

Liked this better, but still
like the 2nd photo best

At this point, I'm letting it rest a bit.  I will use fabric with iron on adhesive, but haven't thought much about color.  I am contemplating black and white fabrics because there are some fabrics with really color b&w patterns, and I've never played with them before.

Anyway, maybe seeing this is helpful to you, and maybe it isn't.  What I've learned is that making a sketch book or journal or blog might help me do a better job of naming why I like or dislike a particular option.

Feel free to comment, and hope you are all getting a few minutes of your own to start doodling with your motif.

Sarah N