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!