Elements of Design- Colour

This year the Waverley Art Quilters have been studying the Elements of Design using the book by Sandra Meech called Connecting Design to Stitch.

Last month we were talking about the huge subject of colour. It was a good opportunity for me to get out all the design books that I have bought over the years and read through it all.

As a bit of fun we had to draw a colour combination out of a box and I got Orange Triadic. To find the triadic colours that go with orange, I had to divide the colour wheel into thirds and find the colours an equal distance from each other. The triadic colours I had to use were orange, green and violet.

It was a bit of challenge for some people who did not get their usual colour preferences.

We had been working on Value the month before and so I thought I would follow on from that and use the Sea horse as the motif again.

Value exercise

I found a lovely pale violet silk to use as the background and fused on the other shapes. I was trying to follow the values that I used in the black and white one.

It sat like this on my design wall for a couple of weeks and the more I looked at it the more I didn't like it. I decided to start again and this time make the background the darkest value and then I liked it much better.

I can see that I didn't get enough value contrast in the rocks below but I still went with it because it is supposed to be a learning exercise.

I added beads to the seahorse and then quilted around the seahorse and the background. When I finished there was a funny looking crease at the bottom of his body before the tail started.

It kept catching my eye and I didn't like it. There was only one thing to do; I had to snip off the beads and quilt the body and then sew the beads on again.

Seahorse 3- colour exercise

I was much happier with it. I suppose I could have added some trapunto to add some support to the body but putting some quilting onto the body did the trick. I suppose the Seahorse was just too large to be unquilted.

It's always fun to experiment with colour.

Bye for now,
Linda