At our March Fyber Cafe meeting, we had fun doing a design exercise with geometric shapes. I stole this from another group's blog, Kathy Schmidt in the UK, links at the bottom of the post. We each started with Six 5" squares of
bright fabric, with fusible ironed on the back, such as Steam a Seam or Wonder Under. Then the two darkest value we cut once, to use in the background, the remaining squares we cut into other smaller geometric shapes, about 4-6 pieces from each square. We cut rectangles, strips, squares, lot of circles, crescents, snakes, many different triangles, stars, eggs, etc... I provided a yard of black solid cotton, to use as a background, and we placed the larger pieces first, then the cut shapes.
We were allowed to place pieces on top, under, overlap, and all over the black fabric, you could move other pieces, we played a long time, every so often moving two steps to the left, so you worked on a different section. At the end we each removed two pieces! The idea was to consider design options, balance, value, line, repetition, shape, color. After everything was in place, we stood back and gave it a good look. We wanted a little more of the black/negative space to show. Paper was placed on top and it was rolled up, to take home and iron all the pieces in place.
As I ironed it, I fussed a little, mostly on how they overlapped and to even out the black space. After ironing, it was cut up into 16 sections approximately 8" x 10" some of them cut straight, and some wonky. Each artist will receive a piece to play with, cut up, repiece, add or subtract, extend, cover over, alter, or embellish. Just to have fun playing with color and design.
I am linking this to Nina-Marie's "Off the Wall Friday" click on the badge on the right column to see what other wonderful artists have been doing this week. Kathy at Quirks Ltd. in the UK has a blog on their groups efforts on a green background with organic shapes
click here, scroll down to Jan 21 also check out their geometric pieces on a black background
scroll down to Nov 22
My group did this a few months ago--maybe you adopted the idea from us! Our pieces ended up looking very much like yours, but I think we did leave a bit more background. Most of the finished pieces were chopped into even smaller pieces and ended up looking really good. It was just so much fun to play this way--I didn't care if the pieces ever got finished!!! We tried it again with differing backgrounds and more organice shapes and none of us liked it as well. Black and brights was the way to go!
ReplyDeleteThank you Kathy, if you'll leave a link for me, I'll add it to the post.
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