Design workout

As much as I love free motion quilting, it is very time consuming. Even a small piece can take several hours to quilt and so doing trials and playing with ideas can be a long, slow process. I, as many others, find I learn best and get my best ideas from doing. Research also shows, that quantity, not quality (in other words, just producing work) in the end gives the best results.
With this in mind, I have given myself a design workout - in paper!

I've painted paper with acrylic to chop and stick, giving myself the following parameters.

• For the moment, I'm working with colours near to each other on the colour wheel.
• The shapes must be square or rectangular - ish. Any mathematician is now screaming at the screen that squares and rectangles - unlike my pieces - have 90 degree angles. Cutting free hand with a rotary cutter gives charmingly mild curves rather than mathematical precision - just how I like it!
• I've avoided diagonal lines.

The idea is to work fast without thinking to much and without being too bothered by the result. I have to admit, I struggle with this a bit and find myself pondering, trying out and changing. I know of an artist who does this exercise as a warm up - creating 15 collages in 15 minutes. I haven't got that drastic yet, but I hate to say I think that is just what I need to try.

Here are the first batch. (You will notice 5, not 15 and it took me much longer than 15 minutes!)

Enjoy.

Thanks for dropping by...

Hilary Florence