Living This Creative Life

I have two favorite quotes. The first one is by Emile Zola, "If you asked me what I came into this world to do, I would tell you that I came to live out loud". I don't know who the second one is by, but it goes like this, "If you're not living on the edge then you might as well jump". Both of these sentiments sum up my personal philosophy of this experience we call life on earth. Enjoy!

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Art Every Day, Thursday, February 15, 2013

Good Afternoon,
I'm always amazed at how easily a day can get away from me.  I finished this piece at 7:30 this morning and here it is almost 2:00 in the afternoon and I'm finally getting it up.
With this piece, I wanted to continue on with a similar color way as yesterday's piece.  Only here, I'm using a much more modern sensibility. The colors are all sitting on a dark gray base of dye painted batting.  I repeated that dark gray with the three, short horizontal lines.  I used curvy quilting in both the red; wavy lines and the yellow; circles and kept the quilting in both the blue and green very architectural with straight lines moving into squares and rectangles. 
One of my students was talking to me this morning about color use proportion; how much of one color to use with how much of another.  There are lots of classic formulas, but mostly dealing with direct complements. Here, I used a proportionately larger amount of the cooler blue along with green and a smaller amount of warmer yellow along with red. Note how well the blue recedes and the yellow comes forward.  Also note how the red is trying to sit on the same plane as the green, but because it is physically on top of it, it's not succeeding as well as expected. 
I love that every day I get to wake up and be an artist!
Till tomorrow,
Heather

2 comments:

me said...

It really is amazing how color just by itself provides depth!

Then you add in the different quilting and depending on it's direction and how loose or tight it is, and that provides more depth.

Physical layering provides depth.

And then there is the play between the colors that provides depth.

The gray grounds these colors really nicely and the small horizontal stripes are a harmonious addition.

Overall, this is such a wonderful lesson in depth!

Steph said...

Interesting how Feb 13 and today are the same colors and so different at the same time. Not sure if it's the picture or the colors, but Feb 13 colors look much more pastel and today look more pure.

Love the depth, yet again. Always makes a piece more interesting. I love the addition of the grey horizontal stripes. Seem to float on top and ties in the grey background batting, unifying the piece a bit for me.

Thanks for the inspiration!