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!

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Art Every Day, Sunday, April 7, 2013

Good Evening,

Here is today's new piece.  I'm sort of ambivalent about it.  Many years ago I tried doing a type of mosaics using wool and I've always loved the look but not the amount of work required, so here, I tried to achieve a mosaic like look but without doing an actual mosaic with all the little spaces in between the colored bits.  

I'm pleased with the swirl but not very happy with the background or with the batting choice.  One of my color students taught me something this weekend about thread color.  She used a medium valued tone of one color to stitch down areas that were a variety of colors as well as black and white.  I was surprised at how well the toned thread meshed with her quilt.  So, that's what i did with the mosaic like swirl, I quilted it with a mid valued tone of red orange and I like how it looks.  However, I do not like the background quilting.  My machine has been acting up and the thread breaks constantly when I stitch a straight line longer than an inch or so, so I chose a stitch design that wouldn't break the thread constantly and viola.... too much activity in the negative space.  Blue green is one of the colors that I don't have a lot of threadwise, so the thread was a little darker and was going to show up no matter what, but I think a more linear, simpler design would have been better.  As for the red violet batting - well, that's all I had cut and was in too much of a hurry to go cut more.  Wish it was orange.

Tomorrow's another day,
Till then,
Heather  

1 comment:

me said...

This is a tough one for me!

I do see what you mean about the level of activity in the background, it's high. However, it does echo the placement of the mosaic pieces, and the focal point is very bright and the big gentle swirl of it seems to offset the angular busy stitching.

I love how the blue green is variegated with the darker in the bottom right, where the weight of the swirl is. The variations really serve to show us how colors affect each other.

For example, the yellow looks more toned down in the corner than it does in the center portion where it is lighter or infused with a little of the yellow-green.

As for the batting, the red violet really pops out the cool colors in the swirl, and tones down the overall brightness of it. Had you used orange instead, I think the swirl would look very different. I think the warm tones would be contrasting much more with the cool ones than they are now.

This was a great study in the "what if". I find that difficult to imagine what something would look like with a different color someplace, but I am trying to develop that!