Designing with Elizabeth Barton: Part One

This past week I went to a wonderful 3-day workshop with Elizabeth Barton.  I’ve long admired her ability to simplify a design and to then interpret it in dramatic, high-contrast, colors.

Our class supply list included several inspiration photos.  I was familiar enough with Elizabeth’s work to know that a landscape image would work well.  But, that’s just not what was speaking to me.  I perused by Pinterest boards for things that seemed intriguing.  Ignoring subjects, I just looked for things that were appealing.  These are the images I came up with.  (I don’t have permission to use the images, so I’m just describing them.  However, if you go to my Pinterest board “Nature Photography” you’ll see them.)

A twig with red leaves stretching over a sparkling stream,

A twig with lots of berries, with everything encased in ice,

A twig with tiny droplets of water,

Terraced and flooded rice fields.  The fields connect with undulating walls of vegetation.

All of these had a sort of “rivulet” quality to them: twigs branching off, or the walls of rice patties creating a similar pattern.  This is what I wanted to focus on.

Elizabeth showed us a variety of ways to create sketches.  These included tracing, simplifying, collaging with paper, or combinations of these techniques.  Her goal was for us to spend and ENTIRE day creating sketches!  That sounded rather lengthy at first, but I quickly got into it and was thrilled with all the variations I created.  Elizabeth wanted us to have 12 sketches by the end of the day and I’m sure I exceeded that.

First, I traced the image that most intrigued me, the iced berries.  (Tracing automatically simplifies a design, since you can’t see all the details.)  My sketch surprised me by being very boring.

It wasn’t too hard to figure out why.  Elizabeth stressed the importance of value contrast and this one just didn’t have enough of that.

But, what if I cropped it?  Like me, Elizabeth is big on this and she had us make paper “L shapes”  as cropping tools.  (I do the same in the design classes I teach.)

The cropped versions were better and are, perhaps, worth further consideration.  I think this first one would look good if turned 90 degrees to the right.

And I like this square one even better.

At this point, Elizabeth suggested a new approach for me.  First, she had me copy all 4 inspiration photos in a grey scale.  This way I could focus on values without being distracted by color.  Definitely true.

 Then, she asked me to study the 4 images, put them away, and sketch multiple sketches from my impressions.  First, I focused on the twig idea.

I like that top one pretty well, but the next two don’t excite me.  Again, what if they were turned into a horizontal orientation?

The main image that was stuck in my head was that of the terraced rice patties.  So, I began to play with that.  First, a busy sketch that’s most similar to the inspiration photo.

Then, a simplified version.

I liked that pretty well and decided to move forward with it. Next, she asked us to create our sketches in 3 different value combinations, using cut paper.  That yielded some surprising results, which I’ll show you in the next post.

Ellen Lindner
P.S. See a related post about sketching barns.