Ellen Lindner: Art & Creativity

I’m having great fun working on my latest quilt.  It’s inspired by a photo I took on an outing with some friends.

Click any imagerfor a larger view

Don’t you love the way the spiky palm fronds cross?  I think the contrasting values and the resulting shapes are very interesting.

Although the photo already had a good composition, I spent a lot of time sketching the design.  (Time well spent, in my opinion.)  My big question:  what can I leave out and still do justice to this image?  This was my final sketch.   I couldn’t wait to get started.

 So, let’s see…if the plants are yellow-green, what color and value should the background be?  Dark definitely.  And maybe red-violet, the complementary color?  Yes, let’s see what that looks like. 

Of course, it’s not enough to plan/construct a background in isolation.  You have to see what the COMBINATION of background and foreground look like together.  So, a little fabric auditioning was in order.

Clearly, the lighter fabrics show up best.  Good to know.

Finally, I sketched in the frond stems and set to work in earnest.    Loved the colors.  I was still undecided, however, on how wide each spike should be.  I started them out at 1″, shown here.

What do you think?  Too skinny?

Ellen Lindner