Tag Archives | Sketching

Taking Inspiration from the Starting Fabric

By Ellen Lindner on January 17, 2018 in Uncategorized

As I worked on the abstract quilt, I continued to take clues and inspiration from the original fabric. Since it was very angular, I wanted my pattern to be the same. Can you see how the shapes and lines of the side fabrics are extensions of the central fabric lines?

Same for the quilting. First, I stitched parallel lines on the two sides and in the middle I stitched around each little line.

Then, I decided to stitch parallel lines in this central area. Oh my! WHAT was I thinking? It was WAY too much starting and stopping for me and I gave up after the few lines shown above.

Plan B: concentric lines. It worked pretty well, except for the fact that my variegated thread gave too much contrast in some of my messy spots. I have a bit of redoing ahead of me.

Next, it was time to think about the main design elements to be placed in the foreground of this piece. Again, I wanted something angular, but when I checked, my sketchbooks I didn’t have anything like that.

So, I turned, once again, to the fabric itself. I took close up shots of several of the fabric shapes and found one I liked. (Although I edited it quite a bit.)

And, so here is the plan for the final motif.

I’m liking it a lot. Next will be determining what color to make the motif. Light or dark versions of the colors already present would be an obvious choice. But, I think I want to do something a little unexpected. We’ll see. Red maybe???

It’s been really fun to let the fabric inspire so many choices.

Have you ever done something inspired by a particular piece of fabric?

Ellen Lindner

A Class with Rosalie Dace: Black and White Exercises

By Ellen Lindner on August 15, 2017 in Uncategorized

Are you familiar with the work of Rosalie Dace? She’s a fabulous art quilter from South Africa and a highly sought-after art quilt teacher. I’ve been wanting to take a class with her for quite some time and I finally got to at Quilting by the Lake a couple of weeks ago. It was very good – although somewhat different than I expected.

She gave us some very useful tips, concepts, and pep talks each morning. Our first assignment was to use black and white paper to create some “sketches.” We were to choose one shape and then explore it over and over at least five times.

I chose the humble rectangle.

These are shown in the order in which I created them. This was actually quite a stretch because it was sometimes difficult to come up with one more variation. I noticed that I was somewhat enamored with the idea of line.

For our second shape, Rosalie suggested that we choose something special to us or familiar to us. I chose a palm frond.

As usual, I had to make a literal depiction in order to get that out of my head. In doing so, I was able to focus on the long skinny tapered shape within the frond and I started playing with it.

Soon, things got interesting. I really liked the last 3 above. Rosalie wanted me to make more, so I began to search my favorite two for tiny compositions.

There were many that I liked.

Can you believe so many viable compositions came from those little sketches?

The fact that these designs no longer say “palm frond” is not a problem. As a matter of fact, it’s actually the point. The idea is to play with shape only and to see where it takes you.

I found these black and white exercises to be fun, enlightening, and useful. Why not give it a try?

Ellen Lindner

Project Resurrected

By Ellen Lindner on June 5, 2017 in Uncategorized

Remember the “project that wasn’t?” After sketching it I decided not to proceed with it. My issue was that it looked too jumbled, and therefore didn’t accurately depict the plant that inspired me.

My inspiration photo:

The initial sketch:

However, I was slow to put the sketch away so it lived on my design wall for a while. That gave me time to consider it further and I thought, “Why work so hard at making it just an abstract design? Why not let it look more like the subject?” So, I rearranged my six squares a good bit and came up with this.

There. That was more like it. Definitely abstracted, but with the nice curve and drape of a few flower petals. I was happy enough to continue.

Next came a computer sketch.

Still happy. Time to audition fabrics. Starting with “black” for the six backgrounds.

I constructed this piece in a very non-standard way using reverse applique. That is, I cut the black fabric to the needed shapes, so other fabrics could be tucked underneath. Like this first block, bottom left.

Why use this technique? One reason: to avoid the black fabric from shadowing through the lighter ones. Putting black on top got rid of this issue.

From a technical standpoint this worked well. The only issue is that it was difficult to change my mind, since the first version would be cut before I realized I wanted a change. Thankfully, my design explorations meant that I needed only a couple of very minor changes. Whew!

Above, most of the black cuts were done. Time to audition petal fabrics.

Auditioning is extremely important. I always tell my students “everything affects every other.” Which means you can’t make a decision in isolation. You have to see how each fabric, item, or placement will work with those around it. For instance, look at the middle two fabrics above, in the left center block. Can you see that they blend together a little bit? So, I changed one of them, which you can see below.

The photo above shows the flower petals partially complete. They were pretty easy to do, since most of the shaping had already been done with the black fabric.

Here the flowers are, complete.

Green leaves and other details would happen soon. I’ll show you next time.

Ellen Lindner

Liquefy and Crop

By Ellen Lindner on July 12, 2016 in Uncategorized

Are you playing along with me? If so, you’ve printed out the liquefied image from the previous post and you’ve found some small compositions within it.

I found ten, but I’m only showing you four of them.

Again, any one of them would be a great start to an abstract quilt. What did you find?

Later, I wanted to select one or two of my compositions for the next stage of experimenting. The first thing I did was to turn them all upside down. That gave me a new perspective.

I chose two and cropped them SOME MORE! Maybe you can find their points of origin in the images above.

Finally, I began to play with the image above and to turn it into a viable sketch.

Maybe this?

Or, with slightly altered colors:

Hmm, yes. I think that’s a good starting point. As with Brainstorm, I won’t try to perfectly replicate the sketch. I’ll use it as reference to get me started, but then – once again – take plenty of detours. I’m already thinking I’ll add a little yellow. We’ll see.

Ellen Lindner

My Train Jumped the Track

By Ellen Lindner on March 19, 2016 in Uncategorized

I was making good progress on my two large leaf quilts when I got BADLY distracted. The culprit was the book Serendipity, by Susan Carlson. In it she explains her fabric collage techniques. In many ways they’re the same as my own, but with a much higher level of tiny details. It was all SO intriguing and I just had to give it a try. “BAM! SCREECH!” The sounds of my leaf train derailing.

I pretty much never switch gears once I start on a quilt, but this time I did so quite gleefully. I searched my photos for inspiration and decided to work with a photo of three tomatoes. I tweaked the composition and will probably do some more down the road.

Susan typically constructs her design elements as stand-alone units. This enables her to move them around later and to easily audition background options when the time comes. So, I followed suit and drew a 20″ tomato.

I drew the design onto muslin with a Frixion (heat-way) pen. The mini iron was my “eraser.”

The idea is to fill the shape with the proper VALUE, leaving the detail areas as cutouts.

This was my first draft as I was nearing completion of the red fabrics. The space was covered, but it was lacking some finesse.

I switched the light spot from yellow to pink. But, it still looked pretty chunky.

Next, I started fiddling with the details. Susan explained the basics in her book, about how to soften any hard edges. From studying her blog and website, I could also see that she often cut little motifs from her fabrics and used them to merge the colors and patterns better. Like this.

Instead of abruptly cutting off a motif, soften the edge by continuing it onto the next fabric.

Well, that sort of thing is totally addicting! AND it adds a lot of interest to the piece, as well as softening hard edges.

Here it is after a ton of fiddling (with the leaves still showing as cutouts.) Much better, right?

I’m really having a lot of fun working this way. Perhaps it will become too persnickety for me in the future. We’ll see.

On to those twisty little leaves.

Ellen Lindner
P.S. I’ve made several other quilts featuring produce. Like Mangolicious.
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Getting Started on Two Green Quilts

By Ellen Lindner on February 22, 2016 in Uncategorized

After studying my quirky fabrics, I decided to work with the yellow-green silk that had been screen printed. I knew I wanted to play up the red design with more red accents. Then, I threw in blue and yellow for good measure.

After just a little arranging I remembered, “Oh yeah, I’m not really good at abstract designs.” (It’s good to know your strengths and weaknesses.)

Knowing that I wanted to make two companion pieces, I did a couple of quick sketches. And since my fabrics were green, why not leaves?

Pretty simple, but I thought I could bring it to life with the right fabrics.

Speaking of fabrics, I started to second guess my original choices, and instead tried something new.

Oh, yes! I definitely preferred this. See those red squiggles? I want to feature them.

So, I got started. I fused a lightweight interfacing on all the silk fabrics and I drew my sketch onto a muslin base. Next, I began cutting and placing fabrics. Placement was determined by a desire to mix values, but also by the size of each fabric piece in my collection.

Those squiggles are looking pretty good, huh?

Ellen Lindner

Arting While Flying

By Ellen Lindner on November 17, 2015 in Uncategorized

From the Ellen Lindner 1st Edition Art Adventure Dictionary:

art-ing, v. the act of experimenting in an artful way

Arting is just what I did on a long cross-country flight. These were the supplies I took with me: InkTense blocks, portable water filled brushes, latex gloves, a glue stick, and my sketch book.*

First, I tried to get to know my InkTense blocks a little. I could easily fit my sketch book and the Inktense container on the tray table. I had prefilled my brushes. (See the water in the handle?) I wore the gloves to keep the color off my hands. (Which I recommend with these blocks.)

First, a little intentional bleeding on wet paper.

Next, some further experimentation.

Mixed results on that one.

On to collage. Those airline magazines have got to be good for something, right?

I wasn’t aiming for anything in particular, just enjoying tearing, gluing, and covering the page. The strong teal water I had seen in California was on my mind, and that influenced the color selection.

Finally, a little sketching. Boy was I RUSTY!

But, it’s good to practice.

All of this arting definitely helped pass the time!

Do you have an art travel kit? If so, what’s in it? And where have you used it?

*It would have been great if I had taken a book of watercolor paper, rather than just sketch pages. They would have held up to the wet work better. But, my approach to my sketch book is to put EVERYTHING in it. Some items are 3D and have to be folded and glued in, but that’s okay. I want to have it all contained in the same place. I record the dates on the front cover, and on the back I list the various projects included.

Ellen Lindner
P.S. The queen of making art on the go is Elizabeth St. Hilaire. See her working on a plane. Her art is amazing (paper collage.) You’ll definitely want to visit her website.

Related posts: Inktense blocks, California’s coast