Super Cool UGLY Exercise
Yep, that’s right: ugly.
I recently did this cool exercise with my local fiber art buddies, the Dirty Dozen Fiber Artists. We used a book called “Paint Mojo” for prompts about making an UGLY painting.
The prompts included things like using a dark neutral in certain ways, painting words, using crayons as a resist, dripping paint, adding stamps, and more. Just let me say, we all achieved ugly! Just as desired.
This was mine.
See what I mean? UG. LEE!
But then, you pull out your little L-shaped pieces of cardboard and start to search for pleasing compositions.
Low and behold, when you zoom in tightly like this you actually find them!
And they’re kinda amazing.
Our plan is for each of us to choose a little cropped view as inspiration for a square art quilt. (I’m not sure the other artists were as enamored with this process as I was, so we’ll see how many still want to do it.)
Isn’t this wacky? It was great fun and the results are totally usable.
Ellen Lindner
P.S. For more fun, follow the three links below to see how this worked it out when I first tried it, six years ago.
