d’Arte Board

Lately I’ve been trying to do more of the types of quilts I started the year working on, but I’ve been having issues with color schemes. I have Piles of canvases lining my dropcloth divided into rough colors (Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Neutral) that are supposed to help me with this, but this actually just tends to limit me to a single hue. When I try to start combining the colors together, the combinations start getting too complicated to control.

Color schemes like this work well, but are harder to herd than you might expect. Complements make each other brighter, so the pieces you thought was underplayed prior to adding it suddenly become stark when sewn together. At that point the rest of the quilt becomes a series of reactions trying to wrangle the color scheme back from noise. If you become too conservative, though, the colors wash out into uniformity. This can be good at times when you want to emphasize the pattern of a quilt, but in chaotic patchwork of a hundred tiny pieces, you lose your focal point.

My response has been to work in more uniform fields, which I can then combine in larger, easier to control forms later. That’s what these are. I need to finish another color or more and then will make 3-5 pieces out of them, with overall shapes defining them. They will each end up 28″ square, but I need to add 4 inches to the green one.

-JD

This entry was posted on October 25, 2011 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Art, Collage, craft, J. D. Hastings, Painting with tags Art, Collage, J. D. Hastings, Painting, quilts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.