Sunday, October 15, 2006

Designing on the Laptop


Last Sunday when I was teaching in Yellowknife, the workshop was going along swimmingly and I sat there with not much to do. I brought my knitting for such a moment, but left my needles back in my room at the hotel, so I was stumped. Then it dawned on my pea brain that I had fabric, and Wonder-Under and the rest of the necessary tools to make a quilt of my own!
Since I am cheap I fused only one piece of my available for sale fabric, and made the quilt top pictured above.
I took a digital picture of it and looked at it in Picasa2
which has become a habit lately. I find I can 'see' my work better on the screen than I can in real life. It's like it doesn't exist unless it is viewable online. Weird, I know.

In Picasa2 I cropped the image once,

recropped and turned it on its side once,


reset, and recropped it again.

At this point I can't remember which side was up when I designed it originally.

I took one of my 'crops' and pasted it three times to see how a repeat might work.


This is a second version.

And a third.

So much of my work is fabric dependent and this would be nearly impossible to reproduce, especially with the dye effects in this specific piece of fabric. But I think that I have another idea...
One of my personal challenges is to switch from my old way of painting to a new non-representational style. But where to start? When I see these panels I think they would make neat paintings, and I could repeat the patterning of the fabric in paint! So yesterday I dragged out a failed work from its hiding place under the stairs and started to paint over it.
It would have been a lot easier to start on one of my many fresh unused canvasses, but I am being frugal these days. Plus I am eliminating the need to fix the unfixable original painting that I started this summer. It was too pictorial. grrrr.
Kitty update: Miss Socks had to return to Frieda's house. Popeye insisted on being the only cat. She was a lot happier back at home with George, I could tell immediately. sigh.

5 comments:

  1. Oh I'm so sad about Socks going back home. But Popeye does have precedence, and he wont live forever...
    Neat idea about using your quilts in Picasa as a jumping-off place for paintings! But what happened to limiting your color scheme?
    Just kidding. The colors are so yummy!

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  2. The problem with all the digital experimentation is that you can end up unable to make a decision about what path to take with the real-world version. Too many fun possibilities. At least that's what happens to me. But it IS fun.

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  3. Anonymous1:50 PM

    Poor Miss Socks, at least she did get to stay overnight at your house....LOL!

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  4. LOL I do that too! I made some blocks and was looking at them to see how the colors were looking. I had to take a picture and see it on a screen to make a decision about how the colors worked together.

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  5. I often photograph my work and look at it on-screen. I get a detached, fresh eye, and often see something different or in a different way.

    I had a feeling Socks might be returning home. You tried.

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