Large Quilts for Sale

Color Study: Why Red?

| ellenanneeddy

I’ve just finished Little Blues! I’m delighted with this quilt. It took me a while to get it finished off. In that process, on a whim I added some red silk flowers to the background.

Why red? Why not orange or blue or white? I did try those. But red was it.

I really think it’s worth the while to put up your color decisions on a color wheel. Just how you can see how they relate.

The color wheel gets a bad rap. It’s old fashioned, it’s boring, we all know how colors are made, it’s incomprehensible…. It’s still the best way I know to show the relationships between colors. It shows how colors are created. But most importantly, it shows how they react to each other.

The farther colors are apart from each other, the more tension there is between them. And like every good soap opera, more tension means more excitement.

At which point, you need to ask, where is this quilt going? If it’s in a baby’s bedroom, you might want to keep the tension and excitement to a minimum. But for a gallery? Bring on the excitement!

I was surprised when I put the colors up on the wheel. I didn’t realize how far around the wheel I had gone. But as you can see, the red zings across from the green. I don’t have much in there, but it wakes up a piece that has that sleepy analogous color thing going on without it. Not much. Just a handful of red silk flowers.

I consider using the whole color wheel a visual trick of sorts. It wins awards, and it’s showy, but color needs to be the focus of a piece for that to work well. But this almost full-color wheel is rich, satisfying, and just red enough to get attention.

For more information about color theory check out Color Theory: The Tug Across the Wheel and Thermal Shock: Shocking Color Choices.

Made by Accident: An Approach to Organic Design

| ellenanneeddy

Some people spend a lot of time designing their art. They sketch. They plan. They build models. I’m so impressed. They can even tell you what it means.

I wish I could do that. I just can’t. It seems all of my art comes from random things, started but not finished, that I found later and made or put more random things on them. It sounds like a dreadfully chaotic way to make art. It is. It’s hellish for commissions. But it’s how I am. And if you want me to tell you what it’s about, you’ll need to wait several years until I get that straightened out. I am not in control of my art. All I can do is attend to it regularly, and do what it demands.

What is central to the process is the time stuff sticks around, on a photo wall before I commit to the next step. Is it right? Does it need to move three inches left? I’ve ruined many pieces by bulling through and finishing them without taking time to really look at them first.

I’m not helpless about this. And I’m not unskilled. It’s just the way it is. I suspect I’m not alone.

Art is a living thing, and a piece of art will tell you what it wants. And in the end, you didn’t so much make it as assist in it’s birth.

I laid out the background for this almost a year ago. Decided it needed white flowers on a pond edge. Didn’t know what else it needed. Lost it. Found it again. Lost it once more and then it resurfaced in the last cleaning. Somewhere in there I’d drawn a swimming frog in a batch of frogs. He didn’t get embroidered with the other batch, and I found him and thought, I really ought to finish him but I didn’t have a place to put him.

Then the piece of fabric surfaced. So I embroidered the frog, put in some water and rocks and a moon. Looked at it a while. HATED the moon. That almost never happens. But it just didn’t work.

When I was embroidering a batch of bugs and did three luna moths. One left over one just fluttered on to my quilt where the unfortunate moon was. White flowers and more water later it was done.

Did it take me two weeks? Or the two years to have the pieces fall together? Even I don’t know. I do know that fallow part of the process where you just stare at it, or lose it, or find it in a pile is an important part of the process, not to be missed or dissed.

I don’t know how to teach this kind of design. I can only show it in process. But I believe in it. I believe art grows like life, randomly, without sense, half by purpose but largely by accident, as it is. I can only stand back and watch.