Shapes are not Lines.

After my frustration with my performance in the Nancy Crow class I just had a "light bulb moment".  In class we did a black and white exercise with lines (less than 1 inch) and shapes, everything larger. I had a problem with lines that were too fat. This makes for a boring composition. Well , I am a slow learner and after making 30 blocks for a new quilt, and spending the afternoon redoing them,  I now understand the difference.

This is the start of  a quilt for my son and daughter-in-law's new house. 16 inch blocks of earth tone mosaics. The bottom blocks are what happens when the lines are the size of the color shapes. Boring and no color impact. The upper blocks are what they look like when neutrals are "lines". Still some of the lines could be smaller, but this is what I got by partially taking apart  and remaking the old blocks. New blocks will definitely have skinny lines. Also need some more variation in the size of the shapes.

What is Good Composition?

Never mind that I haven't written anything since last summer. I started this blog as a way to document my quilting and knitting and hopefully get some feedback along the way. But I have to write something first. So here goes....

I recently took a class from a true quilt artist, Nancy Crow, titled Lines, Curves, Circles & Figure-Ground Composition. The class was intense, and I have to admit that I did not preform to my greatest potential. This was the 4th class I have taken so it was not that I didn't know what to expect. It just didn't seem to work out. A class with Nancy is hard work!  5 days of 8-10 hours of designing and sewing is really hard!  She gives an assignment, and a time to complete it. There are usually detailed exercises which are to be assembled into a composition. And here is where I get stuck. It's hard, and probably takes practice, to walk into a room and turn on your creativity 100%. I just did not have the practice and experiences to do this effectively. But I did learn a lot and will redo my notes and probably try and redo the exercises.

But my greatest question is " What is good Composition?" I know about line, shape, curves, positive/negative space, warm/cool colors, color hue, tint and value. But what exactly is a good composition? What is a bad composition? and Why?  My biggest criticism of a Nancy Crow class is that composition is   never clearly demonstrated. Maybe this is the scientist in me,  but at this point it is not intuitive, so I really need the "evidence" to understand the concepts. The classes are taught in a "student exploration" style and if you go down the wrong tunnel, you can get frustrated really fast. When I got home I spent a long time on the Internet searching for examples and there are really none. Just more on space, color, shape, etc. Maybe I can find a class at our local community college that will get me going down the "right tunnel".

Here are the pieces I worked on, and some of the class evaluation comments.

 Exercise 1. Lines in black and white. . First my lines are too fat. They are supposed to be less than 3/4" . Composition eval - "Don't bother to finish". Not much excitement.

 Exercise 2.  Shapes - Bright colors on a pastel ground. The top left corner is not finished. Shapes just placed so they don't get lost. This got a good review and I was encouraged to finish it. Looks very rough in the picture, but I like it and I will definitely finish it.



Exercise 3. BIG and BOLD. Each of the circles are about 40" across. This composition challenge was to work BIG.  At this point I was pretty tired. I just could not find the energy to come up with a good composition for all 4 circles. I had about 5 sketches in my notebook but none of them excited me enough to work on the entire piece. So I just did 2 of the ideas. I like the first one, but not sure how to integrate into the 4 circles. The second one was a "confetti" look. I like it as a single circle, but again not sure how to integrate into a large composition. I like this idea and will continue to collect ideas for the large work.

   


So still exploring the original question - What is good Composition?