For Your Inspiration: the Farmers Market Flowers

When you see these do the colors just bypass your brain and go directly to that place where joy lives in your heart? I think color, and music, have a direct line to our emotional center.

Have a lovely day!

Art + Quilt: Quilter Beth - Color as Emotion

I had the great pleasure of meeting Beth in Paducah several weeks ago and now it is even more of a pleasure to follow her progress as she works through the exercises in my book, "Art + Quilt: design principles and creativity exercises."

In her own words, "In the Color as Emotion exercise, the instructions said to “Create a simple composition that evokes a feeling, using color as the dominant element. Choose any emotion as your inspiration.” This was a hard exercise for me. Trying to think of an original composition pushes my limits. The requirement to use color as the dominant element also added to the difficulty. This is what I came up with. My first picture represents sadness."

"We were asked if we could repeat the composition in a different color combination and change the mood. I thought I’d give it a try. My second picture represents excitement. The compositions are the same; the only change is color."

Pop on over to her blog and tell her that she's done an amazingly great job for being uncomfortable with original design. 

I hope this inspires you to take a few chances, to try a few things that you might not have tried before. Start out with a few small pieces of batting or muslin and simply layer other fabrics on them. Don't worry about perfection. Don't worry about wasting material. The point is to LEARN something - and that is always of great value.

Thanks Beth!!!

Color Relationships

I believe that color is the favorite element of most visual artists.

It seems to directly bypass our thought process and drill right into our emotions. 

It's interesting to me that I am intensely drawn to color

but especially so in their very subtle moods.

Three

I started out in textiles as a traditional quilter 

and used mostly saturated primaries and jewel tones.

I actually had adverse physical reactions to grayed down blues or all pastel quilts. 

Encompassed

1998

Borders created from center to outer edge by: Lyric Kinard, Karen Zeher, Barbara Molnar, Jan Beasley, Amy Winsor, Mary Stone.  Quilted and embellished by Lyric Kinard

A few years into my learning process as a fine artist I went through a "brown" phase. Everything I made seemed to come out in earth tones with metallics thrown in. I haven't figured out why yet.

Three Rings

2003

Perhaps it was a factor of living in Chicago at that time

or perhaps that year's dye run just had some really great browns.

Out of the Box

2003

As I've grown as an artist I better understand my fascination with color interactions.

Masterful use of value, in any hue, attracts me as much as color by itself.

I'm still learning. Still working on stepping out of my box.

Perhaps I'm even still learning and exploring what the box is.

It is such a fascinating world, so full of wonder. 

Trying to capture those feelings, those visions, those emotions.

What an amazing life-long venture.