Design Exercises

At the last CQFA meeting, one of our members, Amy Witherow led us through several exercises from  Katie Pasquini Masopust's book "Inspirations for Design." She set up a white-on-white still life with all sorts of interesting objects, vases, shells, silk flowers, packaging, a gravy boat. The idea of using all white objects was to take color out of it for us so we could concentrate on the lines and shapes of the objects we were observing and drawing.

I hadn't done a blind contour drawing in a very very long time. Blind contour means No peeking (the hardest), pen stays on the paper (also very hard), eyes trace the edges of the objects and your hand translates that into a line on the page.

We had various amounts of time to do each one. I found that a quicker time was better for me, getting unhooked from criticizing my work before I was even done with it was a good thing.

I think this last one was the best at showing what I was actually seeing.

Next was the hardest of all, not blind contour but we had to pick one shape, for the two things on the left I chose a rectangle and then using *only* that shape draw the still life. The upper left was a rectangular take on just the gravy boat, the lower left was the entire still life represented in rectangles. I find this one the most pleasing to the eye. The upper right was the entire still life done in an elongated oval.

I think this was the most challenging exercise for me, which means I should probably attempt it again several times until I get the hang of it.

Lastly, Amy handed us each a piece of nice thick black paper and we free-hand cut out shapes from the still life and then glue-sticked them down to a piece of white paper, arranging them however we wanted.
Amy shared her sketchbook and process drawings of one of her teapot quilts which was really interesting. I loved seeing how she used this process of abstraction and translating into a great quilt. I'm so glad she presented these exercises to our group, I think we all learned quite a bit.