Monday 2 May 2016

Four in Art- Second Quarter

Time for the second quarter reveal for the Four in Art group. This quarter's theme was Colour: Music, an easy theme I thought... I had an idea right away but in the end I really struggled to bring it to life.

As soon as the theme was revealed, I thought of a quote I had heard years ago, about how the colour purple might be described to a blind person as the deep notes of a trumpet. I searched for the quote and couldn't find it but the image was quite visual to me, with purple sound waves emanating from a trumpet in profile. (I had a hard time getting the colour to show up as the purple it is so you'll have to take my word for that. After weeks of sunshine today is grey and dark so hard to photograph true colours).



I made three different attempts to realise my idea and am still not at all happy with the result. In fact I'm feeling quite embarrassed having to publish my effort... but the idea of the group, for me at least, is to stretch my creative muscles in making something to a theme within a timeframe and to try to identify what makes something work or not. So I'm trying to hold it lightly as a learning experience. Maybe you can help me identify what would have made it work?



I like my profile trumpet which I cut out and fused to the background. I like the idea of the sound waves, but they're not quite right. I tried ribbon on another one and I've tried different colours and shapes. Perhaps the wave form is not right across the space? I quite like how they're fading out, but maybe the zigzag needed to be denser?



Or they needed to be altogether fatter? Or the waves all needed to match and echo one another?  I tried different waveforms but couldn't decide what worked. Perhaps the problem is with the negative space? Definitely the quilting is a problem. My initial idea was to echo quilt the waves and I tried more colour with lines in a lightly variegated purple thread- lots of unpicking after that...



In the end I ran out of time- there's learning in that; but don't seem to have had much success on trying to start earlier- spent plenty of time reading this and this and this...so now I'm all sorted!

My daughter has it worked out, she said sometimes creative projects just don't work and you probably should just scrap it and try a new idea- yeah- that one! But I would actually be interested to read your comments as to what would have improved this one, coz I feel like success must be in there somewhere trying to get out.



You can see how the others in our group interpreted the theme; we have a blog, Four-in-Art Quilts, but you can also visit the rest of us here:

Janine         http://www.rainbowhare.com
Simon         http://quiltalicious.blogspot.com
Susan         http://patchworknplay.blogspot.com
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...