February FFFC # 30 - Done

Houses Round the Bend

It's done. Well, maybe done, it needs a label, and a hanging sleeve and I may decide to add more trees in the upper right corner, but at the moment I am considering it done. Our Challenge for February was to use the design element of an S curve with a split complementary color scheme. Going with my theme of structures, I drew an S curve on a sheet of paper in my Drawing pad and added simple houses. Going through the stash I pulled fabrics using the split complementary colors of Orange, blue green and blue violet. Right away I had a problem, very little blue violet fabrics, not in the hand dye, not in my batiks and even not in my commercial prints. Since I like the color I can only think that the Mfgs don't make all that many fabrics using blue violet. My other issue is that I think some of my oranges are more on the yellow orange side, or even drifting to the red orange, though I did try hard to stay away from that. I did find a group of 6 inch charm squares from a packet of Primrose Gradations fabrics to give the enough blue violets in a range of values to make the houses. I added in a couple of blue violet batiks that I had. Base fabrics are the blue green hand dyes.

Machine pieced, machine applique, machine quilted with cotton threads, usually a 30 weight, and hand embellished with various colors of pearl cotton. The embellishments are the rooftops, the large quilting stitches in the houses and the trees in the background. I am going to call it Houses Round the Bend.

March Winding Down

Almost the end of March is upon us. The weather looks like it isn't going to be quite as nasty as it was for the beginning of the month so we may have the traditional "in like a lion and out like a lamb". It is starting to warm up a bit, and we are having rain instead of snow, Yeah. I actually saw some crocus blooming the other day. Spring is actually starting to come after our very cold snowy winter.

I was back at school this week after last weeks "break", wasn't much of a break for me because of all the school work I was trying to get done but there weren't any classes. I did note that this weeks classes had rather poor attendance, I guess a lot of kids were trying to recover from their spring break. The up side of being back in class is that I have pictures for you again.

Lets start with Color and Design. I turned in my drawing of the 7 houses on Monday. Our next assignment was to draw two views of a room, one from standard human view, and one from either a birds eye view, or a cats eye view, I chose to do the lower view, though mine is probably more of a large dog then a small cat.

Standard Eye view


cat/large dog eye view - lower then the the Standard view anyway.

We now have to draw our 7 barns/houses in 2 point perspective from 2 views. Those images I should have for you next week.

No images for you from either Graphic Design or Typography. In Graphic Design we are still working on our Poster designs, though we have moved into the computer design phase. I need to have 3 files for Monday of my final poster design. In Typography we have started our research paper. I have chosen to do a paper on John Baskerville. He was an Englishman who lived in the 1700's and was actually a friend of Benjamin Franklin. He not only designed the Baskerville Font, but developed hot press paper. Since almost all of the paper we now use is hot press that was a significant development in the process of printing. I promise that I will try to not bore you too much with details of his life as I learn them.

We were back in drawing class on Tuesday, and I got back the homework drawings I turned in just before break. These were our leg and feet studies. We had pictures of a male model for them and I took the liberty of obscuring some of the details on one photo of my drawing. I was going to get creative and draw a fig leaf, cut it out and put it over the proper area, but decided that a small block of post it notes was the perfect size and so used that instead. It doesn't seem quite fair that I post my female nudes with no qualms but mask or select out photos of males that expose too much. But such is life I guess.

Bones of the legs and feet with pelvis


Basically the same view, except covered by skin and muscles


Side view legs and feet

We had a live model again on Tuesday and spent the first part of the class doing quick full studies of her. Then we viewed some slides about drawing heads and faces. Then we went back to class and did some drawings of her head. I have 3 of my quick sketches then 3 of my portrait drawings for you this week.

These may be sketches but I think I am starting to get some of the energy of her poses transferred to the paper, so I am relatively pleased with them.

That's it for this week. I have also been working on my FFFC February challenge quilt and hope to have that done this weekend so I can post to the blog pictures of that one. Since we received our next challenge (March) this morning I really need to get this one done. I fear school work and some pleasure reading have gotten in my way this past month. Hopefully I will do better with March.

As always comments are welcome.

Spring Break

This past week has been spring break for us at school so no classes. That doesn't mean there was no homework. All of the instructors gave homework, but only one really loaded it on. So instead of playing and visiting museums or doing other fun stuff, like getting my Challenge quilt finish for the FFFC group I have been working on homework. That includes writing a paper about a Non-profit organization that I will be doing a logo redesign for, I have chosen Mass Audubon. I have also been collecting pictures and images so I can do 10 sketches before Monday, and now today I have been looking to see if I can find a poem or some words that relate to the word BIAS to put on the poster. Any comments or suggestions about that would be appreciated.

Right at the moment I am feeling very discourage about my Graphic Design class which most of this work is for. I have found images, and taken pictures, but have no idea what I am going to be sketching for my poster design. He wants detail drawings and there is no way I will have ten detail drawings done by Monday. I will try to have 10 drawings, but how detailed is a huge question. I spent all day yesterday trying to get the paper written. Can I say I am a slow writer. It is four pages long and I am now struggling to do the bibliography since he didn't tell us which style of notation he wants us to use I am just guessing. This isn't what I went back to school for I can tell you that

For my Color and Design class my homework was to draw 7 structures using one point perspective on hot press board with ink. I do have mine done, but I took the picture yesterday when we had overcast sky so the picture isn't all that good. Still I think you can see what I have done. Not very exciting, but as the Instructor says we will never forget how to do one point perspective after this.

Thats it for this week, next week I will be back in class and have some drawings for you. I also hope to have finished my Challenge quilt. Don't hold your breath on that one though, too much homework will get it the way of that I fear. Though I have made progress with it I still have a lot of hand embellishing I want to do and that takes time.