QuiltCon Class with Bill Kerr

On the third day were in Austin, I was able to take a 3 hour class with Bill Kerr. Not only does Bill design with his wife Weeks Ringle at Modern Quilt Studio, but he also teaches Graphic Design and is Chairman of the Art Department at Dominican University.  The class I had the opportunity to take was The Role of Color in Your Quilts.

Bill talked a lot about the saturation of color, much as Weeks had. Desaturation can be moving light or darker than the most intense version of a hue.  Think about Red and Yellow. Saturated red is much darker than saturated yellow. Actually what is the darkest form of Yellow? It's brown!

As soon as you put boundaries on your art you limit yourself

Interesting concept isn't it? It aligns with Weeks' comment the day before: Rather than choosing the first fabric then selecting from your stash, consider everything as an option, then edit out what doesn't work. It gives so many more fabrics the opportunity to be selected. There could be hidden gems in your stash you didn't think would work.

The first exercise we did in class was based on a painting by an old master. Bill passed out copies of the paintings to everyone in the class. Here's the one I got stuck with  was given, it's "Icebergs and Wreck in Sunset" by Frederic Edwin Church:

OMG was my initial thought. I really don't like to use pastels in my work; especially the dreaded m-a-u-v-e. (So glad I'm not opinionated.) Bill even told me he chose that painting for me because I was wearing an emerald green sweater and he thought it would be a good excersie for me.

Okay, let me step off the mauve soapbox so I can tell you what we had to do. First we were given a color wheel and had to place dots on the wheel that indicated the saturation of color we saw in the painting.  Then we wrote down percentages of those colors that we saw in our painting.

Next we were to select fabric from our stash that represented the colors we saw. We weren't to try to recreate the painting, but trim the fabric to different sizes to reflect the proportion of the colors found in the painting. Here's my end result:

(For the record, I want to say that the pinky-mauvey color you see above was a piece of fabric I was given when my number was chosen in a raffle at a guild meeting...and I've used it to applique flower petals...the color looked great...Gasp! Perhaps I've been a little hard on pinky-mauvey. Maybe it does have its place.)

After about 20 minutes, we all shared our interpretation of the color with the rest of the class.

We talked about each painting and the fabric swatches. It was interesting to see how certain hues were used to evoke a particular message or feeling. I think that by using the peaches and pinks in the sky, Church was able to evoke more of a feeling of anguish for the ship wreck than if the sky had been steel blue or dove grey. After all, pale pink is the lightest saturation of blood red.

It was a great exercise. Another one Bill mentioned was to hand out photos of paintings and ask everyone in your guild to sew a log cabin block with colors that mimic the painting. Sounds intriguing, doesn't it?