Design Essentials a la Heather

At the NQA show I was lucky enough to take Heather Thomas' Quick Design Essentials class. If you aren't familiar with Heather, she's a fabulous artist based in Denver.

We spent the day with her learning about design aesthetics. Instead of using fabric, we came armed with white paper, scissors and glue sticks; Heather supplied bits of colorful scrapbooking papers. Different ideas were visually captured by gluing down snippets of the colored paper or drawing free form designs.

In one of the exercises I learned that there are many ways you can look at a design.Here's a composition I put together and is a good example of what I mean:

You notice is that there is an orange paper with a traditional houndstooth design (labeled "1"). However, depending on how the paper is cut, the design changes. With a few snips of the scissors, it looks like an arrow("2"). Angle the scissors over a different portion and you have a checkerboard design.  How cool is that?! So when you look at your fabric, there can be a multitude of different ways it can be applied to your art depending on how you view it.

In this composition I also learned that asymmetrical designs are more visually interesting when you use the rule of thirds to divide the work both horizontally and vertically. Also, by repeating colors and designs between those sections, the viewer's eye moves around the piece.  Maybe if I had been an art major in college, I would have known this but I was in the College of Business and this never came up! (Now I know who was having more fun; that's for sure.)

The class was based on Heather's book: A Fiber Artist's Guide to Color and Design. Unfortunately, the book is currently out of print, but will hopefully be back on  quilt store shelves soon.  Great news is that Craftsy has asked Heather to teach the class for their internet site. It would definitely be worth your while to sign up for that one when it becomes available. In the meantime, you can check out Heather Thomas' website: Wild Heather Designs.