
Quilt Artists Guide to Color Session 4: Texture, Print and Raising Surface
Heather ThomasDescription
This session is all about visual and tactile texture and learning how to use them to create movement, rhythm, surface tension, dominance and so much more. Heather will help you understand how what is printed on the surface of a fabric or its visual texture, can affect the piece and in turn the viewer. She will guide you through a couple of exercises that will help you understand how the role of motif scale effects how a fabric occupies space and therefore influences design. She will then lead you into the exciting world of using fabrics and embellishments that have tactile texture so you can create a surface that begs to be touched.
Now that you have gone through all of your fabrics and organize them by color, I hope you have at least, and you've put together some color scales and some value information and have some papers for your color book that show the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, we're ready to talk about this wonderful thing that we fabric users have that a lot of other artists don't necessarily have built in and that is what's called texture. And that texture can be either visual texture, that which we only see, or it can be tactile texture that which we can see and feel or simply feel. And this texture is very, very important because it adds visual interest. So when we go shopping, we're not just shopping for yellow, we're shopping for yellow that is maybe light or dark, but yellow that also has a different type of print on it, and that print is what gives us the visual texture of that fabric. And you're going to find, and you probably already figured this out when you're looking at your stash, that you tend to buy certain things.
If you like reproduction fabrics, you're probably buying mostly smaller prints. And so it has a smaller scale of design. If you're buying lots of modern things then there are probably larger scale prints. We need to have a variety, just like we need to have a variety of values, we need to have a variety of scales also. We also need to have a variety of styles.
Just because you like nature and leaves and flowers doesn't mean that should be the only thing you buy because a quilt filled with nothing but flowers is very redundant and not very interesting, but a quilt filled with flowers of various sizes or scale with leaves, with swirly doos, with stripes, all these different things, all these different visual textures makes for an interesting piece of art. Now, whether you consider your quilts artwork or not is not the important thing. The important thing is am I pleased with the work I'm doing, and if it's important to me, are other people pleased when they receive it as a gift, purchase it, or just see it at a show or in your home? Now for me, if I'm going to go through the time and energy of making something, I want to be pleased with it and then I really like to show it because I believe that a piece of artwork comes alive when another person sees it. And so I want to choose my colors wisely and choose my tactile and visual textures wisely so that they play well on the surface.
So to understand that, we're going to look here and I hope that you'll make a page like this also. Again, it's just a blank piece of card stock. And I went to my stash and I chose as many different styles and different sizes of textures that I could find. And so we'll start here and we've got a stripe that's a batik stripe and what's striped is where there's no print at all. Usually the stripe is printed on and here we've got wonderful color between the simple stripes.
And our stripes are very narrow, maybe an 1/8 of an inch with spaces in between that form stripes that are about 3/8 of an inch. Here we have another batik and another stripe. Here we have big areas of negative space. Some have busy things in them, but this plant or whatever it is, is making that stripe. And again another stripe.
This stripe is made, it's kind of like a marbling design. So three very different designs, three very different scales of stripe. Most people wouldn't look at this and think stripe, but that's the way it's going to behave when I cut it up. Then I've got a big checkerboard, which is simply squares on the surface, but the scale is quite large. When we compare the scale of these squares next to the fineness of this line, much different scale.
And here we have what's a very big flower. Here we're only seeing a portion of it. And it's important to understand how those fabrics look when we cut them up, when we see a portion of a big design and I really like this flower cut up. Over here, a very, very simple texture. This texture here, we've got little tiny fine lines in there of a slightly darker violet.
That is its texture. Here, the scale is again, quite different. We've got big, big circles. Big is relative. Big compared to the fine lines here.
Big compared to the small squares here. However, on this one, our circles are closer together and so that's a different stylization. Here our squares are tiny, but they're bright gold and they're farther apart. Here we have circles that are interlinking but they're hollow circles and they're what we would call tone on tone, which is kind of a misuse of the word tone, but what they're basically saying is it's the same color in a variety of the color scale. We have something light and something dark on something medium, all of yellow-green.
Here is another larger scale print. We can make the assumption that that's probably some sort of fern-like leaf, but here, when we've cut it up, it's got a totally different type of texture and it's quite linear like these stripey things are. Here we have a cross hatch, but it's a kind of a messy cross hatch, it's not neat and tidy and perfect. Again, a different scale, very small, close-together lines. Here our lines are further apart, a little bit bigger, but not as big as our circular lines here, so very tiny scale, a medium, and a large compared to each other.
Again, it's relative because this is not large compared to this flower or this leaf. Here we have something that reads as mottling and mottling is something that basically has a play of the color and design all the way across the surface with no even or pronounced pattern being made and it's a wonderful thing to use in positive or negative space. Circles again, but these circles are amorphous, they're not round, rigid circles like these circles so they have a different type of energy. These circles are all different sizes and different colors and they're floating about, whereas these are placed in a line. This has a much tighter energy, and this is much looser.
Another type of circle, are circles are sitting on top of each other. Again, a tone on tone, a light version of one color on a dark or vice versa. And then here we have, what is probably a very large print. If we think about this little portion that we have, that doily design is probably about six inches around and this one probably even bigger, and so we have just a little bit of it, and what we're seeing is a nice high contrast between light and dark and some fine filigree-type lines. So these all have very different visual textures.
Now we can also have different tactile textures and I can feel these. You can't, but you can see that they're raised. I can feel all of these textures. They are risen above the surface in one way or another. These have tucks and pleats.
These have embroidery. These have embroidery that's heavy, heavy like thread painting. This one is woven, weird fibers woven through. And this is really interesting. It's got these long strands that come through it that happened during the weaving that they left in there to add this wonderful tactile texture.
Now, some of these are gonna have more tactile texture than they have visual. Others are gonna have an equal amount. This one, because there's a contrast in the colors, we have that visual texture as well as a tactile, whereas these, it's all about the texture and it's harder to see that visual texture and more easy to see the, or feel, the tactile texture. Why is texture important? I could say, well, it just is, but I'm gonna show you why it's important.
So here we have three square and a square blocks. Frankly, they're just one small square set on top of another larger square and on point. And I'd like you to do a study like this, just like I would like you to do studies like this. If you're gonna do this again, it's just a blank piece of paper and putting down as many different color scale, excuse me, tactile pieces that you can on one sheet, and visual pieces that you can on another sheet. If you say to yourself, "I have nothing that is tactile," you can go to stores that sell drapery fabrics and they have, on those drapery fabrics, they have little pockets that have little samples of those fabrics and you can go through there and take little samples and get some really cool, tactile pieces.
But it's important for you to understand this, so make sure that you do this sheet. But this sheet is even more important. So what I did is I chose a two-fabric colors, or two-color families, yellow, green, and violet, and I chose a different texture for each one. So on this block, we have almost no texture at all, a very simple mottling and a little texture also, mottling again. On this block, I perked it up and I've got a little tiny white polka dot, and on the background here a long linear design.
And what you're gonna see here is that this tiny little polka dot has a very different scale from this big wide line. And this block, in my opinion, is much more interesting than this block. And the interest is derived by that tac visual texture. Now, because of the print or the texture on this center square is tiny, it is trying to recede. And because the print on this background is very large, it is trying to come forward.
And so when you look at it, it's not really acting like this square is inside that square, it's acting like this square is trying to envelop that square. It's not a right or wrong, it's just something that happened, and knowing that that can happen is important. Whereas this square, I think, is the best square. We have two very different tactile or visual textures. Here we have interlinking circles, a variety of sizes, but relatively large compared to what's on the background here, which is print, totally different stylizations of those textures.
But this texture is larger than this one and so it allows that piece of fabric, that color, to sit on the surface and come forward better. We don't have the fight that's taking place here. Here it's coming forward because it's larger. Things that are forward, that are larger, are gonna appear that they're larger in person and so helping that, having that larger print on there is helping that occupy that positive space or come forward compared to a smaller print that is helping that move backwards. Doesn't hurt that the print is black, so it's the darkest too, and so that's helping that stay back.
So the texture that is printed on the surface of your fabric is very important. It plays a very intriguing and compelling role in that color selection and how that fabric is going to occupy space on the surface of your work.
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