Designing away

Still learning the updates on my drawing program (Draw Plus 8) but have made some steady progress on designing the next little Wholecloth. While inspired by the workshop with Claudia Pfeil that I went to recently, I  changed things around a  bit to make this a little bit more interesting for me. The idea for me is not to draw out the whole Wholecloth in all its detail (although you probably could if you are really keen), rather to just get a bit of an idea of proportions, where to put borders, how much empty space will I have etc. and what one could do with this.

This is how I started out. Circle in the middle, like in the class and then mirroring shapes, filling etc.

Needless to say, this took me ages...but I am learning, so it's all good. Particularly impressed that I was able to construct my own Pebbles vector fill (and put it in the library to be re-used!). So this is the middle and then I started really playing around moving from the center out.

Loved this idea using the arc shape (the fill area will be reduced as I might put more shapes around the circle), so went with it and developed what I call a very loose little 'concept drawing' (Haha...) from this.

Does not really show you that much, but has got all the bits I need. I mucked around with scaling which did work fine, except that my other measurements left a bit to be desired. Was obviously not that accurate at times (and forgot to put things on layers which made things shift here and there etc.). But that does not really matter. I was working from a 30in size and was able to get approximates of the other sizes which gives me a good idea of how big I should make the main elements. The feathers on top  may or may not eventuate...was just practising getting some feathers on the screen with the Replicate tool (very neat feature). This drawing is for a little Wholecloth that I would like to stitch on silk...I am aiming for about 30 in and will follow some of the ideas that we discussed in Claudia Pfeil's class. So obviously all those empty areas will be filled with something. This was really useful and hopefully I get a bit better with the whole scaling function (or maybe the computer could stop being so dammed accurate).
Then I finally tackled a motif that I had drawn some 4 years ago...the drawing was ok, but to really use it, I would have had to re-do it and then muck around with lots of photocopies so it was left.
So here is my new improved version

This took a little while...the tracing of the original image was much easier with the new B-Spline tool and I spent additional time on smoothing out some curves that were wonky on my actual drawing. Definitely getting the hang of this. This was  quite easy and I now have my motif on the computer ready to be grouped, flipped, mirrored, scaled, rotated and the like...this is good fun. Also re-drew my little image from the other day using the programs spiral tool.

As you can see this is working very well for me...so well worth the money I spend on upgrading my program.

Am I actually doing any quilting?  Yes, I am in the process of finishing off my yet to be named Robert Kaufmann squares quilt. Doing some very boring quilting in the ditch at the moment...Using Invisafil! More about that another day...

Karin