One Beauty. . . . Two Ways to Design a Quilt

Well! The second beauty went much easier than the first. The background, as you can see when you compare it to the last version, is now back into its proper proportion (two hours later!) Now the Beauties look properly oriented and the piece is starting to come alive.

Which bring ups something I wanted to mention.  Recently there has been some discussion on how people create:

1. Intuitively, meaning you start off with a blank design board and then let your piece slowly evolve into the finished product
2. Purposely, meaning you start out with a very distinct plan of action and design in mind and your end product is close to that 

Of course, anybody who is familiar with my working style will know that its obviously the latter.  In fact, I can pretty much 'fess up to being very OCD purposeful when it comes to design.  I mean why sketch out a design once if you can do it 10 times???

Now all of that said, I had a very talented artist say to me that she wouldn't like creating like that because then she would know what the finish product would look like.  I get her point, but, the honest truth is that I have no idea what the piece is going to look like at the end. The sketch just gives me a direction to head in. I'm always really surprised when I'm done how it ends up looking.  Sometimes its close to what my minds eye thought and other times its no where near what I thought.

With the Beauties, I'm pleasantly surprised.  I had a feeling that this piece was going to be too flat - too cartoonish.  But with the addition of pattern and the limited palette, they are starting to come alive and to have the old fashion summer feeling I wanted to envoke.

Now if I could just figure out what I'm going to do with that last beauty. She's already had two other suits on and I'm not even sure I like this one. I thought I would give her a rest and look at my stash again. I'm kinda leaning toward a solid - hmmmmmmmmmm.  
 
This is my first entry into the WIP Wednesdays - enjoy more design boards by clicking on the WIP patch on the side of my blog.