Easy-Peasy Value Studies - Off the Wall Friday

 So my last week of traveling got cancelled since I finally caught the dreaded Covid.  It took me 3.5 years so that is another thing I can mark off my bucket list!  Luckily, with the last variant, it amounted to little more than a cold.  It did disrupt my sleeping and eating though which seems to me so strange.So between those two things, I'm a bit of a mess.   It's also kept me out of the studio for two weeks which is a bummer.  Because of that...I am re-running a post I did on value.  The reason I chose value is that I think it's the most important element in designing your own work.  No matter if you're a quilter who does your own original work or one that chooses fabric for someone else's pattern, value is an important skill.  

So here is the post I wrote 8 years ago.

Okay, I admit it, I've been lazy and it's getting harder and harder to get into my studio.  I could blame a lot of things - domestic tasks. working full time, getting Tessa back into the routine of her senior year.   But honestly, I think it's me.

 Sometimes after a big project, it's hard to get back into the swing of things.  So I thought I would take it easy this time.

That said,  with the mood I'm in, I didn't want to over-exert myself looking for something new.  I know I want to play around with simple shapes and keep working on my abstract. . . but after that it is kinda of up in the air.  Luckily, I keep a pinterest board of inspiration.  Even when I'm lazy, I still manage to keep adding to my boards.

This time it led me to some modern architectural pictures which I found very cool.  Using them as the foundation of inspiration, I wanted to abstract them out without a lot of fuss.  Now I could go through tracing them and then doing value drawings by hand.  Why expend all that energy?

Instead, I used an online site - LunaPic - to help me manipulate the images.  I could use my photoshop but I always find it a little bulky.  This online source was easy and very intuitive to use.  For my purposes today I just grayed out the picture (took the saturation of color down to 0) and pixelated them. Instant abstract value study!!!   Easy-Peasy!!!

This was so fun I think I'll work on them a bit longer finding just the right one.  I have an idea of what I want to do with that but I'll save them for another post!!

So What Have Been Up to Creatively?