About Those Lazy Hexagons...

 You didn't think I was going to leave them alone, did you?

When I was first playing with this, I knew I wanted the triangles that make up those hexagons to NOT be dark blue, so I just grabbed random SS Triangles (yes, I have about 300 or so already made) from the SST bin and put them up on the wall to establish the basic design.

You can probably figure out why the triangles above are circled. In my opinion they stick out too much.

Remember, I have decided that for THIS quilt, I wanted to showcase the dark blue diamonds. 

They are not on the design wall because I have spent the last couple of days sewing the side triangles to them.

Now all art manipulates what you are seeing in one way or another. Packages are designed to grab your attention and advertising does the same thing. But good design means that the artist has considered what HE or SHE wants you to see, and has arranged the elements in the artwork (or quilt) so that you see precisely what he or she wants you to notice. I WANT you to focus on the blue diamonds. I do not want any of the other colored triangles to hijack your attention. 

The ones circled above, in my opinion, do just that. Remember the EYE is first drawn to CONTRAST of some kind. This is the way the eye in your head works. It has nothing to do with what you think you see first. We are designed to notice patterns, and that means we notice what sticks out of the ordinary FIRST. It goes back to Fight or Flight when humans first walked the earth and needed to keep themselves alive.

Now I do not mind the other triangles are different colored and I don't mind you seeing them. I just don't want the viewer to notice them FIRST or even second. I want them to be innocuous, and kinda boring. I want them to sink into the background just a bit. I want you to see they connect into those loose six pointed stars, but I don't want to hit you over the head to notice them. 

I could do that, of course. I could make them equally bright and busy. But then you would be looking at something that could be visually overwhelming and you might not notice the diamonds at all. There is, of course, a balance to all this, and good artists do it very well.

In MY quilt, I want the loose hexagons to be in the background. I want them to be the chorus, if you will. I don't want any of them to be the Divas.

So I have gone through my collection of SSTs and replaced the ones I thought grabbed too much attention with triangles that are less busy in terms of pattern or value. I have removed some triangles I thought were too dark, or the same value as the dark blue diamonds. I have for the most part left them in the same positions so you can go back and forth and see what I didn't like with what I changed. I am not sure I am finished, and quite frankly, I am not 100% sure I am done with making those changes. I have said it before and I will say it again, you can't really tell until you have ALL the blocks on the design wall. So when I have finished adding the side triangles to the 58 blue triangles that will make up the blue diamonds, I'll look at it again and reconsider. If I need to make more triangles I will.

Because I don't let one damn thing out of my studio that I am not 100% happy with. I know what I want, and most of the time I know exactly how to get it, so that's what I do.

I love reading comments that tell me you love me explaining the what and why I do what I do and the changes I make. Years ago one lady wrote that she could tell right away that something I had changed made all the difference, but she couldn't tell what I did. This post and the ones I have written and will continue to write about this quilt, will be my attempt to do just that.

Questions always welcome.