watercolor quilts and CorelDraw -- something cool!
DebraWeiss
watercolor shadings, I discovered something way cool with CorelDraw
yesterday!
This technique can probably be used with any drawing program that has a
fountain fill option.
First, draw your grid. Here's a quick way.
Using the rectangle tool, draw a square or rectangle. Make the dimensions
an even number, something that can be divided equally in half inch, 1 inch
or 2 inch units.
In the preferences box (Ctrl-J), set the Place Duplicates to match your
grid unit (say 1 inch) in the horizontal area and 0 in the vertical area.
If you draw a line on top of the left side of your square and press Ctrl-D
(to duplicate) it'll make vertical lines across your square or rectangle
at 1 inch intervals. When done, go back to Preferences, and set the
horizontal to 0 and the vertical to 1 inch. Draw a line on top of the top
line of your square or rectangle, press Ctrl-D and you'll get the
horizontal lines for your grid. This is very quick, accurate and easy!
Click on your square or rectangle to select it.
Now for the fun part...Click on the fill tool.
Click on fountain fill (or, in CorelDraw, it's F11)
Choose Conical, Radial, etc. Look at the preview.
If you play with the options, you'll see your design moving around in the
preview window...you can rotate it, play with the fill angles, etc. You'll
see it in shades of gray, which is very helpful!!!
Set the number of steps to correspond to the way you have your fabrics
sorted. For example if you have lights, light-mediums, light-darks, medium
lights, medium darks, light darks, medium darks and darks, set the number
of steps to 8.
Click on OK, and the design fills your square or rectangle. If you print
this out, you have a complete road map to your design, square by square!
Choose fabrics in your palette that correspond with each square.
You'll be able to clearly see if some squares need to be divided, say half
light and half medium. Either piece them, or better, look for fabric
squares which have patterns that match what you're looking for. You might
find a square that's light on one half and medium on the other.
I wish you could see what I have going on my design wall right now!
Two books about these kinds of quilts:
Watercolor Quilts
Pat Maixner Magaret & Donna Ingram Slusser
Colourwash Quilts
Deirdre Amsden
Both are published by That Patchwork Place (1-800-426-3126)
Personally, I like Deirdre Amsden's book better. She's the one who
originated the technique in the first place, and her quilts are fabulous.
Her book details her personal approach, and there's a lot of great
information in there.
Hope this info helps somebody!
--Debra