Saturday, January 20, 2018

Pattern #1 - stars

This project was in inspired by Rancho Cordova's city council when they announced an art show based on patterns. I have always been fascinated by geometry so I thought I would play around with some new ideas.
This design is based on Arabic patterns. I started it with four 4" diameter circles. I inscribed two squares within each circle.  With the base lines drawn, I added in some other lines to create the "8 petal flower" and stars. 
This is my practice piece in pencil, then photocopied (the original circles didn't show up) and then traced the lines I wanted to emphasize in Sharpie.

I then recreated the pattern on watercolor paper and extrapolated the design to fill the page. I painted a base color of Azo yellow over the whole piece.  Then I went in with a flat brush and put a wash of Anthraquinone blue between the stars. The biggest challenge was to get a consistent color with the blue wash. It started out a little darker than I wanted, but then got too thin and created a green since the yellow was coming through. Once I stepped back from it though, I kind of liked the flow of it, so I left it as is.

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