Dena Crain: Artist/Teacher in Kenya

My software of choice for designing quilts and illustrating my classes at Quilt University is EazyDraw by Dekorra Optics. As illustration software goes, EazyDraw compares favorably with Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw, with a “right” price of about US$ 100, and features about it I like better than the other two products I mentioned. For one thing, it works beautifully on a Mac without any third party Windows integration!

EazyDraw has lots of useful features, like the little visible tape measures I discovered only this morning that can help you measure your patches. What has got me really excited is that I recently found out how to make swatches of my fabrics appear in the Patterns feature. Now I can “color” my quilt designs with photos of my fabrics!! This is really helpful for me, because packaged libraries of manufacturer’s fabric swatches published by other software producers are of little use to me: I cannot source those materials easily in Kenya!

So, if you are a quilter like me, and you want the total control of a graphic design software program built specifically for your Mac, and you want to photograph and use YOUR fabrics as tilings to generate realistic looking illustrations of your quilt designs, first get yourself a copy of EazyDraw. Then - here’s how you do it:

Take a digital photo of your fabric (at low resolution if you will not be printing the image). You will have to play around a bit with how large the photo should be and get some idea of the scale of the print or texture, or you can wait until I’ve had time to do that myself when I will post further details here on my blog. One way or another, save the photo as a bitmap.

Then, on EazyDraw, simply drag the bitmap into a new document or whatever one you are presently using. Then click on the bitmap in the file window and drag it to the Patterns window! Bingo!!! That’s all there is to it!

Be sure to SAVE your new image by giving it an appropriate name. Then apply the image to whatever shape you wish. It will appear as a tiling.

Presumably, if you captured enough of the fabric so the scale was right, you could fill the entire sketched shape with one photo of a single fabric instead of this tiled effect, but for right now, I’m satisfied this tool will serve me well!

Oh - and one other point: Support for EazyDraw is fantastic! I wrote them one message, then figured out how to do this task by myself, so I wrote a second message asking them to disregard the first message. A reply came back congratulating me on having figured it out!! Now, I ask you - how often does that happen?!?

I have been so excited about my discovery this morning of Jane Dunnewold’s tutorial on notan expanded squares that I could not wait to begin working with the technique. As I thought about the design method, it occurred to me that it ought to be possible to produce such images on computer. Why not? Right?

So here is my first attempt at drawing an expanded square on computer:

It’s a little rough, I admit, but I am not yet familiar with the rules. I was playing with the curve tools, learning more about how each of them operates. It’s also sloppy as I did not take time to make certain everything was properly aligned. The worst part of it is the way the center got all chewed up by overlapping shapes.

Still, the original square is preserved by the reversal in values along the straight edges of the image. I played with reflecting one shape twice - can you find the two duplicates? Most importantly, I discovered that the process of drawing expanded squares on computer is relatively simple.

If you are on a Mac with EazyDraw as I am, you can easily work as I did to make your own expanded squares. Otherwise use any vector based graphic design software. The drawing principles should be the same, even if you have to modify the process a little.

Here’s how to draw a notan expanded square on computer:

First, draw a black square. Size is up to you, but of course you can always change that later.

Then, using any drawing tool of your choice, draw white filled shapes that touch the outer edges of the square, either at one point or along a straight segment of the square’s edge. Draw these shapes in white on top of the black square.

Duplicate each white shape, flip it in the direction you wish it to go, then move each shape to the outside of the square so the flat edges touch and the forms mirror each other. If you want to shift discontinuous forms from the center of the square to the outside while preserving their relative positions, handle them as a group with one of the edge-touching shapes.

Once the shapes are in position, fill them with black. If you lose the white shapes against the white drawing field, either color the drawing field to a soft gray before you begin, leave black outlines on all shapes until you’re finished drawing and then eliminate all outlines, or simply use a selection tool to nab all the white-on-white shapes.

When the drawing is complete, eliminate all outlines. That will give you clean white shapes against the black square and lovely black shapes outside it.

That’s all there is to it. How you design the interior of the expanded square is up to you. And how you convert your designs into quilt art is something else I leave up to you as I begin to contemplate my own options!

Have fun! And let me hear from you about how you get on with your notan expanded squares!

One of my favorite e-newsletters comes from The Painter’s Keys. Robert Genn’s insights and wisdom nourish my creative spirit and receiving a new edition is always a treat. Even though we work in different media, Robert’s writings are sufficiently general to appeal to any artist, even patchwork quilters!

Following up on notan as a design concept and the expanded square as a design tool, I found another site that referred to The Painter’s Keys, so I tracked down Robert’s 2004 post on the subject. His post is full of links and comments by other artists, many of which are worth tracing if you are interested to learn more about notan. Now I know why Nancy Crow insisted that all art quilts should contain some black and some white. She was speaking of the importance of value contrast, something I try to impart to all my students at Quilt University and elsewhere.

As for me, I’m going to read a bit more about the subject and then attempt my own designs, as I consider more fully how to apply the design techniques of the expanded square for a new series of quilt art works.

An e-list posting this morning informed me that Jane Dunnewold’s Complex Cloth new website is now open. I checked it out and found that to be true, and the site is well worth a visit and a good look around. Long recognized as an expert on surface design, Jane shares her wonderful sources of inspiration and methods, as well as providing us with a shopping experience and some familiarity with the classes she teaches. Lovely new site, Jane - well done!

What caught my eye, however, was Jane’s tutorial on NOTAN, which she describes as “a Japanese word which means “dark-light.” The word, however, means more than that. The principle of Notan as it relates to design is defined as the interaction between positive (light) and negative (dark) space.”

Jane’s instructions for creating an expanded square are simple and concise - and I cannot wait to try them out for myself! I had come across the word NOTAN before in my creative journey, but I had never seen such a simple and clever design method used before. I’m already wondering how I can interpret it in my own work as a quilt artist, and it will be fun and interesting to try. As soon as I get some images of my own efforts with the technique, I will share them in another post.

In the meantime, take my advice and pay a visit to Jane’s new site, ArtCloth Studios, check out her wonderful tutorials and everything else there she has for you to see and appreciate (her fabric art is stunning!) and enjoy every minute of it. Thanks, Jane!!!

A couple of weeks ago, Bev Rebelo (at right below) from Zimbabwe was visiting in Kenya and she taught some classes for members of the Kenya Quilt Guild. Initial small classes were held at the Guild’s workshop, where charitable and other Guild quilts are made by volunteers. Bev’s classes proved so popular that a larger venue was needed and a private home was taken over the eager students.

Bev taught some basic traditional patchwork methods, much needed by some of our novice quilters. She also presented some novel approaches to applique as practiced in her home country of Zimbabwe.

Bev will be teaching in Ailsa Craig, during The Quilts of East Africa Festival sponsored by Cotton-by-Post, October 20-26. Other teachers include Maggie Robinson, Sheila O’Hagan, and my Kenya friends Charu Patel and Neela Shah. Check out the entire schedule - we hope to see you there!

Due to a rather full teaching schedule abroad in coming months (6 venues in 5 different countries!), I will be unable to teach online at Quilt University for the remainder of the year.

The last class scheduled for me to teach this year is Structured Fabrics: Stripes, Checks and Plaids and it opens this week. So, if you want to study with me before January 2009, Structured Fabrics is your last chance!

Structured Fabrics is a great way of working with those ugly fabrics lurking in the far corners of your fabric stash to make an original art quilt design. If you would like a wonderfully creative way to turn those “dogs” into stunning works of art, and if you would like to learn a few things about the importance of composition and texture in design, don’t miss out on this great opportunity.

Registration is open now. The class fee is only US$ 27 for a three-lesson class (there’s a bonus lesson about the application of shisha which gives you added value for money). Read more about Structured Fabrics here on my blog, and more about the class at Quilt University.

See you there!

Hallelujah!  I’ve got control of my WordPress blog sidebar again, and it happened quite by accident!  I just happened to click on the Widgets link on my dashboard and suddenly a page appeared that showed all of the widgets I’m using on my sidebar and made it possible for me to manage them.  Earlier, I had been trying to access Widgets from the Design menu.  All I could get was an error message that my something or other had a fault in it.  That was no help at all.

Now, I shall have to think about whether or not I want to make any changes to the sidebar.  That will likely take me a few days, but at least I had not wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to make the changes.  Problem solved!

And that’s just the way I like it!!!

<img src=”http://www.denacrain.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/dena.gif” alt=”Dena Crain” />