Sketchy Saturday – Sunshines and Diamond Cards

I’ve decided to start a new weekly picture post called Sketchy Saturday! In reviewing my goals for the second half of the year I realized I need to set aside more time to draw and design new quilts.

My need to draw more became painfully obvious while working on the illustrations for Mally the Maker. I’d looked forward to working on the drawings for months and months. Why did I wait? I could have been drawing and designing alongside the writing process.

I think the main reason I waited was because I didn’t know the size of the illustrations I’d need. Do I need a lot of 4 inch images or 2 inch or 6 inch? I couldn’t settle on a size to work on and that’s honestly a big thing for my brain. I need a system, then to design, draw, or quilt within that system. Until I had a size to work with from the layout, I really couldn’t work on the drawings.

But really Leah… drawing? Uggh!

I know drawing doesn’t rank high on priorities for a lot of quilters, but I honestly think it’s a terrific skill to build and definitely worth your time. There’s a saying in the machine quilting world – if you can draw it, you can quilt it. I absolutely agree!

So each Saturday my challenge is to draw something new. Sketch a new quilt, draw some squiggles on a napkin, something with pen, pencil, and paper involved.

This week I tackled the 5 of diamonds from my deck of cards:

I bought a deck of cards two weeks ago thinking it would be super pretty and filled with fantastic illustrations. Turns out it just had four illustrations from the cover repeated on the royal suits. Very disappointing!

But instead of returning the deck, I decided to use it as another system. I wanted to experiment with how quilting designs work together on a quilt. What better way to test than on a small bit of paper with some random shapes on top?

I didn’t finish this card today, but it will be the first thing I do after my exercise tomorrow morning. I plan to draw spider webs in the background and do a bit more shading around the feathers to fill in the gaps.

It’s fun to play with what designs will work around feathers. I’d say it’s one of the easiest motifs to work with because the smooth curves stand out and are easy to draw / quilt around.

So that’s my sketches for this Saturday! I love having the goal to draw and play and now I have to do a bit of something every week!

Let’s go quilt (or sketch),

Leah Day