A Start-Up Guide to Make Art-Inspired Quilts: No Direct Copies Allowed!

Where do you get inspiration for your quilts? Books? Patterns? Other quilts?

Do you develop original designs?

I’m typically inspired by nature, architecture, fine art, and traditional quilting motifs. Working with fine art as a source of inspiration can get tricky because it’s easy to create a copy but challenging to reinterpret the elements of artwork to develop something that embraces your personal style. Most of the fine art inspiration in my work is imperceptible in the final quilt because I pick and choose elements to incorporate with other forms of inspiration.

Where to Pull Inspiration Within a Piece of Art

A few aspects are found in most fine art pieces that you can draw inspiration from when you create original quilt designs.

Color Palette

Color is a distinctive part of most artwork, and palettes created with paint are frequently more sophisticated than what we find within most fabric lines. Using color palettes from a separate source allows you to combine fabrics from various sources to create a nuanced color scheme for your quilt.

Division of Space

How space is used within a piece of art can inform the overall feeling of the art and, in turn, your quilt. Are there many strong vertical lines, calming horizontals, or energetic diagonals? What are the proportions of the overall artwork, and how is it divided within the piece?

Motifs

Which shapes did the artist use in the inspiration piece? Are the motifs primarily geometric or organic? Are they using realistic or abstract imagery? Are shapes used one time or repeated throughout the piece? What is the scale of the shapes within the overall composition?

Working Methods

What materials does the artist use? Do they use a single material, mixed media, or found objects? Did they use a studio practice that you would like to implement when developing a quilt?

Putting the Theory into Practice

Let’s look at a few pieces of artwork I saw at a recent visit to the Columbus Museum of Art in central Ohio and consider how aspects of each work could potentially translate into an utterly reinterpreted quilt design.

Remember- don’t take all elements from a single artwork, and always strive to make all of your quilt designs unique to you!

Dawn
By Louise Nevelson

Color

By finishing this sculptural piece with a single unifying color, the design emphasis shifts to texture and shape.

Are you inspired to create a wholecloth quilt or work with a monochromatic color palette in a way that highlights texture and shape over color distinctions?

Division of Space

Much like a quilt, this sculpture is divided into blocks. Each rectangular section incorporates found objects to develop the overall design.

Most quilt blocks are square, but what happens when you shift a square block design into a rectangular one?

Motifs

Cast off found objects create the dominant design elements in this piece.

Consider working entirely from your scraps to create a piece. Can you maintain the original shapes of your scraps? What happens if you use scraps to work within a block motif?

Gordion’s Knot
By Richard Anuszkiewicz

Color

Color dominates this dynamic design. Notice how red is used throughout the background of the painting, and the blue and green of approximately the same value create a simultaneous contrast effect.

Think about using a bold background color. What happens when you combine intense colors of a similar value and nearly opposite each other on the color wheel to create the effect of simultaneous contrast?

Space

The corners of each rectangle are mitered to add the energy of diagonal lines to the dominant vertical and horizontal lines. The square and rectangular motifs intersect, dividing the dominant spaces between the painting’s lower left and upper right sections.

What happens if designs interlock with each other? How could you use similar proportions to break up the space within your quilt?

Motif

Line and shape are key motifs in this painting. Notice how the larger square and rectangle are implied, but the shapes are incomplete and interrupted where they intersect. Do you see how the linear elements create a sense of shape and move the viewer’s eye around the composition? But the thickness of each line also tells a story. The artist created the illusion of depth by gradually taking echoing lines thicker then thinner.

How do the lines interact where the shapes merge? In what way could you use wider and narrower lines to develop depth in a quilt design?

zip: 10.01.03…12.31.03
By Yuji Agematsu

The artist created a series of small works by collecting trash from the street during daily walks and arranging small compositions. Unlike the found objects Nevelson used in the first piece we looked at, Agematsu does not alter the items included in his compositions.

Color

The artist doesn’t use paint, ink, or dye to alter the color of the items he finds but composes using the colors included in what he discovers daily.

How can you use your scraps to create a new color combination? What colors are on the wrappings and labels on the items you throw away in a day? Can you use these colors to inspire an unexpected color palette?

Space

These small components work well when viewed as a collection. Each section is a composition, but the grouping gives visual weight and presence to the work.

Have you tried making tiny quilts? Do they work as a collective piece? Are they stand-alone pieces, or are they part of a larger quilt?

Working Methods

This artist incorporates a daily practice to create this artwork. By needing to collect bits of trash along the way, he forces himself to notice mundane details that most people overlook.

Have you tried a daily practice or project? You can do one for a set number of days or leave it open-ended. How can you encourage yourself to notice the small details in the world around you? Try keeping a sketchbook or photo journal to record visual details and turn to it to get inspired for your next quilt.

Making It Your Own

Are you feeling inspired? Have you visited a museum or gallery lately? It may be time to look back through previous photographs. Do you have any new ideas to experiment with?