Color Inspiration

Last week I promised I’d start catching up, so I’m going to work a little backwards and start with the most recent first. We’ve just returned from a trade show, and trade shows always mean new designs. “Radiance” was our big release from the show, so I’ll start with that one. Next post I’ll fill you in on the other new releases.

Usually when I design I start with the design and add the color later, after the design is completed. This time I started with the color inspiration, and designed with that color inspiration in mind. The colors were very bold, taken from one of my favorite dresses:

Dress corrected

 

Wowzer! I love these colors, but knew that the design would require some careful handling or the design would look muddled. Orange, fuchsia, purple and bright green normally do not reside happily together!

So I decided that the best way to handle all these vivid colors would be to assign them to quadrants, and keep them separated, to allow each color to shine in its own light. I bordered the colors with black, because my dress is bordered with black and I liked the way the black set off the colors. I toyed with the idea of black canvas, but gave that up early on.

As I began laying out the design elements, I started with an 8 pointed star in the center that the design “radiated” from. That’s the only place where the colors are mixed, in the center. I used a lot of optical blending of the floss colors, to get some fine shading in the limited palette. And, I played with the sword Amadeus that divided the quadrants to provide the color separation, one of the first elements that I knew for sure would be in the design.

This design reflects a lot of my love for bright vivid colors. And, it also employs a lot of Jean Hilton stitches – crescents, walnetos, Jessicas, sword Amadeus, and other stitches that are loopy and lots of fun to stitch. “Radiance” developed because I loved the colors in one of my dresses, and I hope you enjoy the colors as well.

Radiance
Radiance
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