Leni Wiener

I have always believed that it is easier to learn from seeing what goes wrong than seeing what goes right.  Sometimes it is difficult to see a finished piece and hear discussion about why this color, why this fabric.  It is more instructive to see a piece that isn’t working and discuss why.  For that reason I am airing my “dirty laundry” so to speak, and showing you my disaster du jour.  Hopefully, if and when it is fixed, you will understand what I changed and why.  So here goes, it is like standing before you in my underwear!

Here it is.  I was so excited to get started on this piece, it looked so awesome in my head.  There is the seed of something decent in here, but it isn’t working.  So let’s discuss why.

1.  Color:

In my head this piece was blue tones on one side and purples on the other.  In reality the purple side goes in too many directions, some are red/violets and some are grape purples.  Too many different places to look, no real harmony.

2.  Value:

If you have ever read my blog before, or my book, you know that value is a biggie for me.  Makes all the difference in the world.   Where do the values here go wrong?  First, on the blue side, the dark area of the eye is much darker than the blues around it, making too large a leap in value.  This needs to be fixed.  On the purple side, the values are too close to each other, there isn’t enough of a leap.  Plus the purple side is so much darker than the other side that it looks unbalanced.

Here is the pattern from which I am working.  You can see that although one side is darker than the other, the difference is not as extreme as it looks in the fabric.  The eyes are the darkest part of the face, making them very dramatic.  In fabric, they almost blend in and disappear.

The solution:

1.  first, although I will keep some of the fabrics, I need to revisit the fabric selection to make sure that they blend from one into another, probably staying more blue into blue purple and losing the red/violets.

2.  secondly, I need to lay the fabrics out and look at them again through the red viewer to be sure that they not only move from light to dark,  but that they do it in a way that looks more even–that is to say that each incremental step is about the same change in value from the one before and the one after.  This will give the piece a more coherent and harmonious look.

Sometimes it helps to reprint the pattern or photo in black and white.  This prevents the brain from being too distracted by the colors and allows me to focus on the values from light to dark.

3.  finally, I want to make that piece that runs a ragged line from the eye to the lips a fabric that will stand out more, as this is the most interesting shape in the piece.  It will also (probably) be the inspiration for the stitching when I get to the quilting part.

So there you have it.  What went wrong and what I plan to do to fix it.  So many times artists get started down a path and when the emerging piece doesn’t look right, it is abandoned.  But when you do that you lose out on two scores–the piece is never realized and you never learn how to evaluate and analyze in order to make it right.  Learning to fix the pieces that go wrong is crucial in being able to move forward and evaluate your work with a critical eye.