Design workshop with Jane Dunnewold

I had a wonderful weekend learning about design elements to be used, in my case, when creating fiber art. It was a very intense 2 day workshop with Jane Dunnewold who is a wonderful instructor. Jane has her studio, appropriately called ArtCloth Studio, in San Antonio where she teaches. To learn more about her check out her website www.janedunnewold.com
During the workshop we used personal imagery, explored visual associations and used music and poetry for inspiration. Jane said "We each contain all of the inspiration we will ever need for art-making. We need only to learn how to access that inspiration"
On the second day of the workshop we worked with positive and negative space, symmetry and asymmetry, contrast and relationship and abstraction.
Jane has a very relaxed approach to teaching and thus creativity flows more easily in this kind of environment, of course I'm talking for myself.
I'm looking forward to our next workshop, Design II, which will take place next year. In the meantime, back to Christmas decorations and maybe finding a little time for creativity and applying some of the principles I learned.

Asymmetrical Expanded Squares


Positive and Negative space
Jane said: Notan is a japanese word which means "dark-light". The principle of Notan as it relates to design is defined as the interaction between positive (light) and negative (dark) space.





Abstraction is "challenging the convention of how we see realistic objects" The hammer on the photo is my subject. We morphed a simple object into a more abstract form but still recognizable

Visual exercise: Choose a playing card to reproduce based on the design excercises we worked with during the workshop: expanded square, abstraction, symmetry/asymmetry, contrast, relationship. The Q with the little heart is mine.