The Log Cabin Pin exercise helps you to explore combining the colors once you have mixed them. You start out with a 5 part Skinner Blend of your palette colors, cut it into strips, intersperse the strips with light and dark color clay, blend, cut the resulting blends into strips and make the Log Cabin pin. Then you play with all the clay you have left (or at least I did.)
The colors I chose for the Skinner Blend above and colors blended below
The Skinner Blend cut into strips above and the solid color sheets below
The sheets before (above) and after (below) blending
Blended sheet samples baked
The Log Cabin pin and my variation
Experiments successful and not so successful. I like the three middle pieces. The colors in the circle and the rectangle just look like plain clay to me. The dark pattern on the square in the lower left corner is too thick and the colors in it recede. It may as well be one color.
The color combinations in the top two are nice, although I don’t think the dark squiggles in the left one add anything. I like the color combination and contrast on the piece on the right, but the bulls eyes in the middle don’t work. Too busy or not busy enough? The piece on the bottom is my least favorite; I think it’s boring.
I like all these designs but I think the most successful piece for this exercise is the one on the left (although I think the solid yellow streak is out of place).
So, what did I learn? Next time, I will put lighter colors on the darker base sheets. My dark blends were really too dark for me to use all of them. Not enough contrast. Most of them went into the scrap pile. The blends that were more successful seem a little “Easter Eggy” to me. I learned a lot about what doesn’t work, but most important, I learned why.
On to the next exercise. I’ll post the results when I complete it.
Ornamento 