Study in Contrasts, part 1

Beth Berman has captured my imagination again!  She has been posting recently on Mark Making, but she posted about Visual Exercises here the other day, and it really caught my attention... enough to make a special trip to town to buy some black construction paper!  Her black and white shapes brought me back to some exercises my high school art teacher gave us to study shapes, light and dark, basic design.  Well, this morning I cut out a few shapes with my black construction paper, then I decided to glue them to white card stock to study them.  Here's how they turned out:

This one reminds me of an Easter egg... it started out a circle, but by spreading the black pieces out, it changed the shape to an oval.

For this one, I kept the pieces closer together, so it retained more of the circular shape.

This one was a hoot to assemble!  I did my cutting in the dining room, then had to carefully transport all the pieces back to my studio.  Then came trying to reassemble them in the order they belonged before I glued them to the card stock... I almost blew it, but finally got the last few pieces going in the right direction.  I actually assembled this horizontally, but when I looked at the finished piece, I decided I really like the vertical position better.  I look at these, and realize I can use this exercise to help me design art quilts, just based on shape and contrast.  I can't wait to do more exercises, and may go back to get some grey paper to add to the complexity.  I highly recommend this kind of exercise to anyone who wants to clear their creative palettes and have a little fun, while refreshing their brains!  No doubt, I will be posting more exercises in the coming weeks, and I hope to extend the exercise to using one of my designs for fiber art, then I can do a side-by-side comparison... can't wait to try it!