Pattern Vision and Kids' Minds

This week's post on BrainPickings today is wonderful -- Maria Popova does her review and reveal about kids and design mind!

Like Steve Jobs, who famously proclaimed that "creativity is just connecting things," and Paula Scher, who likens creativity to a slot machine, and like other theorists of creative problem-solving, Kinchin emphasized this inherent pattern-recognition gift of the child mind, also manifested in the most impactful design for children: Designers, like children, find patterns and make connections. The importance of pattern making and creative play with material things, for children and adults, as a route to understanding spatial relations and problem-solving, as well as creating a sense of the individual in relation to larger cosmic harmonies, comes up again and again in the twentieth century.

This new book  and this thought particularly scaffold another piece of reinforcment for the ideas we talk about in our book The Missing Alphabet, The Parents' Guide to Developing Creative Thinking in Kids.

PS: Here's a wonderful site with work by artist/illustrator Gulia Orrachia shared by my friend (also a fiber artist) Diana: http://www.patternprintsjournal.com/2013/03/textures-and-patterns-into-lively.html

And another great page in that inspiring blog! http://www.patternprintsjournal.com/2012/07/patterns-and-decoration-in-amazing-book.html

Pattern Play

Tile Deck patterns are amazing and beautiful!

Certainly this is one obvious strong suit for most textile artists: PATTERN. Pattern, to me, is the visual rhythm that moves me around a textile, or through the story within a piece of art. I posted a short blog on our new and wow, so cool, MISSING ALPHABET site -- and thought I would expand and make a more textile related post here, as well. 

I've been exploring pattern TOOLs in the world of apps, in anticipation of my next iPad workshops (one in Alaska in January and one here at El Cielo March 1-3). I admit to a combination of looking at referals when I see them (that's where Tile Deck came from -- an online magazine article by Jane Davila in the last issue of IN STITCH) and also just in random app store surfing using interesting search terms. It's become my latest recreation, such so that I think I may have to make a firm budget line item for app store purchases!

Here are the apps I have downloaded recently. Some of them are really easy right off the bat, others take a little bit of learning curve. If you want the blow-by-blow (and fiber art specific applications for the art that these apps help you make) sign up for the March workshop soon. It's filling up fast!

TileDeck -- the best of the lot and an amazing tool for making repeating patterns, then changing them around with mirroring and flipping functions. This one is definitely worth paying for.

Playing around with Stencils

Kaleidoverse -- one of many digital kaleidoscope tools out there, and one that I like most

Doodle Dandy -- particularly easy for little kids to use, but with plenty of sophisticated controls

überdoodle -- an app version of the spirograph, with gears, pen sizes, and other variables to play with. The free version offered enough for me to start with, but there's a paid one with more variable options included.

Amacolor -- another kaleidoscope that makes black line patterns to color in -- the black line patterns will be great for thermofaxes.

Amacolor kaleidoscope design

Stencils -- Make multiples with predrawn stencil shapes for interesting art applications, alter and overlap them, use the letters and numbers for textured designs using the different brushes.

Pattern Language

As I head into a busy week (aren't we all?) here's a couple of pictures of platters by my friend Mary Lance. Mary also works in fiber, so we get to share techniques and ideas in that media as well. What I love about this  new work of hers is the exuberance of pattern. 

I think the cross-referencing of ideas from textile to clay is really interesting- I could see these as the inspiration for work in fabric, too.