Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Mocking Up An Exhibit

Last year, I only had 6 pieces for my ArtWalk exhibit and a wall that could have held three times that much. So I didn't worry in advance about how I would arrange them; I could easily do that on the spot. This year I have 13 pieces so wanted to have a plan before arriving to hang them. I planned to work on a mock-up using graph paper, cutting out to scale each quilt and playing with the arrangement on my to-scale paper wall. The problem with this is I wouldn't have the colors of the quilts represented, and I wasn't crazy about envisioning it all in my head, or lining up the actual pieces here in the house.


Since I have pictures on the computer of all these quilts, I hit upon the idea of printing scale color versions to cut apart and arrange on my paper wall. The graph paper has 10 squares to the inch, so in my Corel Paint Shop Pro print layout, I set up a background grid to match. That way I could easily size each picture to the same scale. I felt pretty brilliant at that point.


After printing this out, I had another brilliant thought. If I changed the orientation of the layout, I could pretend THAT was my wall (actually, the page represents three lengths of wall), and play with the order right there. Even better! I can see I have plenty of room and I think this arrangement will work, depending on where some of these fall in relation to some wall sconces (forgot to measure where they were on the wall).

3 comments:

Chris said...

Computers are so useful, ya know? Yet, they will look so much better in person.

The Idaho Beauty said...

Oh, let's hope so! Thanks!

Bonnie said...

looks like you have a good handle on your presentation! Thank you for sending the brochure for the art walk. I am going to keep it in my mind to submit to it next year perhaps...It would be fun to exhibit in Sand Point and a good excuse to visit a few times :-) !
A new quilt store opened in WW this month "Stash" One of the owners is a friend of mine...looks like they have some very nice fabrics...guess you are going to have to make another trip down here to see it!!Bonnie