Colour exercise

As part of the design class I am doing at the Embroiderers' Guild we have to play around with warm and cool colours. The homework is to design a fish pattern and then copy it several times and colour it in various ways to get different effects.

As I started thinking about it, I felt quite inspired - a bit of a change lately. I keep going back to my teaching career though.
First, I thought I might use handwriting patterns to come up with my design. Handwriting may have been on my mind because it was reported this past week that Finland is going to phase handwriting lessons out of their schooling. Then there was lots of discussion about it on the radio. (I haven't seen much in the news, I just happened to be driving around when the discussions were on.) I do have some thoughts about the discussions but this is not the time for them.
I have been influenced by the handwriting talks to go back to the idea of doing fluency patterns. I have also recently started doodling again too. So I thought I might be able to combine the two and come up with a design.

I am also having vague ideas floating around for one of my pieces for the exhibition at the end of the course. It is based on the alphabet, maybe making a textile alphabet book. But then I realised that I would have to make at least 26 pages - that might be a bit extreme. So far it is just a passing thought that has hung around. It will probably pass on when I come to work out what I would need to do and how.

As I started to play around, I realised that the fluency patterns are not that easy to do consistently, especially as I don't demonstrate them to the students anymore. More practice needed. These are all based on the simple line pattern that waves up and down. Definitely more fine motor skill practice needed.

Part of the homework is to replicate the design and colour it in various ways. I thought I might be able to use Photoshop to do the different colour effects more easily. But my designs are not that great yet and I will have to think about how to do the various colours and fills. I may need a better design before I start trying to figure out how to do all this in Photoshop. (Here is a link in which the author mentions that she did it using Photoshop but I haven't yet got my head around how.)

Then I realised that the patterns are looking a bit like they could be tessellated. I know I have a book of tessellated patterns for quilting. But, feeling rather lazy, I looked up ideas on the web. I have found some very interesting pages, some very inspiring works.
There are also a few pages for teachers, to use with their students. I used to love doing that sort of thing and am enjoying remembering all the fun things you can do with your students at school.  Here is one page for teachers - I hope I can understand it.!
So far, that is all I have done. Now I will have to find the book, I am pretty sure it is by Jinny Beyer. (Here is a page from her website on the topic.)
Maybe I will be able to use it for the textile part of the homework - when I get around to unpacking the containers of fabrics that are now in another location due to further work in the renovations saga. Maybe not this lot of homework.