That’s right, we loved it so much, we are doing another one. It’s a summer session of the Spoonflower Handbook Master Class! You can read all of the details here. This session will focus on working with Photoshop instead of Illustrator and I have a bunch of fun stuff planned for you. Registration is open and it is filling up. Let me know if you have questions and I hope to see YOU there.
I write a newsletter for the MN chapter of the Surface Design Association and each month I include a color scheme for inspiration. I know color is a hard thing for a lot of people. I work very intuitively with color and I personally don’t put a lot of thought into color theory or color wheels; I just go with what feels right to me. But not everyone can work that way. So I like to provide a little jumping off point by pulling a set of colors from a photograph to use as color inspiration. Maybe you can use it as a jumping off point for a new design. Maybe it makes you look deeper at a photo to see the way colors work together. Maybe it makes you think about how there are unexpected colors in shadows. I think there is something for anyone to relate to.
As a dyer or surface designer that works with paints, dyes or pigments you can look at the palette and mix up your colors to work from there. As a digital designer, I can import these colors directly in to my graphics program. It doesn’t really matter if I am working with the exact colors from the photo for a single design, but where that is handy is when I want to make a set of coordinating designs where matching colors is important.
I start by pulling colors from the photo using a program called Adobe Color, which is also part of the Adobe Capture app, so you can use it in your web browser (Color) or on your phone/tablet (Capture).
Go to Adobe Color and look for the camera icon that says Create from image (green circle) or click in the center of the screen. Choose the image you would like to use.
When it pops up the photo, it will automatically choose 5 colors, shown by little bubbles on the photo. You can click and move those bubbles around to adjust the colors. On the top left, there is also a palette marked Color Mood, which gives you options for “colorful”, “bright”, “muted” etc.
You’ll need to have an Adobe ID to save this color scheme. If you already have a subscription to Photoshop or any of the other Adobe software, you should use the same ID. Once you have a set of colors you are happy with, click the Save button.
A little note: No Adobe account? If you don’t want to have one more account name and password to remember, I totally get that. If that’s the case, just take a screenshot of this screen instead of saving. You can work from a screenshot almost as easily.
Give your color theme a name and choose where you want to save it. Creative Cloud is the subscription service that you get your Photoshop subscription from. (Because this is always a question I get asked when I talk about this in a class, it doesn’t have anything to do with “The Cloud” or saving things to “The Cloud”, Creative Cloud is your Adobe account. It’s just badly named.) By default, you have a Library named “My Library” but you can create a new one and give it a different name. You have the option of making this color scheme part of the public gallery if you choose “Publish this theme to Explore”. That’s up to you.
Why save it this way and not just on my hard drive? This is the cool part. Anything I save to My Library is available to me in any other Adobe program. So once I have captured this color scheme, I can switch over to Photoshop.
When I open the Libraries panel in Photoshop, there is my Dandelion color theme right at the top. I can click on those colors and use them just like the regular color palette. (If Libraries isn’t open look in the top menubar for Window -> Libraries and that will open it up.)
It works exactly the same way in Illustrator. If you mouse over one of those color chips, you will also get two more pieces of information. The top number (example above #D8923A) is the hex code for that color. The bottom number is the RGB values. You can type those numbers into any other graphics program and get the same color. Here’s what that looks like in PicMonkey.
If that hexcode looks familiar to you, it’s because that system is also what is used on Spoonflower’s ColorMap.
If you didn’t save to Creative Cloud and are working from a screenshot, you can open the screenshot and use the eyedropper tool to get the same hexcode and RGB information.
Want to see it in use? Here’s a very quick and simple example of patterns of chevrons and polkadots drawn in Illustrator, which use colors pulled from the photo. This could be the front and back of a pillow. Or the outside and lining of a totebag. Or some coordinating quilt prints.
Shadows
2016
Digitally printed polyester pique.
I had the photo studio set up for another big project shoot, and I realized that I hadn’t had a chance to talk about this dress that I made this spring. The pattern is a modified version of the Davie dress by Sewaholic. I love the way this one fits and I have made several versions of it. The fabric is Spoonflower’s performance pique.
The design is a combination of cut painted paper and text. The paper design started out like this and I actually used it in a fabric collection of “Fish Market” designs that I have up at Spoonflower.
I layered two copies of that cut paper together and then cut text from one layer. The text is the closing speech delivered by Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear…”
Why that text? Because I like it. And Midsummer is my favorite Shakespeare play. I wanted to do a text based design, where it wasn’t something necessarily readable, but text was a design element.
I manipulated the colors, but you can still see all of the texture of the painted papers in the design. The tie is made from a small repeated section of that aqua with black polkadots pattern you see below.
A little note about the fabric. It’s polyester, and I feel like I spend a lot of time defending things for being polyester. This is awesome polyester. Seriously. Comfy, soft, breathable, unwrinkleable, machine wash, amazing print quality. There’s nothing negative on that list. I understand that there are yucky polyesters. There are also horrific wools, nasty nylons and even some unwearable cottons. So this is a little bit of a soap box and a little bit encouragement to not judge a fabric by its label.
I have been busy traveling and teaching the last few weeks (hi NY and NC!) and I had so many people say “Oh, if I knew you were going to be here I would have brought my book for you to sign.” (Which is awesome and super flattering. Makes a girl feel loved.) Then I had a light-bulb-moment. I could make bookplates to sign and then I could send them to you, no matter where you are (and you don’t have to remember to bring your book)! This little toucan made an appearance in our Spoonflower Handbook Master Class this weekend, so he seemed like the perfect character to star on this book plate.
If you have a Spoonflower Handbook and you would like a hand-signed bookplate, just send me an email (beckarahn at gmail dot com) and I will mail it to you. I will also bring them along to the events I have coming up (WMQFA University Days, Shepherd’s Harvest) and you can just ask me for one. They are printed on Spoonflower’s woven wallpaper, which is peel-and-stick, so you can stick it right in your book when you get it. I did a limited run of these, so they are first-come-first-served.
I have many things to tell you about classes and events near-and-far, but that will have to wait for another day.
I posted a tutorial last week to make your own Valentines hearts design. Today I want to talk about how you can take this basic design and make it better. In the original design tutorial, I cut and scanned 6 hearts and created a repeating pattern from that little motif, which I have outlined in blue below so it is easy to spot. Those 6 hearts repeat over and over to make the pattern.
If you step back and look at this design, it works, but the purple hearts form a grid-like pattern that is pretty obvious. Your eye is drawn to that regular pattern; it gets kind of stuck and doesn’t move around the whole design. There is maybe even an illusion that the purple dominates the design a little bit.
One technique you can try to make your repeat tile have better flow and seem more dynamic is to make it bigger. For example for the repeat below, instead of 6 hearts, I made a larger canvas and copy/pasted the same hearts so I had 24 hearts instead of 6. I also added 4 more colors to my palette, taking the total from 6 to 10. I used the same method to paint and overlay the texture.
Can you find the repeat tile now? I think it’s much harder to do. There’s more variation with colors and more distance between two elements of the same color. I repeated some of the colors, so they form a less grid-like pattern.
Here are the two designs side by side, first showing the repeating tile and then the designs on their own.
Starting with 48 hearts would add even more variation to the design. I could also try varying the hearts themselves a little bit. That could be as simple as flipping a few of them horizontally or even by cutting a few more hearts at the beginning of the design before I scanned. I could also choose to have it repeat using a half-drop or half-brick pattern which would shift the tiles and add a little more variability. (You do have to plan ahead for half-drop/brick to make sure that your pattern matches up when shifted 1/2 tile.)
I often work this way when I am doing a repeat. Start first with the small version and get it close to the design look and colors I want. Then I increase my canvas size, put four copies of the design on the canvas and start to create variations. Sometimes I repeat that process one or two more times until I have a repeating pattern that I like. I check it often to see what it looks like when it is repeating and to see what stands out.
Usually I write tutorials with fabric in mind, and although this would make very cute fabric, I have an idea for something a little different with this one.
To start this design, I cut the hearts out of black paper, taped them on a white background and scanned them. I set the scanner to capture 300 dpi, because I hadn’t yet decided what size to make them and that gives me some flexibility. I like the wonky quality of handcut hearts vs something I drew digitally, so that’s why I did it this way.
I opened the scan in Photoshop and adjusted the contrast a little bit to make sure the hearts were crisp and black. Then I selected the white background with the Magic Wand tool and deleted it, so that my hearts were on a layer all by themselves and I could add in a separate white background layer.
Next I colored the hearts using the Paint Bucket tool. I chose pinks, purples, red and gold for my design. Choose the Paint Bucket tool, choose a color from the palette and then click on each of the hearts to paint it.
You could actually stop here and this would be a good design all on its own, but I wanted to add something special to this design: a watercolor paint texture.
I created my own paint texture as a separate file. I painted with watery black craft paint on a piece of watercolor paper, let it dry and scanned it. I built up several layers of the same scanned paint and created a seamless paint texture. (You wouldn’t necessarily need to make a seamless texture for this project, but I wanted to reuse this paint later, so it was worth that little bit of extra effort.)
Then I turned this painted texture into something I can use as a Layer Overlay. To do that, I select the whole image and then choose from the menus: Edit -> Define Pattern.
Now switch back to the file with the hearts design. Select the hearts layer, then choose Layer -> Layer Style -> Pattern Overlay from the menu and it will bring up a dialog box with some settings you can adjust.
You can choose the pattern by clicking the tiny arrow to the right of the pattern swatch box and it will bring up a palette of patterns, including that paint texture you just defined. I adjusted the opacity and made my pattern partly transparent because I wanted the colors to show through. You can also adjust the scale of the pattern. When you click OK, you will see the new pattern overlay, which I think looks pretty cool.
To make an image to fit your iPad, you want a larger image that is filled with several repeats. First I selected my single repeat of the hearts design and chose Edit -> Define Pattern from the menu. This is another way to use that same tool we used to create the paint texture.
Now create a new file that is about 2000 pixels on a side. Select the whole canvas and choose Edit -> Fill. The Fill dialog box will pop up. Choose Pattern from the top menu dropdown and the same pattern selection box will pop up, click the tiny down arrow and your new heart repeat will be one of the options.
Save your new file. There are several ways to get this image to your iPad. Email it to yourself and then save the image to your camera roll out of the email. If you have a Mac, you can use AirDrop. If you have another kind of tablet, just use whatever method you use to transfer other files to your device (ie sync).
