Spoonflower & Fabric Design

31 August, 2015

Tutorial: Seamless Arrows Print – Part Two

beckarahn2016-03-16T10:02:27-05:00Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials|Comments Off on Tutorial: Seamless Arrows Print – Part Two

(This is Part Two of a tutorial for creating a seamless arrows print. See Part 1 here.)

Part two of the tutorial is all about making the design seamless. What does that mean? I want these arrows to look like they are traveling all over the fabric without having a a start and stop. Even though I only made a small section of the design, I want it to look like I designed something bigger and disguise the edges of the repeating element.

Check and adjust your lines.

With this design, one way to make it look seamless is to make sure that any line that extends off the edge of the drawing, joins up with the design again. In orange I circled two lines, which go off the edge at the top of the repeat, and then show up again at the bottom. When I make this tile repeat and put two identical tiles next to each other, those lines will match up and look like they are one continuous line. I should also say, you don’t have to always work in a repeat, in fact I don’t make repeats very often, but for this particular project I just needed some yardage and not a specific shape. So a repeat was the easy way to go. Make sense?

Try the Pattern Tool.

Illustrator also has a Pattern Tool which you can use to get a preview of what that repeating element will look like. Select all of the elements in your design and then go to Object -> Pattern -> Make.

The pattern tool has lots of options for the kind of repeat style and the spacing, which you can play with. I am using the tool in this screenshot to just show me what it looks like if I were to see 3×3 tiles. And I can see when I have everything repeated that there are a couple of edits that I would make.

What do I look for? Think about how your eye travels around the design. My eye keeps going to and stopping at two arrowheads that are lined up side by side. I think I need to move one of those around and break that up. I also look for negative space – is there somewhere that is blank or has a gap that looks out of place? Then look for things that are unique – there is only one line that stops (it’s between those 2 parallel arrowheads). That might be a quirk that I want to leave in, or it might be distracting.

So my next step is to make all of those adjustments and then save this tile.

I am going to save it as a .jpg and check the box that says “Use Artboards” which will crop it to fit the tile (in case I have anything that hangs over the edge.)

In Part Three, we move to Photoshop to add color and texture to the design.

More in this series: Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four

28 August, 2015

Tutorial: Seamless Arrows Print – Part One

beckarahn2016-03-16T10:01:48-05:00Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials|2 Comments

It’s a busy week for me with The Spoonflower Handbook coming out on Tuesday and the opening reception for my grant project on Thursday, so I thought I would combine the two and give you something fun: a fabric design tutorial based on one of the prints from my grant project.

The third project for my grant was a dress also created in duet with another artist. For that design, she created a layered photo image and sent it to me. I created a coordinating print and the two were combined in the final piece. The photo she created had lots of organic shapes, transparent layers and abstract imagery, so I decided to create some contrast by making a print that was the opposite of that: geometric & somewhat representational.

The inspiration for this design is actually a software engineering tool that helps designers collaborate by tracking the different versions of the code and where things merge and branch off. I saw this graphic representation of that over my husband’s shoulder while he was working and I loved both the look and the metaphor.

I decided to make arrowheads instead of dots and to use a layer from the photo to choose the colors in my design (which I will show you more about later.)

Creating the Arrowhead Design

Open a new file in Adobe Illustrator.

For this tutorial I did just a small repeat so it was easy for you to follow along. (My finished design was about 18 inches square.)

I turned on two options in Illustrator that really make this design easy to do: Show Grid and Snap to Grid. You can find both of those in the View menu. You can adjust the spacing of your grid lines under Illustrator -> Preferences -> Guides & Grid.

Draw with the Pen Tool & adjust lines.

I drew all of the lines in the design using the Pen Tool. (If you need help, there’s a great tutorial here for drawing straight lines with the Pen Tool.) The grid will help you see where to place lines and the Snap to Grid option will make them stick to the intersections of the grid – making it really easy to make straight lines that are very precisely spaced based on your grid spacing.

Once I had a line in place, I selected it and went to the Stroke Palette to adjust the look of the line. I made the line weight heavier at 6 pt and added an arrowhead at the end by choosing one from the dropdown.

Add extra arrowheads with the Polygon Tool.

I did all of my drawing in black and white because I am going to add the color in a later step. Once I had all of the lines in place, I wanted to add some extra arrowheads, not just at the end of the lines. To do that, I used the Polygon Tool (which is one of the options under the Rectangle Tool). I chose a 3 sided shape with a .5 inch radius, which matched the arrowheads pretty perfectly. I adjusted the fill to be black and the outline transparent.

Adjust the fill and outline in the bottom of the tools palette. It’s the two overlapping squares.

In part two of this tutorial, I will talk about how to make sure that this design is seamless and check for a balanced repeat.

More in this series: Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four

24 August, 2015

Jerome Grant: Duets Part One

beckarahn2015-08-24T10:34:01-05:00An Artist's Life, Gallery Exhibitions, Spoonflower & Fabric Design|Comments Off on Jerome Grant: Duets Part One

The three projects for my Jerome Grant exhibition are all duets with other artists. I chose three people as partners who I thought had something to teach me about art and design. The original idea was to work on things digitally and have the focus be about the ways we all use digital design tools, but as we started to talk, each duet turned into something a little different. The first partner I worked with was my dear friend Donna Kallner. Donna is the fiber artist of the three and although her particular passions are ancient art forms, she is one of the most self-taught “techhie” artists I know.

Donna was featured in the Spring 2015 of the publication from the National Basketry Organization.

Donna and I decided to play a game called “Photoshop Tennis”. The idea is that you pass a digital image back and forth and each make an edit. I do something and lob it back to her and vice versa. We gave ourselves a pool of images to work from with a shared DropBox folder. We set down some ground rules (choose at least 2 photos to combine) and a general aesthetic (organic, earth tones.) We had wet dogs, fungus, brick, bittersweet, weathered tables and agates among the images in that folder.

We had several versions of designs going, but this set of photos ended up being the final fabrics. A brick wall, a snowy cornfield, frost on a window and a line drawing that I scanned. These were layered with different opacity, repeated, mirrored, inverted. We did a lot to them, but I think they still read in the final fabrics amazingly well.

I love that we created a geometric print from an organic shape. That is one of my favorite parts of this design. I can’t tell you who did what because it evolved very organically. I was completely skeptical at first because I had never created a design from a large landscape image. My photo choices tend towards close up macro shots, at the other end of the spectrum. One of the “new” ideas I think I learned was the use of repeating layers. The brick pattern was layered several times by itself and rotated – transforming the brick into a more irregular cross-hatch pattern, which is a fantastic texture. We left our files “in progress” when we passed them back and forth, so I could dig right into the layers and see how everything fit together. I think we get into habits as designers of going to your “go to” tools and this was a really interesting exploration for me to dig into Donna’s work and say “what did she do there”. It was a way for me to watch her work and see a new process.

The ensemble that these fabrics go in to is two major pieces: a sheath dress made from the blue brick print and a coat made from the geometrics. Both pieces have the frost image layered on top in very specific places. It makes a “collar” on the dress and is layered at the hem and cuffs of the coat at very large scale. The hand-drawn print is the coat lining. The dress and coat are made from cotton sateen, the coat lining is satin. (The coat is interlined with a heavy cotton twill to give it some weight and structure.) Both pieces are based on 1950’s vintage patterns.

I have titled it “You Can Take the Girl Out of the Country”. I do know that I am taunting you, but I won’t show the finished pieces until after the show has opened. Hopefully you can use your imagination a little bit until then.

4 August, 2015

Upcoming Classes: New Classes this fall

beckarahn2015-08-04T11:52:41-05:00Classes & Teaching, Spoonflower & Fabric Design, UpcomingClasses|2 Comments

I am teaching a LOT of new classes this fall and I am really excited about that. I am going to be one busy lady.

The waterlily is a sample for my Digital Art Quilt class. It is one of the “Beyond the Book” classes that I am teaching, which are based on projects from The Spoonflower Handbook, but I am taking them a step further and adding some hands-on components. This is based on a really cute quilt project from the book using an original piece of collage art. We are going to expand the collage idea by making paper collages, handpainting some papers and adding digital layers to the design as well. This one is made only from the pages of an Eddie Bauer catalog and a sharpie drawing of pebble shapes. I think I am going to print it at about 15 inches square and finish it as an art quilt.

Check out most of the fall classes here on my Upcoming Classes page. I have a few more to come that are waiting to confirm dates.

8 July, 2015

Design Challenges = Practice

beckarahn2015-07-08T11:04:48-05:00Spoonflower & Fabric Design|3 Comments

This is my design for the weekly Spoonflower design challenge. The theme this week is “What’s in your bag?”. The idea is that everyone carries around something interesting in their purse or bag and you should use that ephemera as a basis for a design.

I don’t actually worry too much about the voting part of these contests, although it is very fun and validating to see the likes and comments from everyone. For me these design challenges are all about deadlines and practice. With all kinds of skills from playing musical instruments to sports, you get better by practicing. I feel like design is the same way. I am out of practice with pen and paper drawing. I participated in Illustration Friday for quite a while, but I got busy with other things and stopped. So for these last few challenges, I have been drawing and digitally coloring. Practice. I don’t think pen and pencil drawing is a mandatory component to being a great designer, but I do think the more skills you have in your toolbox the more versatile you are.

The other creative challenge that I love is having a random topic as inspiration. Being assigned a topic takes you out of your comfort zone. It makes you think about topics you might never design and to really think about all the different ways you could represent lemonade or llamas. Next week is a baseball theme. I know next to nothing about baseball and I am really not a fan, so it is a real challenge to me to come up with what to design. I think it will involve dogs and baseballs. I know a lot about that.

This week’s “bag” challenge was pretty wide open and I decided to go a little bit literal, because I thought it was fun to have a fabric design that was just commonplace and odd objects. It was drawn in 3 sections. I started with the sharpies and made them and the knitting needles deliberately very directional to make almost a basketweave kind of pattern with the lines formed by those two components. I drew these bits all with fine tip sharpies and scanned them. I started coloring this one in Photoshop very “inside the lines” and pretty and then deleted the whole thing. It was too “nice”. I started again with a grungy streaky Photoshop brush and painted in things by hand. I added a layer of “fibers” in the background with a filter and then added some splatters and erased some bits of the colors to break it up and add texture. I played with the colors a lot. I wanted a dark background because when I think of “what’s in your bag” I always think about rummaging around in the inevitable dark corners of my tote bag. I ended up choosing slightly muted colors for coloring the odds and ends that I think look a little like chalk against the dark background.

If you don’t like to illustrate, there’s no reason you couldn’t do your own thing. Use the Spoonflower or Illustration Friday topics as a jumping off point for a little creative exercise: how about taking a photo of “what’s in your bag” or writing a haiku?

always lost, searching

compartments and dark corners

provide camouflage

19 June, 2015

My 7th Spoonflower-iversary!

beckarahn2015-06-19T11:13:37-05:00An Artist's Life, Spoonflower & Fabric Design|Comments Off on My 7th Spoonflower-iversary!

June 20th is my 7 year Spoonflower-iversary. That was the day I uploaded and ordered my very first fabric. I remember getting my invitation to join the site. At that point, you signed up to be on a waiting list and Spoonflower would invite groups of people to join at a time. They only had one printer and I think you could only order a yard or two at a time. I remember reading about Spoonflower in someone’s tweet and Googling to find the site and signing up that minute. Printing my own fabric? For real?

When it came time to design my very first fabric, I had no idea what to draw. I don’t usually suffer from the “fear of a blank page”, but I was truly stuck. It was intimidating. I wanted to love it, I wanted it to be mine. So I decided to do something practical. I made a fabric that matched my Etsy shop banner, thinking I would make some gift bags to send Etsy orders in. Smee the fish and bright colored bubbles. I even did a top-to-bottom seamless repeat of the bubble pattern, which when I look back on it now seems pretty sophisticated for my first design. I didn’t end up making gift bags from that fabric, because I couldn’t do it. When I unwrapped the package a few weeks later and I had my first yard of fabric in my hands, it was perfect. It was like the best Christmas present ever. It was my design and it was real fabric. I couldn’t cut it up and give it away. I still have that yard and it’s still my very favorite. I bring it to class with me sometimes and show it to my students.

I didn’t know it then, but that was the day I found my niche. I had been working at an art center for years, and I had taught hundreds of people how to do all kinds of fiber art, but I didn’t really feel like I had an art form to call my own. I wasn’t a quilter or a fashion designer or a felter, although I could do all of those things. I wasn’t really passionate about any of them.

I ordered several more designs and tried all kinds of things, but it took me a couple of years before I really figured out what to do with my own fabric and that was this dress.

I wish I could remember exactly the inspiration for this. I had a couple of events that fall I needed to dress up for. I loved those two photos the design is made from. I had a brainstorm. I meticulously re-drafted all of the pattern pieces for this in Illustrator and placed the photos on each piece. I had to figure out how to make files that were each exactly 1 yard of fabric so I could place all of the pieces. I wasn’t sure what it would look like when it was printed. Would the colors look right? Would it look too much like a photo billboard? I had no idea if it would work. After I ordered the fabric, I realized that I had made 2 left skirts instead of a left and a right and I had to redo and reorder that piece. I wasn’t sure how much it would shrink or even if it was the right weight for a dress. I had never even ordered this silk-cotton fabric before. (It turned out to be perfect.) It was a leap of faith and the worst that I figured would happen was that I would end up with some random silk scraps and no dress.

It maybe sounds cheesy to say Spoonflower changed my life, but it’s kind of true. I loved designing fabrics but it wasn’t something I could just do, except by hand. When I was in college I worked at a summer theater and I costumed an entire show with costumes made from muslin, drawn on with sharpies and colored with crayons. I wanted them to look like they were out of a coloring book. Completely impractical (not washable), but such a great concept. I block printed borders on satin fabrics for another show because I couldn’t afford the fancy fabrics and trims I wanted to make the costumes look lush and “royal”. I could print fabrics on my ink jet printer, but only 8 1/2 x 11 inches at a time. I never could find the fabrics I wanted in my head because they didn’t exist. I now have a whole gallery of fabrics that exist because I designed them. This September, almost exactly 5 years from the day I ordered the fabric for that dress, I am going to have an exhibition of my work and our new book is going to be released and it is all about digitally printed fabric.

Wow.

So, cheers to Spoonflower and Stephen and Kim and Darci and all of the creative and wonderful people I have worked with at Spoonflower. When you are a painter, you don’t think about the people who make your paint or your brushes. I am lucky enough to have a whole fabulous team that is helping me do what I do.