I am so excited about these skirts! Here is a slideshow of some of the designs I have been working on. I don’t know if all of them will make the cut but I wanted to share my favorites so far. Each mockup has a couple of detail “swatches” so you can see a little more about the print and a very brief description of where the print came from. Which is your favorite?
I spend so much of my time behind a computer screen that it is hard to show “behind the scenes” shots of what I do. And I know that people love to see works in progress. I do too. So I made this video which shows my process in about 3 minutes. I captured it in 2 sessions and sped it up 1500%. This is a wrap skirt that I designed that should be one of the ones for sale at the American Craft Council show I am participating in. I just finished it so I haven’t seen the fabric in person yet.
The video shows the whole process from drafting the skirt in Illustrator to adding the photos in Photoshop. In this case it is a wrap style skirt and I used 3 photos: long exposure shots from a nighttime “parade of lights” we watched at Disney several years ago. This is a simple design relatively speaking. The photos are so cool that I didn’t need to do much manipulation to them. I left in all of the things I tried and rejected. You will see that I thought about a row of polkadots at one point. It’s tiny – it’s not meant to be a tutorial, but just so you can join along in the process. Enjoy!
Often when I teach an intro fabric design class, the students and I create a collaborative fabric design during class, which I have printed and mail to them after class. This most recent class played along with me and made this design using speech bubble shaped post-it-notes and wrote their favorite “clean” swear word. I thought it would make a funny fabric, especially given the day I had before I got to class. So I scanned our design and got ready to put it into a repeat and it just seemed sort of blah. We needed a much more colorful fabric to match our colorful language. So I added some color and after I sent the swatches, I told my class I would post a tutorial about how I did it so they could check back. My screenshots for this are in Photoshop, but many other design programs have the same tools you can use.
We started with a scanned image of post-it-notes on black paper. I scanned this at 150 dpi because I wanted to print it at the same size and that is the resolution I need for fabric.
The first thing I wanted to do was to move the speech bubbles to a layer all by themselves. This way I could insert something into the background and have them float over top. When I open the image in Photoshop, it automatically makes it a locked background layer. (See the lock icon?) When I go to the Layers palette and double click the layer that says Background, it will unlock it and convert it to a regular layer (Layer 0), which is what we need.
Next I want to remove the black background and leave just the speech bubbles by themselves on this layer. Choose the Magic Wand tool and click anywhere in that black background. You can see what’s selected because Photoshop traces around it with dashed lines. Once you have it selected, hit the delete key. Your black background will disappear. The checkered pattern you now see indicates that this part of the design is transparent. (It won’t show on your finished design.)
Next I will add a new background layer back in, by choosing the new layer icon (looks like a page with a bent corner) to make Layer 1. Then choose Edit -> Fill from the menu to fill it with black. You will probably also have to put your layers in the right order by clicking and dragging them in the palette to make sure the bubbles are on top and the black layer on the bottom.
So it doesn’t actually look like we have done much at this point, but what we have done is split the design into two layers so that we can now insert something in between them. Next, I am going to add a Text layer, by clicking the text tool and dragging a text box to fill the design space. Now I can type text into this layer. I filled it with cartoon style swear words (*&%$!!@) to match our theme. It doesn’t matter what color they are, we will change that next. Drag the text layer so it is sandwiched between Layers 0 and 1.
Now the color! If you double click the Text layer in the Layers Palette, a window will pop up giving you options for Layer Styles. We are going to use a Gradient Overlay to add a rainbow to this text.
The last little tweak I made to the design was to add a black outline to our speech bubbles to help make them pop out from the background a little more. That is easy to do with the same Layer Styles tool. Double click Layer 0 with the speech bubbles and choose Stroke from the style options. I added a 3 px border of black.
And this is the finished design.
Now I understand that this is a pretty silly fabric and you aren’t probably going to run right out and order yards of it. But by using the same steps you learned here, you can create fabrics like these:
These sheep are drawn with a fine tip sharpie and scanned. I cut them out from the background the same way and added a white Stroke to the layer so they have that white outline. The background for this design instead of text, is a piece of painted paper that I scanned and added a Color Overlay (from the Layer Styles Palette) in green.
Or dancing sheep on a knitted background.
It’s the month for classes for me. Another fun class you can come to is a panel discussion called “Digitizing for Dollars” that I will be participating in on January 29 at 6:30 pm at NE Bank Community Room in Minneapolis. It is presented by WARM (Women’s Art Resources of MN). Several panelists will be talking about digitizing your original art and selling it online. I will be talking about Spoonflower and using your original art to make fabric. The other panelists will be talking about things like making patterns, digital prints and putting your artwork on objects (totes and coffee mugs). I have worked with this group before and there is always great discussion and good questions, so I am looking forward to it. (The event is free for WARM members, $5 if you come as a guest of a WARM member or $10 for the public.)
I am delighted to be teaching some digital design classes to start off the new year! In February, I am going to teach a photo collage pillow class. The class is February 2 & 9 in Minneapolis and all of the details are here.
You may not be in to pillows. I get that. Pillows aren’t really my thing either, but I love these two I made as samples. You can use this photo collage for many other fun things once you know how to do it: photo placemats, tote bag, quilts. There are lots of options. So don’t let the “pillow” part of the project stop you from signing up.
One collage is “Chester and Leo” themed. It is all their puppy pictures with a border “kaleidoscope” design made from a photo of someone’s nose. Their names are on the bottom corner.
The other sample is photos from my trip to Italy last year. The border on this one is a detail from a photo of a green door that is tiled so that it makes neat leaf shapes around the outside edge. I know it sounds complicated, but it’s really easy to do and I will show you how to do both the collage and the border designs.
In class we will talk about collecting your photos, putting together a collage that is balanced and works together. We will set it up to print exactly the size we need (it fits on a fat quarter), make a coordinating border print and get our collages uploaded and printed at Spoonflower. I printed mine on super soft faux-suede. I will also show you how to do the simple sewing steps to finish up the pillow and a few other project variations. We will meet one more time to “show and tell” and troubleshoot for your next project. You need a laptop for class but you don’t need to have Photoshop or any other special software. Really! Just a collection of photos and a web browser.
Share with your friends. Sign up. Pass it on. See more of my upcoming classes here.
I am getting all kinds of new things ready for the show I am doing at the American Craft Council Library on December 13. So excited! This is the first large collection of my digital prints that I will have for sale. Last week I finished the cowl scarves. I know that the “giant infinity scarf” is a major trend, but I just don’t think they are that flattering.
(stock photo)
These are made with a more simple and elegant kind of silhouette. More like a necklace. These are all made from polyester crepe, which is soft and lightweight and drapey and the colors are vibrant and gorgeous. I haven’t used this fabric before and I am in love. Each design also has a story:
