Tutorials

28 March, 2016

Dyeing Wool Yarn with Easter Egg Dye (A tutorial)

beckarahn2016-03-28T10:30:40-05:00Tutorials|1 Comment

When you are an artist, nearly everything has the potential to be an art material. We dyed some easter eggs on Saturday and there was some leftover dye. Which was obviously a great excuse to dye some yarn.

These are 100% wool yarn, dyed using a basic set of PAAS easter egg tablets made up according to instructions: 1/2 c warm water and a tablespoon of vinegar. You can use them following the same basic formula as dyeing with koolaid or food coloring: color + acid + heat. After we finished dyeing a dozen eggs, I dropped these mini skeins into the coffee cups full of dye and microwaved each one for 2 minutes. I know that wool needs more heat than eggs would be happy with in order to make that dye permanent.

After you microwave it, let them sit on the counter until the liquid is room temperature and the dye is exhausted (ie the water is clear). Don’t skip the heat step, or these colors will be much more likely to fade and bleed. No stirring or playing with the fibers when they are hot, if you don’t want it to felt. And this will only work with yarn that is wool or another protein fiber: silk, alpaca, llama etc.

These are super saturated colors because I had a lot of dye and not very much yarn. I estimate that you could dye up to .5 oz of yarn with 1 tablet and get colors this intense. The more yarn you add, the more pastel the color will be.

For a few, I mixed the colors just to see what else I could get. The top 6 colors are the plain tablet, the bottom four are a 50/50 mix of two colors, which I poured into an extra coffee cup. Interestingly, the green was an aqua turquoise color on my eggs, but true emerald green on the yarn.

I am sure the PAAS tablets are on clearance at the grocery store today, so I am planning a walk over there to stock up on a few more boxes. Just because this is fun. The same thing goes for yarn dyed this way as I said in my yarn dye/food coloring tutorial: Your colorfastness may vary. I wouldn’t make an heirloom knit with yarn dyed this way, but it is super fun for a hat or mittens that will get you through a few winter seasons.

23 March, 2016

Three Ways to make a NEW Etsy Banner using PicMonkey (A tutorial)

beckarahn2016-03-23T18:50:57-05:00Etsy, Everything Else, Tutorials|Comments Off on Three Ways to make a NEW Etsy Banner using PicMonkey (A tutorial)

Etsy is rolling out a whole new look for your shop in a couple of weeks. I will admit to some initial grumbling myself and thinking “now I have to redesign everything”, but I actually like the new design quite a bit. I think it was time for a refresh and I think it will make it more appealing to buyers in the long run. I know Etsy has put together some templates with Canva to help you create a new shop banner, but I have never used it and the idea of learning another new platform/software wasn’t really appealing. I also, to be quite honest, hate something that makes you log in and give them information before you ever even see what it’s about. Sorry, Canva.

So I thought I would put together a tutorial in PicMonkey, which I use here a lot, requires no logging in and I think is also really simple to use. If you want just a single photo as a banner, you can upload it right to Etsy and reposition it live in the browser. For these three banner ideas, I have taken the photos and ideas just a little step further so you need to do a little design before you upload it.

Etsy Banner Version One: Just a Photo (with a little branding)

Go to PicMonkey.com and choose Design -> Custom from the menu at the top.

A set of boxes will pop up and ask you for the size. The new Etsy banner has a minimum size of 1200 x 300 pixels.

Now you have a blank canvas that is the right size.

I started by adding a canvas color to this blank canvas. PicMonkey has sets of tools you can choose from that appear down the left side of the screen. Choose the Basic Edits tool set (it’s the top one that looks like a crop box) and then choose Canvas Color just to the right. Don’t forget to hit apply.

I chose one of the colors that is in my “brand” color palette. This banner is an opportunity for me to personalize my Etsy shop, so I want to tie it in to my branding. I’m going to add a photograph on top of this, because I think that this new banner style really lends itself to photos. To add a photo, choose the Overlays Tool Set from the left sidebar, which has an icon that looks like a butterfly. And then pick Your Own from that dropdown menu at the very top. I chose the photo I wanted and PicMonkey placed it on my canvas. I used the corner toggles on the photo to make it a little larger and the rotate tool (a knob on the top center of the photo) to turn it 45 degrees, which makes an interesting chevron shape against my background.

I saved this file and uploaded it to my Etsy shop. Here’s what that simple banner looks like in my new shop homepage.

Etsy Banner Version Two: Not a Photo

Maybe you don’t have a photo that you think really represents your shop very well and you would rather have something a little more graphic. Here’s an idea for that. Start the same way by choosing Design -> Custom and sizing it to 1200 x 300.

Instead of adding a canvas color, we will add a textured background. Choose the Textures Tool Set from the left sidebar. The icon looks like a diagonal grid. For this example, I picked the Boards textures from the list and added a chalkboard texture to my canvas. Be sure to click Apply.

For this version, I thought I might want to add some text to this design that talks about what’s in my shop. First I went to the Overlays Tool Set and picked an arrow from the Dashed & Lined options. Then I added Text with the Text Tool (Tt icon) in the left sidebar.

Save and upload to Etsy and here’s what this version would look like.

Or a little bit silly version with just a few more overlays and text. (I haven’t actually designed my own new banner and I am really liking the idea of this one.)

Etsy Banner Version Three: A Collage

PicMonkey also has a really simple collage tool that would make a great banner. Go back to the main PicMonkey menu and choose Collage. It will immediately pop up a window asking you to choose some photos for the collage. Find some photos and click open. (You can add more later.)

Before you start adding photos to the design, choose a collage arrangement under the Layouts Tool set (the icon looks like a collection of rectangles). The preset for a Facebook Cover works great for this, but you can choose any layout you like.

At the bottom of the screen there is a box which shows the dimensions of your collage. Click the lock icon on the right to unlock it and then change it to 1200 x 300 pixels.

Now you can add your photos by clicking the Photos Tool Set (mountains icon) and dragging the thumbnails of the photos to the empty boxes in the collage. Clicking on a photo in the collage will bring up a tool to resize it. Drag them to move them within the collage box. You can also adjust the background color of the collage and the spacing of your boxes by using the Background Tool Set (icon looks like a paint palette). PicMonkey has a great collage tutorial that shows you a few more things like how to add more boxes and resize them.

Here’s a collage style banner that has been uploaded to my shop.

I hope this has given you a great starting point and some ideas that might make this update little more fun and less of a chore. I’d love to see what you come up with! Share a screenshot with me on instagram or twitter @beckarahn.

16 February, 2016

Digital Fabric Tutorial: Taking your design up a notch

beckarahn2016-02-16T09:41:54-06:00Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials|Comments Off on Digital Fabric Tutorial: Taking your design up a notch

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.

1 February, 2016

Digital Design Tutorial: Painted Valentine’s Hearts Repeat

beckarahn2016-02-01T13:13:37-06:00Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials|2 Comments

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.

Making the Hearts

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.

Adding the Paint Texture

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.

Options for finishing

You could stop right here, save and have a repeat ready to upload to Spoonflower to make fabric or wrapping paper. You might want to check the crop (to make sure you have even spacing around the outside of the hearts) and remember that we scanned at higher resolution than we needed, so think about the finished size you would like and adjust the size of this file. (For example, I chose Image ->Image Size and resized this to 4 inches wide at 150 dpi, so I know exactly the size it will print when I upload it.)
Make wallpaper for your iPad! I thought it would be fun to make a pattern that I could upload to my iPad and use as a wallpaper background pattern.

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).

28 January, 2016

30 Second Photoshop Tutorial: Using Guidelines

beckarahn2016-03-16T10:14:49-05:00Tutorials|Comments Off on 30 Second Photoshop Tutorial: Using Guidelines

The guideline tool in Photoshop is another great 30 second tutorial opportunity. I will revisit the “Dogs Chasing Squirrels” damask design that I have been working on to show you how to use guidelines.

Those bright cyan colored lines through the center of this design are guidelines. Because this is an almost symmetrical design, I wanted to see where the center was top-to-bottom and side-to-side as I was working. Those lines won’t show up in my finished design, but they are really helpful for me as I am working to be able to line things up or check for balance in the design.

How do you make a guideline?

First make sure that the rulers view is turned on. (There’s an option for that under the View Menu). Then click inside the ruler area and drag onto your canvas. Wherever you let up that click-drag, it will drop a guideline. You can do the same thing from both the top and side rulers (my tool palette is covering up the side ruler in this screenshot).

I use guidelines to line up pieces of a design or to give me an idea of where I might want to crop. Sometimes I use them to help with layout. I can use the rulers to lay out guidelines to show me a 1 inch border around all of the edges of a canvas or place a centerline, for example. For this dogs design, I actually replaced the original swirly grass I had cut out with this more “grassy” version and I used the guidelines to help line up my replacement sections.

You can move the guidelines after you have dropped them by choosing the move tool (4 pointed arrow) and hovering your cursor over the guideline. Your cursor will change to a double sided arrow and then you can click and move the guideline.

You can also personalize the look of your guidelines by changing the color or by making them dashed lines instead of solid. You can find that under Preferences -> Grids, Guides & Slices. (The ones marked “Canvas” in this palette are what I have been showing you.)

When you save or export your file as a .jpg, the guidelines will disappear.

18 January, 2016

30 Second Photoshop Tutorial: Copy with Move + Option Key

beckarahn2016-01-18T16:48:09-06:00Everything Else, Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials|Comments Off on 30 Second Photoshop Tutorial: Copy with Move + Option Key

It takes some time to put together a really good tutorial for a project or design, but there are some great techniques that only take a few seconds to explain. This is one I use all the time to copy objects in Photoshop.

Select an object, like this little flower.

Choose the Move tool.

Hold down the option key as you click and drag that object.

Viola! You now have a copy of that shape. Copies made this way will be in the same layer as the original; if you use copy/paste commands, Photoshop will create a new layer for each copy you paste in.

Today I was working on a “dogs chasing squirrels” damask and I decided I wanted a few more flowers in the grass, so I used this technique to copy them. While each was selected, I also rotated and resized a little bit to add some variety, so they would look less like copies.