Registration is now open for my March 2017 Spoonflower Handbook Master Class. This session uses Adobe Illustrator as our main design tool, so it’s a great intro if you have ever wanted to learn about Illustrator. All of the details are on the Master Class page here. Hope you can join us!
I have all of the details ready and registration is open for my first Spoonflower Master Class “On the Road”! I decided that I wanted to try to offer the class in some other venues to help make it more accessible to more people. Not everyone can get to NC quickly and easily, so here it is at another venue that might be a little closer for you. After I taught a class at the WI Museum of Quilts & Fiber Arts this spring, I knew it would be a great place to host a workshop like this. You can see all of the details on the master class page.
Also, there are some spaces left in my October class in Atlanta with the SE Fiber Arts Alliance. Be sure to check that one out too!
I just got back from teaching a week-long workshop at the Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts in Gatlinburg TN. Arrowmont is like summer art camp for grownups in all the best and worst ways. Each class is an intensive week. Studios are open 7:30 am – 1:00 am nearly every day. Students and teachers stay in no-frills dorm-like rooms; meals are provided at the dining hall. There are evening slide talks and open studios. Above is a view of the main building as I am walking down from my cabin.
There was a little snafu with a late shuttle and some very bad communication when I first arrived, so my week started off a little rocky, but things smoothed out as the week went on. I was teaching in the textiles studio, which is set up like the most amazing dye lab you can imagine. Only we weren’t doing anything with dyes, because I was teaching a whole week about digital fabric design with Spoonflower. Having this lab full of computers and scanners is not exactly the norm for Arrowmont, but it worked out just fine. We got to try some things in class which I almost never have time to do, so it was fun for me to be able to teach the students some more complex techniques.
Class started right away on Sunday evening and continued through Friday afternoon. There were 9 classes running during the week I was there. I had 6 amazing students in class; class sizes ranged between 3-15 people. Running parallel to us were classes in woodworking, paper, ceramics, mold-making, wire sculpture and mixed media jewelry. We had 37 hours of class time and we packed it full. We talked about color, patterns, making things seamless, effective repeats, scale, texture…
One afternoon we went for a photo walk around campus to collect photos of textures to use in our designs. We focused on work with Photoshop, but also explored a variety of other programs and tools that are really suited to fabric design. We made organic photographic patterns; we made geometric patterns from cut paper; we made faux batiks and digitally painted designs. Spoonflower worked with us to get fabrics shipped out lightning fast, so that we could create some designs on Monday and have the fabrics in our hands on Friday afternoon.
The gallery which was just outside of our classroom featured an exhibition of work by this year’s Arrowmont instructors. You can see my piece (my Wallflower dress) along the wall on the right. Arrowmont’s awesome gallery director came and filmed a little clip of me teaching to add to the interactive (QRcode) part of the gallery exhibition. I will post a little clip of that sometime soon.
Our class worked really well together and I think everyone left totally fired up about designing some of their own fabrics. Below is a few of them goofing around with their freshly printed fat quarters on Friday afternoon. I was so proud of what they accomplished. And they blew me away with how much they learned. One student had me sit down on Friday with her and she talked through a step-by-step plan she had made for how to finish her “final project” design when she got home. She had come up with about 18 steps and knew exactly what to do at each step. SO proud!
If you have ever wondered what this kind of workshop experience is like: intense, exhausting, focused. Part of the appeal is that you can come and have hours to use specialized equipment and facilities. With a digital class though, I had to be a little more on the ball. There were no special tools or equipment we needed to use; we all brought our own laptops. So the special and intense part of this class was having the one-on-one help and hands-on practice with the tools, with me to look over and remind you to check the checkmark or unlock the layer when suddenly something seemed to stop working.
One of the funniest things about Arrowmont is that just a 5 minute walk away is the tourist trap town of Gatlinburg, which is full of t-shirt shops, ice cream, deep fried food and old time photos. (There’s also a Starbucks and a Walgreens, which I found the first night I was there.) Arrowmont feels like a magic bubble in the woods; they really are odd neighbors. There is a really nice aquarium in town, which I visited on Sunday morning since I didn’t have much classroom setup to do. I took a selfie with a shark.
In our discussion about colorways, my class and I decided if you were going to walk down the street and then design a Gatlinburg fabric it would need to include these colors:
(And if you are designing fabric for anyone under the age of 8, throw in some neon green.) I met some fascinating teachers, I had fantastic students to work with and I had some great conversations with the work-study students that were busy all over campus. Thanks to Arrowmont for a one-of-a-kind experience.
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.
In June, I will be spending a week at Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts in Gatlinburg TN. I haven’t ever been to Arrowmont, but I have heard all kinds of amazing things about the experience there, so I am excited to have been invited.
Our class at Arrowmont will be intense. We have 37 hours to explore all kinds of techniques for designing your own fabric. For the class in April at Spoonflower, we are going to focus on Adobe Illustrator, but for this one at Arrowmont, it is all about Photoshop and layers and texture. I have had several potential students email with questions about the class (which is awesome) and so I thought I should talk a little more about what we will be doing, since the description in the Arrowmont catalog is necessarily brief.
My theme for this class will be exploring the different paths you can take to design fabric. Everyone knows the feeling of staring at a blank page with an equally blank mind. Where do you start?
We are going to start this class by building a common vocabulary. We will talk about pixels and resolution and color. We will learn about different design tools that are common to Photoshop and other graphics programs (select, layer, opacity, offsets). Then we will start building a toolbox of techniques. Each day in this class we will take a different path to start a fabric design. One day we will work with scanned found objects; one day we will start with photos; one day we will doodle with paint. We will learn ways to layer and manipulate textures borrowed from other objects.
Are you ready for this class? You don’t need to know anything about Photoshop or designing fabric. It is helpful if you are comfortable working with computers and you have maybe explored Photoshop (or other graphics programs) a little on your own. You should be able to pull a photo off of your camera, save it and find it again. You should be able to connect to wifi and navigate webpages. You should be brave enough to try things and not worry that you are going to “break something”.
We will be creating a faux batik, similar to this tutorial I put together. Why faux batik? Because it is a fantastic way of practicing a set of design techniques you can use for many other things: scanning your original artwork and manipulating the colors, digitally coloring a design, layering with a photographic textures. It’s a great model that will teach you many skills that you will be able to use for future designs.
We will all go crosseyed if we have to spend 7 hours a day looking at computer screens, so I have a lot of design ideas and exercises that we will do offline as well to help break things up. These will be things like learning how to make seamlessly repeating designs or creating balance in a repeating pattern. We will take a photo walk looking for textures.
You will also have time in class to explore something independently. I want you to be able to work on your own, but with the ability to ask questions and screw things up with help right there. So we will set aside time for me to work with each student one-on-one to explore your own design goal.
These are some of my goals for class. I hope that by the end of class, students will have learned:
You can see all of the details at Arrowmont’s website. If you want to know more about any part of class, feel free to email me!
If you are in the neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI, I will be there a LOT this year. Coming up in August is the Handweaver’s Guild of America conference, Convergence. It seems like it’s a little early to talk about this one, but I know that attending a big conference like this takes some planning ahead. I have never been to the HGA conference before, but I have heard stories from many of the weavers I know. I am looking forward to being a part of it!
Thursday August 4 is a “super-seminar” called Marketing Yourself Online. In this session, I do a roundup of all of the popular social media platforms and talk about how you can make them work for you as an artist. Whether your social media goal is to sell your work or get gallery exposure, there are platforms that are going to help you with that better than others. Basically my goal is to help you compare and contrast and get the start of a social media plan that will help you narrow down your options (because we all know you can’t do everything!) and start a plan.
In the afternoon on Thursday, I do another super-seminar called Photo Basics. In this session, I am not going to teach you how to take photos but rather how to work with the ones you have. Every call for entry or online submission, has very specific specifications that they want your photos to follow. 300dpi at 5×7, sRGB, <3MB. If all of that looks like gibberish to you then THIS is the session to decode that! We will talk about simple edits, cropping, resizing and most importantly how to set up the photos so you don’t get disqualified for not following instructions.
Friday morning is a seminar of Intro to Digital Fabric Design. This is a quick and dirty intro to everything you need to know to get started designing and printing your own fabric. See lots of samples and ideas and participate in a collaborative fabric design in class.
Friday afternoon is Photo Boot Camp. This one gives you strategies for taking better photos. We will talk in depth about lighting, equipment (both professional and DIY), and quick edits that can make all the difference. We will also practice looking at shots and diagnosing what to do to make it better.
Saturday is my favorite of the sessions. It’s an all day class about Designing & Printing your Own Fabric. It will cover the basics just like we do in the seminar, but this class lets you work hands-on all day. We will complete several small design projects throughout the day to give you ideas and techniques you can use to create your own designs and coordinating prints.
