I’ve done a couple of events in the last few weeks where I have been showing and talking to people about my fabric design work. I love the reactions when I start to describe how I design all of the fabric from scratch. The toucans shown up above are one of the examples I pull out all the time. You can see the kinds of paper I use: painted paper, recycled security envelopes, magazine pages (bottom right). Then I make cut paper designs like this toucan (top right). On the left is the finished printed fabric. But there is a step in between that always makes people stop me and comment. I scan those paper patterns and I pull them in to Photoshop.

There is a myth that Photoshop somehow magically does all the work and spits out a fabric design without anyone having to lift a finger. I’ve been plagued by this myth for years. I made pieces called Faking It and Trash Bags (left) that are responses to this same conversation that I have had before. If you’ve never used Photoshop before, let me assure you, Photoshop doesn’t do anything magically for you. In fact, it’s really complex to learn and even though I’ve been using Photoshop for at least 25 years, I don’t know to use 3/4 of the tools. I’m just good at the stuff I need.

And what is that stuff? Here’s what I use Photoshop to do:

  • Clean up little flaws in the recycled papers I use so there aren’t obvious things distracting from my art.
  • Erase pencil lines and dog hairs and fuzz that show up when I scan the art.
  • Rearrange the individual pieces (toucans, leaves) so that I can make a repeating pattern. This is tedious, time-consuming work; shifting things by pixels so that they match up exactly when they repeat. That pink line shows you one corner of the toucans design tile.
  • Sometimes I add a solid colored background. It’s hard to scan a large solid colored area and have it be one single color.
  • Adjust the scale. When I work in cut paper, sometimes I can’t actually cut the paper pieces as small as I need the pattern to be. So I make it larger and shrink it down. Or vice versa.

There are tools that can help with some of these tasks, but there is not a tool that you can choose that says “take these toucans and make them into an awesome repeating pattern”. That takes an artist behind the wheel. With more and more AI fueled art out there, I’m also really careful about what Photoshop tools I use so that I am not adding AI generated elements to my work. I create my own textures by drawing or painting something and making a pattern I can add as a layer over my work. Sometimes I paint with Photoshop “brushes” to add color to a line drawing design (because I hate painting). Many other artists use other apps to design; you don’t have to use Photoshop to do all of those tasks I mentioned. I just like Photoshop best because it’s the tool I’ve invested the time to learn.