Painted Daisies, Take 1

Posted on April 26, 2012 by jean cheszek

Another week, another fabric design challenge… Spoonflower and Robert Kaufman Fabrics are sponsoring the Fabric8 contest. The challenge is to create a modern fabric design that evokes the style of pen & ink drawings colored with watercolor paints. This isn’t my usual style, so I thought it would be a good challenge to tackle to stretch myself.

When I think of modern fabrics, I think of bright colors and bold styles–again, not exactly what I’d picture for pen and ink drawings colored with watercolors. So, anyway, here’s my interpretation of the theme. Continue reading →

Urban Sunset Revisited

Posted on April 23, 2012 by jean cheszek

In a recent post I showed how I created “Urban Sunset”–a repeat design for a fabric design contest. I really liked the design and thought I’d try to create a non-repeating design that I could print on fabric and then turn into a whole cloth quilt. My plan is to create a design that’s about a yard wide so I can have it printed at Spoonflower on a full yard of fabric.

Here’s the ‘brick’ brush I created in Photoshop. It’s slightly different from my earlier post in that I cleaned up the edges a bit. I used only this brush in all the designs.

Continue reading →

Houndstooth Seamless Repeat in Photoshop — Another Digital Fabric Weave

Posted on April 11, 2012 by jean cheszek

In a previous post I talked about simulating the look of a Tartan plaid using Photoshop Elements. The same technique can be used to create a digital version of other weave patterns. I won’t go through all the steps which were covered in the earlier post, but the basic steps are:

create one unit of the repeating pattern (I do this using the rectangle tool in Photoshop)
define it as a pattern in Photoshop (Edit ==> Define Pattern)
use the pattern to fill another object with the repeating pattern (Edit ==> Fill)
select and change the colors as desired

Houndstooth is a popular pattern lately, and easy enough to create digitally. Continue reading →

Urban Sunset — Making a Seamless Repeat in Photoshop

Posted on April 3, 2012 by jean cheszek

Recently Spoonflower and the Textile Center in Minneapolis, MN sponsored a design contest called Urban Sightings. The aim was to design a fabric using, as inspiration, photos taken of the neighborhood around the Textile Center .

There were six photos, and I used the five below as my inspiration.