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.

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The colors I used include the 7 from the first design plus the 4 darker colors on the left (below).  x

I started each design with a blank file in Photoshop, and I added multiple layers so I could build up the colors and reorder things as I wanted.

Here’s one of the first attempts.

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Here’s another one where I played around with some of the filters in Photoshop (Filter==> Distort==> Spherize).

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And then I added some more texture to the background using an Overlay Layer.

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These were a bit too funky for me, so I tried again, just using the brick brush and no other effects.

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And another alternative.

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At this point, I realized the scale was probably too big for the size print I was after, so I scaled down the brush and tried another version.

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And one more version.

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After looking at these I liked the colors, but realized I needed more of a focal point to make this into an art quilt.  Here’s my latest attempt at creating an urban sunset.

I think I’m on the right track now and will keep on developing a few more alternatives before I send one off to Spoonflower to be printed on fabric.

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Math is easy; design is hard.
Jeffrey Veen

Do not copy nature too much.  Art is an abstraction.
Paul Gauguin