Frosty Flakes

When I was in 7th grade my science fair project was on snowflakes, and I learned how to capture snowflakes in a plastic solution on glass slides and then photograph them.  My inspiration was Wilson Bentley’s work.  So, when Spoonflower’s weekly contest was to create a snowflake design, I knew I’d have to design something.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any of my snowflake photos any more, so I looked around the web for inspiration.  You can see many more beautiful snow flakes like these at SnowCrystals.com.

frosty-snowflakes

Continue reading

Snowflakes and Creating a Half-Brick Repeat in Illustrator or Photoshop

I’ve been working on a snowflake design for another Spoonflower contest.  When I thought I was all done with it, I realized that it would look better as a half-brick repeat rather than a straight repeat.  It took me a while to rework it into a half-brick repeat, so I thought I’d show the basic steps in this post, and then cover the details in another post.

A half-brick repeat is similar to a half-drop repeat which I covered in this post.  The picture below shows the difference between a straight repeat (on the left) where the stars are lined up on top of each other, and a half-brick (on the right) where each row of stars is offset from the rows above and below.

brick-comparison

Continue reading