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

Posted on December 11, 2012 by jean cheszek

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.

Continue reading →

Painted Daisies, Take 2

Posted on May 4, 2012 by jean cheszek

I played around some more with my Painted Daisies design, done for the Fabric8 Contest at Spoonflower. Here was the previous version.

While I like the colors, the design seems boring. I decided to try adding lots more layers of daisies to fill in all the spaces. I made this first attempt by duplicating the layer and moving it–just to see if the idea might work. Continue reading →

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 →

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.