Category Archives: Repeat fabric Design using Photoshop

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

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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 →

Painted Daisies, Take 2

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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

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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

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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

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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.

I used the photo of bricks to create a brush in Photoshop. Continue reading →