Tag Archives: fabric design with photoshop elements

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

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Creating the Quilt Top for “Urban Sunset”

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In this earlier post I talked about creating the fabric I used in my quilt Urban Sunset.  My original plan was to use the fabric as-is and create several whole cloth quilts.  However, the more I looked at the printed fabrics (shown below), the more I thought I’d need to cut them up.

I wanted this fabric to be the majority of the quilt, and I decided to use circles since I was looking for an abstract sunset over a city.  Continue reading →

Creating the Fabric Designs for “Urban Sunset”

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When I created this fabric design for a contest at Spoonflower, I knew I wanted to expand on the idea and design some fabric to make a quilt.  In an earlier post, I talked about my initial efforts.

I created the designs in Photoshop, using a custom brush that I’d made from a photograph of bricks.  I used a limited color palette, and used multiple layers in Photoshop to keep each of the colors in its own layer.  I did this so I’d be able to rearrange the order of the layers to get different effects with the colors.  I also used more than one layer for each of the colors, again to be able to control the depth of the colors. 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 →

Urban Sunset Revisited

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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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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 →

Easy Digital Batiks

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Traditional batik designs are created by placing hot wax patterns on fabric, and then dyeing the fabric.   The wax resists the dye and keeps the fabric beneath the wax the original color.  Dharma Trading has a colorful and fun explanation of creating batiks here.

The batik effect is easy to simulate in Photoshop, and the resulting image can be printed on fabric or used anywhere you need a seamless repeating pattern. Continue reading →

Fun Daisies Fabric Collection

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I entered another of Spoonflower’s weekly fabric contests.  This one called for a one-yard image that included four distinct coordinating fabric designs, including at least one stripe pattern and one dot pattern. I’m not sure why I enter these contests…but it’s fun working on the designs and I’m learning a lot about Photoshop and Illustrator and repeat pattern design in the process.

I thought I’d try to use the ten colors in the Pantone Spring 2012 fashion color trends as my palette, since it’s trendy and these are not colors I’d normally pick (especially Sweet Lilac).  A floral theme seemed to fit well with the spring colors, so I started gathering some of my photos of daisy-like flowers.  Continue reading →