Not Boxed In

Posted on June 15, 2012 by jean cheszek

The latest design contest at Spoonflower is all about geometrics, and creating the design using only two colors (RGB #a7bb7d and #724b64) plus white. I like geometrics, so I thought this would be a fun design to work on, though I never would have picked these two colors on my own.

To get started thinking beyond the basic circles and squares, I looked up Geometric Shapes in Wikipedia, and discovered a bunch of fun shapes, like the Bankoff Circle, the Arbelos and the Asteroid…if they covered these in my High School Geometry class, I must have been asleep that day. Continue reading →

Variations on a Fabric

Posted on May 24, 2012 by jean cheszek

A while ago, Spoonflower had a contest to create a Hawaiian ‘cheater’ quilt design, and I wrote about my design here and about the wall quilt I made from the fabric here.

Here’s the original design, using the turtles and flowers of Kauai.
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What’s for Dinner? How to Create a Half-drop Repeat in Illustrator

Posted on May 9, 2012 by jean cheszek

In this earlier post I showed how easy it is to create a seamless repeat in Illustrator. Using a design I created for another contest on Spoonflower, I’ll show how quickly a design can be converted to a half-drop repeat.

First, here’s a comparison of a straight repeat (on the left) and a half-drop repeat (on the right). The diagonal movement in the half-drop repeat is created by shifting each repeat unit (one star in the example) vertically by 50 percent compared to its neighbor.

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Easy Seamless Repeats in Illustrator

Posted on March 27, 2012 by jean cheszek

In earlier posts I’ve talked about doing seamless repeats in Photoshop. Making an Illustrator design into a seamless repeat is also quite straightforward. And, since Illustrator designs are vectors, they can be infinitely scaled without losing any detail.

I’ll go through the steps using this really simple design. In the picture below, the artboard bounds are defined by the white square, and this will also be the bounds for the repeat design.