spoonflower tutorial

Tutorial: Seamless Arrows Pattern, Part Four

beckarahn2016-03-16T10:04:02-05:00Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials|Comments Off

(This is part four of a tutorial for making a seamless arrow pattern. Find Part One and Part Two and Part Three here.)

Proofing and touching up the pattern is the finishing step to create the seamless arrow design and I am going to do that with the Photoshop pattern tool. The first thing I do is select the whole design (Edit -> Select All) and create a pattern tile by choosing Edit -> Define Pattern and click OK.

It will look like nothing has happened. That’s ok! The tile that you selected has been saved in the patterns palette, which is kind of hidden.

To proof the design, I create a new blank file that is the size of a yard of fabric. That’s an arbitrary size – I just think it’s nice to look at a large number of repeats.

Then I choose Edit -> Fill from the menu. From the pop-up Fill menu, choose Pattern from the contents drop down menu. Just below that in Options there is another drop down and in it, you should find that pattern you just saved. (See what I mean about a little hidden.)

Now you can see what it looks like when the tile is repeating across a whole yard of fabric. And right away a couple of things jump out at me.

Oops. I didn’t think about the edges and I have a blank space where there aren’t any arrows. I can fix that by cropping out some of the blank space. The other thing that jumps out is a seam where the color changes. The color change is kind of abrupt and it makes a dark line. I can fix that pretty easily by going back a step to my original file. I select the photo layer of that flower because that is where the color is coming from. The easiest way for me to make that contrasting line to go away is to just use a paintbrush to just touch it up. I choose a green color from the bottom of the image and paint some at the top where that really deep green was, hiding that seam line and blending the two together.

After I do those two little edits…

I have a pretty good finished design. I save that tile and that is the repeat that I can upload to Spoonflower and print my fabric. This is the version that I used for my grant project exhibition, which I will post photos of very soon.

More in this series: Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four

Tutorial: Seamless Arrows Print – Part One

beckarahn2016-03-16T10:01:48-05:00Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials|2 Comments

It’s a busy week for me with The Spoonflower Handbook coming out on Tuesday and the opening reception for my grant project on Thursday, so I thought I would combine the two and give you something fun: a fabric design tutorial based on one of the prints from my grant project.

The third project for my grant was a dress also created in duet with another artist. For that design, she created a layered photo image and sent it to me. I created a coordinating print and the two were combined in the final piece. The photo she created had lots of organic shapes, transparent layers and abstract imagery, so I decided to create some contrast by making a print that was the opposite of that: geometric & somewhat representational.

The inspiration for this design is actually a software engineering tool that helps designers collaborate by tracking the different versions of the code and where things merge and branch off. I saw this graphic representation of that over my husband’s shoulder while he was working and I loved both the look and the metaphor.

I decided to make arrowheads instead of dots and to use a layer from the photo to choose the colors in my design (which I will show you more about later.)

Creating the Arrowhead Design

Open a new file in Adobe Illustrator.

For this tutorial I did just a small repeat so it was easy for you to follow along. (My finished design was about 18 inches square.)

I turned on two options in Illustrator that really make this design easy to do: Show Grid and Snap to Grid. You can find both of those in the View menu. You can adjust the spacing of your grid lines under Illustrator -> Preferences -> Guides & Grid.

Draw with the Pen Tool & adjust lines.

I drew all of the lines in the design using the Pen Tool. (If you need help, there’s a great tutorial here for drawing straight lines with the Pen Tool.) The grid will help you see where to place lines and the Snap to Grid option will make them stick to the intersections of the grid – making it really easy to make straight lines that are very precisely spaced based on your grid spacing.

Once I had a line in place, I selected it and went to the Stroke Palette to adjust the look of the line. I made the line weight heavier at 6 pt and added an arrowhead at the end by choosing one from the dropdown.

Add extra arrowheads with the Polygon Tool.

I did all of my drawing in black and white because I am going to add the color in a later step. Once I had all of the lines in place, I wanted to add some extra arrowheads, not just at the end of the lines. To do that, I used the Polygon Tool (which is one of the options under the Rectangle Tool). I chose a 3 sided shape with a .5 inch radius, which matched the arrowheads pretty perfectly. I adjusted the fill to be black and the outline transparent.