Computer Aided Design

Do you ever think about where the patterns on your fabrics come from? Most of the printed fabrics you buy nowadays will have been designed on a CAD (Computer Aided Design) Programme. One of my current projects is to design my own patterns using a CAD programme- otherwise known as Photoshop.
You may think this would be easy, but I can tell you that it is not!! There are so many processes to go through and so many different ways of doing things!
Here are a few of my first ever experimental attempts...

 

Using a photocopy of some sketches of sea creatures, I selected two motifs that I liked, changed the colours, flipped them and then somehow managed to put it in a stripe repeat (I haven't just copied and pasted the motifs into stripes).

 

Once you have done this you can add another layer and change the colour of the background- although at this point I hadn't quite got the hang of making sure the background wasn't missed out in any areas which is why there are white bits in the crab's claws.

I tried some leave motifs , changing the colour and size, rotating them and flipping  them into positions, editing and fading sections. We then have to offset the design so that it wraps around the 'page'- if you look closely you can see that when a leaf falls off one side of the page, it is continued on the opposite.

I then turned my design into a bespoke brush so that I can draw my pattern into another kind of shape.

But these were just the practises- I have now started (well, I am attempting) to come up with some original designs- here is a particularly bad one!

I think it is bad because whilst doing the striping, some gaps were left and the pattern doesn't flow very well. (Although I could just say that I meant for it to be stripy in both directions...)

I spent four and a half hours in the library today working on some patterns, although it doesn't feel like I have done very much.

Above is the original design (which took about half an hour!!) and then below are experiments with different background colours. I really like the brown background one.

 Another feather one, you can't really see the yellow feathers with the white background though- looks much better with the purple/ blue background.