Saturday 3 March 2012

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.


No comments:

Post a Comment