Design Wall Monday - the virtual one!

It feels like a holiday here at the minute.  I've taken a break this past week or two from deadline makes and must makes to just play and I've been having a relaxing, fun time of it.  This weekend I took advantage of Creativebugs free 10 day trial to watch a few episodes from a series  they have put together on Fabric Design.

You have to subscribe and register your credit card but you can cancel if you like within the 10 day time period.  I had looked at Creativebug before and not really liking subscription based sites much I didn't keep up with it.  I had another look though when I saw their series of work-a-longs as some of the classes are basic and the work-a-longs offer a bit more depth.

The one that caught my eye was Fabric design.  Featuring Lizzy House, Denyse Schmidt and Heather Ross, it is a great watch and I've learned lots about thrown patterns and pretty much spent the whole weekend playing with motifs!

The three designers talk you through their different processes and Lizzy gives you an exercise to try to make a repeating pattern.  This is great fun.

You take a piece of paper approx A5 in size and you doodle a simple design.  I did daisies and dogs paws.  You rip the paper up and move the pieces and tape them back together and doodle some more. 

You scan this into a drawing program and trace the pattern digitally so you can move things around and re-colour.  I lost hours this weekend doodling and tracing.  I normally have the radio on or the tv in the background but not this weekend, just me in the quiet, drawing with the pen tool.  It was massively relaxing!

Heather uses Photoshop and Lizzy and Denyse use Illustrator both by Adobe.  I subscribe to creative cloud for Photoshop and Lightroom and thought both being by the same company and the menus look similar that I'd give Illustrator a go.  Wow, talk about the most awkward, least intuitive, could not be more diffferent program from those I used before!  Learning to navigate it took some time and the help menu was useless!

Still, I managed in the end to trace my patterns, colour them in and build a repeat.   I have a very great respect for fabric designers after this process and I'm sure with time it gets quicker but it is a timesuck that's for sure!

This one needs a bit of cleaning up and its a bit linear but I quite like it all the same!

On Saturday evening, I found myself  doodling some more and on Sunday morning back at the computer scanning and tracing.  This may be a new addiction!

My drawing skills definitely need more practice though.  I tried to sketch Wilbur who was stretched out on the sofa beside me.  Normally that dog stays in the same spot for hours but not when I was attempting to draw him.

Gordon took one look at this and asked me why I was mad at the dog as I made him look so terrible!  So much for artistic licence. I was happy I'd just gotten something that looked Bassety!

Still, this whole exercise has been tons of fun and I've really enjoyed the work-a-long.  All three designers are great to listen to and coming this Wednesday is the lesson on colour.  Really looking forward to that one.  So what do you think?  Tempted to give it a try?