Photoshop workshop

I am so glad that managed to attend the Photoshop sessions with Tim, the new skills I have learnt have been invaluable. I have used Photoshop before and have a basic understanding of how it works, but the skills I had leant up until now have been 'self taught' with tutorials on the internet and general fiddling about until I get the results that I am after.

Now I can do thing that I could't do before and have got faster at things that used to take me ages beforehand. I now know the proper way to add my textile designs to illustrations and can create a pattern repeat from my scanned in samples, alter there colour and change there scale. I have also learnt how to create a displacement map (a way to make your print follow the curves and folds of a garment).

One of my samples, scanned in and turned into a repeat pattern

Using Photoshop is such a fantastic skill to learn, not only does it open up lots of possibilities for illustration and digital print design, but is almost an essential requirement for most jobs in the fashion and textiles industry. I need to continue to practise these new skills that I have learnt on a regular basis, so I don't forget them.

A Day in Rob Ryan's Studio

 As I'm sure that I've mentioned before, my little sister Libby works for the papercut artist Rob Ryan. So back in april, whilst my little girl was away on a brownie camp for the week I managed to escape to London's east end for a day working with her in his studio. I've already met Rob Ryan himself on a few occasions, but on this particular day he was off on his holidays, so it was a bit of an 'odd-job quite day' as Libby put it.

As you can probably imagine, it's a bit odd having your little sister boss you around, a bit of a role reversal, but the bossy Wright woman gene has not by-passed her and she did a grand job.

It didn't stop me having a bit of fun behind her back (literally) tee hee!

I wasn't just playing with sticky dots though. My task was to layout mini Rob Ryan logos on photoshop so that when they are printed onto the sticky dot sheet, they are all in the middle of a dot. So I had to peel off all the dots on one sheet and scan it, then use it as a guide so I knew where to place each logo perfectly. Simple but clever, I'll remember that one!

Amongst other jobs like shopping for, and cooking lunch for everyone, and then washing up. Libby let me loose on putting some water slide decals on mugs, which was really tricky. It is all slippy and you have to get all the bubbles out of it, by being quite firm with your smoothing, but not so firm that you stretch or break the decal and it has to line up when you get to the end, or it creases when you try to line it up. By my fourth one I'd finally got the hang of it, but by that time Libby had got fed up with helping me with my mistakes, so she got me wrapping tiles and moving a load of these kitty cats  round to the other studio instead.

Creating a print design with photoshop

I spent the last couple of days coming up with a design for my screen print which will feature around the skirt of the apron dress.

I had already selected the embroidery transfers that I want to use, based on the fact that they needed to be wildflowers that are in bloom during the months of April, May and June.

My first task was to trace the original transfers in black fine line pen onto white paper and scan them onto my laptop. This makes it easier for me to cleanup and work with the motifs on photoshop. I then removed the white backgrounds from each of the motifs and began to manipulate them into a design that I was relative happy with. This took a long time as I want to make the blooms look they were creeping up the dress, but I also needed to take into consideration the colour that each bloom will be painted in so even spread of the colours over the print.

As you can see from the picture above I put the designs into a repeat to see how the print will join up when printed side by side. Here are four slightly different designs. I was playing about with the placement of the bee and butterflies to see which would work best with the repeat.

This was the final design that I decided on with the help of some of my class mates and Fiona. Luckily I finished it and printed out onto A3 before the end of my day in the studio today so that I could get it exposed onto a screen ready for my next day in the studio next tuesday.