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A portion of my new paisley fabric design... |
The project was also the foundation of an extensive learning experience for me, as
I took a design that I originally drew on paper and then scanned into my
computer for tweaking via
Paint Shop Pro.
Back then, it truly was a matter of "tweaking," as I did not use the program's
vector drawing tools to reproduce the outlines. (Quite honestly, I
wasn't knowledgeable enough about how to use them at the time.)
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| The painstaking process of vectorizing a hand drawing... |
With more years of experience under my belt, I recently took some of those
same paisleys and rejigged them into scalable vectors to create a new design for
a Spoonflower challenge called Novelty Paisley.
Actually, this time, there was also a first attempt done on paper by hand. My doodling ended up transforming paisleys into fish. At that point, I decided that instead of
creating new fishy paisleys from scratch, I would
go back to the ones I already had in my archives and turn some of them into koi.
The vectorizing activity was not quickly accomplished, but it didn't take as long as I thought it might. I naturally turned to my drawing tablet first but found it more time consuming to trace with than the mouse. (It was probably because I have been out of practice using it.) Without too many issues, however, I soon had the following:
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| Core elements vectorized... |
The smaller fish are just scaled down versions of the big one, but I gave
myself three unique paisleys to work with. The next step was to throw down a
serviceable pattern using those shapes, with the end result of achieving
a seamless tile.
As you might expect, the very first version was just a simple line drawing,
black on a white background. I experimented with a gray background next,
arriving at two versions, one light and one dark.
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A light gray version... |
To add a bit of dimension, I then played around with the layers, giving some
elements greater or lesser intensity.
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| A dark gray version... |
A version of the above design is actually for sale in my shop.
I did ultimately decide that I didn't want grayscale for my entry, however, so I reversed the original
drawing and started working with white lines on a black background.
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| Original drawing reversed... |
Those of you familiar with my past projects may know that I like to throw
some red in with my black and white combos, so that was the natural
progression with this design as I continued to make changes.
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| Adding some red... |
With the colour scheme decided on, it was then a matter of going back and
forth, modifying the drawing to add red to different spots and changing the
thickness of the lines around various elements, to uploading the changes to
Spoonflower to see the results.
Spoonflower used to require designers to proof their creations by purchasing at least a swatch. They now have an online proofing process whereby the design is magnified by A LOT so that we can see even a pixel being out of place. Quite convenient and of course, it reduces the amount of time (not to mention money) needed to put a design out and ready for selling.
After fifteen iterations, I had my final design, which I decided to call Dancing Paisley Koi.
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| Final entry... |
You wouldn't believe how much indecision I had over whether to choose this one, or the fourteenth one, or the thirteenth one as my entry. Given that no one would ever be the wiser as to the slight differences among them, it was an insane amount of consideration. As a point of fact, from number nine onwards, you'd would be hard pressed to tell what had changed, even if I showed them all to you.
I've never been one to seek perfection – and I wasn't doing that here – but sometimes in these design
situations, you just want it to be "just right"... whatever that means.
You can see all of my paisley fabric creations here.
'Til next... 🇨🇦🍁
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