The 18 hour Paisley

I worked on this paisley for 3 days.
Here are some of the steps I went through to get it into repeat.

the original "art" from the client

had to reduce it to B+W first, worked in photoshop (psd)

considered completing paisley by hand drawing
got this far and nixed the notion
I can draw nicer shapes with the pen tool in ai

straightened it out using skew transformation

mirrored the elements
I then took it all into Illustrator (ai) and Live Traced

here are elements that I pulled to make custom ai brushes

here are all the brushes in ai

working out the repeat

it's all little bits of vectors from the Live Tracing
big file!

repeat done

I then exported it to psd
and brought back into ai
re-Live Traced
to make it a nice simplified flat file

adjusted colors to beige + grey

finally done

celebrated with chocolate truffles

Spoonflower Design: googie coffee shops of greater Los Angeles toile

Cityscapes. Create a fabric design using a view, or elements of a view, of a particular city. 

VOTE HERE

How did I do this?

trying to remember how I created this repeat because now I need to make a companion with circular elements. argh, brain, get to work and stop thinking about chocolate truffles...

Spoonflower Design Contest: coordinates -- VOTE!

VOTE HERE on my entry in Spoonflower's design contest
(the entries are posted randomly, so I can't tell you which page it'll appear on)

the designs for these originated from my silkscreen work from the 70s
more here

Contest Rules:
Coordinates. Using a single digital file uploaded to your Spoonflower account, submit a one-yard image that includes four distinct coordinating fabric designs, including at least one stripes pattern and one dots pattern. The four designs should take up equal amounts of space on a one-yard canvas (42" x 36"). Preview will be sized at a yard of quilting-weight cotton (42" x 36").

Happy New Year!

here's a Bloody Mary repeat for what ails you:

original photo swiped off from Google Images search
used for entertainment purposes only

flashback: 5/75

My career as a surface designer started when my use of silkscreen as an art medium coincided with the Pattern and Decoration art movement. Back then, I had NO IDEA I'd be designing underwear prints 30 years later!

These are the oldest examples of my silkscreen work that I could find in the house. (There are older ones out in the garage but they're extremely buried. Until I get an intern, I can't get to them. Harhar). They are from the "1st Series" set. Hmmm, maybe they ARE the first of this patterny-type genre.

I had a very different color aesthetic then

Looking at these confirmed my idea of taking all this abstract work and turning them into repeats. I fooled around changing the colorway on the 3rd:

also rotated it
this is my current color crush: lt blue/royal/red
doesn't quite make it
looks like a flag

I'm going to stay with the original colors and make it patchworky with a grid of patterned boxes. Stay tuned!

California Tartan scarf

I have become a seller on Cargoh (a curated Etsy)
While uploading some of my map prints from 2003:

I got an idea to turn the design concept into a printed scarf
Here's the scarf art:

I had to recreate the tartan - I'd done the original repeat on what was then called U4ia, using the weave program. As you can see up top, it's not a perfect square and I didn't like what happened when I put it on the bias.

this really is the official state tartan of California. I kid you not!

Here's where you can purchase the scarf on Cargoh
I will add a product photo after I get my sample from Spoonflower
(and buy a machine to merrow the hem!)