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

My entry in Spoonflower's design contest can also be seen here.

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