Having made my first illustration for use in a textile design the best advice I can think to offer is to MAKE SURE YOU CUT STRAIGHT LINES! when you dissect your image. This a collaborative project I'm working on with artist/designer/speed reader/computer nerd/regular nerd
Kati Driscoll for
this show to benefit the World Wildlife Fund. Basically you have to cut your drawing into quarters when you get to a certain stage so that you can fill in the edges of the drawing in order for everything to meet up evenly on each side of the image. This way your image becomes a repeating pattern. It seems like a weird magic trick and it's really cool and pretty fun to do. BUT! make sure make sure make sure you cut straight bloody lines or you're in for some photoshop nightmares. Anyway, it was tough the first time around and I'm sure if I had a wacom tablet then it would have been much easier to correct my mistakes. The above images show what the final piece looks like repeated as it would on a large piece of fabric, the letter design that Kati contributed to the piece, a close up of all the dumb gaps I made and had to fix, and an overlay that I had to do on a transparency sheet (complete with dust and cat hair, damn you Stilgar) over the original drawing so that I could fill in areas around the letters that were a little bare. Before I started I found a really helpful artical at Design Sponge,
here is how I learned to stop worrying and love making repeating patterns. I'm also working on a comic book for the show and this is why my next installment of
Ovoyyamar will most likely be posted next week instead of this week. It's weird and disorienting when you've been working all day at your computer only to look up several hours later to realize you're sitting in the dark.
