Contrast fabric
Worked on some QE11 themed fabric designs today. Here's where I'm up to and how I got there. Thought I'd share a bit of my design process.
I had made a few dolly mini dresses using this rather nice Warhol inspired fabric last week.
So I felt inspired by it, and decided to design some of my own fabric using the Queen's face in a similar style.
I started off by creating the black and white contrast images using Photoshop and Illustrator combined. I started in Photoshop and then jumped into Illustrator to create nice smooth graphics which can be easily resized.
Next step - I decided to match all face sizes in a similar way to the inspiration fabric. But I have kept more head and shoulders - as of course a Queen needs her crown! I love the sashes and jewellery as well.
Next stage I tried another style - hiding the hard edges of the borders and making the shapes around the portraits smoother.
Also you may have spotted that I filpped some of the portraits upside down, so that the fabric works in two directions. This makes it more flexible when you're laying out patterns.
I decided to try some neater borders and started with ovals.
I was quite pleased with this and felt a bit closer to something exciting. Having felt a kind of slump in the middle of today. That messy moment when everything seems to be taking ages and you can't see any good results for all the time you've put in! But a break helps so much and you come back with fresh eyes and ideas.
I tried filling in the diamond shapes but I realised my repeat only has 3 columns so far and I would need 4 columns to make colours, or black and white repeat correctly. Tesselation can get a bit technical - I tend to rely on trial and error and the powers of automation in Illustrator!
Here is the same pattern with a black background.
As a mini dress
So next I did a few trials by digitally cutting out the fabric in the shape of a mini dress. It's amazing how different it looks when you 'zoom in'. Here's a few. Interestingly the messy first designs actually work nicely when you crop in close on them. They look intriguing somehow. An interesting mixture of hard and soft edges.
Official purple
