My First Fabric Collection: Creating the Work
This is the fourth post in the series My First Fabric Collection. Get started with post number one: Why Immersion in 2024?
Brainstorming
Original thumbnail sketches. Fifteen minute exercise.
With my inspiration gathered, I started the major task of creating the work. I found a couple exercises particularly illuminating. The first one was to do a whole page of thumbnail sketches of potential pattern ideas. These could be composed of pictures or words, but the idea was to come up with as many pattern ideas as possible. With those thumbnails in hand, you could begin creating the individual pieces of art that would later be combined into designs to create those original patterns. A few of my early thumbnails included designs of wheels in different sizes, the tread marks of tires, and some sort of pattern that would combine cars and fashion. All three of the ideas would end up making it into my final collection in some form.
Another fun exercise was using Chat GTP to add additional layers to our ideas. We were told to come up with twenty words that related to our future collection and then to use Chat GTP to come up with 20 more words until we were satisfied with our list. The words were something I came back to throughout the course and as I worked towards my final project. Those words helped with initial inspiration, were a guiding light when I was feeling stuck, and then could be used to help flesh out literary aspects of our collections, such as the collection description or the name of individual patterns. I found AI to be a useful tool to help go deeper on a particular theme or to propose a new but related direction that I hadn’t thought of.
Sketching and Painting
Both the thumbnail sketch exercise and the twenty words exercise gave me a great starting point to begin creating my artwork. An entire module of the course was devoted to the different ways you could create artwork that you would later use in Illustrator to create patterns. I devoted a substantial amount of time to developing motifs related to my theme of early automobiles so that I could use my own artwork during later modules related to pattern making. Some artwork I created directly in Illustrator drawing from scratch. Some artwork I created using Illustrator tools and a photograph as a guide. I also spent a lot of time sketching, using tracing paper to create drawings, and using watercolor to create more organic shapes and textures. Everything that was created in an analog format needed to be scanned into Illustrator, turned into vector illustrations, and cleaned up a bit before they could be used in actual patterns.
Definitions
Vector Artwork: Created with anchor points and lines, can be edited and resized without loosing quality.
Raster Art: Pixel based artwork limited by file resolution. Best for photographs or items with lots of detail.
Pen sketches.
Watercolor play.
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I thought I was doing pretty well when I ended up with about 50 motifs (or individual designs) that I could start playing with as I started to make patterns. I was quite literally stunned (or as the kids apparently say, shook) to find out that Bonnie usually tries to have 150-200 (!!) motifs before she starts to create patterns, four times as many as I had created. This puts into perspective how much work it is to create unique patterns and as I look forward to my next collection, I know I will want to spend even more time in the art creation stage so that I have plenty of motifs to work with.
Pattern Making
While I wish that I had spent even more time creating my artwork during the course, I also knew that this was a stage that I could get stuck in if I wasn’t careful. I decided that my 50 motifs were good enough and I was going to have to make it work. Again, my ultimate goal of this course was to get through all of the material and end the course with some completed patterns in hand. In hindsight, I think the limited amount of artwork forced me to be more creative and to get the most out of each design while not repeating anything. As I went through lessons that taught me how to build out different kinds of patterns: scatter repeats, half drops, scallops, stripes, and plaids, I was able to practice those lessons using my own artwork instead of creating simple shapes like circles or squares. While none of those patterns were something I would actually want to buy, by the end of that module I had 35(!) unique patterns created using only my motifs. Some of them were very simple, where I tried to repeat one motif in various ways. Others were complex and layered, where I experimented with combining motifs and adding textures to create depth.
Practice pattern making.
Color
During this period of time, I also started to finalize my color palette. One of the challenges that Bonnie says new designers often have is having too many colors, so I knew I wanted to have a very limited palette from the beginning. Bonnie taught us to pull color palettes from our own photographs and I chose a photograph from our 2022 trip to Glacier National Park in Montana as the starting point for my color palette. I love the different colors of the rocks in this river bed, everything from pinks and creams, to teals and purples. My color palette certainly evolved over the course of a few weeks but you can still see elements of my original color palette pulled from this photograph.
Practice pulling color palettes from photographs.
Developing these practice patterns and developing a basic color palette served as a great foundation to develop the patterns for my final project. I knew which designs I wanted to expand and improve upon and which were a creative example of proof of concept even if they did not resonate with me. One thing that surprised me during the process of practice pattern making was that I really enjoyed geometric or mathematical patterns, where I needed to make sure that motifs were alternated or spaced a particular way. There were also a lot of moments where I felt like I took two steps forward and then one step back or where I thought that I knew how to create a particular effect, but I just couldn’t get it to work. Bonnie described this feeling as the gap, where you are constantly working to create what you envision in your mind, but you will lack the experience or resources to do so. As your skills grow and develop, certain things will become easy, but then you will want to create something different and will experience the gap again. When I look at my original thumbnail sketches, there are certainly ideas there that are just more complicated than the skills I have right now. It reminded me of something another artist I follow Emily Jeffords often says:
Progress is quiet and slow.
That sounds great, but with an online course to complete by a deadline, it was time to dive into my final project: creating my fabric collection.
Next on the blog: My Final Project
Introducing: TREAD
Hey you! Can’t wait to get to the end of this six part series? My first fabric collection: Tread is available now on Spoonflower. One FREE way that you can support me is by favoriting those patterns that you like.
TREAD is a collection that celebrates the roads we travel and the marks we leave behind. This collection is inspired by historic automobiles, vintage fashion, and art deco designs.