Digital print

Digital print. Day 1 

I have never used photoshop before or designed digitally on a computer, so I was really looking forward to digital print week so that I was able to learn new ways of creating and developing an idea using photoshop. To begin with we learnt the basics of creating patterns with Photoshop through different workshops. I immediately found this to be a challenge, as their was allot to process in a short pint of time, and once I made a mistake it was hard to rectify that as i wasn't used to using this software. I was however,  really suprised at the endless ways you can develop and modify patterns. 

We started with a simple circle shape, and then made that into a repast pattern just to learn the basics of how to design a pattern in repeat. I then started to play around with colour ways and changing the densitys of them to  develop the initial shape as much as possible. The next part of the workshops involved using existing images of flowers to make a repeat pattern. We learnt to extract shapes from within the flower, enhancing the colours and edges, and then placing them into the repeat patterns we had already made.

 It took me quite a while to make a successful repeat at first, because I have always liked to design quickly by hand and I'm not an extremely fast learner when it comes to technocology!! My favourite part of didgital print was taking these patterns that we made and placing them onto a garment. I had never considered designing on a computer as I enjoy designing by hand so much, however seeing a pattern digitally on a garment is really satisfying and gives a more realistic image of how a product is going to look was made, and this is something I would like to develop onto some of my fashion illustrations.

I surprisingly liked the refined more professional outcome of my first repeats, however I don't think they were that successful, as I didn't manage to develop them to the extent of my peers as I did become slightly concused and needed time to really practice and play around with photoshop in my own time out of class, which will then make things easier for me during the next part of digital print.

Digital print day 2

 I wasnt looking too forward to the next stage of digital print, because I'm not that confident using the software yet, however this next stage involved developing our own designs into a pattern, so I can spend more time on this and learn as I go along! 

We were asked to use something representative of our family history to inspire our designs. I looked back through my Turkish culture and wanted to incorporate the blue of the evil eye into my designs. the symbol itself is quite simplistic, so I drew it first using water colours and inks before scanning it into the computer. I thought that this would be a more unique and personal way of creating a pattern, and my tutor picked up on how the ink marks would look particularly interesting on a pattern!

I firstly started to play around with colours and densitys before thinking about how I could rotate the shape and look at it from different angles. Finding ways to manipulate the shape and make it into something more interesting was very challenging, and a lot of my initial outcomes were made through trial and error. Luckily for me the drawing itself had some really interesting elements to it, especially the mark making created with inks and water colours so I didn't want to over edit my pattern as it would take away what made the design so unique in the first place. 

I really liked playing around with the scale of the pattern and overlaying my designs  so I made a repeat pattern onto the background, and then made the shape larger and overplayed it on top which I found to look the more intricate and visually exciting as it shows the sill outer of the shape as oppose to it being a solid block shape.

When it came to colour I wanted to stick to the authentic Turkish blues however I felt like deep blues greens yellows also worked quite well, so I began to develop my repeats in these colours aswell, and also used different effects so that parts  of the shapes were extracted to show the negative shape. 

I also tried to render my patterns onto some of my existing collar designs from design week

My tutor then showed me how I can use the exact same colour oft inital drawings to form a bald ground for the pattern, and this was my favourite outcome because I was amazed at how the software can detect the colour of my ink drawing and transder it onto the background. To me this was the most unique and personal design, which I think is most representative of the brief.