Scarves finally ready to be printed!!!

detail of autumn dawn scarf

An intense couple of weeks but the whole Photoshop thing has finally clicked and that's all I'm going to say- it was a bit like the day when (aged 15) I suddenly realised how algebra worked... still couldn't fathom its use out but I had a vague idea of how to do it - the result being a much needed maths 'O' level first time round!!! Lets hope Photoshop proves as useful and enduring.. Incidentally and completely irrelevant but I now live with a man who does equations and calculus for fun!

My module brief was to make two different, but matching, scarf designs inspired by Liberty style, a style I have always loved.  Each design had to be presented in two different colourways. From the outset I made this module my mission to overcome my aversion to digital design and find a way to incorporate computer aided design into my future work.  This required several hours of online Photoshop tutorials and really starting from the basics but I am very pleased with the results and can see ways of using it as a tool - bit like a paintbrush -  in future, I was so enamoured I'm even considering a graphics tablet!!!

I decided my designs would depend heavily on my sketched line drawings of flowers collected over the summer and taken from our holiday jaunts and some additional from photographs also taken while travelling - I wanted to bring some movement into the design so I added some hares I sketched last autumn.   Recent module colour palates have been fraught with various difficulty but this time it came together really nicely and I have a spring summer collection representing the spring and summer flowers in blues and pale creams and a winter complementary design in warm oranges and reds - two very different palates but looking really nice. The first scarf - detail pictured above -  I did by scanning my drawings into PS and working them from there.  This was an excellent opportunity to learn everything about PS and more... which is exactly what I did.So this design was all done digitally on Photoshop.  (I'm sooooo proud of myself)

The second design was an attempt to marry PS into my way of working - so I hand placed the drawings and then traced them up into a tidy copy and then hand coloured them using promarkers. Once coloured I scanned them into PS and finished the design from there digitally. I didn't enhance to colours but used PS for background and borders again I was very pleased with the result.  The line drawings work nicely and give an illustrated kind of effect - to make the scarves more personal to me I added a little poem about hares in the seasons around as a border.

I'm very excited to see the final printed scarves hopefully available next week but in the meantime here are two pictures of detail of each of the designs and each colourway.

detail of summer dusk scarf