Week 5 I picked to do the Digital Print workshop. Prior this workshop I had used CAD before and knew the basics but wanted to improve my Photoshop skills and learn new techniques.
Started the workshop by learning what Photoshop could do and how to create simple half drop, brick drop etc. This was very helpful as it taught rotation, cropping and offsetting to create a pattern. My personal favourite was the clone stamp tool as I liked that the Repetition effect was not so structured and straight but still a repetitive pattern. We were also taught to embed a white garment with patterns by changing the opacity, scale and selection tools.
once we had gone over the techniques we were to make our own patterns using shapes/ images in our books that would be scanned into Photoshop. I chose images from paper manipulation and draping workshop and shapes influenced by Tish Murtha’s work that we visited at a gallery. I had difficulty wit my first pattern as after cropping and offsetting my pattern still had trap lines, though after some help and starting again I finally managed to grasp the steps and realised that after cropping you shouldn’t manually move the shapes instead offset immediately. After this I did not come across any other problems. I created three different patterns, a random multi-directional pattern, a half drop and another random pattern using the clone stamp tool.
From this a 110cmx50cm page was to be created combining all our patterns to form a family. I think my patterns fit well together in a family as they are not all identical but manage to coordinate due to the use of linear shapes and the shades of khaki. I chose for the family to be printed onto polyester satin as I wanted a shiny finish.
To conclude the workshop we were paired up and tasked to merge our patterns. My partner and I’s work was very different but we decided to incorporate some of my pattern shapes with her overall pattern and vice versa. I liked this task as it was interesting to get a new perspective on my own patterns and, even though the basics were the same, end up with completely different patterns.
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