Hello everyone! I’m excited about this post. We are going to continue along with our fabric development with the end goal of our “swatch” being uploaded to Spoonflower, a new fabric printing company. If you have missed Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, please check them out! This is all about creative FUN! For those of you who have been following this series and have designed something along-side of us, I’d love to see your art! Email me at: info@mammamadedesigns.com and I’d be glad to share your creations with everyone!
To pick up where we left off—I had a sketch I was pretty pleased with. Here is a reminder of what that sketch looked like:
At this point the color I used was simply to show the separation of the front and back bird. Let’s be reminded of our color scheme:
Somehow I wanted to incorporate these colors and maybe a stripe somewhere into my bird sketch. Here was the stripe I was playing with:
Or something like that.
So, my next step was actually to take apart my sketch and get it down to the original “basic” design before I added copies and flipped copies to it. For those of you needing to review some of the basic techniques in Inkscape, please refer to Post 3.
In this form, I can play with colors and textures. Once I arrive at a color scheme and pattern I really like, I can put it all back together.
[PLAY PLAY PLAY!]
Okay, that was me playing around for a couple hours. Time really does fly by when you do this stuff, but I feel really good about how it came together. And here it it:
I’m going to stick with the white background for now. You’ll probably notice that I did stray slightly from my original color scheme and the brown has a slightly more orange tone in it. The stripe could make it a bit busy, but I’m eager to see what it’s going to look like when we make our block of birds. It’s amazing how easy this is to do. You will select your entire image (make sure that all the shapes are grouped together) and right click on it and press “duplicate.” Drag the duplicate art to the side.
Play around with these buttons on the top of your bar. One little click and your image is backwards, sideways, upside-down! It’s miraculous!
Et voila! Doubled and flipped! Now I’ve grouped this together and I’m going to duplicate and flip this to give us our opposite bottom birds.
Oops! Except it didn’t work. Do you see what I did? I need to ungroup the bottom two and switch them around.
When I put them together I actually found that I liked making the birds less even than they are in the original sketch. I like how the colors play off of one another. It will be interesting to see how this “tiles.” To do this, select your image, go to EDIT/CLONE/CREATE TILED CLONES.
The Cloning feature on Inkscape is really quite cool. There are a lot of different things you can do with it. This is something else you are just going to have to play with and mess around. This was just a straightforward tiled clone for me to get an idea of what my print would look like as a whole on the fabric. I LIKE IT!
I’m going to stick with this but here is something my hubby Jon put together. He loves the randomizing mode:
Did anyone say coordinating garments? Hmmm…………I need to hire him.
Okay, we have our design, we have our colors and we have plotted out the way we want things to look. Is that it? Nope!
We need to review some technical details to make sure that you are ordering what you want.
- What size (or scale) do you want your pattern to be? Remember that fabric is 45” wide and there is a huge range of options size-wise for any pattern you create.
- How do you block off your image so that it tiles correctly? (perfect size and perfectly fits together in the tile)
- How do you save out your file to upload it properly to Spoonflower?
Once again, these are some amazing questions! You guys are so good! Let’s address them one at a time.
The Perfect Tile
Let’s get your artwork to tile perfectly. With some art, you really don’t have to do much if anything to it at all. I think I fall into that category with my bird art. I don’t really need to do anything with it. When it tiles, it looks really nice. So in this section, I’m going to use the “Ferocious Lion” art from Part 2.
Say I just loaded up this piece of art the way it is and Spoonflower tiled it to the fabric. Let’s see what would happen.
Ouch. Yuck. Let’s see this closer.
Okay! We are all agreed that this looks horrible. What is the trick to get this tile to perfectly align? I’d like to know! Well, I do know and I’m going to tell you! Yay!
The trick is to pick one point. I’m going to pick the point of the lion’s big tooth.
Click on your “square maker” on the left-hand tool maker. We are going to select the area we need.
Make sure that your “Fill” paint is selected to the X so that your box is clear when you are making it. I would recommend having your “Stroke” turned on for your initial drawing of the box. I tried to draw it here with both turned off and it kept disappearing on me. After you zoom in and correct your box you can turn the “Stroke” off as well to see your box as accurately as possible.
Close-up of tooth. Not quite on the point. Need to adjust that.
Top corner of tooth. Now you only need one more corner and that’s the bottom diagonal corner. You have those two and you have your perfect tile.
In this picture I have the “Stroke” turned on to help me draw the box. I actually found it a bit difficult to work with this thick of a line. Things would shift when I turned it off and on so I ended up making the line .001 thick and that worked just great for me. Now we have our perfect selection and you can set your “Stroke” paint off.
Looks kind of strange, doesn’t it? It works, I promise you that! We’ll test it out in a bit.
Decide The Size Of Your Art
Now is the time to decide how big or how small you want your artwork to print out on your fabric. Whatever you upload to Spoonflower, they will tile it according to the size you give them. So, if you receive your fabric and the print is super small or way too big, guess what? It’s YOUR FAULT! Well, how can we figure this out? Let’s try together. Here are the specs from Spoonflower:
RESOLUTION: Set up your image at 150 dpi (dots per inch). If you want to design an 8"x8" swatch, for example, you need to upload an image that is 1200 pixels x 1200 pixels. We will maintain each image uploaded at the size supported by 150 dpi, then tile it to fill the space of the fabric you order. If you upload an image larger than the area of fabric you order, then we will crop it from the lower left corner.
I got out my handy ruler and decided that I want my tile to be 4” across. So what I need to do is multiply 150 dpi X 4 inches which is 600 pixels. I’m going to export this selection to my desktop with this dimension.
Go to FILE/EXPORT BITMAP
So I set my Bitmap size width to 600 pixels. It adjusted to 599, but I’m sure that’s just fine. When you export this file, it will export as a .png file. Inkscape ONLY exports to .png files. We’ll discuss this in a bit.
Here is my finished tile. Crazy, eh? Just to show you it works, I’m going to tile it on my desktop. I need to make believers out of you all.
Here is is zoomed way out on my desktop. Yay, it worked!
Now that we have our “Perfect Tile” saved to our desktop (or wherever you like to save your files) we need to briefly talk about a couple things before I close. I know you are very anxious to get your artwork uploaded and printed asap! but I need to let you know that I still have a post or two left of important information to share.
Color Accuracy:
- How can we be sure that the colors we see on our screen will be the colors that will be printed out?
This is an issue that some of you may have encountered already. I have. Here is my initial lion art tile:
This is what my fabric actually looks like:
Still cute, but not what I was wanting or expecting. I was designing this fabric for my Fall 08 line. The fabric I received is more spring/summer. Now, I’m not sharing this with you because I’m displeased in anyway with Spoonflower. I am extremely happy with the quality of the printing. If anything, this shows me that I erred on my end and there is a lot more to know in regards to color. We’ll discuss all these things.
I am writing these tutorials to help us work through the process of our designs to get to the end point where we are more than pleased with the outcome. Color Accuracy and color calibration will be another post.
File Uploading:
- So now that my file has been exported as a .png file, how do I upload it to Spoonflower as they only accept .TIF files or .jpg?
Before uploading your file, you will need to convert it to the correct file format. Here are the instructions that Spoonflower gives:
FORMAT: When printing a design onto fabric using Spoonflower you'll get the best results when you upload a file in TIF format that has been created in (or converted to) LAB color space. You can also upload a JPG
or a PNG. Tip: In Photoshop you can switch to LAB format by going to the Image menu and pulling down to Mode, then checking LAB color. You'll also want to make sure that in the same menu 8 bits/channel is checked rather than 16.
CONFUSED?
If you don't have Photoshop and talking about TIF and LAB color make you anxious, don't worry. You can upload a JPG or other common image format and it will still print nicely. There may be colors in your image that can't be reproduced by pigments on fabric in our printer (very bright colors, absolute blacks, and very saturated colors, for example). If that is the case you will sometimes see all of the colors in an image shift and the colors may end up appearing different from what you expected.
Uploading an image in LAB color offers some protection against all of the colors shifting. In LAB color, if the printer encounters a color it can't reproduce it will shift only that color rather than all the colors.
We will talk about these things as well in another post. As of now, congratulations! You should feel proud that you have created and completed a finished tile!
Love, Rachel