This is a blog post on digital fabric design with adobe photoshop. It is a very big topic to write in a blog post. However, I have now gained much more confidence in using Adobe Photoshop and want to write about it. I am pretty much a nature person trying to use everything natural so why digital fabric design. It is good the environment as you one print on demand compared to traditional printing methods. Also, many fabrics are also now eco friendly and made of recycle materials. It gives a great more usage as us correctly it can create lots of wonderful patterns and repeat. While this blog post is not about how to create a pattern using Photoshop but it says how one can develop skills digitally in textile design.
However, Adobe subscription is not exactly cheap for about £40/ month with special discount. Of course if you sign up for just Adobe Photoshop app it is cheaper. But with digital fabric/ textile design one will definitely need Illustrator as it works differently but hand in hand with Photoshop.
Books on digital fabric design with Adobe photoshop
I am self-taught main using Adobe photoshop and illustrator. I learn from books and online courses. The books were many mainly were Digital textile design by Melanie Bowles and Ceri Isaac. Although it is done on old CS5 version many of its application still works with Adobe CC version. The CC version gives clear instructions on how to do what you set out to do. There is also Print, Make and Wear as great books on creating patterns using adobe. Another good book I found is The complete guide to Designing and Printing Fabric by Laurie Wisbrun.
The online course in which I have to learn photoshop skills was from Creativebug. Here is a blog post on it. It is a great course although it is quite old.
What I found along the way is that, at first it completely alien to me. After repeating the same pattern a few times I got the hang of using Adobe. more confident in using the tools and the settings. This mainly only for repeats and pattern design. Not at all for photo manipulation as it is a completely different set. Now that adobe Photoshop is also available on the iPad I use an Apple pencil which acts as a digital draw pad. This gives a big advantage in the world of just drawing in a sketchbook. One can also open images on the Adobe Fresco app on smartphones.
As an, I have now created a few fabric samples and printed them on Spoonflower. So all the great news that I can now design my own fabric in which I can sew. It is still a long way to go but it is a start.
