Print: CAD

This next technical block was all about cad and digital printing this is where I learnt some new skills, which involved Photoshop. I had very little experience on Photoshop although I have used it before.

My brief was to design 6 20cm x 20cm patterns involving my drawings from my swatch book which I had design in my first drawing week from my initial toy collection.

But first I need a refresher in how to use Photoshop and some key tools to help me. Here I’m using an image of a flower.

Using magic wand (selecting something)

Using the magic wand select the pink area of the flower, maybe a tolerance level of 100 his will select most of the outer edges of the flower

Using the elliptical marquee whilst pressing the shift key, select the remaining unselected interior of the flower. Shift key: adds selection, Alt key removes selection.

Continue until all the unselected areas inside the flower have been added.

Once selected copy the flower. Ctr/C

Choose edit paste (Ctr /V) and a new flower will appear in a new layer

Create a new layer and fill with a colour of your choice using the paint bucket tool.

Drag the new layer underneath the layer of your selected flower.

Making a block repeat

To create a block repeat you first need to merge all the layers before you can define the pattern. Merge the layers you are using for the pattern and the edit/ define pattern. A small window will appear confirming the defined selection.

Create a new A4 file (Ctr/N) fill the A4 file with the selected pattern. Choose Edit/Fill another small window will appear with some dropdown menu pattern and select your pattern from the thumbnail menu.

Then the A4 page should be filled with your choosen pattern

Create an all over pattern.

Separate the flower and copy into a new file (20x20) then duplicate the flower layer and move the flower to another location on the page. Keep duplicating and moving the flower until the page is full without going over the edges. Then merge the layers.

Offset the pattern to find the corners (filter/other/offset). A small options window will appear and simply move the sliders in any direction until the design covers the corners.

Copy and paste the flower from the original file and duplicate to fill in the gaps.

Once the gap is filed merge the layers again and offset again to fill in the rest of the gaps. Keep doing this until the design is completely filled in.

When the design is ready choose edit/define the pattern. Then create a new but bigger file and choose edit/ fill with the pattern. You should end up with a file covered in the pattern repeating perfectly.

These are some of the techniques that I found would be useful when creating my patterns. Here are some examples of my experiments with using techniques on Photoshop and different patterns before deciding on my final 6. The colours have been inspired from my colour samples as well as some of my previous technical blocks.

I then decide on these 7 samples as my final to represent my cad technical block.