The post you’ve all been waiting for!

I have almost no pictures from the class, but if you want to see more, there is a Flickr group for our class, and you can see photos from other folks over there. There are also “official” photos in the PNCA Summer of Making Flickr group, including this one of Heather and me looking intently at my computer. Too funny. See what I mean about this class not really lending itself to photos?

Also, Heather has written a post on her blog about the class, and Megan has a post up about it as well.

Working with Heather

The class with Heather was really wonderful. Despite the fact that we spent all day for three days sitting in a relatively dark (and very warm) computer room, staring at computer screens. Heather was smart, patient, generous, charming, witty, and most of all, fun! If you ever get a chance to do a class like this with her in the future, or to attend one of her workshops in Vermont, you should definitely do it. And as always, I think it’s great to spend the weekend with a lot of creative people with positive energy. It’s so inspiring! She was super supportive about everyone’s artwork (we started with sketching, see below), and even complemented my sketching style! That right there totally made my weekend!

Photo by Devon from San Jose

We learned a lot from Heather over the weekend about fabric design in general and her experiences. She draws a lot from her childhood, like the gnomes and the VW buses. She also talked about how she has the hardest time with projects that aren’t her story, like the Owl and the Pussycat (which she has written about before). It’s easier for her to produce art when she has a personal connection with the story.

Photo by Devon from San Jose

She talked quite a bit about her personal experiences with licensing (she is not a big fan), and about how even among what we consider to be big names in the industry (like hers!), there is a HUGE amount of discussion on how to do this and actually make money. It turns out that many people have spouses that support the household, and many of the most successful live in inexpensive parts of the country, like the South and Midwest. She said that she does fabric design because she loves it, NOT because she makes money at it. (Typically the artist gets about 13 cents per yard of fabric sold. Do the math. This is probably not paying the rent.) But stay tuned, she has some exciting new non-fabric projects coming out in the future that you will want to see (we were sworn to secrecy!)!

Details About the Class

We started the class by getting out our sketchbooks and sketching some things. Preferably things you had a personal connection to somehow. Then we played with copying and arranging the art and scanning it into the computer. We used Wacom tablets (more about those below) and the spot channel method in Photoshop (sorry, not finding a good summary of this online, and it’s way too difficult to get into!) to draw and color our artwork. Heather uses Photoshop instead of Illustrator because with Photoshop you can maintain more of a hand-drawn look precisely because it is NOT vector graphics (like Illustrator). She even commented that she has heard fabric companies are getting a little tired of seeing Illustrator art. She then showed us how to generate the repeat patterns. Basically, this is the method described by Julia Rothman on Design Sponge.

And here’s my final artwork! I have a version with a dark background as well, but that Photoshop file refuses to save as a jpg at the moment, so hopefully I’ll get to show it to you later! Kinda crazy, but we had to come up with a sketch we liked in a fairly short amount of time, and this is what I came up with! I am totally going to do a coordinating print of ottomans all lined up! Click on the photo to go to Flickr where you can view larger versions (choose “View all sizes” from Actions menu).

More About the Wacom Tablets

These are so wonderful! And the really coolest thing about them is that they are actually pressure sensitive, so the harder you press, the darker and thicker a line you get. We were using the Intuos 3 tablet ($189.95), but the Intuos 4 is now out and is only $10 more. And we did use the “small” version with the 4×6 screen that I linked to, which worked great. The bigger the tablet, the more you’re going to have to move your arm around, so small can be good!

The Bamboo is the entry level version at $60.99 on Amazon currently. There are several different varieties of Bamboo, many of which have options where you can use your fingers on the tablet as if it were a track pad or iPhone screen. I would actually recommend the Bamboo version that only works with the pen. I think this would be a lot less confusing!

The stylus that comes with the Intuos model has an eraser at the end that is really sweet. You just flip it over and erase as if it were normal pencil, no matter what tool you have selected in Photoshop. The Bamboo comes with a simpler stylus sans eraser.

I would LOVE to own one of these, but I have an issue that makes the entry level version a hard sell for me. I don’t have a nice big monitor for doing graphics. I have a little MacBook and a second small monitor that I pretty much always use when I am using Adobe programs. Neither monitor by itself has enough real estate to deal with all those panels and toolbars AND to have the file big enough to see. And from the research that I have done, the small size that we used at the class with our big iMac monitors would not work well for dual monitors. This is because you are scrunching the area for both monitors side-by-side onto the tablet. A medium tablet or bigger is recommended for multiple monitors. Sadly, the medium Intuos4 is about $300, but this is still cheaper than buying a big monitor! So, we’ll see if I can swing one of these at some point. I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to have one! I might be waiting for Christmas, though.

In summary, it was a fabulous weekend in beautiful Portland (much better weather than the last time I was there, but still way hotter than the Bay Area has been this summer!). I’m looking forward to doing more sketching and fabric designing in the future, and using the Spoonflower credit we got to have some fabric printed!