Design a Fabric Collection: Everything you need to know about designing for the fabric industry.

1. Welcome to How to Design a Fabric Collection: Hello everyone and welcome back to another course from me, Kristina Hultkrantz, I'm an illustrator and surface pattern designer from Mariefred, Sweden. I've been working with illustrations since 2007, it's like over 12 years which is crazy. But I've only been focusing on creating surface pattern designs for the past three years or so in around 2016, when I was preparing to show my work in 2017 at Surtex for the first time. This year I've had the pleasure of coming out with my own first fabric collection with Paintbrush Studio Fabrics, and I'm so proud of it, and I learned so much in the process and in this class I'd love to share my knowledge with you, everything that I learned about creating the collection and all about fabric collections. Because fabric collections are slightly different to when you're thinking about creating the motifs, and to scale in the final collection is slightly different than if you are creating a pattern collection for another industry. This class is for anybody who is interested in pattern design and would like to learn all that I know about creating a collection that is suitable for the fabric industry. This class is suitable for any and all pattern designers of any level. But you should have knowledge of creating patterns as I won't be going over how to create patterns in this class, but I have plenty of other classes that you can watch that cover those subjects. I'll be going over what hero print, secondary prints, blenders, supporter filler prints are. I'll also be going over scale and what you have to think about when creating the different sizes for your patterns, and the colors, we'll be going over colors and the amount of colors you're going to have enough fabric collection and all that stuff. All the things that you need to know to create a professional fabric collection. I know that when you're a surface pattern designer or if you are just starting out creating patterns. Maybe one of the biggest dreams is later coming out with a fabric collection, either if that is designing it yourself and printing it yourself for your own personal use, or if the company were to license your work and you'd come up with a huge collection with a company that would be even better. I really hope that this class is going to help you feel more confident when you are designing for the fabric industry so that you can pitch your work to a fabric company and it's all ready to go to be printed, and yeah. I can't wait to share all my tips and tricks with you about creating a cohesive, beautiful collection, so let's get started. 2. Your Class Project: For the class project, you will need a few things. You will need pattern design. In this class I will not be going over how to create pattern designs, but I have plenty of other classes that go for that, I have three I think, so check those out if you need help creating patterns or need inspiration for that. For the class project, you will be creating a mini fabric collection of your own with six patterns. You can either use patterns that you've already created in a collection where you can mesh them, and add to then tweak them to create a collection that's suitable for the fabric industry, or you can start from scratch, whether an idea for your overall collection and you can map out all of the different sections of your fabric collection from the hero print, to the secondary print, to the support or blender fillers, I'll be going over all of those things all in a little bit. But yeah, it's up to you how you design, whether it's on traditional media, or if you just use the computer. For this class, I'm going to show you my pattern collection that I created as an inspiration. I'll be going over that, but I will also be converting one of my previous collections that I've created and I'm going to convert it so that it's good for the fabric industry. It's nice to have both in mind that you can create a pattern collection from scratch for a fabric, or you can convert something that you already have worked on. It's great for your portfolio that you don't have to necessarily have to have a fabric collection section in your portfolio. You can have different, you can just design for all different industries, and then when you're pitching to certain industries, you can tweak them slightly, so that they work for those specific industries and the requirements that are needed. In the next video, I'm going to go over what makes a pattern collection, and everything that you need to know in order to create one of your own. 3. What is a Fabric Collection: Using the collection that I created I thought that I would go over what a fabric collection entails and all the things that you need to know if you would like to designed for fabric in the future. My collection is called cockatoos, peaches in pairs and it's made up of six designs. I think I would categorize this as being a mini collection and it's available in three colorways. I have a nice pink and blue colorway and I did like a pale peachy blush pink with wine, the wine purple and yellow, and I did a coral a green collection. Collections, they can be anywhere from like six, five piece collections all the way up to maybe 16 or 18. They can be quite large. Maybe the average could be around eight or ten, but it completely depends on the company and the collection, all that stuff. There's no real rules there. It all depends. I would say that most fabric collections come out in two or three colorways. So those are some things that you need to know. I think if you are pitching to accompany, it would be nice if you had at least two colorways to show because it can completely change the collection. What makes up a pattern collection? Usually you have a hero print and that is the star of the show. In mine I have this cockatoos and with the branches and the birds nests like my signature. I love these kind of pattern designs that I make when I combined all the different elements in a tree of life kind of thing. Since the star of the show and you've put most effort may be in most details into this one is, this is the one that's most likely going to be sold the most, is going to be the biggest portion of your collection. The hero print, I suppose we call it, the main print of your pattern collection, you have one of those. Then you should have a secondary print and this one is nice and detailed and interesting, but maybe not just as interesting as slightly different. I've chosen mine has a little bit has a darker background so we have one lightning one dark, and one is super detail and this one is slightly less detailed. As the collection goes on, it becomes less and less detailed. We have what we call a supporter print. The scale becomes smaller and smaller and for the company that I work with, these are mainly for quilting fabrics, so that's a little bit different as well. So to be thinking about quilting that usually use quite small pieces. The scale of your prints, should gets smaller and smaller. Then there's supporter blender filler prints and this is kind of like a fine line between what is the difference there, but what it means is that you have prints like it, smaller and smaller in scale and that are good for blending in and just like mixing when your main print, they don't take over they just kind of compliment the main print slightly. You see what I mean?that's how main pattern collection can be set up. If you were to have a larger collection with many more than you would have a hero print. Maybe you'd have two or three secondary prints and then you'd have three or four prints that are slightly less than the four, that are really simple, that are almost like stripes or polka dots, but will interesting, more interesting. Another thing to think about when designing for a fabric is the size of your patterns swatch. Because fabric is for the most part, still screen printed traditionally, there are other techniques like digital and stuff like that, but for the most part they screen printing. So you have to think about the screen size. Your pattern Swatch has to be divisible of 24 inches this is American sizes. So maybe your main print will be 12 inches and your secondary will be eight, and then your supporters will be six, and then your blender fillers will be four inches but this is something that you can worry about after you create your work. You can, if you want to create your own. Create your patterns on art boards of these sizes. Put it of course, if you are working in Illustrator, it's very easy to scale these. The width has to be 24 inches, but the height doesn't need. There's no specification there. You don't have to work in a perfect square. I know that many people do like to do that and, but I prefer to work in different sizes to keep my prints interesting, at least in my mind. Also because they are screen printed, you should think about your colors and how many colors that you can have. It depends on the company, of course, again, but usually around up to 16 and 18 colors are the maxima. But I think that's quite a lot of colors. It of course, is helpful if you are traditional artists and you create work that has lots of different fades of colors, that would be great. But if you're working in vector, I think it would be great if you could limit the amount of your colors to make your collection look really cohesive and simple and put together. I would suggest somewhere around six to eight, maybe up to ten colors. I chose to do my collections with eight colors. I thought that was a nice happy medium. But all of these things like scale, upward size, color are things that you can tweak later on. You can of course, have these things in mind. It's good to have in mind when you are designing so that you don't draw something incredibly huge if you're going to be scaling it down to very little, there is no point in doing all those little details that you won't be able to see. So there's good to have some things in mind, obviously. Also, in regards to color, the majority of people in the fabric industry used to pantone, TPX, the interiors, fashion in home guides. I don't personally have those guides, but I still had to pick colors from those guides and you can use pantone.com to convert your hex codes into that color guide as as close as you can. The fabric company I worked for they also helped me to pick colors that would work. You don't have to always invest in the Pantone books because they are very expensive. You can use the tools on Pantone to help you and for the most part it works pretty well to see the colors on your screen. Then of course, I think in any circumstance you have to do tests printing anyways. So that's something to consider, but you don't right away, need to invest in that. If you become a full-time of fabric designer than I definitely think you should invest in the Pantone book, but if you're just starting out, it's definitely not needed. Another thing that I learned in regards to color when I was creating these collections was about the different colorways and previously when I create different colorways, I just recolor from scratch each new colorway. I don't think about them matching in anyway. But supposedly for the quilting industry, it is important that the collections as a whole have a look and feel to them so that they should match and what I mean by that is that like my hero print all, they were all on a light background and then the secondary print was on the darkest background of collection. I just changed. So they all have the same value, can we say? Do you understand what I mean. They should all have the same look and feel throughout the different collections. They're just different colors but they are the same, kind of contrast and value. The background is light and then the same items are colored in a similar brightness or lightness. Then I have my really small print is there on the same bright color. I have one that's in a bright color all three of them. When you're creating the different colorways, they should match. But be indifferent tones like I have the blue and pink collection, I have the yellow and burgundy collection, and I have the coral and green collection, but they all evolve in built, in the same way with the same colors like a dark background and light background for the same prints. That just ensures that your collection as a whole, it's really cohesive, thought through and that it's beautiful to look at and that calmer maybe mix and match depending on the different colors that you chose. But for the most part, it just makes it look really put together and if you created projects using the same fabrics with different colorways, they look similar but they of course would just be different colors. So I think that's neat. So just to recap, what we learned in this whole section, like a cliff notes version, is that we learned that a pattern collection is made up of one hero print with a secondary print with supportive prints and blender filler prints after that and they get, it's super complex in the beginning and then they become less and less complex and they also get smaller and smaller in scale. You should be thinking about having art ports that are divisible by 24. So have like 12,8,6,4,2 in size depending on the scale of your print. But these of course can be adjusted afterwards. Then color, you should think about using maybe 8 to 10 colors but of course, if depending on your technique, you can use up to 16 to 18 colors depending on the company. Then to go above and beyond, you could even think about Pantone TPX colors to let you know which sort of colors there can be printed on fabric and use the tools on pantheon.com. or if you're willing to dish out a lot of money, you can invest in the Pantone TPX fashion in home color book. that's all the technical stuff. Now we can move on to the fine creative part of designing a pattern collection. 4. Run Through of my Fabric Collection: I thought that it would be important to do a little bit more of a structured look at my collection so that we can get a better idea of how that looks or how it's set up. So let's look at my collection preview that I've created for this collection that I came up with and it's just a simple PDF that you can have that has your contact information, your name, and the title of your collection, and then the color way name maybe you should also have names of your actual patterns, but that I have forgotten. So here is a little mock-up of the different sizes you can get an idea. So that my main hero print, the birds, is a 12-inch repeat. So this kind of gives an idea for a scale and then we have my secondary print. It is an eight-inch repeat so that's that size and then the six-inch repeat is a supporter prints, it gets smaller as we've talked about. Then here are my three blender fingerprints that are all at four inch repeats. I also have my colors here, where the Pantone TPX numbers. These are, since I don't have the actual color what is it called coloring book, then I don't have these in Illustrator, these are just hex colors that are as close as possible as I could get them using the Pantone.com color converter tools. That's pretty much all that you need to have in your preview for going to be pitching your collection to a company or showing it in your portfolio in some way. This is a great way to show it off. You could have a short text about what your collection is inspired by. Again, I think I would also add the names to your patterns, I'm not sure why I haven't done that. Again, show you the other color weighs just for fun. Here's my green one called Jungle green. Yes, nice corals. The corals printed lot more pink in real life. So that's also something that you have to consider, when you're working on something that computer colors versus what they'll actually be printed. Third color with some recession and I like this one. It's really pretty. So yeah, that's that. Again, you can see the how the collection is made up in this way by having a light background here and then having one of the fingerprints to have the same light background, and then to have a very bold dark background on the second day print is a good fun touch and then also the one of the secondary and one of the blenders humming like a medium tone backgrounds a vine and then what are the fillers to have like one of the really pops a color to really pop of color, which is obvious. So yeah, this is fun. This is how my collection turned out and I think it's very cohesive with the color palette and the popsy colors, and the use of dark colors and light colors and a medium color and then different patterns like they're all pretty messy prints, nothing that's really super plain except for maybe these are fine leaves. They're quite simple, but otherwise there is a lot going on in this collection, but that's also my style. I like carrying all the little details and stuff but I think because there are differences in how the patterns are made and the scaling that brings everything together. If you're wondering what my working files look like me, we could check that out I'm not sure. I also had a similar thing for each pattern, you look at this one. So I have my swatch of what the pattern is and then in the color. For each pattern, I have a preview as well for the collection. Here we go, where else can I show you? Then the printer files for each color way have the different in JPEGs, you can see the different swatches and JPEG and print ready PDF has a different swatches. So you can see that none of minor square, which is fine. But I always also requested to send the original AI file with all the colors separated in different layers. I made a little Look Book for the collection too. I could show you that. Here is the Look Book that I created for the collection, just use some simple mock-ups. Here I did a page with information about me, like a little mini interview about myself. I took a photo of the original sketch that I created and I show that I was drawing the iPad and inspiration books and little snippet about the collection is about. I did a little page with the main prints and complimentary prints in the different color ways you can get an idea for that. Mock-ups, Indonesia, that different collections and here I have added the names to the each different pattern and they show the different color ways. Mock-ups and here is like all fake quilt mock-up to give an idea of what that could look like. The second color way, cool berry. Same thing there in a third color way. Yeah and then information about how to please your order and stuff like that. So that's really neat. That's how that's all the things that I needed to create for this pattern collection. I did that after I was contacted by the pattern company, of course. But you could, if you were really serious about creating fabric collection, you can create one of these look books for yourself, for your collection and send that out when you are pitching your designs to a company. I think that would be very professional and if you have the time, it is not necessary to put that much amount of time into something. If you were to do a look book and maybe want to put this much effort into it. Maybe not have all color waves have become a little bit overwhelming. Maybe we'll just show off the collection with a couple of mock-ups. Interests have a couple of pages so that it's not too much for the complete to look through. That's my two cents. What else can we show you? Then I should also mention that I created a final collection preview that has the swatches in actual scales. So here's my 12 inch and we're considering 8 or 6 or 8 and 6 for this. Here are the force you could see them actually in scale together and what the sizes of my different patterns watches are. So that's what I did also, just so you know. Hopefully now you have a good feeling for what makes up a good cohesive pattern collection that this helped you a lot. In the next section, I'm going to be sharing how I convert collection that I've already created to make it good for the pattern market. But you could, of course, use the same information to start from scratch when you're creating your pattern collection. 5. Start Designing Your Collection: Okay, it is time to start designing pattern collection of your own and you can, of course, decide to draw anything you want. It can be from florals to something funky, to something super themed. It can be abstract. It's totally up to you and how your work. You can use whatever sort of color palette that you enjoy yourself also. My collection was inspired by my vintage books that I have purchased, and they are just inspiring whenever I look at them. They are beautiful old illustrations of birds and flowers and insects. I created a pattern with those and then also birds, flowers, bugs, those are always going to be popular, but there is plenty of things that are also popular you could do. You could use summer themed, having collection with popsicles and summer items, and summer hats and all that kind of stuff, or you could just create something, or under the sea pattern collection with fish and different kinds of corals and all that stuff. There is so many different patterns collections. If you need inspiration, go to your local fabric company or fabric store and see what would you find there. If anything sparks any idea in your head, otherwise, just come up with something. It is so much fun to create a fabric collection. You can have the idea that this is going to be a personal quilt for you and your family. Who knows there is so many ideas. Anyways, also, you do not necessarily have to start with the main print. I think I like to do that because that is the one that I enjoy creating the most, because it has most details, but if you create a secondary printer like more simple print and then you can work from there. It depends on how you work or you can create the simplest pattern bursts and be like, "what can I add to this?" So that the whole collection will mesh together. It is important to remember that when you are creating pattern collections, not to use the exact same motif that you draw in one pattern into another pattern and this is because of copyright. It is important to note that if you were to sell one of the patterns, then that company will then have the copyright to that. If you use the same motifs in different patterns then you would be doing copyright infringement to your other patterns if that makes sense. Just be safe and create patterns that are completely different and unique from one another. You legally, something has to be 20 percent different, but it is hard to say what 20 percent different is. What does that mean? How much is 20 percent? How do you know if it is 18 percent or 25 percent different? You can use the same things. You can make another pattern with birds, but just do not take the exact same bird, draw it completely different, in different pose, different colors, different situations and that way your patterns will be safe. That is an note on copyright and stuff like that. Make sure not to reuse the same motifs in your collection. All of the patterns should be unique. I thought that maybe we will just go into their computer and I will show you the collection that I am going to be tweaking and changing to create my new fabric collection. Yeah, and I will be taking you along with my thought process when creating all the different prints like the hero print, the secondary print and then the smaller supporter blender filler prints. We will go through all those different sections. 6. Building a Collection Part 1: We're in my computer and I thought that I would, for this class, convert one of my pattern collections that I've already created, because that's a good use of time, plus I really like this collection. It is called Paris for a day. As you can see, I only have five patterns in this collection, so I'm going to need a sixth. When I'm looking at this collection so far, resume it slightly. I don't really have a piece that is a super dee duper focal point. Maybe this one could work as my secondary piece, because it's quite detailed and stuff like this. This was also very detailed, but because of the two colors, it becomes quite simple. I would categorize this one with my toile and my balconies as a supporter print, and these two are going to be my blender filler prints, the roses and the macarons. Let's rearrange these a little bit, so that while we're working we are thinking in the same way. All right. I'm going to move my blender filler to the end, and here are my supporters. I move this one over here and here's my secondary print. I'm going to change the scale of these also. I thought I would start from the beginning. Let's look at my sketches, and where my brain was at when I was creating this collection. When I was developing this collection, I started with a sketch and this I created an Adobe sketch on my iPad. Then I quickly, I came up with the color palette and I marked out what my first ideas we're going to be, what colors I'd use for the background, so that there'll be different variations and different levels of prints. Even though I wasn't thinking about fabric, I was still thinking about the collection like having some simpler prints, like the roses and macarons, which are going to be very simple and then I would have three more complex prints, but then they'd also be three kind of different styles, and they'll be visually different and interesting. This is what my brain looks like if, you were wondering. Let's just quickly map up of what my collection, how it looked in my brain. As you can see, the final version was quite close to what I had thought of from the beginning, that's going to mean that sometimes, how that works out, but not always. The balcony print kind of got changed a little bit. Anyway, the next step after I have sketched out my ideas, is that I do the actual sketches for my patterns. Here for my toile, I made all the sketches of the different items that I wanted to include in my print. For the other print, this one is called Packing for Paris. I thought that these were the necessary items and then of course, make the final versions. I created all of these in Adobe Draw and then I made the final pattern repeat in Adobe Illustrator. But, as I was saying, I think this collection needs a hero pattern. I am creating a hero pattern with that hand-drawn half drop technique that I used. There's a class on it and I will show you a snippet of that being created right now. Here where I zoomed into my paper and I'm just using two sheets of regular printer paper. I'm going to be using my technique that I showed you in that first class, hand-drawn half drop repeat patterns. I think it's nice to show you that you don't have to draw the tree of life pattern. You can do what I'm going to be doing. It can be any kind of pattern, I'm going to be doing a flat like, with different items. But I love using this technique, because I can really see how everything comes together. This works for me and how my brain works, and how my design work comes together, meshing thing together as it goes. But feel free to use the technique that you like, to draw the motifs by themselves and build them together. Using an inspiration from Pinterest on my computer, I'm going to start drawing. I'll speed this up and hopefully you can see at least something. I'm not sure how much you can see, but it's a pretty big base of my sketch. I'm going to photograph it and bring it into my iPad to continue on and create the final ink drawing. 7. Building a Collection Part 2: Here's my hero print for this collection that I created that I thought would match what's going on already. I'm going to bring this into my collection over here. It's huge. Here is nice, square half, and then copy front. Then I'm going to just roughly look at the scaling of my collection now. Let's bring down the scale of this one, you do that by Transform Scale and bring it down to 70 maybe. Let's see what that looks like. No. We're going to do a lot more to be able to see it. Maybe that's enough. Here is my hero print. Decided we're going to stick with this scale as a rough draft and then move on to our secondary print. I think maybe this is a good scale in comparison. It's slightly smaller than the first print, but it's still quite large so you can see all the details. This one I think we need to adjust a little bit so it becomes smaller so that it doesn't take over. Let's transform scale this one, I think that's pretty good. Lets just double-check what 50 looks like. Maybe that's better not as [inaudible]. Then it becomes smaller and smaller, this becomes a completely different look. Let's move to the other supporter print like balconies print. I need this one to be smaller as well. Let's see. Scale 50. That we'll do 40. Then we move on to the blue roses. This one needs to be scaled down so it's even smaller, transform that one but I think even smaller. We'll do 30. This would quite smaller as well, I'll keep that at 20. This might be a little bit too big of a difference maybe. Let's step back. Thirty was away a little bit too much. Let's do Transform Scale. What does 40 look like? That's better. Here we go. Here's my little collection I'll put together. I think has a nice flow of different items and different styles in the color palette, pulls it all together. I have one extra color in my hero print with the purple maroon that I just could use in one of the other prints but i think it's fun to make that a little bit special. Of course, once you've laid out these different scales then you could go back into your actual swatches here I can zoom out and show the swatches of my works and then you would scale those to actual numbers divisible by 24 so maybe here my print would be 12, then this one would be eight or six depending, this the supporters would be maybe around four and then the smaller ones would be around two inches wide. 8. Thank you!: All right, that's it. Thanks so much for taking my class. I hope that this class has helped you feel more confident when you're going to be designing your collections. I can't wait to see your class projects. Please make sure to post your mini collection in the Class Project area, I can't wait to see them. All your sketches from the beginning of your ideas to the final collection with your hero print and your secondary and all the other little small filler prints. If you put them in a nice collection preview, a PDF would be even better so we can see the idea behind it with your title, and you could even write a little snippet about what it's about if you want to. Then it would also, of course, be super professional and ready to be pitched to fabric companies, now that you know what you're doing. I hope that all the information that I have supplied in this class will help you feel confident when you're going to be designing fabric collections of your own, or converting collection so that you can pitch them to fabric companies, and that you'll feel very professional when you're creating different scales and different types of prints so that it's nice selection of main prints and smaller prints. I can't wait to see your projects. Please post yours in the Project section. Feel free to either start from scratch and create your six-piece collection from scratch, from sketches all the way to final collection, or use the collection that you've already worked on and supplement or tweak it a little bit so that it looks great for fabric, or add patterns or whatever. It's totally up to you. Remember when taking these types of courses that you can make it your own. Take what you will from my information, what I'm sharing, and mix it with what you learned from other teachers and your own design intuition, and create work that is uniquely you and feels right to you. There's no method or rules when creating and designing this. What's really neat about the design world, there might be a few guidelines to follow, like creating hero prints and blender prints and all that stuff, but the middle part is up to you. I hope that you'll enjoy the process of designing as well, and make it your own. If you enjoyed my class, I would love to invite you to watch my other classes. I have plenty more having to do with pattern design, illustration, and the creative side of illustration, surface pattern design, color, and how to use the Pattern Make tool and all that stuff. I also have business classes for creatives. Please press the little "Follow" button so that you'll be notified when I come out with new classes and other announcements. While we're at it, why don't you follow me on Instagram as well at emmakisstina. If I'm shamelessly plugging myself at the end of this video, I would love to invite you to my resources email list that I have. I periodically send out emails with many workshops, and insider information, and lots of my tips and tricks to give you even more content when I'm not posting classes. It's a great way to have a nice little connection with me. If you have questions or want more feedback and stuff like that, if that sounds interesting, I'd love to have you in our little group. I'll leave the sign-up information in the class description if that sounds interesting. I think that's it. Thank you so much again for taking my class. Bye.