Transcripts
1. Introduction: My name's Samarra Khaja, and I am an artist, illustrator, graphic designer. I'm so sorry. Hang on. It's another call. We're going to make some really, really amazing stuff using the motif. I think the driving force behind a lot of my work is humor, whimsy, kind of a lightheartedness, and I really love things that are clever. So what we're going to do in the class is we're going to put on our hat that we are a souvenir maker for the place that we live. We're going to work on making a motif and I will pull from the place that I live which is New York City. We're going to sketch up some ideas, maybe write a list of possible candidates to include and then also expanding that motif into a repeat pattern. As well as pulling that motif out and maybe creating a couple of others that are used more as a hero in additional end products that we'll make together. I know. It's awesome. Now, it doesn't matter where you live you don't have to be in a place like New York City. You can be anywhere. You can be out in a very rural area and I'm sure that you can find elements that are unique to that place. How can you make something that is unique, personal, and also possibly universal in some way all at the same time?
2. Making a Motif: So, when we think about motifs, I think one good thing to really keep in mind is it really is your hero, and you can have more than one. It's like actors in a play. There are a couple of lead roles, maybe one, maybe two, and those are the anchors for the rest of the scene that's going on. So, if you see a repeat pattern or a collection of visual things together, there usually is one lead or two leads of a hero, a motif. That motif can live and stand on its own, it's fully formed, but it can also interact and gets supported and amplified by what you place around it. I think those are really great things to keep in mind when you are putting together a motif. So, ways that you would see something like that out and about would be, say dinnerware, for example. A motif might be something an element that has really got a lot of nice detail on it that you might find on dinner plates, and then you'll find glasses, and dishware, and additional parts of the collection that support the motif that is on the dining plate, for example. You can also find motifs are also a really big thing on t-shirts. A central image that, again, can stand by itself and it's a neat unique picture by itself, but then you can have other parts of clothing. You can have some pants, or a jacket, or a bow tie, and accessories, and that type of thing that echo the motif and support that main hero image you've created. In this class, we will create a motif that is based on our theme and we'll hash that out through brainstorming, and the motif will then reappear actually in two supporting pieces. We're going to create a repeat pattern that has the motif in it, and then we'll pull the motif and maybe something else from that initial repeat pattern we made. We'll create a stuff toy with it, and then we'll pull the motif again and alter it a little bit just because variety is fun, but we'll pull that into a tote bag. So, thematically, everything will be consistent and it will all be tied together with that motif.
3. Drawing Your Motif Theme: For this class, I thought it would be really fun to customize some fabric designs and repeat patterns to the place that you live. And, specifically, I was interested in the concept of creating souvenirs. Again, specific to me, I was thinking New York City, and what are the things, things that I love to, again, have in my work are an educational element as well, so really pulling out something people never knew or it's not commonly known about a place, putting that into your imagery. Also having a nice equal balance of things. So in the case of New York City, you know I was thinking we have all the boroughs, we've got Brooklyn, Bronx, Staten Island, Queens and Manhattan and so the first thing I wanted to come up with is what are some motif ideas that you might find in each of these places or even if that seemed too specific right away, just start thinking about your place in general. So I started thinking about New York City. What are the wacky things because I like wacky, that I know about the city that maybe again you wouldn't find in regular souvenirs. So, all the gum spots on the sidewalks are always something that was fascinating to me, which sounds like a really gross thing and it kind is, but in terms of a design or repeat pattern, you could put in a kind of a loose polka dot in the background of something just and you know it's something that is referencing something that is specific to the place that you're in. But, it also works as a nice visual supporting element. I was thinking about all the coffee carts that are again that's probably something that's more of a Manhattan centric thing and then specific to the coffee carts are those Greek coffee cups that's a paper coffee cup and it's totally classic to New York City. I can't remember when it was designed in the 60s maybe, these are awesome things to look up online too. When you start thinking about those quintessential items that you see where you live, if you google them and look into the history of why they exist or when they existed, who made them, how did they get to still existing now, that's the stuff that I really love and you're kind of infusing your work with the layers of history of something and then especially if it becomes a gift for somebody you're retelling the story of what that thing is and it kind of continues that curiosity which I think is fun. Water towers are huge. I love the water towers in New York City. It's amazing when they're coupled with also the state of the art buildings to see these old wooden, I think they're like anthropomorphized little creatures. These and they look like they have legs and a little hat on and they're just hanging out above the skyline. Pigeons, come on, what else do I need to say? Pigeons. Quintessential New York City thing. I was starting to think about things that were specific to places so, I lived in Jackson Heights Queens and if you are at 81st Street in Jackson Heights and you look up at the street sign there you will see that it is written like scrabble tiles and that's when you come to find out Scrabble was invented in Jackson Heights in Queens, in that area which is awesome. So I think something like the scrabble tile could be really cool and we can even do like the word Queens in Brooklyn, one of my absolute favorite things has always been there's a metal set of trees on Flatbush Avenue, and I don't actually remember how long they've been there. Decades and they've gone through a few iterations of being restored, and then also kind of falling apart and then people have come back and restored them again. I think they have floral stickers on them right now. But it was a sign that was right at the corner of Flatbush Avenue and it says Flatbush Avenue on it, and it's just a great old piece of sculpture. Graphic design because it's kind of nice and 60s 70s vibe to it. So maybe I don't want to put in a taxicab but I do love the yellow, that's going to be a given and then I do like skylines. I'm not sure that I'm going to be specific to any iconic buildings that we all know full and well because I kind of want this to be more about all the boroughs. Even the subway stations the green glass lights that are at the entryway of all the subway entrances and it's that same kind of old metal work that the fire boxes are made of. And if you really look at them they have some beautiful ornate patterns on the basis of them are right above where the glass domes are. It's not only bringing the things that I know about but also write the list about the things that you don't know about that you think, oh wait hang on a second, I always say whatever that thing is and then look it up and see if it's something that has an amazing history to it or you know is somehow like wow I really had no idea about half of this stuff. Let's say based on what we have here, I really think what feels like it will visually be pretty interesting and also kind of give some some spotlight on each of the boroughs was going to be, I think we'll do the Flatbush signage. I think that's cool. We'll do the Staten Island ferry and I think will do for the Bronx I want to do the carrot cake and I will definitely we have to do the scrabble for Queens and I know again with Manhattan there's a whole bunch of stuff that is kind of interchangeable and we've seen it. It's just the fact that I don't think you often see it in souvenir form, so we're definitely going to do a water tower and I'll do the coffee cup and actually one other thing I forgot was kind of the old school subway tokens, before the metro cards which are kind of cool too. But, you know, before that is really neat is the old token that had the little Y shaped cut out of them and I have one somewhere because I collect things. Those are fun too so we'll do subway token and I think I'm feeling like in my version, my hero my main motif which we're going- I think we're what we'll do is we'll create a repeat pattern using all of this first and we will incorporate a pigeon. So my pigeon will be in there where we'll bring in all these other elements, will create a repeat design and then we'll move on to creating a stuffed toy aka Stuffy that pulls a couple of those motifs out and kind of refashioned them into that end piece.
4. Designing Your Pattern: We are going to build the elements within Illustrator. Again, don't get concerned if you don't have all of these things because you can do things on paper and put them together. We can even really super old schools; scissors, tape, we can do it that way. But this is the way that we're going to build this particular repeat in Illustrator. What I started with was creating a 10 inch square art board, and for the sake of this because some repeat patterns are very clean like a polka dot for example, it's a basic repeat, everything is contained if you were to put a square around the set of boxes. Usually, they are all within that shape. So, there's nothing that overlaps and there is no bleed on one edge that you have to ensure it shows up on the other side to make a seamless repeat. In the case of what I'm doing with this repeat design, I do want that. I personally, I'm a fan of repeats that you can't tell where the master swatch is. I like them to be pretty complicated and dense. So that really any vignette within it looks full and it's not like there's a negative space that seems like it was just a secondary occurrence. So, because of that, for this particular project, we're going to create this 10 inch square art board and I'm going to begin with my hero, the pigeon, and will zoom in here and I think, again, I also personally I'm a huge fan of things that are slightly comical and have extra layers of personality to them. So, it's not just going to be any pigeon. He's got an attitude and you can decide if that is needy and forlorn or if he's had enough and he's a total NewYorker. So, I've got my little pigeon, and he is happy to be here. So, I feel like Bob Ross, mother pigeon, has his little beak, and he's standing here. This is a really nice easy way to create your repeat. If we go under symbols, can create a symbol, and you're going to leave it as a graphic. What we've done, if you look up over here, is the pigeon is now a swatch. In the case of this one we're going to make a brick repeat. So, we want three instances across the top, four in the middle, and three again on the bottom. So, here is my original pigeon, and if you look under here it's under these symbols. So now, we go into the instance. Say I want to add some big bubble like that. I've done it in the swatch palette. So now, I double click out and that circle appears at each one of those increments to give me the break repeat that I want. So, this is our main swatch and any one of them can be your main swatch because they are instances of it but I'm going to stick with this particular one so that there's consistency for you. So again, just for fun, I'll show you. Say we do a whole bunch of this, and then we double click out of the swatch, and you see that the instance has repeated itself. So, I like this way of working because it gives you a lot of flexibility to come back in and nothing is set in stone. Here are my other motifs that we talked about. I have my shout out to Queens with the Scrabble tiles, the Brooklyn Flatbush trees that I mentioned, Staten Island Ferry, the steam pipes, my water tower, and I made a coffee cup. In the case of the coffee cup, I thought it would be fun to personalize it and change up the Greekish lettering, the Greek style lettering and make it say wish you were here, and then a subway token. So, what we'll do is I draw all of these on the side on the art board itself and now what I'm going to do is pull one of them, copy and paste it, go into the swatch and start building it around our central pigeon. Central pigeon, sounds like a good name for something. Welcome to central pigeon. So now we double click and we're back in the swatch palette. I'm going to get rid of these spots. That was just for showing you how everything does repeat, and we copied that Queen's Scrabble tile, and we're going to paste it within the pigeon. I'm going to print it up there. Double click out. What I'm doing right now is just bringing in my elements. I mean, you could just do a quick copy and paste and bring it in but because I've got everything aligned, some things are going to overlap. So, I like to be particular about at least when I initially bring it in, try not to make a giant mess out of it, which a giant mess is fine. You can make a giant mess and then work through it if that's also part of your process. I do like a lot of anthropomorphized characters so I did the skyline, I can zoom into the skyline, and I thought it would be fun on these watertowers to put little faces on them. Not on the main one because again, the main watertower is a supporting element within the motif or within the pattern and the pigeon is in my, how I'm approaching this, that the pigeon is the hero. So, I didn't want an anthropomorphized watertower to distract from the pigeon's expression. So now, we're going to stay in the swatch for you. So everything else gets lightened whatever percentage. So, you can see where everything else is on the swatch but the ones that are at 100 percent color are the ones that you are live for us to move around. So, we can really get an idea of where we want to place everything.
5. Building Your Pattern in Illustrator: When you've created a pattern, and yes, something does seem strange, there are a few things. First of all, you can play with scale of each component, makes some things bigger, make something smaller. If something seems like it should be bigger, make it bigger and then make it a little bit bigger than that. Go further than you think feels right because the exploration of going too far in one direction or another will help you actually hold in on where that thing needs to be and how it needs to look. So, always, if you think, "Oh, yeah, that's great." Do a little bit more because you'll be surprised. Sometimes, something you'll be absolutely sure there was no way that needed to be positioned like that or be that big or small. But there will be other times where you think, "Oh, I'm glad I tried that because now look at what it does like this." Having an emphasis change can really enhance the overall look. So, that's one thing to do. Another thing to do when you're not quite sure and you're thinking there are holes in a repeat is you can actually, one thing is you could print the whole thing out and look at it from a distance, look at it up close. When you're working at your computer, it's nice to see it from that distance, but when you get further away if you zoom out and you step back, you might see something in that pattern that really bothers you, some weird flow of negative space that now seems to be really off. So, look at it close, look at it from far away, also look at it in a mirror if you can. If you can print out what you're working on, hold it up to the mirror and look at it backwards or even take a mirror and hold it up to your screen and look at it. If it feels like it works in reverse, then you are really working in the right direction, because it balance works no matter what direction the repeat is in. If it's face up, if you're looking at it upside down, and again at a distance, it really should just feel well-balanced. Use those tools to help you hone in on the set up that is really appealing to you. I like to add a nice amount of, well, first I like bright colors and I love a lot of little added things in the background. So, what I'm going to do here is maybe we'll add in some stars, take some of the stars that I had made, and we've got extra clouds. Those are really tertiary items. So, you have your hero motif, your main, we've got pigeon, then we have the supporting, little vignettes, the little motifs for each one of the burrows, and then I thought just for fun we go and add some clouds, and stars, something that really can tie the whole thing together that you can sprinkle into the background, just to give it balance and flow. So, again, each little swatch doesn't seem like a static thing, just a line next to each other but there really is kind of flow between everything. This is where we are with our pattern so far. I think it's looking pretty good to me. The only thing that I want to do is you can see in this area like there's a big bunch of negative space. There are few things you could do. If you feel like your elements are off, you can go in like we said before and adjust your sizes. You can change your colors. If you think when you zoom out, for example with this, if I actually really like the colors that I've chosen and they're accurate to the real thing so I wouldn't make the Staten Island Ferry another color other than orange and the same with the steam pipes, I chose to make them two different oranges just because we could have that nice variety. Then if you look in the pigeon's eyes closely, look deep into his eyes, he's got the same colors are brought through there, same with the carrot cake. I think it gives good variety and dimension. I just want to fill in with some additional stars, so I'm going to copy and paste them and maybe rotate them. When you're doing those filler elements, it is definitely easy to copy and paste them and then just fill them up. I think if they are a uniform thing like a spot that type of shape that symmetrical, I think that works easily. But in the case of something like the stars or clouds, it's nice to have variation. You've gone this far with your design so why not add a little extra love into more unique little instances of something. So, sometimes what I'll do is I'll bring in that star that I had in a couple other places and I will actually go under my object palette and I'll just reflect it which flips it. So, it gives the variation and looks like a whole new instance of a star, but it actually was the same one from before and I just was kind of half lazy about repeating it but making parts of it new again. All right. Let's come out of this view. Everything has now refreshed itself and come into what it would look like in repeat form. Again, sometimes if you're feeling this is all overwhelming and you feel you've worked on it enough, one thing I do definitely which I recommend is stepping away from it and giving it a little while and coming back to it, because there is no rush. It's very possible you'll see something when you look at what you're working on later and realize, "Oh, yeah. No, I never wanted it to look like that, I want to switch this out." So, if you have the time, don't feel like you need to complete it all in one go, it can really make a work be better if you take a little longer on it.
6. Motif Pattern into Product: Fabric: Now that I have the repeat where I want it, I'm going to go back over here because I forgot these guys. We don't need our originals anymore that we had brought into the swatch view. So, since they're already in the pattern, they've been used, and everything has been placed. So, everything looks like this on your 10 x 10 inch art board, and we're going to export it. So, we're going to save it here, Export As, and we'll do New York City Pigeon Repeat. The important thing is to use the Artboard. Click that at the bottom before you export. If you see then, that will crop your swatch to the Artboard only. So, all that stuff that we talked about that was off the Artboard goes away. I'm going to keep it at a medium PPI for this, and transparent is fine. So, we click Okay. Look, I'm going to bring over Photoshop, and this is our file. Now that we have cropped it, the PNG file. As you can see, it's perfectly repeating at all edges, so this is ready to be tiled. So, at this point, you have your finished swatch, and it's ready in all its beautiful repeat glory. I like to use places like Spoonflower. It's a wonderful source to print wallpaper, gift wrap, all sorts of fabric, and they have a gazillion substrates. Substrate means the type of fabric that it's getting printed on. So, you can have linen, you can of Jersey, you can have a whole bunch of different cotton types. There are canvases. So, you can choose the weight of the fabric, the brightness of the fabric, because they do vary between substrates. Some are a bit more earth toney, kind of muslin colored, and some are super bright white. So, you can get different printing on different substrates, which is fun. So, what I'm going to do is, take our souvenir repeat that we just made and upload it to Spoonflower, and make a nice big amount of fabric that we can turn into a whole bunch of fun stuff. My profile on Spoonflower, so sammyk. Now, we go to, when you're on Spoonflower, you can go to Design and Upload, and it'll bring you to this window. If you're not familiar with the file preparations, you can just go on their site, but I already know what they are, so, acceptable formats. We have a PNG that we just created, and a 150 DPI is recommended. So, we're going to choose our file type. We are going into our folder where we had created our final PNG file. I have it here uploaded. Confirm copyright, and yes, I created all of this from scratch myself. I'm a big believer in that. Redraw, recreate, make it yours. So, I own the rights to that. Now, we're going to upload that file, and it'll just take a few minutes. Okay. So now, you see the view on Spoonflower. You can see your fabric and now in repeat. We're going to select the basic repeat because what we did in our originals, we actually built in the repeat. You can create files where you just bring in one element. So, say, we just brought in our pigeon. Could just bring the pigeon in, upload that, and you can fix the the repeat type. Do an automated version within the navigation itself. But for us, we're just going to choose basic because it'll repeat it the way we want it. I think I'm going to select the Organic Cotton Sateen Ultra, and I think the Organic Cotton Sateen Ultra is a really nice option, and I'm going to pack a yard of that. Maybe two yards. And this is, again, I think this is going to be nice to make either a curtain. You could make a really awesome kitchen curtain with just an easy panel for somebody. Making like a duvet-type cover, or a daybed, some sort of covering like that, or a pillowcase cover. There are a lot of really fun things you can just do with a straight fabric repeat. So, I've selected all my options, and I'm going to add that to my cart, and I am ready to get my fabric.
7. Motif Pattern into Product: Stuffy: Here's the really fun part with, well, it was all fun. So far, we're having fun, right? We've created our repeat, and this is another opportunity to brainstorm and come up with additional supporting items that we're going to make after we've made the repeat fabric. Remember, that's kind of like our big show. We've got all the players that are in this performance, in this final picture, and there are all these elements, and we have our hero pigeon. Now, what we can do is, I think, I'm going to pull one or two elements out from that original repeat file, rejig them a little bit and position them so that we can make a nice stuffy out of them. So, what I'm going to do is I've taken my pigeon and I'm taking the water tower. Now, I think if you remember when I was showing you, and I said, "I do like to anthropomorphize some things," and in the case of the repeat, I have a vision that I want a water tower with a face, but I didn't want that in my repeat because I didn't want it to compete with the pigeon, who is my main character in the repeat pattern. So, instead, I put the faces in my supporting background silhouette of some water towers, and you can see the tie in between those pieces there. So, what I'm going to do is, just for reference, I'm going to pull my water tower out, and I will take the pigeon as is, and we're going to open a new file. In the case of this, I'm setting up my document to be exact to Spoonflower specifications because I want to use the minky substrate, which got a little bit of a fuzzy pile to it, which is great for stuffed toys. So, because of that, what I did was went on to Spoonflower, found out what their dimensions are for a yard of minky fabric. Because I'm actually going to make two of these, but you might want to make just one. That's why I used a yard but otherwise, you can use a fat quarter or smaller amounts. I sized my artboard to 54 inches wide by 36 inches tall. So, that's a yard by 54-inch width fabric. You'll discover that for orienting your files for when they go on Spoonflower, everything has to be turned sideways if you're doing something like the dimension I'm going to do for the water tower. So, this is the final size. But for now, we're going to draw things upright so we can get the image to look the way we want it to. So, I brought in the water tower. I don't think I'm going to use the water tower just the way it is. I don't want the letters on it anymore. I'm going to ungroup it. In this case, we're working directly on the artboard. We're not doing anything in a swatch-view because we don't need to repeat it. So, here's the vision I have in my head, is a water tower with eyes and a mouth, smiley face, and he's going to have a little pigeon up on his water tower hat. Because it's a stuffy, it's two-sided, and as much as you can repeat your front on the back, it doesn't make much sense because it's a toy. There should be, at least for what I'm doing, there'll be a face and a front, and then the back side. So, since the pigeon repeats, we want to show the back of the pigeon on the back of the stuffy. So, I'm going to make two versions of the pigeon. The one that I have highlighted, he's going to be the one on the front side. So, I'm just going to reflect him. So, this is what he'll look like when he is on the water tower. I'm not going to size him yet. I don't want to do that because both the front and the back need to be the same size. So, let me size them together, make them a little bit closer to the scale they're going to be, and I'll zoom in. Now, this is kind of a fun thing because this is going to be the back of the pigeon. I am going to remove his eyes. It's all okay. This is the back of his head. Let's see, this. I'm going to send the front of the beak to the back of the beak. Do you see how immediately doing that? He looks like he's turned his head back the other way. So, it does really look like you're seeing the back of the pigeon all of a sudden. Actually, I think this is all I needed to make the back of him. So, we removed his eyes and just stuck his beak behind him. I'm going to group it all again, and I'm going to take her around with the water tower, make it look a little bit different, maybe bring in some more vivid color, and I will want the legs longer. Right now, as you can totally see, I'm just working on the artboard, but it doesn't matter where anything's placed. We'll place it all for real in a minute. Right now, this is the creative part, don't-let-anything-get-in-your-way stuff area. So, here is where we've ended up. We have our little pigeon. This is going to be the front, this is going to be the back, and I went in and added eyes and a mouth, just like I told you I would to our water tower, and I thought it would be fun to write on the back "With love from NYC." Because again, I imagine that this is something that's being given to friends of mine. So, it's like a memento of the place of me and something that they would like. So, it's a fun little mash up. So, there's a message there. You could do something like that on the back. What I've done is created two panels and I've just spaced them evenly. My plan is, there's a little thin white line I also created around it, which will make it easier when you do upload and get your fabric from Spoonflower to be able to know where you want to sew everything together so it aligns properly. So, here we go. I've created this, and like I said, I'm making two of these. If you're making one, you'll only do this once, but here is one complete set of front and back. So, I'm going to group them and turn them on their side. The reason for doing this is when you upload to Spoonflower, there are those dimensions that I mentioned before, and this is for a yard of the minky fabric, is 54 inches by 36. So, I wanted to maximize what I would get on a yard of that. When you have the ability to build your files, yourself in Illustrator, you can really maximize the fabric that you're ordering, and you can get as much printed on the sizes that are available. So, what I've done is I just duplicated it because like I said to you, I was going to make two of them, and I'm just going to confirm that they are aligned to each other. So now, that they're aligned, I'm going to group them, and I'm going to center all of this on my artboard. This is what we have. We've got our pigeon, the front and back, and the water tower, very happy water tower, and I also pulled in the clouds which are again, carrying through the same cloud that we used in the repeat, but it was just blue circles in that original, and I just inverted the color. I've used the same color palette, as in the repeat design, so that we have continuity between the pieces, and this file is now ready to create a PNG export file ready to upload. So, I'm going to do that now. I'm going to put final. I'm notorious for making a gob of versions of things. So, it's always good to number your files, and then when you believe you're done, I always use the word final. Now remember, we have to click Use Artboard, Export, and this is also will keep this at 150 transparent. Everything looks good there. So, that is done. So, here we are back at our Spoonflower upload page. So, we're going to find that stuffy file. What did I call it? Here, Stephanie, I've chosen that file, I own the rights. I've created it myself, Upload File. One other thing I like to do sometimes is bring in the PNG file that I've just created in Illustrator, bring it into Photoshop because I can then pump up the saturation just a little bit, and I always find that that just makes everything a little bit more vibrant, and that's a fun thing to do before you upload it as well. So, here, we have the stuffy, and I want the minky just down here, and you see it already gives you the the default to a yard, which is what I wanted. So now, I've got both sets of stuffy panels ready, and we will add that to our cart.
8. Motif Pattern into Product: Tote Bag: Okay. So, we've created our stuffy now and the third part of this collection, our souvenir collection for New York City is going to be a tote bag, because who doesn't need one of those? We are going to now build the art board for the tote bag. In my case, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to make two tote bags. So, I will use a yard's worth of art board space to create each panel for that. So, I've set up my art board to be 54 by 36. If you look here over in the layers, I created the same yellow background that we used in the repeat background, and I've made it the same size and we've locked it because we don't need that to move around. We're going to work with everything facing upright and then once we get it the way we want it, we're going to panel it and get it ready for uploading to Spoonflower. So, I brought over my trusty pigeon and I think in this case, since he's been facing this way, for variety's sake, I just want to turn him back the other way, and we're going to make him a little bit bigger. Now, the "Wish You Were Here", I think, what we're going to do is I'm going to change the positioning of the cup. I'm going to ungroup it because I think this is a fun opportunity again to have a similar motif. This is a great thing about when you create a collection and you get to do it yourself is you can have things look similar but then you can switch up little details in them. So, it's the same but there's something new to find, which as I said to you before, that's one thing I absolutely love in any design. It's like a new little eureka thing to spot in something. So, we're going to take the lettering but I want it to say something different, and I think what it should be is a classic New York thing to say. So, I'm going to start writing it here. This is also, so we have, "Fuggedaboutit" which is, again, if you're from New York, you know what that means. So also, when you're making your own collection of souvenirs, think about that as well. Not only the events and things that you see and know about the area but things people say, maybe colloquialisms. Got it. Maybe just some fun local sayings and that type of thing are really a neat addition to add to your collection. So, I've done that, added that in. We don't need the "Wish You Were Here" anymore, and I'm going to move it over to our pigeon and this is what I've done is we've placed the cup and I thought it would be extra funny to make it look like he's holding it, and he's your average grumpy New Yorker headed to work and he's got his morning coffee. So, we have him ready and I think this is extra funny to add to it because I'm all about what's comical. Let's go ahead and put that there. There we have it. Seriously people, forget about it. So, we have pigeon ready. Pigeon ready, we are pigeon ready. We're going to group it and all we need to do now is upload or prepare our art board. What I'm going to do in the case of this is you remember that for the stuffy we made the reverse side of the pigeon, so you saw the back of the water tower and the pigeon. You can do that again if you want to. This is also a fun opportunity just to explore different things. So, what I opted to do in this case was just repeat the pigeon and so it's on the front in the back. I know some tote bags have different fronts, different backs, or you could actually why not make it look similar to the stuffy so you show the reverse side or the backside or something so it's feels like a complete object being seen in 3D. But for this case, for this situation, we'll just flip. We'll just make the same panel. So, I'm aligning everything. We're going to put one set here and like I said, I'm going to make another tote bag over here. So, my plan is I will cut the fabric along this line and we're just going to have two panels here, and then they can just be folded and that makes your sewing super fast as well, which is another bonus to all of this. So, let's just make sure these guys are aligned and they're aligned here so we can make two bags that are the same. All right. So, now, we'll just erase other stuff that we have on the outside just to be safe here, and we're going to export this. We will call it our New York City pigeon tote, and same 150 ppi, transparent, and we're all good there. Let's select OK. Now, we'll go back over to Spoonflower where we had our last file and we're going to go to our upload screen again. We will choose the file, upload file, while uploading, uploading file. So, now, we've uploaded it. This is our pigeon tote and we will go into our fabric type, and I like the linen cotton canvas for this. It's one of my favorite fabric types that that's Spoonflower carries. So, we're going to keep it at one yard. So, as you can see on the panel here where we got two full tote bags out of this. So, we're going to add that to our cart.
9. Your Cohesive Motif: So as you know we uploaded everything to Spoonflower and I received everything back, all the printed, lushest, glorious fabric, which is right here. And I want to show you what everything looks like. So the first thing was the repeat fabric. This is on the satin fabric substrate which is awesome. It's got this little sheen to it, and you can see all the elements are really nice and big, which is how I wanted them. This would make a perfect kitchen curtain or any kind of, like a day bed accent or pillow cover, a sham action or any kind of like a duvet or that type of a fun little guest room edition. That would be a fun thing to do with this fabric. Really it's pretty and less. But you get a sense of what our repeat design looks. How great all the colors look in the final project and I'm really pretty happy with this. Not pretty, I'm really happy with this. So there's that. Next is the stuffy fabric and this is how we received it from Spoonflower. This is the minky fabric, the front and back panel and our little pigeon. So everything looks like that. And then what I did was cut it out, sew it together and made this friend. And my children want this right away, so it was very hard to keep it here for you to see. But in all its glory, with love from NYC is the water tower stuffy, exclusive souvenir by me and you will make something like this too. So it's a really fun, really unique thing to make and give to people. So we have the stuffy. And then last but not least is our, forget about it, pigeon tote which came from Spoonflower looking like this. This is half of a yard that I cut. So that's what it looks like. And what's so great about this, like we said when I was showing you how we set it all up is we're just going to sew it up like this, so you already have the panels, the front and back attached for the bag and looks like this. I know, I know. It's awesome, right? And inside I actually paired it with some of my, one of my latest fabric lines with Lecien fabrics. This is made in Japan fabric and you can find this in sewing stores all over the place and online. And I decided to make an internal pocket because pockets, awesome. So, I thought this was a great way to to trick the whole thing out, make a fun tote bag that speaks to the city. The pigeon, me, all of that super fun. Thank you so much for taking the class. I hope you had fun. I really think that your goal should be to have as much fun as possible. Make sure that you really delve into the depths of your brain when you're brainstorming things, come up with any and everything that's related to what's around you and what you see is important and nostalgic and amazing about where you live. And also don't let my projects, let that just be the beginning of what you come up with for yours. You can do things like make oven mitts, make little potholders, stuff for the kitchen. You could easily make pieces of clothing. There's a jersey knit, you can make a t-shirt. You could even take your motif of the pigeon, put that on a t-shirt. There are so many options and really the sky's the limit and I want you to have a lot of fun. That's the most important thing. I look forward to seeing what you upload. Upload everything. I need to see it with my eyes. We're like this. We're like friends, best friends. So, thanks again and enjoy. Have fun. Souvenir time. Custom souvenirs by you and by me.
10. What's Next?: way.
Samarra Khaja, Pattern-maker, Designer
