Illustrated Textiles: Design, Print and Sew a Cushion

1. Illustrated Textiles: About this Class: Hi, my name is Ellie Shipman and I'm a participatory artist, illustrator, and pattern designer. I work across all media, but have a particular love of textiles, which I use in everything from a participatory public art pieces to personal craft projects. I love being cozy. I'm constantly making cushions for my own home and that is what I want to share with you today. We're going to be designing, digitally printing, and sewing our own cushion cover in this class. The lessons for this project will be broken down into key achievable milestones. Interior design research and finding inspiration at home. Where we will explore our own homes with our cameras and reflect on our own unique interior design style. Making a moodboard, and setting your creative brief. We will add the photos we've taken around our home, as well as some research through Pinterest into our own unique moodboard. Drawing thumbnail sketches using different illustration techniques. We will explore drawing abstract shapes, continuous line drawing and digital collage. Reflecting on our moodboard and brief as we go. Designing your cushion placement print. We will develop our final designs using Illustrator or Photoshop, or by hand, using paper and pens, if you like. We will finalize our designs digitally and upload them to a digital fabric printer. Sewing your cushion cover. Once we've received or fabric in the post, we will sew it into our final cushion cover. By the end of this class, you will have a unique, handmade, digitally printed cushion. You will learn and develop a range of skills in this class, from experimenting with different drawing techniques to digital skills in Photoshop and Illustrator, to machine sewing your own cushion. You'll be invited to upload key milestones into the project gallery, including your moodboard, your thumbnail sketches, your final design, and ultimately a photo of your finished cushion cover. Once you start printing on fabric, the sky is the limit. You could design and print fabric for your own clothing, bedding, homewares, and so much more. Thank you so much for watching. I look forward to seeing you in the class. 2. Your Class Project: For this course project we'll be designing, digitally printing and sawing our own illustrated cushion cover. By the end of the class, you will have your own unique illustrated cushion cover to use as a prototype for other textile projects. Feel great to practice or simply to enjoy in your own home. The class project will consist of uploads from each lesson, real project brief to your moodboard, thumbnail sketches, final design, and finally a photo of your finished cushion cover. Make sure to upload every lesson stage so I can answer any questions you might have and support your learning process. I'm here to help, so don't hesitate to get in touch. I want to share this project with you because in my opinion, you just can't be feeling cozy and making your home more beautiful and what better way to do that than with a unique vision cover that you've designed.This class is a brilliant first step to seeing digitally printed products with your own artwork and seeing your designs come to life on fabric. It's a great place to start if you're a beginner, so as well as the simple cushion cover will help you get to grips with the basics of machine sewing. If you're more experienced sawer I think of this as a trial run for creating more complex projects in the future. After creating this simple cushion cover, you can move on to creating clothes, bedding wall hangings, homewares, or any other projects using the techniques you've learned here today. For your cushion design, you could use artwork you already have, but to get the most out of this project and develop your personal brief moodboard and designs, I'd recommend trying something new. You can always make more later. Some tips before we get started, check out the digital fabric printers you might like to use. I tend to use Woven Monkey who are British fabric printer, Contrado who are another one with excellent sustainability credentials who are based in London and CottonBee are European printer, and there are many, many others so have a look and see which ones might print and post near you. You might want to order a swatch pack from the printers at the beginning of this project so that it comes in time to check the colors and check the materials that you're happy with it before you send your designed to print. Keep an open mind, this is an experiment that you can own over time. Before we get going in the first lesson, please download the moodboard template. This is an InDesign document, but if you don't have InDesign, you could create your mood board in Google drawings or just use Pinterest. Before we start our first lesson, have a good read of the project description and familiarize yourself with the classroom and how to upload and then let get started. 3. Interior Trends and Inspiration: Hi, everyone. Welcome to this lesson. Today we're going to be looking at interior design trends and making our own moodboards. We're going to be exploring our own home with our camera to notice our own taste in interior design pattern and style, and apply that to our cushion cover brief. We will then make a moodboard for this project, bringing all these elements together with Pinterest research on photos from our own home to create our truly unique project brief. Once we have our moodboards, we will refer back to them along with the project brief as we go through the project and design our placement print for our cushion cover. If you haven't already, now's the time to download the InDesign moodboard template or set up your Google drawings document. To start off, let's have a look at some interior design trends for 2020. If you're looking at this video in another year, then just have a look at contemporary design trends for your year. These interior trends I've picked out for you are just some of my personal highlights, but I'm sure you can find loads of different ones yourselves. This first one is bold monochromatic, It's all about the use of one key color in an interior space. I've loved this royal blue one, as you can see the upholstery, the walls and even the ceiling, all paint this amazing blue, really rich blue color. This is something to think about when designing your own cushion. How the colors in your home might go with the colors that you're going to be designing. This yellow one again with the rug, the sofa on the walls all blending into clear really beautiful color pattern. For this first interior design task, your task is to go get your camera or get your phone and go around your house and take photos of your favorite boldest colors in your house. When you're taking photos of the colors in your home, think about not only your interior space, your goals and your furniture, but also your wardrobe, and any other accessories like crockery and ceramics that might be colors in your taste and in your style that you haven't even noticed before. This is the time to go and take photos of your favorite colors in your home. Just about five or 10 photos and come back here in a moment. This next key design trends for 2020 is all over pattern. As you can see from these amazing images, the pattern design is really complex, it's the seamless repeat pattern in both these examples, but it could be any pattern. Again, it goes from the cushions to the upholstery, the wallpaper and even the curtains. You really get this feel of a very consistent design, almost overwhelming, but at the same time, quite subtle because it makes it plane of this image which is very inviting, I think. The question and the task for you is to go and find pattern in your home. Again, just take 5-10 images of different types of pattern you can find. Can you find seamless repeat patterns like these where you can't tell where the edge of the pattern block is? Or can you find tiled patterns, geometric abstract, more floral patterns perhaps? Go and have a look at all the patterns in your home and see what you can come up with. This example is all about neutrals and black and white. These two are obviously very beautiful stylish spaces using really contemporary lovely furniture. Again, it's just about noticing the different tones in your home and what those tones are bringing. It could be that the times are coming from wood, it could be that they're going from fabric or metal perhaps, or just soft furnishings. For this one, your task is to take 5-10 photos of tones. These don't have to be whole images of spaces, but just really focused tones in your space to make a neutral color pattern. This trend for 2020 is cooled artist's mark all about these messy brushstrokes where you can really see this painterly quality coming through. As you can see the first image, this beautiful, very bold, thick brush design is actually repeat print. You can see the repeats of it. It looks quite messy, but actually there is an order there. Similarly with this woman decorating her own home by hand. Again, it is using a similar brushstroke all over, so you do create quite a consistent effect. The task for this trend is to have a look at the different marks and lines in your home. Are they messy? Are they brushy? Can you see paint marks anywhere? Or are they more geometric, and neat and ordered? Just reflect on that and what that means for your home, and your style, and your space. Again, go off and take 5-10 photos of lines, marks, dots, and any other creative brushstrokes you can find in your home and in your wardrobe. This trend comes around every year, florals are always a big thing in interiors and fashion collections, and 2020 take off florals is wild flowers. You can see from both these lovely images, but we have a really lovely and wildflower pattern on both of them. The one on the left as she's using it looks like paper prints which are then posted onto the wall as a DIY wallpaper. Shutting is a really lovely effect then the one on the right is a sticker wallpaper with ferns and other foliage. The task for this one is to find floral prints in your home. Even if you're not into florals, I'm sure you can find some which have snuck in somewhere. Reflect with florals on the scale, see if can take 5-10 images of different scales of floral designs. You might be finding a teapot with a rose on it, for example, as I found in my home, and then you might be finding leaf friends on a DV set. Those scales are just very different and this is something to remember when we're designing our cushion cover, is that the scale of the print can really change the feel of the whole design. Come back when you've got 5-10 photos of different floral patterns. Finally, this last trend I'd like to share with you is tapestries and wall hangings. This has been a big trend for a couple of years now as people have been knitting, and weaving, and having these really beautiful textural wall hangings. For 2020, it looks like there's a bit more of an old fashioned approach, so we've got these really beautiful antique or hangings making a big patterns all over Pinterest, all over interior design magazines. Have a look at some of those and think about how these different textures and these different depths of an image might be able to bring some link to your home. On the right of this, we've got a much more contemporary take on air, where we've got a digitally printed woven blanket. These blankets you can print yourself on a lot of different print on demand shops, it's another output for your kitchen design. You might want to make you blanket that goes with them. As you can see, you could use it as a wall hanging to really bring a softness and texture into your space. Your task for this trend is to find different textures in your home. Again, go off and take 5-10 images of really interesting, soft, hard, shiny, rough, different textures you can find that might contrast each other. This is something that we're going to think about how to bring into our kitchen design in terms of what fabric we might choose. Now that you have a selection of different photos, go through them and highlight a couple of favorites from each category, and then make a separate folder of those and come back here in a moment. 4. Making a Moodboard: Once you've got your images from around your home and you've highlighted a few of your favorites, have a look on Pinterest to see if you might be able to find anything which might complement or provide some more interest into your style. You might want to use search terms from the slides I've already shared with you, like monochromatic or artists smoke, but you might want to just have a look at your own. If there are colors which are coming out, if there are themes coming up from your own home exploration, you might want to search those further. For me, I've been obsessed with eyes on everything for as long as I can remember. I'm just going to search 'eye cushion' and see what might come up. As you can see, we've got loads and loads of 'eye cushions' as expected. There are some really beautiful examples. I particularly love this Gucci velvet cushion. Lets click on that. As you can see, this is a velvet fabric and it has a kind of pompom edge around it. I'm going to right click on that, 'Save Image As', rename it Gucci velvet cushion, and I'm going to save it in my folder for my Moodboard image examples and click "Save." With Pinterest, you might want to make your own Pinterest board for this course and collate all your images there, but I find it easier to just right-click and save them in a folder on my computer and then I can access them a bit more readily when I want to drop them into my InDesign file. Go through Pinterest, have a look at different trends which might be appearing, different textures, different themes. Saves some images, I'd say again, no more than 5-10 images and put them in a folder and then come back here when you're ready. Now is the time to open our InDesign Moodboard template, or the template on Google Drawings if you don't have InDesign. Open it up and you should find a nice template like this, ready to go. If you go to view and screen mode and then click "Normal," you will then be able to see the picture placeholders, which will help you just drag and drop the images in which is our next step. Go to you finder or folder and find your example images, and you can keep this photo open on the same screen. Simply drag and drop some of our favorite images from the Pinterest research we've done and from the images of our own home into the Moodboard to create a brief thought of cushion cover. First of all, go through your folder and see which theme you'd like to drop them into. I've broken down this Moodboard into themes, so there might be recurring motifs like eyes that I was saying. Texture, pattern, color; we'll make our own color palette in a moment. Then we will do a short word association exercise, which will then inform our creative brief. This skirt is a beautiful skirt. It's actually from Northern Vietnam where I was living last year. It's from a hill tribe community called the Hmong, and it's amazing hand cross stitched skirt. It's got a beautiful texture and an amazing pattern. It could go into either of these categories, but I'm going to put it into pattern. Again, just drag and drop it across into the holder. This is a really lovely wool blanket and I just loving cozy as I said so I think this is a really important thing for me to have on my Moodboard, so I'm going to put it into texture. Eyes again, perhaps in themes. These eyes came from the armchair that I made, which I showed earlier in the lessons. Eyes again to put that in themes, a ceramic coaster, pattern. I'll put that in pattern. That's a really lovely quilts that was made for me by my mother-in-law. It's has this really cute vintage floral fabric on the back and again, a nice floral pattern. These are some vintage silk shawls which have this really lovely clashing pink and red rose pattern on them. What else have we got? We've got some macrame. I love that soft rope texture and then the rose teapot, maybe that could be a theme, vintage or floral theme and then some more eyes there as well. I went through that and for now I'm going to go to my Moodboard images and look at some texture. I really love this woven texture, I think that goes really nicely with this group. If you hover over until your cursor becomes a hand, you can move the image around to focus on the area that you'd like. Let's get back to the finder. Green velvet fabric. That's a really lovely texture. I think I might replace the macrame because I'd like a bolder color. The eye cushion, I really love that color palette so I'm going to replace my own eye fabric there. Again, just move that with the hand to the point I want. Already you can start to see a Moodboard building up with some common themes and common colors and textures. For this next section, we're going to be using InDesigns color theme tool. Hover over the eyedropper, click and hold to come up with the color theme tool. The shortcut for that is Shift I. For this, it's a really wonderful tool to click on an image and it just brings up this color palette immediately from the image. Then what we're going to do is click on any color that you fancy, that you like, and drag and drop it into our color palette down here. I'd like this turquoise color, drag and drop it there. Then to get back to the normal cursor, just press V. I'm sure you like to do that again with this image because this is again a really lovely selection. Love that orange on this mustard and maybe a pink to finish. As you can see, you've already got this very cohesive Moodboard with the color palette really bringing everything together. You might want to zoom in a little bit for this next section. The three-words exercise is all about just having a little brainstorm to inform our creative brief for our cushion cover. Think about three words that describe your creative practice. Now if you don't describe yourself as an artist or an Illustrator, that's okay. Just describe something which is about how you like to create and what you create. My practice, three words to described my practice might be curiosity, playfulness, and maybe tactile. Three words that describe your home is the next section, so have a think about the kind of environment you like your home to be at its best. For me, cozy, warm, and welcoming. Then finally three words about your own personal values. These are just the values that you feel you embody or that you try to live by, which again will inform our brief. My personal values are encouragement, exploring, it might go into another line so you can just make the box a bit bigger. Encouragement, exploring, and creative. Double-click in the box to the brief to get your text box. For the brief, we're going to be writing a sentence which embodies some of these values, it doesn't have to embody all of them to inform our cushion design. My brief now is to create a cushion designed to bring playfulness, curiosity, and fun to a home through vintage inspired design and bold textures. Come up with a brief like that of your own. Just has to be a sentence not too long and just to embody some of those key values around your practice, your home, and who you are. This is what we'll be referring back to as we go on to the next stage of the design process. Once you're happy with your Moodboard and your creative brief, export the Moodboard and upload it in the project gallery. Lets go to file, export, and it's fine to export it as a JPEG or a PNG file. PNGs tend to be better for texts, so I'd recommend exporting as PNG file, give it a project name, and save. Just double-check the resolution is a 150 or so just to keep it relatively high and then click "Export." Well done on taking this first step to designing your creative cushion cover. In this lesson, you have learned about different interior design trends, you've explored your own home to find out more about your own taste and style, and you've put together some images from Pinterest and from your home to make your own Moodboard and set your creative brief. This is really great progress and gives us the foundations to build a really beautiful design together. Again, upload your project Moodboard into the class gallery and for the next lesson we're going to be developing six concepts thumbnail sketches of our placement print. I can't wait to get started. See you there. 5. Abstract Shapes - Thumbnail Sketches Part 1: Today we are going to be exploring, creating six concept thumbnail sketches using some different illustration techniques. We're going to try three different techniques to just brainstorm some ideas and try some new things. The first one is abstract shapes, the second is continuous line, and the third is digital collage. Each of these tasks is a chance to try a different illustration technique in order to develop our final cushion cover design. This is an experiment, so don't be too precious, try to let go and be playful. For this lesson, you will need the template for the thumbnail sketches open as well as your moodboard from the last lesson. You'll also need something to draw with, whether that's pen and paper or an iPad or Illustrator on your laptop. What we're going to do for the abstract shapes task is to see what kind of shapes are emerging from our moodboard and this could be as tiny as dots or stripes or how something is woven or something more geometric or abstracts. You might not want your final cushion cover to be abstract, but just remember this is a playful task just to get some ideas going and you never know you might be inspired. On my wall on the themes section, this first image of the eye cushion. I really like these elongated tear drop shapes. I'm going to draw some of those and see what that might come out like. For this task, I'd recommend using a black marker or some thick felt-tip pen, it really helps to make a solid shape, which we're then going to take a photo of or scan and open up an Illustrator. I've drawn a couple already. Let me draw some more here, I'll do some slightly different shapes. Let's color it then. For this task, you don't actually have to color all of them and if you want to save time or don't fancy it, you can just draw the outline like that and we can color them in an Illustrator. Lay it out in reasonable light, daylight preferably, and take a photo of it with your phone and I'm just going to send that photo to my computer. Now I want to open Illustrator. Go to File New and then I'm going to make a custom size file and I want to actually make it the size of the cushion cover which is 45 by 45 centimeters. This will make a large file, but it means that you can definitely see the resolution well. You could make a smaller file and scale out later. I want to make it the size first. I'm now going to drag in the marks into this file. As you can see it's absolutely huge even from my phone and so I'm just going to hold the corners and hold Shift to just scale it down, holding it to proportions. Now what we need to do is embed this photo into the file. I'm going to go up here and click Embed. Then I want to image trace it to extract the shapes out. But let's go to Window and image trace. Now the presets, there's lots of different ones to choose from. But for shapes like this, it's quite good to go with a black and white logo because it really horns down the black and white areas and keeps it very simple. Let's select that one. Great, that looks fine. Lets expand that. Now we have our shapes here. We want to right-click and ungroup them and then you can see that they are separate pieces. Now we have these shapes and they are ungrouped, we want to get rid of the background, and then regroup them into their own individual components. Select the background, this white shape and just delete it. Now you can drag these squares over the groups that you might like to keep separate. Well, I find that just helps to be able to start organizing them and dragging them into different places. These are all a little bit rough around the edges as you can see. What we can do that is use the unsmooth tool to just smooth out the edges of that. I select this smooth tool and you can just click on the shape to smooth out and click on that. I quite like this. That is fine. You might want to leave some of the texture in to just give it that handmade look and I think I would like mine smooth. You can also smooth the inner and outer shapes as you can see here. You might want to double-click on it if you've made it a group to separate it, again smooth that out. Again, you can press V to go back to your main cursor at any point and select the different ones. Once you're happy with those, you can zoom back out and then you've got these really lovely shapes ready to go in for our design. When you're designing, I'd recommend making copies of the shapes as you're processing them so that you keep the originals and you can refer back to them if you get a bit down the road to far but you don't want to go down. To make a copy just hold down Alts and drag it over to your main design. To make it bigger, I'm just holding Shift and then scaling it up. Next, what we want to do is make a background for our cushion. Go to the rectangle tool, which is M and click in the intersects, the top right corner and enter 450, 450 mm and click Okay and you'll come up with a color square. Let's send that backwards. We're going to right-click, arrange, send to back. As it's black we can't really see so let's make it another color [inaudible] Now we can see that we've got this square with our design on them. What we want to do next is bring in the colors from your moodboard and InDesign so let's get back to the moodboard and Indesign and just select all the colors, copy it, command C, and paste it into your Illustrator file, You might want to make it a little bigger. Now we have these colors here, we want to make a color swatch from them with the group selected. Go to swatches and click on the folder, new color group, and name it, whatever feel. You want to make sure selected artwork is highlighted and convert process to global. These mean that it converts the colors to global colors which are recognized instead of just RGB or CMYK and there you have your color group come on. Now I'd like to make this background one of these colors, maybe the red or mustard. Let's try red and then again, let's color the design. These row grouped, but you could ungroup them or just click into the group with a double-click and then select these two color then. I think they might have all of this same color, these as well. Once you've come up with a design, you can duplicate it by selecting the whole thing and holding Alts and Shifts to drag along the same axis. Now that you have a copy of it, you can go to this color wheel to recolor artwork and just try out some different color options. Let's click that, these are your selected colors and you've gotta make sure that you're Skillshare colors are highlighted and then you can just literally click this randomly changed color order button to see what different combinations might come up. Just endless fun in my opinion. That's quite nice. I like the teal background. You don't need to save changes so click No. Now you have two designs with your color palette and some abstract shapes. You can use the designs just is a placement print if you like, or if you'd like to try the repeat pattern tool on Illustrator, you can drag one of the elements out or group of elements out, make sure it's highlighted and go to objects, pattern make and then you can see that the pattern will come out as a grid. This is a grid, but you could do brick by row to see how it repeats in a different way, brick by column, hex by column or hex by row. As you can see, it starts to overlap that you can then click Size Tile to Art and add some spacing, give it a little bit distance. That's quite nice. Let's try 70 [inaudible]. I like that so let's try saving that, abstract pattern 2 and then click Done when you're saved. Now, you can make another square, 450 by 450 and then in your swatches panel, the new pattern should have arrived, and there it is. Now it might be too big, so you can right-click transform and scale and you won't see make sure transform objects is unchecked, otherwise it'll make the whole square smaller. I quite like that uniform, let's try 70 percent, let's try 60. I quite like that on another backgrounds, so I'm going to draw another square behind it, like that. Red and do Command and close bracket to send it back. So there we have another abstracts pattern. You choose one of your patterns. I think I'm going to choose this one. Make sure the whole group is selected and drag it over to asset export and drop it in there. The settings we just want it to be a JPEG so just make sure JPEG is selected and a 150 ppi is fine. You click Export and make sure it's in the right folder and click Choose and then it will pop up then. Now you can go into our InDesign document for thumbnails. As you can see, I've already made a couple of designs here, and I'm now going to drop in the design I've just made. Then we have another thumbnail design, which I really like actually I think I prefer it to my earlier version. 6. Continuous Line - Thumbnail Sketches Part 2: Let's go back to our mood board again for this next section on continuous line drawing. Continuous line is a really fun way to just get really loose with your drawing style and see what comes out. So again, refer back to your mood board and see what kind of themes or ideas or illustrations might come up from there. For me, I can see the roses coming up as a theme as well as eyes. I feel like my patterns, I've done a lot of eye patterns, so I'm going to try floral design for this continuous line drawing. You can refer directly to images in your mood board or you can refer to other images and use the mood board as inspiration, but I'm going to use the rows here on this teapot and on these shores as my inspiration for the continuous line. So a continuous line is exactly what you'd expect. You literally just put a pen to paper and start drawing without lifting it off. Referring back to the design and the image all the time. Once you've drawn one element, you can move on to another element. Or if you like, you can continue in the same way. Once you've got the design you're happy with, draw a few other random shapes in bits and pieces to just give some more interest. Again, using a thick marker is a good idea to see the lines very clearly, but you could use something more detailed if you like. Once you're ready, it's the same process again, so take a photo of your design and drop it into Illustrator. When taking a photo of your design, makes sure the frame of the photo goes around all of the design. Then again drop it into your laptop. Name the file, and then drag it into Illustrator. As you can see, again it comes out very big. Again, press Shift and grab the corner to reduce it, and then embed. Now let's image trace again, Window, Image Trace, and again Black and White Logo. It should be on the same settings as last time. Though it might be different for each picture depending on the shadow. But that looks fine to me. So let's click Expand and now right click and Ungroup. So now we just want to drag little rectangles over the areas we don't want and delete them. Then these are all separate element. So we just want to regroup them again by command G and move it out the way, command G, move it out the way. Then continue until you've got all your bits and pieces nicely grouped. So I can use a square. I'm actually going to color that straight away. Let's make it yellow. So again, Alt and drag. It might be behind it. So you might want to click Arrange, bring to front. I actually quite like that white and black on the mustard. So I might keep that. You can duplicate them and just play around rotating them. Remember, this is a draft stage. So we are not trying to finalize anything yet. We're just trying to get some concepts and some ideas together. I actually quite like these two falling together. I'm going to group them and try and see what it comes up like as a pattern. So pattern make and that's actually really lovely. Group by column. It's quite nice, slide the tile and give it some more space. That's really nice. They're starting to overlap. Actually quite right. But I think is really lovely. Wiggly, wiggly rose pattern. Let's click Done. Let's duplicate that square and fill it with our pattern. Again, that's come up quite big. So that's right-click, transform and scale, undo the objects. That looks really nice, again I want the background. So I'm just going to duplicate this square and you might want to align them to themselves. That is looking really lovely. Let's group that and duplicate it again. Play around with our color wheel. Now because we have black and white in this design, which is not in our colors, you need to add a new color to the current harmony. Then again, so that's the original pallet. So we can play around with that now. Quite like the green. Looks nice. Again, you don't need to save that. Let's duplicate that again, try another color way. Again, you can drag these between each other if you want to be a bit more specific about the color way. Well, that's nice. Let's try that. Let's explore the one you want. We're dragging it to the asset export panel. Let's do rose design two, the settings are the same, make sure it's highlighted and angular export. Then go back to our thumbnail design board in InDesign and drag and drop in your design. Okay. You can see the earlier version I made with more of a bigger rose with some leaves around it with the same colors again. I think those are some really lovely designs and as you can see, they're very quick to do. Very simple, but result in some really interesting and contemporary ideas which respond to your own living space. 7. Digital Collage - Thumbnail Sketches Part 3: The third and final illustration style we're going to explore is called Digital Collage. Digital Collage we'll be using Photoshop, but you could do it by hand with paper and scissors and scan in and upload your designs that way. For Digital Collage, is really important if you're getting images from the internet that they are copyright free, so that you are able to use them for personal or commercial use. There are several interesting websites where you can get copyright free images and particular vintage image which is quite exciting to use. This website does what it says on the ten freevintageimages.co.uk. They have lots of different categories you can choose from. Then you can just literally have a look at the latest images and right-click on them and save them. Also interesting fish here, smoothly flowers. This file, for example, dhalia. This really lovely botanical illustration. You can actually right-click, "Save Image As" resources folder and save it there. So I have a browse on that website and others that you might be able to find and see what interesting images you can source. When you're ready, open Photoshop and again, make a document which is 45 by 45 centimeters. I have made one here already 45 by 45 and click "Create." So then find your source images. I'm going to use maybe one of these nice ferns that I've already found. Drag and drop it into the Photoshop folder and press "Shift" to embed it. Your image will appear as a small objects, but we want to rasterize it in order to directly edit it. So go to Layer, Rasterize, Smart Objects and click them. Then you can see on your layers panel it becomes a regular image. Again to click on the image, I'm going to select "Color Range", and then it comes up with the eyedropper, where you can click on the background image to get rid of. Then let's click "OK." See what that comes up as. You can see that it's made a selection all around the outside of this image. So I'm going to click "Delete" and then "Command D" to deselect. So now we have these two fern images without any background. With our digital collage file, let's make sure we save the Photoshop file. Then if I want to use a Wacom tablet and pen to select and move these images. For now I'm just going to use my hand. Not smooth, is it? I'm going to right-click and click "Layer Via Cut." Then I have two ferns, lets fern one of those two. So you can then go back to your Move Tool and start to move and play around with these designs. Actually, I'm just going to get rid of that smaller one. So I quite like this big one, but I think it needs some other things around. In my resources I've got lots of different illustrations. Black and white ones, thistles, roses, some lovely outfits, eyeball, small ferns. We will take that fern leaf as well. Make sure it's rasterized, by going to Layer, Rasterize, small objects. You can say it's become rasterized. I'm just going to hide the other layer or I select the color range. Photoshop is definitely not my strong points. I am sure you all have better ways of doing this than I do. Again, I'm going to delete that and deselect it. We have another fern, it's made of small. These spines are quite interesting, maybe I'll have a slightly creepy spine coming in. So again, I just want to make that bigger place there, rasterize it, and again selects "Color Range." We'll go by gray, gone, Delete, Deselect. Now this is taken out the gray in-between, the spine hair. So maybe I'll undo that. Maybe I'll just use the Magic Wand Tool for this one. It's quite low tolerance because the shading is flexible. Well it looks good. So I probably have these vertebrae look very similar to the forms of the fern. Again, I might just divide this up, by just selecting each one, doing Layer via cut. I quite like this side view one. Is really quite creepy. In order to bring in our color palette from [inaudible] for a Photoshop, I would make a clipping mask over these different objects. Use the color picker to pick out this colors. So I'm going to start with a mustard, and use the fills, to just fill a layer. Right-click on the layer and create clipping mask to cover the spine. I don't want it to be full opacity, so I'll change that to 30 percent. On the background, I also make orange. Then you can duplicate this layer. Again, right-click and create clipping mask to all of these ferns that Fern. Again, you can just use different colors to experiment. So play around with your Digital Collage. You can really spend a long time doing this. So limit yourself to say an hour and see what you can come up with. When you're ready, you can go to File Export and Save for Web. This enables you to just clarify how big the file size is, because it's going to be a really big image. So you just save it as 2,000 by 2,000 pixels. Make sure it's JPEG. I click "Save." When you're ready, go back into your thumbnail board in InDesign and drag and drop your finished designing layer. As you can see, I've got another one I made earlier, with roses and this bed design. Actually I think they do grow quite well together as a set. There you have your thumbnail concept sketches. Well done for getting to this stage and developing a six different concept sketches. In the next lesson, we're going to be choosing one of them to develop into our final cushion cover design. Once you've got your six thumbnails in the thumbnail template in InDesign, export it and upload it to the project gallery. I'd love to feedback on your designs and give you some support if you need it, so do feel free to get in touch with any questions. 8. Finalising Design: Now that we have our concept sketches, we're going to choose one to develop into our final design. This is a really exciting stage of the project, hope you enjoy it. You can work on your final design in whatever program you've started and whether it's digital collage in Photoshop or an Illustrator or something on procreate or an analog on paper. I'm going to start work on this abstract design and I feel it does meet my brief, which I'll refer back to. My brief was to create a cushion design to bring playfulness, curiosity, and fun to a home through vintage inspired design and bold textures. Now aside from the Vintage Pearl, I think it does meet that brief. I've used my color palette from the mood board, and also some shapes which I've brought up from this collection. In terms of the bold textures, I think this design would look really lovely with some additional embroidery, I have some of the shape. It really brings out the shapes and creates more tactile experience. I'm just going to duplicate the original or drag it again and continue working on this section. I might add some more shapes by just copying and pasting them and seeing how it looks starting to build up. You might want to change around the scale of some of your shapes and just make them look a little bit different. Change color as well and see what that looks like in another colorway. Colorway again, it's quite nice. You can work on your final design as long as you like, but when you're ready, export it as a high resolution JPEG, and then we'll get ready to upload it and [inaudible] print. I'm going to grab this make sure is all selected in group together drag it over to asset export label it final print. Just double-check the DPI is 300 it's very high res, is JPEG and we can now export. Choose a folder, should have bring this way off. 9. Uploading to Print: Now that we have finalized our design, we need to think about the placement of it on the cushion cover, as well as what fabric we would like to use. If you've ordered a swatch bag, you can check how the colors might appear and you can change the colors on your design to match these if you want to. Our cushion, like this one, will be 45 by 45 centimeter square. We need to make sure that our design fits within that 45 with some seam allowance for sewing around the edges. We want the design to be in about 30 by 30 centimeters square space in the middle so that it gives it some breathing room around the edge. In this example, you can see that I've placed the print in the middle and it has a nice edge around it so that it can be sewn and you can still see the design once it becomes a 3D object. Of course, if you've made a repeat pattern, your pattern can go right to the edges so you don't need to worry about the seam allowance. I'm actually going to set up a new document for my cushion cover just to double-check that it has that spacing around the edge. I'm going to set up a new document which would be 450 by 450 mils. That's my document. I'm going to copy and paste my design into this one. As you can see is the whole thing. I'm going to ungroup them and lock the backgrounds by doing Command two to lock it. Then I'm going to group by central design and transform them to be 300 by 300 mil and then center them. That's the line. Let's make sure that's perfectly in the middle. Now it is. Now this does look like there's a lot of room around the edge but it will go forward once this 3D into the middle of the cushion and be more of a focus. Let's save that and then let's explore the asset again. You have to Object, Unlock All to raise the the background, regroup it, and drag it to export. Again, check you're on 300 on a JPG, make sure its vectors and click export. As mentioned, there are hundreds of different fabric printing companies all over the world so there's a few things you might want to check before choosing yours. It's worth noting here that if you don't have a sign machine, you could send your cushion to print on a print-on-demand company. He will print it straight onto a pre-made cushion cover. A few things you might want to consider when choosing your company to print are pricing, the sustainability credentials of the company, any postage or shipping fees that might happen and where the company is based and where they are manufacturing the fabric or the products. Once you've chosen your company, go to their website and you can upload your design. I'm going to use Woven Monkey, which is a UK based fabric printers to show you the step-by-step process but it will be very similar for these different companies and their website will guide you through the process. Here I am on the website of Woven Monkey. As you can see, they have a choice of 20 fabrics, international delivery and samples and color charts you can order. I'm going to go to Create. I have my color chart here, which I've already checked and I also have a Woven Monkey sample book. I can feel the weight of these different fabrics and see what might work in my home. As we talked about before when we were making a mood board, think about the texture. Think about the existing fabrics in your home and how these might be able to complement or contrast them. One of my absolute favorites is the soft velvet. It feels absolutely amazing and I think I will bring that into my design to create those bold textures I was talking about in my brief. As you can see, you can drag and drop your file or browse. Just drag it straight in and it will start uploading them. Now, the different fabrics, even if you order one meter, they have different widths. Some of them are 136 centimeters, some of them are 150, so just double-check that depending on the amount you want to order. First of all, select your fabric and select the size. You can order a test swatch if you want to test your design fast and buying a new order of fat quarter, a fat quarter is usually come up big enough to make a cushion out of, you just need to double-check the measurements. This one is 68 centimeters by 50. That's perfect size for my cushion cover. Now I need to check the resolution and how it comes up on here. You can maximize that and then you'll start to see the design repeating. You can play around with the different types of persons here. If you sent to your design, this white edge of fabric will be just printed. It won't be printed, so it will just be white but I'm going to choose mine to be repeated even though it's not repeat pattern but just say that the fabric color goes right to the edge of this piece. You can see the other section coming in there but that will be wastage so that doesn't matter. Once you're happy with the layout, you can zoom in to just double-check it all looks fine and then check you're happy with the price. Fat quarters are usually very reasonable, so just make sure you're happy with that and then check the postage and add it to your basket. Just check all the shipping costs and everything else and then proceed to check out when you're ready. Well done on sending your final design off to print. It's a really exciting stage and I can't wait for you to receive your fabric in the post. 10. Sewing Our Cushion: Now that you've got your fabric in the post and I really hope you like how it's come on. Now, it's time to start sewing. All you need are: a pair of embroidery scissors or small scissors, a pair of fabric scissors, pin cushion, tiny stroke or fabric pencil, tape measure. If you want to do piping, or have an edge to your cushion piping or pom poms around the edge on a string. You will also need backing fabric and of course, your final fabric printed. Now, this is an example that I did earlier with these digital collage technique to bring together this bird-hands leaves design. You want to make sure that your backing fabric is the right measurement. Let's check this one. This will make the envelope back of the cushion cover like this one. You might have noticed, I've changed my table because this is my sewing machine. I'm going to get set up. There it is. Our first thing to do is make sure your machine is fully threaded, that very slightly for all different sewing machines, but it's worth a google. I'm not going to share it now just because it's so varied, the mind's an old one. The first thing we're going to do is take all two back panels and hand them. This will be along the edge where the cushion will go inside. It's cool that this, ham is really nice and strong. All you need to do is, with the long side facing up, fold down about a centimeter, and then another centimeter, take a pin. Stick a pin through them. Do it again and again. You have a nice flat edge. Now I'm easing velvet for mine and you might want to check the thickness of your fabric it depending on what stash you're using. I'm going to use a zigzag stitch to make this a nice wide and strong stitch. I'd like to go foot and back at the beginning just to ensure that it's very strong. Then keep your hand flat on the fabric. Hit your right hand, guiding it through the once more holding attention. I'm just guided along. You want the edge of your fabric to line up with one of the numbers on the side, you can choose which one, but as long as it's consistent, that's the main thing. It's straight. Now when you get to the end, go backwards once again, and forwards to finish it off. Then bring in low a little bit and cut. We have a nice flat edge for the first envelope. Back section, I'm doing the next one. Now this is my fabric. I'm just going to cut the white edges where it wasn't printed off. I'm going to use this piping, this twisted piping online. If you do want to use piping, then you can do a similar thing; you can use the edge of the piping as a guide to make sure it's evenly distanced in from the edge. Again, let's go record by files here. Gang it back and forward from the corner. Don't cut it off. Just turn it, might match a small snap so that you're able to turn and again on the fold. Now I'm just going to line this up with a map. Make sure the needles sticking into the fabric when you rotate it. Given this, I guess all sled and absolute. Ideally need for this is a piping folds, but my machine did not come with one because it's very old. Renders having to weigh less a little bit. Sit back when you're finished. Now the piping is secure around the front facing part of the design. We're going to take the hemmed back sections and lay them face down, right sides together on top. Well, to put the top one on first because I'll be the front of the body as it were. Then the bottom model overlapping, side line up the edges with the edge of the front. Then you are to pin them all the way round. Say, you want to pan around the entire attribute cushion, lining up all the corners and making sure the kitchen overlaps neatly in the middle and its flats. Now you're ready to sign around the edge of your cushion. Start in one of the corners, take out the pin on the corner if you have one. Make sure your needle is as close to the edge of the piping or of the same line as you can. Again, go forwards and backwards to begin taking out the pinking scissors and making sure it's close as it can be to the piping and also that it's lined up on an edge. You might need to lift the foot to go over the bulkier piles, but just lifted, put it back down and go over gently and slightly. Keep the needle down and lift up the foots to go around the corners. Now, keep flattening the fabric and holding your hands flat on it so it keeps it nicer, strong. You might find I have it pushes the fabric along to the end. In order to stop brushing just on day one of the pins and flatten out again by sides on the corner. Once you've got your top edge, you cushion colors now sewn together. You just want to open it out the other way round and double-check all the seam around the edges. Sew sides and out. Grab your cushion in a pot and now you put it into the cover. There you have your very own digitally printed cushion cover, well-done. 11. Conclusion and Thank You: Well done for completing this course and making your very own digitally illustrated cushion cover. Remember to upload each stage of your creative process from your original mood board, your thumbnail sketches, your final design, and a photo of you with your finished cushion. I'd love to hear your plans for how you're going to use these creative skills that you've learned on this course and any ideas you have for how you're going to integrate printed textiles into your own creative practice. Do leave a review, if you like, with any comments or suggestions of how to improve this class or future classes. I'd really appreciate it. It's been a real pleasure teaching you, and I really hope you've enjoyed it. Thank you for taking part.