Thank goodness for WordPress and WordPress plug-ins.  I was able to put together a couple of small quilt galleries and post them on a new page without much fuss.  The most time consuming portion of the exercise was locating all the photos, and preparing a formatted for the web copy of each in Photoshop.  There is even a cute widget for the right column that displays three random pics every time the page is refreshed.  Fun.

Currently I am designing a portfolio website for an artist friend, and I spent the weekend playing with the various web photo gallery tools out there right now.  Lots of great stuff, but none of it seems to work with Adobe Dreamweaver very well.  It’s especially distressing to own all the latestCS4 tools and learn from the Adobe forums that Bridge generated photo galleries can not be “easily” incorporated into Dreamweaver pages.  Nor, according to the forums, is the “Create Web Photo Album” feature of Dreamweaver recommended by the Adobe Dreamweaver engineering team since apparently it has been many years since this feature has seen any “love”.  Importing any of the cool Fireworks Galleries also appears to be a non-starter. So I’m on to third-party tools or coding up something myself.  Flash is a non-starter for this particular website. Web design should not be so hard in 2009.

© Mamma Made Designs. Photo used by permission.

Rachel has been posting extremely detailed tutorials on designing fabric using vector art created in free software tools like Inkscape, a new SVG authoring program (shameless plug for SVG, a web technology I worked on years ago).  In fact, she details her complete design process for making the Lion Fabric pictured here.

Many of the principles she discusses like choosing a color palette, considerations about your design before you begin drawing, rotating images to make tiles, etc. are useful regardless of the software design tools you like to use.  

Personally, I’m not so big on trying to calibrate your monitor, or attempting to get a color managed workflow when printing on textiles.  Without ICC profiles, you are kind of stuck.  Even with ICC profiles on common printers, it’s complicated.  Rachel’s experiments sort of prove my point. Though she does end up with the makings of a great color swatch book.  

I’m more inclined to stick with using colors specified in the Spoonflower color palettes for Photoshop, and swatching my designs before printing yardage.  I’ve had very good results so far.

   This is my cat.

This is my cat on Spoonflower.

Even though I worked at Adobe for over 20 years, I am not a Photoshop expert. I can tell you a whole bunch about the technology inside the software, but I am like most folks who own Photoshop or Photoshop Elements and use it occasionally rather than daily.  I know how to do a few things well, but am generally lost when it comes to doing any task besides those few things.  I use Photoshop to prepare photos for the web or to print.  I do not use it as a graphics art tool very frequently.

So when it came to creating some sample files for printing onto fabric, I knew it would be best to consult an expert.  I pulled out my dog eared copy of Design Essentials by Luanne Seymour and thumbed through, looking for an easy and fun technique.  Luanne Seymour is a great designer, teacher, author, and quilter.  When we worked together at Adobe she gave me a copy of the first edition of Design Essentials with the inscription “Show me what you create”.  Needless to say, Design Essentials is one of my go to resources for Photoshop and Illustrator techniques.  I located her straightforward step-by-step instructions for “Warhol-style images” and presto, I transformed my cat into a pop-art portrait.   

The posterize technique is a good one for textile printing because it results in distinct shapes of flat solid colors. You can easily execute this sort of thing with traditional textile silkscreening methods, so I wanted to have a sense of what a digitally printed textile would look like.  I think it came out great. This method is much faster than making screens, getting out the paints and squeegees, etc. and not nearly so messy.  Not that I object to messy when it comes to art.

I recommend Luanne’s book, but there are other great tutorial resources for posterizing in Photoshop on the web too. Here’s one. Try it out. 

Wouldn’t it be great to have a quilt made with brightly colored pop-art images of your pets or your kids? Maybe gerber daisies? There are so many ideas for projects using this technique and printing the results to fabric.