Designing Surface Patterns Blog Hop + Free Printable

Welcome to The Cloth Parcel blog and today’s stop on the Designing Surface Patterns from Scratch Blog Hop!

Hopefully, you strolled on over from Amanda McGee‘s blog, and tomorrow you will visit the next stop on the tour with Melanie Ham at iheartstitching.

Okay, let’s get into it!  We took this course by Bonnie Christine online at Creative Live last month when it first aired.  About 30 minutes in, we realized that this was one class that we definitely needed to own.  (It is still available for purchase here if you are also interested!)  Bonnie did a great job with this course and we both learned so many specific tricks to help with our design process.  She takes you all the way from the beginning of a design to the finished repeating pattern in Illustrator.  Both of us are artists at heart, and this is something that we have been working to figure out for a few years now.

We thought we’d give you a little bit of perspective on the class from both of us individually.

Diane:

This course opened a whole new world of art tools for me. Having never used Illustrator before, I have been glad to be able to watch the course repeatedly. I really appreciate Bonnie’s artistic style and her personal instructive style of being relaxed and clear. The most useful things I learned were drawing and scanning in black and white, working with photo colors, and different ways and tools to use in Illustrator.

Audrey:

I consider myself pretty proficient in Illustrator.  I was first introduced to it in high school ten years ago and have been fortunate to always have access to it since then.  However, I haven’t had much formal training since college and have missed out on learning some of the newer features of the program.  This course has opened my eyes to many new tools and tricks specific to designing repeating patterns.  Some of my new favorites are the blob brush tool (which didn’t exist in the version I had been using for years), the move tool (I had been doing this the hard way), making pattern swatches, and the offset path tool.  My design process has improved tremendously!  I was able to finish a six-pattern mini collection called “Facets”:

We are loving all of our new knowledge and have been working hard on getting our ideas for collections put together.  One thing that Bonnie touched on in the course was keeping your work area clean and inspiring.  Using some of our new knowledge and the Facets color palette, we designed a mini poster printable in three colorways that you can print and use to brighten up your work space.  The text was actually traced over with the blob brush and pen tool instead of written using the text tool in order to sharpen our skills.  The flowers are image traces of dahlias in the garden out back.

Just click on the image you want to take you to a page where you can right-click and save the image. Prints to an 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper.  We recommend printing on cardstock.

We hope you’ve enjoyed spending a little bit of time with us on the blog hop!  As part of this event, Bonnie has offered a free month’s membership to her Roost Tribe to all of our readers!

Thanks again for joining us.  We hope you’ll stick around, subscribe to our monthly newsletter, and join us on Facebook, Instagram, Bloglovin’, and Pinterest!

-Diane & Audrey