I have pulled myself out of my funk after Lilla Roger's Global Talent Search and I'm filled with creative energy. I found the most amazing course on Creativelive.com called Design Surface Patterns From Scratch with Bonnie Christine. Bonnie reveals all her secrets showing step by step how she creates her designs. She uses Adobe Illustrator (Ai) and I have struggled with this program. It can do hundreds of things but I don't need to know everything it does. I only need to know how to use the program to make surface pattern designs. This is the first course I have found that shows you the creative process using Illustrator for Surface Pattern Design from beginning to end. It has great video instruction, lots of info and Bonnie Christine in an inspiring instructor.
Much of her beginning process is what I learned in Make Art That Sells; find inspiration and sketch, sketch sketch. The big eye opener for me was how to transfer my sketches into Illustrator and maintain my hand drawn look. I don't like the perfect shapes you often see in vector drawing so it's very important to me to maintain my style and personality in my drawings. Bonnie uses Image Trace, the Blob Brush, the Pen Tool and the Pencil Tool in various ways to bring her drawings into Ai. I love the Blob Brush so I had a blast using my Wacom Tablet and bringing my sketches into a vector format. My other best friend became the Smooth Tool (which is in the fly out menu of the Pencil Tool). You can use this tool to smooth out your lines if they're a little wonky. It also works well with drawings brought in with Image Trace to help smooth out lines and reduce anchor points.
I went through my sketches for the nautical assignment from Make Art That Sells Bootcamp and started my first collection.
My main print is the sea creature print which I've done in a girl themed colorway and a boy themed colorway. I created a supporting jellyfish print and the abstract dot print is actually a piece of coral I photographed and Image Traced it to change it to vector. Using photography for vector drawing was something I hadn't tried before and it's so cool!
One thing Bonnie doesn't use often is the Pattern Tool new to Illustrator in version CS6. I'm going to try and see if I can conquer it. I used the Pattern Tool to make the above patterns. I think some artists don't like it because it's easy to see where the pattern begins and ends. As long as you keep moving items around you can create a very interesting pattern. I'm also doing a course from Laura Coyle that talks all about using the Pattern Tool called Pattern Power. It's very thorough and it's free when you sign up for her newsletter. You need to have knowledge of Ai though for Laura's course. If you or a real beginner it will be overwhelming.
What I can't wait to dig into is putting the sketches I've made in Adobe Ideas into Ai. Adobe Ideas is a vector app that works with Illustrator. You can upload your files straight into Ai from Ideas as long as you have a Creative Cloud account and wifi. Check out these cute critters I made! The only downside is you have to clean up a lot of stray anchor points when you bring it into Illustrator.
If you are interested in creating patterns from your art I highly recommend Bonnie Christine's course. The beginner and the professional alike will find this course helpful and inspiring. If you are new to Creativelive.com they often send out a coupon (I got one) to purchase past classes. Bonnie's course is around $80 and so worth the money. Other courses I've had my eye cost $100's more and this one has everything you need to get going. Below I will provide links to all the things I've mentioned.
I hope you find all this info helpful. Thanks so much for stopping by!
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