My Backyard Fun fabric collection has sold well (in fact, it looks like the focal is sold out–our fabric manager told me that that bug print was the best selling open stock print since we started making fabric a year ago!), which makes me happy because that means I get to illustrate for more collections! I’m getting ready to start sketching for the one that will be released next year, which will feature woodland animals instead of bugs, so that got me to thinking about questions I’ve been asked about the process of doing Backyard Fun. I thought you fabric lovers might enjoy a visual journey of my process from sketch to fabric. It was also a good reminder for me to review the process, since I did all this work a year ago–it’s a long process!

THE SKETCH

I generally start the illustration process with a hand-drawn pencil sketch. I’ve been using a computer for over half my life, but I still find it no substitute for hand drawing. My sketches tend to be pretty rough because I know that I’ll be bringing them into the computer for clean up. This guy is my favorite character from the focal print, the fishing ant.

OUTLINING

Once I’m happy with my sketch, I scan it and bring it into Adobe Illustrator. I create vector outlines on a new layer where I want hard outlines to be and leave the rest pencil.

COLORING

With my outlines in place, I create another layer in Illustrator underneath the outlines for the color. I draw vector areas of color where I want them, just roughly guessing at the colors that I’ll want. You can see that my outlines need to be cleaned up, but I’ll get them in the next step. When I’m done coloring, I turn off the pencil sketch layer and export the file to my fabric design program.

REPEATING & FINALIZING

My fabric design software isolates the color areas, converting the file from RGB to Index color. This is necessary for screen printing. In this program, I clean up my outlines, adjust the colors and recolor some objects, create the fabric repeat by stamping down my “motifs” (of which this ant is one), and finally I add in the background texture & color. This is where I do the most work and the technical part that most fabric illustrators don’t do. (I do it because it’s my job foremost with illustration being secondary.) Once the fabric design is finished, I save off the screens and color composites and send them to our factory. It’s kind of a bummer to see how crisp this picture looks, when I know that it will have less detail and crispness on fabric. That’s just the nature of printing on woven material though.

FINAL FABRIC

Here’s a closeup photo of the same motif on the final fabric (after going through a proofing process called “strikeoff”). All of these photos have been about 200% scale. You can see that the black outlines bled out a little bit, which is the nature of dark ink. In my next collection I think I’m going to minimize the outlining more so that it’s less bold on the final fabric. It’s definitely a learning process! One thing I’ve learned about fabric printing is that the darkest color is printed first to minimize bleeding. It was so strange to think that the outlines, which look like they’re on top, are actually the bottom layer.

And that’s about it! Wish me luck on my new sketches.