It’s that time again…my instagram feed is flooded with beautiful posts and promotions for Bonnie Christine’s Immersion Course. I’m a huge fan. She’s the reason I started learning about surface design in the first place :). I found her course on CreateLive and just fell in love. But…Being that Bonnie teaches surface design in Adobe Illustrator, I struggled finding my signature style. Why? Because I’m a fine artist at heart. Everything I create is painted by hand or digitally so I had a bit of trouble with translating my paintings into vector. so, I just gave up for a while. I focused entirely on illustrator, and finally found my groove…but something was still missing.

TEXTURE! GRADIENTS! TRANSITIONS!

The lack of these 3 things in my patterns was totally bumming me out because it’s what I love about painting in soft pastel, oils, acrylics, watercolor…the ability to create depth and realism using textures, gradients, color shifts – oh, I live for it! It makes me so happy to see something go from flat color to rounded form and so full of exciting details that you want to take a closer look. So…how did I solve this problem?

I learned to create a repeat pattern in Photoshop. And let me tell you…when I figured this out and created my first pattern, I was over the moon!!!!

Since then, I’ve created about half of my surface pattern designs in photoshop and I love them so much! So…knowing that so many of my fellow surface designers also create their motifs by hand drawing and painting, I thought I’d share the process.

I’m offering a free workshop, via Zoom where I’ll teach you how to take your hand painted motifs to create a repeat pattern in PHOTOSHOP.

Click this link to register for my Free workshop Monday, March 1st at 12noon PST.

Workshop will last about an hour and we’ll have a little Q&A after my demo. Be sure to register at the link above. I’ll be sending a workshop link to everyone who registers 24 hours prior to workshop.

Hope to see you there!!!