Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Figures

I would like to make a crappy "go figure" joke here. But I will refrain.

Keep your figure as a separate thing.
Keep comprehensive files of your heads, bodies etc - will be super useful in years to come.

Flat colour on girl - think about where shadow is - use burn. Render bodies.
Need to give girl a skin colour - test various colours, do test prints.
Flat colour, shading over the top.

Plan where your shadow is, where is the light hitting the person?
Using dodge tool, put exposure down. Subtly mark in shadows.

Rendering

With business shirt - have a copy left as a working copy.
Then, merge all the stripe layers to one - delete fabric layer.

To make your shirt look more 3D - add in shading shadows etc.
Use black lollipop - eg dodge tool.
don't make it too airbrushy - maybe 58 for hardness. This will gradually make it lighter. On dodge there is also sponge tool - sucks up colour. Burn tool does the opposite of the dodge tool - makes things appear darker - adds shadow. This is good.

Can use draw on colour, with paintbrush - but first take off original - use magic wand to select area you want to paint in, otherwise the paint will go anywhere outside the line.

To make your shirt a block colour - turn off fabric layer, got to outline, magic wand, inverse, create new layer (block colour) - put this underneath - edit -->fill - block colour underneath outline. Then burn away. This is a good way to add shadow for a pattern.

Also bear in mind - blur and smudge tool - the drop. Takes up lots of memory and speed on your computer, try to do it little by little. Sharpen makes it more pixellated. Smudge is awesome - makes it more mottled.

Flatten outline and coloured image together - this is so you can move this around, put it wherever you need. Flattens outline and rendering together. But - if you need them separate - just cut and paste front out - creates a new layer and they are all separate and lovely.

To duplicate into another file - if you click duplicate layer you have the option to duplicate it into another document. Or just cut and paste.

Use black arrow, press control - you have a menu icon - keep pressing control and press once - it tells you which layer you are on and then you can switch to that layer.

Drop shadow - important!!!!!!
Layer --> layer style --> drop shadow.
Look through these, experiment with layer styles. Multiply makes the shadow transparent.

Graphic design - for boards



Graphic design process is interaction between each of elements - line direction shape, size, texture, value, colour. Meaningful organisation of elements.

Balance around optical centre - place where the viewers eye spends the most time - most stuff is not in the middle, but to the side. Balance can be achieved through - symmetric or asymmetric balance. Classic vs modern, edgy, younger.

Same principles as designs for clothing.

Balance positive and negative space in layout - positive - where visual information is - negative - where it isn't. Design often needs more negative than positive space. Need to "ground" things - work out some kind of relation between elements. Not just things floating on the page.
Balance colours - think about how you will relate colour palate for skirts to boards. Think about colour psychology. Colours with high chroma bleed into surrounding regions - this leads to blurring edges. Adjacent colours of low values give greater visual distance - one advances and the other recedes. You need distinct boundaries with colours to make them look good together. Blue is hard to make work - can blend into the background, is hard on the eye - do NOT use for text. Blue is for backgrounds - but not details. What a sluz.

Go crazy with heading font, but for text about DDS - plain, simple, legible.

Mood - warm colours -evoke pleasant dynamic reactions - cooler - calmer. Temperature of colours is used to indicate priorities. Colour stands out on grey.
Don't do anything on your board that will clash with your designs in any way - for both range drawings and DDS.

CONSISTENCY of mood - through everything you do. Drawings, boards, fonts. Everything.
Eliminate crap on board.
Range board (heading that describes concept and 5 skirts together as a range), 5 DDS boards(style number, scanned fabric swatches(not necessary), garment description and name for skirt - front side and back labelled, little picture of girl wearing skirt), Title page, feelers. Giggle.

In general - make it look right.

Hand in - 6 boards, feelers, concept board you chose - group it together in a cool way.

Range boards


Image from http://9626deventures.posterous.com/

Architectonic stuff

- figure has to be hand drawn - do your figure first, do a trace over and keep figure separate! Then trace clothes onto a separate layer.
- Can do DDS with or without rendering, but probably better to render - but you have to be able to see details, eg stitch lines buttons etc. Can render on or off computer.
- DDS hand drawn.
- Range drawings have to be hand drawn but can be rendered either way.
- So range board - 5 drawings on one board, rendered with singlet tops - no face
- One board for each DDS with a little range drawing on the side of each board.

Makes me feel better.






Business shirt

Hooray - another thing to cross off my list of life goals - photoshop success with stripes.
Or more or less success.

Friday, May 21, 2010

Wilderness


Kathryn Del Barton - I recently went to the Wilderness exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW - such beautiful things - and i figured that on a day as rainy as today everyone should take the real inspiration from this picture, and paint your nails in different colours. Do it.
I'm off to observe cyclists in the rain.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Business shirts - for example

Putting stripes onto a business shirt in photoshop.

Get rid of white out of DDS - get rid of background.
SO - DDS has to be perfectly joined.

Contiguous off (on the top bar - un tick little box), use magic wand and remove all sections of white.
Duplicate this Original DDS layer
Name it Outline Shirt black.

Then - we need to get rid of pleats, stitching, etc - we only want the outline.
use erase tool and marquee tool and delete large areas. This includes - buttons, front button fasten. And so forth.
We are left with something bare and plain - only outline.

New layer - test fabric
Turn outline off for the moment.
Need to create a stripe - ise paint tool, paint whole background a certain colour eg pink.
Create rectangles using marquee tool and make rectangles - fill those with colours.
Create stripes.

Open rulers - view --> rulers - work out where the stripe is repeating. Make sure stripes are even.
Select space of 2 stripes
edit -->define pattern - name pattern. Do a test fill - select an area - fill-->pattern we have defined.

Turn this layer off
Create new layer - Fabric.

Re-arrange layers - ove test fabric and original DDS to the bottom.
Select fabric layer - select whole space, fill with pattern.
Change scale - free transform
Command T to select the whole thing
Go to top bar where there are percentages - type in 55 and 55 to make it smaller.
We still want to fill the whole page - so copy and paste to fill.
Black arrow, hover over stripe, click alt key - has a white arrow behind. This will copy.
Alt --> Shift - get mouse and pull stripe - you have a copy.
Make sure that these match up EXACTLY - zoom in a lot.
These are now 2 layers - merge layers - in layer menu.
Continue this process until it is small enough.

Now we have our fabric - duplicate layer a lot - you can only use the layer once - try maybe 10 duplicate layers.

Pull one of these to the bottom - turn it off, don't touch it! Just in case you haven't duplicated enough of the the fabric layers.
Turn all of the extra layers off, keep one fabric layer on - work from the top down. Outline is always the top layer.

Get magic wands - contigiuous on - use shift key so you can select front of back.
Go to fabric layer - selection stays there.
Use invert to cut out only the pattern for the first bits.

For the other bits use free transform to get the stripes at the angle you want - do yokes etc one by one.
Cut out a small area - has to be big enough to fit in yoke when it's pulled.
Go back to shirt outline - select bits we did with magic wands then invert.

Do sleeves, use free transform etc.
For collar warp (!!!!) - yaaaaaaay.

Keep up with the changing layers, cutting transforming etc until it is all going the right way.

Unselect the outline - odd little gaps where the outline used to be. Go back to outline - use magic wand to select the outside of the shirts on your last fabric layer - select --> inverse--> delete - this then gives a background of the shape of the shirts, so we have no funny little gaps.
Do not merge things!!!!!! You might want to change. Keep this as a working file.

Then.... back to original DDS - take this to the top and turn it on - and your shirt is done woot woot!

If you are using a black fabric make the outline white or grey - the outline layer is only ever for your own access - so it's not too important.

Cool your boots.

I am quite happy that this week is so very close to over - image from http://detourthroughwonderland.blogspot.com
I realised that I might need to be slightly more on the way to serious with the things I learnt - so a supplementary piece of knowledge.
Be super good at labelling your layers in photoshop - do a test print and remember that glossy paper is a bit ugly - make sure that you zoom out often to look at how it is at a distance. In terms of boards in general - be calm in the layout - I have a tendency to cover every surface which is a bit chaotic at times.
So hopefully that's more demonstrative of what I actually learnt - though I stand by the socks comment.

Friday, May 14, 2010

Template?


So, the template then - I like how it looks in A3 much more than here. Here it looks small and a little on the dull side.
I was still tossing up between this and my collage, but I realised that my collage didn't really have anything significant that this one doesn't, and that this one is just a lot clearer and easier to understand.
It has all the colour scheme I'm going for, as well as the staircase and the texture of the walls is a lot clearer in this one.
Rightio, then.
Anyone want to contradict me? Please check out the other 2 options and give your (that's right, your as in the plural - 2 followers!) opinions.

The learning.

The lesson you should take from this photo - stacks on are rarely a good idea. I think that broke my rib.

Ok, here is what I've learnt from this assignment -

1 - You need someone who will tell you the truth about your projects - so make sure you have someone to tell you when you are making things look a little on the shoddy side. Definitely too easy to stare at your project and not have any concept of how it looks by the end.
2 - I have learnt to love the pen tool with a passion that borders on creepy. Illegal? Debatable.
3 - Through a process of elimination I have discovered that the best photoshop clothing to work in is an enormous and warm jumper, red long socks and undies. Highly recommended.
4 - The warp tool is completely rad-core. Not to be underestimated. Also layers. Fo Shiz.
5 - This has also been an important journey of self discovery for me - I have learnt to understand myself and my aims in life. Hooray!

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Awww.... flip.


Flipping images (not the whole canvas) -
Select Image (Command T), then go to edit --> Transform --> Flip horizontal.
That should definitely work.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

I love the way we come undone.

A very blurry picture - my baby sister hovering over my mother's head, but I love the colours of this. Not entirely relevant, I know, but I'm feeling like this - momentarily extremely happy because I just finished board mounting! Huzzah! Fleurtinis all round!
It took me ages, but I was significantly quicker by the end, and I'm loving the result.