If you plan to print and sell your illustrated textile designs then knowing how to produce clean, neat and printable artwork will bode you well. Our senior designer and workshop instructor, Charis, explains.
Here in the studio, we have a few tricks to clean up your illustrations quickly and create a professional-looking end product.
1.USE THE LEVELS TOOL
When cleaning up your pen illustrations, the goal is to create crisp black and white lines with minimal areas of grey, and the easiest way to achieve this quickly is with Levels.
Levels can be found in the toolbar: Image> Adjustment Levels.
Levels adjust how much light, dark and contrast is in your image. You simply adjust the sliders to clarify your black and white image. The far left slider makes the dark tones darker, while the far right slider makes the light tones lighter. This can be used to ensure your linework is true black, but also to clean up any subtle paper texture that may have appeared in your scan.
2. CLEAN BEFORE COLOURING
Always clean up your illustrations in Photoshop BEFORE you start colouring up your art or creating a layout. If you start colouring your design while your pen linework is grey, mottled or blurry you can run into a lot of issues should you need to change colours or neaten the linework down the track. It can also be a nightmare if you’ve created a beautiful layout, only to find that the lines are thick and blurry, or too pale and washed out as you then have to change every repeated element individually. It’s something we’ve all learned the hard way in the studio, so save yourself a lot of time and heartache and learn from our mistakes 🙂
Once your linework is cleaned up, you can start on the fun part: Colouring up your elements and creating a layout.
Charis shares a host of tips and tricks in our upcoming in-studio Sydney workshop, Photoshop for Fabric Design: Illustration.
It’s an all day intensive course designed to brush you up on ALL the photoshop skills you’ll need to become a commercial textile designer. Never used Photoshop? No worries! We guide beginners through the basics before working up to the more advanced stuff. Learn more about it right here.
Can’t make it to Sydney? Join Charis online in our digital version of the course, Photoshop for Fabric Design: Illustration. Or, if you just want to be kept in the loop with upcoming courses, sign up below!
Thanks for reading and good luck! x