Top Surface Pattern Design Blogs in 2023

Here are some of the top surface pattern design blogs that are popular amongst designers and pattern enthusiasts like myself:

  1. Print & Pattern (www.printandpattern.com) – A comprehensive resource for surface pattern design, featuring the latest news, trends, and tutorials in the industry.
  2. The Pattern Observer (www.thepatternobserver.com) – A blog that focuses on the analysis and creation of surface pattern design, offering inspiration and insight into the design process.
  3. surface pattern design guide (www.surfacepatterndesignguide.com rel=”nofollow”) – A blog that provides resources and tutorials for surface pattern designers, with a focus on software tutorials, design inspiration, and business advice.
  4. Spoonflower (blog.spoonflower.com) – The blog of the popular fabric printing company, Spoonflower, offers tutorials, design inspiration, and insights into the world of surface pattern design.
  5. Pattern People (patternpeople.com/blog) – A blog that offers a mix of design inspiration, tutorials, and business advice for surface pattern designers, with a focus on both traditional and digital design techniques.
  6. The Pattern Base (thepatternbase.com) – A blog that showcases the work of surface pattern designers from around the world, offering a diverse range of design inspiration and tutorials.
  7. The Pattern Spot (thepatternspot.com) – A blog that focuses on the latest trends and news in surface pattern design, offering inspiration and insights into the industry.

These blogs are a great resource for surface pattern designers looking to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and techniques in the industry, as well as for anyone looking for inspiration and guidance in their own design work. Head over to my Tools page where I share some of the design tools I use on a daily basis.

Why You Should Start Using Procreate: The Ultimate Digital Art App for Creatives

Procreate is a powerful and versatile digital art app that offers a wealth of features and tools for artists of all levels. Whether you’re a professional artist, hobbyist, or just starting out, Procreate has something to offer everyone. In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the reasons why you should start using Procreate and what makes it a must-have tool for creative professionals.

  1. Intuitive User Interface

One of the biggest advantages of Procreate is its intuitive and user-friendly interface. The app is designed to make it easy for artists to get started and to quickly create professional-looking artwork. All of the tools are organized in an easy-to-navigate manner, making it simple to find what you need when you need it. The interface also includes customizable gestures and shortcuts, allowing you to streamline your workflow and work faster.

  1. Wide Range of Tools and Brushes

Procreate offers a vast selection of tools and brushes, including pencils, pens, watercolors, and more. Each brush is highly customizable, allowing you to adjust the size, opacity, and pressure sensitivity to create the exact look you’re after. Whether you’re working on fine-tuned details or large, sweeping strokes, Procreate has the tools to get the job done.

  1. High-Quality Output

Procreate is designed to deliver high-quality output, no matter what type of artwork you’re creating. With support for up to 8K resolution and an advanced color management system, you can be confident that your artwork will look stunning and professional. Procreate also supports multiple file formats, making it easy to export your artwork for use in other applications or for print.

  1. Advanced Layers System

Procreate’s advanced layer system allows you to work with multiple layers in your artwork, making it easier to create complex compositions. Layers can be moved, duplicated, merged, and more, giving you complete control over your artwork. The layer system also makes it easy to create non-destructive edits, allowing you to make changes without affecting your original artwork.

  1. Time-Lapse Recording

Procreate’s time-lapse recording feature is a fun and engaging way to share your creative process with others. With this feature, you can record your artwork being created in real-time, and then share the time-lapse video with others. This is a great way to showcase your skills and to give others a glimpse into the creative process behind your work.

In conclusion, Procreate is a powerful and versatile digital art app that offers a wide range of features and tools for artists of all levels. Whether you’re a professional artist, hobbyist, or just starting out, Procreate has something to offer. So why not download the app today and start exploring all the amazing features and tools that Procreate has to offer!

Top Surface Pattern Design Blogs in 2021

Here are some of the top surface pattern design blogs that are popular amongst designers and pattern enthusiasts like myself:

Pattern Curator

TRENDS TRENDS TRENDS! The Pattern Curator blog is the place to be when you need accurate and helpful trend forecasting mood boards to help develop your designs. If you sell your designs on products, this blog will be an important ingredient in your process.

Denise Anne

Denise Anne’s website has a really cool blog but I thought I would point you to a particular post about creating your own surface pattern design collection. She goes over the different kinds of repeat pattern layouts This is a great guide if you are working on making a viable portfolio. This post was one of the very first pages I bookmarked that helped me get my career going.

Spoonflower – Logos Download

The Spoonflower blog is a great place for surface pattern designers to explore. With tons of topics pertaining to pattern design, you will be sure to find this a pertinent place for inspiration and industry info.

dark logo

Kelcie Makes Patterns is a fellow designer who keeps an interesting blog about the tools she uses such as the Procreate app. She also talks about using Adobe Illustrator and helps other designers “level up” their design.

Longina Phillips Designs | LinkedIn

Longina Phillips Designs also a great place to find trend reports and color palettes. They post helpful how-to’s and about different styles of design. If you love floral prints, you need to check this out!

UPPERCASE

UPPERCASE is a quarterly magazine who’s subscribers to the print magazine also receive free access to their online community, the UPPERCASE Circle. This is where you can find videos, friendly conversation and monthly creative prompts. Their blog is awesome too which recommends workshops, and great info about all things creative!

These blogs are a great resource for surface pattern designers looking to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and techniques in the industry, as well as for anyone looking for inspiration and guidance in their own design work. Head over to my Tools page where I share some of the design tools I use on a daily basis.

Digital Art: Explore Illustration

Digital illustration is big business these days. A quick look at roadside billboards, club flyers or magazine covers should be enough to convince anyone that the art of the digital designer has never been in higher demand, and its popularity just keeps on growing.

But defining exactly what digital illustration is proves tricky. We all know what the words mean, yet the myriad of ways in which illustration can be applied makes it one of the most versatile of the creative arts and as such, it’s pretty difficult to pin down.

With a strong creative vision and the right software, concepts can be articulated in limitless ways; each style opening new doors for expression. The one crucial skill that ties it all together is the need for some innate artistic ability. You don’t need to be a virtuoso with a pencil to be good at computer art, but there’s no doubt that most professional illustrators are proficient with traditional art techniques.

The basics of image structure are the same across mediums, after all, and with software increasingly able to mimic traditional drawing methods, the transition to digital has become almost seamless. Let’s take a closer look at the main branches of digital illustration and discover a little more about how the experts put them together.

Vector art

It’s no great accident that vector illustration is currently one of the trendiest and easily recognizable of the digital art disciplines. The signature flat colors and clean lines are easy to spot and quick to grab attention, which of course makes the style hugely popular with advertisers looking to catch the eye of potential consumers. In addition, their reduced color palettes and scalable technology means they are perfect when it comes to artwork for the Web.

Created with precision by manipulating Bezier paths, the mechanics of vectors are based on mathematic principles that make them infinitely scalable without suffering degradation. This trait is extremely attractive to illustrators because it means images can be shrunk to a stamp or stretched to a billboard, without having to be redone. Paths are also easy to edit at a later stage, making vector images quick to tweak and rearrange if need be.

Vector shapes are often produced with photographs or hand drawn scans as templates, digitally tracing as much of the outline and detail as needed. Programs such as Flash can even create vectors automatically by tracing over photographic or pre sketched material, allowing picture elements to be created quickly and with little effort. However, the real artistry comes when choosing which elements to take to the digital image, and knowing how to color and arrange the final illustration.

Keeping up to date is crucial and, since digital artists typically spend hours in front of a screen involved in their masterpieces, it’s all too easy to become isolated from what’s going on around you. Styles ace constantly changing and trends can come and go at great speed, so keeping your finger on the industry pulse is vital. Not only does it make good commercial sense, but it can also act as a rich muse from which to draw ideas

Mixing media

While vector art focuses on clean shapes, simple forms and bold chunks of color, other digital illustration techniques take things in the opposite direction. Since the arrival of Photoshop in 1990, artists have been able to digitally manipulate photographic material and combine it with other visual ingredients, and when layers arrived with Photoshop 3.0 five years later, the stage was set for a new form of digital image. In 1995, digital photo illustration was born.

Based on the traditional method of using scissors and glue to cut and paste photos and artwork together in new arrangements, it’s a technique that has always been popular with children but has now become the favored strategy of many an adult illustrator. This is primarily due to Photoshop’s specialized, yet accessible and intuitive, tool set, but also reflects the success the strategy can have when attempting to convey a complicated collection of ideas.

Sketching toons

While everyone knows that Photoshop is the king of detailed mixed media illustration, less well known is the fact that it’s also astonishingly good at producing line and comic style artwork. Deftly sidestepping the need to use intricate filters and effects, the hand drawn, hand colored look is gaining favor with artists and art directors alike.

Because of the time saving tools that Photoshop offers, professional comic book artists are beginning to use the software to color their hand drawn sketches and are taking digital art into previously unexplored areas. Using a mixture of both hand drawn and digital painting, new styles are surfacing that are making a massive impact on the established illustration industry.

Realer than real?

But for many artists, the Holy Grail of computer art is realism. Recent advances in graphics technology have enabled software developers to accurately simulate real world drawing and painting tools by modelling how inks, chalks, oils and paints behave when they are applied to different surfaces. Using random particles to create natural looking strokes on simulated materials, you can now produce painted images that are all but indistinguishable from their hand made equivalents.

Since you can also grab a graphics tablet and paint directly onto your digital canvas, digital painting is less a description of an illustration style and more a literal possibility. As well as further mimicking the traditional within the digital arena, it’s also easy to pick up and get started. To this end, having some experience with real world painting is a definite advantage.

Because the technology behind natural media is so intricate, there are only a handful of programs that can actually achieve believable results. One of the most specialized is Corel Painter, which takes the possibilities to extremes by providing an array of simulated traditional drawing and painting tools. It even goes so far as to model the way that watercolor Paints behave when wet, with drips, runs and splashes. However, with some crafty brush creation and expert manipulation of layers, equally exciting effects can be replicated in your humble copy of Photoshop.

Pixel power

But although illustration software is advancing, it would be a mistake to think that the industry is focusing purely on pushing the undiscovered boundaries of digital imaging. In among the simulated paintings, clean vectors and intricate photo collages, a resurgence of old school pixel techniques is proudly celebrating the humble beginnings of computer art.

Pixel illustration is arguably where the whole digital illustration shebang began, back in the days when computer screens could only display a small number of colors at a low resolution. But, like so many limitations, this situation forced creativity and produced a unique style that’s now being snapped up in an industry that’s constantly on the lookout for something different.

Because low resolutions mean large pixel sizes, pixel art uses geometric rules that ensure perspectives are correctly maintained. A by product of this is the familiar isometric view that’s so common in this style of illustration, yet it does lend itself surprisingly well to conceptual art.

Pixel art continues to gain momentum, with increasing numbers of advertising and editorial commissioners looking to capitalize on its retro style designs. The bold use of color and scrutinizing detail also make it ideal for clients wishing to attract close attention and its popularity shows no signs of slowing.

Make it yours

With so many creative styles to work with, there are many entry points into the world of digital illustration. If you already own an imaging package, then you’ve got all the tools you need to get started. The disciplines we’ve delved into cover the majority of styles that are suited to computer art, but who knows what some hot new illustrator will come up with tomorrow. The range of software available combined with the sheer diversity of human experience, means that there is unlimited opportunity for individual expression.

So if you think you could be the next big thing then don’t delay because, whatever your style, now is your chance. The hipness of digital illustration is just beginning to break into the consciousness of the mainstream and there’s never been a better time to explore your creative potential.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Rich_Goldman/60822

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