Microscopic image would make a good fabric design

Spoonflower.com lets you upload your own images and have them printed on fabric. Or, you can select some beautiful fabric that others have designed. We’re going to upload some pictures of crystal formation seen through the microscope.

"Vintage" fabric design from Spoonflower.com

]]> http://oncomp.com/2010/06/put-any-image-on-fabric/feed/ 0 http://oncomp.com/2009/09/books-getting-crafty/ http://oncomp.com/2009/09/books-getting-crafty/#comments Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:57:35 +0000 Bob and Joy Schwabach http://oncomp.com/?p=1506 “Digital Textile Design,” by Bowles and Isaac; $23 from Amazon.com and various other book sellers.

This is a difficult book to describe. While initially intended for students at British textile colleges, the techniques can really be used by anyone, and truly individually designed fabrics can be created at home or by a small shop. The lessons show you how to add a design to paper patterns, how to space out sequins and other applied materials. Or, you can skip all that and just design for whole bolts of cloth.

A search on the web revealed a number of places that would both print your design and/or make your garment. Spoonflower.com, FabricOnDemand.com and KarmaKraft.com all charge around $17 a yard and up to print your design. If you want to do it yourself, you don’t need expensive equipment; Bob recalls printing a silk tie with a Canon inkjet printer.

Painter 11 really captured Joy’s fancy. It’s a professional program with a long learning curve and the results are impressive.

Painter is a Corel program for creating digital art. The key and pretty much whole structure is based on brushes. There are many and selecting a particular one determines how a picture will be done. Selecting a pen and ink brush will naturally enough produce a picture that looks as though it had been done with pen and ink. Similarly productive results can be achieved by selecting crayon, pencil, chalk, watercolor, oil paint, etc.

Not merely the effect, but the type of brush may be selected as well. It can be thin, broad, soft or hard. Effects can be combined to create new special effects. Combine charcoal with crayon or oil paint and you get an effect not seen in art that uses physical tools, though the look is something like what you would get by painting on highly textured paper.

The brushes are touch-sensitive. If you move a brush slowly it lays down more paint or charcoal or ink. Moving swiftly lays down a thinner layer. This kind of control really works best using a digital pen and tablet, instead of a mouse. Wacom (wacom.com) makes one called Bamboo that can be purchased for less than $80. You draw on the tablet with the special pen that comes with it. The drawing will of course appear on the computer screen. A nice and delicate feature of this pen and tablet combination is that the width of your line or brush stroke can be controlled by tilting or twisting the pen.

Painter 11 is fairly expensive: $429 list price for Windows or Mac, or slightly less from discounters like Amazon.com. There is an educational edition available for just $100, but you must provide proof that you are a student or teacher at a recognized school. Usually this means just showing an identification card. You can find many deals of this kind at Studica.com and AcademicSuperstore.com.

If you can’t qualify for the special educational pricing, there is a $100 version called “Painter Essentials,” which gives you most of the tools. If you really like what you’ve created, you can have it reproduced on canvas at CorelPainterPlus.com. Prices start at $59; you can see examples there.

One of the neatest features of ArtRage is that you can open an image from your computer as a fainter version of itself so you can trace, draw or paint over it. This provides an instant template for your work. There’s an artist in the New York subways who uses ArtRage to sketch the other passengers.

SnapArt turns a photo into a painting

single click. The bad news is it’s a plug-in for Photoshop or Photoshop Elements or PaintShop Pro. So you have to have one of those to use Snap Art 2. Photoshop is expensive but the other two programs are well under $100. Snap Art 2 itself is $199 from AlienSkin.com.

All you do is open a photo and click on the kind of filter you want: oil painting, pencil or whatever. You can also select a style: comic book, for example.

There are 700 presets, all of which can be tweaked to produce the effect you want. The neatest new feature is the “focus region.” Drag a circle around a face in a portrait, for example, and you can isolate that from the effects produced in the rest of the picture. There are great tutorials on the alienskin.com website that show you how to tweak your settings.

What amazes us is how advanced these tablets have become. The $122 price is less than the first clunky 4 x 5 inch low resolution tablets we reviewed 25 years ago. But the CyberTablet Z12 has a 10 x 6.25 inch drawing surface and is only a third of an inch thick. It can record hand-writing and drawing with resolution as tight as two thousand lines to the inch. If you’re an artist with a steady hand, the screen is pressure sensitive and the thickness of your line can change in response to more than a thousand levels of pressure.

Using the supplied software or Vista’s built-in features, the system will convert hand written notes to regular typed text. You can write numbers directly into an Excel spreadsheet, for example, and you can send handwritten notes and numbers directly through Microsoft Outloook. Click a button to send handwriting and drawings through email. Clearly marked hot spots on the tablet are dedicated to common word processing functions like cut, copy and paste and another 25 hot spots can be used to hold any other macro functions – opening other programs, word processing, pasting in so-called “boiler-plate” text, etc.

Our Z12 tablet came with software for creating macros and editing notes, as well as a copy of Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 5. This last is great for editing photos or drawings, especially for “masking.” Masking means taking any part of a picture, like a person’s face or figure, and moving it to another part or even to another photo. This is usually done by carefully outlining the object using a mouse pointer, but this offers nowhere near the control that you can get with a pen and tablet.

MutualArt.com lists local and international art shows. We went to the special exhibit of Edward Hopper paintings at the Chicago Art Institute, but didn’t find out until we visited this site a couple of days later that there was an interesting exhibit of ceramics at an art gallery nearby. The site culls information from 10,000 art galleries and museums and has 150,000 articles from magazines. The links to exhibits, galleries, art fairs and auctions are worldwide.

We found a nifty device that’s like an iPod docking station only it’s for hard disk drives. The $44 docking station will take just about any kind of 3.5-inch hard drive; just plug them in and plug them out.

The new CorelDraw Graphics Suite X4 has a list price of $429 ($199 for upgrades), which is pretty hefty, but nothing compared to the time cost of starting over. The large installed base of users should like the new features: There are 80 templates for producing business documents, advertisements, newsletters, etc. Each template can be further defined by selecting the type of business you want applied to the form. If you’d like to share your thoughts on any design, the program has a “ConceptShare” button that takes you to Corel’s Web site where you can look over and talk over other people’s designs.

A feature we’ve always liked in CorelDraw is the ability to bring in any bitmap drawing and automatically convert it to a vector drawing. In plain terms this means that enlarging a drawing that has been converted to vector art gets rid of the so-called “jaggies” you see as a bitmap gets bigger. The jaggies are those stair-step lines that appear on the edges when a bitmap drawing is made larger. The vector transfer routine can now be applied to mechanical drawings and signatures as well.

New features in CorelDraw X4 include 10,000 pieces of clip art, new type fonts, support for RAW camera files, and the ability to add notes to imported PDF files. You can save any files in formats that can be opened by users of Microsoft products and AutoCAD.

A new feature that should appeal to many writers, editors and type compositors is “What the Font.” Clicking on this takes you to the MyFonts.com Web site, which can identify what font is being used in a document someone gave you to work on. (Free trial at Corel.com.)

That’s just the basics, because there’s a lot more you can do. For example, a freehand tool lets you draw any kind of figure and push that down to ground level to create an atrium or court, or pull on the drawing to create a tower or bridge. Any shape, whether a simple square or circle, or a closed freehand curve, can be pushed right through a structure to create a tunnel or the kind of architectural hole-in-the-wall you see in some modern buildings.

You can model any kind of building you can imagine, and then add windows, doors, decks, sheds, arcades, etc., and have them done with dimensional accuracy to match the rest of the building. A “components” library has figures of people, furniture, trees and shrubs along with stuff you seldom think of, like microphone stands, in case you’re designing a stage or recording studio. The textures library lets you set your walls in brick or stone, floors in wood or tile, etc.

The drawings can be extended to make entire cityscapes or landscape settings by adding surrounding buildings and settings from the real world. Pictures of existing buildings and grounds can be traced and those structures added to the one you create. Alternatively, you can start with a photo of an existing building; either alone or in its setting, and modify that to see how your changes fit.

Enormous power here, and all for free. The professional version of SketchUp Pro 6 is available for $495, but what it primarily adds is the ability to use drawings from other architectural programs, like the market leading AutoCAD, from Autodesk. The pro version of SketchUp also lets you take the 3-D model you created and make two- dimensional floor plans and layouts, which would then be used for blueprints. You can see lots of examples of finished and semi-finished work by going to Google.com and doing a search on the key words, “SketchUp Gallery.” You can get the program itself at SketchUp.com.