Frankie and Swiss: Digital Textile Print & Design Class

Monday, July 15, 2013

Digital Textile Print & Design Class - at the CAE

The CAE Winter course guide is out and if you look closely, you’ll see something new. A new textile class - presented by Frankie and Swiss! We are very excited to announce this 3 part workshop series – a journey into digital textile printing and design at Melbourne’s CAE in Flinders Lane.
Make your very own fabric – your design from concept to cloth! The first class is at our studio in South Yarra, a space brimming with colour, texture and endless possibilities, the perfect start to inspire a digital design journey.

Join ‘Florence’, the 2 tonne digital textile printing machine on a journey exploring the possibility of printed textiles in millions of colours and the creation of art in another form!
Digital textile printing is the process of printing a design or image directly from the computer screen onto fabric. Whether originating from original artwork, a photograph or digital design, exciting opportunities are created for bespoke and customised fabric with photographic quality reproduction and complex and subtle effects not previously possible in printmaking methods.
In this 3 part workshop series, we will look at how to develop your very own customised fabric from concept to cloth. We kick off at the Frankie and Swiss studio with a digital textile printing demonstration and general overview. The studio is brimming with colour and pattern and will provide a visual reference and context for developing your customised fabric design.
We will explore pattern in detail and learn several repeat pattern methods in Illustrator and Photoshop (including simple and more complex tossed layouts in Illustrator, free flowing prints in Photoshop and an overview of the new CS6 pattern tool). We will look at how to prepare a hand-painted design, a photograph and a digital design for print and the application of various design tools such as Image Trace in Illustrator and Filters and Masks in Photoshop. Other topics such as file formats, file preparation, resolutions and basic colour theory will also be covered.
At the end of the workshops, you’ll have gained both practical and theoretical experience in developing a textile print from a sketch/photo into a digital file in both Illustrator and Photoshop, from initial concept through to full design realisation. You’ll be inspired by infinite colour possibilities, textures, decoration and the application of textile design for a multitude of end uses. After the last session your design will be custom printed onto 1m of natural fibre cloth which you’ll be able to pick up from CAE the following week.
Be inspired to widen your design ideas and colour palettes and create art in another form!