Printing your own textiles is so achievable now with bureaus like Spoonflower. I’ve been working on the perfect design for over a year now, and realising that it will never see reality have rashly submitted a couple of designs based on a scan of native grasses and a seamless tiled and re-coloured image of a drawing that my niece did.  I’m expecting them in the mail shortly.

OK…print textiles can’t compete with the lovely intricacies of the woven textile IMHO, but I still love them and they are needed for different purposes. Mostly I’m unable to find any fresh new style fabrics in my home town, especially for home furnishings. So next we’ll each be designing fabrics ourselves then shipping the fabric in – custom style. So I’ll have to get much better at designing if I want any decent fabrics for clothes or furnishings.

Hence purchasing every book on digital print designing. But learning Photoshop and Illustrator prep techniques is only half the process. The most important one is the actual design and drawing. As always, the help I’m looking for isn’t in the books or resources about the topic. It is in the byways.Creative Doodling & Beyondis just that. We all doodle in some way and designing is really an extension of that. This book has many great ideas for creating pattern and pattern elements in a very approachable way. Structured as a work book, you won’t even have to find paper to immediately test and copy the ideas. In copying the approach to the doodle art you soon adapt here and there to develop a new idea on the page without knowing it. Shape, rhythm and texture with line weight are covered adding real zest to the drawings. I’ve enjoyed it so much I’m ordering more to give to others!