I had a great time on Saturday afternoon at a design workshop run by Emma and Mel of The People’s Print.  They run their workshops in a studio in an old warehouse in West Hampstead – a bit too far away for some of you, but if you can get to North London, I can recommend them.

Our aim was to produce a design with a hand-painted look, inspired by wild flower meadows.  We started by tracing flowers, so my design was more garden flowers than wild flowers, because I used a garden flower book for my tracing.  We used black paint to produce silhouettes which were then scanned into a computer.

We used Photoshop to create our designs.  I learnt how to upload the flower paintings into Photoshop and use them to create a design.  We used layers to create depth and kept the background clear so that we could change the colour of the background.  We even put a layer on top of the background so that we could have a patterned background.  We then learnt how to make a seamless repeat.  The 3½ hours went by so quickly, there were so many things I wanted to try.  I’ve come home inspired to try more designs; I have lots of ideas running about in my head that I want to have a go at!

We decided to go for a Liberty print look, so worked on a small, 6 cm square, canvas, but I think this technique would work at any scale.

We finished the workshop by printing our designs onto silk. We used A4 silk pieces which come on a paper backing and go through an ordinary printer – very useful for testing your design; seeing how it looks and that the repeats work.

This workshop was very timely, as August's design competition theme is Summer Flowers - look out for details next week, but in the meantime, why not have a go at designing your own floral pattern?