Adventure block prints – A fun design project for everyone
Either as a single pattern concept on a piece of paper or a repeat pattern for fabric design
A block print-style is something I like very much on fabric and on products from other designers, so it was great news to spot the Adventure Block Prints Design Challenge organized by Spoonflower.
The block print style reminds me of screen printing. But with screen printing you need some infrastructure, whereas to achieve a block print look, you can easily create your stamps and prints whenever you are using for example, Foam Rubber. The cutter I have used here is the cutter SW-600GP with a swivel mechanism (which works very well for small details) and acrylic paint. For this challenge, I got a sheet of Foam Rubber and drew some “easy” icons o it with a pen. As I cut up a pineapple for breakfast that morning, one of the icons ended up being a pineapple :-) After cutting the icons out I glued them on to jam jar lids (You could use something similar).
And inspired by one of my recent pattern designs, I cut out some blackbirds and just for fun a cute whale and some trees.
Usually I create my illustrations in Adobe Illustrator because I like the flexibility to easily change scales and colours without any loss of quality. That’s why I created a print I would image trace in Adobe Illustrator later.
For that I put acrylic paint on the bottom of each object (you can mix it with water) and stamped them as shown below onto some paper. As I wanted to image trace the result in Adobe Illustrator, I used black paint, but you could also use any other colour. And when you want to put a pupil in an eye, use a brush or cut out a small round to stamp the pupil into the eye.
After the stamps dried I scanned the image. For a good contrast between black and white, I made some adjustments in Adobe Photoshop. Then, with the image trace tool I turned my icons into vectorized objects, which made it easy for me to recolour, copy, scale and arrange them. Finally, I created the pattern “Blackbirds in the Woods” and uploaded it to Spoonflower.
