July 2017 – Dee-Ann LeBlanc

Along with making patterns, my other favorite digital technique is making color variations, both of my patterns and my paintings. These variations can be fairly straightforward color-themed shifts, or they can involve more complex effects and alterations beyond simple color. The simpler changes you can see in part of my Forest Spirit variation series, where I’ve shifted the colors according to the elements. The air piece among those variations, though, involved more complex adjustments since flipping it to a negative threatened to drown out any detail in the environment. You can see a sample set below, for the full set of variants see the Forest Spirit variations link earlier.

Forest Spirit

Fire Spirit

Air Spirit

Some of the transformations are more involved, especially for patterns. I’ll use everything from color inversions, color overlays, pattern overlays, and more until I get something I like and that I feel will look good on products. Honestly, I think I’ll play with every aspect of Photoshop in the process! See my digital pattern Kaleidescape to see a breakdown of how it, in particular, evolved.

If anyone has relevant questions, please leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

I’ve always been someone who straddled multiple worlds. This tendency continues into my art. Once I get a solid photo of one of my traditional media paintings it’s fun to make digital variations, and to play with little pieces of them to make digital patterns. For an example, I’ll use my Forest Spirit and Variants piece:

Forest Spirit by Dee-Ann LeBlanc 200px — Forest Spirit by Dee-Ann LeBlanc

I first choose an interesting section of the painting, like this one:

I may play with making it a seamless pattern, like this:

Or I may start expanding it into a larger pattern, playing with it in a variety of ways, and build out from there. When I do spirals (example shown below), I’m starting with a square sample. I decided to minimize the edges but otherwise keep the squares intact, like a spiral made of overlapping cards, in a nod toward the origin of the initial pattern piece.

Color shifts and so on can also be a big part of the process. Here’s the first that I was really happy with it, called Ring of Angels. Which colors I choose and what process I go through to get there can drastically change the mood of the same exact pattern.

From there, depending on the pattern, I might also choose to tile it into a separate creation. I enjoy doing this with my spiral patterns as it’s interesting to see how they come together in the process. For an example, here’s Ring of Angels tiled, which I’ve titled Angelic Dreams:

I hope you found this brief glimpse into my process interesting.

You can find a wide range of products with both of these patterns in my Society6 shop. Sign up to Society6 using my referral link and you’ll get $10 off a purchase of $40 of more!

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Month: July 2017

Creating Digital Color Variations

Creating Patterns