Surface Design Bookshelf from Susan Niner Janes {part 3}

Here is part three of our five part feature on some lovely Surface Design books by Susan Niner Janes.

The Digital Brushes Sourcebook: 300 Original, Royalty-Free Illustrator Brushes – and How to Make Your Own

By Emily Portnoi
RotoVision 2010
ISBN 978 2 888893 091 4
Paperback £25.00

This beautiful book is a revelation. It comes with a CD of beautiful royalty-free artwork to use in your designs. That’s very nice. But the strength of this book is that it teaches how to design and edit your own Adobe Illustrator brushes from scratch, in great detail.
The author says about brushes, “ It may seem at first that they are just one limited function of a large illustration package, but the array of effects they can achieve is vast.” She concentrates on vector brushes because design details and sizes can be easily changed, and the file size is smaller.

The first section of the book is an invaluable beginner’s guide to brushes. It discusses what they are, their uses, how to locate them in the Illustrator program, features and functions of the brushes palette, how to add and delete brushes, resize them, colour them.
There are four types of brushes in Illustrator: Calligraphic, Scatter, Art, and Pattern – and each is given its own section in the book. Each section begins with a gallery of artwork generated with that brush type. It discusses the characteristics of the brush type and goes on to give detailed how-tos for creating it. The directions are written – an illustrated – clearly.
Digital brushes are best created and worked with using a pen tablet, and info on how to adjust brush settings and control the brush artwork is given.

The last section of the book is a Tips and Tricks section – the graduate school of brush creation.
The section on pattern brushes shows how to create designs for photo corners, a skill that would be useful to those thinking of designing for digital scrapbooking.

Full marks to this title for showcasing the potential of digital brushes. For those learning about vector design, this book is a journey of adventure and discovery!

Note: this title is out of print, but is available new and used from Amazon.
Note: I was supplied with a review copy of this title.

Digital Fashion Print with Photoshop and Illustrator
By Kevin Tallon
Batsford 2011
ISBN 978 1 84994 004 7
£18.99

This title comes up with the goods if you are looking to learn how to design prints. The author, Kevin Fallon, has a practical approach, advocating “thin slicing” – learning the specific aspects of a program that you need to know to produce results. He advises you to “drill the skills” to become proficient at designing.

This large-format book (it is square, like a scrapbook page) wows you with inspirational examples – full-colour pics of digital textile prints bursting with originality and techie expertise. Then it clearly and concisely imparts the necessary how-to information via step-by-step tutorials.

The tuts are invaluable and include: Scanning and Lens Correction, Adjusting and Cleaning Up Imported Artwork, Using the Path Palette and Pen Tool to Select Elements, Using Photoshop Filters, Working with Live Trace, Using Puppet Wrap (a feature introduced with Adobe Illustrator CS5), Compositing, Creating Pattern Tiles (Basic, Intermediate, Advanced), Working with Symbols, and Using Art Bristle and Scatter Brushes.

The author “invite(s) the reader to think laterally when navigating through the tutorials”. Cherry-pick your newly-acquired skills, and “transfer them to other areas”. The textile designer has to think outside the box! As you acquire new skills, there will be many eureka moments, and you will make the connections necessary to come up with new design ideas. Exciting stuff.

Kevin Fallon, is a visiting teacher on the BA Fashion Design Course at Saint Martins College, and he also works as a Design Director within the fashion industry.

Note: this book is still available from Amazon.

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Susan Niner Janes is a craft designer, author, and blogger.