6 weeks in and only 5 remaining it feels like just yesterday was my first week.

Hi all,

I’m 6 weeks in working at Amanda Kelly and yet I’m still learning new skills every week. This week we had a series of repeat tiles and colour separations needing to be done. As we had 3 new in house designers start this week this meant there were very few computers available for us to work on. Since I am the fastest at repeat tiles I was given the task of completing the several clients requests, this involved me needing to learn how to colour separate. Colour separated files tend to be done when the client is wanting to screen print the design, they will give us a the size of their screens and how many colours they wish to have it separated into so we can then edit the file and make it ready for printing.  Generally colour separations should only be a maximum of 12 colours, with some designs this can be very difficult to achieve as I discovered with a file that had 64 different colours. Up til now I have tried to avoid doing any colour separating as when briefly shown it deeply confused me and there were many other tasks that could be done. However now I have had to learn and I have to say this skill will be of great use to me in future designing for garments and patterns. The tools involved in colour separating allow you to select everything within the document of the same colour and cut, delete or copy it. Personally I can see myself using this as a much more effective version of the magic wand tool, allowing me to clear a space much more precisely. I also learnt how to change everything of one colour in a pattern even quicker than I already knew, this will definitely be useful in other placements as well as my final year for doing alternative colourways with speed.

Dotty Ditsy

As we weren’t particularly busy this week I got a chance to learn more about drawing on photoshop from the designers and put these techniques and skills into practice. There are so many tools in photoshop I just never thought to even look at before now that I know will be useful for me for any general drawings I do as well as designing in my final year. Above is an example of a ditsy pattern and below is a different style of ditsy.

Detailed Ditsy

    As you can see the ditsy’s can be very different from each other varying from detailed to simple and quick. The designers taught me that not all patterns need to be incredibly accurate and detailed. However when drawing ditsy flowers for digital patterns it is best to draw the flowers very large and shrink them to your preferred size to not lose any details or quality of the flowers when the pattern is then printed or if it needs to be up scaled.

In my general life this week I finished my book ”The luckiest girl alive” and honestly I wouldn’t recommend it. Personally it just didn’t catch my attention as much as previous books however I felt I could relate in some ways on a personal level to certain parts with the main character and issues she comes across in the story. However although it didn’t personally turn out to be my kind of read it wasn’t a painful story to read so if from the blurb it catches your attention it could be worth a read. Also because it’s going to be my very fluffy man’s 21st birthday on Monday I luckily got an extra visit from him this weekend and we went on many adventures. First once he arrived all the way from Victoria station to Wembley for dinner as they used to have a South African chain restaurant there, unfortunately it turned out to have closed and re-branded however still excellent food. The next day we went to the Shrek adventure which was amazing and I would thoroughly recommend. I’ve always loved Shrek being an alternative happily ever after story and personally not being the prettiest of women it made me so happy to see you don’t have to look like a model to get a happily ever after. Anyway the whole thing was simply great fun and very much touches into your inner child.