Diane's Digital Surface Design

I am thrilled to join in the Blog Hop and Give Away for Diane Doran's new Quilting Arts Workshop dvd, Digital Surface Design! 

It's awesome. Really.

Get this: I am NOT proficient at Photoshop Elements at all! I wondered if I really could watch this dvd and walk through Photoshop to create interesting digital images that might be good for printing on fabric. I know Diane is an amazing artist and teacher, but I still doubted by ability to take it all in.

Here's what I did. This is a picture of my computer monitor. I've got Diane's dvd running in the window on the left and I have Photoshop open in the window on the right. Even though she works on a PC and I work on a Mac, I was able to follow along easily. As we went along, I clicked pause or zoomed back to look again at what she was doing as neccesary.

I learned to use the motion blur filter to create something that looks like it might have been drip dyed. And then duplicate and play around with that image for more arty effects. I could even enhance and adjust the color to use that same arty image and create it in different color ways. Like this.

 By the way, those images originally came from this photo. Really. How fun is that?

Honestly, I had to pause the video and play around a bit to find the right screen or selection. It took me awhile to just find the plain-old-brush tool, but once I found it, I was able to follow right along with the video. If you're willing to be patient, play around, and experiment, this DVD is an excellent framework for learning lots of stuff.

I learned the very basics of using brushes. In the dvd, Diane used a leaf shaped brush, but I could only find a butterfly shaped brush on my Photoshop Elements version. No problem! Who doesn't love butterflies?

There's a portion of the dvd where Diane uses a pre-designed grass stamp... which I didn't have. I googled "free grass photoshop brush" and it took me seven seconds to get a new brush loaded. (I was feeling quite proud of myself in that moment.) Here you can see my Photoshop work on the right and Diane's dvd on the left. Pretty similar, right? (Remember, I was/am a complete Photoshop novice.)

I learned so many other little things about gradients, making brushes, easy tricks for working with layers and much, much more!

Here are a couple of the final images I ended up with after watching the whole dvd.

Of course, the dvd is full of stunning fabric that Diane created (Candy included lots of them on her blog). But, I wanted you to see what I created by watching the dvd and just imagine what YOU could create.

Here's your chance! Diane is giving away a copy of her amazing dvd. Leave a comment here on my blog before January 28 and you'll have a chance to win. Plus, Diane is giving away four fat quarters of her fabric created for this dvd workshop. It's beautiful!

Check out all the other blogs for more great reviews of Diane's dvd.

January 14 – Candy Glendening - http://www.candiedfabrics.com/journal/

January 16 – Sarah Ann Smith - http://www.sarahannsmith.com/weblog/

January 21 – Deborah Boschert - http://deborahsjournal.blogspot.com/

January 24 – Susan Brubaker Knapp - http://wwwbluemoonriver.blogspot.com/

January 28 – Diane Rusin Doran - http://oohprettycolors.blogspot.com/