Placement Print development

Unlike university which offers the lectra students the option of using kaledo print for repeat/ placement print development, most design studios use good old photoshop. In fact the lectra/ kaledo system isn't known to the designers here.

I got given an assignment to help my head of design with a print project. Initially she took a scan of a floral motif designed in the studio and started to manually fill colour to the elements. The problem was that the flowers had to be a gradient from orange to red and the others to be a blue gradient.

The best way we could fill colour was to create a circle fill it with the gradient and then erase the area outside the bud outline. As this was a long process she told me that she would handle the coloured version and they needed a beige flat coloured version of the exact design as well, so she handed the original file to me and I began filling in colours following the pantone reference.

The fastest way I could fill the elements was to directly use the eyedropper (I) and paintbrush (B) tools on photoshop and use the occasional eraser (E) tool. The whole process took me 4 hours to finish the entire design. This was purely because we made new layers on top of the scan instead of the easier route, which would have been an illustrator file with the flower outline drawn with the pen tool (P) and then filled in with colour,

I had to then take this element and create a placement print from this. The initial design was a embroidery design on a sleeve which the team wanted to convert into a wide scale digital print.

Before starting the placement print on photoshop, I had to take the main sleeve design and place it into a square and then duplicate the square including the design on the left, right, top and bottom. The file was 50.8 by 50.8 inches wide. This was because the aim was to create a full coverage print within the central square but if elements overlapped into another square, I'd have to repeat it in the other boxes. For example, if I place a flower on the bottom right side of the central box and it crossed the outline of the square, I'd have to place the same flower on the bottom right side of each and every box on the page. This was a measure we had to take to make sure the print looked right when it would get printed on fabric professionally.

The best way to copy and paste the exact elements was to click command c+ command v

or to click alt (option) and drag the element and it would create a copy of the layer, eg- layer 4 copy, layer 4 copy 2, etc, instead of a new layer for every single copy and pasted element. Also to make sure the elements stayed in the same line of proportion the best thing to do would be to click shift + alt (option) and the left, right or top, bottom arrow on the right side of the keyboard. This ensured that the elements were the exact same size and they were placed accurately.

My head of design proceeded to make the placement print of the beige version and I made the print of the coloured version ( She made the file and sent me the psb via wetransfer).

The most important thing was to make sure everything synced together. To ensure this I had to make sure all the vines linked and the empty spaces had to be filled with the leaves or smaller flowers.

Total time: 5 hours.

All the printers had to do was take the middle tile and put that on repeat.

It was such a cool experience to create a wide scale print, towards the end of the 2 days I managed to remember all the shortcuts to the tools we were using.

The main thing we both wish we had done was drawn out the original file on illustrator as that would've made the whole process a lot quicker.