If you ever pay a visit to Printfresh Studio, you'll find our office full of designers creating beautiful artwork day in and day out. One of our teams produces trend-driven and runway-inspired original designs, while our CAD & Custom team develops custom artwork for our clients' more specific requests. That team also helps out with making sure artwork files are factory-ready, which you can read about over here.
When we're working with a client on a custom design, they'll send over some inspiration photos so we can get a feel for their vision. We also make sure to discuss important elements like scale, spacing, and hand, as well as nitty-gritty technical details like repeat size and color max info. We want to make sure the final artwork is both beautiful and also workable for their printer.
Today we're going to show you how our CAD & Custom team moves from inspiration to a finished print. And if you stick around until the end of this post, we're sharing some free wallpaper downloads we created for your desktop or smartphone!
Earlier this summer, one of our team members brought in some beautiful sunflowers from a weekend getaway. We fell in love with the colors and floral shapes, and decided to use them as inspiration for a new print.
When creating a custom print, we'll typically get started by putting together a mood board of images we love, to help narrow down our concept.
These are the kinds of questions we consider: Do we want our print to be on a dark ground or light ground? What scale should the motifs be? Will the sunflowers overlap, or be more spaced? There are tons of details to take into account, and pulling other images helps us navigate how we want our own print to look and feel.
Now it's time to start painting! Here's our designer working on her sweet sunflower motifs. Once the elements are done, she scans them into her computer and moves over to Photoshop to create the print.
Take a look below - the scanned motifs are on the left, and the finished print is on the right! We used Photoshop to create the layout, while also playing around with scale and color. Once a layout is worked up, we'll send the WIP (work-in-progress) to our client for review. Sometimes we'll need to make adjustments, but if everything is approved we'll send over the final artwork file, ready for printing. After it's all done, it's fun to look back and see how the print took shape!
Are you as obsessed with sunflowers as we are right now? We have free downloadable wallpapers featuring our sunflower-inspired print, just for you! Click the links below to view the full-sized images, and then save them to your device.
Does your design team need a hand with creating the perfect print for your collection? Send over your inspiration, and our CAD artists can work with you to develop custom artwork that fits your needs and budget. Get in touch to learn more!