If you’ve had the joy of talking to me these past few days, you probably know that I’m sick of looking at cupcakes.  As in positively disgusted with them.

In my defense, I think every artist goes through this with any project.  I’ll call it, “I’m so sick of looking at this” syndrome.  It isn’t that I don’t like what I’m working on–I wouldn’t be working on it were that the case–it’s that I’m temporarily out of the fun part of drawing and now I have to do all the technical stuff of fabric making and that…well…is hard.

Worth it, but hard.

Because everyone knows how excited I’m going to be when I finally get this pattern figured out properly, and how loud I’m going to squeal when I get the package in the mail.

So, what I figured out yesterday: Manga Studio has this lovely grid feature that can go behind your drawings(that I wish I had known about sooner).  Sounds handy, right?  Oh it is.

After trying and failing with the offset feature in Photoshop, I decided to try doing things a different way.  Unfortunately, in trying out my different way, I discovered that my cupcakes would never align properly because I had created one row too many on the left (I erased them and transplanted the prettiest toppers to other uglier cupcakes).  Then I went back to Manga Studio (which is such a lovely program compared to PS) and created my grid.  The purple lines are based off where the cupcakes should sit in relation to each other.  There was much more math involved in this than I really would have liked.

Now I’m trying to complete the tedious process of shifting (scooting might be a more appropriate term) cupcakes into their proper spots.  You can see a few duplicate cupcakes, gaps between cupcakes.  The one second from the right on the very top gives you a pretty good look at how far some of these have to move.

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9/26/16 Update!  I’ve now officially scooted all of the cupcakes!!!!!

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Hopefully this works and I can grid them together.  This is so insanely tedious.  Oh.  My.  Goodness.

I’m going to have it done by Wednesday’s post.  I’m determined!

If you’re interested in patternmaking on your own, and don’t know where to start check out these two links:

Julia Rothman’s Tutorial on Design Sponge

Rothman shows you the basics of how to do it on an actual sheet of paper (and by “do it”, I mean the fancy thing that the offset feature in PS will do for you).  It kind of blew my mind and the whole process made so much more sense to me after reading this tutorial.

The Jungalow’s Tutorial on Reapeating Patterns

This is the method I’m currently trying out.  Justina Blakeney (Jungalow founder), even recommends the Design Sponge tutorial. Blakeney’s tutorial is very simple, and I really do get the theory of it.  My only complaint is that I wish she told you exactly where the buttons she was clicking were on PS.  Because I am waaaay behind the times on it.

(P.S. Check back on Wednesday, I’ll be posting the new embroidery designs Becky and I put together!)