Textile & Pattern Design Course

Learn hands-on fabric printing techniques to unleash your creativity and enhance your professional skillset with our handcrafts short courses in Sydney!

This textile and pattern design short course teaches you the skills to create exciting digital patterns ready for printing on fabrics and garments. Use your own hand-drawn designs or digital images and photographs to create prints from scratch in Adobe Illustrator. This Textile & Pattern design course will introduce you to the basics of colour, drawing, composition and pattern repeats and then process them into print files that can be used in fabric printing and garment manufacturing. Throughout the course, you will receive personal feedback on your work from the course tutor.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this fabric design course, you will have enhanced your career prospects by:

• Understand Adobe Illustrator as it relates to the production of a print
• Understand different colour palettes, base-cloths and their applications for fabric design
• Develop your own creative style by making choices about types of patterns, images, drawings you use and repeat in your design
• Produce your own unique and professional quality fashion fabric design ready for printing

Course content

What will be covered in this fabric design course?

• Setting up a document for printing
• Introduction to print design in Adobe Illustrator 
• Creating a print design concept from your own source material
• Working with placement prints
• Working with pattern repeats
• Learn about different colour palettes, base cloths and their applications for fabric design
• Preparing a print to send off to printers

Intended audience

Who is this fabric design course for?

This course is for students looking to upskill and enhance their abilities in illustration, graphic design, textile design, or Adobe software. It is suitable for anyone who is interested in exploring and expanding their skills in these creative fields, and for individuals working in these fields who wish to consolidate and enhance their professional skillsets.

Course venue

Rozelle Campus

2A Gordon Street, Rozelle NSW 2039 (corner of Gordon St & Victoria Rd in the grounds of St. Joseph's Church)

Course materials

What to bring to class

• In the first week students will discuss ideas for creating a repeating design using their own artwork, it might be helpful to bring along 1-5 Illustrations you have made at home (drawn with ink, pen, pencil, watercolour, gouache, etc) or perhaps photos or images you'd like to work with or use as inspiration - some of these may be scanned and used in your print in later weeks.
• Please bring a hard drive to store your files (or a min 16GB USB) to all computer classes.

Additional information

Please note the following:

This Textile & Pattern design course runs in our computer lab, fitted with 27-inch Apple computers as well as Dell computers running the Windows operating system, both types of computers have the latest Adobe apps installed. Adobe products function the same on both Windows and Macintosh computers except for minor differences with keyboard usage and where files are located within the computer.