A William Morris Thistle Garden

William Morris is often considered the ‘first graphic designer’ because of his beautiful fabric and wall paper patterns. Using an original William Morris design as a starting point, you are going to create a thistle garden using Von Glitschka’s TCM (The Clockwork Method) and then a garden based on a William Morris design. For this project, you will turn in two files, the thistle traced by you with Clocks included (based on Chapter 5 of Glitschka’s Vector Training) and a piece of artwork that builds a garden using the thistle and custom pattern brushes that you create.

Make a Thistle using TCM

Step 1 – Download the Thistle pattern located here.

Step 2 – Pick one of the Thistles (flower head type objects) that you want to trace and copy it into a new Photoshop document. Orient the Thistle head so that it is straight up and down.

Step 4 – Place the Photoshop Thistle into a new 8 1/2 X 11 in. CMYK Adobe Illustrator document. Lock the layer it is on, and Dim according to the instructions in the first Tracing a Drawing video.

Step 5 – Create a new Layer to make your Vector drawing on. Apply The Clockwork Method described in Chapter 5 of Vector Basic Training as you carefully trace the thistle.

Step 6 – Once you are finished tracing the Thistle, lock the layer and create a new layer called “Clocks”. Make a clock similar to what is in the textbook, copy/paste and orient clocks as demonstrated in the Design Drills: Spotting Clocks section of the textbook.

You may need to scale the clock non-uniformly, or rotate the clock to line up with key sections of your drawing. Use Figures 5.35 thru 5.39 as reference, and just place clocks about how often he does and in a similar fashion.

Step 7 – Save your file, you are done with the first of your two files!

Make Thistles using a Pattern Brush

As you can see in the Using the Pattern Brush in Creative Cloud video, the pattern brush is amazing for making borders, great for legal documents, contracts or menus. Adobe Illustrator contains a vast number of border pattern presets to do this, some of them are actually nice looking. However, the real power is when you use pattern (and art) brushes creatively. You can use them to create arms and legs, arrows, and thistles!

Step 1 – Watch the overview of the new way to make a pattern brush in the Using the Pattern Brush in Creative Cloud video tutorial.

Step 2 – A thistle plant will need a base clump of leaves to emerge from (line start), a stem (line side), and a thistle flower (line end). Forget about inside and outside corners, we’ll skip those and use straight lines only. You already have the thistle head, now make your leaves and stem.

Step 3 – With all your parts in place, drag the stem into the brush palette to make a new pattern (as directed in the video). Make your thistle flower the End and your base clump the start.

Step 4 – Draw straight lines and apply the brush to each line to make flowers. Play with line width, color (assuming you are using the Tint mode as directed in the video) and length of the line to make a variety of flowers.

Step 5 – Enjoy your thistle garden! Save your Thistle garden file in a folder, include the standalone Thistle (with clocks), Zip the folder and upload to Canvas by the due date.