Designing and Submitting Patterns
Designing Your Own Patterns!
It's fun and easy to design your own patterns. You will most likely want to do this when you have become a beadie critter fanatic and want to make a beadie critter to represent your other favorite things. That is how most of the designers who submit patterns got their start. Then there are some of us who enjoy it so much, we'll design patterns for things that others request.
- First, you should have completed enough beadie critters that you know how they are made. It's helpful to have made several "Advanced" patterns with different styles of arms, legs, ears, etc. This will help you "think" like a beadie critter designer.
- When you first start designing Beadie Critters, it is best to actually try to make the critter out of beads first. As you get more experienced, you will be able to draw up your idea, then make it with beads to make sure it works. Look carefully at what you're trying to design and think what elements are important to make it look like what it is--hair/clothing/fur colors, shape of body/arms/legs/ears, etc. Try to duplicate the most important elements in your new critter. Remember you won't be able to exactly duplicate all the details unless you make a very HUGE critter, and that won't be very handy to tote around on your backpack.
Now, on to the REALLY fun part...
Submitting Your Design to Margo's Beadie Critter Collection!
- Getting your pattern onto the computer. There are several options for doing this:
- a) phone or digital camera--take a picture of the actual critter
- c) draw a picture of your pattern on paper and scan it or take a picture of the drawing
- d) draw a picture of your pattern on the computer
- Now that you've got your pattern scanned, photographed or drawn on the computer, here are some hints and tips for sending it to me:
Ideally, I would love to have both a picture of the completed critter AND a drawing.
I'm going to talk about option d, drawing your picture on the computer. There are many different graphics programs that you can use for this.
If you have a PC, and you use Windows, you can use a program called "Paint" that comes with the system. Here is a great tutorial from Lily on using Paint to draw a pattern: Lily's Paint Tutorial. And here is a downloadable bead template (in Zip format) that Mike Ward used when drawing his patterns--it has beads at all angles. You would use this in a similar way to what Lily describes in her tutorial. Most of the pattern drawings on this site were done with this template.
Other graphics programs include PaintShopPro or Adobe PhotoShop, and some people who send me patterns use Microsoft PowerPoint or even Microsoft Word.
If you have a Macintosh, Adobe Photoshop, MacPaint or Superpaint can be used. I used Adobe Photoshop when I had a Mac, and did it in much the same way described in Lily's Paint tutorial.
- Make your file as small as possible. First of all, crop all the extra space from around the photo or drawing. In Adobe PhotoShop or Paint you would do this by selecting the graphic, then selecting "Crop" under the "Image" menu.
- Another way to make the file smaller, if it is a drawing, is to resize it. When I take photos of beadies with my phone, I resize it to 15% of its original size when I open it in Paint.
- The picture or drawing should be in .png, .gif, .jpg, or .bmp format, unless you're sending it as part of a Word document.
- If you have several patterns to send me, you can compress them using WinZip or PKZip and send them as one zipped file. But you don't have to.
- Compose an email to me, and attach the photos and/or drawings to the email.
- Please include a materials list, preferably as part of your e-mail to me. Don't forget to tell me your name, and/or town, and/or age, whatever you want to appear by the "designed by...".
- Send it to me at beadiemom @ gmail dot com (type this address all as one in your e-mail program), and sit back and wait-- hopefully soon you'll see your pattern on the site!
I reserve the right to refuse or redraw patterns that do not meet these standards.