I used a favorite sunflower watercolor painting of mine and turned it into a fabric print design. The Watercolor Sunflowers fabric is available for sale on Spoonflower.com. I created the fabric design by scanning my painting and working in Photoshop. In Photoshop I create the “repeat” for the pattern – the small square or rectangle that repeats and lines up perfectly for a seamless design.

I create an artboard larger than my intended repeat size and use guides to mark the repeat. Elements can overlap the guides, but anything that goes over gets cut off. So for a sunflower that gets cut off on the top, the rest of it must exist at the bottom to complete the sunflower. Like this:

When I’m finished laying out the elements, I crop the image at the guidelines to create my repeat.
Here is the final repeat:

When it is repeated it looks like this:

For step by step instructions on turning your artwork into a repeating design, read this post:

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Prints of my watercolor beach paintings are now for sale at shop.eileenmckenna.com. Take a peek!