Many of the lovely designs in the Goldcrest Gallery greeting card collection were first created for 1970s silkscreen-printed textiles. Different colourways for each design had to be painted by hand at that time, before the advent of computers. However, today surface pattern creators can produce several different colourways for their designs in a relatively short time. Programs like Adobe, Procreate or Affinity have obviated the need for tracing out and hand painting a design several times.
Different Colourways: Hoopla and Toffee Apple
‘Hoopla‘, one of our new canvas prints, was silkscreen printed on grey textured paper. In the 1970s, fine line marker pens were quite new, and the designer used them to hand colour the circular motifs. This colourway has violet, magenta and fuchsia hues, offset by a deep burgundy colour.
There is an alternative colourway for this design in our collection called ‘Toffee Apple‘. This time, the design was silkscreen printed on pale tan textured paper. Then the circular motifs were hand coloured with fine line marker pens. The designer used a scarlet, sienna and orange colour scheme. It was quite a labour-intensive, time-consuming way to achieve two sample colourways of the design, compared with contemporary methods.
Thistledown and China Blue
There is an interesting parallel in the two colourways of our lovely vintage 1970s fabric design, ‘Thistledown‘. Originally, this pattern was drawn out on layout paper over a grid, using a chocolate brown fine line marker pen. The floral motifs were then coloured in with additional marker pens, in purple, blue and turquoise, creating bright notes on a subtle background. An alternative version of this pattern was subsequently produced in black and white, showing the influence of blackwork embroidery. Jumping forward to the present day, a third colourway has been created, using the Affinity program. ‘China Blue‘ is a new version of ‘Thistledown’, in blue monochrome. In the 1970s it would have taken two days or more to produce ‘China Blue’. Now it is much quicker!
Fabric design buyers prefer to have the option of several colourways for a textile pattern. This enables them to offer scope for a bigger range of products to their retail customers. Therefore, surface pattern creators make sure to include different colourway choices for each design. And this aspect of textile design has certainly become much more straightforward!