You can, of course, scan your envelopes, but my scanner is currently broken! You will want to photograph a fairly large part of your fabric – if the fabric has a large scale, it should look large on the drawing, and small scales should be small. I’ve had to look around for Simplicity patterns, since their website has the zoom feature, making saving images difficult. For McCalls, Butterick, and Vogue, you can get the large images off their website, even the line drawings. I am using the pattern illustration, the line drawings, and my selected fabric. Now you will need to open the images you will be using in this storyboard. You can also right click on the canvas to select actual pixels. It’s awfully small! Click on the zoom tool (bottom arrow) and then on “Actual pixels” (top arrow) to get a true representation of the size of your canvas. Press ok, and you get a screen that looks like this: I usually go with 640 pixels for the width, as this displays nicely on my blog, and a long length that I will cut off later. Choose the width and height of your blank canvas. Name it whatever you like – I use the pattern number. Menu commands are in parenthesis.īegin by starting a new document (FILE–>NEW)

You can click on the images to make them bigger. I am not a Photoshop expert by any means, but I hope my explanations make sense! I really enjoy writing tutorials – it’s so satisfying to my OCD tendencies to list steps! I haven’t assumed any prior Photoshop experience, so this is a detailed tutorial. If you have Photoshop Elements, it will mostly work, but you will not have a pen tool – I know there are workarounds for that, but I don’t have Elements so I can’t test them! If you need a program, I’d recommend downloading Gimp. Gimp is a free, open source image editor that allows for the use of layers – you must use layers for this tutorial! I tested most of the tutorial in that program, and it works, although some of the tools have different names. I find storyboards to be very helpful and inspiring – it’s so neat to get an idea of what your project will look like, and to pull together the various inspirations for your project. This storyboard includes the ability to fill line drawings with images of your selected fabric. As requested, I’ve put together a tutorial that leads you through the basic process of creating a storyboard for your projects.

Storyboard quick tutorials