A timeless style that can look great in your fabric collections!
What is Gingham?
Gingham (sometimes known as ‘Vichy Check’) is a timeless classical style and can make a beautiful coordinate or blender print for a pattern collection.
Gingham is traditionally made up of vertical and horizontal coloured stripes of the same width and colour on a white background.
It was originally woven with dyed cotton, so where the lines intersected it would have created a third tone or slightly darker section.
How to make gingham
Creating a simple gingham is easy-peasy in Procreate! It will take you a couple of minutes.
Create a new canvas sized at 12x12 inches at 300dpi
Choose your colour and fill the whole canvas on the first layer.
Under the spanner icon in the top left, toggle the drawing guide on and click edit drawing guide.
Where it says grid size, slide it up to max which will now divide your page into 4 equal parts.
With snapping and magnetics on, select the layer and move it horizontally so it snaps in the middle. Now half your canvas should be white and half filled with colour.
Duplicate the coloured layer and rotate it 90 degrees. Move it to the top of the canvas so it snaps into place.
Now this is the fun part where you get to create the signature third tone you see in gingham where the lines intersect.
On the horizontal layer, click the N in the layers panel. This opens up 'blend modes'. (If you haven't discovered blend modes yet, there are many exciting possibilities here, but that's for another blog post...)
Select Multipy which should be at the very top. You should see the top left quarter go a slightly darker colour.
Now believe it or not, this is finished! If you wanted a jumbo gingham, this is the repeat tile completed.
However, if you would now like to scale it down, you can do it easily by merging the two layers together and then duplicating them four times. Now with snapping and magnetics on, scale each one to a quarter of the canvas. (You can keep repeating this process until it's at the scale you'd like)
You can now add this to a collection, or upload it to your print on demand sites for people to purchase.
What next?
Once you've mastered this technique you can experiment by bending the rules!
You could try using two complimentary colours instead of one.
Why not try making a classic plaid? Plaid is similar to gingham but it doesn't necessarily have a white background, it usually has more colours and the lines aren't always the same width.
You could also experiment with using texture to create a more tactile look.
If you're interested in learning more about surface pattern design, why not download my three free pattern layouts for Procreate!
As always, let me know in the comments if you have any questions or need some clarification on how to create your gingham!