This month on the blog we’ve been sharing back to school DIYs for a creative start to the new school year. Emma Jeffery, author of Hello Beautiful blog, visits to share a design tutorial for cushion covers featuring your favorite book titles, perfect for your study nook!
Since it’s back to school season, I started thinking about a design that might appeal to teachers and children alike. I came up with the idea to create a book spine image (made to look like books on a shelf) with the authors being the names of children in the class and the titles saying something about the child, their interests, personalities or hobbies. I wanted to make it fun and quirky since I imagine this design being used on cushions in a reading corner of a classroom. I think kids would get a huge kick out of seeing their name on a book cover (even just an illustration of one) and I hope it might inspire a lifelong love for books and reading.
I have been desperately wanting to improve my design skills so that I can make the most of the array of options and possibilities Spoonflower has to offer, but until now I’ve been hesitant at trying my hand at using professional design software. For this project however, I had a clear idea of how I wanted my design to look, and I figured that with its straight lines and simple graphics, it might just be the project that introduces me to the world of Adobe Illustrator.
I downloaded the trial version of Illustrator, available here. The following tutorial is an absolute beginner’s guide to some of the most basic tools of the software, written by an absolute beginner (me). But hey, if I can do it, you can too!