digitizing patterns in illustrator

Here is a behind the scenes process of digitizing the patterns.

This is the follow up to the blogpost "editing madness". This should not be seen as a tutorial on how to digitize the photographed patterns pieces. But it gives you a glimpse of what I was doing for hours and hours. I wish it would work that fast in reality. But here we go, my workflow.

First I decided to limit the patterns on 100 pieces, wich in this case equals 28 sets. I created an excel file, documenting every single piece, numbering the set and the piece. Picture after picture was first edited in lightroom to compensate the lense curvature, and then opened in Illustrator. By using the path tool, you can trace the shapes of the patterns. Its important to have a scale reference (e.g. grid as backdrop). It does not make sense to save a file in the 1:1 original size. It would take too much capacities on you laptop. But after having it vectorized you can easily scale it the size you need it. And if you are planning on using the patterns given in the archive in CLO3D for example, you might not even scale beforehand, but open them in the program and scale there.