Transcripts
1. Class Introduction- What You Will Learn: Hello, my name is Ashley and I'm a surface pattern
designer, educator. I've been taking up almost 60 years through
a lot of students. Today. I'm here to show you how to get a seamless patterns using your own artwork and how you can use it for many spots like Spoonflower, 56,
Redbubble, eccentric. What you imagine in the lesson, you will learn how to edit your own artwork
to put back in if you create a textured background
of your pattern. How to test your practice
and how it will flow. Beautiful, seeing this one.
2. Scanning & Editing Your Elements: So you need to download Affinity Photo and
affinity designer circuit. Then right at the
bottom of my screen. Affinity Photo is for the
editing side of the artwork, and affinity designer is
for the pattern-making. So first of all, we click on Affinity Photo. First thing we're going to
do is go into File Open. I'm going to find my artwork. So when you deal with patterns, you want to do at least for
three to four elements. So I'll have four elements. Going to. My scans are scanned, my work into the scanner. You can choose
whatever you feel. The one that I have
is a Canon scanner, but they all pretty
much do the same thing. As long as it's 300, you can get up to 300 DPI. That's fine. Okay.
So let's follow. I'm just going to open my one. The first scan. The first thing I'm going to do is find the first element
that I went to work with. I'm going to crop it. So I've gone here,
this crop tool, I'll just pulled from the center side like that. And then I click on Apply. Then I've got my element that I want to get rid
of the background. How I do that, I click on
the flood select tool. So this is one way
you can do it. Can do it by using the
floods select tool. Click. Then. Press Delete. You can see there's
little specks around those elements that they
can see the very small, but you want to
get rid of those. So what I'll do, I go to
the Select, de-select all. Then I go to the rubber tool, which is over here on the slide
or the eraser brush tool. I click onto that, can make it bigger by clicking
on the width here. And I, it go across, you can see how big
I would like it. That's the big take it down. I just rub it out.
What you can do is you can zoom in. Zoom in. I use my finger on the firm. If you're using the Mac
because I am using a Mac. I'm just getting rid of any extra specs that
I don't want on here. Let's zoom out. If you feel that the brightness
of it isn't so clear, this one's quite bright. But what you can do if you
go into brightness and contrast gives you
a selection there, but you can click on it. Then you can arrange and change your brightness and the
contrast of your element. I'm going to leave it as that. Then I'm going to open
Affinity Designer. I'm into Affinity
Designer. Going to New. Then I am going to
put it into inches. You can put it into
pixels points, viscous, feet and yards, millimeters,
centimeters, meters. But I tend to work in inches by eight inches
by eight inches. So it needs to be an
excellent an exact square when you dealing with repeats. It can depend on what
you're creating. If you want to do it. Largest square,
then that's fine. But this is kind of the
standards that works well with a lot of
print on demand sites. Then also it needs
to be 300 DPI. Then the last thing
you need to look at is this box needs to be ticked. Transparent, background. Because we don't want
to have a background of it until we are ready. Then we press Create. There you go. There's my box. Now that I have my books, I'm going to start off by going back to Affinity Photo because we're gonna be
going back and forth. And I'm going to go
to Edit, Copy Merged. I click on it, Affinity,
Designer, Edit and Paste. There you have your element. You first sediment. Just a little bit smaller. Just move it around to work like this with
boron elements. So that's my first element. You do the same with the others. Then you can open, file a plan document. Again. This is for the second element. Once I transferred it over, I can just put File
Save As flower one. All right. Let's save the file. I put my scan. The same thing again, crop the image. Supply. I click onto the flood
select tool, press Delete. So I go to select and deselect, then going to the eraser tool
and rub out those elements. Sorry, excess splotches,
you could say. It's nice and clean. Then I'll go into Affinity, Designer and file. My leaf. Again, you do the same process editing if you need to edit it, the sense of getting, making the contrast changes, just as in the first video. The first part,
That's what you do. You do the same process
for all four elements. So I'll leave you to
do that yourself.
3. Creating a Seamless Pattern: Okay, So I have all four
elements into Affinity Designer. Now I can start
working on my pattern. You want to make sure that when you're doing
a repeat pattern, everything is connected
and everything is exact. So say for instance, this pattern here, I'm gonna put this for just
made a slightly bigger. I'm going to start off by
putting it into this corner. Didn't have to be exactly
in the corner like this. It can be a little
bit like that. Depending what kind of
style you're going for. Make that a little
bit bigger actually. I'm going to just let it hang
over the corner little bit. But this is, this pattern is a randomized pattern
because you can do partners that are more structural. What you can do like
a scattered effects. The one person, the
ongoing scattered effect. Because we've leaves florals. It kind of works nicely. If you're doing something
more structural, you want to be doing things, for example, like lines and
squares, geometric shapes. What really well with that. But I'm gonna do running
my pattern here. Edit, edit, copy. But you can do it. It shows you how to do and copy. So copy is Command
and say depending on if you have a Mac or a PC. But if you look at what they use to do it short,
short handedly, do Command C, and then
Command V to paste. So it's pasted on top of that. How do I get it exactly? To the right-hand corner? This corner over here. Because that's what you need
for the repeat is gonna be repeated onto the
other side exactly. You go down to this area here
which is called transform. It has all the axis of the
square and the pattern. How many? It just tells
you exactly where it is. Now click on the x-axis, so it's gonna be exactly onto
the right-hand side here. I typed that number away, which you have to go
into this section here where it says Transform. You click onto the x axis there and you get
rid of that number. And you press plus eight because a plus eight because
we're working in inches, eight by eight
inches, press Enter. That goes exactly
onto the other side. We need to do that for
the button too as well. It's brought into corners. I've already copied
this element here, so I'm going to paste Command V, then click on the y-axis and
the transform pattern box. And I'm going to change
that y-axis two plus eight. Now I can do, I can
copy this element here. Command C, Command V. Then
I click onto transform, the x-axis because I'm
going to the right. At the right. I get rid of that. Put plus that's copied exactly. Now I've done that, going to work with these
elements here and try and work out what kind of style
don't want to go for. Might want to make that
a little bit bigger. This one I'm going to
copy either edit, edit, command C, Command
B. I'm going to put in the transform box
plus that copy there. That's pretty much it. Because I don't need
for this element here, I don't need to do
it at the top of the bottom because it's
just on the sides. It's just whenever you have
any other element that is touching any of
these corners here, here and here, they need
to be copied exactly. If it's on the slide, it only needs to be copied once. If it's at the top here, it needs to be copied
to the button. I hope that makes
sense to you all. Not making things
confusing for you. That's how it works. I'm
gonna try to put this leaf, some kind of
mathematical in essence. I'm going to copy this
element command C, Command V. Then I'm going to pick on the y-axis plus eight. There we go. Now I have
this element here. Maybe around anything. You can just have a
little play around. This can do some large florals. Here's another thing
you might want. You might look at
this and think, oh, this is nice. But I would prefer stems to be behind
this lake, this petal. I feel that that needs
to be underneath. You can do via this part here
by clicking on the layer and moving it underneath
the leaf layer. You can do it by the
arrangement way. Send it back one to the
back, the back there. Then you can move that
around. Quite nice. I can use these elements
again and again and again. I might want to
use this in here. Make it smaller. Let's go to the corner there. I wanted to fit
it in that space. You really got to think
about your space in half. How much of a design you
got to put in spaces. Because if you have
too much base, it can look quite bear. You don't want it
to look to bear. And yet you don't want
it to look too crowded. So it's all about your eye or creativity that works well with this and it's trial
and error as well. Another thing you need to make sure with all of these would
have already been there. But this tool here, this is very key. This is the snapping tool that would've been
enabled when you started. But if you find that it's not
clicking to certain points. If you wanted to exact, in some way, that
needs to be clicked. But if you want to
play around with it, you can take this snapping tool off so you can have
a bit more freedom. Not sticking to a grid. Might want to use this flow. It's nice and small. Flower. Just move it around. You can really have
some fun when you do. Now you can finish putting
your elements together. After you have completed that, you can then start
doing the background, which will be in
the next lesson.
4. Creating a Background Using Your Hand-drawn Elements: Now in this lesson, I'm going to show
you how to create your own background
using your own elements. Click on the snapping tool and then click on the
Rectangle tool. Then you go to the point outside scribes kind
of like a bleed. If you just click
outside and drag across. Make sure that this
layer is right at the back because
there's not in front of all the other elements. So it was good
cleanser background. I'm going to rename
this as background. Then I can change the color by clicking
on this circle here, which is your color to
Judah in the swatches. And then you can see, you can see that
it changes, color. Starts making your
pattern come alive. This is caught my eyes color. I'm going to go with
this teal color. Then you have your
pattern there. And if you want to add more variation into
the background, you can choose. This
is how I do it. I cheese one of my
elements on a chief, this one command
C command V down. I wanted to try and
put this element at the back of a whole design. So can I go to the
layer section, click on the layer that it is. I'm going to drag it down to the button just in
front of the rectangle, which shouldn't be
rectangle, should be ground. That's why it's at the back. Now, I click on that. I'm going to change
the opacity of it. I'm going to change it to nine. Stretch. It just adds a bit of
depth to the background. That's why you see here I'm
putting it in the corners. That means it needs to
be in every corner. So I've put that here, so what I can do as well, I've changed your property, but then I can also change
the style of it as well. This is quite fun. You can lighten it,
That's quite nice. Making screen color
dodge lots of different ways of creating a
nice interesting background. Just add more depth
to your designs. I'm going to go with luminosity of being that's quite nice. Here. Command C, Command B, and computed across the corner, you can see it's
gone to that corner. Then command, click on button
again, press plus. And that goes to the button. Then Edit, Copy. You
can do it that way. Then I click on here, and then I'm going
to do is V again, because I can put something
in the center as well. You can see this one
is the corner here. This is what I can
choose not touching the edit command C, Command V. Then I press
plus bite on the x-axis. And I'm going to put
one, just call it black. Here's my pattern. Exciting. Bit of some of the most
important thing is to save it. Go to File. Save As make sure getting to my my patterns. In the next lesson, I will show you how to
test your repeat pattern.
5. How to Test Your Seamless Pattern: Now that I've got
this document here, I'll go into File and place
some of wipes because that's my place it
into the document. Then copy Command C, command V. And I just drag it
across and it should snap. Command V. And snap. You can see that is all get. There. Shouldn't be
any white lines. I did see a white line
but it's just disappear. You can see, so that's
your repeat pattern there. Look closely, I see it. Then you can put that
can be nice pattern. Another way you can do this
by showing the repeat. You can go into, first of all, file and export this
document as a JPEG or a PNG JPEG export workplace. Rather than an affinity. Rather than just being
an affinity document, you can save it as
a JPEG or a PNG, because then you can
use that for you print on demand sites. The cons of the document here. Get a square. Click on the Fill Tool, click onto the type I
want it as a bitmap, which then will then, which will then
let you click onto an image pen. There you go. What you do, you
just made it in. Cool is that you can actually see you repeat
how much it repeats, and it looks seamless. You can't see when
the scene starts. This is quite nice as well
because you can change the rotation of the
repeats as well. So you might want
to do like that. That's quite nice. So depending if you have
Spoonflower account, I highly recommend spring
flowers a great way to get your work
noticed by others. Designers and crafters,
even buyers as well. They do a lot of
competitions as well. They do one every week and it's a great challenge even
if you don't win, you still get your work exposed. So highly recommend,
he's in spring flower if you're new to the surface
pattern design world. There are also other
print on demand sites like Redbubble and society
sakes that you can work with. But I'm gonna show you how to
upload it onto Spoonflower. Even if you don't have
a spoon flower account, you can actually upload
your design without being, without being a member on it. But you won't see how it can be repeated onto lots
of different items. For example, wallpaper, home
deco items like beddings. So many to see. Let's get straight
into it anyway. So I'm just going to
get into my account. Here we are spraying flower. Click onto upload
your design file. Check to confirm that
the copyright is yours, copying anyone else's work, and you own the rights. Then you upload. It. Can take few minutes. Exciting minutes, I must say. Can see all the other
patterns I have. But anyway, this pattern
has been loaded. See here it says fabric, this is what it will
look like and fabric. And then you click on wallpaper. It's 16 inch by 16 inch, which is quite large, large floral say if you want to have that effect
and that's fine. But if not, you can
just make it smaller. You just click on this
and it makes it smaller. You can view on all products. This is wallpaper. This is onto type class runners, tea towels, bedding. Just click on it and view it. And it just gives you
that these mockups, so good because
it just gives you a little view of what
it would look like. And it also depends on what
you want your fabric on. For example, the money
better as a wall hanging or even clay then say, but this is a great way to
see how your pattern looks. Quite vibrant, fun. And then you can start
doing your own shop, creating your own work. Such an exciting thing. Pattern design for someone who is an artist who wants to do something in
a different way. Yeah. Please. Comments and if you have
any questions, let me know. But yeah, thank you very
much for joining my class. I hope you've learned
some valuable things. And it's such an
exciting thing to work in Affinity Designer
and Affinity Photo. I hope to hear from you soon. Take care. Bye.
Sheleen Cocea, Teacher of Pattern Design in Affinity
