AD7 Create a Half-Drop Repeat in Affinity Designer Using Procreate and Affinity Designer

1. Intro to Create a Half Drop Repeat in Affinity Designer: Hi guys and welcome. My name is Dolores now sprint and I'm coming to you from sunny, Manitoba, Canada. I'm super excited to bring you this project. I've been wanting to do this for quite awhile, and I finally have the chance to show you how to create a half drop repeat. In Affinity Designer. I've shown you how to do this in Procreate. Procreate is really not the ideal program to do it in. For one thing, when you move around a motif, you don't see how it affects the other tiles in that repeat pattern. This way with the techniques that I'm showing you. If you go to move a motif, you'll see how that affects all of the pattern tiles. So you're moving and working on that one tile. And then in the repeat, you're gonna be seeing how the movement of that motif affects the overall pattern. We're going to start with researching the project. I'm going to show you some ideas and some inspiration from artists that I know and really admire. Then we're going to go into Procreate to do a quick sketch. As that's the program that we're all most comfortable using at the moment. Eventually I'm gonna be showing you how to do this right in Affinity Designer. But I figured that this excellent opportunity to show you a different way of doing it. Once we have that sketch, we're going to ink it right there and procreate. We're going to take that eight finished illustration and vectorize it using Adobe Capture. I just want to reinforce that. I know we've done it in another class, but there are some techniques here that will help us in the long run when we're doing our pattern. I've got it in three layers to start out with so that there are different dimensions to our pattern. And things like the stems can be separate from the flowers. So all of that stuff will be revealed in class as we go through. Then we're gonna do a bunch of work to enhance our pattern. Starting with changing the colors and just thinking about ways that we can make this pattern more interesting. We perfect absolutely everything in this class so that it's ready for the next class, which is going to be adding a bunch of embellishments to our motifs. So all of this is in preparation. And I know that as a three-part class, you want to have some really interesting stuff to do in each class. I've tried to organize it in such a way that you will be able to go through all of the steps and gain a bunch of knowledge and techniques that you're gonna be able to use moving forward. Does that sound good? Now if you haven't done so already, please hit that follow button up there. That way you're gonna be informed of any of my new classes as I post them and anything that I send out as opposed to all my followers here. Also, I would suggest that you get to my website and Azure named my mailing list there. I send out all kinds of announcements from there as well to do with my school. And that's where I generally have all my artists resources that I either sell or give away. So it's good to have your name on both lists. So you're ready to get into it. Let's get to it. 2. Lesson 1 Overview and Examples: Hi guys, welcome to lesson one. Lesson one here I want to do a little bit of research with you. What we're gonna be looking at specifically are really layered designs. I want you to just kinda know what there is out there and the kind of things that you can do. Of course, you're gonna be trying to think of ways that you can make your design a little bit more unique. So we're gonna be talking about that as we go through the lesson. Let's get to what we've been talking about, pattern design. And I know that the only pattern design template or layout that I showed you here in Affinity Designer is a grid repeat, and I'm really excited to be showing you how to create the half-drop repeat. Now you might be wondering what the heck is a half drop repeat? And what's the difference? Who cares? Why do it any differently than what we've been doing? And there is definitely a place for all different repeats. But the half-drop repeat or the half brick repeat are two that are most commonly used by professional designers. A diamond repeat pattern like what you see here is way up there too. And of course, you've got the specialty repeats like the OG and stripes tossed patterns, that sort of thing. Now we are going to focus today on doing a half-drop repeat and it's going to be somewhat of a tossed pattern. And what I mean by a tossed pattern is a pattern that can be seen in more than one direction. So if you're a sore, you be completely aware of what that sort of a repeat, why it's important. So that Toss Repeat is a kind of repeat that no matter which direction your fabric is, it doesn't look wrong. If you were to do something like this, which is a floral that standing straight up and repeats exactly the same way. It doesn't change its position, then you try to use this one sideways or upside down and it's going to look wrong. So that's what I mean by a toss repeat. I'm not sure if it'll be 100% toss repeat, but we'll see when we get to it. Now the other thing I really wanted to focus on is creating a pattern that's got layers, layered colors on it. So I was looking here for tutorial and patterns. I found a few that I think would be excellent. And I've got an example sheet that I'll show you in a minute. But to start, you might want to just look at people like Helen. Helen designs are always richly layered and I want to focus on this type of repeat because I think it'll be a good exercise for using the pencil tool or even the pen tool. We're going to continue this particular design from start to finish only with vectors. I don't want anybody cheating. And using the paint tools or the pixel persona, I think that we should challenge ourselves to try to create a pattern with all of its layering done in a vector format. I pulled up this artists here. She was the one that WHO site we were just on showing us the different pattern of peace. I pulled up her patterns because I loved the way she lives, her patterns, her colors are always super interesting and I've seen her stuff pop up in just general searches that I do or in my surface pattern design board on Pinterest here. And I think brilliant the way she uses her colors and layers. It's stuff that you just don't think of doing like here's a really good example. Like, I would never think of this color combination, but I love it. So this is the kind of work that I'd love you to take a look at. Now this is a different artists here, Serena or Chetty. But the kind of layering that you see here is what I'm talking about. I think the big challenge is in keeping the color palette to 10-20 colors. I think that it's doable. A lot of fabric companies, when it comes to the actual printing of the fabric, we'll even limit you to ten or 12 colors, so you can even challenge yourself to that. I can't remember how many I've used in the pattern that I've practiced width, but I think it was more like 16 colors here. So this is the kind of thing that I want you to just study a little bit and you can go to my surface pattern design board again and check out some of the layered patterns that I have here. I've got one here called Paint detailed patterns. To forgive me, my Internet is not very good today, my husband did a firmware upgrade on our modem and I find that whenever he does that, it takes a few days for. Everything just start working normally. So this forward, even though some of these might be hand painted, is also a very good reference. Here's a beautiful one I love. And this one is hand painted, but when you take a look at it really, everything is tone on tone like radon, pink, brown on gold. Looking at these will give you some great ideas. Now this one was a hand painted one, but all once you see down here seem to be vector patterns. There's a really simple color scheme, four or five colors. And I think anyways, two blues here, and then there's light and a dark pink and then the red. So I think it's like 55 colors. Isn't that gorgeous? How that has turned out? This is kinda thing I want you to be thinking of. And I'm going to be showing you a bunch of different methods to achieve that. Now this is Rachel, again, Rachel whole local colloquial. She's Australian and she actually has a really great website and does a lot of teaching to do with pattern design as well. She's not on Skillshare or anything, but I have seen that she's got a lot of courses. But look at something like this, even just tones and again, really simple, very, very few colors there. So take a look at that board that I have and you'll find definitely Helen dark. She has cropped up so many times for me when I'm researching. Different finishes are different things I wanna do. Here's another one by her. So her website is orange. You lucky. And it would be a great place for you to go to find ideas on how to do some of this stuff. Now personally, I think a lot of this I could do with strokes, thin strokes, and you can add a little bit of profile change onto the strokes to make it look like it's hand painted. I know that Helen does hand paint all of her stuff, but then obviously converts them to vectors to be able to be used for printing fabric. Not that, that's always a prerequisite, but I've seen a lot of her stuff and that's what she does. Think about the color scheme that you want to use. Try to keep it simple. Here's a gorgeous, gorgeous pattern and I love the use of different tones of blue. So this is something that looks like it could be done with strokes as well. Like that person has used strokes to create this highlight area and the darker areas, and probably then expanded and added them together so they become one shape and then drop them into the shape of the leaf here to clip it. So I think that's great. This little piece right here that's drooping flower, I think. Absolutely perfect. As a vector. It's amazing how much detail and color tone change. You can see there. This is a kind of stuff that I think would be great for you to research and create a little bit of a mood board for yourself. I did that and I'll show you the one that I have, how it turned out. It's just four pieces. And there's something in each of these pieces that I particularly liked, which is why I saved it. So this one here I thought, again, all could be done with strokes. And I think what works with this one is the consistency that these strokes are pretty much the same thickness on all of the different pieces. I also liked here how some of the pieces almost look like they have a bit of an outline or a shadow like this one here, I guess it's just because of the solid area in behind. I like here how there's been a bit of a release between the petals. So rather than inking an outline or drawing an outline here, it looks like possibly with these petals that they're just made, each a little bit smaller to have that gap in-between. That gap is usually called a release. So I loved that one for that reason. This one here, I liked how simple the idea was with the highlights and shadows, e.g. with a leaf like this to simply cut in half, which can be done with another function of the geometry tools, which I will show you. You can draw a line and then divide the original leaf and half and color the two halves separately. So that one I thought was really attainable, really doable. Now this is a Helen dark pattern. And what I love about this is how much of this, it's put into the background and not just the background, can see that she's added a lot of detail onto some of her motifs. That could be a possibility where you have your flower or whatever it is you're drawing and then add little bits of texture with repeating patterns. I would do these in vector, but I think that that's something that you would be able to do. And then on this last one here, of course, there's spots where there are tonal changes, where there's two layers, the pink and the red, e.g. but these are also little patterns like I think this one here could have been created as a vector pattern and then used and applied to different motifs to do the same thing almost as what helen does hers, but to add texture. And then the other thing I thought was really, really pretty with this one was these dotted lines like who, who would have thought, right? And those are added on enough of the motifs to really tie them together, but not all of the motifs. So this is something that we could also do. I can teach you or show you how to make dotted lines so that you might want to use that to enhance your motifs. Four or five different things that just from here that we can use as inspiration. And besides setting up the template throughout the class, we're going to be really talking about all the different aspects of creating that half-drop repeat. With the first lesson, I'm probably going to be going through it fairly quickly with a time-lapse of my planning process and procreate. Then the second lesson will likely be vectorizing what I've drawn in Adobe capture. By now, you may have figured out which method you like best whether you like Adobe Capture or vector Nader or using an online converter. It doesn't matter one way or the other. As long as we get the vectors that we need in SVG format that we can then import into our affinity document. As long as we have that, we're good to go. So I'm going to try to squish those into the first couple of lessons so that we can spend a little bit more time working on adding this interesting detail. Alright, Enough, chat and I'm gonna hit you in the next lesson. So I'll see you there. 3. Lesson 2 Design Process for Half Drop Repeat: Hi guys, welcome to lesson two. Lesson two here is all about the design process. We're gonna be doing a sketch in Procreate to help us out with our layout. Let's get to it. I wanted to show you the steps that I take when I'm just in the process of planning a half-drop repeat. So I am here in Procreate because that's where I'm gonna do my sketching. You can totally do this on paper if you would prefer. Either way. There are a few things that I wanted to point out when we're doing this. So I'm going to just quickly start drawing out a pattern. I am going to use a pencil and what I wanna do is turn My Do Not Disturb for a few minutes so that I can get through this without having a bunch of stuff that I have to stop myself from reading. Because of the nature of the pattern that we looked at. I want to keep my motifs quite bold and I want to be able to fill them in with a lot of that detail like we saw. So I'm going to be, first of all, just quickly sketching out some of the flowers. They're gonna be really simple flowers. You can draw them whichever way you feel the most comfortable, you can do. Little wireframes are frameworks like this to easily keep them, the petals contained once you have a shape that you think you might want to reuse, then by all means, cut and paste. Have a copy of it. So we can duplicate and have a couple of copies here. And I can make changes by repositioning and resizing. And I could take the work and just basically change it so that it doesn't look exactly the same as the other one. I just flip that one that doesn't really look that great, but I can work with it. So you can use warp or you can use Distort. Distort. You're just pulling each of the corners warp. You can do a little bit more in the way of a variety of adjustments. I've even been known to use Liquify in a pinch when I want to, way too big, when I want to just make slight changes. Let's say e.g. that pedal, I don't really like too much, but I'm not going to be using this as my final art. I'm going to be rethinking all of this. So right now, it's all about just trying to fill up the space to figure that out. I like keeping those on separate layers because then if I go to draw another flower, let's say like this one here I'm thinking maybe here I would have a cup of flour, a tulip. Remember that this is going to be half-drop, so this will end up being down here on the next one. So it might want to avoid having it right across. What will end up being right across. So you could do something like that. Maybe it's not quite this one and this one on the same layer, believe it or not. So I'm just going to cut this one. It doesn't matter that a little bit. It'll be cut off because you want I'm just going to backtrack. It will be just easier to cut and paste this one and then move it. So this one could be moved independently. So I'm not really doing anything on this side. So at the moment, the fact that this is top to bottom, obviously going to have to continue up here. I'll deal with in a minute. I'm thinking another sort of a daisy with long petals would also be a good flower to have in there. And I'll figure out, let me put this on a new layer so I don't have to do the cut and paste. I'll figure out the length of the petals and all that. Makes sure that it kinda works. And I'm going to duplicate that one. This would be a nice filler and I probably would need to move that one there. But I'm going to show you how to deal with this one is not separate. I'm going to show you in a second here how to deal with making sure that you've got everything working as far as the continuation of your design from top to bottom. Like I'm thinking this one is going to be right about there and see from the grid. And so this one will probably continue somewhat like this. I know I'm going to have to make adjustments here, but this is just to get the idea of the basic placement. And here I could probably do another one of these, maybe this one I'll flip and work to look somewhat different. When I'm at the inking stage. I can also make slight adjustments. Overall. I'm just trying to have like really nice bold flowers that I can really work with to put those other texture layers on. I know we're going to need something here, but what I wanna do here now is do the repeat so that I can just see how this is working out. So my fastest way of doing it is this four corners now have what you would call a registration mark. I can put all this together here in a group and I can move this entire, Well, let me first copy it. That I can move this entire pattern to the halfway mark and then I can see the space that I'm dealing with here. Right? So I was pretty close with that one there. I'm just going to add a layer on top to do some of this correcting. And it's so rough. I get it. It's really rough, but it's exactly what I would need to do my inking stage and looking at the way my stems are all going here, I'm thinking that I wouldn't mind something in this direction here. So maybe it would be this one here that I could add a stem to and pull down here so that I can have some continuity. And we know that that's right where the seam is going to be. So that way there's nothing really obvious. We don't have anything. You're running straight across here. We haven't stopped everything here and then there's another half that I have to deal with. Little stripe of obvious repeat on both edges. So a time like this, we can decide, do we want to take and move some of these elements within what we've done. So this could move, turn that snapping off, and you can see that I'm really just dealing with top-to-bottom, not really worrying about the sides here because I think that's something we can wait and do when we're in Affinity Designer, obviously this leaf would have to continue, but it can't continue straight across because it's going to drop down. So I'm going to duplicate this flower and use it in here. And then maybe from this group, I'd want to duplicate this flower and I had put that on the same layer, so I'm going to cut and paste it and then I can duplicate it and bring it over here and maybe flip it. And I'm just going to pull that over to the side because I think it's gonna be alright for what I'm doing next. I still feel like there's space here that I could fill so I could redo these leaves so that this go back to the top here so that I can maybe have two sets of leaves. Or what would work too would be another stem here with a little flower. This one might work better if the leaf is a little bit more angled. So that's the continuation of that one. And I think what I wanna do now is the side-to-side repeats. So here is where I've got those, a couple of those little edges or corners on. So I might as well just erase those nice and big and see if I can locate the other ones. I'm going to delete this one. Delete that one. I know there's gonna be something here. I'm going to have to figure out. But right now what I wanna do is I think in this case I'm going to flatten it. So I'm going to group it all and I'm going to flatten, and I'm gonna get that posca again and just make my little marks in the corner. And in this case, what I want to do is increase the size of my canvas. So I'm going to double the size of it with y's and that must be pretty close. I'll go to the settings and I've got it so close, so close. And I'm guessing you guys already have figured out what I'm gonna do next. So again, I'm going to duplicate this layer. I'm going to put snapping on and magnetics. And I've got three copies of it because what I wanna do is this. I'm sliding it halfway up and I'm doing the same thing here. So I now know what it is I have to do. I have to fill in this space from side to side and I obviously didn't match up that very well, but that's okay. This is what this planning stage is all about. So I'm going to group all these and flatten them, erase these little things everywhere, and just go ahead and starch. It's my pencil and start just roughing in those little things that are going to make it seamless from side-to-side as well. So you can see from side-to-side that this flower and this flower are going to conflict. So what I would do here is select both of these and slide them over a little bit so that I can just finish this and I'm so rough. I know that this is not like I feel like I'm not setting a good example, but this is all you need. You don't have to get too wrapped up in it and try to be perfect. Because what we're gonna do next is we're going to redraw our ink these so that we have them ready for doing our auto trace. So I think side-to-side, We're kind of okay here. I feel like this has to have something else. There's definitely some space here that needs to be accounted for or fixed. Maybe what I'll do here is get rid of this half of this flower and then we'll take and enlarge. This, ends up being quite a bit bigger. I think we'll stop this lesson for now. Then I'm going to show you the next stage, which is the inking. We're gonna do a couple of little things here before we inked, but we can do that all in the next lesson. 4. Lesson 3 Inking of the Artwork for Auto Tracing: Hi guys, welcome to lesson three. Less than three here I'm gonna be showing you how I go through and ink illustration to separate the layers to make it easier for ourselves once we get into Affinity Designer. Let's get at it. Okay. I did a couple of things off camera and nothing major change the angle of that leaf. And I was toying with the idea of changing out this Daisy for something like this instead of leaves. But I think I'm going to stick to the daisy here. And really all I need right now is to now make or ink all of these different motifs that I have. I want to do them so that they're all in one piece. Like I don't want this one to be half year and a half there. So at this point, I'm going to go and crop my canvas again. I'm going to bring it back to here, to the ten inch mark, which would be 3,000 pixels. Because we're just inkling at this point. I'm going to hit done. Then I'm going to go back into that. And I'm going to make it big enough that you can just eyeball it at this point. I just want to make it big enough that I can actually don't need too much width. But I want to cut this one off and put it here so I can ink it all in one piece. And I think this one here connects to this. So those are really the only two things I have to do. So I don't really need a ton of extra space and really none on the sides. So I'm going to hit Done here, grab my selection tool and select this cut and paste. And I can bring that up into here. I guess I didn't need a little bit more room there. That's okay because I can just move this layer down a bit, so I just need that to connect. So I have a really good drawing guide. And then this one here I want to add to that. So I probably could have done that without cutting and pasting, but I'll show you this way so that it's just super obvious and what you have to do. And I'm obviously going to have to ink this whole flower in this. If you want to, you could cut and paste. Because that connects to this over here, which I could do without having to have that guy. But I'm doing it this way just so you totally understand my process. So this flower here, I think I can do spy. I'm going to actually make a new layer. I'm going to actually group these, flatten them and reduce the opacity, make a new layer. And here you could do a whole new pencil sketch where you're just a little bit more careful, where you're really deciding on the shape. A lot more clearly, really tempting to make a change like have this, like this, but It's likely that I did it in this direction and this size because it was fitting with something. So you have to kinda stop yourself from having too much licensed at this point because the positioning that you did here was for a reason. Remember when you're drawing a curve that you can hold it when you get to the bottom and adjust if you want to get a nice consistent thickness. I mostly do that when I'm at the inking stage, but I'm actually thinking that I'm going to ink those solid anyways, so I don't think I need to even show any thickness on them at all. I have a little fern that I added when you weren't looking. I thought that would be a nice one to have just kind of LinkedIn and vectorized because I think it would be a good filler if I need it. One reason to do it this way and to vectorize it from something that you've hand-drawn, Is that your finished pattern ends up looking hand-drawn. It's not going to look as though you created it using the symmetry tools. I mean, if you do, it's not that big of a deal. I'm sure it'll be great in its own way. But this is the look, I'm kind of going after myself at this point. So I'm wanting to have these so that they aren't absolutely perfect looking usually works because you are handwriting these. That's why I always take a little bit of a fence to people who think the computer is doing the drawing or doing the work because needs to be an artist to do this. Even if you don't consider yourself an artist and you're able to follow along and do all this stuff. It's still more than the computer can do on its own. And you're just in training, you will be eventually doing all of this drawing and stuff without thinking about it too much. And if you don't really have any ideas for your motifs, than do a lot of research like go back to Pinterest and have it open and just kind of use it as you are doing your sketches. You don't want to be copying somebody exactly, but unless you're tracing them, it's unlikely that you're going to be able to get it to look absolutely exactly like they did anyways. So full disclosure, usually I don't need to do this second sketch. I just usually go straight into the inking, but when I do it, when I do take the time to do it, I'm usually pretty glad that I did because I do end up saving time, I think in the long run. And the cool thing about it is we know that we've basically got our half-drop repeat figured out. I'm not sure about that stem. I don't know what that leads to, so I'm just gonna leave it for now. I can always draw that in later. Now we can turn off the sketch and see how much cleaner this one is. So this one is a lot easier to follow. I'm going to do the same thing though. I'm going to reduce its opacity and I'm going to be using my, you can use whichever inking pen that you like. If you want a mono line, you can go into the calligraphy set and grab it. You can use the pen pressure brush, I think I've given you several times, and the Posca paint marker, if you want your lines to be all same thickness. This is something for you to take a look at when you're looking at those examples. Some of them have lines that are thick and thin or they vary in some way or another and others are one solid thickness, the same thickness throughout. I'm going to do this one and I'm even going to enlarge this. Now. It doesn't matter what size we really do this. And I think the bigger we have this inking is the nicer are finished, vectorizing will be. So this is a reason why I always reduce that opacity because then I know when I start and if it's still gray, I'm on the wrong layer. And you know how often that happens for me. What I'm gonna do first here is I'm going to go through and remember that I'm going to have these a solid, they aren't going to be outlined. So I want to go in and do all of the shadow areas, areas that are gonna be inside or on a different layer. I'm gonna go and do these first. So this is the point at which you need to think about that like how, when you are adding together these vectors, how are you going to want to have them constructed? And I want all of these to be solid. I don't want any outlines on mine because of the idea that we have for adding that extra texture. So I am making all of these solid and I think that's it for this. We've got all the centers, maybe not this one. And I'm going to go and fill the first one and then I'm going to continue filling with re-color. You need to take the little cross hairs that you see as tick them in one of the areas. And then you'll be able to just tap. I remember when I learned this and I thought, Wow, that's a great idea. So now I've got all of that layer done so I can either turn it off or reduce the opacity. I think I'll just reduce it for now. I'm going way low on this one. I'm going to add another layer. And I think on this one I'll do all my leaves and I want them to be solid so I don't know why I was drawing the second line there because all I need to do here, of course, is just have my thickness appropriate. So I can go pretty thick here. And I'm using the pen pressure brush that I have that if I press harder, it makes a thicker line. I'll go through and do that first, do all my stems so they are fairly consistent. That could be the same plant. I'm going to leave it separate because just in case I want to move them apart or something. And I might as well do this little guy. In this case, this whole plants or branch will be there. So I'm gonna go a little bit smaller on my brush here. And then I'm going to go through, and here's where he asked yourself. Now what do I want those kind of rounded ends or not? If you don't, then go with a much smaller brush, you're still going to end up with a solid shape, but you can then get that point a little bit better. And sometimes it's better to not be at the point when you're starting that line so that you can swing back in. And your point is a little bit more defined because it's really hard to line that up again. So I'm going to do it. I'm making a point to not overlap anything here so that I can fill easily. What's really funny being in that line, but that's okay because we're filling it just makes sure that you close your shape entirely. So I'm going to move that one a little bit so that when you go to fill, it's not going to fill the whole background as well. And these guys, so with this one, I'm gonna do these leaves. Just want, I'm going to not do that leaf there because I can add that later if I want it. But at least this way, this plant will be independent of that one. And then you can also take the time to look at some of your stem ends. And then maybe you might want to square them off a little bit. That's totally up to you again, that's a stylistic choice that is not closed. So I can do this and continue filling with re-color in the crosshairs to one of the areas I'm trying to fill and then I can just tap it all the way through enlarge if you need to. And I know that this did not feel completely. My pen was pretty small, so I'm gonna go a little bit bigger and just fill it. And then you can go ahead. And if you want to clean things up a little bit, the cleaner this is, the better it'll be for your tracing. The auto trace often will pick up little things like that, little notch that's there, that's going to easily be picked up. So I might as well take the time now to fix it. And then the last thing is the flowers. I'm going to do that a time-lapse just so that I don't have you watching. Every little thing I do are listening to me breathe. And at the end of the lesson, I'll show you what I want to do to prepare this to go into Adobe Capture. So make sure you add a new layer for the flowers. And remember that that shadow is actually going to be the top of the flower. So you don't have to be too perfect at the top because that's going to end up being defined by that Phil that's there for the back. At this point, you might want to turn off your sketch because it helps you to line up your inking when you need to be prepared to turn it off and on if necessary. Okay. I'm turning off my sketch at this point just so that I can get a better look at everything I've drawn and make sure that it looks the way I want it to. And overall it does. I'm making a couple of little corrections to some of the petal shapes. I'm not going to spend too much time doing that. I can always make adjustments if I need to infinity designer as well. So I've got what I need. I've got my three layers that I can use for the auto trace. I could maybe go in here and into my gallery, select it and duplicate it. So I can go in here and delete the two sketch layers, knowing that I've got that on the other document, if I ever was to need it. So before we do anything else, I think what I wanted to do is set up that half-drop repeat template. So let's do that in the next lesson. I'll meet you there. 5. Lesson 4 Setting Up the Re Usable Half Drop Template: Hi guys, walked less than four. Before we do anything else, I want to create the template that we're going to use for laying out our design. We're going to be importing the inked version. I also want to make sure that our reminds you to save that template, save a duplicate of it immediately. That way, you will always have that template that you can use for creating a future half-drop repeats. Let's get to it. So this might seem a bit challenging. I think it's not as bad as you would think, but we'll get at it and I'll explain everything as we encounter it. So let's make a new document and I'm going to stick to my hand by tens, so I'm switching that to inches here. Then I'm going to type in ten, then I'm going to put it at 300 here. It's just almost just habit. We aren't going to be using any pixel related decor or enhancements in this class, but I may at some point to that. So sometimes I even put this as high as 600. Maybe I'll change it now just because I don't want to forget about that. The higher it is, of course, is the bigger the document is, which means you pictures were bigger. Whatever you add, pixel-wise, is less likely to pixelate. If you enlarge it just a little bit, you're still limited, but it's better the higher the resolution. So I thought maybe I'll just because I know my other template is only 300s, so I thought it would be good to have high resolution one as well. So what happened there? And I'm going to hit okay, here, we're going to have just that single page, which means that we have just a single art board. What I want to do though is inserted art boards. So here, as soon as I hit that art boards selection here, as soon as I hit that is Context Menu came up. And in this context menu, you can add additional art boards. I'm going to do that. So that's the first one, that's ten by ten. And then I'm going to do a second one. And then this one, I want to make it double the size. So let's go into the transform studio and we're going to change this to 20 " by 20 ". So this is exactly what we've done before. I'm actually going to move this art board to this side. That's the way I prefer to work. You can do it whichever way you like. You can even select both of your art boards by holding down your single finger and you can go to Alignment and align the tops. It's probably not important, but it's just have it. Alright, so now I want to insert a rectangle here or a square. If you put your snapping on, you can snap it right to the edges really nicely. And let's just go in here and make sure that we're on ten by ten or that we have ten by ten and that the position is 00. So that's important because we're going to create the symbol. And from that symbol, we're going to create the repeats over here. So now that we've created it, Let's go over here to the symbols and we're going to add symbol from selection. Alright, so now what we need to do is duplicate this so we can duplicate it. I've showed you two or three different ways you can, with your move tool selected, you can start dragging. You can drag with two fingers held down. I'm going to just duplicate it and move that one into position. And as long as you've got your snapping on, you should be okay. There was that red line and green line that showed you that you are on-center. But you can always go here and check to make absolutely sure. And it looks like we're good. This is 100 and everything is good. So this one, the Y position is 10 " down. If you remember that from our other class, that's what we did. Now for the next two, we're gonna do something a little bit different. So we're going to duplicate this one. I'm going to bring it into position here. And of course that would end up being a grid repeat if we left it there. So what we wanna do here, go into the Transform palette. And with the y measurement here, we want to put minus five and you see how that just pops it up, 5 " in this case up, but it means it's a drop repeat, right? So now we can duplicate this one. Let's just try it this way. Yeah, it worked this time. See, I don't know why. Sometimes it doesn't work. That one we've popped into position, Let's just check 10.5 is correct. And then from that one there, we can also drag to get our next one. So it doesn't look that much different. But if you select over here, you can see that you've got your initial motif or your initial pattern, and then it'll be duplicated cross and halfway down. And you see how you get that drop effect. And that's why it's called half-drop because it's dropping by half. There are tons of other repeats. You can do one-third, you can do one-quarter, you can do whatever you want. But in this case, this is going to be what's called a half drop repeat. So now let's just give it a little test to see if it has worked for us. So let's draw something. I'm just going to use the pencil tool and I'm going to draw. Now you can't see it because of course it's drawing it with no fill and it's just a light gray stroke. I'm going to change the fill. Let's have a red hearts and a man, it's not working. What's going on? You guys are so smart, you know exactly why? It's because we don't have it as part of the symbol, so that's the initial symbol. So now if we take this and we drop it into the symbol, is going to repeat everywhere. So of course, my little example here, I did not close the shape so I can switch and close. Now it has closed it. We do have an extra point here. I would just get rid of and why am I fixing up this heart? There's absolutely no reason for me to do that. But now you can see it's half-drop repeat, right? So this is ready for you as a template. I would delete that. It doesn't matter what color you've done this, if you would prefer to have it so that it is in slightly more visible color, you can definitely change it. Now, when you do that, you'll probably notice and you're going to get what looks like a gap there. But you can see that as I enlarge it, it's not exactly there. If you're worried about that or if you ever have issues with it printing for some reason it's not working. Just fill it and stroke it with the same color and the stroke doesn't have to be very wide. It's only at 0.1 here, which is probably a pixel. You can increase that a teeny tiny bit if you wanted to. It doesn't really matter. The art board itself is how I usually crop my pattern designs to export a swatch and it'll be completely fine. So now you've got this. Repeat, alright, back into your gallery here. Make a duplicate. Make sure that you save it with a really suitable name. Here. Go to this three-line menu and hit Rename. And I'm going to call it drops 600, 600 pixels or whatever, whatever way you want to rename it. And maybe put the word master or main or something like that. So you remember and this tells me that as soon as I see the word master, that I don't want to use that one because it's gonna be my master. Let me just actually delete this one here. What I would do here is duplicated and you can see as soon as I do that, that's the original over here and this is the one that is the copy. So it has copy. And generally what I do is I'll go in and rename it right away and I'll call this one whatever the pattern happens to be. I think this one, I'll just call it mixed flowers. And say, okay, so now I know that this is the one that I need to be working on for this project. So now what we'll do is we'll get that tracing done of my flowers, the SVG graphics. We'll import it and we'll start working on our pattern. Okay, so I will see you in the next lesson. 6. Lesson 5 Vectorizing and Importing the Motifs: Hi guys, welcome to lesson five. In less than five here we're going to be doing the vectorization in Adobe capture. I'm gonna be showing you the technique that I used for this and the ways that will make it easier for us when we get into Affinity Designer eventually will be sketching right in this program. But this is the most comfortable workflow for me at the moment. And I'm sure for you as you've been using Procreate so much. Let's get started. Okay, so I want to show you real quick why we can't export the file the way I have it there in procreate, I have selected here, I'm going to go to files. The one I just did was called Art for class. And you can immediately see the problem. Everything is merged into one layer. So that is going to be a real issue for us when we get to Affinity Designer. So let's go back to procreate, and let's set up this file so that it's easy for us to do the conversion that we want. So I'm going to just in case I'm not sure if I'm going to need these were not for lining up. I think this is a fairly simple pattern, but it wasn't. What you would do is put marks on the corner of your artwork. And this is simply going to be to line up each of the parts of the pattern when we get it to Affinity Designer. Now, the fastest way would be to actually do that on its own layer and then duplicate it twice, add it to each of the layers. So this one I'll put on top, that's when I'll put in-between and then will just merge down. So each of them individually has these little corner marks. Now we'll go into the Canvas, crop and resize. And we need it to be three times the width so that we can fit them all in there. So that's probably going to be big enough. I'll go a little bit bigger just to be sure we get those crop marks in there, I'm going to hit Done. And then we can move each of these layers so that they are literally side-by-side. So I'm going to put snapping on so that they do stay lined up, which is not 100% necessary, but definitely could prove to be helpful. So that one is a little bit tight so they can remove this guy over a little bit. I'm going to have to make my canvas just a little bit wider. It doesn't want to. So I'm probably at the maximum that I can be at. So rather than do that, I'll select all three, reduce them down slightly. And now I should be able to move that guy over there still lined up. I'm going to move this one over because it's literally touching that one there. So that gives it a little bit of breathing room. Now we've got all of our parts. So let's save this document out. And I'm gonna do it as a PNG. I think that might be better quality than a JPEG for what we're doing and save it to Files. I'll call it art for class and hit Done and save. And here's my correct version. And that's got the three you can see here barely, but it's there. Let's bring it in. And now you can see we've got the three parts here. So it looks pretty good to me. I'm going to hit, Okay. So it's pretty rough here, so I'm going to put some moving on. You can see that that's improved it quite a bit. Not sure if this Refine will make any difference. And I think this is what I will use as my final one. It looks pretty good. There's gonna be some little things that we may have to change or fix. We can always try a different converter if we don't like this one. I showed you those other two in one of the previous classes. I'm going to hit Save. It is going to be exporting it as a vector, as you can see here. I'm going to temporarily put it into my graphics folder here. Then I'm going to select this one and I'm going to export it as an SVG, save it to my files into folder that I'm keeping my art in. This time I'm going to call it flowers, vector, hit Done, and save. And now I'm ready to go into Affinity Designer. So before putting it into my half-drop template, I'm actually just going to import it. So open from Cloud flowers vector because I want to separate these and get them ready for what we're going to be doing. So before I align these up, I'm going to group them. So I'm selecting each of the groupings and grouping them. So we've got the three separate groups here. And what that helps us do is align them so we can select all three, go into the Transform palette here to the align options. And here you can align horizontally and aligned vertically. So that gets them into the approximate position they need to be. I can see that there one of them is off a little bit, but that doesn't matter because we're going to be bringing this into the other document and colorizing it and we're gonna be moving things around. So all we really need is this. Now we can copy it. So I'm going to copy and go into this other documents. So here I can simply paste and we've got it here in position. And now we know that we can reduce. They don't want to grab this group separately, but you can go into your folder here and you'll see that either still grouped. It's hard to know what the exact size here until we put it into the symbol. We're still only going to be kind of winging it because we have a lot of stuff we need to do to make it work, but we can at least somewhat figure out the size here. So I'm kinda looking at this one here and it's going to fit into that space there side-to-side that looks a little bit tight there. So maybe I'll go a bit smaller and I think it's going to be alright, so we're ready to basically start fitting our pattern and re-coloring it and doing all the things that we need to do. I'm going to change what I just did there. And instead of putting it right into that rectangle because that was clipping it, I'm going to put it of the rectangle. So basically I'm just dragging it into the symbol itself. And you see that leaves the rectangles separate. And that might help me a little bit more because then I can see that a little bit better side-to-side is still not fantastic. But that's probably more to do with my positioning. I'm gonna go a wee bit smaller because I think I can fudge and move things around a little bit more easily. The next step that we take is to actually go through and take them out of their groups and make each of the flowers themselves or motifs themselves their own group. So I think that is going to work just fine for us. So just ignore the fact that it's not necessarily fitting completely or perfectly. And we'll go through and do the next step, which is doing some just a basic color on each of the different layers so that we can see what we're working with. So I'm gonna do that by selecting the individual group. And in this case, I can just work with one of the swatch pallets that I already have. I'm going to change the color, not the stroke at the color of that layer to teal. You can see it has changed here and that's not the one that I want because I actually want the leaf layer to be teal. So this one I'm going to just fill with orange. Then I'm going to grab this group was not the one with the leaves. Yes, it is. So that one I could fill with the teal and then our last layer with a slightly lighter orangey color. And let's reorder this. So we've got those in behind and you can see how this is going to work now. And that's always just so nice seeing it. Okay. I'm close, I'm getting there. I know what I have to do now. It's just nice seeing it repeated. I just love that part. I find that so satisfying. So we're going to go through and group each of these in its own flower unit. Alright, so I'll do that in the next lesson, and I'll see you there. 7. Lesson 6 Grouping and Arranging the Motifs: Hi guys, welcome to lesson six. To make everything easier for ourselves, I want to show you how to individually group each of your motifs. Let's get started. So to do that work, to get that all into individual groups per flower, I'm going to just take them out of the symbol for now. And we're gonna work on separating each of these elements. So as I'm about to do that, what I want to do is get this order correct. So I'm going to put that set of stems behind. And so we've got everything technically correct here. Just a little adjustments we're gonna be making. But what I want to show you here is that, believe it or not, now we have to ungroup all of these. And it's a scary sight when you start seeing all of these layers, strikes fear into the hearts of every graphic designer. But we have a plan here. Like I said, we're going to group each of the flowers into its own unit. And the reason I ungroup hit is that then I can select like this, and it'll select all of the layers. So you can see here it's selecting all of the are those. There should be three of them. Forgot to ungroup this guy and see that when I selected it, with it being grouped, it didn't select the green. And now you can see that it did select a green. So it's selected each layer of our registration triangles. So I'm going to delete those, of course. And one of the things I've noticed, I'm not sure how it happens, but when I delete this one, it goes and select something else. But I want to just do this methodically. Now here it's selected that which is great. So that speeds me up a little bit. And like I said, I want to do this fairly methodically. One of the things you want to do here is when you're selecting, you want to drag over the entire motif. Nothing else will add to selection, which is different from Illustrator. Because if I did this, this stem would also be added. But I liked this because it isolates and just gives you only what's within your selection rectangle, which is fantastic because now we take that one and we group it, and we take this one and we group it. And you'll see that one didn't select because I didn't go far enough to have selected the entire shape. But now I have so I can group it. And so far so good. Sometimes this is really hard to do because when things are squished like this, selecting, I mean, that's gonna be an issue and I think probably this one's going to be an issue, but these little ones aren't too bad. Now this background I can temporarily locked so that I'm not accidentally selecting it at. Let me just follow through here with these. Again. I'm doing the easy ones first. The ones that I know, hey, I just locked this guy. The ones that I know are easy to enclose within. Sometimes it's good because then you kinda get rid of certain ones, get them out of the picture. In this case, what I would do this one is already done. So I would just temporarily lock that one and then I can make it into its own group. Do that one. Let's flip this guy back in. Moving that when a tiny little bit to get it into position and you know what, that's in the wrong layer. So it's behind and it needs to be above. So I'm bringing it up here. I'm not sure if that's the exact right position and they can see a little flaw here. So we want us, we'll deal with that first and then get rid of it. And one of the things we will be doing is a little bit of touch up on things like this, where the shape is a little bit off or where the angle might be a little bit off. So I'm not going to start that now I want to follow through with this process. So now it's these big ones that we want to do. So I'm trying to select just this, which is a problem. As you can see, this is what I made about it being a little bit frustrating. The other way you can do it, it's just sort of identify. Okay, That's, that's the right stem. That's one of the curves. So this, and this, we could group right now, Let's move this up a ways and we're going to have to reorder it. But this way I can figure out what things need to be added. So this needs to go in, that oval needs to go in. And I don't think I have this oval here and that needs to go in and I believe that's the whole thing. Well, I didn't get it in there. Again. That's the whole group, so we've got that one done. Why don't we missing we don't have this one. So in this case, it's probably just easier to hold about single finger down and select both parts of it. Actually there's that little inner circle to, well, let's do these two first. We'll group them. And here it is, down here. It does already have this circle because I had already grouped those two. So I don't want a group within a group that could cause issues later. So I'm going to pull this into this group and then pull that one out of that double groups. So it's just a single. Okay, so now we've got this group. Let's see if we can select the whole thing. And yes, we are able to so we can group that. And then we'll just have to figure out what's happening with this one. So this is, this belongs to this, I'm going to unlock it, put these two together and group them. And this, and this are likely the two. And it gets easier once you get to this point because there's not that many left, right? So these are the ones that will go together. So group that and this needs to go with this group. So slide that in there and change the order so that it's behind. And if I fix that other one, yes, it looks like I did. So now I have all of these in groups of their own, which is great. It's gonna be a lot easier to move them. And what we can do too is take all of these now. This one, That one's okay, so we can drag all of these now into our symbol layer. Okay, I did not drag it into the symbol layer. So let's make sure that we do. This is the symbol here. It's kinda confusing because you see the rectangle there and you're like, okay, that's where it goes. But no, it's got to go right into this one with that yellow edge there or that orange indicator. And do I have everything no, I missing these three. Slide those in there. And now we have everything that we need in the repeat. And the beauty of this now is that any of these that we grab and move around will move around on all the repeats of our symbol. We haven't duplicated them and put them on the other side like we need to, but that's okay, we're gonna do that. And I might as well save that for the next lesson. I want to do some moving around to figure out if I've got enough motifs here to fill out my pattern. And yeah, we'll do that in the next lesson. This is the fun part. I get so excited when I get to this stage. It's like doing a puzzle, right? If you've always love to do puzzles, like I have, we used to do thousand, 2000, 5,000 piece puzzles with our families. Just a great big table. And all of us would sit around and do the puzzle. Sometimes it would take us a couple days. Sometimes. I mean, it's amazing sometimes how quickly and my grandson who was here yesterday, I watched him do one and I can't believe for a five-year-old that he could do it as fast as he could. So I guess it maybe runs in the family. Anyhow, I'll meet you in the next lesson. 8. Lesson 7 Altering Arrangement for Best Design: Hi guys, welcome to lesson seven. In this lesson, we're going to be doing anything we need to alter our layout to make it work really well now that we're looking at it in the full repeat. Let's get to it. So I'm sure at this point you know exactly what to do. And that is to repeat some of the elements that appear both top and bottom. As you can see, the top of this flower is missing, e.g. so what we're gonna do here is work with this symbol here. And we'll select flowers that are on the edges and repeat them down. Now something like this one will need to be repeated here, but it will also need to be repeated over here. Do you remember what size our document was here? If you don't, then it's pretty easy to remember by just selecting your symbol and going into this transform area and taking a look. And this is the area that we need for doing all of this movement that we're doing. So I'm going to start with this one because I think that's going to fill this whole quite nicely and it's going to help us to start visualizing and making sure that we have everything the way we want it. Open up your layers palette, select the flower or grouping that you want to move, then go into the Edit Channel. So this is edit. You're going to duplicate. So it's sitting right on top of the other one. Then we're going to go into the Transform palette and we're going to change the y measurement here. And I'm sure you remember this, but we're going to hit plus ten and that's going to move our duplicate down here. So you can see that we've got what we need as far as the repeat goals. Now because it repeats on this side as well, we're going to duplicate it again. And actually we can grab this one to duplicate, or you could have just used the one that was selected top one because I think it'll be easier for you to visualize the movement. So we're gonna go 10 " to this corner, so it will be minus ten and then we're going to go plus five because we wanted to only move it halfway back to the transform studio. I always call it a palette, I know. And here we're going to change the x coordinate to be minus ten. So that brings us over here, 0 to not duplicate. Okay, sorry, miss that step. So minus ten here. And here we're going to do plus five. And you can see as we're doing this, you know, everything is starting to repeat over here the way it needs to know. I'm a little worried about this not lining up. I think possibly one of my symbols here has dislodged and moved a little bit because these should all be lined up perfectly. So there's something wrong there which we can address in a minute. And it's good that this stuff happens in class so that you can see when you have an issue like that, what it is that you have to do to resolve it, It's very easy, but we'll tackle that after we've got these other things done that we want to do. So let's go back into here, and now we want to repeat this one and this one and move them across. And this one is going to have to move down. And so this one we could have done at the same time as this one, but we didn't. So now we're gonna do it. So that's this one. I think this one, no. I mean, in a perfect world that would have taken the time to label all of these. But since I didn't, we're just going to deal with it. Okay, here we hit Duplicate and then we go to the Transform. We're going to move them over and up. So we're going to move 10 " so plus 10 " this way and -5 " this way. So you can see we've got most of that flower now. And the reason we don't have it completely is because we didn't repeat it in this direction. So let's get that one again. Duplicate it. Take that duplicate and move it minus ten. And now we've got that whole flower. And we can see here that this little fern is probably going to need to be re-positioned, which we can wait and do all of the repositioning later. Or I can just do it now. And it's not just the most amazing thing. Being able to just move it without worrying and trying to figure out just by luck or by golly, whether or not it's going to work like in procreate where you're basically guessing and trying to make everything work. Now this one here we don't need that was good. I duplicated when I did that. And what are the other flowers I see that's in the way as this one, but let's just do all of this stuff first and then we'll go back and make any of the corrections that we need. So this little flower here, I need to repeat over on this side, so I forgot to do that. And which one was that? This one here. So let's duplicate it and we're going to move it 10 " over, so plus 10.5 " down. So plus five here. Okay, so now we've got that whole flower and is that it shall be bought at all. I think this scam, this flower here we need to do so it's really just the stem parch. So let's find it. That's this flower here. We could duplicate the whole flower. It doesn't really matter. So hit Duplicate here and we're just going vertically minus ten. For that. Okay, so that's extended that perfect. And it looks like everything is okay except for the positioning of our symbols here. So let's just go through and quickly check those so we can close that up and we can start, let's start with the top corner here. We know that this one needs to be zero-zero. So we'll go in here and that one is correct. So we'll grab the next one down. And these are not currently in the right order, but that's okay. It's pretty easy to figure out. So this one should be at zero for the x coordinate, because that's this line here and ten for the y-coordinate. And that's correct. Well, it's one of these little scoundrels. So this one, can you figure out what that one should be? This one should be minus five, so it's correct. So I'm baffled here as to what occurred because these appear to be all correct. 10.5 and then our last 110.15. So these are all correct. So the problem with this one is not immediately evidenced, so let's redo it. We're going into the symbol here. Let's just figure out which one it is. I think I'm just going to get rid of these two. So these two this one and that one on the side, just trashed those. And I have another duplicate here. It looks like I do. Yes, I do. So I'm going to trash the bottom one here and this one will duplicate. We know we have to go plus ten and then we can go back to that original one. It doesn't matter. You can do it from this one, but we can do the duplicate. And when it repeats down here, it's a little confusing. So that's why I usually go back to the original. So I'll demonstrate that instead. So we go back to that one duplicate and we're going to go minus ten and plus five. So that hasn't resolved that issue. And I see that I'm having a couple more here, so I'm going to take a minute here off camera to figure out what the heck is going on, and I'll come right back to you. I think that I have figured it out. I think I've got this within Threat angle which is causing a problem because it's treating it like a clipping mask. I want to take it, I took all of that stuff and it's in the symbol, but now the rectangle is separate at the bottom here. And I had noticed that it was off a little bit. I think that's what was causing the problems with the alignment and now it's all good. Everything is lined up perfectly here. So now everything will work exactly how we need it to when we want to start moving around our elements. Plus, when it was in the group, I couldn't double-tap to select it. So I just did that wrong within the rectangle and it was needing to be in the symbol, but not within that background. So it's all worked out now. And I think in the next lesson, what we'll do is we'll just really make sure that our arrangement is good. And I definitely think I'm going to be needing to add a couple of motifs to fill in some of this. I mean, sometimes you don't, after you start rearranging things, it all works. But I'm thinking that some of the things like this flower here, e.g. once I move it, it still seems quite large for the space there. And what we can do to start thinking about color. And if we change some of these motifs a little bit, it might work. You might be able to put them in different levels or whatever. And I know your design is going to be completely different, but I just like showing you everything that as a designer, you have to do when it comes to problem-solving. Alright, so let's meet up in that next lesson. See you there. 9. Lesson 8 Color Adjustments for Perfecting Layout: Hi guys, welcome to lesson eight. In less than eight here we're going to be doing any of the adjustments that we can to the color to really perfect our layout when it comes to rearranging the pattern. Now that we've thought these repeats on the outside, I try to really stop myself from moving those. And I tried to just move the ones that are within, like completely enclosed within here. Of course there are instances where you have to move it. So then what you'd have to do is eliminate the repeat of it and then go back and duplicate repeat again. So because it's that much of a process, I kinda tried to avoid it. But of course he never say never, sometimes you just have to. So this is where we start making decisions about whether we need to add multi-use to fill the space, or whether changing color is going to make a difference. Changing sizes of certain things like this one here because it's completely within the square or rectangle. I can make it smaller and move it around and make decisions like that. In a case like this where there is a lot of space here, I might consider duplicating some things. So maybe even this one here, I will just duplicate and then move it into the remaining space that's there. So sometimes you have to move a couple of things. And of course, if it goes off the side, needs to be repeated down here. I'm going to wait a bit until I have done a little bit more rearranging here just to figure out whether or not I want to move it or change its color first. Now something like this where we have the duplicate here, we could select both of them if we need to move them. And then as long as we're moving them, the exact same amount, it'll be okay. So I'm not sure whether it went back down or up. I'm thinking down here. And I think also that one of these guys, maybe this flower or this flower here, would be a good one to duplicate. It'd be made quite small and still be bold enough that we're gonna be able to do that next step, which we want to do, which is the adding of detail on our motifs. So I think that kind of works there, but I don't like the color being the same. And I think also I just want to make an adjustment on this petal and I hadn't duplicated it, so that would be something to do at this point to now, one of the things I also like doing is at this point before I do too much, is to do a little bit of correcting on some of the motifs. Now in a case like this, I'm going to hit smooth so that I can eliminate some of the points. And I just don't like this, that square. So I'm going to delete a couple of points here. I guess that was the duplicate I was moving. So I had been smart enough to do that. My goodness, I'm doing this honestly. Sometimes I don't know how I forget things, But I do point to delete all of these extra points so that I can easily make that adjustment. And same with this one. I think I'll just leave that center one thing on this one here, we can just move that over a little bit. I hate it when there's too many points, I find it's so frustrating to deal with the shapes. So really I just moved my rectangle I saw, I'm going to lock that sucker before it goes anywhere else. So make sure you're on the rectangle and then go in here and lock it because I do not want that to move to so much easier to adjust when you get rid of all of the extra points there emphasized a lot of times they do distort a little bit. That one I think is okay. I'm at it. I might as well do this one. So smooth it, get rid of a few of the points and then I think I can delete all but four to make a nice clean oval stroke when there wasn't really extra batch, I've removed it. You really just need those two and then you can make a nice smooth oval. I think this can now be pulled in. And of course, you're looking at this and thinking, oh my God, do I have to go through every single symbol? And you don't, I mean, you want to do anything that you see immediately stands out. By. A lot of times. You don't want to get too much of the character out of it. So be careful of over adjusting and perfecting. Because a lot of times then our motifs will start looking to, to mechanical and for these kinda do the same thing. In this case, I think I'll move one over here and one over here. And with these, what I like is to have a little bit of that yellow are lighter color showing through around the edges to make it look like that flower is a little bit. At this point to check your stems makes sure that they're all even. You could go through and fix things like this. This might be better to have one of these as a sharper corner point so that you can bring it in and you don't get that flow a little bit better. Think about these, the basis of your flowers. You might want to make sure that they're all sort of consistent, that their shape the same way. I kinda like mine to be a little bit flat, but I don't want this sort of a thing. So how we go through and do that, less points you have also on your long sweeping lines the better because you can get them a lot smoother and control the thickness of them a lot easier. So take some time to just look at everything at this stage. And then the next thing you want to do is start thinking about your colors. Let's go into our swatches here. And this was the group that I was working with. That's my background color. And then I chose a couple of different of these orange colors. But at this point, I really want to diversify a bit and add a little bit of a lighter color in here. So I'm thinking that maybe this one here would be a good candidate. So I would do that one. I want it to be somewhat like this, but even lighter. So what I've got, I've got that selected, That's the color I have in here. I'm just going to sweep up a couple of times until I get a lighter color and I know it's perfectly matched or part of this set just simply because I've lightened a color that I already have in this set of colors. This center dot on this one maybe I would do in a green. I'm just trying to think of ways to make things different. So possibly this one as well, or I can even take this one here now and make sure that it's in a group and duplicate it and then use this one elsewhere as well. So that I've got a little bit of unity happening because I'm adding. And the nice thing about adding a different color like this is I could do things like overlap, as in putting it over one of the other leaves. If I chose to. This one here I think might be a good candidate as well. We'll leave that one for now. And I'm thinking maybe with the stems that if I got a different color on a couple of them, so maybe this biggest one here I would do in a slightly lighter tone like that. And maybe this one here in that same color or lighter. I need to isolate that, makes sure it's the one just the one that I'm grabbing there. So I've got three different sort of green happening. And I like that. I think I'll go through and do a little bit of this. So I'll touch up some of my shapes and I will do some color changes. And I'll come back to you in the last lesson and we'll talk about what it is that we're going to do next. So the next class that we're doing in this series, we're gonna be adding all kinds of detail to each of our motifs. I'm going to show you a finished look at this because I've already done this one once. And I'll also explain to you things that you can prepare or think about before the next class starts. Alright? Okay, so I will see you in that last lesson. 10. Lesson 9 Additional Advice for Finalizing Your Pattern: Hi guys, welcome to Lesson nine. Less than nine here is all about finessing and perfecting. Let's get to it. Okay, so I think I have everything the way I want it so that I'm prepared for the next class. There are things that I might still consider changing. Maybe the color of this flower here, I like the color, but I think I might go a little bit lighter. So you can make changes and corrections like that as you see fit. So go through and to prepare for the next class, tried to perfect your colors that you see here and your shapes. Amongst the things that I did is I shortened the stem on this flower here so that it wasn't overlapping on this flower. I've created a couple of the leaves. I didn't go crazy, but I did do some of those little things. Also, other colors, you know, that I've made some changes for this flower and more on the yellow ones there. I've changed the center on a lot of the flowers so that I could just get what I consider more of a balanced pattern. I'm liking it so far. I don't know about you, but I think that it's working quite nicely. I like the sort of sweeping lines that have been formed by the stems and leaves. I like that there's variety. I've tried to not have too many things of the same color together unless there what I would consider fillers, I repeated this flower and anything else that was on the edges. I made sure that the duplicate was there so that the entire pattern was perfect and lined up and all of that kind of stuff. I could still go and then make adjustments. I don t know. Some of them. It's something as simple as taking one of these and flipping. It might make a difference. I did flip, I think this yellow one. So it wasn't exactly like the other one. And now I want to show you what we're going to be doing in the next class. So the next class is going to be all about embellishing our motifs. So here's an example. This, I don't even like this pattern as much as the other one now, I like the other one that I did today better. But this does show you all of the little things that we're going to do to add interests. So that should remind you quite a bit of some of these inspiration pieces that we have. It's a good time to revisit those and take a really close look at how e.g. a. Two tone flower would lock or maybe adding all of these little lines on there. This is where you really, to start putting your own stylistic choices in motion. This one here has a ton of really cute stuff. I'll lift this up a little bit so it doesn't get the light through it. But you'll see all of these little fillers that are put in between. So that's something to consider. These are things that you could think about the preparation for. I don't want you to necessarily go ahead and do that because I think there's a lot that we can discuss here before you get started and I can show you some shortcuts. So next class, that's what I'm going to do. This class is definitely long enough. And I think we've done a really great job of getting our pattern ready for this next stage. Like I said, I like this layout so much better now, I know that this is going to be the one that I want to consider as my final hero pattern. So this being our hero pattern and getting all of those little embellishments done. We will prepare us then for the last class and the last and the three-part series is going to be in producing coordinates for this collection. So we're going to end up with a collection. It might be a mini collection maybe for patterns or something like that. But I think that once we're done, the next stage here, adding the little extras that will make all of these looks super interesting. I think whatever we do there is going to help us with the production of the coordinates, if that makes sense. That was a lot of explanation as to what we will be doing. And I think really at this point, you're perfecting your motifs more than anything. So go in and make changes, make corrections. Take a look at things, find inconsistencies. If you see that on a flower like this, e.g. all of these are at a specific distance away, then make sure that they're all like that. This is the kind of little extra stuff that the professionals do. This is what you do at this stage when you are designing a pattern that you are going to submit for art licensing, you don't want to have somebody take a look at it and think, Oh, that's not really quite finished. That needs this. It needs that. You're hoping that whatever you do at this point is really showing what you can do as a professional. That's exactly what puts you beyond a dabbler and into the category of a professional. So not trying to scare you or anything, but this is really exactly what happens and this is exactly what I do before I submit something. You'd be surprised at the little things that a customer will pick up on and you don't want you to adjust. So why not do the best you can at this point? Be sure. I'm going to show you something like this is something that happens in the tracing process. I know I had that as a very nice sharp angle. So some of the settings, something that I did has caused this to happen. So this is something where I would make that, I think I'll delete that point. And actually in this point here, and then this one here, it is already a sharp points, so that would work perfectly there. So I would go and make these kinds of adjustments. And I'm looking at every single motif. I never go without checking every one of them closely. Little things like this are so easy to fix at this stage. And I would definitely do this before going to the next stage, which is going to be adding a bunch of detail here on the top of this flower. So I don't want to add all that detail and then think to myself, Oh, why didn't I fix that or this needs to be fixed and then I would have all of the little things that are on top to have to fix as well. So I rather do whatever I can at this point to save myself the heart ache later. I'm really looking forward to seeing your patterns. One of the things I love seeing is when you start applying color to your patterns and then how your color scheme works with this. One of the things I do miss about Adobe Illustrator is that there is a really simple way to select something like this, our pattern square and then do a re-color on it, keeping the original the way it is, but also having a recolored version. Most of the time when I am submitting fabric designs are patterns that could be used for either fabrics or for some other surface pattern design application. I tried to submit two completely different color ways. So something like that, we'll explore the future. And I think that you'll notice when you are re-coloring and trying to make changes that having a smaller set of colors ends up working in your favor. It's much easier to change and it's much easier to make the pattern look really cohesive, especially within a collection. And a lot of times when I do a second colorway, I make sure that I use at least some of the colors from the original one. I might e.g. keep the background color the same and go in and have mosque greens instead of these two hormones that I have going on. And then I would change all of the oranges to be maybe pinks or something, whatever it is that I do, it's a lot easier to keep it really looking like it works. And really making it work when you have less colors to work with. And yet, you know, keeping some of the same colors in both of the colorways. So these are all things that we'll discuss at length in the future. And I'm just so excited that you're at this point now where you've got vector patterns because that's where you're going to really notice the possibilities have really opened up. And I think that's it. So I have nothing else to say. And I hope that you get your pattern prepared beautifully and ready for the next class in this series. I guess that's it for this lesson. And I will meet you in the wrap-up. Bye for now. 11. Lesson 10 Closing Thoughts and Wrap Up: Well guys, we've made it to the end and we now have everything that we need for the next class of this series. In the next class, we're gonna be adding all of those little embellishments that we talked about at the beginning of class. This would be a great time for you to do some additional research and look at some of those artists that we talked about at the beginning of class. A good example would be Helen, Darn it. Go and take a look at her blog where she really shows all of her artworks. And if you go way, way, way back, you'll see the progression of how she has learned the technique, I guess you'd say, or how her process has evolved over time. It's really neat to look at all of the different little things that she puts into her patterns. A lot of times it's more than just lines and dots. She has all kinds of different shapes that she uses. So it's a good time for you to just kind of sit back and think about how you want that pattern to look in the long run. I would suggest you go through and do a ton of research here at this stage, check out my boards on Pinterest, especially at the surface pattern design for it, that's called Paint detailed patterns. From there, you can probably find all kinds of other inspiration as well. Now if you didn't do so at the beginning of class and he liked by seller while he liked learning from me, then definitely hit that follow button up there. That way you will get all of the new classes that I post and all of the posts that I sent out about all kinds of random stuff here. Don't worry, I don't stand out too much. I would also suggest that you check out my website, get your name on there. And if you're really curious about my work, definitely check out my portfolio. I have work on Behance. And if you go to my website, you can link to my portfolio there to see my work or just Google my name. And I think you'll find me on a few sites. I know that I'm currently on wayfair.com and I Canvas sites like that. I'm really excited about the second class in the series here, where you're going to be adding some of those embellishments. So I guess I'll say bye for now and I will see you then.