Transcripts
1. Intro: Hey. My name is Juliet Meeks. I'm an artist and surface pattern designer based in New Orleans. I paint with lots of watercolor, and I'm often making repeating patterns for, both my own product line and for other clients as well. I design for various types of textiles, primarily, and paper goods, and other fun products, basically, anything that I can get my patterns on to. Today, I'm going to be sharing the handmade repeat method. If you're new to repeating your artwork, I think this would be a great place to start to really get an understanding of how are repeat works. There are lots of types of repeating methods. This is just one type. I encourage you to do some research and find out which type works best for the particular artwork that you're working with and then also the look that you're going for as a final piece. This is an example of a handmade repeat that I've already made just to show you what we'll be doing in the class today. We're going to be using watercolor paper, and I'll be going over all of the basic watercolor supplies you'll need, but you can feel free to draw or use any other method that you're used to or like to use. Once we've scanned in the artwork, we will be cleaning it up in Photoshop, and doing a couple of things there. If you have basic Photoshop skills, that would definitely be helpful for this class. Then once our pattern is cleaned up in Photoshop and ready to go, I'm going to show you just a little bonus video of how I order wrapping paper at wholesale prices, which is especially useful, if you're interested in selling something like wrapping paper. I'll also share a couple of tips of how I package my wrapping paper as well. Let's get started. In the next video, I will be going over the basic supplies you'll need and then we will start painting.
2. Supplies: We're going to get started talking about all of the basic watercolors supplies you'll need. First, I wanted to show you where we're going to be going at the end of the project. This is what we'll be scanning in and taping it all together and cutting it down. I'll go through that whole process with you. I'm not going go too in depth about the watercolor supplies right now. I do have a couple other watercolor classes that you can check out. I go into it in a little bit more detail. First we'll need a block of watercolor paper. It doesn't have to be a block. It can be individual sheets as well. I like to use a block usually but in this case if you are using one like this, you are going to have to remove the glued down edges from your sheet of paper. It might be easier for you to just have sheets of paper. If you are using a block, I like to have this bone folder. It makes it a lot easier to pull your sheets out without ripping them. It's pretty necessary. I've got just a whole bunch of my favorite brushes here. I'll probably only use a couple of them. But just to show you the variety of what I have in different sizes, I like to use the round shape most often. You'll need two cups of water, one for warmer and one for cooler tones so the water doesn't get too muddy. A plastic palette, any type of palette that has individual wells will work. As far as watercolor paint, I like to use tubes of watercolor. I find it easier to mix colors and have a little bit more control but it's just up to your preference. I use a lot of Winsor & Newton but I have a few brands here. You'll need a paper towel. When we cut down our painting, you'll need an X-Acto knife. I like to use this utility knife but you can use one of the smaller X-Acto knives, of course. Tape to tape your painting together once you cut it up. You're also going to need a ruler to be able to cut your painting very precisely. I really like this duroedge ruler. It's definitely my favorite type. You'll also need a cutting mat, which I will show you in the video when we get to that point. Then of course, you'll need some inspiration photos or you can draw something from life or from your imagination. I like to have something to look at just a little reference for shapes. I just found these holiday themes bouquets on Pinterest. I printed them out in black and white because I'm mostly looking at the shapes although the colors were a nice too. But this way, I can just make up any colors that I want. Lastly, I wanted to show you the wrapping paper that I had printed last year. I sold this wrapping paper in my online shop and at art markets. I used a different repeating method than I'm showing you in this class. But I actually have a class for the method that I used, which is primarily painting all of the elements individually and then putting together the pattern in Photoshop more extensively. We'll also go over a little bit more in detail about the wrapping paper in the last video. Next step we're going to get started on our first step of just doing a quick sketch of the design that we're going to be painting.
3. Step 1: Sketch: I want to mention now the limits of doing this repeat method. It doesn't give you quite as much control as the Photoshop method that I share in my other class on painting to pattern. I actually don't often sketch before I create a painting. But because of the limits of this handmade method and there's not so much room for error, I am going to sketch, do a really loose sketch just to at least get down the general elements that I want to be including into my painting. So I'm looking at my reference photo and those white flowers are going to be my main focal point of this print. I'm going to sketch the white flowers first, place them in different areas. As we're cutting down this pattern later you'll see how the placement moves and adjust and you'll have to play with that a little bit later. But for now, I like to start with the biggest blooms and then I'm going to just add in some leaf shapes that I like from the reference photo. I like to be really loose and playful with my paintings, which is why I often don't sketch beforehand. The hardest part of this handmade repeat method is the fact that you can't adjust the elements after. One of the most important things about repeating patterns is for the pattern to have a nice flow once you've finished with it, to be really dynamic and not have too many elements competing with each other or getting to stripy. So the limit of this method is that once you do it, you can't really go back and change too much. If you are looking to make a repeat that's of a really large-scale especially one where you're not having tons of tiles of the repeat, then this works well. If you were trying to make a repeat of wallpaper at a smaller scale, I think this would be a bit trickier to get right, especially the first go around without having to keep making multiple versions of the same pattern until you get a repeat that you like. It's an old school, very handmade method with a little less digital control. But I do think this is a good method to learn even just to compare to other methods that you use. You will probably find certain things that you'll find it useful for. I encourage you to just keep that in mind that when you finish your pattern, it may not look exactly how you'd like it to look, but in some ways that's the beauty of the handmade method. It's not going to be perfect. It's going to have some corks. Before I got started, I knew I always wanted to include some red berries. I don't think there in any of these photos possibly, but I really wanted to have that pop of red amongst lots of green and white. For my wrapping paper, it's going to be Christmas themed or just general holiday themed. But of course you can do this for any type of all your wrapping paper as well. I want to balance those longer branches with some bigger individual leaves as well. That's it for the sketch. It's just to get you feeling a little bit more comfortable before you start painting and just have a general idea of what your layout is going to be.
4. Optional Step: Paint Masking Fluid: I actually decided that for these white flowers, I want to use something called masking fluid. If you aren't familiar with masking fluid, it's basically just this smelly liquid glue material that you use to paint on and it's saving that negative space for you so you can paint over it and then later you will peel it up once it's completely dried. You can't paint over it when it's wet. Though so, you do have to let it dry once you put it down on the paper. Also, I would suggest to make sure that you use a brush that you don't love because it will pretty much destroy any brush that you use. I've got this really old brush here, and then I've also got a cup of water on hand to keep rinsing it. I poured a little masking fluid in here. Actually, I probably poured a little bit too much. After this, I'm going to put it back in the bottle. I'm just going to use the masking fluid to paint the white flower shapes that I know I want to keep a light color and may actually paint them a really, really light shade of peach or gray or something like that just to give them more of a feel. It just depends on how much, how many leaves, and other elements that I paint over them to really make sure that you see that shape of the petals. I'm trying to place my flowers strategically. Although, honestly, every time that I do that, it never seems to be quite right once you end up repeating it. Just make sure they're not like too close to each other and this is definitely, the placement of the elements. Is one thing that you definitely start to improve on once you do this a few times at least. I think, probably, after this dries and once we get to the one of the last steps, I will probably add in one more masking fluid flower. That's it for this step. This is definitely a step that you can skip if you know you're not going to use masking fluid, but I just thought I would share a little bit of my process with this as well.
5. Step 2: Painting the Center: I let my masking fluid dry. You don't want it to be wet at all, because we'll be painting over it. Now after I've sketched, I know that my plan for this design is to have lots of greenery, some bigger blooms, and then some little pops of red berries. I also know I want to put in just a couple of little pink flowers, because I like to use pink and a lot of my color palettes. I'm going to start by painting some of these bigger leaves. I like to paint the larger elements first just because I know I'll have room for them. Now as I'm painting, I'm not going to paint against any of the edges of the paper. You don't want any of your elements to touch the edges, and you'll see why that is later. I'm adding a variety of greenery here using different shades of green. I want this pattern to have a really full luscious look with all of the greenery which I think is going to look really pretty on presence. I'm painting some straighter branches here that I will later add berries on top of once this layer dries. I really like this brush that I'm using, because I can get a nice tip on it. The type of brush is called Black Velvet. I think the brand is Silver. If you look up Silver Black Velvet, you'll be able to find some of these there. They're a little bit pricier, but they're really nice to use. Now, I'm starting to paint over some of the masking fluid. The reason for that is that I want the elements surrounding the areas where there's masking fluid to help define that shape. Once I remove the masking fluid, I may keep that area white or I may go over and paint a lighter color over it. But regardless, I still like that look of the whitespace cutting into the elements around it. Which is why I tried to paint as many elements around and on top of the edges of the masking fluid as possible to show that effect. As I'm painting the center of this piece of paper, I'm trying not to make a really obvious rectangle shape by just creating a perfect border around the edges. It's just going to help whenever we repeat the tile for the tile to not be such an obvious rectangle shape as the patterns repeating. There's some things that we can do later to help with that as well. But just keep that in mind. If you don't paint the entire page up to the edges, that's fine. We can add in some elements later. I'm just continuing to paint and filling the spaces that I'm creating, trying to have an even distribution of the different types of greenery. Now I'm going to add some of my red berries on top now that the branches below have dried. I'm actually going to grab a firmer brush that's easier to make round shapes with. This brush is soft to get that nice tip. I like these green brushes which are called the Princeton Lauren Series and they're synthetic brush, but they have a nice firm feel that's easy to use. I'm painting more along the edges of the masking fluid that I've missed before. Adding some little pops of pink. I'm going to stop here. I know that that bottom left flower doesn't have anything painted along the left side of it. I may just be leaving that as some negative space to add an element on top of it later, as we will be cutting or painting up into four pieces. I know that's hard to imagine. If you're a little bit nervous about cutting up your painting, you could scan this just as it is, just in case you would ever want to use it for something else.
6. Step 3: Cutting and Taping: Setup your cutting mat, make sure you have your ruler, your X-Acto knife and some tape. What we're going to be doing, is cutting this into four pieces. I'm going to find the center of my painting vertically and I'm going to cut that first. It doesn't have to be super precise, but basically as close to center as you can get it. Just making sure I have this measurement right. It's about seven inches wide, so I'm going to cut down at about 3.5 inches across. I'm going to hold my ruler firmly and then cut down and make sure that my paper doesn't come loose, so I'm not messing up the cut. Now, I'm going to do the same thing likewise. I'm going to do the same thing and measure how many inches across and get right at about the center. I'm using my hand and my ruler to hold the paper down for me as I make my cut. That's it. This is what it was originally and we're going to be flipping some pieces. We are going to take the top right quadrant and bring it over to the left side first, then take the bottom right quadrant and bring it over to the left side. Just to show you again what I did. Now, we're going to take the top two and bring them down below the bottom two. So the bottom to come up to the top and the original top or at the bottom. Then I'm just going show you how these two will match up when you're repeating that title. It will match up at the top and bottom and it will match up left to right. Now, at this point, we're going to flip them over exactly as they are and tape the backs. Now, this tape actually isn't really as sticky as I would like. I often use something called Artist's tape, which is archival tape useful when you're framing paintings and stuff like that, but this tape works just fine. You just want to try and get the pieces as tightly together as possible. So just as least amount of a gap as you can get. Don't worry if it's not perfect because mine certainly doesn't end up perfect, and that's something that we can definitely adjust in Photoshop. I'm taping the top two together first and then the bottom two, and then I will take them all together. I'm just trying to line them up as well as I can as I'm taping. I'm pulling them together as I'm taping as well. That's it. I'm going to flip it over and check out what spaces I'll be painting. So this is where you can kind of get a sense of the repeat. The center area is what we will now be finishing up painting, and with this, you can see how this top flower is corresponding a little bit too much to the bottom flower. It creates a stripe effect, so I may go in and add some elements on top of that, left flower and cut into the flower a little bit so that it's not quite perfectly lined up with that bottom flower. You'll see when I do that in Photoshop.
7. Step 4: Painting the Rest: Now it's time for our final painting steps. I've gone ahead and added another masking fluid flower just to balance out the other flowers that were there and make it a little bit more cohesive and I let that dry so I'm ready to get started painting the rest. I'm going to paint that center of that flower and then I'm going to go right for the largest area of whitespace here to add in a larger greenery element. I'm going to keep going and just filling up this whitespace and being careful again not to touch the edges. I don't want to forget about adding some more berries. Here's some more branches that I'll add on top of. Then add some more as well to this new flower to help to find that negative space. Now what we're going to do, paint some extra elements that we'll be able to play around with more freely on their own and add to the pattern in some of these blank spots that you're seeing. I'm going to grab my paper and just start painting some of the same elements that you see in the pattern, but on their own so they're easier to isolate and move around. I'll also go through the process of how I clean these up in Photoshop once I've scanned them. One of the nice things about this handmade repeat method is if you want to keep your tile on a white background, you do not have to remove the white background of the paper, unless you really don't like that texture. Ultimately, my wrapping paper is going to be on a white background so it's nice that the only things that I have to remove from this paper background are these isolated elements. I'm going to let these dry and next step, I'll be removing this masking fluid and then we're almost ready to scan.
8. Optional Step: Removing Masking Fluid: My painting and the masking fluid is all fully dry, so I'm going to use this eraser to help easily pull up all the masking fluid. I think this is called a gum eraser that's usually used for removing pencil, but I find that a grabs the dried masking fluid easier and then my fingernails can. This is either a really boring or relaxing process depending on how you feel about it. I think it's fun to peel it up. Sometimes it can take a few minutes. But as I start to pull it up along the edges, it's satisfying to see those shapes cut into the other water color. You can see here I have lots of white space here where these flowers are. It gives you a gesture or idea of a flower. But I think I'm going to paint a really subtle Peachy Pink over these negative areas just to give more of a feel of the petals. I'm going to leave the right side of this flower on the top right empty, and I'm going to add one of my individual elements on the top in Photoshop because if I painted all the way to the edge of the paper here, it would not match up to the left side. We're going to fill that space with something in Photoshop that's going to enable us to put an element on both the left and right side that will perfectly repeat. I'm going to finish up painting these flowers, let this dry, and then I will scan in both this full piece of paper and then also the individual elements.
9. Step 5: Scanning and Cropping: I've put my painting on the scanner and I'm pulling out my scanner software. Usually 300 dpi is the minimum for artwork. If you want to blow up your painting a lot bigger, you could do something like 600 dpi. But I'm just going to do 350 dpi to have a little bit of leg room in case I want to blow it up later. I like to scan at TIFF files which are fully usable within Photoshop, and then later I'll save it as a Photoshop file. Now that it scan, I'm going to open it up in Photoshop. I'm going to unlock that background by clicking on the little lock. I'm just going to check out what I'm working with here. We're going to be removing these lines, but first we need to get the tile cropped down as close as we can to the edges. I'm going to be doing a lot of adjusting here just to try and get it as straight as possible. You'll find that as you're taping your pieces together, you may think you have it pretty much perfect. But when you scan it in and try and crop in a straight line, you'll see that the top left quadrant may be less cutoff than the bottom quadrant as you're showing your crop lines. Sometimes I like to go through and crop each quadrant at a time and then get it as close as possible. It's not going to be perfect, but we can fix this. I'm just using the rectangle selection tool here to remove this white background. Getting it as close to the paper edges as I can without removing too much of the artwork, you're probably going to want to remove a tiny bit of it so that you don't get any of that shadow from the paper. Because if you leave that at all, it will show up as a line. But again, we're going to be using the healing brush tool to fix most of this. Came in and Zoom out and see how it's looking. Then what I like to do is select the negative space, then select inverse, and then image crop. You'll see there are some negative space leftover around the edges, which makes sense because the way I matched up the pieces of paper wasn't perfectly square. I'll try and maneuver it to get it as close to square as possible and then we'll be removing that negative background as much as we can, but we'll be still leaving a little bit. I'm selecting these negative areas again and selecting inverse and then doing image crop again and see if it helps me a little bit. That moved it up a little bit and I feel like this is getting pretty good. Now I'm going to go to image Canvas size and just manually crop the width of the Canvas just to get it a little bit closer. Then finally, I'm just going to start on the top left, use my selection tool, get it as close as possible to those edges and do one last image crop. You can do this earlier on as well. Next up, we will be getting rid of all of those lines in the center.
10. Step 6: Creating the Pattern Block: Now this step is all about using the spot healing brush tool to get rid of those lines. It actually doesn't take quite as long as you might think it would. But I go through and just individually use the spot healing brush tool, and I'll size up and down the size of the brush using the bracket keys on your keyboard really quickly. It's an easy way to do it. Sometimes I find reducing the size of the brush can help you get a better healing brush effect. I'm just going to go through here and go section by section and maybe grab a couple other little flecks of dust that I see along the way. The center's spot where all the lines intersect is usually the trickiest part. But I find that the spot healing brush does a pretty good job. Sometimes as you're using this, especially in larger areas of paint, it will show a stripy effect, so I'll use the clone stamp tool to go back and fix it, which I'm going to go back and fix this leaf right here in a little bit. I've cleaned up all the lines, and now I'm going to use the clone stamp tool to bring this darker texture of the leaf over here so it doesn't look quite as light on the bottom or create such an obvious stripe. This next step is awesome. It's called the offset filter. I've used it before, but not in relation to these handmade repeats. Another artist, her name's Caitlin Wallace Roland, brought this to my attention and it really helped out my process a lot. I just wanted to give a shout out to her. I'm going to show you how to do this. The first thing you're going to do is bring up your canvas size and that's under image and canvas Size. It's probably automatically coming up as inches, but we're going to bring it into pixels. Looking at both your width and your height, right down half of those numbers. Half of my width ended up being 1,200 pixels, and then half of my height was 1,768. Then you're going to go to filter, other, offset, and I had experimented already, so my numbers were already put here. But you're going to put that half of your width and the horizontal section, and the half of your height and the vertical section. If you want to preview it, you can select preview and then at the bottom you're going to make sure wrap around is selected and then hit okay. Then that helps you make your tile. It's moved all of the sections around for you, basically did what we did by hand, but digitally. Now you'll see that those lines are there again, those lines that we had left, so those transparent little edges, that's why I try and minimize them as much as possible because we're going to go through and use the spot healing brush tool again and just get rid of those. I'm going to do the same thing here and get rid of each line. Now that I've done this, I want to get an idea of how my pattern is going to look as it repeats. To do this, you would make sure that your layer is selected, and then you'll go to edit, define pattern. You can name it whatever you want and then hit okay. Then I'd like to create a new document. You can make it letter sized. Having a familiar size will give you an idea of the scale of your pattern. Once you've opened up your new document, you're going to unlock that background and then you're going to double-click on that layer and then you will check pattern overlay. Then under pattern overlay, you can click that little thumbnail there and find the pattern that you just saved. What's great about pattern overlay is that you can easily adjust the scale. It's awesome to preview and imagining this paper as letter size, you can see that this is pretty small scale. Now we're not quite done with our pattern yet. Next up we will be scanning in those individual elements that we painted and cleaning them up. And I'll show you how we're going to maneuver them around the pattern to really finish it out nicely.
11. Step 7: Clean Up Your Extra Elements: Now this is something you may already be familiar with, but I just wanted to show you a quick process of how I would clean up these individual watercolor elements. I've scanned them in at 350 dpi. First I'm just going to quickly get rid of as much of that white paper as I can, just so it's out of my way. Then, I'm going to zoom in and look at what might be some potential problem areas. Meaning when I erase that white is it going to erase too much of lighter colored water colors. I'm just simply using the eraser tool to protect those areas and erasing around these lighter edges. Then I'll use the levels adjustment to just brighten up that white background so it's easier to grab with my magic wand tool. Once I select that white with my magic wand tool, I like to zoom in and see if there's any areas that are getting are getting erased too much that I want to go back and use the eraser on. This little branch here, I think it erased it a little bit too much and I want it to be that jagged. I'm going to go through and erase it before I remove this background. I think that looks good. I'm going to grab as many white areas as I can and then I will just delete this background using the Delete key. Now these are ready to incorporate into our pattern.
12. Step 8: Adding Extras + Color: We're on some of our last steps here. I've got my patterned tile and I'm ready to fill up some of these negative space areas with these extra elements. First I'm going to make note of my current canvas size and just write that down because I'm going to be making the canvas a little bit bigger and then reverting back to that. In case that doesn't work or go as planned, I'll at least know exactly what my original width and height was. Then I'm going to make my canvas size larger, doesn't have to be any exact number just so that you have enough room to work with bringing these additional elements in. I know I want to fill some of the space on the top here. I'm going to start playing with different pieces and parts and see what fits best without looking too obvious that I just placed it on top. This piece here ends up being a little bit too big, so I think I need to go with something smaller. I think this smaller branch was going to work perfectly here. You'll see I'm bringing it down to the top and bottom, but that's just to make sure that it works. Essentially, we are going to be leaving it up at the top and then cropping whatever is left over and bringing that down to the bottom. You can imagine it's now going to repeat from the top and bottom. I was just clicking multiply here to see if it would look like a realistic watercolor effect. But I think it looks a little bit too different than the rest of the painting. Also, I have another class where I go really in depth into this process for an entire pattern, it's called from painting to pattern. This is just a snippet of that, but basically it's the same idea, just you doing it with your entire pattern. I'm removing the extra top of this branch and using the selection tool for this. Luckily, Photoshop helps you along and it matches up along that line pretty perfectly. You can zoom in and zoom in really close and double-check and make sure that there's no white line at the bottom where you bring that little element and that there's no extra leftover at the top. Next up, I want to fill this space that is next to this flower here at the bottom. I think I could use some berries here and I think that this shape is going to work perfectly there. Yeah, and it fits pretty well, I just want to flip it the other way because I think it's going to look better that way. Now I'm going to just play with some more of the space left over on the left side and see which ones end up working here. I'm going to try this pink flower first. Not sure if I like the way that the greenery on this flower is competing with that leaf below it, so I'm going to grab something else to try instead. I think that looks pretty good. Make it a little bit smaller, you can use the Transform tool and just do Command T. If you want to make sure it doesn't change shape, hold down Shift while you transform it. So that looks good. Now I'm going to see if there's anywhere that the pink flower can fit. I don't think that it really can fit anywhere even if I make it smaller and I don't want it to look too forced a little bit of white space here and there is okay. I'm just going to grab a little snippet to fill this last space on the left to right. I'm not really sure about the shape of this leaf, I don't think it's quite working. I want to grab something maybe a little bit darker to put there instead. Think I'm just going to use this little piece here, I feel like it will fit well. As you do this a lot, it gets a little bit faster. It starts to feel like a puzzle and you can more easily see what's going to fit well and what won't. So I'm just going to copy and paste this little branch and then remove the white background. I don't think it needs to be quite so large, so I'm going to erase this top part here, which will also help it being less obvious that I copied and pasted from another section and also changing the direction helps with that too. I'm just going to select this and move the excess over to the other side and make sure it matches up perfectly. When that little purple line, purple guide comes up, you know that it's matching that edge. There's my tile just deleting all of these extra layers here that I don't need. What you can do here to get back to your original canvas is select the Outside Negative Space and then select Inverse, and then you'll go to Image Crop. Then once this is done, we're going to go to Edit, Define Pattern again. Save your pattern and go back to your preview page that you had created, and update that pattern tile in your layer styles. Now you can see this repeat is much better. You can play with scale again and see how it looks at a smaller and larger scale. I would say that if I had better control over each of these elements, I would maybe adjust the placement of these flowers. I can see how those branches along the sides are creating a stripe. But I think for my wrapping paper, it's going to be at a fairly large scale that I think it's working just fine. Then something else I want to do is play with color a little bit. I usually try to stick to the original colors as much as possible. But I do want these red berries to pop a little more on the page, so I'm just going to use the Saturation tool and selective color to play with the reds and greens and get a color that I like. I like these greens being a little bit more on the teal side than the super green side, so that's something I'm doing as well. Then that's it for your pattern tile. If you want to go back and look at your original tile again and double check and make sure you get all the dust free from the page, use your spot healing brush tool with painting. Lots of little marks will come up and you can decide how much you want to erase or how natural you want it to feel. But I always like to get little dust marks or sometimes where the watercolor has cooled a little bit and just remove those so it's nice and clean. Next step I will be showing you just a quick video talking a little bit about the wrapping paper itself that I have ordered before and then showing you how to order it through this site that I like to use if you've never done that before.
13. Wrapping Paper: Part 1: I know not all of you are going to sell your wrapping paper to customers. I just wanted to share a little bit behind the scenes of what I do with mine. Last year I got papers printed by a site called StationeryHQ, and you can also get paper printed from sites like Spoonflower. The paper from StationeryHQ is nice and thick. It's printed by sheets, so it's not printed on rolls. I use these plastic sleeves from a place called clear bags that I'll roll up three sheets to sell to customers, last year I did two-color ways. I like to sell these at art markets and on my online shop, I shipped them in mailing tubes, and I also have a studio that I'm getting ready to open up this fall where I will be able to sell my products out of as well. Next step, I'm just going to show you the quick process of how I order through StationeryHQ and how I set up my file.
14. Wrapping Paper: Part 2: I've pulled up stationery HQ. If you are going to make an account here, if you're a business and you plan on selling your products, you can set up a wholesale account which will get you wholesale pricing. They have a section here on their files setup guidelines, which mostly that we need to know is that we're going to be exporting our file as a PDF and making sure that those colors are set at CMYK. Now I'm going to go under products and then wrapping paper sheets. There is actually a template that you can download when you click download image. But I find that I don't really need a template for these they are pretty simple. I just use this art size and set that up in my Photoshop document. The art size is the size that they need, including the bleed, which means that a little bit of the edges will be trimmed off so that you know aren't showing a white edge. You want to make sure that your image extends to the bleed. They also provide the trim size, which I find doesn't usually really matter with a repeat pattern like this. We're going to change the size of this file to 20.25 inches in width and then 29.25 inches in height. That pattern overlay was set up at the eight and a half by 11 size. We're going to need to make a new layer with a solid background and do the pattern overlay on that. Then this is where scale becomes really important because you want to think about, do you want your wrapping paper to be really large scale, where it's really making a statement but you're not getting as much of that repeat when you like imagine a gift being wrapped and it's large-scale, you're not seeing as much as that repeat, but you can do a smaller scale. You can do a mid-range. I'm going to end up doing a middle between small and large scale. If you want to set up some guides to help you get an idea of the sizing. I've set up a little section here that's about 10 by 10 inches. I can get a better idea of what the scale is going to be like. I obviously don't have a printer that can print this large to really get the exact field of what the scale is going to be, if you wanted to, you could order a couple of samples and then adjust from there. It's just you're getting a better rate the more that you order through the site. Usually I just wing it. Once you have a pretty good idea of the scale, you're going to go for, you're going to save as a PDF. They had suggested to save it as this PDF slash X-1A. I'm going to make sure and do that. You can see here that's specified in their file guidelines. Now I'm going to go back to the stationery HQ site. I'm going to name my project. Then before you can add it to your cart, you will upload your artwork, which takes a couple seconds to upload. Then before you add to cart, you're going to upload your artwork, which can take a little bit of time depending on how big your file is. You'll see they have an orientation option here you can do portrait or landscape. I just find that thinking about wrapping presents that the portrait works better. Now my upload is complete and I will click add to cart. Here you can see at the minimum quantity of five sheets, they're not giving me a wholesale discount. But once you increase that quantity, it's going to give you more of a discount. That's it. If you order your wrapping paper, I hope you have a lot of fun with it. I hope this method was helpful for you to create your repeat patterns. Again, if you're interested in something that's a little bit more exactly controlled where you're painting elements individually rather than one painting altogether, check out my other class from painting to pattern. Thank you so much for joining my class. I'd love to see your repeated patterns if you want to post them in the project gallery, I'd love to give you feedback or answer any questions that you may have, you can ask on the discussion page as well. Thanks again for joining and I hope to see you again and one of my future classes.
Juliet Meeks, Designer and Artist
