Creating Damask and Toile Du Jouy repeat patterns in Affinity Designer 2

1. Course introduction: Learning to create a variety of patterns is paramount to developing a strong surface pattern design portfolio. Pattern design is an essential element in the retail and creative fields as it adds depth, character, and visual interest to products and offers potential clients a variety of options that they could possibly license or purchase from you. In the past, I have walked students through basic and intermediate surface pattern design techniques. But this month, I'm coming back with a more complex class that will walk you through how to design two new repeat design styles, the Toi and Damask patterns, using Affinity Designer two on your desktop. Hi, everyone. Welcome to class. I'm Jen Guzan, and I'll be the one guiding you through this creative course. I am a freelance graphic designer, illustrator, and educator based out of the Midwest and H Run Bella and Sophia Creative Studio. If you want to learn more about me, you can find me online at bell sophia creative.com. You can also check out my YouTube channel, the creative studio where you will get a behind the scenes view of the work that I do as a creative freelancer and find a huge library of free tutorials, cater to those of you interested in graphic design, surface pattern design, programs like Affinity and Procreate, as well as art and Illustration. This month, I'm excited to share a new surface pattern design course focused on designing Ti and damask patterns. These are great styles to learn so that you could add some complexity and diversity to your portfolio, and we'll create it all in Affinity Designer two. Let's get started and create something great together. 2. What you will learn and tools needed: When it comes to the skills that you'll learn. In this course, you will learn how to create two beautifully complex pattern styles, the Tis repeat and Damask repeats. We will learn what these repeats are, the history behind each of these styles, the elements that make up each of these patterns, and the structure so we can understand how they're built. We will also learn how to create each of these pattern types in Affinity Designer two and some helpful tips and tricks to support you in the pattern creation process. To make things a bit easier, I will be including the class project as an affinity designer two template that you can edit and get acquainted with before you start your own in the resources section of a class. All you need to dig this class is a computer with Affinity Designer two installed on it as well as a tablet and stylus of your choice. You can opt to just use your mouse, but I find that vectorizing sketches is easier for me using a stylus and tablet. Personally use a Huan tablet. I would also suggest you grab a sketch book and some pens or pencils if you prefer to sketch traditionally, or you can also use something like an iPad. But I will also be showing you how you can sketch digitally right in the program. So who is this class for? So Honestly, this class is for anyone, but in particular, it's for artists, graphic designers, graphic design enthusiasts, surface pattern designers, or surface pattern design enthusiasts, illustrators, Anyone creative who would like to learn how to create seamless patterns in these styles. This class is geared towards intermediate learners as we are exploring more complex patterns. But even if you are a beginner who isn't afraid of trial and error, I will walk you through the process step by step and help familiarize you with the process, as well as affinity designer to. 3. The class project: For your class project, you're going to create two patterns, 112 style and one Damask style. You can share your final project and upload the images as a JPEG to the course project gallery. Some things to know. Make sure you download the class resources. I've included the project template and a file that you can utilize to showcase your class project. Please make sure to share your project in the class project gallery, or if you feel up for it. You can also share it on social media and tag me at Bello Sophia Creative. I'd love to see what you created or even offer some helpful tips if you need them. Finally, Please consider leaving a class review. These reviews are so helpful in ensuring teachers get engagement, which in turn helps our classes overall in search. I'm really looking forward to seeing your work. 4. The History of Damask: So before we start creating these patterns, I want to share a bit more about the history, the background, and how these patterns are made up. We're going to start off with damask. So, what is Damask? Damask fabric is named for Damascus, which is where this textile product originated, known for its intricate and reversible Jacard patterns, Damask fabric is prized for its ortnes. So the history of this pattern goes way back to China Circa 300 BCE, but it really wasn't until it was developed more in Syria centuries later that it truly hit its stride in terms of its popularity. It's named for the city of Damascus in Syria, where the textiles were made from the middle ages onward. Because of its location in the global crossroads of the Middle East, Damascus was a really active and important trading port on the Silk Road, and of course, it makes sense that early damasks were handwoven in silk only. When it comes to the structure of the design. Traditionally, damasks were a single color of yarn with multiple tones and textures, so I created more of a tone on tone effect. But it's not unusual for the fiber content of the more modern damasks to be multiclored. They typically resemble a brocade in appearance and texture and they're both constructed on a Jacard loom. Although damask more often features single color thread in a pattern that's reversible, brocade often features multiple colored threads, usually featuring gold or silver, which makes it more expensive than the damask fabrics. We're looking at the elements of this fabric and this pattern in general. A true damask fabric is actually a woven textile with the pattern being dictated by the weave structure and the loom. Typically, woven damask and the classic patterns that they're known for was often made to have become synonymous with what we see today. Just that pattern and not just the weaving technique. When we see a damask, we're looking at something with more of a digital design, you'll see that very synonymous OG style pattern, but it also refers to the style of fabric that is woven. Its most technical level, Damask refers to a woven fabric that uses two or more weave structures like satins and twills to create contrast in texture, and this allows the image to be brought out of the fabric. These fabrics are often monochromatic in color in order to highlight the contrasting matt and sheen surfaces that you might see with those two different weave structures. Damask patterns which are Initially, really inspired by nature are known for their symmetry. For a true damask, you should expect to see symmetrical designs often with an OG shaped layout, you'll often see them depicting a simple representation of organic shapes like fruits and flowers. Very early European damasks featured flowers, fruits, and animals. But then there are these scrolled motifs that we see more commonly throughout today, and those are based on the stylized acanthus leaves, feathers, even things like vases and such. These all became popular during the Renaissance and have remained so. So typically, when you see a damask style pattern today or something that is inspired by Damask, it's often also inspired by these Renaissance visuals. Even though these scrolled patterns were the most common, there were many other types as well, including hunting motifs, monograms, coats of arms, and even entire scenes. So now that you understand a bit more about the history and the structure of the Damask style pattern, let's learn a little bit more about Toa. 5. The History of Toile: So when it comes to the history of Toi fabric, it was first created in the mid 18th century by a French textile manufacturer named Christa Philippe Abercomf. Abcamf was inspired by the Chinese and Indian fabrics that were popular at the time and wanted to create a French version of these textiles. In 17 59, the same year that cotton Prohibition had ended, he transferred his business to o and sas in order to be closer to Versailles and the Sine River. The printing process for Toi D requires a very large amount of clean water, so it makes sense to see that he made this move. The word is means cloth in French. Toi Dji therefore refers to cloth typically cotton from the commune of Joy in Josas in the southwestern suburbs of Paris, just 4 miles away from Versailles. Today, Toi Dji has become a generic term meaning all single color printed fabrics regardless of the design's origin that matches the scene and style of the original Toi deger. So during the 19th century, Toi dezi became associated with the French empire style, which was characterized by its grandeur opulence and attention to detail. And in the 20th century, the fabric experienced a resurgence in popularity with designers using it on a wide range of interior design styles, and we're seeing it more and more in the fashion realm as well. People remember Toile gi's narrative French country patterns today because basically, it kind of taught us about this idea of mythology and literature and fabric form, and it recorded major moments in history as well. So when we're looking at the elements of a Toi design, Tober Comp was hugely influenced by rococo art. This is a great example of how we see art influencing things like fashion and fabrics and textiles and interiors. Today, people flock to Toi Dji for its storytelling abilities, and creatives are increasingly inspired to put their own spin on it with their own locales, close to their hearts and other different visual landscapes that they feel inspired by. So long with that whole idealic, romantic landscape scene vibe that we see in the more traditional Ti. Toi patterns were also used to tell a story. Some referenced tales of European mythology and others married major events of the time. The Toi de gi style uses decorative illustrations to depict specific themes. Some of these themes could include places, events, mythology, family, or even culture. The story of the theme is often told through illustrated scenes. You'll see often multiple scenes repeated throughout the fabric. And these scenes are often composed of decorative motifs, such as people, animals, plants, or buildings. Toi has a slightly different look today. Since it still uses decorative illustrations to celebrate lifestyle and culture, but instead of the more common rule life and pastoral scenes, often you'll see the prints today celebrate the lives and interests of the modern consumer. Modern prints depict places like Brooklyn or cultural figures, and even events like Mardi Gras or stories like Alison Wonderland. We'll often see that in more kids focused fabrications and things like that. Finally, when we look at the structure of the Toi design, there are some key things that we want to keep in mind. As often consists of white or off white cotton fabric printed with single color pastoral scenes. Historically, it was only the scale that determined if the fabric would be used in fashion or interiors. Obviously, larger scale would be used for interiors while smaller scale motifs were intended for clothing. In the past, it was common for designers to use wood blocks, and the printing process was highly labor intensive, making a luxury item that only the aristocrats could afford. Each color of dye required a separate bath and as many as 20 colors could feature in one pattern if needed. But techniques for this improved in the 1700s, specifically 17 70 with the factory's introduction of copper plate printing, which Obercof discovered after visiting England. This allowed for a single color toi print, such as the iconic pastoral scenes that we associate with the modern day toile ji. Most of today's designs still use a limited color palette of usually two or three colors. However, prints are no longer confined to just a white background and color combinations are endless thanks to things like digital printing. 6. Researching: Now that we have a better understanding of the historical implications and background of both the damask and the Tis style patterns, I find that it's helpful to tap into that information to better inform our sketching process. I do that by pulling visual inspiration from a variety of sources, and you can opt to make a more traditional moodboard. But I like to use a combination of book resources and the Internet, and then I create a digital moodboard using something like pints. This is just a surface pattern design boards. I have a whole bunch of different styles saved, but my most recent ones include both Ti and damask style patterns. I just wanted to kind of get a better understanding of the visual design and layout and different applications that you see used throughout each print. So before I tap into Pinter, which is a fantastic resource to utilize, I have a few books that I like to look through, including the pattern source book and the complete pattern directory, and other resource books of vintage fabrics that I own. I would highly suggest tapping into your local library if you have a chance as there are so many resources that you can access for free. Then the most common research resource to go to for many of us is the Internet. Websites like Pinterest make it very easy to research specific key terms and get a variety of options that you can save and aggregate in a Printers board, like what I have created here under my Surface Pattern Design. Pin board. I often opt to use this as my digital mood board, and then I reference it for sketches. But Pintras isn't the only place that you can find visual reference. Google is a great option to just search general terms, but I also like to utilize Unsplash. Unsplash is a free resource with additional paid to use premium options, and the photos on Unsplash are free to use and can be used for most commercial personal projects and editorial projects. But you want to make sure you double check the use requirements if you plan to use the photos outright. I find that it's really important to be very specific when you're using your key search terms or you'll get a lot of variety of things that may not necessarily fit what you're searching for. And then finally, I really like to tap into my local environment. If you're going on a trip to a particularly beautiful place, remember to take photos. And even if you're not going anywhere special, photograph, local nature, or interesting buildings on your daily walks, and you can definitely reference that as you create your sketches. So now that we kind of have looked into research and finding visual references that I know about you, but I have difficulty imagining things visually in my brain despite being a creative. So references often help me in terms of understanding how things take up space and the placement and the different angles and things such as that. So, reference is always something that is key to my design process. 7. The Workspace and Sketching Toile: So now that we have our reference, let's set up our file to work on our sketches first. So I'm going to launch Affinity Designer two, and we're just going to set up a basic file to sketch on. I'm going to start with a 4,000 by 4,300 DPI artboard. I'm going to go into my document layout here, select my document units. I'm going to update it to pixels, and I'm going to change the page width and height to 4,000. I'm going to keep everything as is. I'm going to go into my color options. I'm going to change everything from CMYK to RGB. That way, we can use it for online use, but depending on where you're using this project for, whether it's something that you're interested in manufacturing or things like that or print on demand, just double check to make sure what the color requirements are with the company that you might be utilizing. But if it's just for a project that you want to showcase online, RGB will work just fine. We're not going to create a transparent background because we are going to be working in layers, so that'll make it easier for us to transition the linework to a new file. But everything else can stay as is, and then we can hit Create. All right. So this is our art board. Before we even get into sketching, I kind of want to highlight some important aspects of the design of Tilesi. So I'm going to go back into my Pinterest board and kind of pull up some visuals that we can kind of explore a little bit better. So the big thing to note is that often Tiles is created in a half drop format. So you'll often see the motifs created in sketch in more of a diamond shape. So if we look at the sketch, it has a very evident kind of like diamond shape to each of these motifs. So I'm going to pull this into affinity just so that we can kind of get a better idea of what this looks like. I'm going to go into my file options and my menu, select place that will allow us to place an image on our artboard. I downloaded this and then I'm going to tap in and drag just so I can pull this onto my artboard, and we can zoom in and look at how this is built and give us a better idea of what we should keep in mind when we are sketching our motifs. I'm going to grab my diamond tool on my left hand side. It's under my shaped tools. If I tap and hold that star icon, I can then get these additional options. I'm going to select diamond. I'm just going to make a really basic diamond shape. So we can see how this is set up. I'm going to change this from filled to an outline. I'm going to go on my right hand studios. I'm going to remove my fill. I'm going to go into my outline so that I can have a stroke. And then in my upper left hand menu area here, you'll see where it says fill and stroke. If you tap on that little line area that says none to the right of stroke, you'll be able to increase or decrease the width of your stroke. I'm just going to increase it so we can get a better idea. More or less, each of these sketches are done within the confines of a diamond shape. Some of them are a little bit taller like over here, but overall, it'll still fit within that general diamond shape. E. We can kind of get an idea of where these motifs kind of live and play. So this isn't the exact pattern build out for our repeat, but this is just kind of showcasing that each of these sketches are created in more or less a diamond shape. Okay, now that we understand that, let's explore the overall style of Tides. If we look at this, you see motifs that tell a story. Ties is a narrative focus type of pattern. If we go back into our Pintra s board and we just explore some of these, you'll often see the themes will often include places, events, historical moments, mythology, family, culture, even So this right here is a really great example of a more modern style is. This is obviously very much inspired by LA, the Beverly Hills kind of scene. We see bar life, we see city life, traffic, cars, palm trees, people doing yoga. So this is a great example. So, when it comes to creating your sketches, you can opt to sketch traditionally with pencil and paper and pen and scan your work in to digitize it, or you can just save yourself a step and sketch digitally. That's what we're going to do today. I like to sketch directly in Affinity Designer. For this process, though, just keep in mind, we are going to be working in the pixel persona here. And with that being said, since I want this to have more of a sketchy feel, I won't be vectorizing this art. So it'll be important to work at a larger size. That's why I set us up a 4,000 by 4,000 art board. And keeping it at a higher DPI. I kept it at 300 DPI. And if you plan to edit the overall size of the final pattern, remember, it's easier to scale down rather than to scale up. So I'm going to remove this off of my artboard. I'm going to select it, and then I'm just going to go into my layers panel on the right hand side, and I'm going to hit the remove layer garbage can I can. This will delete it. And like I said, we are going to be working in the Pixel persona. So just keep in mind to give yourself a lay of the land up here up top in the upper left hand side is our main menu. You'll also be able to access each of the personas. We're currently in designer persona. But if we tap on this middle icon here, that is our Pixel persona, which is what we'll be sketching in, and then this last icon is our export persona. We go back into our designer options here our designer persona. On the left hand side, you'll get access to your tools. So things like your pen tool, your brushes, your shape tools, things like that, everything that we will likely be utilizing to kind of work through creating this pattern. And then on the right side, we have our studios. So you'll have your color studio, your swatches, transform studio, your layer studio. If you don't have access to any of these, don't worry. You can just go up to your main menu, select window, and then just make sure that the elements that you need in each of these studios is check marked so that it shows up on the right hand side. So what I like to do is pull out some of my inspiration to the side of the artboard where I'll be sketching before I even start the drawing process. So I'm going to go into file place, and I'm going to find some of my inspiration images that I pulled and I'm just going to put this off to the side so that I have access to it and I can reference and make sure that the overall skeleton of what I'm sketching makes sense for this style. Then I'm going to pull in some pictures that I recently took while I was on a walk and some of animals that I think will work for the idea that I have. Once I have all of my images placed off of my artboards so that I can reference them, I can just begin the sketching process. So one thing before I jump into my draw with me, I am going to highlight some key things that can utilize in Pixel persona in terms of brushes. So I'm going to switch over to Pixel persona. And on the left hand side, you have all of your tools, specifically your selection tools at top. But towards the middle here, you'll see a paint brush. So you click on that on the right hand side, right next to your layers studio. If you tap on it, you'll have access to your brushes studio. What's nice is that there's a variety of brushes that you can utilize already preset in affinity, but you could also download affinity designer affinity photo specific brushes as well. But underneath that, you'll see pencils, but if you tap on that, you'll have options to select from a variety of different mediums. We have pencils here. What I suggest is that you experiment to see what works best for you. I think either going with a pencil or more of a sketchy pen or ink type brush might work really well for this. I'm going to tap on pens here and see what we have access to. You have access to lots of different styles. I'm going to select this variable felt pen. What I'm going to do is make these really large so you can see what the texture is for each of these. Alright, so after experimentation, I think that this calligraphic two and this calligraphic broken are going to be the two brushes that will work best for the kind of style that I'm going for here. Remember, we are working in more of that kind of diamond shape. What I find is helpful is going into my shape tool and creating a diamond shape and sketch within here, and then go into our layer study here and we can always add more layers if we need. Now that I have my template in place, I can begin the sketching process. What I'm going to do is add a new layer. I'm going to go to the right hand side. There's a little icon next to the garbage can in this lower area of the menu, and it's add a pixel layer. I'm going to do that, and I'm going to be drawing on this layer. I'm going to go back into Pixel persona and then making sure my brush is selected and the brush options that I have selected is that calligraphic nib broken brush. And then I can start to sketch. Experimenting with this a bit more, actually think that I'm going to be better off using one of the pencil brushes. So I'll be utilizing the mechanical pencil six B, as it's going to get me a little bit more variety in terms of texture as well as lightness and darkness for my contrast, especially when I'm drawing things like grass or trees and whatnot. 8. Toile - Recoloring the artwork: Now that we are done sketching, let's set up our file so that we can pull in our visuals and adjust color if we need to, and then set up our tile, our repeat tile, and then our preview. So I'm just going to go into my file system, and I'm going to open up one of my sketches. And what we can do say we want to change the color of the final sketch that we have. What's really nice is that we can access some really basic, like recoloring effects. We I always like to have something that I can go back and edit as an original. So I'm going to go into my upper left hand menu, select my pixel persona. And then I'm going to select my sketch here in my layers panel. I'm going to double Taptzs background and just rename it to sketch. So to recolor, we have a couple of options. We can utilize our adjustment tools here, or we could also do something like a color overlay effect as well. So I'm going to make a copy of the sketch first. I'm going to hit command C, command V to copy it. That way I have an original that's locked. I'm going to tap on the one that is unlocked, but just right above my original. And I'm going to tap on the Fx icon in my layer studio here to the right. I'm going to select color overlay and already you can see it darkened my sketch. That's if we use a pure black. But we can also play around with the huge saturation luminosity color wheel here, and it will change the overall color and effect of our sketch. And because we made a copy, we don't have to worry about anything if say we want to go back and change something from the original, we can always remove that copy and just go back to the original. So after we've done that, we can go to another option, which will be in our adjustments panel. Once that icon is unlocked, then we can make sure that the sketch layer is selected, go into our adjustments panel, and then we can select the recolor option. And then we can do the same kind of process with recoloring the sketch by just adjusting the sliders on this panel here. And what's nice is that if you notice there's a little icon that's now next to our sketch. What this has done is created a recolor adjustment layer so that it's not destructive to the original sketch. So if I toggle this layer on or off, it'll show me the original sketch itself. So this is just a less destructive way to go about recoloring your artwork. So I'm going to recolor my artwork and then we'll jump into setting up our repeating pattern. I'm going to close this. And what's nice though before I close it is I'm going to copy that adjustment layer, so it'll make it easier for me to apply the exact same adjustment to all my other sketches. So I'm going to copy this. I'm going to go into edit, copy, and then I'm going to place the rest of my sketches here just so that I have one file with everything reclored. So I'm going to go into my file me, select place. Go into my file system, find my next sketch, it open, and then I'm just going to place it in. And readjust the placement. And then I'm going to turn off my other sketch here. And then I'm going to paste, can click our layers and select paste, or we can go into edit paste and paste your style, or we can go into our shortcut and select command V, and it'll recolor this here. And what I'm going to do is just group it together, so it's within the sketch. And to group it together, all I have to do is tap on the layer with the recolor adjustment. Drag it right on top of the Sketch two layer so that it Um, highlights the holier and blue, let go, and it'll house it within there and create a little drop down. So now it's the exact same color as the other sketch. So I'm going to do this with the final one as well. All right. Now that I recolord everything, I'm just going to save these sketches as reclored Tiss sketches so that I have access to the final sketches and their reclored layers in case I need them in the future. 9. Toile - Building the Pattern Preview: Okay, now that we're done with our sketches, let's jump into setting up our arbord for building out our pattern. So I'm going to go into file. I'm going to select new. And even though we created these sketches on 4,000 by 4,000 rods, so they're quite large. I'm going to set up my tile to be 2000 by 2000, and then our preview to be 4,000 by 4,000. That's because I made my sketches larger so that I don't lose any quality if I need them to be at a larger scale, but then also so that I can keep it crisp if I scale it down, and that's what I'm going to do. So I'm going to go into my layout settings. I'm going to change my width and height to 2000. And then my DPI, you can keep it at 300, or you can bring it out to something like 150 if you are working on a website like Spoon flower, and you need a little bit more of a trim down size. I'm going to go into my color settings, and I'm going to make sure I have transparency turned down, so transparent background. And I want to keep it at RGV because it's fine. This is going to be for website viewing. But again, if your printer needs something, they see, I'm like, Hey, just make sure you confirm those things. And then I'm going to select Create. So this is going to be our artboard. And what I want to do now is add in our preview to the right of this, or you can do it to the left, whatever's easier for you. So we have artboard one selected. I'm going to go into our artboard tools here on the left hand side, so I'm going to select the artboard tool, which is right underneath our Black Arrow tool, which is our move tool. And in this upper left hand corner right next to where it says, roard, you'll see size, and then Insert artboard. So I'm just going to keep it as a document size and select Insert artboard, and then we're going to manually update the size of this because we want this to be double. Since our artboard was 2000 pixels by 2000 pixels, we're going to set up this arboard, so it's 4,000 by 4,000 pixels. Making sure roar two is selected and you'll know it's selected because it's outlined in blue, we're going to go into our transform studio here, and we are going to update our width and height to 4,000. And everything else stays the same. Instead of being like a straight repeat, we're going to be creating a half drop. We can just tap out of our artboard by just tapping anywhere on the screen outside of the artboards. And we are going to set up the file so that we get a pattern preview. But before we do that, I want to highlight and explain how the half drop works. So I'm going to move us over to a clear spot off of my artboards here, and I'm just going to create a s perfect square. And I'm going to fill that with color. And remove the stroke just so that it's easy to see. And then I'm going to make some lines to kind of highlight where our pattern pieces are going to fit together. You don't have to do this. This is just so that I can kind of show you how the mechanics of this works. I'm going to create a very basic pattern here with some shapes. I'm going to use a circle. I'm going to remove the outline. I'm going to make it so that they're easy to see in terms of contrasting colors. And then I'm also going to create a diamond shape. All right, so in a half drop repeat, just like a traditional repeat, whatever is on top of your artboard has to go in the exact same place on the bottom of your artboard. But things change when we're looking from left to right and working from left to right. So if I were to build this repeat here, this diamond would have to be copied and pasted and placed right, exactly in the exact same spot on the bottom of the artboard. And then say I made the circle over here to the left. This is where things change. This circle from the left with a half drop wouldn't go directly across. Instead, it drops down by half. So it would go from this left position to the right and down by half of the measurement of the square. So I'm going to do the same thing with the diamond. If the diamond is in the lower left quadrant. We were to make a copy of it. We would bring it not across directly to the right, but across to the right and then up. So with half drops, where these shapes meet or half of the original size of the square or a rectangle if you are working with a rectangle. So we'll look at this in action. I'm going to group everything together here. So that we can kind of see how the swatch works. It's probably not going to be exactly perfect because I'm kind of eyeballing it over here. So I'm going to take all of these shapes here. I'm going to group them together in my layer studio. I'm going to tap on the first, whole shift, tap on my last to select everything right click and group, and then I'm going to embed that group in my orange rectangle here, and it's going to cut off the sides. What I want to do is make some copies of this shape now that we've built out, and basically, we're going to start to place them where these guidelines are. As I said, we were to take this original shape, we wouldn't move it directly over to the right because it's a half drop. The idea is that it moves to the right and down or up half. This is just an easier way to understand the mechanics of how the half drop works. So what we're going to do is create a new rectangle on top of artboard, one, that is the exact same size and parameters as our original artboard. All right. Now, I'm going to go into my rectangle tool, and then I'm going to make sure I have magnetics turned on in the upper, like menu right below our main menu. In this center area here, over to the right, you're going to see something that looks like a magnet. You want to tap on it, to make sure that it's turned on, and that will turn on your snapping options. So what you'll see is when you hover your mouse or your stylus or whatever you're working with on the corner of the artboard, you know it's exactly in the place that you want it to because you'll see these green and red lines show up. What we want to do is make a square that goes across the artboard and it is exactly 2000 by 2000. You'll see these green and red crosshairs come up, and you also see a little preview window that says W, and it should both be at 2000. If it accidentally changes or moves after you place it, it's fine, you could always just go into our transform studio and double check your width and your height here to make sure they both stay 2000 by 2000, and that your location for your x and y are both at zero. So with that square still selected, what we're going to do is change this into a symbol. And basically, what symbols do is allow whatever you do to one artboard. If you copy and paste that symbol into the next artboard, whatever you do to one, we'll show up on the other. So with that square selected on your artboard, we're going to go into our layers options and our menu. And we're going to scroll down to create symbol. If you go into your layer studio here, you'll know that your square is a symbol because it'll have this little orange line to the left of it on the left edge. And then you just want to make sure that that symbol is selected, and we're going to make a copy, and then we're going to paste this five times here in our artboard, because we're going to create that concept of the half drop, remember using these guides. So before we paste those in though, I like to kind of create guides to make things a little bit easier for placement. So I'm going to select my pen tool, and I'm going to go into my color studio. I'm going to make sure I have my stroke turned on, and I'm just going to create a black stroke. And then I'm going to create the first guide right in the center of my artboard two. I'm going to hold shift. I'm gonna follow those guidelines, and by holding shift, it's going to give me a perfectly straight line. And I'll know I am in the center because I'll get again that red and green cross hair lines here. Once I've done that, I'm going to select copy and then I'm going to paste. I'm going to hold shift again, and you should see this little arm. I'm going to copy that and then I'm going to paste it. I'm going to hold shift and I'm going to tap on that arm and I'm going to rotate the line so that it goes 90 degrees. I'm going to copy that line again, paste it, and then I'm going to hold shift and I'm going to move it so that it goes right in the center area of my first square here. Then I'm actually going to make this line shorter because where we need to worry about those half drops again is the right and the left, not the top and the bottom. So once I've created that first line for the half drop, I'm going to copy it and paste it by hitting either command C, command, or edit copy edit paste. I'm going to hold shift so I can drag that line down in a straight line. Any trouble lining up this second line? What I suggest is just making a copy of your square from rbard one, dragging it over to Artboard two. Go into your layers, bringing that square underneath all of your lines for your guides. And then going into your transform studio and making sure that this little quadrant in the transform studio is at X and Y 2000 by 2000. And then this should help you place this new line exactly in the middle of that square because you'll get those red and green highlighted crosshairs. Once we've done that, and we have that placement correctly. Now we can get rid of that. And then what I like to do is just select all of these lines in this artboard, and then I like to go into the layer studio. And then just group them all together and then lock them so that they don't move. And then we'll get rid of them when we're done, but just for the time being, I like to lock them so that they don't move. Then I'm going to go back to artboard one. I'm going to select my little drop down menu. Looks like a carrot to the left, and then I'm going to select the symbol. Then I'm going to copy it. I'm going to go into edit copy. And then what we're going to want to make is copies of this. So we're going to paste this so that we'll be able to move. Those symbols into each of the areas of these guidelines. So I'm going to tap into artboard two, making sure it's selected. You'll know it is because it's outlined in blue. And then I'm going to select paste. Now that I have pasted all of my symbols, you'll see them because they will have that orange glow. Then I'm going to start placing them and matching them up with these guides. I like to hold shift to kind of make sure that whenever I'm going to a left or right plane or up and down plane that moves exactly along the same line. And then also, it helps ensure that you're in the exact place that you need to be because the magnetics is turned on and you get these red and green crosshairs. Correct. So I'm going to start to pull my copies into their places based on the guidelines that I have. So this first square should be at 00 in our x and y placement under our transform studio. The next one, we're going to pull it over to the right and then up half. So once you've drag the second copy over to the right, then we need to hold shift once more and start to pull it up halfway. Again, you'll see the guides help make sure that we're in the right place, but then the magnetics also ensure that we're in the right place because you'll see all of the bright color lines pop up. Now, we're going to go back to our third square. And then we're going to hold shift, drag it to the right, and then hold shift and drag it down so that it matches up on that bottom. Now we're going to take the next square, and we're going to drag it down. Snapping guidelines. You can then release. Then I'm going to select the last square. I'm going to drag it down, and then I'm going to drag it to the right. And then we're going to drag it to that bottom lower right hand side. And now we have all of our symbols placed in the correct place. What I like to do then is group all of these together and lock them so that they don't move out of place. So I'm going to select my first symbol in this set in Artboard two. I'm going to hold shift, and then I'm going to select my last symbol, and it'll select all of these symbols for me. I'm going to right click this set, and then I'm going to select group, and it's going to group all of these together. And then, like I said, what I like to do is lock it so that it doesn't move. And then what we can do now is turn off our guide. So now that I've done that, I like to go into my layers and just kind of organize myself a bit. So I'm going to select Artboard two, and I'm going to double click where it says Artboard two, and I'm going to rename it Preview. And then I'm going to double click where it says Artboard one, and I'm going to rename it pattern tile. So I like to select my preview layer group here and I like to just lock it. That way it doesn't move, I don't have to worry about anything happening. And then I can go into my pattern tile here, and then my symbol. And then I'll select the dropdown menu, and I'll go into my rectangle, and I like to lock just the rectangle itself. That way it doesn't move. So what I'm going to do is take my guides and bring them all the way to the bottom of my layer set up here. And then same thing with my half drop mechanic outline here that we did just kind of understand how this whole thing works. I'm going to drag that all the way to the bottom as well and then just make sure everything is toggled off. So we're going to be mainly working with is the pattern tile and our preview. So this is where we'll see how everything's coming together, and then this is where we're going to place everything. And it's important to remember that We have the guides here to give us an idea of where everything worked, and we want to keep that in mind as we're placing our elements on the left and right as well inside of the pattern tile. 10. Toile - Creating the Repeat Pattern: That All right. So now that I have this setup, I can start to bring in my artwork. So I'm going to select all of these sketches here in my sketch file, and I'm just going to copy them. Go into my pattern preview, and I'm going to select edit paste. And I'm going to drag these over to the side, and then I'm going to resize a bunch of these because they're quite large. So once I've brought them in, pull them to the side, I'm just going to hold shift on my keyboard and drag in from the corner to resize. Once I've resized everything, I can kind of pull all of these pieces apart. So we can see where they are. And then we can go in and adjust as needed. But before we even start playing around with placement and adjusting sizes and whatnot, what I want to do really quickly is save my file. So I'm going to go into file, Save As, and I'm going to rename it working file. So I know that this is the file that I'm working in before I save it as my final pattern tile or final placement. I like to have a working file, and then I have a final file, and then I export it into the final tile. All right. The important thing to note when you're placing elements into this pattern here for the preview is that we want to make sure any of the elements that we place into our pattern tile show up in our preview. That means we need to make sure we place these elements into our symbols. Once we do that, then we start to see the preview come to life. So I'm going to take this sketch and pull it in on top of my symbol and then figure out where it will work best. With these half drops, it's really important to keep in mind size and placement of everything as well. So remember, with this, anything that goes on one side is going to have to go on the other side. So I'm going to start with my edges and then see what we can do about filling in our center area here. I'm going to keep this little baby guy out of this for now and pull him off to the side. So this is the whole next part of the puzzle. Keeping in mind those rule of thumbs, that whatever goes on top has to go in the bottom, and then when it comes to your right and left hand side, your upper left hand quadrant will then show up repeated in your lower right hand quadrant and whatever's in your upper right hand quadrant will show up in your lower left hand quadrant. We will be utilizing our transform studio to make things a little bit easier for us. So, for example, if I'm going to place this sketch here, I'm going to select command C to copy command V to paste it in place, and then I'm going to go into my transform studio. I want to move this from left to right in so I'll be working with my x position. So I'm going to tap into my transform studio. Tap where it says x, and then I'm going to select plus 2000 because our artboard is 2000 pixels by 2000 pixels, and it's going to bring it directly to the right. And then I'm going to hit Enter. And then what I'm going to do next is then go into my y position. And because we're going from top to bottom, I'm once again going to select plus. But this time, instead of doing 2000, I'm going to select 1,000 because we only want to move it halfway down the artboard. And it's going to place it exactly where we need it. And you'll know that that is correct because you won't see any issues within your preview. So now that we've done that, we can start to pull in another selection from our artboard here. So I'm going to go to my next sketch. I'm going to drag that over so that it's on top of my artwork, and then I'm going to pull it onto my symbols. And then you want to play around with size when it comes to these types of Ti dei not everything is going to be the exact same size in terms of the art. You want it to feel variety. I think what I'm going to do is actually pull this into the bottom section here, and then I'm going to select edit copy edit paste. It will paste it right exactly on top, and then I'm going to go to my transform studio. Since we're moving from top to bottom, we are working with our Y coordinate. I'm going to tap into the Y coordinate. Since we're going from the bottom to the top, we're going to use a negative this time. So negative 2000, and it's going to move it right up into the exact place that I needed to be for that top section. And remember, the top and bottoms will match. It's that left and right hand side that we're staggering. All right. So once I've done that, I can kind of finish out my sides here, and I'll go back into my layers, grab my next sketch, which is this cute frog guy, and I'm going to pull him into my symbols. Then again, playing around with the size of things so that things kind of like Move and work together. Whatever we do in the lower left, we're going to have to do in the upper right. I'm going to select that. I'm going to copy. And then pace, and then I'm going to go into my transform studio. I'm going to move it directly across, and then I'm going to move it halfway up. I'm going to go into my x coordinates first. I'm going to select plus 2000. Then I'm going to go into my y coordinates, and I'm going to select negative 1,000 because I'm moving from the bottom to the top. Everything is placed better now, and I can play around with the top and bottom here, see if I want to repeat any of the motifs, and then pull in this cute squirrel somewhere as well. I think I like the idea of having him in the center here and then repeating this deer once more, but flipping it around. I'm going to go into my deer sketch and make a copy of it, and then I'm going to pull that copy up here and then I'm going to rotate it. I'm going to transform it. I'm going to go to my quick options for my transform tools up in the middle here. I'm going to use this first one, which is flip horizontal and it'll flip my deer so that it's facing the other way. And I think I might resize the squirrel a bit so that he's smaller and duplicate him as well, because I think I like these little nature characters the most. I was kind of inspired by where I live. I live in the Midwest, right outside of Chicago. There's a lot of plains and prairie paths and prairies in general. So when I was kind of thinking about the sketches and the pictures and the visuals that I was going to use for this Tui concept, I was inspired by my locale, by the Midwest. The idea is to fit all of these little bits and pieces together almost like a puzzle. Let's traditionally how I look at building patterns. But I feel that's even more so the case when it comes to the Tis deg. All right, this is the final pattern tile. I like the narrative that's going on here inspired by my locale and the Midwest and field animals. Then again,'s nice is, if we wanted to, we could always go back and change these colors. We don't necessarily even have to just change them in our original recolor set. We could also change them while we're here. I do like this kind of darker purple with the cream. But if we wanted to change some of these colors, we could as well. So what I would suggest you do, if you wanted to play around with color, I would select all of the elements within my pattern tile. So under my pattern tile grouping here, I would select the first sketch in the set. Hold shift, select the last. And then I could go in and we could group them just to make things a little bit more organized. We can group these. And then we can go into our effects options and you could do a color overlay, or we can go into our adjustment options and select them and then go into recolor. And then we can play around with color here once we've placed it. It feels very much similar to some of the more traditional toi degies that we might see with the bluish colors. Um, once I've done that. I think we're good. I like this. I'm going to keep this color. I'm going to get rid of this extra sketch here by just tapping on it and then hitting little garbage can icon in my layer studio. This is my final pattern and delete all of my guides and my half drop mechanic kind of testers. So I'm going to go into my file options here. Select Save as. And I'm going to update the name from working file to editable file. And then I'm going to hit Save. And then I'm going to go into my layer studio here, and I'm going to select the guides and delete that. And select my half drop mechanics layer and delete that. And then save this once more, file, save as, and then I'm going to save over it so that it saves the file without all of those extras. But don't worry, I'm going to include both files in our class resources. I'm going to hit Save. It's going to ask me if I want to replace it. I'm going to say yes, replace. Then this is our final editable file. 11. Toile - Exporting the Final Files: So what I like to do now is to then export my final tile because that's the work that I'm going to upload to any of the print on demand sites, like spoon flower and whatnot. And then I like to export my preview just by itself as well, just so that I have a copy of what the full pattern looks and feels like. To export your pattern tile, which is the item that you would upload to any of these print on demand sites, you're going to select pattern tile, and then you're going to go into your file menu, select export, and you just want to export as a PNG or JPEG, whichever you need for the website that you're utilizing or uploading to. And then I'm going to hit port, and then I'm going to name this Ta Tile. And then I'm going to select my preview, and then I'm going to go into File Export, and then name this Ti preview. And then you can go into your file system just to double check to make sure everything is there and saved and it is. And that is it. That is your final T pattern, showcasing it in a preview, utilizing a half drop system in terms of your pattern repeat style. 12. Damask - Sketching the Motif: Once you log your fit designer, you'll be greeted with this new document setup page. We are going to be working in pixels, so you'll want to go into your document units here and update it from whatever it is. I currently have points to pixels, and I'm going to be working in a square format. Again, depending on whatever printer you're working with or whatever manufacturer you're working with. Keep in mind the size requirements of what you may need for that. But for the case of this project and just for ease of use, we're going to be working a 2000 by 2000 pixel square. And then I'm going to keep my DP at 300 in case I want to print something, and then I'm going to create an artboard so that I can jump right into actually creating my template once we're done with all of the sketching. Once I've had all of this set up, I'm going to go into my color options. I'm going to select transparent background. So after I've updated all the elements in my layout, I can then just select Create, and it'll set up a new file for me. So, as I said, you can sketch in affinity designer. You could also just like, right away, utilize something like the vector pencil tool, and it'll give you vector lines that you can edit and makes things a little bit easier if you like to work quicker versus the whole process of, like, a sketch and outline and then filling the color. I like a flow of a sketch and outline and filling the color, so I often will use that because I just feel like my linework feels a little bit more natural and I'm doing it that way. But if you prefer and you want to work fast, you can just work in vectors from the very start, but oftentimes That damask style feels very orgamic, so it might make more sense to just utilize the sketching functions so that your strokes and your linework just feels more natural. So to undo this, you can just hit dit, undo add curve, or command Z to undo. What I like is that in Affinity Designer, you have access to different persona. So up here in the upper left hand corner, you'll see the affinity designer icon that is your designer persona, which is what we currently are in. That offers you all of the vector based tools. But then you could also access pixel based tools like you might see in affinity photo. And that is under Pixel Persona. So, I like to use this persona actually for sketching because I like the brush types that they have and just how everything kind of feels a little bit more organic. This is also why I opt to use a stylus and a tablet because it just makes it feel a little bit more organic. So if you go to the left hand side, when you are in pixel persona, you have access to a brush, an easer, all of your selection tools, those are all your marquee selection tools. And then we have, like the fill color. Smudge, color job, things like that. So what I'm going to do is just tap on my brush tool, and then I'm going to go to the right hand side. If you don't have these options in your studios, you can just go up into Window and then just make sure that you checkmark whatever grouping you want to utilize. So I want to use brushes. I'm going to go into my brushes options. And you'll have lots of options here. I'm just going to use a pencil just so that I can get that kind of, like, sketchly feel to what I am doing. I'm going to use this mechanical pencil six B. I want to make sure I have a color selected. When I do that. So you can just go into your swatches, update your color, to whatever you'd like, and then you can just kind of start sketching on your screen. And you'll get this pop up telling you that it adds a new pixeler once you're working on this. What I like to do before all of that, though, is utilize my guide. So like I said, you're often working with symmetry. You could utilize the symmetry function. We do have that here, which will give you that same kind of idea and might make it faster. But for the sake of what we're going to do in this class, so we can understand the process behind everything, we're just going to use a template to only create and sketch one side of our Otif. So I'm going to go into file, and I'm going to select place because I've already downloaded my triangle template here. And I'll include these in the class project file. I'll have my template for the actual whole project and then these sketch guides. So I'm going to go into my downloads. I'm going to select my triangle. I also have my intertwining double template as well. So I have my intertwining double, which is basically like a rhombus guide, and then I have the triangle as well. So this will help you kind of guide to where you place your motifs and making sure that everything is kind of centered so that it'll make it easier when you go to reflect it and duplicate your final motif. So I'm going to use the triangle. I'm going to select open, and then I'm just going to drag it in so that it's placed into my project file here. I want to make sure it goes almost all the way to the edges. And I'm going to give myself some room. You can opt to just keep it on one side of your artboard, or you can center it as well. But this is just our sketch, so we don't have to worry about reflecting, adding additional art birds right now. This is just kind of like a guide to kind of get it started. So once I've placed that, I can then go back into my brush tool, select the brush that I want. I'm using that pencil brush, and then I can start to sketch. For this idea, I'm going to go for that pomegranate style, fruit motif, so I'm going to start by just adjusting the width of my line work. I think 15 is good. I want to make sure I have 100% flow. I don't want to have any, like, gradients. You can opt to use a stabilizer if you want. It'll kind of make your line work a little bit more stable. And then you can just start sketching. I just kind of keep in mind the overall shape of a pomegranate. And then I want to make sure my line work goes right to the edge of that red template. And then I'm going to focus on more outlining style work because keep in mind with the motifs that you create in the damask style. So you're essentially working with negative space to create the shape and overall design of your element. So now start adding some of the seeds that you might see in a pomegranate. They don't have to all be the same size. In fact, you want to look kind of wonky to have more of that organic feel to them. All right. So once I've added that, I can kind of review it, revise, make any adjustments that I might want to have. Again, this is just a sketch that doesn't have to be. And then we can start adding some of the elements that might work with, like the intertwine. So I think I might want to have a a leaf on this side, maybe some flowers up top and some elements towards the bottom, so we can kind of add those pieces as we go. Then I think I'll add some more leaf work. So more of that like pointier style leaf that we created down here and I'll make it in a mini version, the top. We just want to make sure that it won't interfere with this bottom set. I'm going to actually copy this bottom set and pull it up here to see how it'll work. I'm going to utilize my last tool on the left hand side. This will let me kind of free hand select some of this sketch. I'm going to select it. I'm going to go into my edit option, select copy, and then paste. And it's going to paste another version of this. I'm going to tap on my black arrow tool. Tap on my lasso tool, tap out of my artboard once I've pasted it so I can de select, and then I'm going to go into my black arrow tool. So I'm going to tap on that pasted element and then I'm going to rotate it. And then I'm just going to hold shift and drag it up so that it'll go into place. Then I can kind of see where things will start to fit and where I have enough space. I'm going to go back into my brush tool and then continue to add these elements. All right. And once I've done that, and I like how things look, I'm going to remove this top leaf here. I'm just going to turn it off so I don't see it. And then this is going to be the motif that we're working with to outline and then fill with color to multiply and and to duplicate and kind of build out this repeating patterns. All right. So once I've done that and I've finalized all of my small scale troubleshooting, adjusting, to make sure everything kind of fits nicely the way I'd like it. Then I can go back in and test it one. Now that I finished revising this, I've just basically adjusted that upper right area of the motif so that there was less elements that went out further that could potentially block the leaf and I adjusted the shape of the leaf just a bit, so it has more of a curve to it so that it could fill this top portion a little bit a little bit more nicely. And then I just simplified some of the elements and then added some more leaves to the rest of this as well. Now that we've done that, I just want to test this because I'm going to go into my layers on the right hand side, select the pixel layer with this drawing, select edit, copy, and then tap it into artboard two, and go into edit and paste. Then I'm going to copy this again, it edit copy edit paste and I'll paste right on top, and then we want to go to this upper menu bar, and we're going to select reflect. Then I'm going to hold shift on my keyboard and drag this over so that it matches up. I like the way that looks. I'm just going to select everything with my black arrow tool and I'm going to group those two options together. The two layers, I'm going to select edit, or I'm going to go up to my main menu, select layer and then group. And then I'm going to resize this by holding command and then dragging in from the corner. So I have some more space. And then I'm going to make a few copies of this. I'm just going to hit command C or go to edit copy, and then paste, which is also command C, command V, if you're on a MC. And then I'm going to hold shift so that I can kind start to align these up. I want them close enough so that it feels like one of the motifs is going into the next. So you get that intertwined feeling. You can't really tell where one stops and where one begins. I'm going to paste a few more. And then I'm going to adjust how I'm placing this. Again, just holding shift so everything stays aligned, and then just see how everything works together. As long as it feels like it's intertwining, and it doesn't feel like things are too far or too close, or there's nothing overlapping, then I think this motif is good and we're ready to get to the next step, outlining in designer persona, using vectors and then filling with color. 13. Damask - Vectorizing the Motif: Now that we're done with our sketch, we can go in and refine our linework in the designer persona. We want to make sure we have clean lines because it'll make it easier to get a nice clean motif using that color blocking, negative space technique that we are going to be working with. So before we even get into setting up our file to start the repeat, we need to finalize the outline and the coloring. What I like to do is take my sketch, pull it over to one side of our artboard. And we're going to work with Affinity designer, so we're going to make sure we are back into the designer persona. And we are going to use the Pencil tool. This is a really useful tool that creates vector outlines, and it gives that kind of hand drawn effect. I'm going to update the color of our stroke here. I'm going to go into the Swatch studio on the right hand side. Update it to kind of like this dark gray. And then I'm going to go into my layers and my layer with my sketch, I'm going to tap on that layer in artboard one. Then what I want to do is lower the opacity, so it's going to be easier to draw on top of this. Then I'm going to add a new layer by going to my layer menu and then select new layer, and then I'm going to make sure I have my pencil tool selected. I'm going to just my width of my stroke here. And then what's nice though is that we can always go through and increase the line width of certain areas where we want to really showcase that negative space. I can then go in and then start outlining. So I like to zoom in when I do this. And then you can choose whether or not you want to have the stabilizer or you can opt to not have the stabilizer. If you choose to have it, just kind of gives your curves a little bit more of a smoother look. You just have to get used to how the controller works. Smaller, more detailed work makes it a little bit more difficult in my opinion, but you might find that it's easier. So I'm just going to turn off stabilizer though because I don't mind working without it because I could always go in and readjust my line work. I also want to make sure I turn my guide back on just so that I see what I'm doing because it'll be helpful in ensuring that we stay within the parameters of this guide, especially at the center. All right. I'm going to go back to my layer. You could also adjust the opacity of the guide as well. I might want to pull that down too. I'll go back to my layer, and then I'm going to select my pencil tool. I have the width at 1.5. The stroke is a dark gray. Then I'm going to make sure I also have sculpt turned on. What that does is just ensure that you can keep creating a shape within the line instead of the stroke closing, and it keeps everything connected. I'm going to zoom in and just start outlining everything. Then you can always go in and select your node tool and adjust shapes as needed as well. Any line work that I have inside of a leaf, I wanted to be a little bit thicker, so I'm going to adjust my stroke with just a bit because again, we're utilizing that negative space and we want to make sure that anything that needs to be like a highlighted line that would be inside of the shape is a little bit more prominent. Then I could always just go back and update width to what it was before, which is 1.5, and then keep working on outlining. Now I'm going to keep doing this process until all of my linework is fully outlined, and then we will jump into getting some color into this. I also is that in affinity designer, you also have a shape builder tool as well as a ton of options for shapes. If you tap on this diamond and you hold, you'll get this pop up and you can select a variety of different shapes. I want to add a little hearts to this kind of like bunting ribbon here. So I don't necessarily have to dw over these. I can just create the heart shape that I want using the heart shape tool and then adjust the shape to what I want it to be. If you double tap on the shape, you'll be able to adjust the inside angle of the middle of the heart, and then I want it to be a filled shape. Once I've done that, I can use my black arrow tool, I can tap on it and then rotate it whatever direction I want, and then use that for this bunting. Once I've done that, I'm going to edit, copy, edit paste, and then just place them. All right. Once I'm done with that, I can finalize these last little details here. 14. Damask - Coloring and Finalizing the Medallion: Now that we're done outlining everything, we can turn off our guideline, and then we can turn off our sketch as well. All right. And then what I want to do is group everything together. And move it towards the center of our artboard here. And then I want to group all of these layers together. So we're going to go into layer, and we're going to select group. That way, everything is all grouped together. And now we can begin the process of coloring. So we're going to utilize the vector flood fill tool. Once you've selected that, we want to just go in and make sure all of our settings are set. We want to make sure our insertion mode is set inside that we are adding on top and we are filling two visible boundaries. All right. So to utilize the flood fill tool, what we'll do is once we've selected, we have to outline, like, select the area that we want to start to fill. You'll select over your whole shape. And then we can start to fill. And it's going to fill anything that is a closed boundary. So that's why I said it was really important to make sure that all of your linework is closed and anything that needs to have kind of like a highlighted negative space inside of it, you'll be able to do that. If you're noticing you're having trouble with anything, and it's not filling, you just want to make sure that your outlines are closed. That the Once I've filled everything that I can fill, that's a closed line. Then I'll want to close my motif, close the shape, and then I can fill in the rest of the open sections, and then we can remove the black outline. I'm going to select my black eral tool, drag over the entirety of all of my elements. Go to layer, select group, and then I'm going to go to it, copy, edit paste. Then I'm going to utilize my transform tools here. I'm going to flip horizontal. I'm going to hold down shift on my keyboard and then drag this to the right. And if you notice that there's any line gaps, you just have to nudge these over. And what we can do is basically close these just like what we were doing with the shapes, while we were filling, just select your white arrow tool and then just make sure you can connect these elements together. If you're running into any problems combining your shape, another tip that you can utilize is combining your line work together. For example, we have this half in this upper area, I'm going to hold shift and select the second half. What we want is for all of these to connect together. If you're having trouble utilizing your node tool, connecting and closing off your shapes. You could also go into your layer menu, go into geometry, and then select merge curves. Then you can go back into your layers menu and scroll all the way down to expand stroke, and then you should be able to then select that fill tool and then fill that area. And then you want to go inside and merge the shape of the inside part of the flower. Then you'll go to layer geometry, merge curves, layer, expand stroke, and then we should be able to fill with that vector fill tool. Once I'm done with filling, then I can go into my layer studio, and then I can go and find my outline and then just remove those. What I like to do though is just make a copy so that I can always go back and edit. This was just my tester, so we don't need any of these. I can just select them and delete them, and then I can take this grouping over here, select all of it. Select copy, and then paste it over here so that I have an extra editable option. I'm going to go where it says artboard two. I'm going to double tap it in my layer studio, and I'm going to rename it to it motif. Then I'm going to lock this. I'm going to select that layer, and then I'm going to tap on this little lock icon that way. I can't move anything on this artboard. Now I'm just going to tap into my outline work and just start deleting it. And then you'll start to see that negative space start to highlight If you're noticing when you're removing your black lines, if anything isn't actually deleting, like it should, you could also just utilize your geometry tools. For example, when I go to delete the veins of this leaf, it doesn't show as it's being deleted. What we can do is just select that grouping, go into layer geometry ad, and then all the way down to our expand stroke. And it'll create a new shape, and then we can select our leaf and that shape, and then we can go back into our geometry tools, either under layer, or you can go to your quick shortcuts in your upper menu on the right hand side and then just select the subtract option, and it'll delete that vein out for you. Is our final medallion that we can then group together and start to make our repeating pattern from. What I suggest is once you've done that, save your file. Somewhere safe, so you could always go back to it, and then we'll start with the next step, which is building out the pattern. 15. Damask - Building the Repeat Pattern: Now that we've built out our medallion, we're going to set up our file so that we can quickly create a repeating pattern. We know that our arboard that we built on was 2000 by 2000 pixels. We're going to start with that. We're going to go to a file. And we're going to set up a new document. And then we are going to make sure that our page with and page is 2000 by 2000. And then we are going to create the artboard and make sure that we have a transparent background and then hit Create. And we're going to set this up so that we have a preview. So basically, what we're going to do is utilize the symbols functions in Affinity Designer so that Whatever we do on one artboard will show up automatically on the other. To do that, we're going to need to add in another artboard. We're going to go to the left hand side, select our artboard tool. And then you'll get this option that pops up in the upper left hand corner. We're going to just keep it at document and then select Insert. It's going to give us an exact duplicate, but what we want to do is multiply this by two and double this in size. Our new artboard should be 4,000 by 4,000 since our original was 2000 by 2000. So we're going to go into transform our transform studio. If you don't have that, again, just go into your window menu and then just make sure that the transform menu option is check marked. So now what we want to do is go to our width and height and update it so that it is 4,000 by 4,000 pixels, and this is the beginning of our preview. So what we're going to do now to start to add in our symbols function, that's what's going to allow us to have whatever we place on RPR one previewed in artboard two. We want to make it so that it creates a seamless repeat. So the next step in this process is to select our rectangle tool. And what we want to do is make sure we turn on magnetics, that little magnet looking icon in our upper menu on the right hand side. So the next step in this process is to add a square that is exactly 2000 by 2000 to our artboard and to our artboard one, and that is what we're going to utilize for our symbols. So we can just make sure we double check in our transform studio that this is exactly 2000 by 2000, and that our X and Y placement is exactly at zero. I'm going to update the color though, so that's a little bit easier to see and you want to make sure that you don't have any stroke. If you ever run into any issues where you're seeing dark hair lines in between your symbols on your preview, it's likely that you have a stroke turned on. Let's go back to our transform studio. Again, just making sure everything is exact. Go to our swatches, select our fill, and then we're just going to select a color that is easy to see. Now that we've created the square, what we need to do is turn this into a symbol and then we're going to copy it and paste it into our artboard two. We're going to select that rectangle and artboard one, and we're going to turn this into a symbol. Make sure that the actual rectangle and not just the artboard is selected. You can do that in your layers and then just tap on the rectangle. Then we are going to go into layer in our menu bar, and we're going to scroll down to create symbol. You know that you've created the symbol because there will be this orange line on the left hand side of this layer here. Then what we want to do is copy this. Now we're going to tap into artboard two, and then we're going to paste it four times. So that we have one square for each quadrant of R board two. What we're going to do now is making sure magnetics is turned on. Hold shift. We're going to drag your first square to the upper right hand quadrant, and you'll know everything is in place because you'll see we have these guidelines that pop up, the green, yellow, and red ones, and then we'll also be able to double check in the transform studio as well. We're going to tap on the next square, hold shift, drag it down to the lower left hand quadrant. Once everything is in place, you'll see those lines pop up and then you can let go, hold shift, and then drag your final square down to the right hand lower quadrant. You'll know everything is in place. If you don't see any lines, if you're noticing there is some lines, just zoom in because it could be that either you're just off of hair or it could be sometimes affinity has a bug where you can see these hair line like pixels, but they're not actually there when you export your final file. But what I like to do is just double check and check my transform studio. This first upper right should be at 2000 for X and zero for Y. This lower right hand one should be at 2000 by 2000 for X and Y. This lower left hand quadrant should be at zero for x and 2000 for y, and this upper left hand quadrant should be at 00. So everything is exactly in place. You can double check to make sure that there's no outline on any of your swatches just to make sure. So everything is now in place for our pattern preview. I suggest you save this once more, File save as. Then we can open up our original file with the motif. I'm going to open up my dibask pattern motif, and then I'm going to select this entire grouping of elements. I'm going to group at one more time just in case. I'm going to select my black arrow tool, select over the entirety of this motif, go to layer, go to group, and then I'm going to just go into it, copy, and then go into my project file here, and then select edit paste. All right. Since we have this blue icon, we can go into our artboard and we can update the color of our background here. All right. Since I have this like lighter blue, I'm going to go for a darker background. I'm going to actually resize this a bit so that I can play around with the placement of it throughout this preview. I'm going to hold command and then pull in from my corners, and it will allow me to resize in proportion. If you're noticing that nothing is popping up in your preview, that is because your motif is not under your symbols. You want to go into your layers, and I'm going to resize this a bit so that it's easier to see, and I'm going to select that group, my motif, and I'm going to pull it so that it goes right on top of the symbols and then it'll pop up in your per two for your preview. Now, basically, whatever we do on the left hand side in this tile will happen on the right hand side in our preview. We have an idea based on the practice that we were doing. What I like to do though is start with my corners and then fill in the center to see how all of this works together. So I'm going to copy this motif, and then I'm going to paste it, so it pastes right in front. And then remember when you're building a seamless pattern, we're just going to do a straight pattern just for ease of use for this project. But basically, whatever you put on the left hand side has to go in the exact same place on the right hand side and whatever you do on the top has to go at the exact same place on the bottom. So what we're going to do is go into our transform studio. So what we're going to do is just first make sure that that copy is indeed in our layers, and it looks like it is. Yeah. Then we're going to go into our transform studio. Since we're moving from left to right, we're working with our x parameters. We're going to tap on our x measurements here, and we're going to select plus because we're going to the right, and we're going to type in the measurement for our artboard, which is 2000, and then press Enter. I'll copy and paste it exactly where it needs to be. Now that we have our two top corners, we can just select both of our motifs by tapping on one holding shift and tapping on the second one. Then copying it by either going into edit copy, or doing command C, and then command V for paste or edit paste. Then we'll go into our transform studio again this time because we're going from top to bottom, we are working with the y parameters or y axis. Since we're going from top to bottom, again, we're going to hit plus. If we're going from bottom to top, we would hit negative. But since we're going from top to bottom, we're going to hit plus, and then we're going to type in two than and then hit Enter, and it'll move our elements right into the bottom part of our square. Now, we can make another copy and put it in the center to see how it fits with everything, or we can basically try and work with the top first. I like doing that just so that we can see how it all fits together and then fill in the center or see what else we can add to the center. I also suggest once you've placed your background and whatnot, you can lock those layers in place so like your rectangle, we can just lock it so it doesn't move, and then we can do the same thing for R two. The rectangles that we've added. We can lock those as well if we want. Once we've placed the top one, we can go in and select edit, copy, edit, paste, and then we're going to go into our transform studio. Again, since we're going from the top to the bottom, we're going to go to our y axis. Then we're going to type in plus 2000 and then press Enter. And then it'll move it exactly where we need it. I don't like the placement of those, so I'm going to start the process over again and then just move these around and see how everything will work. All right. With this top one, I'm going into my y axis, type in plus 2000. Then enter. I don't like how that looks. I feel like I needed to have it a little bit more centered, so I'm going to move that up, and then again, copy paste, go into my y axis, select plus, and then type in 2000, hit Enter, and it'll move it slightly to the center here. I'm going to copy this left hand motif, paste it, go into my x axis, and then select plus 2000. Enter. And then that gives me my final bit. But I feel like this is a little sparse, and I kind of want things to feel a little bit more interconnected. We can move things closer if we want. All right. After some fine tuning, I think I like this layout. They're a little bit more sparse, but we can add in some additional pieces if we'd like. So we can add in more floral elements. We can utilize our pencil tool or our pencil to create more shapes that go and perhaps, you know, create some more fluid movement throughout this. I'm going to use my pencil tool, I'm going to go into my swatches, make sure I have the correct color. I'm going to use this green. Then I'm going to make sure I adjust the size of my stroke, just a bit, so it's a little bit easier to see. Then again, I want to go into my layers and make sure that the stroke is within my symbols so that it pops up on my preview. I think I'm going to add some leaf tendrils here. I'm going to zoom in a bit so I can see what I'm doing. I'm going to select that leaf I made. I'm going to copy it and paste it, and then I'm going to adjust the rotation of it a bit. Then I'm going to flip one and rotate it and pull it to the other side of our stem here. Then what I want to do is just make sure I group all of these elements together, so the leaves and the stem, and then also make sure those leaves are inner symbols, and then select the stem and all of my leaves and then group those together, go into layer group. Then I'm just going to copy this, and then I'm going to paste it, and I'm going to use my transform tools and I'm going to flip this so that I can have some more movement in the center here without having to add another motif. All right. Once I've added those tendrils to the center, I'm going to play around with placement. Make sure I like where they're placed. Then since we have some of these hearts going on in here, I think I want to add another heart to the center here. I'm going to use my heart tool and then double click on it so I can adjust the shape and pull that little red dot down to give the center a little bit more bounce. Then I feel like I need some more filler in this bottom area. First, let's go into our layers, make sure our heart is in our symbols grouping. We got to pull that down here, and then we can take some of these tendrils. And maybe see if we can fill more space with that. If we adjust the rotation. I'm going to copy this, paste it. I'm going to rotate it by flipping it, and then I'm going to hold shift and drag it to the other side. Then to ensure we still have that symmetrical feel. Any of the stuff that we put in the center here. I'm just going to go and utilize my alignment tools in this middle menu here and make sure that they're aligned at the top or the bottom, and they're evenly spaced from the elements that they're next to. I think I like the idea of placing some of those hearts above the left and right motifs. I'm going to pull one to the left, copy it, paste it, go into my transform studio, select my x axis, and then select plus 2000, and it should pull it over to the left there and give us some more of that visual interest with those hearts. All right, I think I like how this looks. Adding these extra elements help to fill out some of the sparsity, but it still creates that movement where it feels like things are interconnected and built into one another. 16. Testing and Exporting the Repeat: All right. So now that we're done with this, what we'll do is save this file, and then we'll want to export and test the repeat. So when we're exporting, keep in mind, we don't want to export the preview. We want to export the tile itself. So this tile here, the smaller one. So artboard one, we're going to make sure we select it, we click on it, and then we are going to go into file. And then we're going to select Export. And then we will want to export this either as a JPEG or a PNG, whatever your manufacturer suggests. PNG keeps a higher quality image, and you can upload PNG or JPEG both to places like spoon flower. I'm going to export this as a JPEG 2000 2000 hit Export. I'm going to save it in my project file. Then I'm just going to create a new 8.5 by 11 page that we can see if this fills properly. I'm going to select file new and I'm going to select letter size, select Create Then I'm going to use my shape tool here. I'm going to tap on the square rectangle shape, and I'm just going to fill this space that we have, and then what I want to do is add in a bitmap pattern fill. On our left hand side, underneath our bucket fill tool that we're using, we have the gradient tool. If we tap on that, it'll allow you to fill with different options. It's not just the gradient fill you can fill with solids, but then you could also fill with a bitmap. Basically, a bitmap is just an image file. So something that is a seamless repeat, will repeat very nicely using this option. I'm going to select my pattern preview tile. I'm going to hit open. Because your file is relatively large, it's going to fill up a large swath, but all you have to do is pull any of these arms in to either rotate or to resize. What I like to do is just resize, make sure there's no strange lines or broken lines, or spacing doesn't look off and see what everything looks like. If I need to, I could always go in and revise. But I think this works really nicely, and I really like how this turned out and is how you created a mask. This is a little bit more of a simple intertwining damask utilizing the medallion effect. You can do more complex intertwined options using things like the double damask using that Rhombus style template that I shared with you all. 17. Course Outro: Thank you so much for creating with me today. I hope this class has helped you get comfortable with Affinity Designer two. L earn more about Toi and Damask repeats and gain the confidence that you need to design these complex patterns. I also hope that the class has inspired you to experiment with different pattern styles that you create so you can diversify your portfolio. Remember to make sure to check out the class resources for your project template and the additional files that I made just for this class. Also, please share your project in the Class Project Gallery, or if you feel of for it, you can also share it on social media and tag me at Bello Sophia Creative. I'd love to see what you created or even offer some helpful tips if you feel that you need them. Finally, please consider leaving a class review. These reviews are so helpful and ensuring teachers get engagement, which in turn helps our classes overall and search. Remember, you can find me online at bell sophia creative.com and on socials at Bella Sophia Creative. Thanks so much for joining me in class. I'll see you in the next one. Bye