Creating Seamless Repeating Patterns in Affinity Photo

1. Intro to Seamless Pattern Creation in Affinity Photo: Have you ever fancied making a seamless tile pattern in Affinity Photo? Well, this class will aim to show you how. Hi, I'm Amy started. I am an artist and illustrator living in the American Midwest. You can find me online and Amy illustrates.com where you can see my artwork, find my stores and more. In this class, we will be taking your original designs, importing them into a perfectly square document, and using measurements along the x and y-axis to create our seamless pattern. It may sound a little complex at first, and it does involve a little bit of math, but it is very easy and you will be so happy once you learn how to do this. Once you have created a perfectly seamless tile pattern, you can use it to create notebook covers. You can use it to create wrapping paper, fabric designs and more. Please join us and create your own very unique tiling pattern that you can use for many purposes. Hope to see you in class. Bye bye. 2. Lesson 1 - Spanning Patterns Across the X-axis: Hello everyone and welcome to lesson one on turning your artwork into seamless repeating patterns. In Affinity Photo. The first thing you're going to want to do is to have some artwork ready that you would like to work with. Here, I have some witchy theme drawings that are already prepared on a transparent background. The transparent background allows me to easily cut and paste my designs without any backgrounds getting in the way. The next step is to create a new document that is a uniform square. This one is the 2000 pixels. By 2000 pixels, you can choose however big you want to make your square. This is just what I use and it ends up printing well for me. But if you want to work larger or even smaller, you're totally welcome to. But be sure it's a complete square, 2000 pixels by 2000 pixels. Having a uniform square is crucial to getting your measurements correct later in the project. Alright, for the purposes of this lesson, we are going to be focusing exclusively on measuring along the x axis, and we'll cover the y-axis. Lesson two, I don't want to give you too much in a row and confuse you. And for those of you who might be unaware, the x-axis runs horizontally across your piece. Alright, so the next thing I'm gonna do is just to paste in one of my pieces of artwork. And I am going to go ahead and slide it off the page here. You can place yours anywhere. It doesn't matter. What the key is, is going to be finding out your measurements and adjusting later. Now up here in the upper right-hand corner, you're going to see measurements for the x and y and the width and height of your piece. If you do not see a transform palette up there. And any measurements, check, double-check, and make sure that there's a bounding box around your pasted artwork, like mine has a little box around it. You'll get that if you activate it using the arrow tool. Once you have found your little Transform palette with the measurements, you're going to want to go ahead and write down or just record it somewhere. The measurement, the x measurement of your piece because we're focusing on the x-axis. This particular piece is 1,468.3 pixels. Now, do be sure that you include any decimals in your measurements. Otherwise, it's going to be off. And just even like a 0.3 is going to have a difference. So make note of your measurement for where it is on the x-axis. Alright, so in order to have this be a seamless repeating pattern, what we're going to want to do is get our bunnies, but on the other side of the page. Or for you, it'll be whatever artwork you're working with, not necessarily a bunny's behind. So to start to do this, what we're gonna do is we're going to go to our layer with our artwork on it, and we're going to go ahead and duplicate it. This is going to create a whole, another layer, exactly the same, in the exact same space. Nothing should have moved at all. Then we're gonna go up here on the x. And we're going to subtract 2000 from whatever number you had originally in your X slot. So for me, this is going to wind up being negative 531.7. And I'll go ahead and write this down here. But basically what you've done is you've just shifted the piece of artwork on the x-axis by the unit measurement, your square, which for this example was 2000 pixels. So if we subtract that, we get 531.7. And that is the measurement to get. For me. The bunnies behind perfectly seamlessly on the other side of the x-axis. So when I use the paint bucket tool and drop this in somewhere, it will flow nice and be seamless. So to recap here, you are basically duplicating your layers and adjusting your art work along the x-axis by subtracting or adding the unit measurement of your entire square. And for this example it was 2000. So when you want to move something left, you're going to subtract 2000s when you want to move something, right? You're going to add 2000. This should work for placing anything along the x axis. Now, I also wanted to mention here that if you want to pop any additional artworks in here, and you want them to be in the middle of the artwork and they're not flowing off the end of the page. That's totally fine. You can just plop them wherever you feel like. And it doesn't matter. You don't have to keep track of your measurements or anything like that. It's only when you start going off the page do you need to concern yourself with your measurements? One more thing I want to mention here is if you want to make any adjustments to your artwork that you're having, go off the page into a seamless pattern. Don't move them individually because they will get misaligned. What you are going to need to do is to select the both of them and then move them in concert around the page. This way, they will always be linked and you will never have to go back and redo the math and all that fun stuff or not fun stuff. Let's say. That is pretty much it for our little x-axis seamless pattern lesson. And in the next lesson we're going to pick up and we're going to repeat the same thing with the y axis. And then we're going to throw it all together at the end. So thank you for joining us and I hope to see you in the next class. See you later. Bye-bye. 3. Lesson 2 - Spanning Patterns Across the Y-axis: Hello everyone and welcome to lesson two on creating seamless patterns and Affinity photo. In the last class, we went over the x-axis and how to get our patterns to tile across that x axis. For this lesson, we're gonna be returning to the same example, but we're are going to be exploring using a y-axis with using measurements along the y-axis, we can then add in new artwork pieces and have them go off the top or the bottom of the tile. So to show you how to do this, I'm going to take it the new piece of artwork that I popped in here, the moon card. And I'm going to make it go off the top of the square panel. Now, again, as with the x-axis example, you can see that there's a bounding box around my artwork, which means that's active. And that also means that in the upper right-hand corner, I can access where the x and y coordinates are for that specific piece of artwork. And just as in the last example, I'm gonna go ahead and mark down my coordinate measurement, which in my case is negative 274.2. Then when your artwork is going off the top of the panel, you are going to add the measurement for your whole square panel. And in this case, it's 2000 pixels, so I'm going to add that. So this should give me 1,725.8. And that is the number that's gonna get me for my duplicate layer to appear in the right place along the y-axis. So it repeats seamlessly. So I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate the original layer. Once that layer is created, I'm going to go in and up in the little menu up at the top there in the right. I'm going to put in the 1,725.8 and that is automatically going to shift the second artwork to the bottom of the square. And there you can see it has moved. So now this would all perfectly tile on both the x and the y-axis. And just a little reminder, if the bounding box doesn't show up around the piece of artwork that you're trying to move. That means you need to get the arrow tool out and activated before you can go in and adjust where it is along the y-axis. Alright? So just as with the example before, with the x-axis, if you select both layers that have your matching artwork on it, you can move the whole thing in concert and you can make adjustments on where you would like to put it. Now you may be wondering, what if I want to put something in one of the corners of my panel? Well, you can do that. It's a bit trixie and we're going to save that for the next lesson. So that is it for this lesson. And I hope I will see you in the next lesson where we will go over putting things in the corner. But don't put baby there, you'll get in trouble. So thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. Bye bye. 4. Lesson 3 - Placing Designs in the Tile Corners: Hello everyone and welcome to lesson three on turning your artwork into seamless repeating patterns. In the last lesson, we went over adjusting your art work along the y-axis. In this lesson, we are going to go over putting a piece of your artwork down into one of the corners of your tile square. Here you can see, put it in the lower right-hand corner. And I think I'm going to focus on the x-axis first because both axises will come into play in placing these. So it perfectly tiles. So with that said, I'm gonna go ahead and write down my x axis measurements first. So in my example here, the x-axis is 1,747.6 and the y-axis location is 1,640 point for whatever your measurements are, you are going to want to mark down both of those. The next step then is to activate and duplicate your artwork layer. Then go ahead and do the math to move your art work along the x-axis first. And here you can see I have done that. It has moved the mushrooms all the way to the right so they go off the edge of the page and it will tile them along the x-axis. But it's going to mess up along the y-axis. Here I've written down my math basically to get your artwork to move along the x-axis. As we already discussed, you're going to subtract the width of your tile, which for me was 2000 pixels, and that resulted in negative 252.4. Well, let's pause and look at this with a little better visual. So we're basically taking our artwork and we're going to move it along the x-axis first to move it to the lower left-hand corner. And again, before you move it, you're going to want to duplicate the layer and then go ahead and adjust, do your math and do the adjustments to move it along the x-axis. Here. I have done that. Now, the next step, we are going to be focusing on that layer, the lower left hand corner. And we're going to move it along the y-axis to the upper left-hand corner. So you're going to duplicate that layer and then figure out your measurements and then do your math to adjust it along the y-axis. Now, here is probably a little difficult to see, but my little mushroom bottoms, they showed up up there. I can visually see that this is all coming together. And now for the final step, we're going to move it back along the x-axis. But we are going to be using, making a duplicate of that layer that is in the upper top left corner. We're not messing around with any of the other layers right now. We're basically playing Ring Around the Rosie. Alright, so I will duplicate and paste that layer now. And it should show up in, Yes, there it is, in the perfect area in the upper right-hand corner. Here I'm going to mark each corner with a hot pink star just so my little examples show up a little bit better. And then the next step is to turn this into a pattern and do a test tiling to see if everything turned out okay. Alright, so the first thing we're going to need to do to create a test tile is we're going to need to select all of our artwork layers, excluding the background. Don't bring the background into this. And you're going to want to merge them all together. And they should show up on a new layer up here, all merged together. And next, you will select everything on that new layer. And you are going to go up to the Layer menu up here. And you're going to scroll down to new pattern layer from selection. And you're going to want to go ahead and give that a little click. Once you do that, you will see that a new pattern layer has emerged above the old layer where you merged all your art work together. The next step is to create a new, larger document that we can tile into. Then we're going to go back into our original document with the pattern layer selected. We're going to copy that. And then we're gonna go back to our very large white blank page. And we're going to copy the pattern into here. Now. It looks gigantic right now. But let's zoom out and re-size it. And I think we're going to find that it has perfectly tiled and made a very ugly example pattern, but it's necessary in order to learn. So I will zoom back in here a little bit and I'm just going to circle a couple of the mushrooms with their little ugly hot pink stars. So you can see it did tile perfectly. And it is a little bit tricky, but you can do things in the corner of your tile squares. So there you have it. So that is it for this lesson. And in the next lesson we're going to finish up. We're going to make a pretty pattern. And I'm going to show you how to export it and use it on merchandise or your own personal projects. So thank you for joining us and I hope to see you in the next lesson. Bye bye. 5. Lesson 4 - Exporting and Using your Patterns: Hello everyone, Welcome to lesson four on creating seamless repeating patterns in Affinity Photo. And this will be the last lesson of this course. The last lesson, we went over placing artwork in the corners of the tiles and using both the x and y-axis in order to get the artwork to repeat. At this point in the lesson, you should have all the tools you need to finally create your very own seamless repeating pattern. So at this point, it is mostly going to be you importing your artwork into the square tile. Keeping in mind, of course, the x and y axis's. And you're just going to want to fill up the whole page or the whole tile with a nice repeating pattern that feels good to you. I will now share with you a little sped up, time lapsed version, my process just so you can see how I work a little bit. And then after this, we will export your pattern files and start using them in a project. The example we're going to use is a notebook cover. Also, this time-lapse is about 59 s long. So if you just wanted to skip through it and go onto the next one, that's also awesome too. Alright, so once you have your artwork about where you think you'd like to have it, then it's time to save your work. And after you save your work, you're going to want to go ahead and export your tile as a JPEG. This is just one way to do this. Other way we did it was in the last lesson where we selected all of our pieces of artwork. And we merged all those pieces of artwork and they showed up on a new layer. And then we turned that into a pattern. But this way, you can save your design as a JPEG and then open up this design anytime without having to worry about your base document, the origin document. Basically doing it this way is just an added safety measure. The next thing we're going to do is to go ahead and open up that jpeg document that we just saved. We're going to select the background layer. And we're going to go back up into the Layer menu and select the make a pattern from selection, I believe. Or you can choose a new pattern from layer if you want to. If you haven't selected the layer, it doesn't matter. Both things are going to turn up. You're going to end up with another layer on top called the Pattern layer. Now this pattern layer is the basic repeating pattern that you just made. So if you take the arrow tool and you move around this pattern layer, you're going to see that a whole image just keeps on repeating itself as you move it around. So the next step then is to copy your pattern layer, the width command C or whatever your computer uses. Then I'm gonna go ahead and open up a notebook cover file, which for me is an eight-and-a-half by 11 sheet. And then I just fold those over and make little kind of nice size pocket notebooks, travel notebooks. And then you're going to want to go ahead and just paste your tile pattern in there. And it should automatically repeat everywhere and be completely seamless. Now here's the tricky part. If you notice anything you don't like about your pattern. Now is the time that you'll end up going back to your original file and make some adjustments. For me. I felt that the black cat was a little too big and a little to notice. Noticeably repeating. I mean, they all do, but that's pretty glaring for me. So I'm just going to go back and do some edits and keep on repeating the process of creating new jpegs. And then I'm pouring the pattern into the file. So here I am back in my original document and I'm going to see if I can't make just a very easy tweak to that cat by just shrinking down the files. So what I'm gonna do is I have both of them selected, so they'll still be in concert together. And I'm just going to shrink them together. These are little quick tips that you can do to make things easier on yourself. And then, well, the adjustment isn't going as planned. So I'm probably going to have to remeasure and do the math again and adjust the top black cat again. So I will just focus on getting the cat on the bottom where I want it. And then I'm just going to go ahead and delete that other layer up top that has the other cat on it. Then I'm going to read duplicate the layer with the cat on the bottom. Then I am going to go back in and do my little mathematical adjustments on the y-axis to get the cat to show up nicely. And the new cat layer should go ahead and there it is, it'll pop right in there. Now, this doesn't look quite so perfect to me. So I am going to add another small bow up there and just play around with it. And this is what you'll be doing to just until you get it. So it looks visually appealing to you and you're happy with it. The most important thing I believe in making a pattern is to make sure that you are happy with it. I mean, I think that goes for any artwork you make ever. So, yeah, just be happy with what you make. Alright, so after you've made all of your adjustments, just go ahead and save it and then paste it into your new document. And here the cats are smaller. And I like this, repeat quite a lot better. Now you may be thinking to yourself, Well, this is great and all, but I don't want a white background. Well, go back to your original document and start a little background layer underneath all of your pattern files, all of them. And you can just pop in different colors and sample things. This blue is not working because it's too close to the blue in the images. So I will be changing it to purple. Here. I fast forwarded and I went ahead and made it purple. This is looking at a heck of a lot better. Now, once you have one of these files done, you're gonna do the exact same thing that you did before with the original file. You're gonna go ahead and save it as a JPEG. And that is going to be your pattern file. You can make as many different backgrounds as you want. Just export them all as your little square J peg tiles. And then just lather rinse, repeat everything that you've learned so far. So this pretty much wraps up this lesson and the whole class. So if you have any other questions, if I didn't cover something, please feel free to ask me that. I believe there's a section where you can ask me and I hope to see you in my future classes or in any of my previous classes that I've made. So thank you all for joining me and I hope you learned something useful and I hope you will enjoy yourselves. Have a great day. Bye.