Design a Pattern Collection on Your iPad

1. Design a Pattern Collection on Your iPad: Hi everyone. I'm Liz Kohler Brown. I'm an artist, designer and teacher. Today I want to show you how to design a pattern collection on your iPad. I'll show you options for designing in both Affinity Designer and Procreate, so you can choose the option that works best for your personal style. When you watch this class, you'll get all of the tools I use to build my pattern collections, including four pattern mock-ups that you can use to display your patterns, eight quilt squares that you can use to test out your patterns as a set, and my collection builder template, which will help you develop a cohesive collection that you can share online or in print. First, we'll talk about what a collection should include. I'll give you ideas for themes, pattern layouts, and ways to build patterns so that you don't have to start from the ground up. Next, we'll build several different types of patterns, ranging from simple to complex. You can build your patterns along with me, without having to guess what kind of patterns you should create next. We'll look at a few different pattern configurations like interweaving vines and super complex layered patterns. You'll have a chance to try out a lot of different layouts. We'll also look at ways to add texture to your repeats.I'll show you how to create your own unique seamless texture blocks for your repeat patterns. I'll share with you six different seamless textures and six different texture brushes for Affinity Designer that you can apply to your own patterns and use to make your own layer textures. By the time you finish this class, you'll know how I created every pattern in my wildflower collection so you can start applying the pattern building principles to your own designs. Last, I'll show you how to use mock-ups and quote squares to display your patterns online and in print. I'll also show you how I create my mock up so you can apply your patterns to any product you'd like. At the end of this class, I'll invite you to join me in a pattern challenge where you can follow along with my prompts for pattern layouts. The challenge will help you build your collection one pattern at a time, and share your pattern online with your friends and followers. One great thing about creating pattern collections is that they are so much more marketable than individual designs. Whether you want to share your patterns on print-on-demand sites, or you want to work with companies, working in collections is a great way to present yourself as a professional designer, and give your buyers cohesive set of designs to choose from or pair together. All you need to take this class is your iPad, a stylus, and the Affinity Designer app. Let's get started. 2. Collection Basics: Let's start by talking about why you would create a pattern collection, how many patterns your collection to contain, and also what type of patterns should make up a collection. There are so many different uses for pattern collections depending on your personal style and your goals for your work. Of course, you can share your patterns on social media. These are great for marketing your work or sending people to your website. You can also upload them to print on demand sides like spoon flower, red bubble societies 6, and any other print on demand site that except [inaudible] repeat patterns. Having collections in your portfolio is also a great way to show interested buyers or companies that you are professional designer who creates full collections rather than just individual designs. If you plan to submit your work to accompany for licensing, it's much easier to do with collections than individual patterns. Companies are often looking for multiple pieces that will work well together rather than just individual patterns. Before I started making collections, I never got any interests from companies and my surface design work. But once I started putting my collections out there, I had several companies asked me to have my work on their product. One thing to keep in mind is that creating collections can give you some exposure to buyers and companies and you may not know now what your patterns could be used for, but if you never create the collection, you may never get those opportunities. Here's an example of a company that reached out to me after seeing some of my collections. This is the wildflower collection that I'll be creating in the class today and then my geometric collection here. These are phone grips that attached to the back of your phone. I never would have imagined that my patterns would show up on here, so when I was creating this collection, I wasn't necessarily thinking about them for that use. But I'm certainly happy to have my pattern on these products. The thing is, just go ahead and create the collections and worry about what they'll be for later and also getting comfortable with the process of making collections gets your portfolio built up so that companies might be interested in your work. Here is another example of an interesting use for pattern collection. This magazine reached out to me to ask if they could feature some of my pattern collections in this issue. Here's my fruit collection and here's my geometric collection. You can see how companies really like presenting multiple patterns that work well together rather than just single images. It also shows that you have a cohesive style. If you can show multiple images together that work well and compliment each other, it makes you look good, it makes the company look good, so it makes it much more likely that a company would reach out to you rather than another designer. Now that you've started to get an idea of why you should create a pattern collection and what you might use it for in the future. Let's take a look at the types of patterns that you can create for a collection. The first type of pattern that every collection should contain is a hero print. This is the most complex pattern. This is the star of the show and embodies the theme of your mood board, which we're going to create next. This is really the star of your pattern collection. You can have multiple hero prints. You don't just have to choose one single complex design and also secondary prints are really important. These are detail, they can complement the hero, they can work with some of the other patterns in the collection, but they're not as detailed as the hero patterns, so they're just like one little step down from hero pattern. The next type of pattern is a blender or filler. These are small-scale patterns. They blend really well with the hero and the secondary prints. They're really just compliments to the more complex prints in your collection and we'll look at some ideas for how to create those throughout the class. Something you're probably wondering is how many patterns do I need to create to have a collection? What is officially a collection? So it really varies from industry to industry and it depends on your personal style. I might recommend starting out small and then building up to a larger collection as you get more comfortable with the process. Typically, a full collection has 2-4 complex patterns, so those can be heroes or secondary prints and 8-12 simple patterns or blender filler prints. You can also create a mini collection which has 1-2 complex prints and then 4-8 simple prints. If you look at the mini collection side, you could really have one hero and then for simple prints, that would be a mini collection. If you're feeling overwhelmed by this process, by all means, start with something small and then you may get into it and realize you really like the process and you feel like you can create a few more patterns. So start small buildup with what you're comfortable with and before you know it, you'll be making big collections and having to remove old patterns that you don't like out of the collection, so don't worry right now about the number of patterns. Just get started with the process and you'll see how it really becomes an enjoyable process once you get into it. Also, one thing to note is that not all pattern collections follow the exact rules that I've just covered. There, good guidelines to start with, but in the creative world, in all things, you can always use your personal style to change out the numbers and the sizes and maybe you don't like doing blender filler prints, so there is a lot of flexibility in their, don't feel like you have to follow my formula exactly. I find it helpful to have a formula so that you don't have to do a lot of guessing while I'm working. We want to show you some examples of some of my recent collections so you can get an idea of what I like to include in a collection. This is a geometric inspired many collection and you can see that my hero trend is the most complex. It has the most pattern and lines and color and it's really densely packed. Whereas the secondary prints are still complex, but a little less complex than the hero print. They can support the hero print, but they're not necessarily competing to be the star of the show. Then the blender prints just work well with the hero and secondary print. They're pretty simple, poker dots, lines, triangles. You can see you don't have to spend a ton of time on your blender prints. You really just need to focus on using colors and shapes that compliment your main prints. Here's a collection I did inspired by the year that I lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I took so many pictures and did so many sketches while I was there. I had a lot of material to pull from. You can see I did two different hero prints for this one because I just couldn't decide which one I like more. The first one is more botanical inspired and the second one is inspired by the birds of Thailand and then my secondary prints are two different color versions, of the same pattern. That's one thing to think about, is your hero or your secondary can actually just be two different color versions of the same pattern. My blender prints are just really simple plat forms leaves and they complement the main prints. You can see how important having a color scheme is to this process. It helps tile the patterns together. That's something we'll be working on in the next section. Here's the collection that I'm going to create in the class today. I have to hero prints, two secondary print, which if you look at the secondary prints, they're color versions of each other and then a lot of blender prints. The more pattern collections I create, the bigger my collection's get but also I create a lot of patterns that don't end up in the collection. I think that's a really important part of the process is to make more than you need so that you're able to edit out the pieces that aren't your best work and just use the pieces that really support the collection. We'll look at some ways to do that as we work through the class. Now that you have an idea of what your collection should contain and what you can do with it, let's dig into finding inspiration and choosing a palette. 3. Gathering Inspiration: We're going to start by creating a mood board by pulling together some inspiration and sketches so that you can refer to your mood board as you create your patterns, rather than trying to brainstorm as you work. So let's start by taking a look at some inspiration. So first we need to go to the downloads in resources page for this class. If you go to the class on Skillshare and go to the projects and resources section, you'll see a link for the downloads and resources. Make sure you're using Skillshare in a web browser, not the skill share app. So once you click on that, it'll take you to the downloads in resources page, but you'll see that you need a password to get into that page. I'll show the password on the screen right now. Once you enter that password, you'll see that the page opens and the first section on that page is collection inspiration. So I've gathered a lot of different inspiration resources for you. The first one is a Pinterest board with a ton of different types of patterned styles. The next four are fabric companies that show some beautiful collections, and then the last is the print pattern blog, which always shows new interesting patterns you can check that all the time to stay up-to-date on pattern trends. Of course, when we look at these, we don't want to copy anyone who's on any of these pages. It's really just for getting an idea of what's in a collection, and maybe even getting an idea of what kind of theme you might want to follow for your own collection. So let's start on the Surface Design Pinterest Board. You'll see as you look through this that there are so many different ways that you can go with building a collection or creating patterns. This is a really modern funky style, or you can go more traditional with some plant forms, or this is more of a modern interpretation of a plant form pattern. You can also just go with something geometric, you don't have to represent something specifically. So I recommend that you take some time to scroll through here and maybe get an idea of what fits your personal style, what is speaking to you, maybe make a note of some colors and some shapes that you like. You might just write down things like botanical pastel, or you might write down something like animals, jungle animals, tigers. So maybe just start brainstorming some ideas for what your collection could contain. Of course, for the projects today you can feel free to just copy me if you just want to learn the process, but if you want to go ahead and start building your own collection, this is a great place to start. Back on the downloads and resources page, you can also check out all of these other resources, there is an endless supply of inspiration for pattern collections, so take your time here and find something that really works for your personal style in terms of theme, colors, and the content for your collection. The next section on this page is the mood board resources. So this is the first thing we're going to create today, and I'm going to start here on the vintage image resources page. If you scroll down here, you'll see a huge list of images that you can use as inspiration for your compositions. There's all kinds of different inspiration resources out there, it's just important to check the copyright status of each piece because you want to be sure you're not copying anything that still has an existing copyright. So what I really like to use is the Flickr Commons. So I'm going to click on Flickr Commons. You don't want to search up here because that searches all of Flickr, but down here, I could search something like wild flowers because I know that's going to be the theme of my collection and type search. Then you're going to get all kinds of different pictures of wild flowers, and you may even try some different search terms. If I go back and I type flower illustration, I'm going to get a totally different set of images. So play around with search here, find some images that worked for your personal style. What I'm going to do is just click on each image, tap the downloads button, tap original, and that opens the image. Then you can tap up here on the share button. So for some browsers, you'll use the share button up here. For other browsers, you might tap and hold on the image, or you can just take a screenshot depending on what you want to do. Then you can save this image, you can save it to your Dropbox, to your photos, wherever you would like to save your images. What I like to do is save everything to my photos app, then I go to albums and create an album, and then put all of those images in there. So here's my wildflower inspiration album that just makes it a lot easier to find things on my iPad, and as I'm inserting these into the canvas and affinity, it makes them a lot easier to find. Of course, you can also print these out onto paper. I find that sometimes it's really nice to just unplug and get your sketchbook out, and maybe even sit outside with your inspiration and some paper and just brainstorm a little bit about your pattern. So I do often print out these vintage images. Maybe even hang them up on the wall so that they're inspiring me for a few weeks in a row. So that's one good way to dig deep into your subject matter is be surrounded by it. Have the shapes out or you can see them every time you go to sketch, and that'll help you start getting some ideas for your pattern collection. So let's go ahead and start building our mood board. 4. Building a Mood Board: So before we dive into using affinity to build patterns in a mood board, I wanted to make a note that I do have a beginners class on pattern design in Affinity Designer. If you feel like this class is moving too fast for you or like we skip some steps, you may need to go back to the beginner class and get some of those foundational principles before moving on in this class. In the class, we'll also cover how to import your patterns into Adobe Illustrator if you need an AI file, and how to create half drop and half brick repeat patterns. We're going to create a mood boards so that we have something to reference throughout the pattern building process. What I like to include on my mood board is some inspiration, some sketches, some colors, maybe even some ideas for how some of the patterns might be laid out. Then any notes that I make that could be themes, colors, ideas, whatever comes to you as you're sketching, just put it all down on the page. Let's go ahead and start making our mood board. I'll open Affinity Designer and tap the plus symbol to create a new document, tap new document, and then set the size. It turned down my light, so you can hopefully see this a little bit better. Under the documents settings, I'm going to change the measurement to pixels so that I'm working in pixels, I'll change the width to 3,000 and the height 2,000-3,000, and then the DPI to 300. This doesn't really matter so much. This is just my mood board. That's just a size I like to work with. Work with any size you'd like here. Now I'll tap "Okay". The first thing I want to do is insert my images that I just saved. I have those all on my mood board, I'll just tap the documents menu, tap place image, import from photos, go to that album where I saved all my images, and tap on the first one. Then I like to just tap to insert an image. It says that you can drag to place an image, but I typically just tap, I think it's a little bit easier. I'm just going to repeat that same process with each of my images. Now that I've got all of those on the Canvas, I can just resize each one by making sure the move tool is selected. Tapping on the photo, dragging the corner to make it smaller, and then putting it into place. I'm just going to throw these on the Canvas. This design have to be any specific orientation, I just want to have these nearby as I'm sketching. One nice thing that you can do an affinity is drag all the way across all the images that selects all of them, and you can make them all smaller or bigger at once, just make sure you put one finger down to constrain the proportions. I'm just doing that to leave a little bit of image space over here for my sketches. I'm ready to start sketching. I'm going to create a new layer, tap the layers panel, tap the plus symbol, and tap pixel layer. I need to make sure I'm on my pixel persona, grabbing the brush tool, tapping on the brush menu, and then I'm going to choose a brush. I'm going to go with the natural pencil 2b in the pencil section, just a simple pencil brush. I'm going to start looking at the shapes that are on these inspiration images and seeing what I can do to pull out some of those shapes and simplify them a little bit for a pattern. I really like these shapes that have these little bulbous ends in and this little stick veins here. What I'm going to do is just recreate that over here. They had sharp ends. I didn't really like those sharpens, I'm going to play around with doing rounded ends, and just whatever works for your style here. This is where you're taking your inspiration and turning it into your own ideas. It's not necessarily going to fit exactly what you see here and that's exactly the intention. We want to use this as a starting point, not an ending point. I really like these leaves that are bigger on the bottom and then come to a point, I made a little note of that here. Now I want to include some flower shapes. I really like this flower shape that has five circular sections or five petals, and then these little stamens that come out from the middle. I'm going to create some of those over here. I'm running out of room with my sketching, so I'm going to make myself a little bit more room. What I'll do is tap the documents menu, tap our boards. Then in the layers panel, I want to make sure I'm not selecting anything, so you can just tap the x here or you can deselect by swiping on the layers panel here. I'm going to tap the plus symbol to insert our board. I have to make sure I turn that art board tool on first to be able to see that menu. You can see that changes my layers panel so that now everything is on an art board, and what they can do with that art board is just drag it out like this. I have a little bit more space for my sketching. Now if I tap the move tool again, I'm clearing out that art board section. I can go back to my sketch, tap the move tool. I can move my sketch around. For example, bring one of these images over here if I wanted to see that while I was sketching, go back to my pixel layer, get my brash. Then I can look at this image while I'm sketching that flower. These are really simple sketches. I'm not trying to create professional illustration here. I'm just trying to start getting to know these shapes and start getting my brain moving in that direction of putting wild flowers together on the canvas. If you just sit and think about your collection, you may never come to any great ideas. But something about the sketching process will really get your mind going and start to take you to a place where you could start to visualize, maybe just one of the patterns. Sometimes in the beginning, that's the biggest challenge, is just one pattern. Do whatever it takes to get yourself to that point. Just keep sketching, gathering inspiration until you feel like you can get going. Another thing I'm thinking of as I'm creating this is things that are related to wild flowers. What if I just had some little petals that were floating around, or maybe these are seeds that fall off of the flower. If I think of anything relating to this subject matter, I can make a little note or I can make a little sketch about it, just so I have all of my ideas in one place. I'll tap the Move tool, put have flower back into place. Now I can start playing around with color, there are a lot of different ways to create color palettes. If you go back to the Downloads and Resources page, you'll see that I have a class on creating limited palettes, I have a blog post here with some ideas for creating palettes. Also in the beginning, surface design for Affinity Designer class, I also cover a lot of ways to make color pallets. If you're not sure how to make color palettes, there's a bunch of resources for you there. You can also just sample some colors from your inspiration board. If I tap the color menu, drag onto one of these colors. I'm going to get this pink down here. I've got that eyedropper tool, I'm just grabbing this color right here, and then if I tap on it, that puts it in my palette here, making sure I'm still on the pixel persona, creating a new pixel layer, and let's grab a nice thick brush. I'm just going to grab this brush in the Ink section called Comics Ink Pen. Once I've got that color saved, I can start placing my colors down here. I'm going to create some more space on my art board so I have a little more room to work with. If I just tap on the art board, tap on our boards in the Documents menu, I can just drag to make this a little bit bigger. Anytime you want to increase the size of your art board, you just need to click documents and then art boards, that looks good. I'll make a new pixel layer, make sure I've got that brush tool and start drawing. Let's do that again, I'll grab that eyedropper tool, sample a different color. Let's get one of those greens and add that. That's just one way to make a color palette, but you can look at the downloads in Resources page if you need more ideas for color. I've actually gone ahead and saved a color palette for this pattern collection. I'll go ahead and put that down on my mood board. You can see I saved a lot of different colors, but you can work with as many colors as you'd like. I'm only going to use all the colors in my hero pattern, and the rest of the patterns will just contain maybe two to three colors. It's different for every single collection and you just have to decide what works best for your personal style. One thing I like to do here is save this color palette, so it's in my saved palettes. The easy way to do that, is tap the hamburger menu on the color menu, tap Add Application Palette. That means you're adding a palette that will show up anytime you use this application. Whereas if you tap Add Document Palette, you're only going to be able to see that palate when you look at this document. I'm going to click Add Application Palette, it's going to come up as unnamed. I'll tap the hamburger menu, tap Rename Palette. I'll call that wildflower collection and tap, Okay. Then I can do the same thing, grab that eyedropper tool, hover over a color. That puts that color in the center, and I'll tap, Add Current Fill to Palette. Do that one more time, drag the color down here. It shows up on that dot, tap one time, and it shows up here. Then I can tap Add Current Fill to Palette. This is really helpful when you're building a pattern because you don't want to have to go find colors as you're working. I really recommend saving this and maybe even creating a few palettes. You may change your mind as you work and realize that you really want to try a different color version. It's nice to just have some color sets that are your personal style saved in here. I have four or five of those, at least just for this one collection. You may think about going ahead and building your color library and affinity. 5. Sketching Pattern Blocks: This can be enough. This can be your mood board. Or if you want to go a little bit further, maybe you're starting to get some ideas for your pattern, we can open the layers panel and create a new vector layer and make some squares to fit our pattern. First, we are going to need a little bit more space on this mood board. I'm going tap the documents menu, tap art boards. Tap on that art board in the layers panel and then just bring this over, so I have a little bit more space for some patterns. Let's go to that new vector layer that we created. Go to the vector persona, tap the rectangle tool and just create a rectangle. I'm going to put one finger down to constrain the proportions and make that a square. Tap the move tool and get that into place. Let's give that no fill and a black stroke. Then we just have to go to the stroke menu here and increase the size of that stroke. I just need a little thin line so I can see the boundaries of my pattern. I can tap the three dot menu and tap duplicate. If I make sure magnetics is on down here, I can move that over and it'll be exactly in line with the other one. Tap duplicate again, and now I've got three of those. Try to select all three of those, duplicate, move that down, and duplicate again. Now, I've got nine sections here where I could start drawing my patterns. Let's create a new pixel layer. Back to the pixel persona, back to the brush tool, and I'm going to find that pencil tool again. I'll get that natural 4B pencil with black as my color. I'm just going to start thinking about how I could lay out some of these patterns. So I might look at the shape, for example, and think, how could I use that shape in a pattern? It could be scattered around the page, it could be overlapping. So they could actually lie on top of each other and really just fill up this canvas totally. That could be an interesting pattern. I'm not going to spend a ton of time worrying about if that's perfect or not, I'm just going to move on. I also liked my little seed shapes that I created earlier. I think I might have a pattern that's more of a filler pattern that is just seed shapes, and maybe I'll put some little circles on the inside of those. You can see this isn't an exact science. I'm just playing around with the shapes that I've drawn, turning them into a pattern and thinking about how they might be laid out on the canvas. I'm just going to continue the same process and speed up my video while I brainstorm a little bit about this collection. Now I've got a few ideas for how I can get started with my pattern collection, and even if you only have one pattern in mind, this is still a great place to start. So don't worry so much if you don't know how all of your patterns are going to be laid out at this point. Really, if you can just get some shapes, get a starting point, this is a great place to get started and open up your first canvas. The next thing I'm going do is just save this by tapping the documents menu, tapping export, and then I just use PNG, leave the default settings. Click share, save Image. I'm just saving that to my photos. Now that we have our mood board created, let's go ahead and get started on our first pattern. 6. Vector vs Raster Patterns: Next we're going to create a pattern with some overlapping elements. I recommend choosing some elements from your mood board that would work well overlapped on top of each other. Or of course he could just follow along with me and use the same shapes that I'm using. We're going to start by creating a new canvas, but I want to mention one thing before I do that. The size of your canvas depends a lot on what your final use is for this project. For example, if you're using vectors, you can work at any size because vectors can be resized to any size at all. Whereas if you decide, you really want to use elements that you made in procreate for your repeat, or some other raster based drawing program, then you really have to know exactly what size you want your canvas to be right now. If you tap the plus symbol and choose the pixel dimensions, your raster images need to be a set size. I'm going to be working in vector, which is typically what I do for patterns because I never know what size I'm going to need and I don't want to get into a situation where a company asked me for a certain size and I don't have it and I have to recreate it or something like that. So I always work in vectors. But if you're going to work in raster based images using procreate brushes for example, then the size here should be whatever size you're going to need in the end. We'll talk about that more in just a moment. But let's go ahead and create our first pattern art board. I'll tap the "plus symbol," tap "New Document." I'll choose Pixels as my document measurement, and I'm going to work at 2000 by 2000 pixels and you can change the DPI here to 300. So this is the size I work with when I create new patterns. I can resize this to any size later on. I'm not so worried about the size right now. But 2000 by 2000 pixels for me tends to be a good balance between not overloading the program with too much information, and not building something so small that it would never be usable for any use. Then I'll tap "Okay." Again, I need to get that second art board. So I'll tap the "Documents menu," tap "Art boards," insert art board, and then I can drag to create a new art board and just drag that to any size. Go to the Transform menu. On the width, I'm going to do double the size of this original art board. So art board 1 is 2000 by 2000. I'm going to make art board 2, 4000 by 4000. I can tap the "Move tool," get that a little bit closer to this other art board. This will be my workspace, art board 1, and this will be my previous space. Again I go through this in a lot more detail in my first class. So check that out if this is going way too fast for you. Art board 1, I'm selecting that, tapping to create a new vector layer. Tapping the Rectangle tool, and just drawing a rectangle that fits that canvas. Then I'm going to make sure that shape is sized to perfectly fit that canvas. I can check that by tapping the "Transform menu" and making sure when this rectangle selected, it says 2000 by 2000, and the position is zero zero. That looks good. Let's just change the color of the shapes so it's easier to see on this canvas. I've got my rectangle here. I want to make that into my live preview. In the layers panel, I'm going to tap the "Symbols menu," tap the "Hamburger menu," add symbol from selection. Now that's glowing orange in the layers panel. If I tapped a three.me and tap duplicate, make sure the Move Tool is selected. I can shift that over on to art board 2, and make sure that that is right on the corner of art board 2, duplicate it, shift it over. I'm making sure that Magnetics tool is on so that this is perfectly in place. With this rectangle, I should see 2000 by 2000 as the dimensions, and 2000 by 0 as the position. I'm going to duplicate that first rectangle again. Put it down in the bottom left corner, and duplicate it again and put it in the bottom right corner. I'm always checking that transform menu to make sure I'm not one or two pixels off on the position. This one should be 0 and 2000. This one should be 2000 and 2000. Let's just check to make sure this is all working properly. If I go to art board 1 and I tap on that rectangle, if I change its color, it should also change the color of art board 2. That's working correctly. I'm also going to create a vector layer, drag it into that symbol sections so it's glowing orange. Get any tool, draw something, and make sure that's showing up on art board 2. As long as everything looks good here, we will consider the the master document. I'll go back to my gallery, tap on the "Hamburger menu,"" tab "Rename," rename that master. Now I can just duplicate that over and over for my new patterns that I'll create, rather than having to do that process over and over. Before we start placing elements down on the canvas, I want to show you options for both vector and raster patterns, and talk about the differences between using a vector or a raster pattern this is a pros and cons lists so that you can decide what's going to work best for your uses. I like to use vectors because they're infinitely scalable. I never know what size I'm going to need so this is really important for me. Also if you're planning on working with companies or having your work license, it's important to have your work available at any size so that whatever they ask for you have it ready. Also when you work with vectors, color changing is much faster and the easier. You can easily create a whole new color version over your entire collection really quickly when you work in vectors. Whereas if you're working in raster images, it's going to take you a while to change your colors. The last point is that many companies require vectors. If your ultimate goal is to work with companies and have your work license, it's important to know how to create vectors. When it comes to raster images, you can have more texture options, especially if you've already purchased a bunch of procreate brushes, and you have some procreate brushes that you really love and want to use in a pattern. Also raster images are fine for print on demand and online uses. If your plan is to upload is boom flowers, societies six things like that, then raster images are fine. You don't have to have vector images for that. Also, you can use your procreate brushes. If you have like some watercolor brushes or washed brushes that you really love, you can use those in a pattern. Some people who really love their procreate brushes will probably prefer to make their pattern elements in procreate. I'm going to be demonstrating making the pieces and affinity. But if your plan is to make them in procreate, you can just create your elements however you like to create them in procreate, I would recommend making each element on a separate layer so that if you decide later that you want to change the colors, you have everything on a separate layer. Whatever you're using, watercolor guage or anything like that, put every color on a new layer so that you can go back into these later and change colors if you need to. Once you create your shape, whatever it is, and I recommend doing each individual shape on its own canvas like this, you can remove the background layer, tap the "Actions menu," tap "Share," save as a PNG and tap save image. What that's doing is saving this as an image with a transparent background. If I go back to affinity, open one of my canvases, tap the "Documents menu," place image, import from photos and grab that image that I just saved. I can tap and put that down on the canvas. One reason I like to tap in affinity is because it puts the image down at the exact size that it really is. If you put your image down and it looks like that, that might be a little bit too small. So I made my image at 3000 by 3000 pixels, so it fits fine on this canvas. It's really big. But if you made your elements really small in procreate and they would show up small on the canvas. That's something to consider when you create items in procreate. They need to be very large so they'll work well on this canvas. If you use this process using pixel images to build your collection, then you'll be using the same process as me. Moving forward, you'll just have to import all of these images one at a time so that they're on your art board. But as you know, I'm going to be working in vectors, so I won't be doing that process in this class. So I'll just delete that image. I'm going to go ahead and insert my mood board right here so I can see what I'm doing and get some ideas as I work. 7. Building Pattern Elements: First I'll create another Artboard by going to the document's menu, tapping Artboard and tapping Insert Artboard and it put it over here but I'm going to tap the Move tool and move it over here. Then I can tap the Documents menu, Place Image, import from photos, and stick my mood board in there. This can be really small. You can always zoom in. I just need it as a reference here under my main pattern. So the first shape I'm going to use is this plant shape here. I'm going to go over to my Artboard and get rid of this super bold color because it's a little bit distracting. I'll change the Stroke and the Fill. Now I can create a new pixel layer. Go to the Pixel Persona, tap brushes, and grab one of those pencils. Get black as my color and just start drawing. What I like to do is draw my shapes separately and then overlap them as I create the vectors. Right now I'm really just getting an idea of what shapes I want to turn into vectors. I find that's a lot easier to do if I start with a sketch. If you're ready to go and you know exactly what your shapes are going to look like and you feel like you don't really need to sketch, then go for it. Sometimes I'll just dive in if I feel really confident about a shape but typically I will go through this process of just sketching out each shape. Even though I know I want to use this exact leaf shape, I still want to have a few versions of it. I don't want my pattern to be boring and have just one or two shapes on it. I want to have some interesting variation and movement. So I'm trying to make each plant form just a little bit different, even though it's kind of the same theme over and over. So I'm happy with these. I think that's going to be enough to build my pattern. Now I can create a new vector layer. Make sure that's on my Artboard one and I can go back to the vector persona. I'm going to be working with the pencil tool. I cover a lot about these tools in my first class, so if you're not familiar with all of these vector drawing tools, you may want to check out that first class but I'm just going to dive right in here. So I think I'm going to start by making the stem, and then I'll move on to the petals or leaves. I want to make sure I've got the color I want to work with and down here with the pencil tool settings, I'm going to turn on, Use Fill, so my Fill and my Stroke to be the same color or you can just turn off your Stroke and just use a fill. You could use the Brush tool for this, you could use so many different tools for this. It really just depends on your personal style and how you like to draw. So we cover some reasons you might use one tool or another in the first class, so we won't dive into that here. I drew my shape and now I just need to fix my vectors a little bit because they're a little messy. I've got this big weird indentation right here. I'm just going to tap on a node and tap Delete until I get rid of all of those nodes that are just looking weird at this point. I always go through and check my nodes as I work. I think some people like to do it the opposite way. They draw their vectors and then they go back and check their nodes. You can do whatever works for your style here. I find that if I don't check it as I work, I'll often forget, and that can be a big mess. You definitely don't want to send something like that to a client or a company and they open your file and the vectors just look crazy, so I just do that as I work. I'll just continue this same process, making all my stems for each of these leaves. Here's another example of a vector that got out of control. I've got a crossed path here. I'll just delete paths until that looks right. Also, it got way too thick right there, so I'm going to thin that out. So just taking one shape at a time. We're going to reuse these shapes over and over in this pattern, so it's important to spend enough time on each shape so that you don't end up with a lot of wonky shapes on your canvas. But it may be your style that you're purposefully creating wild shapes. If that's your style, then embrace it and do it all over the canvas rather than just in one place. That's the thing, it's okay to be messy as an artist or a designer, but it needs to look intentional. To make it look intentional, you just do it over and over in different parts of the composition, and then everyone assumes that you did it on purpose. Now I'm just going to check for consistency. I want all of these to pretty much look the same. If I see any that just are way too wide or way too thin, I would get rid of those but these look pretty good to me. So now I can go through and start doing my leaves. I'm going to start my leaf where this other vector is. That way, I don't have this weird ending point. For example, if I start right here and end up here, then you'll often end up with these weird little areas like this curve in that you're going to have to fix every single time you draw one of these. So what I do is try to hide my vector start and end points in some little location and that's why I like creating these stems first because that gives me secret place to hide those pieces. I'm trying to do these shapes about the same size each time. I'm basically following my sketch but not perfectly. You'll see as you create these, you might get ideas as you work, so don't feel like you have to stick with what you originally put down on the page. I'm happy with how these shapes look. I can go make that sketch layer invisible or just click on it and delete it. If you look at my Layers panel, you can see we've got some chaos going on here. We've got a lot of different pieces. When I go to re-color and shift uses around, that's going to be a big pain. So what I want to do is group these shapes so that they're functioning as individual objects. What you can do is select multiple shapes. For example, if you tap the Move tool and just drag over a set of these, you can see this is made of four different shapes, the stem and three leaves, but I want it to be one big shape. So I'll tap the three dot menu and tap Add. Now this is one shape and if I tap my nodes, you can see exactly how it just turned it into one single shape. I like to do that because it just makes it way cleaner on my layers panel and way easier to recolor. Now that I've done that one, I'll just make it invisible so I can focus on the others. I'll select everything in this group, three dot menu, add, make it invisible. So just going through one at a time and turning these into single shapes. When you drag, you have to start off the canvas, so somewhere outside of your little rectangle. Then if you make those invisible as you go, it just makes it a lot easier to select the remaining pieces. Now I've got several nice shapes to work with, and I can start moving those around the canvas. 8. Creating an Overlapping Pattern: As you might know from my last class, I like starting with the corners or the edges. Let's just start by sticking this little guy in the corner. Turn it to curve, get it into an interesting orientation, duplicate, and then I can start building my repeat. I'm going to open the Transform menu, tap the x position and tap plus 2,000, because this is a 2,000 by 2,000 pixels Canvas. Go back to that first shape, and I like to do that in the layers panel. I find that if you select stuff on the Canvas, sometimes you can move it a little bit and that messes up your whole repeat. I never do that. I always select using my layers panel. Duplicate again y-axis plus 2,000 and same process. Plus 2,000 on the y-axis, plus 2,000 on the x-axis. I also like to group those. I'm selecting all four of those pieces that are on the corner and tapping group. Now, if I need to shift that a little bit, they function as one set, so it's really easy to move them around. Let's repeat that same process, and start building over here in this corner. I'm trying to keep this overlapping random. That looks good. I'll start with this one on this side, duplicate it x-axis plus 2,000. On the top, duplicate it y-axis plus 2,000. I'm starting to get to the point where I need more pieces. What I can do is just select everything and duplicate it, move it over here. Then I've just got some extra pieces to work with. I can select those one at a time and just get those into place. When I'm using reccuring elements like this, I like to flip them horizontally in the transform panel, or maybe even just rotate them a little bit so that they don't look like the exact same shape over and over. I'm just going to continue this same process, putting these little pieces over each other, overlapping them on the edge, and getting to a place that's tightly packed but not so packed that I can't see the shapes. I'll take just a few minutes to do that. I'm also trying to create some variation with how I place these on the edge. This platform here, only a little piece of it is on the edge, whereas this one, almost the entire thing is off the edge. I'm trying to do that because I really want the viewer to not see the repeat line. If I do it this way where I have different things going on on the edge, it's a lot easier to hide your repeat scene. I'm happy with how this looks. I feel like it has a lot of randomness to it and there's some bigger open spaces where I want to put some filler element. Once you're happy with how you're overlapping repeat is filled out, this is a great time to start experimenting with some different filler elements. 9. Filler Elements: Let's select the clean engraving brush in the engraving section. We can just do some little strokes. We could do some little circles. Although if I was going to do circles, I probably grab the pencil tool and make some oddly shaped circles, so that they match the strange shapes that I'm using for these petals. The only thing to think about if you do shapes like this is that you really need to zoom in and clean these up. For example, I need to make sure we don't have this weird shape right here. I'll just go through and clean each of those up a little bit. Then once you get a feel of those and you're happy with how they look, you could swipe to select the monolayers panels by each one. Grid out down menu, tap duplicate, tap to move tool, and then move those into place. Then we can move those one at a time like this. I like to create these little interesting filler elements. I think if you zoom out and let's group all of these. I'm just going to swipe each one and tap group and drop that onto my symbols layer. Now it shows up over here. It just had a nice interesting field to this part of the canvas. I can shift that around so it fits nicely here, and then let's just duplicate that. Move it down here and then within this group, we can double-click on it to shift these around so we don't have the exact same configuration that we had in that other batch. I'm always thinking about ways to add variation to my patterns. I don't want every little piece of look the same, so I'm working to try to shift things around and make it feel different. You can see from the preview, what's weird about this is it's like one, two. It's like creating a line. If I can move this around or add some more, it would really help break it up. I'm just going to repeat the same process, duplicating this group of dots, moving into somewhere else, maybe adding some, deleting some, until we've got a nice bit of variation here. This is where the preview becomes really helpful because I'm looking for dead spots here. It looks like there's this big open area and I could shift this down a little bit. I'm just looking at where that section is over here, and I'm going to shift things around until that feels better on the preview. This is why I love working with this preview because sometimes it just takes like a little centimeters shift to fix a big issue in the pattern. I take a lot of time to do that with patterns like this. I'm happy with how this looks. I would probably move on to the next pattern at this point, and maybe come back to this one later to check everything. But at this point we could also do some color changing. Let's for example just select all the elements on the canvas. I'm just going to swipe to select all those groups of dots and all those platforms. Then we can play around with various colors. We can do the same thing with our background rectangle. I've gotten no stroke and a red fill. This is another reason why it's so great to work in vectors because if you had made your pattern and procreate and now you want to do some color changing, you would have a lot of work on your hands. I really like to do it with this process because it's a lot less work overall. 10. Using the Collection Planner: I'm happy with how this pattern turned out, so I'm going to go ahead and add it to my collection planner. You can pick up the collection planner in the Downloads and Resources section. I've given you two options here with all of the class downloads. You can either save everything to your Dropbox, which is definitely going to be the easiest way to do this, or you could save every individual object that is a download for this class. I really recommend doing the download to your Dropbox option. Dropbox is free, and it makes it really easy to import things in from affinity. If I tap Save All The Files to Your Dropbox, it's going to ask you to log into Dropbox if you're not already logged in. Once you logged in, you'll see Liz Brown shared this collection with you, and you can tap, continue to website, and then you'll see all of the downloads for this class. You can really easily add this to your Dropbox by clicking this Download menu and clicking Save to my Dropbox. Then all of these files are just going to be in there, and you don't have to save each individual one. The one we're going to use first is called collection planner. If I go back to my main gallery page, tap the Plus symbol, tap Import From Cloud, then I can get that collection planner, and that is an AF design or affinity document, and that's going to open my collection planner. I want to import my pattern onto the collection planner, so the first thing I'll do is save it, tap the Documents menu, tap Export, change the area to Artboard1, because I don't need to save all those different art boards. Make sure the file type is PNG. I find that's the best file type to use for these documents, so we've got Artboard1, PNG. You can set the size here if you want to change the size, but I'm going to leave that as is. Click Share and save image. Now, I've saved that to my photos. If I go back to the collection planner, I can click Place Image, Import from photos, and then select that photo. Now, I need to decide what this pattern is. Is this a hero? Is this the secondary? Is it a blender? I can change it later, this isn't set in stone. I think it's going to be a blender. What I'm going to do is tap on the section where I want that pattern to go, so I'm going to put it right here. That's going to show me where that rectangle is. So it's right here being selected in the layers panel. If I take that pattern and drag it onto that rectangle, you'll see that it only shows up on that rectangle. So that's a mask, recreating a mask of that pattern. Then we can resize it and play around with it here, and as we add more and more patterns to this, it's going to really fill out our collection and help us see how these different patterns work together. Each time I finish a new pattern, I just throw it onto this document, place it where I think it should go, and then I am getting a bird's-eye view of my pattern collection rather than just looking at the individual elements. Let's look at a few variations that you could do on this same pattern. You don't have to overlap your elements, you can just create shapes and scatter them around the canvas. Here, I just created two different simple shapes and scattered them around and use two different colors. Same thing here, I used the dot pattern with a few different colors for my color palette, and those work really nicely in my collection as a blender print. I'll go ahead and place those two patterns also in my collection planner. Now, I've got three different patterns in my collection planner, and I'm starting to get an idea of how these will be playing off each other. Let's go ahead and move on to our next pattern type, so we can add some more patterns to this planner. 11. Creating Connecting Elements: For this next project, we're going to create a vine pattern that has elements that connect throughout the repeat block. This looks a lot more difficult to create than it really is, so I want to show you an easy process for creating connecting elements across your canvas. I'm going to start on the gallery page here and open one of these master document copies that I created earlier. Let's go ahead and go to the rectangle on artboard 1 and change that to just a basic color, could be cream or white, whatever is easiest to see. Then I'm going to create a new pixel layer to start doing some sketching. Go to my Pixel Persona, make sure I've got my brush tool selected, and let's grab one of those pencils. I'll just get the natural 4B pencil and get black as my color, and then I'm just going to start sketching where I want these vines to be. We have to think about with a repeat pattern when we have one shape that touches the edge, on the opposite side of the canvas, we need to have another vine touching that same edge. I'm just going to go straight down here and have a line that goes up like this, or let's go up like this, and that can end right here. We could also do one that goes across the canvas like that, and then we need to look across here, and we'll see that we need another vine right there to connect to this piece. This doesn't have to be perfectly in line with how it's going to be, but it needs to be close so that you have an idea of where your lines are going to start and end. This line here needs to meet something, let's just bring it down here and it can connect like that. I'm just playing around here, I don't know exactly how my vines will be in the end. I'm just trying to play around with some options, so I'll take just a few minutes to do that. I'm happy with this basic layout. Of course, it doesn't have to be exactly like this once I get into making my vectors, but I'll create a new vector layer and make sure that's on artboard 1 and it's glowing orange. I'll go back to my Vector Persona, make sure the pencil tool is selected, and then I'm going to turn on the stroke but not the fill. What that's going to do is give me a uniform line, and so we turn off that fill. Then I can make that line any width that I want. I'm going to figure out here how thick I want these vines to be, so let's go with that it's 3.4 points. Now I can start drawing, making sure I'm on that new layer. I've got the point size that I want, and I'm just going to draw my first vine. That vine touches the top of the canvas, so it needs to also touch the bottom of the canvas. What I'll do is tap once on the three dot menu, tap Duplicate, go over to the Transform Menu, and make sure the move tool is selected. On the y-axis I'll tap plus 2,000, because my canvas is 2,000 by 2,000. Now I know that my vine needs to connect right here on the bottom, so I'm just going to leave that as it is for now as a reference and continue with my other vines. Back to my pencil tool, this one is going to connect all the way from the top to the bottom. This has two connection points, it connects to the top so it needs to meet here, it connects to the bottom, so it needs to meet here, so we're going to have to duplicate this twice. I'll tap the Move tool, tap the three dot menu, Duplicate, on the y-axis in the Transform menu plus 2,000, so it's right there. Back to that same line that we just drew, duplicate, and now we are going the opposite direction, minus 2,000, and now it's going to meet right here. I'm basically just making some little notes for myself about where these vines need to connect. I can't touch these because they touch the edge. I can only add onto them, so we'll be doing that once we fill out our main vines, we can start adding onto those so that they continue across the repeat. Let's just add in a few more vines here. I'm going to do one that starts right here and goes over to the edge like that, so that touches the edge and needs to repeat over here, duplicate it. Tap the Move tool, plus 2,000 on the x-axis, so it's right over here. Back to the pencil tool, and let's do right here. We're going to meet this piece that's already here. Go off the canvas, and you can see this meeting place is not perfect, so what I'll do is just play around with these nodes a little bit to get them close. One rule when you're putting something on the edge of the canvas like this is that you can touch any node that's past the edge of the canvas. So I can't touch that node because that is the node that affects this area on the edge of the canvas, but I can touch any node after that. I'll show you an example of what I mean here. If I have a line that goes off the edge, you can see all these different nodes. This node is the only node that controls how this meets the edge of the canvas. All these other nodes, if I move them, they don't affect that area that's touching the edge of the canvas, so it's okay to play with these, It's okay to delete these, even up to this point, but it's not okay to mess with that node, that's the one we have to preserve. I'm following that rule with this piece here. I'm not touching that node, but I can play around with this one and the one that I just added. That's a pretty good seamless transition right there. I could also put a leaf here to disguise that a little bit, but for now I'm just going to leave that as it is. I've got my vine that goes off the canvas here, duplicate that, tap the Move tool, minus 2000 so it's over here, and now let's just add in a few more filler vines that are just weaving in and out. That one touches the edge so it needs to be duplicated. So you can see I'm just going one piece at a time making sure that if I let something run off the canvas that I repeat it correctly. Let's look at our repeat here, so you want to make sure that your lines are continuous. I can see one line that I haven't worked on yet and it's this one. I need to go up here and make this little tail connects to something, so I could make it connect to this vine or this vine, so I might just play around with connecting it here and then zooming out and looking at my overall preview and just seeing how that looks, so you can step back and step forward, two fingers, three fingers to just see how that addition looks. I like that edition so I'm going to stick with that. I feel like what we need is one little vine that goes across here to bridge that gap right here. I'm going to find that area and add in a vine. I like how that looks. I'll duplicate it, y-axis plus 2,000. It looks like it's also running onto this corner, so I need to duplicate it again minus 2,000, so just have to be really aware of where these are touching the edge and then triple check over on your artboard 2 to make sure nothing is getting out of line. I'm happy with those vines, I'm going to go ahead and make my sketch layer invisible and now just do a little bit of cleanup, so that might be something like this, where this didn't meet this vine properly just clean that up. It might be something like this where I just got a little bit of wiggling going on, so you just need to be really aware of where your nodes are and not touching any nodes that are right on the edge of the canvas. Another great thing about working with vectors something that we could do right now is tap the Move tool and select all of these vectors and if they don't all select you can swipe on the Layers panel to make sure they all get selected, and then we can go to the Stroke menu and play around with the thickness of those. That's another great thing about vectors, something you could never do with raster images is adjust the thickness of lines like this as you're working. I'm going to go with a pretty thin line because I want these leaves that I'm adding to be a really bold contrast. 12. Creating Variation: One thing I like to always do as I work is group things that are alike. All of these vines obviously go in a set together. I'm going to select them all and press "Group." Now, they can be moved as a set and I don't have to worry so much about accidentally breaking them up. I'm going to create a new vector layer and start adding in some leaves. You can sketch these beforehand, or you could just go for it. I'm going to turn off my "Stroke" and turn on my "Fill." Making sure right here it says, "Use Fill" with the pencil tool selected. I've got a black fill and no stroke. Just going to draw these little leaf shapes. I'm going to try to overlap these a lot and try to get that overlapping to look really intentional. You can zoom out as you work and make sure you're doing those leaves in the size that you're intending to, whatever that size is. Of course, with this vine process, you don't have to use leaves. This could be any kind of long thin thing that connects different parts of your pattern. It can be abstract. It could be wires, chords, strings, if you were doing a fabric related pattern. Really feel open with how you interpret these prompts, especially if you do the challenge at the end. The prompts are really just meant to get you started and then you can really go crazy with the finishing of them. I like to get a little bit haphazard with my leaves. You can see the difference when I go down the vine like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 versus when I actually just randomly skip around the canvas. You get a totally different feel this way, so maybe try both and see what works for your style. I'm just going to repeat the same process, adding leaves all over the place and trying to do a pretty clean connection to my vine. They're not all going to be perfect, but if I see something like this, where the two vines didn't quite connect properly, that's a perfect place to throw a leaf. You may run into a spot where you really need to put something on the edge, which of course is perfectly fine. We just need to duplicate it and make sure it's repeated on the other side of the canvas. There's that leaf on this side and that side. As I fill this canvas in more and more, I'm going to run into some areas like that where I need to stick a leaf on the edge of the canvas. One thing you'll notice is that you can't use the transform studio unless you have the "Move Tool" selected, so that's one thing to keep in mind if you're having trouble moving an object, it may be that you just don't have the "Move Tool" selected yet. You can move your object and then tap back to your pencil tool, and then you can use your pencil again. Back to your "Move Tool," and then duplicate and move the object. You can also duplicate multiple items at once. I just created two leaves on the edge of the canvas. To save myself a little time, I'm going to do them both at the same time. I created each of the leaves, now I can tap on one to select it. Put down one finger and tap on the other. Now I'm selecting both of them, you can tell because there's that big box around them. Tap the three dot menu, tap "Duplicate. " Make sure that "Move Tool" is selected, minus 2,000, and then both of those show up on the left. You can save yourself quite a bit at a time by doing multiple objects at once. At this point, I'm zooming out a lot to get a bigger view of my pattern. It's really hard to tell on the single repeat blocks what exactly is going on, whereas when you use that preview you can get a much better idea of the overall layout of your pattern. This is another reason I like working with vectors in Affinity Designer, is that you can actually draw off the canvas and then the shape still exists off the canvas, whereas in Procreate, you've probably noticed if you let something go off the canvas or move it off the canvas, it's gone forever. I find that really frustrating when making a repeat pattern because I need to go through this process of shifting and moving and changing colors in order to get to a good repeat pattern, whereas if I'm doing on Procreate, I need to know exactly what everything's going to look like in the end. That just doesn't work with my process at all. I'm also just doing a little bit of clean up, if I find any nodes that just look weird or creating some little blip on the vines, I'm just going to fix those as I zoom around. 13. Grouping and Color Versions: I'm happy with this overall vine layout right now. I want to add in some more elements and see how they work with this pattern. Before I do that, I want to group all of these leaves onto the same layer. The easiest way to do that is make my vines layer invisible, in my vines group that I created earlier. Once that's invisible, I can tap the move tool and I can select all of these leaves. You may have to manually select some of them, if they don't all select. Just scan through and make sure they're all highlighted and then tap "Group". Now we've got a leaf group and a vines group. That's going to make your life so much easier when you get to the re-coloring stage. My motto is group as you go. Don't wait until the end and try to group everything because you're going to be giving yourself a lot of extra work. I'm grabbing the pencil tool again, getting a new color and I'm just going to stick some little flowers in here. Of course, you can sketch these ahead of time. I'm pulling these from my inspiration board. I had these just simple little, almost tulip shapes. But of course, very abstracted. I'm just going to stick these all around the Canvas. Am not worried so much about them perfectly meeting my vine. Of course, I'm going to try to do some that go off the Canvas, so then I'll have to repeat those on the other side of the Canvas. Again, I'm zooming out a lot and looking at my overall view of the Canvas before moving on and creating more flowers. I don't want to accidentally create some weird pattern that I'm going to have to fix later. I'm just going to check things as I work. I'm going to keep my flowers sparse. I like how that looks. I'm just going to add in some little filler dots like I did with the last pattern. These dots are just going to help everything feel cohesive. The first thing I'll do is just group all of these flowers that I just created, group as you go, creating a new vector layer and I'm going to put these dots down. I can use the pencil tool for this, if I turn off the fill, turn off that thing that says use fill, then for the stroke, I'm going to choose black as my color. That's going to allow me to do some little dots and what I like about doing dots with a stroke is that I can then change the size of the dots. Another great thing about making your patterns in vectors because let's say, I get this deal from a client and they say we love this pattern. We just wish the dots were a little smaller. That would be a lot of extra work for me, if I hadn't already added these. But not just client work but your own work. There may be days when you think it looks good like this and then you realize, this would look way better with some smaller dots or some bigger dots. With this process, you can just go into that group and really quickly adjust all of these at once. I'll just continue the same process around the Canvas. I'm happy with how this pattern turned out but obviously, take your time here, play around with color. The next thing I would do, which you probably can guess because this is what I do every time, is make my other groups invisible, tap the "Move tool", select all of those dots, scroll through and make sure they're all selected, press "Group" and now I have all of those dots in a group. This grouping process gives me so much freedom in the coloring process. Let's go to our flower group and change the fill to pink or gold. Now I can play around with that. I could also, if I wanted to make these flowers a little more chunky, add a stroke. They don't look great like that but you get the idea. This process of working with vectors, allows you a lot more freedom and flexibility when we get to this coloring stage. Let's play around with the leaf color. I'm clicking on the leaf group and on the fill, I'm going to change those colors. We could do green, we could do pink. That's a nice contrast. Just something to keep in mind if you're afraid of trying vectors, here's some great examples of why this can be so helpful. Let's also play around with the dot size for these. We got those dots. I'm going to go to my stroke studio and just slowly increase and decrease those. I might go over to my art board too because I like looking at that bigger view and we can really see what size is going to look best there. I think that looks good. That's 5.5. It's a really nice contrast with the size of the leaves and flowers and so this is where you can just play around with your pattern and maybe you want to go back to your gallery, duplicate this and try a few different color versions. I pretty much do this with every single pattern. I finish the pattern and then I duplicate it and start playing around with other color versions because once you get a color version you like, you may not want to mess with that, you want to just keep it how it is. That's one option for just creating some color versions without losing everything you've already done. There's our red and pink version. I like that for maybe napkins or notebook. Obviously you can keep going with this process. You could do any kind of leaves, any kind of flowers or not botanical at all, it could be some totally different style. Here's a pattern where I did the exact same process but I did way less leaves and added way more flowers and more colors. You can think about this as just being a process for learning how to create connecting patterns that we've across the Canvas but then you can apply that to so many different pattern styles. I'm going to go in and add these to my collection planner by exporting our board 1, save image. Just like we did before, place image, get that into size. I'm going to call this a secondary pattern. It's detailed but it's not as detailed as it could be, so I'll drag that onto one of these secondary blocks. This is just temporary. I don't have to keep these on the same spots. This may end up being a hero pattern. This may end up being a secondary pattern. Right now we're just getting them all together, pulling them onto one canvas and keeping them in the same spot, so we can judge how they work together. 14. Applying Overall Textures: Next I want to show you how to apply seamless textures to your repeat patterns. I'm going to share some textures with you that I've already created but I also want to show you how to make your own texture so that you can create some that work for your personal style. I recommend choosing any of the repeat patterns that you've created so far. Just pick your favorite and we'll play around with adding some textures to it. First I just want to show you an example of what I mean by adding textures to your repeat. If I zoom in here and turn some of these textures on that I've created, you can see we can layer multiple repeats. We can do just one by itself. Here's a couple together. There are endless options when it comes to using textures. I will show you this quick process for creating these in your repeat pattern. First, I'll show you how to insert the textures that I've already created for you. First we'll tap the plus symbol and tap pixel layer to create a new pixel layer and I just want to make sure that layer is above everything else on our board one. Anything else I've created on that art board should be below this new pixel layer. Next, I'll tap the Documents menu, place image, and then import from cloud. This is where it's great to have these in your Dropbox. It will probably start you out on a screen, something like this and you can tap Dropbox and then find that folder in your Dropbox. You can grab any of these documents that are called, "seamless texture". There's five total. I'll just grab this number four here, I'll tap on that and then I can just tap once to place that on my image, so you can see it places it as large as it is. You want to be sure any texture that you use is larger than your canvas or the same size, but you wouldn't want to use something that's smaller and then make it bigger manually considering it get some blurriness in your texture. I'm just resizing this to fit the canvas perfectly. I want to go to the transform menu and make sure it's actually a perfect fit, it's 2,000 by 2,000 at zero-zero for the position. We need to see those numbers here on the transform studio to be sure our texture is fitting properly. You can see that this doesn't look very good, we need to make some changes to it. Back to my layers panel, I'm going to tap the three-dot menu and then you can just start scanning through the blend modes. What I typically use for these is overlay. There's a couple others that look okay, saturation can be good on certain colors, but it really depends on what colors you use in your pattern. Reflect looks interesting. You can scroll through here or you can just go straight to overlay. What I like about overlay is that it pulls out the colors that are already in your patterns so it's just complementing your pattern. We can also reduce the opacity of the texture in that same menu. If you don't want it to be quite as intense, just tone it down a little bit. If you want it to be more intense, duplicate it. You have a lot of freedom there in terms of how you want this texture to show up on your pattern. Then of course, play around with layering these. I created a bunch of different textures so you can really feel free to add whatever works for the style of your pattern. 15. Creating Seamless Textures: Of course, you may want to create your own textures rather than just using mine. To do that, it's a really simple process. You just go back to your gallery, tap the plus symbol, New Document, and again, I'm going to work in pixels, and this time I'm going to work at 4,000 by 4,000 pixels at 300 DPI. The reason I'm doing that is because I want to have a texture that's as big as my pattern or bigger and maybe, could be used for other uses. I save all these textures in my Dropbox, I never know what I'm going to need them for, so I might recommend you just go through and make a bunch of textures and just see what happens. You will use them down the line for other patterns, you could use them in every collection you create. These are reusable, which is why I create them in a large size that I know I'll be able to use later on. I'll tap Okay, I'll get black as my color, I always make my textures in black, just because it's easy to see and you can always change it later. Make sure you're on the pixel persona. With that brush tool selected, I'm going to go to the brush menu and just grab one of these brushes. Let's get the India ink drops. I'm putting my pencil down here on this width button and then just sliding up. What that does is it adjusts the size of the brush. Now, you can see those are way too big, so let's turn that down a little bit. That's a little bit better. What I might do is a few different strokes, changing the size in-between, and I want to get close to the edge. But I don't necessarily want to touch the edge, if I do, I can erase it, so don't worry so much about touching the edge. But I'm just trying to create a nice varied texture here. I don't want to get too dark, I just want to create an overall texture. Then I'm going to grab my eraser tool and erase anything that is touching the edge. Again, you can change the size of your eraser width, you can change the brush that you're erasing with, so I want to erase with something that's solid like this. What's this called, Comics Ink Pen. I'm scanning around if any droplets touch the edge, I'm erasing them. Nothing else is touching the edge, so this is the first layer of my texture. I'll tap the Move tool, tap the Transform menu, and I want this to say 4,000 by 4,000 at 00. What I typically do is just pull this to the edge so that it's perfectly lined up with my canvas. Now, I've got 4,000 by 4,000 for my width and height and 00 from my position. The reason I need to do that is because I need to turn this into a seamless repeat, and without it being the perfect dimensions of the canvas, it isn't going to line up correctly. Now that we've got that in place, we can tap the three dot menu and duplicate this layer so that we have four total in the layers panel. Once I've got four of those, I can move them to the corners of the canvas, and I just want to make sure I'm keeping my transform studio open and the Magnetics tool on, and making sure that when I think I'm placing this perfectly in the corner that I actually I'm. It should say for that squared negative 2,000, negative 2,000 for the next square, negative 2,000. That said like 1980.2, obviously, it's a few pixels off. We need to get those solid 2,000 rounded numbers to make sure that we're getting this right in the middle. That one's 2,000 by 2,000, and then the last one, pull it down here negative 2,000 by 2,000. You can see now we're left with this cross pattern, where we don't have any spotters. Above everything, I'm going to create a new pixel layer back to that same brush and just start filling that in, and again, we're trying not to touch the edges too much, but if we touch them a little, it's okay because we can erase that later. I'm just playing around spattering means until we get a pretty good texture. That looks good, but I need to be sure I didn't touch the edge at all, so I'm not messing up my repeat. Looks like I did, so I'm just going to go through with that eraser and clean up all of those edges. Nothing is touching the edge and I can bring back all the other parts of my texture, and then I just want to merge all of these parts of the texture onto one layer, so I can save this as a transparent image. I'm just going to swipe to select each of those, tap this little hamburger menu and tap Merge Selected. That turns this into one big layer that is a cmos repeat. I'm going to tap the move tool to make sure that is selected, tap the Documents menu, tap Export, and in the area, I'm going to tap Selection without background. That's going to let me save this as a transparent PNG. Making sure I've got PNG selected, Selection without background, and then I can click Share, Save Image. Now, that's the texture just like the ones I shared with you that you can insert onto your pattern, turn on that overlay blend mode, and then play around with layering now that with other textures. I also want to show you if you create a new pixel layer, I made a brush set of more texture brushes, so if you don't find what you're looking for in affinity, I created a bunch of different textures here that you can play around with, lights GFS that's going to give you a nice light texture, tiny scrapes that's giving you a more high contrast texture, some staples if you want to put a staple texture in there, some rafers GFS, that you can try and then some little random speckles. If you want to play around with those brushes, it's the same process that we've been doing to import from Dropbox. I'm just going to tap on the brush symbol, making sure I'm on the pixel persona. Open the brush menu, tap the hamburger menu, and tap Import Brushes, and then it's going to take you to your Cloud storage, so you'd have to select Dropbox and then find that file in your Dropbox, and then once you click on it, it's going to open and save in your brush menu. Once you've created some of your own textures, you can go ahead and apply those to your patterns. I'm just going to open one of my patterns here, tap Place image, import from photos. I'm grabbing that texture that we just created, that seamless texture, tap one time to insert it, making sure it's perfectly lined up with my canvas, and using the transform studio to make sure it's 2,000 by 2,000 at 00 position, and then I can just play around with that blend mode. 16. Texture and Color Options: One more thing you may want to do is change the color of this texture because each color is going to look different with different blend modes. Let's say for example, I wish that these platters were white instead of black. What I can do is make sure that layer is selected. Tap the adjustment studio and remember you can tap the question mark to find which studios is which. There's the adjustment studio. Then I'm going to tap on the Re-color tool. You can see that goes ahead and makes a big change. I don't want to do that yet. I want to first play around with the lightness. You can see right now that this is applying this change to my entire pattern whereas I only want to apply it to my texture which is on this layer. I'm going to grab that adjustment layer and drag it onto my texture. Now you can see it's only affecting my texture. Now when I tap on that recolor adjustment and play around with things, it doesn't change my entire pattern, it's just changing the texture. We can play around with the hue, get all different colors. We can play around with the lightness, saturation, opacity. Just play around with that until you get a color that you like. I'm going to go with this dirty pink. Then we can go back to our texture layer. Tap the three dot menu and start playing around with some different blend modes. This is the lightened blend mode. Now we can get a wider texture, but it has a little bit of a pink tone to it. We can do screen which basically makes it almost totally white. You can just scan through here and you can see how this color versus the black is very different. You're getting really different results for the textures. You have to decide here what works for your personal style and does using a texture at all even work for your style? I don't even really use textures very much in my seamless patterns, but I do like how they look in some other people's patterns. You just have to play around and see what works for your style here. One thing I would recommend is if you use a texture on one pattern, try to use that on at least a few of the other ones in the collection so that they have a cohesive feel. One last thing you may want to do with these textures is apply them to a single element rather than the entire design. Maybe you just want to put the texture on the red flowers or just the pink flowers or just the leaves, something like that. That's really easy to do. What I would do first is tap the move tool and tap on the element you want to add texture to so you can locate it in the layer's panel. It's right here. Now above that I'm going to create a new pixel layer and go to the pixel persona. I'll get black as my color and choose a brush. I'm going to grab one of those brushes that I created. Let's grab the tiny scrapes brush. I'm just going to paint this. Let's make it a little bit smaller. Just going to paint this over the flower so it has a nice textural feel. I like how that looks, but obviously I don't want it to appear everywhere around the flower. In my Layers panel, I'm just going to take that layer and drag it onto the flowers layer. That makes it show up only on that flower shape. I'm just dragging it straight on to the middle of that layer. Then we can go in and put a blend mode like the overlay and then you get that nice texture just on the flower. I'm going to do the same thing with a more drastic texture on this flower. Tap the flower, go to the layers panel, create a new pixel layer. Black is my color. I mean, the pixel persona. Let's grab a really intense brush. I like these engraving brushes. These leave early interesting texture. You can just go crazy on that. Again, just taking that layer, dragging it onto my flowers layer, which clips it to fit only on that shape. Tap on the settings, go to a blend mode. I'm going to go with overlay and then we have some nice texture just on that flower. Just a couple of options for you. Overall texture or a single object textures. Let's go ahead and create one more pattern style together. 17. Complex Vector Shapes: Next, I want to show you how I created all of the pieces of my hero pattern so that you know how I created every single part of my collection. I also want to show you a few tricks for layering elements so you can add a lot of visual interest to your patterns. I've gone ahead and created some of the parts of my hero pattern here. I just want to show you how I've created these. One thing that you'll see a lot with vectors is shapes with a shape taken out of the center of it. If you'd like to do that, you can grab your pencil tool and create a new vector layer on our board one. Grab any color here I'm going to go with a dark color, so it's really easy to see. I'm going to be using a fill but not a stroke. First thing I'm going to do is just create the shapes. This can be any shape at all, any shape that you want to have something taken out of the center of it. Then I'm going to tap that node tool and go through and clean these up. Wherever I have some messy spots that didn't quite connect properly. Sometimes that will totally change your shape. You can just tap on the edge of your shape to create a new node. If you are editing and you end up losing a node and you want it back, you can always just tap on that shape edge to get a new node. Here's an example. I won't want it right here, just going to tap, and that makes a new node. Now, I've got some nice little shapes. I want to take some shapes out of the center of them so they look like that. I'll just grab a different color. Actually, I need to make sure this is not selected first. Click the x symbol. I'll tap the move tool and tap the X symbol to make sure that's not selected. I'm going to get a different color. I'll just get the color of this bright pink. It really doesn't matter what color I use here because I'm just using these as cut-out shapes. I'll get my pencil tool. Create a shape on the inside and clean that up. Then I want to take this shape out of this shape. I'll tap the move tool, which makes that pink shape selected, put down one finger, tap this other shape. I want to have both of these selected. If you have any trouble with that and maybe that they're not on the same layer, I had to move that pink one down into this layer to make sure they're on the same layer. Let's just move that blue right under the pink. We've got those two layers right there. Tap one, select the second one. Tap to three dot menu, and tap subtract. We're subtracting the pink out of the blue. Then we can tap the node tool and play around with that interior shape if you don't like how that looks. That's a great way to get a shape out of the inside of a shape. [inaudible] really erase vectors like you would a normal shape. This is one way to get around that you create two different shapes and put them within each other. Then of course, once you get all of those shapes done, you can swipe all of them and tap group. They work as a single group. That's what I've done here to create these shapes right here. But you can do something similar without actually affecting the shape. Like this shape, for example, just has some dots on top of it. I just used that pencil tool only using the stroke, not the fill to create some nice little dots on top of this leaf form. These are just some ways that you can add just a little bit more visual interest to your patterns. Same thing here. I use my pencil tool to create some leaves that I created these inner veins and use the subtract tool to subtract that vein shape out of the leaf shape. Another way to make your patterns more interesting, it's just to do a lot of layering. I've got my one shape here, second shape here, and then the dots. This group is actually made out of three parts. That's one thing you can think about is how can you add more layers to shape to make it a little bit more interesting? Especially when you get to your hero pattern, you want to really go far with adding a lot of extra detail and visual interests. For this one, I added some flower petals, a little circle in the middle, and then some little lines and dots for the stamen in the center. Then I would just start creating a bunch of these shapes and fitting them into place just like we did in the other patterns. I'm not going to do this on camera because you've already seen how I create repeat patterns. I layer one shape after another, starting with the edges, and moving into the center. I just created all these shapes just like we've made all of our vectors today, and layered those on top of each other. Did some little overlapping parts, tried to get a lot of different shapes and colors. Because this one is so complex that has so much going on. This is my hero pattern. Now, you've seen me create these patterns and you've seen every single process that I use to make my collections. I use the vine process here, just adding in some little flower and berry shapes. I use the cut-out for this where I did one shape and cut out the center and then just repeated the same shapes over and over. I didn't individually draw each of these. I made a few and then repeated them and rotated them around. As you can see, these filler blender patterns can be super simple. It can just be dots like this. Or it can be three or four shapes repeated over and over across the whole canvas. I also usually add in a few color versions because I'm not sure if this bold red is going to work for everyone. I add in something a little more subtle, which is the exact same pattern just in a pink. Same thing. This is the polka dots pattern that I've already showed you in a different color version and a different size. You can really play around with just reusing parts, especially parts that you make from your hero pattern to sample those and throw them into your other patterns sections. 18. Quilt Square Mockups: Next we're going to test out our patterns on some quilt squares, and some product mockups. See, you can start getting an idea of how your pattern pieces work together, and how your collection looks as a whole, and on individual products. Before we start working on inserting these patterns into mockups and quilt squares, I wanted to mention that I think it's really important to not show your repeat block online, especially not to put it on your website where someone could save it at a high resolution. It would just be way too easy for someone to take that image, and upload it to print-on-demand sites or do whatever they want with it. So rather than using this full repeat image, what I do is tap the "Documents" menu, tap "Export," select "Artboard1", and Share, Save Image. Now, I'm saving that full repeat block. If I tap the "Plus" symbol to create a new document, create a New document using Pixels as the measurement. Let's just use again, 2000 by 2000, and we'll do 300 dpi. Tap "Okay." Tap the "Documents" menu. Tap "Place Image," Import from Photos, and grab that photo that we just saved. Then I'm going to resize that. Once I get that to about the size that I want my repeat to be displayed, I want to do a couple of things to make sure I'm not working in partial pixels. Partial pixels are for example, 0.6 on the height of this image, or 0.3 on the y-axis, I don't want to have any of those decimals after my pixel dimensions. For my repeat block, it's about 1207 right now. I'm going to change it to 1200 by 1200, just so I'm working with a nice round number. Then I'm going to move it to making sure that magnetics tool is on, and making sure that the position is zero, zero. You shouldn't have any extra points or like 0.5 on the Y position. The reason for that is partial pixels cause pixel lines in your patterns. So if you've ever seen little white or transparent line showing up on your pattern, it's likely because you're working in partial pixels. This is true in any digital art program like Photoshop, Illustrator. That's just one thing to keep in mind when you're setting the position for things, make sure you're working in home pixels. Now that I have that all set, I can tap the "Three dots" menu. Tap "Duplicate," and shift this over, and it should say 1200 on the x-axis. You can also, instead of shifting it that way, you can just tap the "X," and tap "Plus 1200," as long as it says 1200 there in the end, it doesn't really matter. Now, I can do both of those at the same time. Dragged, then select them both. Tap the "Three dot" menu. Tap "Duplicate," y-axis, plus 1200, and Okay. Now, I have this nice image that I can share online that shows people what my repeat looks like without showing them my repeat block. If you want to adjust the position of this at all, you can definitely do that. But again, we just need to make sure we're working in whole pixels. For example, if I drag to select all four of these squares, and I want to move this let's say, up a little ways, I would go to the x-axis or go to the y-axis, and press "Minus 200" pixels. I could do the same thing on the x-axis. Minus or let's change that one, and do 100 pixels. It's okay to move things around, but keep it in whole pixels. Don't just shifted manually like this, because that could lead to pixel lines in your pattern. Once you're happy with how that block looks, you can tap the "Documents" menu. Tap "Export." I always use PNG. Share. Save Image. I always repeat that same process with all of my patterns. If I go to my photos app, here's my repeat block. I've put this in a collection in my photos app called Wildflowers Collection, and here it is mocked up. I've done that for every single pattern in the collection so that when I want to share these online, they're all here ready to go, and I don't have to worry about going into infinity, and figuring it all that out. You can see especially when it comes to like the hero pattern, it just looks so much better zoomed out. Whereas when you're looking at that repeat block, you're missing part of the picture. You can't really see where the parts connect. I definitely recommend doing this step, having all your images ready to share, and not sharing your whole repeat block online. Now that I have all of those patterns saved, I can start applying those to some different mockups. I created all of these quilts square documents for you, and you can import these the same way we've been importing. Tap the "Plus" symbol, tap "Import from Cloud," and then find them in your Dropbox. Let's go ahead, and use the first one here. I'll show you the easy process for using these quilt squares. These look great posted on Instagram or Facebook. It's really easy way to just pop your pattern in there, and share it with people. If you tap the "Documents" menu, Place Image, Import from Photos. Then I'm going to go to my Wildflowers Collection. Just going to grab my mocked up version of my repeat block. Pop it in there. Then if that's not big enough, you can grab your repeat block, and repeat it. For example, if I tap "Place Image," and I grab my repeat block, I can drag it here, and get it whatever size I want it to be. Just like we did when we mocked up the pattern. I'm going to go to the Transform studio, and make sure I'm not using partial pixels. I'm going to change this to 1350 by 1350, and put this in place. Then I can start duplicating that, and moving in across the canvas, 1350 pixels. I can swipe all three of those, tap "Duplicate," and on the y-axis, plus 1350. Press "Duplicate" again, and it moves it down there. Now, I've got that whole pattern mocked up here, and I can shift that around. With these quilt squares, what you want to do is drag the image onto the color that you want it to display. For example, when you first import this, it's really just going to look like some images laid on top of your quilt square. You just want to drag it onto whatever shape you want it to show up on. If it shows up on the cream here when I drag it onto the cream, or it shows up on the blue when I drag it onto the blue. Let's do that same process with one of these more complex patterns. You can see, I've done the exact same process. I use the repeat pattern block on this part of the square by dragging those pattern blocks onto the cream portion. Same thing with this lighter pink, and same thing with the red. You can see how this is a really nice way to not only display your patterns online, but also to kind judge for yourself how these are working together, and what different scales you could use. You can see how typically the more prominent patterns will be displayed in a larger format, whereas the blender filler prints will be in a smaller format. You can play around with the scale there, and get an idea for how you might want to present your patterns in your portfolio or social media or your website. 19. Applying Patterns to Mockups: Next, I want to show you how to display your patterns on mockups. So I've created some mockups for you, but I also want to show you the easy process for creating your own mockups. The first step would be to import the mockup. So just like we've been doing tap the plus symbol, import from cloud. I'm going to use the one called plate first, and you can see it's just a black and white image. But if you open the layers panel, you can see we have two different layers. The first one is the background and the second one is a copy of the plate. So first we'll go ahead and insert our patterns. So place image, find the pattern that you want to use, and I just tab to insert that. I want to get that above everything else, and get it to a scale that I think will look good on that plate, and then I'm just going to drag that image onto the plate. So you can see, it's just totally covering the plate. Obviously, that's not what we want. We want to see the shadow and all of that. So I'll tap the three dot menu, tap the blend mode, and tap overlay. So what that does is it brings out the shadows that are on the plate so we can start to see some of that on our pattern. Another thing you may want to do is add a different background color. So I'll tap the place symbol, tap vectored layer, and tap the rectangle tool, and just drag a big rectangle, you can do that in any color you'd like. Then I'm just going to drag that rectangle onto my background layer, and you can see it's just flat solid. I'll do a blend mode, and I like to use the average blend mode for this, and then I usually bump down the opacity a little bit, but it really depends a lot on what color you use. So you'll have to play around with the blend mode and also the opacity, depending on what color you want on your background. We can also change the brightness or darkness of the plate itself. So to do that, select the plate layer, tap the adjustments studio, tap brightness contrast, and then play around with the brightness a little bit. Make sure that brightness contrast adjustment is right on that plate layer so that way when you play around with it, it only affects the plate and it doesn't affect the background. So depending on your pattern, you may or may not need to do that, and depending on your mockup or my mockup or whatever you're using, you may or may not need that step. Let's do one more mockup. I'll tap the plus symbol, import from cloud, and I'm going to get the gift tags mockup. So I want to show you this one because it has multiple elements in it. So for example, each gift tag is on its own layer. So each one of those you'll have to do separately. So let's start by inserting a pattern, and I'm going to put this on the first tag on the left. I'm just using the corners and the rotate bar here to adjust how this shows up on the gift tag, and I'll repeat the same process with the other two patterns. I'm going to do the same process we did before to add a vector rectangle for the background. I'm going to go with that same pink color just for consistency's sake, and the average blend mode. Another thing you can do with some of these mockups is change some of the other elements that go along with it. So for example, with these strings, I've put those on a separate layer. So you can add a rectangle that is, maybe gold. Drag that onto the string layer. Let's do the overlay blend mode, and then you get a gold string instead of the silver string. So if I turn that on and off, you can see the difference. So you can use my mockups or you can create your own mockups, which I'll show you next. 20. Creating Mockups: Next, I want to show you how I created my product mockups so that you can grab any product that you want to apply your patterns to and create your own mockups. You can certainly use mine for any use that you'd like, but you'll probably also want to create some of your own so that you can use some products that work for your personal style. The first thing I'll do is create a new document using pixels as my measurement and I'm just going to do 2500 by 2500 pixels at 300 DPI and tap, "Okay." I tend to use square images because that works well for a lot of the social media platforms. Next, I'm going to place image and rather than import from photos, I'm going to import from Cloud. You can take your own pictures and I'm going to talk to you about how to do that, but for this process, you may just want to use my example mockup photo that's in the folder. Tap one time to place that image and again, that places it really large so you can size it down to whatever size works for you. We're going to try to put it in the middle there. You can see this is just a single image and we need to separate it to be two different parts. One thing to think about when you take these pictures is that your background should be different from your actual object, you can see, I chose a brown plate because that contrasts really well with a white background. You wouldn't want to use a white object in a white background, because then you're going to get the issue where it's really difficult to select the object. So I always try to find something that's a solid color and a dark color, and then I use a light background. Another thing to think about is that, it's nice to be in a spot that's slightly cloudy and has light coming from the left, I wouldn't use unnatural light, I would only use sunlight for these and I would always let the light come from the left or the right so that you have that little bit of shadow that gives it that realistic feel. It's also important to use a flat object. It doesn't have to be perfectly flat obviously, this has some curves, but I wouldn't recommend like a t-shirt, I would recommend something flat like a wall hanging, a tote bag, a clutch bag, it can be a gift card an envelope, something that's flat and easy to photograph and place your pattern down on a flat plane that you don't have to think about wrapping the pattern around it like you would with a mug. For the background here, I just used some simple white poster board that you can get at any craft store or office supply store. The first thing I recommend is to take a ton of pictures. You'll be so much better off if you take a lot of different angles, a lot of different distances. Don't be afraid to take 30 or 40 pictures of the same object because you'll be so happy you did when you realize that only one of them has that perfect shadow that you wanted, so take your time on getting these pictures. Then you can just save those pictures to your cloud storage just like I've shared them with you today, and import them into your document. Once you have that image ready or if you're using my image here, we can select this whole section here, I'm going to click on the "Pixel Persona," making sure we're on the pixel persona and clicking the "Smart Selection Tool." So we can press that question mark if you have trouble finding it, it's a little brush with a circle around it. When you click that smart selection tool, and then you run your brush around here, it just starts selecting, to tap two fingers to step back and just reduce the width of that brush that's way too big. I want to be able to go around this slowly and carefully, and not get too much selected. This isn't my final selection, this is just a rough selection, what you can see is that there's little marching ants going all around here and there's some spots that is selected that I didn't really want it to select, like right here. If I change the mode down here to add or subtract, I can change if I'm selecting more or less. Here I'm going to change my brush size, and I've got the mode on subtract and if I paint right there, it deselects that little area. That's one step to get a better selection, but that may not be perfect. Then we can click the "Refined Selection Tool" right here, it's a little square, and that sends me into a different mode where I can see the selection in red. The nice thing about this mode is I can really see what I'm selecting and deselect or reselect areas that need to be within my selection. Down here on adjustment, we can change it to foreground, which is what we want to select or background, which is what we don't want to select. So foreground will be my plate and then I'll just change the brush size here. Then I can just paint over that area to tell the program that I did not mean to select that area. Same thing over here, we need to reselect that area, we're going to change that to background, and select all of that and then it takes a second to think and it refines that selection. You can repeat that process all the way around the canvas until you get a nice selection. Depending on the color of your object, it may also be helpful to change the preview mode. We've got black matt, white matt, transparent, black and white overlay. You can scroll through these and see which one is most helpful, I like using this mode because it makes it really clear that I'm accidentally selecting some of the shadow. So a minute, to make sure my background is selected for the adjustment, and I have a really small brush and I'm just going to come through and with a few strokes, get that shadow out of my selection, that looks better. Once you're happy with your selection and everything looks good, you can change the output here to new layer. What that's going to do is take the area that's selected, copy it, and put it onto a new layer so that's exactly what we need for these mockups. Then I can, with new layer selected click "Apply," and now, I have this nice layer, that's just the plate and then my old layer, which is the plate and the background. Now I can start playing around with taking the color out of this so it can become a mockup. If I go to the adjustments panel and tab "HSL," I can tap "Ranges" and bring the saturation all the way down, now we've got a gray image. I'm going to drag that onto my plate, now I need to apply that same adjustment to my background layer, the easiest way to do that is to tap the three-dot menu tap, "Duplicate", and then drag one of those HSL down onto your background layer. Now we've got a background layer and we've got a platelayer. We could apply other adjustments depending on what you've got going on with your photographs. One thing I might apply to this plate is a brightness adjustment. So tap the "Adjustments Menu," "Brightness Contrast," and just brighten that up quite a bit because it just seems really dark and drag it onto that plate layer, I think I went too far there and then duplicate that and drag it onto the background layer, so I have an adjustment layer for my background. You can just play around with do you want to darker mockup? Do you want to brighter mockup? Really just depends on your personal style. Once you're happy with how all of those look, you can start inserting your pattern. So just like you did for my mockups, you can insert your pattern onto here. Now obviously, not all mockups are the same, let's look at one of the mockups in the download set that's a little more complex. I'm going to grab this one called notebook.afdesign. So if you open this notebook mockup you'll see that we've got three different layers. One is the background, one is the notebook cover, and one is the rings. This is where mockups can get complicated, I painstakingly selected all of these rings, whereas you may not want to do that, you may want to stick with symbol objects for your mockups so that you don't have to go to so much extra effort to have these rings be editable. What I like about doing that though is, let's say, for example, I don't like the color of these rings, I can just drag a vector layer on and a gold color, just like we did for the gift tags, and I put it on overlay and then I can play around with changing that gold color if I zoom in, you can see it a little better. Depending on my pattern, I can play around with different colors that would work well for my pattern. Now that you know how to use mockups and how to create your own mockups. Let's talk about one more way to share your collection online. 21. Pattern Challenge: I want to invite you to join me in a pattern challenge where you can share your collection on Instagram. I created this challenge to help you develop your collection without having to come up with a new layout idea for each pattern. All you have to do is use one of the layouts you see here to create your pattern. You can be really direct or really loose with following these prompts. The point is to create a beautiful collection. If you start with one of the prompts and it ends up as something else, don't worry, you can still share it in the challenge. You can share your patterns on Instagram and use the hashtag iPad pattern challenge to share your work with everyone else in the challenge. I chose dying prompts but of course, you can do more or less depending on the style and size of your collection. I can't wait to see what you created. I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start building your pattern collection. If you liked this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to design and paint on your iPad. Like how do you use hatching, crosshatching, and slip plane to create eye-catching illustrations. How to paint wild flowers and procreate, and how to create insect animations and illustrations. Check those out on my profile if you want to see more. Also, share a lot of free downloads and resources for iPad artists and designers on my website. If you'd like to get more resources like the ones you got for this class, check out my site. I would absolutely love to see the pattern collection that you create after you watch this class. So please share what you made, you can do that here on Skillshare in the project section or you could tag me on Instagram or Facebook. If you have any questions about the process you learned in this class, please feel free to reach out to me. You could reply to my discussion here on Skillshare or you can contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye, bye.