Design a Simple Decorative Band | Chris Heath | Skillshare
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Design a Simple Decorative Band

teacher avatar Chris Heath, The Geometrical Design Guy

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Welcome

      1:10

    • 2.

      Exploring the Grid

      4:43

    • 3.

      Affinity Designer's Symbols

      3:54

    • 4.

      Vectorize

      5:18

    • 5.

      Your Project

      2:25

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About This Class

In this class, we will cover how to use a geometric grid made up of nested squares to lay out a continuous pattern called a band. Bands can be used for bordering, framing, or to divide spaces. Bands are not all-over patterns, they tend to extend as a line across a plane or surface.

Bands can be purely geometric, interlaced, foliated, or include any combination of design elements of any style. They can run up, down, left or right or diagonally.

In this class, I'll show you how to design a range of simple bands that range from geometric to foliated.

To follow this class, download and print the grid that we will be using from the 'Your Project' page. These PDF files are an an integral part of this class and are designed to help you turn your decorative ideas into reality.

"Use the grid to add rhythm, formality and a sense of harmony to your decorative ideas."

The video lessons in this class illustrate the usefulness of the grid for laying out a variety of patterns. Seven patterns are covered to inspire you to try out your own unique ideas. As a learning exercise, feel free to:

  • copy what I have done
  • create a variation of one or more of these patterns, or
  • come up with your own pattern.

For Affinity Designer users, you can download the Affinity Design files. For users of other vector drawing tools, download the PDF files and import them into your vector drawing app of choice.

To complete this project, it is assumed that you have used a vector drawing tool such as Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer. However, you may side-step the vector drawing tools and complete your project with whatever technique you wish, whether that be pen and ink, water colour or stenciling.

If you are an Affinity Designer user, check out the bonus introduction to 'Symbols'; a really useful and productive feature for surface pattern designers.

Welcome to the class. I hope you enjoy it. Remember to share your hand drawn ideas and finished artwork in the project gallery.

Note: To stay informed of my up and coming classes, click the Follow button on this page. Also check out my profile and my first class 'Design an Arts & Crafts Decorative Pattern'.

Meet Your Teacher

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Chris Heath

The Geometrical Design Guy

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Check out my profile page to discover more classes for artists and designers.

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Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Welcome: My name is Chris. I'm a writer and designer, and I used to be a decorative artist in this class. We're going to use a great to determine the size and location of all of the elements in our design, in particular a continuous repeating pattern to help you along the way. I have taken some photos, and we're going to use these photos, its inspiration for what we put into our pattern. And also we're going to use the grids to help us along the way to create some abstract geometric designs. Now I know what you're thinking. That's good. Looks complex. But if you control a circle in the square, this grid is actually incredibly easy to put together. Having said that, if you don't want to draw the grid, that's absolutely fine, because there is a pdf that you can download pen that you can use to get drawing straight away. Also, if you use affinity designer, there's some affinity designer files that you can also use, and the pdf can be imported into illustrator. So you're here now? Hey, we might as well just get started 2. Exploring the Grid: for this exercise. Download head and grid dot pdf file and printed out. Feel free to copy the peasants presented here or try your right. 3. Affinity Designer's Symbols: here we are in Infinity Designer. You can download the file that I'm using and use it with an affinity designer for Mac or windows, where you can download the victor PDS and open it an illustrator or what, Oh, disk graphic or any other victor Drawing toll. Even programs like comedy Grateful and my class is really about how you can use a variety of grids to create patterns and to bring a sense of order and harmony to these patterns. And I met a hell complex that's all about handling the complexity off your pattern on a balanced and harmonious way. However, I have discovered a really useful and cold told for settlers. Pattern designers with an affinity designer, an affinity, a designer. It's called symbols, and you can see that I've got this panel open up on the lift here and done there. I have my grid units, and this is a really useful tool for creating the units within your pattern that you are repeating. So if, for example, of house to look over Teoh here, if I drew just that shape, fear and made copies, tours in any changes are made to that shape, would automatically follow through to the other copies or instances. Justus An example have created this particular shape. And I just want to show you how to turn it into assemble and thin how we can modify that symbol on all instances of that symbol to create a pattern. I have this design selected, and what I'm gonna do is now have it selected is to click create up here. This will create a new symbol from the current object, and it will pop up there. So now what I can do is duplicate this and its command j to duplicate er and they will move that along, snapped into place fear and again and again and again and again. So now I've got this unit repeated and you could do this on any victim current told just replicating the same shape and repeating it. What is really cool about this toll is you can start to modify just this instance how just so human here. And I just changed my tool to the point made. And I haven't done this before in this example. So this is the first time just have a play and see what happens. So that's sort of that object. And if I want to say, for example, start to play around with this shape, you can see all instances off this shape stat change. Just gonna do that. What you will see here on the right is theory, journal symbol, and it's essentially a group, a group with one item in there. If I was to add a new object to that group, so just a little square, for example, you can see that Ripped Angle has just being added to the group. But it's also been added to every other group and for wanted to modify this particular rectangle. Just zoom into this so I can select it a bit easier. Right click? It's just computed kids. That's why I can sort of play around foot and again. You can see every other instance has also changed. So this was just a quick introduction to the symbol Tolan affinity designer that I'll be using on the following Listen more information. You can also download my notes about the stole from that your project page 4. Vectorize: affinity designer. What I've done here is we've moved my image underneath the groups and directed onto the outboard change the place 30 to 40%. So it's just there is a bit of a shadow. I can work with it quite easily. You'll also see that that symbol, which I drawn the previous class I've just lift up here and I'll be using that later on. So for this class, I'm assuming that you're already familiar with using Pinto all there are plenty of classes with unskilled Shia which show you how to use. That's This is the pin tool that I'm talking about for most of this listened, I will speed things up. I think you will still get some ideas to how I'm putting these patterns together. We're pretty much done for this. Listen, now it's just a few things would like to try. I can show you what I'm intending to do with this later is to duplicate this group and just today to there. No, we're not seeing the whole thing. I'm gonna do this when I'm finished and probably us onto a separate outboard later. So I'm just really playing around to see what we can Do you hear on the duplicate this again and this time flip. It's because I wanna drop it into because one thing I haven't done, it's chick see with these kids line up, starting to see what can happen if I just moved it out of the way. You know dearly and want to the late this case. But if I relate it with on symbol, you see it disappears. Everybody arrests as well. So it's still a little bit of playing around. And people that again check it out. Yeah, let's pick it up. It's small and chuck it over there. 5. Your Project: Congratulations. Well done. You've reached the end of this class. Well, almost. What I would like you to do next is to download the pdf grid and give it a go. Hey, if you haven't used a grid like this before, don't worry. I've got a process that I would like to share with you. So first up is emulate, then deviate and then innovate. So what do I mean by these terms? Well, emulates fist up is to copy exactly what I've done. It doesn't have to be a perfect copy. Just close enough. After all, this is all about practice and learning to get used to drawing with the good. The next stage is to deviate. So once you have copied all of my patterns, pick a pattern to and then just change out some of the elements create a pattern which is a combination of your work and mine. And again, this is all about gaining experience with using the grid to guide the size and location of all of the elements in your design. The last stage is to innovates and what I mean by end of a is to take this a step further and create a design or composition that is unique to you, something you can be proud off in order to achieve this. What I would like you to do it is just look around your house for some objects that you can turn into elements that could be incorporated to your pattern or have a walk around the garden, take some photos of plants, animals and then six and used these elements and put them into your composition. So the aim here again is to use the grid to guide the size and location of all of these unique elements that you have collected and to one design. Oh, and also remember to follow me on skill share so there will be a link either above or below that you can use to follow me and remember to share your project on the project. Syria. I'd love to see what you've come up with, especially if you've gone through that entire process off emulating, deviating and innovate. Stay tuned for more courses by May cross the geometrical design guy