Design an Arts & Crafts Enclosed Pattern | Chris Heath | Skillshare
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Design an Arts & Crafts Enclosed Pattern

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.

      Introduction

      1:29

    • 2.

      Building the Grid

      9:07

    • 3.

      Choosing Your Plant Subject

      3:56

    • 4.

      Drawing Your Plant

      7:25

    • 5.

      Vectorizing Your Plant

      4:42

    • 6.

      General Design Principles

      6:58

    • 7.

      Adding a Background Pattern

      5:01

    • 8.

      Styling Your Artwork

      11:54

    • 9.

      Your Project

      1:06

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About This Class

In this class, we will cover how to:

  • use some simple geometry to build a geometric grid, and
  • lay out an Arts & Crafts style decorative pattern using this grid.

Given the fluidity and naturalistic style of Arts & Crafts decorative patterns, it may seem a bit strange to start with a geometric grid. We will be using this geometric grid as a creative springboard for laying out your decorative ideas. When finished, we will remove the grid so that your completed design can shine through.

I'll guide you through each step of the process, highlighting key principles to keep in mind while you are drawing, so that your design captures the essence of the Arts & Crafts movement.

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 in whatever medium you wish, whether that be pen and ink, water colour or acrylics. The grid that we will be building in this class is also available for download and printing.

Welcome to the class. I hope you enjoy it.

Note: To stay informed of my up and coming classes, click the Follow button on this page. Also check out my profile.

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Chris Heath

The Geometrical Design Guy

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Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: At the heart of every repeat pattern is geometry. With some simple geometric shapes. We can establish a proportional relationship between every element in the design, and the design is a whole. Hi, I'm Chris, and I would like to share with you some of my design secrets. In this class, we will begin by drawing a grid; not this grid. This grid, because this grid is far more interesting and far more useful. So starting with a circle, I'm going to show you how to go from here, to here, to here. Once we have created the grid, we will print it out, draw our design and scan it back into the computer. Vectorise the design and add some colour. Along the way, we will also look at some plant material and some Victorian Arts and Crafts pattern books. And the reason for doing this is so that we can establish some design principles that we can incorporate into the design which will help make the design look authentically Arts and Crafts. Feel free to inject your own sense of style and methods of work along the way. And I hope to see you in the class very shortly. So welcome to the class. I'm really excited to have you here. Hey, let's just get started. 2. Building the Grid: Here we have two versions of the same grid. That's the grid on the left that we will be drawing in this lesson. The one on the right is a little bit more complex, but it is just It's easy to draw. If you see this dotted line, that is the edge of a pattern that is the edge we're going to draw to. And then this one here. If I was to use this artboard, I'd be drawing to that edge in there, Basically around the outside I have allowed in this one to draw a border. But I won't be doing this in this class, although I may show you an example of what the border may look like if you do decide to give it a go. So starting off. 'File > New' I'm using Affinity Designer. But of course, you can also use Adobe Illustrator or any other victor drawing tool. I'm going to stick with some of the default settings so 'Print > A4 Paper > Millimetres > , Create an Artboard. For this exercise I'm just going to stick with RGB. The dimensions are fine. We can click OK to create the new document. The first thing to do here is to drop in some Axes. I'm going to drop in an X and a Y, and snap them to the centre of the page. So just on snapping... These are my snapping settings. So if you're using Affinity Designer, you may want to take a screenshot off these settings and set up the snapping settings, in your version of Affinity Designer to match what I have here. That'll make things a lot easier to follow. The first shape we're going to draw is the circle. So holding down the Command and Shift key, I'm just going to create a circle of any size. And that is because I prefer to set the dimensions down here. I noticed down here I've got the centre selected. Everything's going to rotate around this centre here, and I've also got the dimensions linked. So if I change one, the other will change automatically. Now, I'm not too keen on this particular shape as it looks right now, So I'm going to make a few changes. One of them is too remove the Fill and change the colour. I'm just gonna go for a grey, so that's 150 , and 150 and 150 will, do. This is so that when I print it out and hand draw over the top, I'm not competing with a grid. in other words the grid needs to fade into the background so that we can draw over the top. Just adjust this stroke to 0.5 I don't want to be too thick when printed either. So 0.5 point is good. And that's our first shape. Shape number two is a square. I'm going to start again. Start that in the middle. That would do. In terms of size, but I'm going to change it to 200 millimetres as well. And now I need another square. So I'm going to use Command J to duplicate that shape. I just want to open this and see what's happening there, and the layers of created two rectangles ones directly on top of the other. I want to reduce the size of this by a ratio. So I'm gonna multiply this by 0.7071 and you'll see that this rectangle sits nicely within this circle. I am going to just deselect it and select it again because I want to use the duplicate tool without reducing its size. So Command J. And I want to rotate this copy 45 degrees. I held down this shift key so it snapped to 45Ëš. So what I'll do now is group these, I'll group these all except for the the largest rectangle. So I'll hold the Command key down to select those > Right-click > Group. And just call this, uh, Squares. I think that'll do just to give it a name. And I'll just call this one - out of boundary, and put that at bottom. So with this group, what I want to do now is duplicate it. > Command-J (Ctrl-J for Windows) again, and I want to multiply this group by the same ratio that I used before, which was times point 0.7071, and press return. And that places that nicely inside the other one. So because I used the Duplicate tool, (Command-J) I can now repeat that, and create multiple copies. I've got four, five, six, seven... will do. What I'll do now is group these, just to tidy up my layers. Press 'Command- G' to group, and I'm gonna call this 'Progression of Squares. I actually just want to copy one of those. In fact. [indistinct expression] Yeah, let's take one, and paste it just above. And what we'll do is place it up there and drag this out Uh, okay, so drag this out to that point there. The width and height is still the same. And I'll put one down into that corner as well. So the reason why I'm doing this as I want to draw that boundary, that edge, that I'm going to draw the pattern to, which will be that shape there. I'll just compare this to put a drew before. So, all that's left to do is to create a dashed line. So I'm gonna up the line weigth of this to about 1.5 and change it to a dash and I'll put a three in there. And then I'll zoom in, I'll just deselect it and zoom in so you can see what I've done there. Well, I think for the purpose of drawing a grid, we're almost there. So the last thing to do is because these guides are going to print. I need to change my pen and I want to make sure a settings for the pen. are not going to be too bold. And so what I'm gonna do is just drawing in these axes. Press escape between each lines. Here, so it lets go of the line. And I could start another one. Press escape again. And put some diagonals in as well. And we are done. So now it's time to print this out and start drawing over the top. If you found that a little bit tricky to follow and you want to continue on with the next lesson, then what you can do as you can print here either one of these grids. You can download a copy of thes grids from the your Project page, which is to the right of the project description, and either one of these is fine to work with. It just means that if you work with the 2nd one here will just be working in a slightly smaller space. We'll see you on the next lesson. 3. Choosing Your Plant Subject: For this class will need some source material and probably the best source material. You can find us on the garden, but if you don't have a garden, you could always pop down to your local park and take some photographs of the plants. I would't advise taking, cuttings, just in case you get into trouble. But you could at least take some photos. I've just got some samples from our garden. It's the middle of winter here, so they're all looking a little bit said. I found some, Buxus. Star Jasmine. We have a hedge grown from Griscelinia, which is a New Zealand native. It has really nice glossy green leaves. A Bay tree. An orchid. leaf or set of leaves, and some branches off the mandarin tree. That's not the healthiest Mandarin tree, but given that it is pretty unhealthy, the veins stand out quite clearly, so that it was interesting to see how the veining pattern worked on there. So if we look at these plans to draw them, what we're looking for is a combination of things, things like the leaf shape and the curvature of the leaf and how the leaf departs, how the leaf stem departs from the main stem. The plant that I've decided to draw is the primary plant is the mandarin. I still have this rather unhealthy looking specimen here, and a mandarin fruit, a much healthier one from the supermarket. What I'll do is just place some paper under here. That's a little bit easier to see what I'm talking about. So just a quick, quick examination off this plant, reveals quite a bit of information. The leaf shape is what's called lanceolate. So every pointy at one end. It sort of rounds down nicely at the other end. There's a small leaf stem before we hit the the main stem. And the other thing to note here is the way that the leaves alternate. as they branch off. So here, this one alternates to the left. This one, is growing out to the right. This one to the left. That one to the right. This one to left. That one will eventually come out to the right, and if this continued to grow, there be another one to the left. Another thing to note is where the branches start to occur. So just at this point there is a little bud and in this case, this bud has sprouted out with another branch, just between the stem and the leaf's stem So these are things we want to just make a note off when drawing these leaves, when drawing this particular plant. By contrast, if I compare this to the Star Jasmine, which I have right here, the leaves are opposite each other, so I'll just make it a little bit clearer and easier to see. So these two leaves our opposite. Where as these ones alternate and likewise these two opposite as well. So it's just a difference from plant to plant. 4. Drawing Your Plant: so we have begun. The thing here is we need to pick up points were l main branch will start to appear and again just to point a moustache line as we're all of the leaves will end police. That will be the boundary of patterns that sit inside this, uh, larger square. So one of the key things to make a note off when using these sorts of Greg grids were really any grid Is that the curves you draw run 10 gently to the grip lines. And sometimes if we can't, well, we were going to draw a curve. We can actually extend the grid a little, so I'm just randomly can extend the goods, extend some of these construction lines in a few more, So probably branch off to the rights first and just see what happens. Thier and I should really take that outs to the as you drool and you need more detail. You can basically divide the grid up even further, so close here. Probably near enough. That's great. That's really just a matter of deciding roughly where you're gonna put things. Andi, The example. You what you've seen so far ahead a women which I placed in the middle and the flower to the lift and another limit to the right and one in the top corner. So it's time I got a Mandarin say, I may just placed it in the middle. But Coach, just wait and see so initially could decide we're the stem starts, so I'm just going to draw the pace of steam there. And then it's a matter of deciding where these branches will go. Say I'm just going through the center of the branch fist and just try and draw Hey, continuous curve. So this CUF I want her intention to here I could have actually put it anywhere. And I just terminated it there for now, the next one. How much as dame for that points. Which means I might go through that point for coming down to here to spearing a mind that I probably have a branch shooting off here at some point. Maybe there what a day is. Take this. We start from over here. In fact, I want to bring something right down to this corner who is close to maybe that what the So I'm just bringing attention to the truth bring down through that on six from there and just bringing it, You end up to the So what is she looking? The duplication of this curve down here. So I'm just gonna take it out for now and think about something else and was Just bring that down into tears. That's more of a gentle curve. I kind do. At some stage, when he hit up to this corner so I might put a leaf I happened to hear I'm just going to divided up at that point into their This is really determining the size of the latch leaf. In fact, I make only flood Gia for this particular plant. I don't have to troll so many just bearing in mind that I've got a drawer a steam in there too for each leaf. I'm just really just gonna stop. Sorry, we're some of the sleeps. We're gonna go and bring that, um, into his somewhere. So maybe compare actual fit point. No peace. Probably draw some fruit here, so this curve may be moved or it may just be behind. Whatever I put in the center pick may not go to something else. Intermont put something I happened to hear or what? Put some fruit on the belly. I'm just gonna focus on the on the leaves and we're gonna go at aside. 5. Vectorizing Your Plant: here I have the primary piton scandals. That's the Mandarin floods, and it's really just a matter of sizing it to match the grid that's sitting underneath. This is the group be true earlier. I'm just gonna place that approximately in the top left hand corner, just the pace cities, I conceive the grid underneath and then it's a matter of re sizing. In effect, that might just seem to that approximately in place there, drink one of the diagonals out, holding the command case that scales size. And that looks close enough. So just trying to position it a little more accurately, and that will do it. It's hard just locked in positions that doesn't move around. Bring the opacity back. Not that I think I'll probably just reduce it even further. Really Wanna work off the grid that's underneath more than anything else. What did she just bring it up above the image itself? And I think little that should allow me to snip Teoh Theo Grid, We're gonna do this in parts we've got leaves, we've got branches, we've got fruits and we've got a flower. So really, all I'm gonna be doing here is using the Pimental to draw out the shapes by essentially getting lots of small points. It's I truell and trysts. I'm gonna zoom. And yes, I can see what I'm doing better. There is a place each point just exposing some of their handles that I could get a little bit curvature wonky to Richard of my branch. This is gonna take a little while, so I'll speed up this part of the video. And, uh, we'll come pick when it comes to try in the next segment. - What I'm gonna do now is that she could things a bit of colleges so that I can see them about more. Clearly. I'm not these at the final Colors. It's a bit to the pin tool, and we're just going to just very quickly troublesome. I haven't I would normally sketch this out fists so may actually do that and then scan it on. But to see how guys just rough things here for now and then target the kids next 6. General Design Principles: So here we have the primary pattern, which we drew earlier eventually calendar on just to make it a little bit easier to see on screen, especially when it comes to hitting the background. And before we start, what would it like to actually do? Is talk about some general principles of designer these air Victorian principles, and you can source principles from books. For example, Christopher Dresses, study and design. Sorry about the reflection there. Try and hold it so it doesn't reflect the light so much. And Owen joins us Gramma of ornament. I don't really want to go through. All of the principles are really just picked three which relate to what we're doing in this class. So the 1st 1 promises from 10. Harmony of form consists in the proper balancing in contrast, off the straight, the inclined and the curved. So what we mean by this is especially in relation to using a grid like this one is that we're using the grid to help balance the design. So, for example, if you look at this pattern here, we have leaves which basically sit on the grid lines or terminate it. Gruden decisions Chora intention to construction lines. So this curve here runs tension, too. Construction line there. So the more carefully you look at every single curve in here and it's not perfect. But we need to treat this as a general principle. All of the curves that we're drawing relate back to the grid. And when the grids disappears, what we end up with is a nice balanced design, and nobody's aware that the group was ever used. Proposition 11 is on surface decoration. All lines should flow out from appearance Stine, so that is definitely apparent in this design. All the leaves, all the curves all trace back to the parents team, which is the branch. So that's a principle that is just based on the observation off plants in the natural world . Proposition 12 all junctions of curved lines with straight should be tension toe to each other. So what that means if we regard this as a Kubel straight line there, this brunch departs 10 gently from that main branch, and the scoop departs 10 gently from that one. So just picked to this story where we were talking about all junctions of curved lines with straight should be 10 gentle to each other. We can see that and this pattern and in the present where you're gonna draw today. But essentially this one here, which was filled with their secondary pet on the same rules apply. So just in general, with regard to all of those principles, we can see that, for example, on this plane design which I just go back to here we have this leaf sitting on the screwed line. Here we have the sleeve here terminating on the same group line. And we have this Mandarin here and the curve runs tangent to the same grid line. When we had a secondary pattern, we're basically doing exactly the same thing. So here's the sleeve we saw earlier. But in the secondary pit on this leaf also terminates on the same line as does this one, and it's does this one. And of course, the main stem off This background pattern departs from this point here, which is really should be on that dotted point there. But parents from the same line as well and this is what I'm talking about when we're using a grid like this to relate all of the elements within the design to each other. It's not only elements all falling or curves touching the same line. For example, with the sleeve here sitting on the slide, this one departing from that same line is this. This one, and then if we traced the stone will also see this sleeve was pretty much centered on the same line, and, uh, one here in the background also sits on the same line as well. So it's not just that things falling on the same line. It's also the shared angles. So, for example, if I was to pick the sleeve here that's sitting on the line and the general angle here, it's 45 the grays. So if we look elsewhere, we can also see that the sleeve here also falls on the same angle off 45. And this is where that talk about her money comes on. You know what I'm talking about? Harmony. It's thes shared relationships between all of the elements within the design, which gives a feeling of balance to the entire design. It's not just about starting with a bold pattern and then filling in the gets with more detail. That's adding information to each line and curve. The wonderful thing about that's when crafts patterns, because they don't have to be perfect. So when it comes to using principles and design that's treating them as general principles , not trying to it adhere to them dogmatically for want of a better word? What I'm drawing patents like this. I'm also deliberately introducing some variability because nature nature is full of it variability. If, for example, we look at a particular plan to a particular plant, species No. Two leaves are ever exactly the same. You might be up to pick two leaves, which look the same off plant. But the closer you examine them, the more you're start to see differences between them. I think that's pretty much what I wanted to talk about in terms of introducing some general principles. And these principles they come from is a mentioned Victorian books on ornamentation, but they still equally applied to the arts and crafts period 7. Adding a Background Pattern: e. I think it's time now to go back on drawing the background, and what I'll do is because that's going to employ the same principles that were used for drawing. The large pattern would just speed up the whole prices so that you can see how this wigs. 8. Styling Your Artwork: we're on the home straight. This is the pattern as it stands at the moment, or the leaves have drawn, the periods have drawn. I think I probably will have a few more leaves, but I don't think I need to cover how to do this. So what we're looking at now is how to style this pattern, and just so we can see it a little bit better, give it a dark background. Well, it's looking theory. Arts and crafts at the moment I thought I'd like to talk about is how to find the right sort of color scheme for this pattern. One of the principles, which was covered by Christopher Dresser and his studies and design, was the principal off repose. In other words, trying to achieve a sense of repose. You could define it as a harmonious arrangement of form and color that creates a feeling off wrist fullness. To quote Christopher dresser repose is attained by the absence of any want. You can still use strong colors in your pattern, as long as you use them in small quantities and still achieve a sense of repose. You can use the rich, earthy tones that we find in acts and crafts patterns as long as they balanced out. Color schemes may be monochromatic or Polly chromatic, but what we want to do is avoid color schemes like you can see at the moment colors that pop the use of pest ALS, really bright colors that just compete with each other. What I would like to do now is show you the same pattern, with a few more leaves added here and there and playing around with the colors. What I'm trying to achieve here is that sense of repose. It's it's more of a restful state. There's not a lot of colors used. It is a bit of high contrast on the mandarins, and that's balanced out with the smaller orange Berries that are on the smaller vine there . Rather than show you the steps involved in getting here, I thought it would be get a just to explain some of the things which I've done to the pattern so you can see how it went from here to here. So some of these things are playing around with the line waits with an affinity designer, and the brushes all zoom in to have a look It's just the line that runs around the main stem. End all of the branches to achieve this variable line waits on the branch. Basically what I did waas. And I'll just draw a new line so that I can show you what's happened. Just this one will move it to the top so we can see it about bitter. In this panel, we can adjust the pressure off the lines. For example, drag the stone at a point here could make a filler and places and thicker another's notes. Could be easy to see. A trick. The set of the way it's on these branches. You can see the line weight varies throughout. In some places, it's thicker. In some places, it's and this is the tool to use to make that happen. So that's that tool, and it's also being applied to these lines here. A swell. So the thermal federal money and think the other thing, these ones thicker on the center and these ones a figure in the center of the line and thinner towards Thea outside. The next thing to cover is how do we achieve this effect and fruit? What I have basically done is created and you brush. And that new brush looks like this. And I've called these fruit bots. It is essentially just one line, so if I grab the busy appoints, you can see that line moves and changes and all the dots move with it, so it's very quickly cover how you can create a very simple brush with an affinity designer . Here we have a black background. I've created a black rectangle, and I've drawn a white circle on top before duplicating the shape would actually like to convert it from a shape to curves. And we'll see why shortly. No, we need to duplicate because we can use command. J have made a copy. I'm going to drag it out in 3456789 10. I'm not really too worried that they're a little bit of all over the place. At the moment. I just drink the back approximately in position, and even if they're not perfectly aligned again, it doesn't really matter because we don't want a perfect set of circles. Now we've got this for it's time to sort of push and pull these circles a little bit. I think I want to do with this particular brush and I'll just go back to these two Here is to sort of flat in them off on the ends here because when we create the brush, these are gonna be squashed on the opposite directions. Have I just have a quick look at the pressure used here? They tended to get a bit squashed towards the end. First are a little, but why do in the middle? So let's go back to here, and we just sort of squashed this one up a little bit, probably doesn't need too much. And what, even just just the size a little, because thermal the same size, you need to tend my stepping off for this. Sometimes the snapping just gets in the way, and we don't really want everything snapped to the same thing. Nothing here is I'd like to also very some of these about Next thing to do is to export. This is a P and G, so PNG file looks quite big, but it's any 100 70 kilobytes such a stick sport. This is a PNG to my desktop, and I'll call this because I've already got two pressures through dots 03 Now it's time to import. Airbrush were just hit up to here down to new textures. Intensity, brush, Select the file we just saved. And here it appears, just right there. We need to edit Urtz and we just make some changes here. So brush with home make 50 sighs variants 70 pasty variance. I think I'll leave that Visitors. I want the pattern to repeat, but I also want a hid in detail on this pattern. So the part that repeats as the butts in the middle we can now close that and save it. And just to show you what that looks like when we draw Cullen, we can apply the brush tours. When we entered the sittings here, we were emitting global sittings for the brush. Go to sleep that open for now. But if we just want to change the settings for this particular line weaken go up here and changed the thickness of the line. And I think for the mandarins probably bet there is fine. We can also just move this out of the way so that you can see it more clearly. Just the pressure supposed to pull the standard narrows in the middle. Onda, if I was to pull the ends down, narrows towards the end, which is the sort of the effect that we want to achieve. And that's what we can see and this Mandarin heading here. So if I was to take one of these lines now like this fun and select the new brush and to apply it looks like that. Take another one of these and apply this pressure as opposed to this brush. And there we have it. So this is how we create that Dottie pattern for the men to runs. The next thing to look at is the colors. What I did here was basically pick a color that approximated the relief that I had for this . Now the relief was actually a little bit more saturated and color a little bit brighter in the aim here is to create a sense off propose. So just blow that up inside so we can see it more clearly in terms of choosing colors for the fruits I matched for Hugh, such a super can click into that fruit, which is that when there and basically just picked a color that matched the fruit reasonably closely if I was going to go for a perfect match would probably be hitting off over here, but it would just stick out like a sore thumb. So I have a little bit of grey through this color and the same with the leaves as well, in terms of picking the leaves from the Mandarin plant and metering the color to them. I've actually great those off just a fraction as well. No, just a belief to show you what cholera selected there again of Viet, often to slightly grey area, because I want the color slightly muted on a little bit more. Rithy. I don't want anything that looks very neon and in terms of the background color for the stem and thes leaves. Here again, I just click into the look at the Phil. I picked a color from the same Hugh and Luck waas for these. I've done that again, so it's really just a variation of the same Hugh. The background itself, in this case, is also using the same Hugh. But I've made a gray ER and in this case of a did just a little bit of noise to give the background a little bit more depth there. We have a attempting to create that feeling of repose, with colors in the pattern, feel balance and restful. 9. Your Project: your project, should you choose to accept, is to draw your very own authentic looking outs and crafts pattern. And how do you do that? Well, all you need to do is apply those principles that we covered in the class. You don't have to apply all of them. For example, if you want a more contemporary colors game, you can use more saturated colors just like you can see here. If you don't want to draw that really complex looking grid, or at least you don't want to draw it right now, and you want to get stuck straight on to creating your own pattern, download the pdf bread and printed out and start with that, you can always learn to draw the grid further down the track. Also, you can skip the victory rised vision, for example, if you prefer to work on water colors, quash acrylic, then just work directly on those mediums. So choose whatever medium you want to work, and that's where you feel comfortable and remember to show you what you have done. I'm really looking forward to see what you produce, but