Drawing Seamless Patterns in Procreate + Professional Surface Design Tips

1. Intro: Hey, everyone. My name is at Coct and I am back for my 15th Skillshare class. This class is all about how to create seamless repeat patterns using the drawing app procreate. This has been one of my most requested topics lately, so I am thrilled to bring you this class. Seamless patterns are the most versatile surface design type out there, and what makes them so magical is that the blocks will line up perfectly, which means these patterns will scale up infinitely. This is the key to creating designs that work on wallpaper, fabrics, betting, you name it. So if you're interested in surface design, seamless patterns are a must. Bonus, this opens up the door for you to upload your artwork to print on demand sites like spoon flower, or you can start earning an income with your artwork. I'll be walking you step by step through creating a tiled seamless pattern from start to finish. We'll begin by illustrating our asset library, so you'll learn all my best tips for drawing in procreate. And as an extra bonus, I have teamed up with illustrator Lisa Glanz to provide you with four of her best procreate brushes. Thank you, Lisa. You will get these for free just by joining this class. After we draw our elements, I'll show you exactly how I arrange them together like a puzzle to create a fluid seamless pattern. Procreate has some great new tools to help snap these tiles into place and make it even easier for you. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare by clicking the Follow button up top. This means you'll get a heads up when I launch a new class or have advice to share with my students. Alright, let's go right ahead and jump in so you can create your own seamless pattern. 2. Your Project: This class is all about creating a seamless pattern using procreate on your iPad. I'm going to walk you step by step to show you how I illustrate seamless patterns. If you follow my work on Instagram, you probably know that I love illustrating pretty florals. And flowers make great patterns. Plus, they will always be on trend, which means they're strong sellers. So on my end, I'll be showing you how to create seamless patterns using flowers as an example. But and I want to put this out there, you can follow along using whatever motif you like. Trust me, it's going to be the exact same principles, whether you're illustrating butterflies or bananas or carousel horses or champagne bottles. The main gist of how we create these patterns is having a few big hero elements and several tiny detail elements that we can use to fill in the gaps. So if you want to create your pattern out of your own existing artwork and skip the floral illustration steps, please feel free. As I walk you through this, I'll be keeping in mind that you might not be following along exactly with my floral illustrations, and I will be accommodating for you as well. This means that we are going to have an incredibly versatile project gallery with tons of different styles and motif choices. I cannot wait to see what you guys create. Absolutely, don't forget to upload your final artwork to the project gallery, so we can all see what everyone made. If you're cool sharing on social media, don't forget to tag me at CT Coke, so I can comment and like on Instagram as well. As artists, we got to support each other and lift one another up. Social media interactions are my jam. All right. Think about what kind of motif you want to illustrate or follow along with the florals, and let's just dive right in. Okay. 3. Asset Library: All right. It's time to get out your iPads and open up Procreates. Some of the tools that we'll be using are brand new and procreate, so please make sure that your app is up to date. These freebies are totally optional in this class. Think of them like an extra perk. You're welcome to download these freebie assets to use today. Or you can follow up and complete your class project using your own favorite procreate brushes and color palettes. It's entirely up to you. Either way, you're going to wind up with a gorgeous class project. All right. First up to download your class assets, go to catcok.com slash Pattern. Once you're there, you can submit your e mail to unlock the Dropbox folder that contains all the brushes and color palettes that we'll need for today's class. And I want to give another shout out to Lisa Glans for providing these free brushes which are normally for sale on her shop. If you want to check out the rest of her brush collection, which I have purchased most of, I'm providing a link to her shop in the class description down below. And heads up. Submitting your e mail also unlocks access to my newsletter, as well as Lisa's. You can subscribe at any time. All right. It is time to open up procreate and let's get started. All right. So let's go ahead and get started creating our art library. I've opened up procreate, the first thing I want to do is add a new Canvas. Click that plus ineptp and that black little file folder with a plus. I'm going to change this 2 " and have it be 12 " by 12 " at 300 DPI, which gives us a maximum of 37 layers. Pretty good layers wise. Go ahead and press Create. All right, and we have our Canvas ready to go. So if you haven't already done so, go ahead and import those brushes and swatches into procreate. So the brushes should show up down at the bottom under imported, and Lisa has been super generous giving us four brushes to use for today's class. The two that I'll be using to create this pattern are messy monoline and build up spladder. But I've decided to include two more deliciously inky and build up spray if you guys want to create something a little bit different from what I'm doing on screen. And also, please go ahead and import your swatches. If you airdrop them to your iPad, they should all show up over here. Now, I went ahead and created six swatches for you guys today. Please feel free to use whichever palette is most resonating with you or choose your very own colors. For this example, I'll be using the modern autumn palette, so I've gone ahead and tapped defaults to set that as my defaults. All right, cool. Let's go ahead and get illustrating. I want to start with that really hot pink color. I'll tap at once. Make sure it changes up here on my top right color indicator. Go to my brushes, and I'm going to start with this messy monoline. The first part of my illustration that I'm going to create are these big blooms. I'm not going to use a reference photo. I'm just going to go in and free hand this to feel like a big juicy tropical hibiscus balloon. Perfect. It's pretty sloppy. It's not perfect. But again, this is all just practice. And let me zoom in and show you this really nice texture on this messy monoline brush. It's not a perfect stroke at all. You get this really nice texture coming through, and that's why I decided to use the brush in this class. Instead of feeling perfectly polished, we get these nice rough edges, which help it feel a little bit more hand done. And to fill in my bloom, I'm going to tap that color. Bring it over and release it. All right, looks pretty good. One thing I want to do is flesh out these blooms a little bit more so that they fill up the space a little bit better. I'm just going to let's see, look for opportunities to maybe smooth some areas out or fill it up a little bit more so that we have less white space coming through. That might do it for me. Let me go ahead and fill these in. Well, that one's small enough. I'll just do it by hand. Cool. That's looking pretty good. If you want to fine tune it, please feel free to go through and smooth out some of these areas. But for me, I like having this rough and tumbled messy texture. So I'm going to leave it as is. And I'm going to create two more blooms, one over here and one over here. Now that I look at it, this is taking up a lot of space. I'm going to shrink it down a tiny bit, so I have room for my other two. I'll click my arrow. Bring it down a tad and then click that arrow to set the transformation. All right. I'm going to go back into my color palettes. And choose the second one down. It's kind of this pinky peach. Make sure it changes up here on the top right and create some petals. I want these to feel much more iconic when it comes to florals, so I'm going to keep it pretty simple and then go ahead and fill these bad boys in. Just by clicking my color, dragging and releasing it into the fills. And I can kind of scrub through here to fill in some of that center area. Perfect. And let's do one more bloom over here on the right so that we have these three main icons that we'll be using for our pattern. I'm going to go back to my palettes, switch it to this peach. And I really like the simplicity of this kind of floral. I'm going to continue that one over here. Awesome. And I'll click and drag to fill these in. And kind of zoom in and scribble a little bit in the middle to fill in some of that white space. Cool. As you can tell, the way I illustrate and procreate is very loose. All right. So now that we have our big blooms filled in, let's go ahead and do the center part of the flower. So before I start illustrating that, I want to go over to my layers and click this plus sign to add a new layer on top of this bloom layer. And this is going to come in handy later when we start adding a little bit of texture in. All right. So I still have that light peach in my palette, and then do the center part of this far left flower. As you can see, still super super loose, that's the way I like to illustrate. All right. And I'm going to go back to my palettes. Choose this kind of light pink and do the same thing for my hibiscus and this flower over here on the right. And then clicking and dragging over to fill in. All right. Pretty simple. Let's go ahead and add those little kind of like sooty stringy things. I think they're called pistols, maybe that come out of the flowers. So I'm going to go to my layers, click the plus nine, add a new layer, go over to my palettes, and I'll start with a bright pink. See how big this brush is. Pretty good. Remember, two fingers can always undo a movement, and then three will redo. You can also do it over here on the bottom left, but I'm a key command person and in procreate that translates to using my finger commands. All right. Those kind of stringy things that I think are called pistons, but I'm not totally sure. I'm going to start filling those in now too. So I'll do the hot pink over here. And for the middle one, I'm going to use that really light peach. Maybe four for this one since it's a bigger flower. Again, I'm keeping this super loose. Let's go ahead and use that light brown for the one over on the far left. All right. And the last layer that I want to add for these flowers are some leaves peeking out beneath the petals. I'm going to go over here to my layers, click the plusin to add a new layer, and I want these leaves to be behind the petals. I'm going to click this layer four, drag it all the way down, so it's just underneath that petal layer and leave it right there. All right, let's start drawing in our leaves. So one thing to note here. Remember when we use this feature where you kind of fill in these shapes that we draw, that only works if a shape is perfectly contained. So I'm going to show you two examples right here. So over here, you see it fills in perfectly, but over here, it fills in that whole artboard. Let me do this. Because it wasn't connected all the way. And the reason I'm showing that to you now is because this leaf layer is on its entirely own layer. So it might look like it's all connected if you draw something like this. But if you hide that primary layer, you can see it doesn't connect all the way. So just keep that in mind. I'm going to turn that layer back on. And my workaround for that instead of hiding and unhiding the layer is just to make sure that when I draw these, I'm connecting all the way behind that shape. So that's just a little trick to save you some time. All right. Now I'm going to switch my color to this kind of, like, darker burnt sienna, darker brown. And I'm going to do the same thing here. Draw a leaf, fill it in, making sure that I'm connecting that shape all the way behind the flower petals. Let's do one here. And maybe one right here. And I want to add one more leaf kind of behind this big hibiscus. I'm going to actually choose that kind of peachy, really light beige color and do this overlapping. Maybe it's going to come all the way down here as long as it connects together and fill it in. Oops. I guess I'm going to fill this one in manually. Cool. That's looking pretty good. So we have our basic blooms drawn out. Let's go ahead and add some details and textures. 4. Details & Texture: So first up, some details. I want to add some veining to these leaves. So I'm going to go back to my layers, make sure that layer four is selected with those leaves. I'll tap at once. And select alpha lock. And you know that alpha lock is on. If you see this checkered background on the layer thumbnail behind the illustration elements. So if you haven't used alpha lock before, what that does is now with alpha lock on this layer. Whatever I draw on my artboard is only going to show up on that actual layer. So as you can see here, these lines I'm drawing are only appearing on the leaves. They're not appearing anywhere on the background, and that's because I have alpha lock turned on. So I'm going to undo that. That was just an example to show you. And I'm going to use that strategy to create the veining of these leaves. So I'm just going to draw in what I think the veins of those flowers might look like, and not worry if it goes off the edges because alpha lock is protecting me there. Same thing here. Now I think I'll switch the colors up. Let's try this kind of mid tone brown. And I'll use that one right here. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect. Same mid tone over in this area. Now I'm going to switch the colors to that really light pink and finish the veining on the last two leaves. Awesome. That's looking pretty good. Let's go ahead and fill in some texture. So for my texture brush, I'm going to use that build up splatter. But if you want something a little bit more subtle, feel free to use the spray. It's a much lighter texture than the splatter. But I want something that really pops. So I'm going to go with the splatter. And then I'll go to my layers. And I'm going to start the texture on these big bloom layers. So I'm going to select that layer and then do that exact same alphao trick. So tap that layer once, turn on alphaoc. Make sure it's indicated by seeing that slight checkmark grid behind the main illustration on the thumbnail. And my color is still that light pink. I think I'll keep it that way. And now just have fun with it. So kind tap around at a little bit of slight texture. You can see it really well here. Oh, man, I really love this texture. Let's switch the colors up. I'm going to go to that hot pink. And add some hot pink over in this guy. Maybe in this one, two, and I don't want to overdo it. So I think I'm going to leave it there. Some have just one color of texture, whereas this one on the far right has that light pink and that really bright hot pink two. I love how that's looking. It's pretty loose. So let's go ahead and do the same thing to those other layers. So I'm going to tap layer two, turn on Alpha lock. Remember layer two or the center parts of those flowers, and then just do some tapping around. I think I want to add some of that dark brown. I'm going to select that dark brown. And some of the dark brown into those middle parts. Nice. Go back to my layers. Same thing with the pistols, slash whatever they're called. Tap that layer, turn on Alpha lock, and then just do some taps. You can see it's really subtle, but it's filling in those pistols. Few taps. Oh wait, I don't like that brown. I think it clashes with the brown that's already behind there. For this one, I'm going to make it light pink. Cool. And over here, still have that light pink. Do you taps. Looking pretty good. The only layer that we haven't added texture yet to is that leaf layer. So I'm going to tap that layer. Do you tap it? You can see there's a check mark next to Alpha lock. And that means that it is already on. So we're already good to go. I'm going to switch to that light beige and do the same thing. Tap around a bit, not overdoing it, just adding a little bit of visual interest. Cool. And I'm going to switch to that darker color for that light leaf. All right. So now that we have our primary florals completed. Let's go ahead and add a few little detail elements down below. And remember, those detail elements are going to be pretty important when it comes to filling in the gaps of our pattern. First things first, I'm going to open up my layers and then we swipe all of my floral elements and select group. I'm going to rename this group and call it flowers. And this just helps me stay organized. So I'm going to tap that carrot to condense the folder and hit this plus sign up top to start a new layer. It's called layer six. All right. Now, let's add a few details. I'm going to go to my brushes, select messy monoline. Right now, my palette is at kind of that dark burnt sienna. I'll just go ahead and keep it there and draw a little leaf. Fill it in. Maybe switch it to that lighter brown. Do the same thing. Draw a leaf, fill it in. Maybe fix that edge a little bit. But remember, these do not have to be perfect at all. Let's go ahead and do a little stem maybe with some leaves coming off of it. And fill that bad boy in as well. Remember, and I can't say this enough. It is looking pretty grungy, but that is the way I like it. All right. I'm going to switch to that light pink and do the same thing, add a little leafy stem thing going on here. And fill that in. Add a kind of budding flower thing there. I think I'll do one of those with each of my three pink colors. And as you can see, it's super gestural, and it doesn't have to be perfect at all. And last but not least, I'll do a hot pink bud and go ahead and fill it in. Awesome. So now we have our three primary illustrations, and then we have some options down here of some detail work we can do. So right now, the details are super flat because there's no texture, and our main illustrations have a lot of texture. So I'm just going to go in real quick and add some nice texture down to these details. So with layer six selected, I'm going to tap at once, hit Alpha lock to turn that on. Make sure there's this kind of gray grid behind those primary illustrations to know that it's on. Go to my brushes, select build up splatter. And I've already got that hot pink selected, so I'm just going to do a couple taps over here in the buds Maybe in that pinky leaf. Let's change it to this light tan. Let's do some tan over here, maybe over there. And last but not least, I'm going to use this really dark brown, do a touch of it over here. Cool. So again, I'm not overdoing it. I just want to make sure that the texture I'm using on my detail elements is matching the texture that I'm using for my primary illustration. All right. I know that was a lot of steps, but we have gone ahead and created our art library. So go ahead, applaud yourselves. We have done the bulk of the work already. So after this, it's just kind of fitting things together like a puzzle. These are going to be all the assets we use to kind of rearrange and piece together into the seamless pattern. So the hard work is all over, which was also the fun part because it's illustration. And now we can go ahead and start designing our block. So let's go ahead and dive into that. 5. Prepping the Block: All right, now it is time to make our block or tying square. So we have our completed illustration over here. Go ahead and tap gallery on the top left, and we're going to rename this file by tapping it says Untitled Artwork. We're going to call this art assets, colon working. And working is just an industry term, meaning that this is an editable file. This file has all of the layers intact. So if you need to make any tweaks, working indicates that that's the file you go to to make any adjustments. So we'll go ahead and press done. And now I'm going to duplicate this file by hitting select. Clicking our file and hitting duplicates. Cool. Press the x up here on the top right. Click the title name. It's going to be called Lock Working. Okay. And so right now, they look like the exact same file. But what we're going to be doing is adjusting a lot on this block working file, but I don't want to lose all of those layers I have over here in that file we just made. So by duplicating it, I can preserve that original in case they need to go back at any time. But now, since I have that original over here saved as the working file, I can go ahead and make some adjustments to the block without worrying about losing everything I just created. So go ahead and open up that duplicate file, the one called block working. And the first thing we're going to do is open up our layers and flatten everything into one layer. And you can do that by using two fingers. And pinching those layers together. So now, everything we created, which previously was on a bunch of layers is now just on one flattened layer. So now you can see why it's important to duplicate that file. We've just flattened everything. So if I wanted to go through and maybe remove this leaf behind the flower, it's not going to be so easy anymore because everything is now on one layer. But at this point, I'm assuming that my textures, my illustrations, everything are pretty much ready to go. So now what I'm going to do is select out each element individually and put it on its own layer. And the reason I'm doing this is so that it makes it pretty easy when I'm going to be moving things around and adjusting the block. So to do that, I'm going to go over here to this little S ribbon, which is my selection. And I'm going to select freehand selection. And now with my Apple pencil, I can kind of draw around each shape. It gets kind of tight in there and select one piece at a time and put it on its own layer. So I've selected it with my pencil. I'll use three fingers drag down and choose this right here, cut and paste. Cool. So it doesn't really look like anything happened, but let me hop over here to the layers, and I'll show you that this flower is now on its own layer. So I'm going to do that for the rest of the pieces of this illustration. So when you do that cut and paste, it's automatically going to select that new layer. So it's a little bit tedious. But every single time, we just need to make sure you go to your layers and you select that original layer four, so we're cutting out of that original layer. So same thing, click the selection tool. Draw all the way around. Three finger swipe down, cut and paste. Let's go over here to our layers, and we'll see that this hibiscus is now on its own layer as well. So I want to go back, select my original layer, rinse and repeat. So I'm just going to go ahead and do that for all of the assets within this illustration. And if you're ever not sure what you already selected and put on your own layer and what you didn't, you could just take a look at this layer thumbnail over here, and I can see that I've got four more elements to go. So grab that a three finger swipe, cut and paste. And that is the last one. Cool. So now if we look over here at our layers, each of these elements is on its own individual layer, which is perfect. So now I want to pinch out a little bit and move all of these illustrations to kind of this bottom right corner. So to do that, I'm just going to start with that first layer. Use my selection tool, move it to the corner and just kind of go one by one until all of these elements are overlapping in this bottom right corner. It's kind of this process. So I select the layer, select my selection tool, bring it on over and repeat. Cool. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just kind of overlapping is totally fine. Remember, we can move these layers around. And because they're all on their own individual layer, we can still grab them and move them around later. So now I'm going to show you why I just made you move all of your elements to the bottom right corner. And the reason is because we're going to change our canvas size. So right now, we've been working off this 12 by 12 inch canvas, but now we're going to make it a little bit smaller. So I'm going to go over here to my actions, tap Canvas, crop and resize and go up here to my settings and change this from 12 by 12. To 10 " by 10 " and go ahead and press done. Now, this is why I moved everything to the bottom right corner. When canvases crop in and procreate, they always crop in from the top corner and come downwards. And because in procreate, if you move something off of your artboard, it's going to be permanently deleted. Let me show you what I mean. You don't have to follow along for this. But if I were to move this halfway off my artboard and then later try to move it back, that whole left edge has been permanently deleted. So me undo with my two taps. So I'm really careful to make sure that nothing is leaving that artboard unless I'm intending for it to be deleted. So that's why when I'm resizing my canvas, I want to move everything as far away from that corner that crops in as possible, which is why I put it on the bottom right. And if you're wondering the reason why I made this artboard 2 " smaller from a 12 by 12 to a ten by ten, it's so that our illustration elements are a little bit bigger and they'll fill in the space more as we're creating our pattern. All right. Now let's go ahead and start kind of filling in this space. 6. Splitting the Elements: All right. Now, let's go ahead and we are going to start filling in our pattern block. I'm going to open up my layers. I'm just going to click this checkbox next to all of the layers to go ahead and hide everything except our biggest layer first, which is this hibiscus. I'm going to select my hibiscus, swipe left, duplicate it. And then hide that duplicated version. And the reason I did that is as I kind of move this hibiscus around and cut it up, I'll still have the original down here, this hidden layer to reference if I want to use it later, which we probably will. So all of these techniques in procreate are based off of non destructive editing techniques, which means that I don't ever want to delete something permanently. I always want to have a backup of it later. I work the exact same way in photoshop. All right. So right now, all of our layers are hidden except for this duplicate hibiscus. Remember, we have our backup habiscus hidden underneath it. So go ahead and select the hibiscus that's turned on with that check mark, and we are going to start filling in our pattern block. So with my hibiscus layer selected, the first thing I want to do is go over here to my selection arrow. And bring it over here to the top left of the screen. And I'm going to have it about here. So I have a little bit of room between the top and the bottom, but not much on the left and right. And so what I want this hibiscus to do is to come off the edge over here on the left edge, and then re emerge onto that right edge. That is the key for a seamless pattern, and that means that when we duplicate this and stack stack stack, those edges will always align perfectly. So this is where we get to some fun problem solving. So I have my new Hibiscus selected. I've made a duplicate of it just beneath it and gone ahead and hid in it. So right now, it's the only layer that's selected on my entire palette. So now what I'm going to do is click this plus sign to make a new layer, go to my palettes, and choose any dark color. Actually, on this modern autumn palette, there's this navy blue. So that's pretty dark. I'm going to go ahead and select it. Make sure it changes up here on the top right. Click, drag release. So our entire board is turned navy blue. So I'm going to go back to my layers. Click this n next to layer 12. Remember N stands for normal, which is a normal blending mode. And I'm going to take this opacity and move it down so that, you know, it's around 30%. As long as we can see the blue and see the flower, we're good. So tap your layers again to close that. And what this blue background is going to be for us is a guide, and you're going to learn y in about 30 seconds. So go ahead with that navy background selected. Also swipe right on that visible habiscus layer and select group. So now you can turn that group on and off, and you can see that the group only consists of that visible habiscus and this blue background. So what I'm going to do is swipe left on group. Duplicate it. We can go ahead and hide that original group by clicking that checkmark. And now with the new group selected, we want to move this habiscus off the page. And so remember, with a seamless pattern, it's going to tile perfectly. So this can be repeated over here and over here. So what I want to happen is for this habiscus to go off the page on the left, and then wherever it's going off the page to pop up on this side of the page. And this is the magic of seamless patterns. So make sure that your group is selected, not an individual layer within that group. Make sure the selection is on new group. And that way, whatever we move, everything in that group will move as well. All right. So we have our new group selected. It's that visible layer. Everything else is turned off. We're going to go to our arrow. And this is where we're going to see a really cool new feature of procreate. And it's called snapping. It's down here on the bottom left. Now, what snapping does is it makes it so that anything you move, it's going to snap to a grid or to an axis. So make sure that magnetics and snapping are turned on. My distance is about halfway. It's at 22, and my velocity is at Max. Now you can see that when I click and drag this around, we have these kind of blue or yellow line indicators that show you where it is on that page and what grid it's aligning to. So when I move this around, it's these really jerky movements, and that's because it's aligning to these grids. So I'm going to show you an example of what snapping looks like turned off. So don't worry about following along for this part. It's just an example. So if I toggle off snapping and magnetics, then when I move it around, it's much more fluid. It's not really snapping to any particular grid. It's going exactly where my Apple pencil is telling it to go. So good and bad. If you want to have a lot of control with your movements and put things in a perfect place, then you do not want snapping or magnetics turned on. However, if you want it to be aligning perfectly with a vertical or horizontal axis, you want to keep snapping on so that it stays on that grid. And that's really important for these seamless patterns because like I said, I want half this hibiscus to go off on the edge here and pop back on this side, and that is where snapping and magnetics come in handy. So without further ado, let's go ahead and move the sky a little bit to the left, about a far so that just the tips of these blooms are getting cut off. And this is why we had that navy background here. It's to make sure that we're not moving up and down. We're only going left and right. So if you find yours to be up here, it shouldn't look like that. It should be perfectly on the page. All right. So we have those blooms kind of getting cut off on that left side. I'm going to go back to my layers, which will set the transformation. And remember, let me just show you real quick. Don't follow along. If I move this back now, we've lost all of that data, which is why we have that other group that we made. Remember, you want to make sure that not a piece of that group is selected, but the whole thing that says new group. You've turned on that checkmark to turn the layer on, We're going to go to our transform tool arrow and bring it all the way to the right. And because we had snapping on, you can see it really just locked in place here, which is perfect. Go ahead and tap that arrow again to set the transformation. And now you can see that the areas where the pedal got cut off over here have been repeated over on the right side. That's perfect. That's exactly what we want. And those backgrounds we made, that was only to create a guide so that we could see exactly where it should snap in place over here. Remember, you had this kind of box behind there, and having that blue background showed us where it should snap to. But we don't need that blue background anymore. It was just a guide for us, so let's go ahead and delete it. So first, I'm going to swipe left on those navy backgrounds and hit Delete. Now I'm going to grab both new groups and merge them together into one illustration. So just grab those, pinch them together, and now this layer, is that entire hibiscus. So to bring this full circle, that's why we made this backup habiscus down here because our first one got cut in half. So if we want to be putting this new habiscus anywhere on the pattern, we have it fully preserved and ready to go. All right. So when I make these repeating patterns, we have a lot of different sizes of elements, and I prefer to work from largest element to smallest element. And the reason we do that is so that we can use these teeny little detail pieces down here as filler for those white space areas. So the first thing we want to make sure is that we have room for three big flowers. Alright, next up, I think this peach flower. Let's see which one is bigger. Oh, this guy. Alright, so it's that kind of light pink flower is our next largest flower. And this is the one that I'm going to do the exact same thing to except it's going to be on the top and the bottom. So with Hibiscus, we split it left and right. And for this pink flower, we're going to split it top and bottom. And if you're groaning because we have to do that all over again. This is actually the last time we're going to split it like that. Once we have every side that has a full bleed element, we'll be totally finished, and that's just going to help us later on when it comes to aligning the pattern. So I want to make sure that my left and right have something that goes full bleed like our split hibiscus and that top and bottom, we also have something that goes full bleed. So this is the last one, I promise. So it's going to be the exact same step. I'm going to swipe left, duplicate it. Hide that original because we're going to save that for later, and then make a new layer by hitting this plus sign. Dragging our blue in to create a background, going back to our layers. And we're going to make that blue much more transparent so we can see all this background stuff. Remember, this blue is only a guide for us. I'm going to go to my visible flower, the one with the check mark on. Go to my arrow tool. It's getting a little jumpy right now, so I'm going to turn off snapping while I find a good positioning on that vertical axis. So I think I like it right about here, and I'm going to have it really popping off on the top. So I'll go ahead and tap that arrow again to set the transformation. And now with my flower selected. I'm also going to swipe right on that blue, group them together, swipe left on the group. Duplicate. We can go ahead and hide that bottom group. And now with my new group selected, I'm going to go to my arrow tool. Go to snapping and turn it on again. And now I'm simply going to move it up the page until it's mostly cut off. That's actually feeling pretty good. So I'll go back to my layers. Select that group that's underneath. Go ahead and check the box, make it visible. Let's go to our arrow tool. Bring it all the way down, and it will snap right in place here, which is perfect. We're not going left or right. Remember, we just want to stay perfectly on that vertical axis until it snaps in. All right. That's looking perfect. Hard part is over, guys. Let's go ahead and swipe left on those navy layers to delete them. Those were just our guides, and we don't need them anymore. And let's consolidate those two split flowers into one layer. Awesome. 7. Arranging the Block: Now it's just going to be the fun part, which is rearranging the rest of this composition. And for everything else that we rearrange as we turn these layers on, we want to make sure that nothing else is going over any edges. We only have these guys going over the edges, and that's exactly where I want to keep it to make it simple. And like I mentioned, I want to work from largest to smallest. So it's time to find that there it is, that peach flower and find a little spot for it. So I've gone ahead and clicked that checkmark to make it visible. I'll select the layer. Go to my arrow tool. And at this point, I'm going to turn snapping off and I don't need it for a while, because now I'm going to be able to move things very fluidly and meticulously. I don't want anything snapping and jumping to place. I want to have full control. So snapping and magnetics are both turned off almost from here on out. Alright, now it's time to kind of fit everything into place and make it look good. And you can rotate these layers around by finding that little green guide and pulling it left and right. You can also re size by grabbing a corner and dragging it up and down. When you're re sizing, always go smaller, never go bigger than your original illustration. And the reason for that is because if this were printed and I made it artificially bigger like that, it would get really, really pixelated when you tried to print it. So let me undo. And now I'm just going to again, work from largest to smallest and start rearranging all my shapes. So with that layer selected, I'll go to my arrow tool and just find some room for everything. I don't want anything to feel like it's, you know, perfectly up and down or right and left. So I want to make sure that I'm kind of staggering these things a little bit. I think I'll go find that duplicate of my hibiscus. Turn it on. Find that arrow tool. I kind of tuck it into this corner down here. I'll rotate it a little bit, so it looks different. Cool. All right. So I have two more areas that I kind of want to fill in the gaps for. So first, I'm going to go ahead and make a copy of this one. Use my arrow. Rotate it around so it feels different and find a nice snug place for it on the bottom. Actually, I think I want to bring it down. I have to zoom out so I can see. I want to bring it down, so it's almost touching those edges, but definitely not overlapping. Cool. So now it's time to kind of fill in these white space gap areas with our detail elements. Let me zoom out a bit so I can see what's going on. So again, working large to small. I'm going to start with these kind of leaf stems. So I'll start with the pink one. Find a nice spot for it. That feels nice and do the same thing with that brown stem. Cool. And having things overlap is really helping this whole composition feel more integrated. All right. I think I'm going to make a copy of that brown one. So swipe left and hit Duplicate and use it to kind of fill in more areas in other parts of that composition. I can even make it a little bit smaller if I want to. Perfect. And I'll do the same thing with the pink. Swipe left, duplicate. Arrow and find a nice little home for it. It's kind of nice over there. All right. Now I'm going to move on to some of my smaller elements. Let's start with this light brown leaf. I'm going to make it a little smaller. And I want to go almost to the edge but not hit that edge. So now let's turn on my dark brown leaf and find a spot for it as well. It's feeling nice. Again, super close to that edge, but I definitely don't want to overlap. Cool. I'm going to actually duplicate that brown leaf. And to kind of balance out the color, I think I need some dark brown over here on this side. In this situation, I need to move the board up a little bit to actually see what I'm doing. All right, so I'm bringing it just to that corner. And keep in mind that everything on the top up here because this is tiled is going to be repeated down here at the bottom. Same thing. Everything on this left side is going to be repeated on this side. So if I have something coming really close to the corner down here, that's going to hit right about over here. So I know that's kind of tricky to kind of visualize without actually seeing it, but it's just something to kind of keep in mind as we're filling the space. All right. Let's get those little bloom illustrations. I think I need some of that bright magenta over in this area. Perfect. Now, that light pink. Where would that go? Probably maybe were right over here. Nice. And then that peach one. I don't have much peach going on on this side. So I'm going to put it right there. Perfect. I think I'm going to add one more leaf right here because it's feeling a little bit sparse. So I'm going to duplicate that light brown. Use my arrow tool. I kind of fit it in Snug. My it a little smaller right here. Perfect. So now that we've kind of filled in this space filled in these gaps, we have our block illustrated. It's time to test this out and see how it looks on a repeating pattern. And that is the next video. 8. Pattern: All right, at this point, it is time to take our block and test it out as repeating pattern. So let's go ahead and go back to gallery, hit select. Take our block. Duplicate it, press that x. We're going to name this new layer pattern. And this will be the final piece to go from our initial illustrations to creating our block to see what it looks like fleshed out as a pattern. And remember, we're duplicating these and going one step at a time so that if we ever mess anything up, we can always go back to the previous step and revise. And again, this technique is called non destructive editing. I use it all the time, and it has saved me on multiple occasions. Alright, let's go ahead and open up our new art board called Pattern. And the first step is to open our layers and just to grab big chunks at a time and start merging everything together so that that whole selection is all on one layer. And this is another reason it's really important to kind of duplicate those previous artboards out in the gallery, because once you flatten things, you can't make little adjustments and move things from behind anymore. It's all flattened on one layer. All right. So now that we have everything flattened onto one layer, it's time to test out our pattern. And the way we're going to do that is by making our canvas much larger. So go over here to your settings, which is the wrench, tap crop and resize, and under settings. We're going to change it before it was ten by ten. Now we're going to make it 20 by 20 and keep that 300 DPI and make sure that resample canvas and snapping are both toggled off. You do not want those on and press done. Cool. And just like before, when we shrunk our canvas down, everything happens from that top left corner. So when it expanded outwards, it started from the top left corner and went out. We have our artwork down here at the bottom, really snug in that corner. Let's go to our layers, swipe left, make a duplicate of that layer. Then go to our arrow tool, and now we want to turn snapping back on. Select snapping, turn on magnetics and snapping. Now it's simply a matter of bringing it up and letting it snap right into place. That looks perfect. Let's go back to our layers. I'm going to blend those both together by pinching them. Then I'll swipe left. Duplicate, go to my arrow tool, and then do the exact same thing. Perfect. I'll hit the arrow tool one more time to set the transformation. Now you can see this is the glory of that repeat pattern. Everything has lined up absolutely perfectly. Let me turn it off and on. So you can see you can scroll in really tight, turn that off, and you can see how it aligns absolutely perfectly with those edges. So this is an absolutely perfect seamless pattern in terms of lining up really well. So if this is what it looks like on your screen, good job. You guys did it. This is the most complicated form of pattern making. And if you made it this far, then that is a big feat. So congratulations. All right. So before we call it today, I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves. What I want to do is just add a few more details into some of these white space areas to help it feel a little bit more integrated and so it's not so choppy. And we're going to go ahead and do that in the next video. 9. Fine-Tuning: All right. So this is where we left off. It's time to add in some little details to make it feel a little bit more integrated. So first things first, I just took a look at the layers. Let's go ahead and squish those together to make them one layer. And now I'm going to tap that plus line to add a new layer. And we're going to do exactly what we did earlier. We're just going to draw some leaves and things to kind of fill in some of these areas. So I'm going to go to my brush. Make sure it's on messy model. Go to my colors. And I want to use this dark brown. I'm going to select that one. And now it's just a matter of zooming in and looking for areas that we can fill in with some additional illustration elements. One important thing is we're only filling in the main part of the illustration. Don't go over any edges like this because then it won't be able to be repeated seamlessly anymore. Any of these adjustments we do, we want to keep on the main part of the illustration, not go over any edges. You know, it's not too bad of a job. There's not too many areas that we need to fill these details into, but a little bit does help. So at this point, I'm just kind of eyeballing it, looking for white space areas that feel a little bit sparse or awkward and filling those in with additional elements. And I think in a few areas, I'm going to get really close to the edge but not touch the edge. And that's going to help it from feeling like there's too much white space when this begins to tile again. I'm going to do the same thing up here. Really close, but not quite touching. All right. I don't even remember which way was up. It probably doesn't matter because this is intended for fabric. All right, kind of eyeballing it. It looks pretty good. Don't forget that we had all this nice juicy texture on these other areas. So I want to repeat that on these elements that I just added in. So go ahead and tap that layer. Turn Alpha lock on. And I'm going to go to this light tan as a color, and my brush, I used splatter before, so I'll use it again. And I want to actually see what I'm doing. So I'm going to turn off that main illustration layer. So I make sure that I hit all these guys with a little bit of texture. Perfect. Let's put that layer back on. And go ahead and pinch them both together. Cool. So that was our method of adding details, and now our repeat pattern is ready to go. If we want to test it one more time, I'll show you how just to make sure that everything's going to line up well with those details. So I'm going to swipe left on that layer, duplicate it. Hide the original. Because remember, this is just a test. So I'm going to go back to that original when all is said and done with this quick, 32nd test. So I'm going to have this new layer selected. Go to my transform tool. Make it a lot smaller. Go back to my layers, swipe left, duplicate. Make sure snapping is turned on. Then I'm just going to move it over, merge both those together, duplicate again and just kind of test out and see how this is looking. This is actually looking pretty nice. Yeah, it feels really integrated. I can see this doing really well on wallpaper. So adding those details in helped it a lot. Let's go ahead and delete both those layers, turn our original back on, test completed. We did a good job. Alright, so we have done so much work to get to this level. It's been super fun, but it's also been a lot of effort. So we want to make sure that when we're creating patterns like this, we're optimizing it the best we can. And for me, that usually means sales. So since I did all of this work and effort, it's just a few extra steps to create some additional color palettes. So, for me, that makes a lot of sense because maybe someone doesn't like these colors together pink and brown, but they might purchase it if say it were blue or green or yellow. So because it's so easy for me to make additional color palettes, I'm going to go ahead and do that so that it's more likely that people will purchase this pattern if there's maybe four color options rather than just one. So this is just being a little bit strategic with surface design and making sure that I'm getting the most bang for my buck. So on this next video, I'll show you how to really efficiently, quickly and simply play with some additional color palettes, so that by the end of this class, you don't just have one pattern, you have a whole range of color palettes. So let's go ahead and get started. 10. Color: All right. So let's go ahead and play with some color variation. So first things first, I'm going to go into my layers, and this is where it pays to be very organized. We're going to have a lot of layers up here. So the simpler it is the better. So I'm going to tap layer four, select rename. And I'm going to call this modern Autumn. That's the same name as the palette that I pulled the colors from. So that is our original. So we're going to keep that here and build some color palettes on top of this. So the first thing to do, which is the easiest is to see what this looks like with a new background color. So I'm going to add a layer. Tap it. Bring it underneath modern Autumn. Go to my palettes, and it's that navy blue that's built into that palette. So I'll tap it to set. Grab that circle, release, and bam. That looks entirely different, and it was just one simple step of changing the background. So you can see what it looks like without that background and with it. I like both. So I'm just going to keep it there, but have it turned off for now. I'll show you later when we're exporting how to export both versions, the white version and the Navy background version. But for now, I'm just going to go ahead and turn that off. Go to modern Autumn, swipe left, and hit Duplicate. Just going to turn off that one underneath so that we're working with this brand new layer. All right. And like I mentioned, blue is a pretty strong seller. So I want to see what these look like with a blue tone. And just to double check, let's open our layers and make sure that we're working on a copy of that layer, so we're not rewriting anything. So this new one is selected, I'm going to go up to my adjustments and go to this first option, hue, saturation, and brightness and choose layer. And now I can click this scrubber down here on hue and bring it all the way to the right of the spectrum, as well as all the way to the left. So we're seeing a lot of options here, which is pretty cool. So I mentioned that I wanted blue. So I'm going to find something right around here. That's a really nice balance actually with this kind of blue and purple indigo. You can also adjust the saturation, make it very saturated or very desaturated. But I want to leave saturation about where it is at around 50%. And over here on the right is the brightness. You can make it almost white or all the way to dark. And same thing, I want to leave brightness exactly where it's at 50%. And I'm really liking what this is looking like. So go ahead and hit your layers to set that transformation. Now we have this really nice blue. So let me show you what it looks like before. And after. So all we did was adjust the hue to get this nice blue tone. And you know what, on a whim? I want to see what it looks like with that navy background, too. So I'll turn that back on. Oh, yeah, that's super cool. Okay. So I already see four color palette versions that I'll be saving after this. I'll be saving the original, the original with the blue background. The blue and the blue with the navy background. So I'm already at four color palettes. I do tend to get pretty crazy with color palettes and have a bunch of options, but I want to simplify this for you guys. So I'm just going to show you one more way to adjust color. So I've hidden everything except that original modern autumn. Oh, wait, real quick. Let's double tap that blue layer and rename it blue. Just to stay extra organized. Okay, cool. So with modern Autumn selected, let's swipe to the left and duplicate it one more time. And for this, you know, retro nostalgia vintage, all of those things are really on trend right now. So I want to try kind of a retro vintage palette for my final and last palette. So with my new modern tum selected, I'm going to rename it retro. And go up here to my adjustments and go back to hue saturation and brightness, tap layer. And first, I'm going to find something that has a little bit more orange tones to it. So I'm just going to take this hue scrubber slightly to the right at about 57%, call it a day there, and then go back to my adjustments and this time hit color balance layer. And now with color balance turned on, you can make much more fine tweaking details. It's not going to be as crazy as that whole spectrum with the hue and saturation. But rather, you just make much more subtle changes here. You have much more control. So I think what I want to do is bring that between cyan and red, bring it all the way to red. And let's see the difference between all the way green and all the way magenta. I like this one skewing a little bit more on green. And let's try yellow, all the way to the left. Oh, all the way to the right, drastically changes things. That's a really pretty palette, and I might use that later, but for right now, I want that vintage retropeel. So I'm going to keep it about in the middle here as well. And if you want to get even more fine tuned with the color adjustment, go ahead and click this little sunshine. And we've just been adjusting shadows on mine. You may have started at mid tones. So if yours didn't look quite like minded with those adjustments, that's why. You can adjust these different areas within the colors. So evidently, I was on shadows. There's also mid tones, and there's also highlights. So let's try mid tone real quick just to see if it makes any drastic difference. So all the way to blue. All the way to yellow. Oh, that's kind of fun. But you know what? I think I like this kind of neutral tone in here. If I go to yellow, I lose that nice neutral, and it doesn't feel less sophisticated. So when you pair bright colors with neutral, it always makes your illustration a little bit more sophisticated. So I like to use neutrals whenever I can. All right. It doesn't look like I'm going to adjust magenta that much. Let's try cyan in red. Oh, cool. So if we bring Cyanne all the way to the left, all of those greens turn very green. So they're kind of brownish now. But like I mentioned, I like keeping things neutral. So I think I'm going to keep it there as it is. So let's go ahead and go back to our layers. This was our original, and this is our retro layer. It definitely feels retro. It has those kind of 60s 70s color palettes with those oranges and olive tones and browns. I really love it. I do want to see though what it looks like with kind of a yellow, maybe, like, sort of a tan background. So I'm gonna hit that plus sign. Drag a layer underneath retro. Go to my color palettes. And I'm going to go down here to my classic option. And I'm going to hand pick my yellow background. So I'm just going to drag on the spectrum, find something that feels nice and kind of not too intense, maybe something over here. You can see the color change on the top right, be a little bit lighter. And now I'll drag that color release. Yeah. That's interesting. Let me see what it looks like. So with the white background. And with this one. You know, I think I need to make some really subtle tweaks to that background. And rather than going back to our color picker every single time, if you want to see what the tweaks look like in real time, I'll show you how. So with that background layer selected, Let's go up to our adjustments, and I want to choose hue saturation and brightness for layer, just like we did last time. And now you can see in real time, what it looks like when we adjust the value, the saturation, and the hue. Oh, wow. I really like that blue all of a sudden. Okay. I wasn't planning on going blue, but now I'm thinking I just might. So I want to make it desaturated. A little bit darker. Find something that kind of hits that, like, cornflower blue, minty look. I bring that saturation up. Oh, yeah, I totally love that. Okay, well, that's the benefit of exploring in real time. You see some colors that you didn't initially think that you were going to use. But, you know, I started this. I thought I was going to use this kind of tan background, but I love that desaturated blue. So that is the winner. Yeah. So it's looking pretty good. So real quick, I'm going to group the retro and the background together. So I've selected both. I'll hit group. I'm going to call this group. Retro. Awesome. All right. Well, cheers to happy accidents, guys, because I love that blue background. I think that's going to look really cool on fabric. All right. So now that we have some various color palettes. We've done a lot of exploration, some testing, we wound up with some happy accidents. Let's go ahead and I will show you how to save and export this depending on your desired output. So if you want to be uploading these patterns to spoon flour, I'll show you how to export to optimize for that. Same with Society six or Etsy. So slightly different output for each one, and we'll dive into that in the next lesson. 11. Saving: All right. So now that we have put in the hard work to create this beautiful, seamless pattern illustration. It's time to learn how to save it and export it in the most optimized way, depending on what your intentions are. So I'm going to go through the three most common scenarios. Scenario one, you just want to save this master file. It's got all of these layers intact. It's got all the different color palettes. And to do that, I'm going to go back to gallery, and we want to save all of these. So I'm going to select each and every one, go to share. And for this, I'm going to share it two ways. I'm going to share the procreate version. And I'm going to either save it to my iPad and probably export it to my Macbook so I can save it to the Cloud. So procreate is the first version to save it as. And the second one is as PSD. So PSD stands for photoshop file, and that means that if you open this up in Adobe photoshop, all of those layers are going to be preserved in each one. So again, I usually airdrop it straight to my mac. Yeah, and so PSD matters if you use Adobe Photoshop. If you don't use photoshop, you can probably skip that one, but I would definitely save it as procreate and save it in a second location. This is actually my third iPad P. I use a 12.9 inch iPad P. Two others have totally failed on me. I have no idea, well, no, one, I did drop. But the other one, I don't know why that happened. So I lost all of my procreate work, which was a huge bummer. So now, whenever I finish final illustrations like this, I always export them to my mac book so that I can save it on the drive from my computer. So if you've been a designer illustrator for a while and you have digital copies of things, you probably know that hard drives fail all the time, and it's always good to have more than one backup. All right. So anyway, lecture over, back your stuff up because it is a huge bummer when you lose files. All right. Let's go to scenario two. This is probably going to be the most common scenario for most of you guys watching my class. You're creating seamless patterns because you want to upload them to a print on demand site like spoon flower. Spoon flower is a print on demand site that turns your seamless patterns into fabrics primarily that they sell on their website. It's a pretty huge platform. And I know a lot of artists out there. This is their bread and butter for income is spoon flower. You can have your artwork printed on seamless patterns with a bunch of products through their website, wallpaper, tablecloths, dinner napkins, table runners, tea towels, Dube covers, curtains, blankets, fabrics. Literally, you name it if it's a fabric or wallpaper, Spoonflower definitely offers that. So this step here is specifically for when you want to have this pattern, continue repeating, like on spoonflower products. So to do that, I'm going to export each color palette individually. So I'll start with the modern autumn original. I'll go up to my wrench. I'll hit Share, and I'm going to export this as a JPEG. And I'll go to airdrop, usually send it to my Macbook and upload it to Spoonflower from there. You can also save it directly to your iPad and then upload it dpoonflower from your iPad, whatever you prefer. JPEGs are important because it flattens everything and compresses it to the smallest file size, which is important for uploading to these print on demand websites. So I'd literally go through, I have one version with the white background. I'll turn the background on, go to my wrench, JPEG, and rinse and repeat and kind of, you know, send it to my Macbook again and do that for each individual color palette. So I'd go through turn on retro, then turn on blue and then turn on blue with a white. So each one of these I would export as individual JPEGs so that they are all ready to go being uploaded to spoonflour. Because remember, this itself is a block to make a repeat pattern. So this whole thing we already tested it earlier, it will repeat seamlessly, so it's perfect for that. And last but not least scenario three, you want to use this pattern and print it on art prints to sell on your tsi shop, or even upload it to another print on demand website like Society six. Unlike spoon flower, Society six doesn't really require repeat patterns for most of their products. Granted, there are a handful, like their wallpaper where you will need to upload a repeat pattern. But for most of their products, what you do is you upload a flat JPEG like this. So not only can you upload this artwork as an arch print to sell on their website, but you could also sell it as phone cases, dove covers, leggings, Macbook leaves, you name it. So the vast majority of the products you upload to society six are just going to be this flattened art work. It's not going to automatically repeat like it does with spoon flour. So there's two ways you could do this. You could save this file and use the JPEGs that we'd uploaded to spoon flour and just upload those. Or you can make this slightly bigger and max out the dimensions that are available in procreate, which is 27 " by 27 ". By maxing out the dimensions, it's going to open you up for more product types. So that's the big P there. So if you want to use this existing artwork to sell on Society six or other print on demands that don't do that repeat pattern thing. The first thing you want to do, always, always, always is add your signature. So I'm going to start a new layer, pick a dark color, probably go to one of my default sketching brushes. I love peppermint. I use it all the time, and then find a place within this pattern. Oh God, it is pretty filled out, isn't it? Okay, here we go. To sign. And that way, when you upload this as art prints, pillows, whatever, your signature will be in place. From a personal branding perspective, it is so important to make sure you always have your signature on the artwork that you're uploading, especially art prints. Now, obviously, we're not going to do the signature if you're selling it as fabric through spoon flower because your signature would just repeat repeat repeat repeat, which is kind of weird. But I do keep my signature in place, especially for arch prints. So the Society six version, I'm going to upload it with my signature in place. So same thing as before, tap that wrench, share, JPEG, and I usually airdrop it to my mac book and upload from there. And I would do the same thing again for each and every color palette. One thing you'll note is if you turn on this navy blue, you lose your signature, and a quick way around that is just to duplicate your signature, turn off that original one, go up to your adjustments, saturation and brightness and bring that brightness all the way up, and then you can see it up here. So usually when I do this, I have two signature layers. I have my signature on dark like this, and then I also have a signature that will show up on light backgrounds. And one more caveat, I want to put in place for Society six. So right now, this artboard is 20 " by 20 ". If you want to absolutely maximize the artboard that you could do in procreate, it's actually a little bit larger for this type of iPad that I have, which is a 12.9 inch iPad Pro, The biggest canvas size I can get to is 27 " by 27 ". So if I really wanted this to be applicable for all Society six products, I would make a new artboard at 27 by 27 ", dump these layers in one at a time, and then save that higher file. But the only problem with those larger artboards is it limits you to four layers. So it's pretty tricky. What I will do, though, is I'll show you an example for one if you're interested in seeing what it looks like at the largest possible size so that you can click on as many products as possible with Society six. So I'm going to go back to Gallery. Select this. You guessed it, duplicate it. Click that x. I'm going to rename this 1207 x 27. And that's to remind me what the size of this artboard is. And then what I'm going to have to do is select this duplicate it again. I know you guys are probably super sick of duplicating, but I'm going to show you why I did that. Okay. So I'm going to go into that original one or whichever one. And now I have to cut it down to four layers so that I can expand the artboard. So I'm just going to do this with the original so that you can see, So I've got my four layers intact. I deleted the others, but that's why I duplicated it earlier, so it's not forever lost. I'm going to go to my wrench, Canvas, crop and resize. Settings 27 by 27 done. Now, remember, you never, never, never want to upsize like this because that's going to make the resolution pretty bad. But instead, because this is our magical seamless pattern, we can just duplicate this to fill in the rest of the space. But to duplicate it, I'm going to have to lose a layer because I'm only limited. Watch this. Maximum of four layers reached, which means we can't add another layer. So I'm going to lose this background. I can add it back in later. Duplicate use my transform tool, bring it up, consolidate and do the exact same thing. I know this is kind of a tedious extra step, but one day I hope procreate allows for larger artboards. Okay, cool. Consolidate. And now I can add that background layer back in. Drag it underneath. Cool. All right. So make sure my signature. Oh, there it is. Cool. Yeah, so then I would do the same thing here. I would hit Share. JP port it, either save it to my iPad and upload it from my iPad to a print on demand site, or send it to my Mac book, which is what I usually do. And I would do the same thing for both color options. And then when I'm ready to do the other color palettes, I would have to go back to my gallery, duplicate this and do the same thing. So it's a little bit tedious, but that is how you can get the absolute maximum file size to upload to print on demands where that does matter. All right. So before we end the class today, I want to talk to you guys real quick about building a portfolio and how I optimize my pattern portfolio for sales so that I can earn additional income. So for this next video, you don't have to do anything on your iPad anymore except maybe take notes. You can just sit back and listen to some of my best advice for creating high value marketable sellable patterns. Alright, let's get started. 12. Professional Tips: Okay. All right. You have made it almost to the end. I am so excited to see what you created today, please please please feel free to share the project gallery down below. If you decide to share on Instagram, please tag me at CT Coke so I can like and comment to help boost your engagement. After all, we artists have to stick together and help each other out. Bonus, if you share your project or anything related to my classes in your Instagram stories and you tag me. I can re share your story, so all my followers see what you posted as well, and you'll get even more eyes on your page. And before we wrap up, I have some final tips to help you take your artwork to the next level. I want to spill some insider tips from the surface design industry to help you create designs that are going to stand out commercially. Plus, increase your chances of succeeding in this competitive industry. Surface design is a massive industry, and for artists, it's a great opportunity to cash in and get noticed. If you're not familiar with the term surface design, and I definitely wasn't when I was getting started, surface design is simply any type of artwork or design that's applied to a product. Look around you and you'll see surface designs everywhere. They're on tapestries, throw pillows, wallpaper, fashion accessories, literally anything you could print designs on. And there is always an artist behind the artwork. Like I mentioned, when I was first getting started as a commercial artist, I actually had no idea what surface design was. But I lucked into the industry by getting started uploading my artwork to print on demand sites like Society six. And as a beginner artist with a full time job, print on demand websites were my access to making a side income and getting my name out there. Now, I still sell on print on demand sites, but I also license my designs to stores like Target, urban outfitters, home goods, Moncloth, Nordstrom, and more. These big brands sell my designs on wallpaper, apparel, art prints, home decor items, and more. And they like me because my design sell well, so we both make money from these partnerships. So I'm going to walk you through what these big brands are looking for when they want new surface design patterns to license. Even if you're not selling a target yet, they are among the industry leader for licensing designs, and so they kind of dictate what the rest of the industry wants. First up, color. Brands want colors that are on trend and customers purchase what's relevant. When I'm coming up with color palettes for my surface designs, I take a look at color trends. I consider this year's Panton color of the year, as well as the New York fashion week color projections for the season or year that I'm designing for. And fun fact, the palettes that I put together for you for this class are actually inspired by the New York fashion week autumn winter palettes. So these are colors that are being noticed in the surface design industry right now. You're already one step ahead of the curve. I also get color inspiration by looking at top fashion brands. Fashion is always ahead of the curve when it comes to new trends. So that's the industry I turn to first when I want to know what's in and protip. I will go to websites like anthropology.com, sort by new, and look for commonalities in color that are appearing over and over again across their new products. If I spot a really popular color, I'll try to incorporate it into my new artwork. And if you want to learn more about how I track trends and incorporate them directly into my designs, check out my class, how to discover profitable design trends before anyone else and create artwork with mass appeal. All right next up, a big key to creating surface designs that appeal on a commercial level is to put together collections. What I mean by this is grouping pieces of your artwork together based on similarities. A lot of surface designers reach their success not by selling one design, but by offering a group of their designs together as a package. This is especially important when it comes to fabric. So on sites like Spoonflower, where anyone can upload your own designs to sell on their products, the top selling artists create collections of artwork. And this means they have multiple designs that feel cohesive in a group. So customers wind up purchasing several rules of fabric with different but complimentary artwork. And on the larger scale, when I'm pitching fabric or wallpaper to big companies, I will never send them a standalone design. They just aren't interested in that. Instead, I show them groupings. So I'll put together a contact page that shows various designs that could work well together as a collection. This way, if I'm lucky and I get a collection chosen, that licensor winds up choosing a group of maybe five to ten designs all in one fell swoop, not just a single solitary piece. This is good for them because now they can offer a cohesive collection to their customers, and it's really good for me because I just got a big handful of my designs licensed out. So when you were thinking about creating your group or collection, here are some factors to consider. Include a variety of small and large elements. This means that some of your designs in your collection should have teeny, tiny details or shrunken down motifs. Others should be medium range. Lastly, you should have one or two big patterns. This shows a great variety. It looks more appealing and it's more functional. Certain products simply look better with larger patterns, and some work better with small detailed illustrations. So it's important for you to show that you can provide both. Another thing to consider when you're designing a collection is to make sure the colors coordinate while showing variety at the same time. And what I mean by that is that the overall color palette should work well together, but that doesn't mean each and every pattern needs to be the exact same colors. It's good to have a few colors that are found in each pattern to tie everything together. But in general, it should not be monochromatic. Look for a balance in the palette so that it works together as a whole, but each design also succeeds as a standalone piece. And as a general rule, limited color palettes do much better. So when in doubt, pare down those colors. And here's a little time saving sheet for you. For a lot of my patterns, I actually use existing pieces of standalone artwork like these retro campers, for example. And I rework them into a pattern. And by doing this, I am opening up so many more avenues to get this artwork sold on products. Check this out. This illustration is pretty cute on art prints, but that composition isn't really going to work on extreme horizontal surfaces like credenzas and benches. But what will look great on these products would be a pattern out of that same camper motif. And that's exactly what I've done. So I started with one standalone illustration, but I created a pattern version of it to make it even more versatile, which means more sales for me. If you've seen me post actual product images of my artwork on Instagram, there is only about a 50% chance that that's a real photo. The other half are digitally simulated images that make my artwork look like it's really on that mug or wallpaper. These are called product mockups. Mock ups are great tools for promoting your work and showing customers and potential clients what your designs can look like in a real world application. When you upload your artwork to POD sites like Society six, that site will automatically generate a simulation of what your artwork looks like on their products. I take mockups to the next level by using professional quality files. Sure, you can always share your Society six mockup, but there are limitations there. It's a flat image, so you can't change the background color or make minor tweaks to the artwork placement without re uploading the entire design. My solution is to use customizable mock ups made by professionals. These are photoshop files that use smart objects with your artwork, which means that all you need to do is drop your artwork in, and it's automatically applied to that mockup. Because it's a smart object, Photoshop will bend your artwork if it's on a mug, add shadows, highlights, slight textures, everything needed to make it look as realistic as possible. Customers and potential clients alike love seeing your artwork in real world applications. It helps them see the product even before it exists. Plus, it makes your portfolio look professional and commercial. And you guessed it. I've got a class that teaches you everything, even if you've never used Photoshop before. And because I love partnering up with brands to give my students free stuff. For that class, I have teamed up with mock up industry leader Creates to give you guys ten free mockup files just for joining the class. So you can follow along with the exact same files I'm using step by step. Go check it out. This class is called Design top selling product mockups with your art. All right. That wraps up my professional tips for you. I just have a few more things to share in the last video. 13. Final Thoughts: All right, guys, thank you so much for taking my class and learning alongside me today. If you enjoy this class, please leave a review. These reviews mean the world to me, and I read each and every one of them. If you have any questions or comments about the class, please feel free to post in the class discussion down below. Consider that class discussion, the community chat for everything related to this class. Last but not least, please follow me on Skillshare by clicking the follow button up top. This means that as soon as I launch my next class or want to share something with you, you'll be the first to know. You can also follow me on Instagram at CT Coke to see all my latest works in progress. Read my advice for artists and designers out there and see a snapshot of where in the world I'm living at the moment. Thanks to art licensing and my portable lifestyle. I travel the world 2047 and create artwork as I go. It's an adventurous and fulfilling experience, and it's the reason I love illustrating on my iPad. I can create artwork from anywhere. All right. Thank you again for taking the time to learn with me today, and I'll see you from my next class.