Explore Complex Repeat Patterns in Affinity Designer V2 on the iPad | Jenny Veguilla-Lezan | Skillshare
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Explore Complex Repeat Patterns in Affinity Designer V2 on the iPad

teacher avatar Jenny Veguilla-Lezan, Latinx Designer & Illustrator

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.

      Course Introduction

      2:40

    • 2.

      What this class is about and tools needed

      3:44

    • 3.

      The Class Project

      1:25

    • 4.

      Affinity Designer V2 Updates and Helpful Tips

      12:23

    • 5.

      Exploring the Tools in AD V2

      14:39

    • 6.

      Exploring the Studios in AD V2

      13:38

    • 7.

      Tips and Tricks for Building a Seamless Pattern Pt. 1

      17:30

    • 8.

      Tips and Tricks for Building a Seamless Pattern Pt. 2

      16:05

    • 9.

      Symbols Explained

      1:23

    • 10.

      Creating the traditional full drop template

      14:36

    • 11.

      Creating the half drop template

      16:09

    • 12.

      Creating the diamond template

      10:27

    • 13.

      Creating the stripe template

      10:08

    • 14.

      Building the half drop pattern

      13:31

    • 15.

      Building the diamond pattern

      13:20

    • 16.

      Building the stripe pattern

      12:33

    • 17.

      BONUS: Showcasing Your Project with the Sell Sheet

      8:11

    • 18.

      Course Outro

      1:14

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About This Class

Explore Complex Repeat Patterns in Affinity Designer V2 on the iPad 
Learn to Create Half Drop, Diamond, and Stripe Pattern Repeat Templates

INTRODUCTION

One of my favorite programs to work on the go with is Affinity Designer on my iPad. The program is a powerhouse of an app that works wonders for those of us who create surface pattern designs.. Affinity Designer is a dream to work in and if you haven’t heard, there was an update and Serif officially released version 2 of all three apps on the desktop and iPad. This month, in this class we will be exploring the updated Affinity Designer version 2 on the iPad, it’s interface and I will be sharing some of my tips and tricks that I find make the design process more streamlined. We will also explore ways to create different templates that will work for different pattern types to help elevate your skills on more complex pattern types such as: rectangle half drop, diamond and stripes.

Jen Introduced

Hello everyone, welcome to my latest class. If this is your first class with me, welcome! I am Jen Veguilla-Lezan and I’ll be  the one guiding you through this creative course. I’m a freelance graphic designer, illustrator and educator based out of the midwest and I run Bella + Sophia Creative studio. If you want to learn more about me, you can find me online at:http://www.bellasophiacreative.com. You can also check out my YouTube channel: The Creative studio where you will get a behind the scenes view of the work I do as a creative freelancer and find a huge library of free tutorials catered to those of you interested in graphic design, programs like Affinity and procreate as well as art and illustration. 

If this is your first foray into my classes relating to surface pattern design or your first time building patterns on the iPad, I highly suggest you check out some of my previous surface pattern design classes. I have a variety of beginner and more complex classes within my course library that walk you through surface pattern design and building repeats on the iPad. If you are interested in using traditional mediums in surface pattern design, check out my most recent class: Surface Pattern Design: Digitize Traditional Artwork in Affinity Photo V2. In today’s class, though — we will take the basic design process a little further and explore 3  complex pattern repeats -  a half drop repeat, a diamond repeat and stripes.

Expanding on the types of patterns you can create helps to add visual interest to your patterns.  Choosing the right pattern repeat for your design will depend on what sort of look and feel you are after. But, the wonderful thing is you can keep experimenting with your repeat layouts until you get the result that you are after. 

 

What the class is about

In this class, I will walk you through my surface pattern design process. We will explore some of my favorite tips and tricks that help to streamline my design process. We will also go into detail on how to make  some more complex pattern repeats in Affinity Designer on your iPad. This course will help you understand the process using the interface on the iPad app. The more complex repeats we will review are: the rectangle half drop repeat, diamond repeat and stripes. We will work on designing these patterns and creating a seamless repeat using illustrated motifs and creating templates to streamline the process using the symbols options in Affinity Designer 2. 

What you will learn

This course is designed to give you all the technical skills you need to start designing these complex repeats. We will go over the updated interface in Affinity Designer V2, explore some of my most used tools and studios in the app, as well as help you learn more about the tools and studios in the iPad app, familiarize you with some of the layer effects, geometry functions and transform options that will aid in building a repeating pattern in Affinity Designer right on your iPad. Finally, I will help get you comfortable building a repeat pattern template using symbols that you can reuse to make your design process faster.

Things to Note

We won’t be going through the entire process of surface pattern design from concept drawing to final pattern, though. Instead we will be focusing on understanding the mechanics behind and constructing each of these pattern repeats. If you want to learn the very basics of surface pattern design using your iPad, Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo, feel free to check out my Surface Pattern Design intensive course for beginners: Learn How to Create Surface Pattern Designs on the iPad with Affinity Photo + Affinity Designer V1.

TOOLS NEEDED

All you need to take this class is an iPad, an apple pencil or stylus, some pre-made digital art and the Affinity Designer iPad app installed.

WHO IS THIS CLASS FOR

Artists and other creatives

Surface designers

Pattern designers

Graphic Designers

Illustrators

Anyone who wants to create seamless patterns 

SKILL LEVEL: INTERMEDIATE

The class is geared towards more of an intermediate student who may have some basic experience creating patterns in the Affinity software. Knowing the software makes the process a bit easier if you are familiar with the interface, but since I do walk you through the process step by step and I am also reintroducing the interface due to the update, some beginners may be able to follow along.

HELPFUL LINKS

Pinterest

Spoonflower

Youtube Video on Mockups

AD 2 Exploration on Desktop Version 

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Jenny Veguilla-Lezan

Latinx Designer & Illustrator

Top Teacher

I am a Chicago-born Latinxer (I'm a proud Puerto Rican and Mexican American) millennial, an educator, and a freelance creative with experience in graphic design, digital media, illustration and surface pattern design. I am also a mother of two who is in on a mission to reach all the creative goals I've set for myself while trying my best to be a positive influence on the world.

I have 15+ years of experience in the fashion and creative marketing industry in both the corporate world and teaching as a professor in Higher Education. I am working on building course offerings that bring people a new perspective and opportunity to take your design and art to a new level. I am pushing for continued growth, running my indie studio, Bella+Sophia Creative, while also usi... See full profile

Level: Advanced

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Transcripts

1. Course Introduction: One of my favorite programs to work on the go with is Affinity Designer on my ipad. The program is a powerhouse of an app that works wonders for those of us who create service pattern designs. Affinity is a dream to work in and if you haven't heard there was an update and Sarah officially released version two of all three apps on the desktop and the ipad this month in this class we will be exploring the updated affinity designer version two on the ipad interface. And I will be sharing my tips and tricks that I find make the design process more streamlined. We will also explore ways to create different templates that will work for different pattern types to help elevate your skills on more complex patterns such as the rectangle, half drop, diamond and stripe repeats. Hello everyone. Welcome to my latest class. If this is your first class with me, welcome. I'm Jen Vigia Lazan and I will be the one guiding you through this creative course. I'm a freelance graphic designer, illustrator and educator based out of the Midwest, and I run Bella and Sophia Creative Studio. If you want to learn more about me, you can find me online at www.bellsophiacreative.com You can also check out my Youtube channel, The Creative Studio, where you will get a behind the scenes view of the work that I do as a creative freelancer and find a huge library of free tutorials cater to those of you who are interested in graphic design, programs like affinity and procreate, as well as art and illustration. If this is your first foray into my classes relating to surface pattern design or your first time building patterns on the ipad, I highly suggest to check out some of my previous surface pattern design classes. I have a variety of beginner and more complex classes within my course library that will walk you through the surface pattern design process and building repeats right on your ipad. If you're interested in using more traditional mediums and surface pattern design, definitely check out my most recent class, Surface Pattern Design. Digitize traditional artwork in affinity photo version two on your ipad. In today's class though, we will take the basic design process a little further and explore three complex repeats, a half drop repeat in rectangle format, a diamond repeat and stripes expanding on. The type of patterns that you can create really helps to add visual interests to your patterns, as well as helps to elevate your portfolio. Choosing the right pattern repeat for your design will depend on what look and feel that you're going after. But the wonderful thing is you can keep experimenting with your repeat layouts until you get the result that you're going after. 2. What this class is about and tools needed: In this class, I will walk you through my surface pattern design process. We will explore some of my favorite tips and tricks that help to streamline my design process. We will also go into detail on how to make some more complex pattern repeats in affinity designer right on your ipad. This course will help you understand the process using the interface on the ipad app, which is a little bit different from the affinity designer version one ipad app. The more complex repeats that we are going to review today are the rectangle half drop repeat, the diamond repeat, and the stripe repeat. We will work on designing these patterns and creating a seamless repeat using illustrated motifs and creating templates to streamline the whole process using the symbols, options and affinity. Designer two, what will you learn? This course is designed to give you all the technical skills that you need to start designing these complex repeats. We will go over the updated interface and affinity two, Explore some of my most used tools and studios in the app, as well as help you learn more about the tools and studios within the app itself if you're not familiar with them. I'll also help familiarize you with some of the layer effects, geometry functions and Boolean functions and transform options that will aid in building a repeating pattern in affinity right on your ipad. Finally, I will help get you comfortable building a repeat pattern template using symbols that you can reuse over and over again to make the whole design process faster. Some things to note relating to this class. We won't be going through the entire process of surface pattern design from concept drawing to final pattern though. Instead we will be focusing on understanding the mechanics behind and constructing each of these pattern repeats. If you want to learn the basics of surface pattern design using your ipad, affinity designer, and affinity photo, feel free to check out my surface pattern design intent. Of course. For beginners, learn how to create surface pattern designs on the ipad with affinity photo and affinity designer version one. As we're working throughout this class, there will be some tools that you need. All you need to take this class is an ipad, an apple pencil or a stylus of your choice. Some pre made digital art. The affinity designer ipad app installed on your ipad. Make sure it is version two though, since that is the app that I will be walking you through today. Who is this class geared towards? Obviously, really anyone who is creative artists. Surface pattern designers, pattern designers, graphic designers and illustrators can all utilize this class up their game when it comes to applying their artwork in a pattern repeat. But essentially, I want to share this course with anyone who wants to learn to create seamless patterns. Even if you don't fall into any of those categories and you're just interested in this whole concept, I'm happy to have you and support you, help guide you throughout this whole process. When it comes to the skill level you'll need to take this class. This class is geared towards more of an intermediate student who may have some basic experience creating patterns and the affinity software. Anyone who maybe has taken some of my beginner level classes, this will work really well for, because knowing the software makes the process a bit easier if you're familiar with the interface. But since I do walk you through the process step by step, I'm also reintroducing the interface due to the update. Some beginners might be able to follow along just fine. If you want to jump in and give it a try, definitely go for it. 3. The Class Project: Now what I want to go into is just an overview of our class project. For your class project, we will be creating three seamless repeating patterns. A half drop in a rectangle format, a diamond repeat and a stripe repeat along with those templates to go with each of them using affinity designer version two ipad. Once you complete your project, you can submit the following to the course project gallery to share with your fellow classmates and myself your final half drop repeat pattern. You can share it as the tile or an example of the pattern in full repeat, your final diamond repeat pattern and your final stripe repeat pattern. Also, make sure you check out the class resources for your project. Templates. A cell sheet template links to sites for mock ups and links to a pintrest board and my spoonflower shop with surface pattern design inspiration. Don't forget, make sure you share that project in the class project gallery or if you feel up for it, you can also share it on social media and tag me at Bella Sophia Creative. I'd love to see what you created or even offer some helpful tips if you need them. Finally, please consider leaving a class review. These reviews are so helpful in ensuring that teachers get engagement, which in turn helps our classes overall in search. I'm really looking forward to creating with you. Let's get started. 4. Affinity Designer V2 Updates and Helpful Tips : Before we begin anything relating to actually building and designing our templates and creating our repeating patterns, I want to go over some of the updated interface options within affinity designer. I have affinity opened already. Things are a little bit different when it comes to your opening interface. You have a lot of the same options like new and open, and different templates that you can load. But the big thing that I've noticed in terms of copying and editing files is we're going to be utilizing some of their swipe functions you can tap to open, or if we go back out, you can take a finger and swipe left and you'll be able to access some of these quick options. We can edit the name of your file and then we can also duplicate a file. We can save file, save as a file. This will allow you to save them into your file system. Typically, you would have been able to see this in the past in the hamburger menu Here, the save, save as rename. But you'd also have things like duplicate there, but that's no longer there. You utilize the swipe function, so you'll swipe left to access that. All right, so what I'm going to do is set up a new file so that we can play around and review some of the studios and the tools and see how things are a little bit different in affinity two versus affinity one. On your ipad, I'm going to select on the left hand side new and I'm going to select new document. And I'm just going to set up a basic letter size. They have all of these different options here. You can have print options, press ready, Photo Web, and different device sizes, et cetera. I'm just going to select a basic 8.5 by 11 letter option here. We're just going to keep the general 8.5 by 11 settings. I'm going to keep it at 300 DPI just in case I wanted to print something out. But you can adjust your DPI as needed. For websites like spoon flour, they often suggest like 150 DPI. Then I'm going to keep my units at inches, but you can also adjust it to feet, yards, millimeters, centimeters, et cetera. Once I've updated that, I'm going to keep my color format RGB. Because if I were to upload this to say something like spoon flower, they typically accept RGB. But if you're working on a client project or working on any type of project that may be printed, you might have to use something like CMYK. I would suggest that you touch base with your client or with whatever manufacturer working with just to double check what their specs are. Once you've updated all of this, what we're going to do is create an artboard and then hit Ok. Before we work in this file really quickly, I want to go back out into our main gallery. And on the very bottom, in your lower left hand side, we have our settings options here. I'm going to tap on that and I'm going to go into my user interface and I'm going to adjust my background gray level just so that there's a differentiation between the paper artboard and the actual background. Just do so it's a little bit easier for you all to see on screen as I'm working. All right, now that I have this set up, what I want to do is go through some of the studios and some of the tools and highlight some differences. And some of the tools that we'll likely utilize as we work through creating our repeating patterns. The first thing I want to highlight is you have these options. You had these infinite as well in affinity designer version one, but I like to utilize these a bit more. We have assets that we can pull in to work really easily. Say you create a whole set of motifs that you want to utilize. Typically, I would just like create another artboard and paste of motifs to the side and drag things in. But if you want to make things a little bit more neat, you can utilize assets. For example, if we scroll down on our right hand studio, there is the setting right below our type studio and that is our asset studio. There are already some pre loaded assets that affinity designer has included in your application. They simply flat icons. There's a bunch of different icons that you can utilize but you can also pull in your own assets. I have a set that I'm going to be working with today for our practice. These aren't going to be the actual designs that we'll be using for the pattern repeats that we're going to be making today. But these are going to be my practice sets. I loaded these in. I'll show you really quickly how to utilize these assets and how to load them in. I'm going to go out into my gallery. I already have these assets on, drawn an art board for a project that I've been working on. These are completed, everything is all grouped together and finalized. What I'm going to do is select all of them by selecting my move tool and dragging over all of these icons. And if you didn't select all of them, you can just hold your finger down on the screen and then tap on the additional elements so that everything is all outlined in blue. That's how you know everything is selected. Then you can go into your asset studio. I already have loaded them, but what we can do is create a new category. You can name the category. I'm just going to keep it unnamed for now to show you the example. Then we can a subcategory. Then what we can do is select this little three line like hamburger menu here. And then you're going to add assets from selection. All of the selected icons that you've created are now loaded in as an asset set. I already have this already loaded, so what I'm going to do is delete it. I'm going to select that hamburger menu again. I'm going to delete subcategory Select. And then I'm going to go in here to my upper hamburger menu. And I'm going to select Delete category, and select Yes, I have my practice florals already loaded. This is a great way to keep things organized and easy to access. If I go back into my file here, I can open up my assets and I can just tap on them and select Insert. And I can load them all up into my file here. Then I can move them using the move tool. I can resize If I want to keep everything in proportion, I just need to hold my finger down. Then I can use the black Rl tool to move and adjust and resize things since they are vectors. I am not concerned with anything becoming pixelated because the air vectors and you don't have to worry about that, I'm going to tap on my asset studio here to pull it in. All right, I pulled all of these little icons in. And then what we're going to do some of the studios on Explorer first, here we've looked at the Asset studio. I also want to look at our transform studio, which is one of the major studios that I utilize when I'm working in affinity designer. I want to have all of these lined up at the bottom. Obviously, we can utilize our line functions and you'll be able to find those here. What's also nice though, is that you can find them in other places in your app. At the top here, we have our Align, flip, rotate, and our order functions as quick options, you don't just have to go into the transform studio. You can select these little center icons, your align functions are here, as well as your flip and rotate and your arrangement. Our arrangement you can move your icons front to back and re order the layers. If we go to our flip rotate, we can flip horizontal and vertical. If we go to our line tools, obviously we can align left, center, right, space them horizontally, align top, bottom, et cetera. I'm going to align them to the bottom that pulls everything so it's in a nice straight line. All right, one of the big things that I notice is the way you edit your functions and your different effects. Say for example, I have this flower here, I want to add a shadow. I'd go into my effect studio if I tap on the actual flower using my black arrow tool, my move tool, and then I select effects. Typically, when we would tap on any of these effects, let's say I select that outer shadow, I turn it on by tapping on the little circle icon here to move the switch to the right. Typically you would see a pop up at the bottom that would allow you to adjust your different settings. Now as you can see on the left hand side, you have your options. You're able to adjust how wide out the radius of the shadow goes, how opaque or transparent the shadow is by scrolling up or down. Then you can adjust the offset at the bottom here. That's a big thing here is that a lot of these settings have changed so that they are on this left hand scroll bar. You still can manually adjust these as well by tapping on the actual numbers. And you'll get the little calculator pop up that will allow you to manually enter numbers. You can do that with the percentages as well. And each of these options you're able to actually manually enter the actual percentage or number that you want. Another helpful tip to look at in terms of some updates with the interface is utilizing, again, those swipe options. If we're in the layer studio, we can swipe right and it'll give you a mini version so that it doesn't take up so much of your workspace. And then to pull it back to normal, you can just swipe over it with two fingers and swipe left. Also, when you're working in it, you can swipe over each individual layer and it'll allow you to adjust those layers. You can lock them. You have all of these different quick options here like multiply, darken for all of your different settings for those specific elements on that layer. And then you could also minimize it even more by selecting the dropdown arrow so you can see all of the different elements within that single layer. Then again, you just swipe out to access these quick options. And then two fingers to swipe on the layers to pull it back so that it's its full options. Which I think is really helpful in terms of just making things a little bit more accessible and easy to use your hands with to edit and revise or make room as you're working on your pieces within your file. Speaking of the swipe options, I'm going to tap on my layers to pull it back in. You can also use the three finger swipe down to access any of your quick edit options. You can do things like group elements, select all Zoom in Rasturize. You can duplicate, copy, cut, paste, and then delete elements off your screen as well. Here. Then you can just tap out to remove that. We still have all of those options up here in your menu options, but these are just like some quick options. Those are the main things that I see are relevant and important within affinity two. Obviously there is a ton more. But I just want to touch on a few things that I know we'll be using as we work through this. 5. Exploring the Tools in AD V2: Then also really quickly, I want to look at our artboard. We're able to change our artboard so that we don't see anything that's around it, and that we're utilizing our clip to canvas. If we select this K on the air, you can turn on clip to canvas. So say I'm going to make a few copies of this little flower and place it around our canvas. All right, now that I've made some copies of this little element, you're able to see these off the edge of our canvas. Now what we want to do when we're working is we're going to be keeping everything nice and clean and neat. We'll be utilizing the clip to canvas to look at our final tile. As we build out our template to turn that on and off, we have, it looks like a windshield wiper icon. You can tap that. You can either go directly into it and it'll say clip to canvas. Then you'll know it's turned on because it's darkened. When it's lighter, it's turned off, I'm going to turn it on. And then what happens is when I move these elements, they'll clip directly into the canvas and you'll no longer be able to see them on the outside of the artboard here. Now I want to just go through really quickly, for those of you who are more beginners and don't necessarily know all of the different tools and studios in affinity designer, I'm going to get rid of some of these things and just keep two of the icons so that we can work with them later. First, let's get started with our tools. On the left hand side, that black arrow is obviously our move tool. We can use it to move elements on our screen and to resize things by tapping on them and pulling on the corners. And then we can also rotate by using that little arm that is at the top of this. Below it is our node tool. Say you're working with a specific shape, in this case, have a specific heart that I've created in the center of this. If we use our node tool, we can get some additional options that allow us to adjust the shape of that and work with the actual nodes within the, the elements that we've created. If this round flower head here with the node tool, you'll see a half. We zoom in really close, there's a little red dot. What we can do is adjust how long or how short the little scallops are on this flower. You can do that with a lot of the different shapes as well. We'll look at the shape tool really quick and then use some of the shapes with the node tool. If we go down towards the bottom of our left hand tool bar, it looks like a rectangle. But if we hold down, you get this pop up and you'll be able to access all of these different shapes. For example, the way I made this shape was I utilize the cloud shape. Then what you can do is you create a cloud. If you hold your finger down, it'll create it in perfect proportion. Then I adjusted how many of the bubbles were on that cloud. In the upper menu here, you can either tap on it and manual adjust it. Or you can tap where the number is and scroll right, or scroll left to decrease the number. If you scroll right, you can increase the number. I added more of the bubbles. You could also adjust the inner radius, which is what we did with the node tool, by adjusting how long or how short that dip is, or we can just zoom in, tap on the node tool and then adjust it from here. Then we can update the color. That's pretty much how I made this little flower head here. Then if we tap on that rectangle again and we select the ellipse tool, you're able to create another circle, update the color. Then we can use some of the quick options. Again, there is a outline here on this circle. Say, I don't want it, I can just swipe up and it'll remove it. Or if you have trouble with swiping, you can also just utilize the quick colors here. There's a white square with a blue line through it and that will remove your outline. All right. Say I want to select all of this and I want them to all be grouped together. I can use those three finger swipe down and then select Group. And it'll allow me to group both that red flower and the white inner circle together so I can move it as one element or. The next tool that you'll likely use is the pen tool. You'll notice that you can adjust the stroke. Your outlines as well, once you select the pen here in this little pop up on the left hand side, or you can go into your right hand studio and select your stroke studio, which is right underneath your color studio, which is that circle with the color in it. You can adjust the width of your stroke, can adjust the type of, you can adjust how your stroke joins and aligns and things like that. I'm just going to update it so that it is a bigger stroke. So you can see what I'm doing then with the pen tool, what you're doing is utilizing lines, create segments and things like bezier curves. Then you're able to create shapes with it. Then you can go back to that node tool and adjust the nodes that this is a really helpful tool for outlining. But if you find that you have difficulty using the pen tool, the next best option, and it's usually my go to option, is the pencil tool. What's nice is there are some updates with the pencil tool. You can automatically close your shapes using the options up here in the center of your menu. You can adjust the color that you fill will be. You can select if you want your shape that you're creating to have a fill as you're drawing it, or if you want it to just be a stroke, you can select auto clothes. What it'll do is auto close your shape. It'll automatically close that shape for me. I don't have to go back through and manually close it. Then what we can do is make sure that we have a color fill and no stroke. You can create shapes using this pencil tool. And you can also outline and trace any sketches that you may have created before. And use that to basically draw over and create your vector shapes on top. The pencil tool is a fantastic option. Something that I use quite often now that I've created that shape. The next one I want to look at is our knife tool. You added too many round points to the shape and you want to create it so that it's just these three bubbles here. You could select that knife tool and cut across and it'll create a section. What you can do is then select that actual knob and then delete it. And then you'll just have your three pieces here. Like the knife tool, lot help to refine and edit shapes that I've been building or creating. The pencil tool or even with the shape tool itself. There's also the vector flood fill, where you basically, if you have an enclosed shape, you can update the color by selecting that and taping, we have it read now I want to use this blue. I'll select my vector flood fill and I'll tap that and we'll update the color for me that it is the updated version of the color options that I've selected. It's really helpful for filling your colors really quickly if you like to outline and then adding color. This is a really helpful tool. There is also the gradient fill tool. With this tool, which is right underneath it, it looks like a gradient with like a rod through it at an angle. This tool we will use when we're testing our patterns. You can apply a bit fill, gradient fill. You can see in the upper menu here, there are some additional options Right now currently it says solid, but if we tap on that, you can change it from radial to conical. But you can also select bitmap. And what bitmap does is allows you to add a fill that will be in repeat using an image show, in our case, our tiles that we're going to create in future. We can select Place from files. I'm going to go into my affinity files here and then I'm just going to select print that I've already created just so that we can test this. Once we put it in, you'll see it's large because I made this specific file a larger repeat. But you'll have these little rods and you can adjust the scale by pulling them in and then also rotate it. You can fill your shapes with your patterns. Then underneath that, the next tool that I want us to look at, and we've tapped into this already, is our shaped tool. There's different shapes that you can utilize. They have a whole bunch of already pre made shapes that you can use. Segments, pies, donuts, arrows, things like that. What I'm going to do is utilize this doughnut shape. I'm going to change my fill from the pattern to just a basic color that's easy to see. What I want to use and what I want to look at really quick is our geometry functions, which are really helpful. I'm going to add another shape as well so that we can combine these shapes. So I'm going to select arrow. Also, you see you're able to adjust your options as well in terms of how wide or how thin your arrow like your shape will be. I want to make sure I don't have a stroke, so I'm going to select my stroke. And then I'm going to swipe up to remove the stroke outline. And then I'm going to create my arrow. Then again, like I said, you can adjust the width and whatnot of your stroke in your outline here, I'm just going to remove it. You can also see if we zoom in the red dots, which allows us to the angles of each of these arrows in the placement. What I'm going to do though is adjust this arrow so that I only have one side. You'll be able to edit those options here in the upper part of your main menu, one side you'll see there's arrow arrow. That means there's an arrow on each end. I'm going to tap on the left side and I'm going to select none. And that way I'll have just like a straight arrow. Then you can adjust your thickness up here as well by either tapping on it and manually entering your percentage, or just dragging right or left. And it'll adjust the thickness of your arrow. Now what I want to do is rotate this out a bit. Then I'm going to select my move tool. I want to connect these, make a new shape. All to do that it looks like it's connected, but it's still very much two separate pieces that I can move. What I'm going to do is use our geometry, our Boolean functions here. I'm going to select both of these shapes. By selecting my black arrow tool and then dragging across both of them. What I want to do is combine them. Our geometry function. This is another difference in terms of affinity one versus affinity two. They used to be in our edit menu. Here are three dot menu. Now if you look in this center main menu, you'll find them right next to our rotate a line and our arrange options. I'm going to tap on my three dot menu to pull it back in. If we look up here in the center, you'll be able to see something that looks like a square and a circle with a plus in it. If we tap on that, that will give us our geometry functions. We can add, subtract, Intersect. We have some other options as well here, like merging our curves and separate curves I'm going to add, it will basically add these two shapes together to create a new shape. Then you'll see it's all one shape. If we select our nodes, we can go through and revise and edit because it's all one shape and it's been combined together. We can also just select undo by double tapping with our two fingers. If we went into our geometry options, again, selected something like subtract, it would subtract that top shape from the bottom shape. It goes based on placement of the layers. I'm just going to tap the screen with two fingers to undo and it'll undo my subtraction. This is really helpful as well as you're working on creating your different elements, um, within your artwork. The last tool I want to look at really quick is our color picker. If we select color picker and say we have a shape selected and we wanted to update that shape based on something that's like in a picture or somewhere else on your artboard, we can select color picker and then we can tap on anywhere in the new image and it'll update the color for us here. Color pickers are really helpful to as well. 6. Exploring the Studios in AD V2: All right, so now that we've looked at our tools, let's look at our studios really quickly as well. This first option here is our color studio. You can update your colors, utilize recent colors. You can tap on your swatches, and you have a whole bunch of different options within. I have pantone colors here as well. You can also create your own. You can import a palette. You can import it as a document palette. You can name the palette and then hit okay. Then using the hamburger, import a palette. You can add current fill to palette. You can select the different elements within your artboard here and then add your fills based on that as well. Then you can even use your color picker to pick up colors you can add, then you can create your own color palettes within here. This is really helpful, especially if you have specific color palettes and stories that you're working with when it comes to your specific project. Underneath that is our stroke studio. You'll be able to adjust and edit strokes here. I'm going to select my pen tool and I'm just going to create a straight line here. Then I'm going to go into my stroke studio and I'm going to adjust the width. Then you'll also be able to change the type. You can do a plain choke or you can do a dotted shok. Can change your pattern here as well and it'll adjust it. You can adjust your minor limit. You can change the way dash looks like. If you wanted to have a square cap, more of a square dotted, more of a rectangle, rounded. You can also adjust and create your own line types if you want to create more of a flow, more hand drawn effect, you can adjust that. The brush stroke options here and you can adjust your pressure. This could be really helpful if you do a lot of line work to be able to edit and adjust based on that. All right, underneath that is our layers studio. This is where all of the different layers are on our board. This current art board. Since we have everything clipped into the artboard, everything is going to be embedded and housed within a dropdown menu. If we tap on this little carrot and it faces downward, you'll be able to see all of the different layers and be able to access them individually. Obviously, since some of these are all grouped together, you'll see them in their own grouping folder. You can rename these by, by selecting your layer options, you'll select that group and then tap on the little three menu within your Layers studio. Then you'll see all of your layers options. You can turn the layer on or off. You can lock the layer so it can't be moved. Then you can adjust the opacity of that layer. But right above the opacity, it says group. Once you tap on that, you can then update the name of that group folder to whatever descriptor you want to utilize. In my case, I'm changing it to red flower and then I'm going to hit okay. That way my layers can be a bit more organized. Underneath that is our vector brush options. Don't use the vector brush as much as I'd like to. I'm hoping this year as I do more work in affinity designer that I'll use more of these brushes as I'm creating art pieces. But if we select our vector brush, you have all of these different brushes within the brush studio, you can change the brush type from gushes to ink markers. There's a ton of different options, patterns, pencils, acrylics, dry media, and it gives you these beautiful textures. I'm going to select this dry to, then you can just create these beautiful, it looks like hand painted effects, but they're actually vectors and you can adjust the shape of them using your node tool and whatnot. These are really helpful and very effective at giving a bit more of like the hand drawn effect to your vector artwork. Then what's nice is once you've created a shape, you can just go in and change it. By selecting the different brush types I can go into dry media. Then I can, which if you do line work with, this can be really helpful. If you want to change the look and feel of the line work, you can update it here really easily. Another studio here that is really helpful is the apparent studio. It'll allow you to select an element or a motif on your artboard and it'll tell you what kind of stroke it has. If it's filled. You can also go into your options and you can change it in terms of like if you want to utilize your different effects like multiply bright and dark in color, burn, things like that. Then the next studio below that is our symbol studio. We're going to go into more depth with this later on, but this is where you'll find the symbol studio. You'll be able to add symbols from different selections. And we'll be able to create our template using this particular studio. Underneath that is our effect studio. We looked at this earlier because I wanted to highlight how you're no longer going to be able to revise your settings on the bottom portion of your screen, but instead it's moved to the left side of your screen. But you'll be able to add different types of effects like bevel emboss. All you have to do is toggle on little icon to add any of these. For example, I'm, I'm going to select outer glow and then I'm going to tap on the words outer glow so that I get the settings. And then you can adjust the settings on the left hand side. And what I'm going to do is update my color. Then you can adjust your settings and your color. In the upper menu here, you can tap where the color option is and then you can change your color. And then you can change the type of effect that it has. In this case, I'm going to change it to soft light. Then you can go in and adjust your intensity. You can adjust your radius, so how far out it goes, you can adjust the opacity. If you want it more transparent or if you want it darker, then it gives you a bit of this nice little like neon looking glow under that. You'll have a bunch of different adjustment options. You can adjust colors, you can invert your whole file to black and white. It curves change your color balance. It's really helpful if you want to quickly revise colors and things like that, you'll have access to all of your adjustments in this particular studio. Then underneath that is your text options. We didn't add text here, we'll do that really quick. On the left hand side, your text tool, it is right above your color picker tool. If you tap on it, it looks like an A with a square around it. Or you might have the text tool which looks like a T with a square around it. But basically the art text tool just allows you to create text and it doesn't give you any parameters. You can just keep going until you press return. But if we utilize the frame text tool, you're going to be able to create a frame, then your text is only going to be able to go into that frame. I'm type in Hello. I'm going to select it all by double tapping or dragging across the text with my apple pencil. And you can select closer so we can see that again, you can just drag over with your pencil and it'll select your text. Or you can just double tap and it'll select it. In the upper menu, you'll have some quick text options, so you can increase your size, you can change your traits. And then you can change your font option here, I'm going to change it to this contrail, I'm going to increase the size. Then what I'm going to do is go back into our text studio here. Can adjust whether or not it is left align, center, aligned, right aligned. Sure, this is selected. Once I've selected, you'll see my keyboard pop up and then you'll get some quick options here. You can cut, you can copy paste. I'm going to copy this and then I'm going to paste it. Then as you see, when I paste this in, it doesn't go beyond the boundary that I've created with my text box here. This is really helpful if you have like specific columns and whatnot that you need to work with. But you can adjust the actual text box itself as well. If you want to get more to fit in it. You can also it, you have that quick option up top to edit the traits and the fonts and whatnot. But you also have all of those options here in your character studio. You also have all of those options here in your type studio. What's nice though, is that you have some extras here too. You can add in specific glyphs if you're looking for specific letters glyphs, you can also go in and change the style of your type. Your text here. You can select underline, and strikes, and things like that. All within these options you can also add in things like bullet points or numbers and whatnot. So this is where you'll find all those additional traits and specialty elements that you need to use within your characters and your type faces. All right, underneath that is our asset studio. So like I said, you have access to this in affinity one, it just looks a little different, the icon is different. I just started really utilizing this more because it makes things a little bit easier to keep track of and coordinate. Just keep in mind that sometimes it could impact, I feel like, the size of your affinity designer program file, which could possibly make your ipad lag depending on how old it is. But I find that it's better to do this than to have a ton of assets on your screen at once, which in turn will make your ipad lag. This is just a really helpful tool to utilize. Underneath that you have access to stock photos and then underneath that is your resource manager. If things become unlinked files or loss, you can re link them and adjust them here in the resource manager. I don't use that as much in affinity designer as I use an affinity publisher, but it's good to know that it is here. And then finally, the last thing I want to look at is our transform to do. I use this a lot when I'm working in creating my seamless repeats because of adjusting your width dimensions in the positioning the x and Y placement on your screen. We'll use this when we're building up our template. But then what's nice is once our template is created, we don't have to use this as much. But this is where you can adjust, you can increase your width and your height. Right now, I have my dimensions locked, which means it'll keep it in proportion. But if you unlock it, you can adjust your width or your height individually. But I always suggest keeping it locked because it keeps everything in proportion and nothing looks funky. Then you could also adjust your position. It'll move along the x axis and along the y axis, it'll move it up and down or left and right here is rotation, It'll rotate your elements. Then the shear. You also have your alignment options within your transform option before I showed you the quick options up top. But you have those same alignment tools here in the transform studio. You just have them organized based on horizontal or vertical and then you can adjust your spacing, et cetera, all within this. This is probably one of the most used studios along with my symbols and my layers and my color and stroke when I'm working in affinity designer, specifically with surface pattern. 7. Tips and Tricks for Building a Seamless Pattern Pt. 1: Now that we have a better understanding of some of the tools and studios and the menus that you find here in affinity designer. I'm want to share some of my top tips and tricks that I tend to utilize when I'm creating surface pattern designs in the affinity designer to app. So there are a few different things that I like to work with. But before we start I want to add some motifs from a pattern collection that I'm working on that we'll be using in today's lessons. All right? I'm adding in these Sound motifs that I'm going to be working with in a collection that I'm building that we'll be utilizing for this specific class as I'm creating some repeats with you. Now that I have these place, what I want to do is make a few copies of these so that we can work with them. And then I could always pull them off the board if I don't want them on our canvas. But I like to have a few copies to work with to start. In order to get copies of these, you're just going to select that black arrow tool, your move tool, drag over your element, or you can tap it. Or you could also always go into your layer studio here and select them in the layers. I have all of these grouped because it's made up of vector shapes. And then some pixel brush strokes. I have everything grouped together in folders here. Once I've selected the element I want to make a copy of, I'm just going to take three fingers swipe down and then I'm going to select duplicate. Or you can select copy, then you can paste. And what's nice is that in affinity designer it doesn't just paste any which way, Place it. Just paste right on top of the original element. And then you can move that off to the side. I'm going to pull that pasted element and I'm going to take all of these and pull them off to the side. For now, what I want to do is highlight one of my first tips and tricks. I love to play around with the placement of my motifs in my shapes. Sometimes maybe it'll look completely different if you flip or rotate it around. What I like to use is the reflect option. What's nice is that when you select your element, you'll get these quick options. Up top and right in between our arrange icon and our align icon right in the center, It looks like a little triangle. That is our reflect options. It allows you to flip horizontal, flip vertical, and then you can rotate clockwise and counterclockwise. You can also access these options in our transform studio, which we'll be talking a bit about. We're not going to be using the transform studio as much because we are going to be using a template. But at least want you to have a good understanding of how to build a basic seamless repeat. And understanding how the positioning with the X and the Y all work to create that seamless effect. We will talk a bit about the transform studio, but for now let's look at the options you're able to utilize that flip and rotate KA reflect tool. Here in transform as well, you'll see the flip and the rotate and then the flip, vertical, flip, horizontal, which is essentially just the reflect tool. It'll give your motif just a little bit of change and it creates a different effect when you're working in this. The next tip and the next tool I want to share is the Align function. I mentioned them earlier. It's right next to where you'll find that reflect tool that rotate, flip, horizontal, flip vertical. And you'll see it to the right side of it, right here in this upper menu area. Say I wanted all these to be aligned at the bottom. When I'm working on my placement, what I can do is select my move tool, that black arrow, drag over all of my elements. Then you'll notice they're all highlighted in this blue outline. They're not aligned at the bottom, obviously they're staggered. Say I wanted them all to align at the bottom area baseline. I could go up to that quick menu towards the top, select my Align Tools, and you're able to align left, center, right. You can space things horizontally, You can align to the top, the middle, bottom, and you can also space vertically. These are really helpful tools when you're trying to get precise placements. And what we can do here is just select align bottom and it'll automatically align everything to the bottom baseline. You could also access those same tools again in your transform studio. All the way towards the bottom you'll see alignment options. And then you'll get all of your alignment options that you have in that quick menu. You could also add things manually and separated by aligning horizontally versus aligning vertically. Now, speaking of the transform studio, this is one of, if you do design the more traditional way, you're likely entering specific numbers based on placement on your artboard when you're working in a vector program. Whether it's something like this affinity designer or if you're working in something like illustrator. What's nice though is that we can often utilize things like templates, and the new illustrator tends to create your repeat for you as you build it out based on different repeat styles. We're essentially going to do something similar to that today. I'm going to show you two different ways of building your templates. But when you're creating a repeating pattern, essentially anything that you put on the left has to go on the right, and everything that you put at the top has to go on the bottom. We will often be utilizing the transform studio to adjust the positions of your elements and your motifs on your artboard. In transform though, let's look at a few other things. Before we get to that, I showed you the alignment options. We also have the flip and rotate, but we also have the order. Say we wanted something to be on top of something else or hidden behind something else. Say for example, I'm going to take these flowers that I have here. Maybe I don't want them to go on top of the cactus. Maybe I want them to go behind with that flower element selected using my black arrow tool. The move tool, I'm going to tap on it, you'll see it's outlined in blue. Then you can utilize this order function to adjust the order of the placement of that element. You can send it backwards. You can pull it forward. You can send everything to back or pull everything up front. It's just based on what your needs are. When you're building a seamless pattern, typically whatever you put on the left has to go on the right. Whatever you put on the top has to go on the bottom. Let's build a really simple basic pattern here using some of these elements. I think I want to have these two together and then we can start making copies of everything and then playing around with placement. What we're going to do is select these two flowers by dragging over them with the apple pencil, making sure your move tool is selected. I'm going to do my three finger swipe, and then I'm going to select duplicate a few times so that I have a few copies of this, these flowers here. All right. I'm going to pull these over and right now you can't see them off the edge because I didn't create an artboard. I essentially have this clipped. But what we can do is turn off the clipping so that you can see what's going on on the outside so we can figure out how this seamless works before we clip it in, what I'm going to do is go into my Toggle Preview mode. It's in the upper right hand corner. You can turn it on or off, but if you tap on the side of it, it'll give you all of your options in a drop down have preview mode. But what I want to do de select Clip to Canvas so that you can see where we're working here. As I mentioned earlier, when you're building a repeating pattern, whatever you put on the left has to go on the right to create that Sams effect. I'm going to select these elements, I'm going to do my three fingers step down. I'm going to duplicate them. They're going to copy and paste essentially right on top. And then we're going to go into that transform studio, because this square is a 2000 by 2000 pixel square. I'm going to go into my positioning, and I'm going to select my X axis because we're going from left to right. If we're going from top to bottom, we would be working with our Y axis. But I'm going to tap where as x. And I'm going to select plus 2000. And I'm selecting plus because it's moving from the left to the right. If you're going from the right to the left, you would select negative. We're going to select plus 2000 and then hit, okay. It will move our elements exactly where we need them. I'm going to start to place some of these also on the top here. Once I place it on the top, we're going to go from top to bottom. What we'll want to do is duplicate this and then move it down on the Y axis. I'm going to go into my quick. Options here, select Duplicate. And then I'm going to go back into my transform studio here. And now I'm going to tap on my Y. Since we're going from top to bottom, we're going to select Plus. And then we're going to hit 2000 again. And then we're going to hit okay, and it's going to move it exactly where we need that element on the bottom. Some people like to work with just sides first and then build up the top and the bottom. I just like to do whatever feels right at the time and piece things together as they make sense. I'm going to select this figure cactus here. I'm going to duplicate it and then I'm going to move it. Keep in mind again, whatever you put in one corner has to go in all corners, essentially because it's on the left and the bottom, I'd have to move it to the top. And then the rest of the corners, I'm going to put this larger cactus in the corner here. And I'm going to select duplicate. It's going to paste it right on top. And then what I want to do is tap on it, and I'm going to move it up. And then I'm going to move it over. I'm going to go into my Y axis this time, because I'm going from the bottom to the top. I'm going to select negative 2000. And it'll move it exactly where I need it, to that top corner. But as I it there, I notice that it's going to take up space here. I may have to move these elements down a bit so that they don't compete with the placement of that new one in the corner. I'm going to delete some of these because I'm going to have to place this because I have clipped to board turned off. I can just pull all of these little flowers off to the side so that they're not taking up space. And then I can use them as filler. All right. I adjusted my placement, Now I want to make sure I get these other two corners placed. I'm going to select my cactus in the upper left hand corner, I'm going to duplicate it, and then I'm going to go back into my transform studio. Because I'm moving from left to right, I'm using the x axis, I'm going to select x plus 2000. And then hit okay. And then I'm going to go to this middle one here. I'm going to duplicate that one as well. And then I'm going to go into my x axis again. And I'm going to hit plus 2000 and it'll help clean up that side and finalize the placement there. Then I'm going to go down to this lower left hand corner again, because we're working from left to right, we're going on our x axis. I'm going to duplicate it. Select my x axis once more, select plus 2000, and it will fill up that corner. Here we have our sites completed. Now we can go in and finish working with our top and bottom. What I think I want to do is create almost like a pattern here. I know we are working on a pattern, but I'm going to do this bigger cactus and then the smaller, bigger, smaller to fill up this top portion. I'm I'm going to pull one of these up here so that it and creates that effect that I'm going for. Once I've placed those elements where I'd like them, what I'm going to do is select all of them. And then once I've selected all of them, I'm going to duplicate them. And then I'm going to move them down to the bottom. I'm going to go into my transform studio. Since I'm going from top to bottom, I'm working with my Y position. I'm going to tap on that. And then I'm going to select plus 2000 and then hit okay, and it'll duplicate them right at the bottom. Now that I have these I just completed, what I want to do is make a few more copies of each of these elements and pull them off to the side because I'm going to lock them. I'm going to make a copy of the red larger cactus and then I'm going to pull it out to the side here. Then I'm going to select all of these here by just dragging my apple pencil across all of them. Then I'm going to go into my layer studio here. I'm going to go into my layer options and I'm going to lock them. You'll access your layer options by tapping on layer studio. You'll get your pop out and then at the very top, right next to the garbage can, you'll see three dots. We'll select that. Then right underneath your opacity options, you see an sack papers and a lock button. What you'll do is select that lock and it will make sure that we cannot move all of our edges, all of the different motifs on our edges here. That way we know everything is going to be seamless, it's going to stay in place. Then we can start to fill in our center. Now that we have locked that, we can just play around with placement. These additional elements, I'm going to add in some of these flowers here. I'm going to add more of the smaller cacti, and then another one if it fits any. I'm going to play around with the placement and the rotation. I'll just continue playing around with the placement, almost fitting things together like a puzzle until I'm happy with what I have. Once I'm done filling my center, I want to make this a bit more of a dense repeat. I might go in and add some additional elements from some of the artwork. Just like filler elements, I have these organic dashes. What I'm going to do is update the color of them and go into my layer, select all the curves and I'm going to change the color to more of that pink that we have in that other flower in the smaller cactus. Once I've done that, I'm going to make a few copies of this so I can see how I can play around with it. I could always adjust the size if I need to, but I can just like place it in between to fill up some of this blank space that I have going on here and then just basically repeat that same process. All right, now that I've created my repeat, now we can go back into our preview mode. I'm going to tap on that windshield wiper and it's going to clip everything outside of our artboard, and this is what our final tile essentially would look like. 8. Tips and Tricks for Building a Seamless Pattern Pt. 2: I'm going to do though, is group everything in this art board so that I can show you a few more tricks that I think will be beneficial. All right, so now that I've grouped everything, what I want to do is just really quickly, for organization's sake, I'm going to rename my group. One will be edges, one will be centered. Anything that's on the edges here, I'm going to tap on it. Select three menu. Go into my Layer Options where it says Group, and then rename Edges. And then go back out, select my second group, which is all of the centered stuff on it. Go into my three menu, Taporzaz group, and then rename that center. Pretty much. This is the final repeat. What I want to do though is show you a few more things that I think are really helpful. I'm going to turn off this repeat so that I can show you my next tip, which is our geometry functions, the Boolean functions. Essentially, you can add and subtract different shapes together. You could utilize like we have a shape builder as well. This is similar to the path finder that you might find in something like Illustrator. I'm going to go into my left hand tools here. I'm going to select my shape tool. We're going to just create some shapes together. I'm going to select this rounded rectangle and create a shape. Then I'm going to select that doughnut. I'm going to update the color so that it's easier to see when I place it on top. And I'm going to create a doughnut on top. If you tap your finger as you're creating a shape, it'll make it a perfect shape so it'll be in proportion. I'm going to create this doughnut on top of this rounded rectangle and say I wanted this doughnut to be cut out of that rounded rectangle. What you can do is utilize your geometry function. I'm going to select my move tool, highlight everything by dragging my apple pencil over the two shapes. And then I'm going to go into my geometry function. You can access those here in the upper menu. You have those shortcuts. If you tap on them, you're able to add, subtract, intersect, or divide, merge curves, or separate curves. Say I want to knock out that blue circle, I can subtract and it'll knock out that blue circle for me, and it creates this brand new shape. If we double tap with our fingers, it'll undo it. If I select divide, for example, it'll divide that top shape, it'll give us two different circles based on that original shape that we had placed. This is just really helpful when it comes to just trying to make really intricate shapes that aren't necessarily included in your shape tool, which there are a ton of different shapes already included in your shape tool. But you can create even more intricate shapes using our geometry functions or bullion functions. I'm going to adjust and create this star shape here. And then I'm going to select the outside shape. And that new star shape go back into my geometry function. Select, subtract, then I've created shape. All right, now that we've gone over the geometry functions, let's get rid of that. Let's look at a couple more things with our repeat pattern. I'm going to turn the spec on, then I'm going to show you my last few tips. Typically, I like to have a color scheme in mind when I'm working on a pattern. I often color my motifs before I start placing and building the repeat. But some people like to work differently. Maybe you like to color your patterns. Once you have the design and the repeat already set, I just find it's easier for me to have it colored area, say I wanted to change things, maybe I didn't like the color combinations that I've created. There is a really, really helpful tool in affinity designer because you don't have access to the recolor tool like you might have an illustrator. But I have found there is a trick that you can utilize to recolor your artwork that is the selection tool. It's important that your elements stay vectors when you are doing this recolor function, because it's only with vector elements. Say, if you work like me and you sometimes use pixel persona to add detail, you might want to wait to the end to do that thing. First, let's look at the selection tool. What we can do is select our layer with all of our elements. We can select our layer. Then in the upper menu here, you'll see right next to our geometry tools is our select. You can select same, you can select object. What we can do is select same fill, color, stroke, color, things like that. What you'll want to do is go into your elements here, and then you want to go into a specific color. All of these flowers are grouped together. I want to select just the red part of the flower. Then basically, if I select same and then fill color, anything that is that red will be selected. I'm going to zoom. And you can see there's like these little blue outlines. And basically anything that is that color is selected. What I could do is then go into my color studio and I can change the color to something else, to whatever I want. Or I can go out of my swatches and into my color wheel and play around and see if I can find colors that might work better for my project. This is a really helpful tool to recolor. We can do the same thing for the pinks as well. Say I want to recolor all of the elements that are pink. I'm just going to go into my drop down menu and then make sure I select a layer with just that pink. Go into that upper menu, select Same, and then select Fill Color. And then I can update the fill color. Then of course, you can just tap to undo, it'll take you back to your original. Even though we don't have a recolor, you still can do select same and essentially get the same idea. It's not going to recolor all of everything based on say, like the color wheel, But you can go in and select everything that is one color and then adjust with your color wheel manually or with your color story manually. The last thing I'm going to do is review our clipping mask and clip to Canvas. We've been working with Clip to Canvas. That little windshield wiper there gives us our option to toggle on or off our preview mode, which will essentially show you everything off of your canvas. But sometimes people like to finalize their repeat and clip the entirety of the outside so that there's no extra work on the outside of their artboard, which essentially can help with file size. I haven't had very many issues. I often like to keep it as is, so that I can go back and edit. What you can do is just make a copy of your final tile. So I'm going to select my final repeat in its editable format. Then I'm going to go into quick options here, select Duplicate. Then I'm just going to turn one of these repeats off by going into my layer studio here. The second repeat, you can just tap that little circle icon and it'll turn on or off your layers. I'm just going to turn one off. I'm going to keep the one on top on. As you see, there's like this outline because that's how far out our artwork goes. As I said, some people like to trim this down. You essentially would utilize Pathfinder, which is similar to the geometry tool that we have. You would use Pathfinder in Illustrator to clip around and basically trim all of the access, but we don't have that option here, so we have to work a little bit differently. The reason why I make a copy is because to do this what I find is easiest is to rasterize and trim. But to do that you're flattening your final print and you're not going to be able to edit it afterwards. This is your final step in this whole process, if you like, to trim off the axis around your tile. But I find that utilizing that preview just gives you a final version. You're still able to it if you need to, but if you like to trim off the access, what you can do is, like I said, make a copy on that copy. What we're going to do is rasterize and trim. Basically what this does is it flattens your tile, all of the artwork. And then it trims it so that it fits your final artboard size. What we'll do is select that layer and then we'll go into our Layers menu. Here right next to the plus is our merging and rasterizing options. When you tap on it, you get a whole bunch of different options merged down, Merge Selected. Then if you go down to rasterize trim, what it will do is rasterize and cut everything on the outside of the artboard and trim it so that it fits into the artboard, get your final tile. This is essentially what you would export. But like I said, this turns it into a rasterized image, like a final J peg. You don't have access to be able to edit this final piece here, but that's why I always suggest making a copy so that you can have that in your layers, save it, and export it as is. Then you only see the art that is that final, seamless repeating tile. We can export this as is. You could even add in a background color if you wanted to. You could add a layer, add a vector layer if you wanted, pull that all the way to the bottom, then you can create a background. What I find helpful when doing something like this is to turn on my magnetics. Right next to that preview mode, it looks like a little magnet, you turn it on. This allows you to utilize stapping. What you'll see is you get these red and green cross arrows, which shows you you're right on the edges of your artboard. And then you could always go into your transform studio to double check to make sure that the dimensions of the square are 2000 by 2000 and then you can go in and update your color. Okay, I think I'm going to utilize this very soft pastel, yellow as our background. Then you can export this as is. Or if you wanted to just export it with a transparent background, you can do that as well. If you found that you created your file and didn't check transparency, all you have to do is go into your Document menu. You can go into your Canvas options and select Transparent Canvas. And it'll remove your background so you don't have that white background. You can export this as a transparent PNG so that you can just place it on any color. You don't necessarily have to have a background. This works really well, especially if you're working in like a print on demand type setting. But if you're working with a client, you may want to make sure you have the final color background in your tile. And then you can go into your Document menu, select Export. And then you can set up your final file. I'm going to export this as a J peg. It's at 200 by 200. I have it at 100% quality. I'm going to update my file name collection name because this is inspired by Mexican and Hispanic themes. I'm going to name that. Then when I'm done updating, I can hit export. If I export as a P, it's going to export with a white background. But if I select PNG, it's going to export with that transparency. But if you didn't and you added a color, you can just export it as a Jpeg or a PNG and it'll export it just fine. I find that PNG tend to be a little bit higher quality than Jpegs because sometimes it flattens the file a bit. Then you can hit okay, select where you want to save it. I have a surface pattern design folder in my ipad that I will frequently save everything in and then dump all of those files into an external hard drive. I have backups and then hit Save, and it saved the final file. All right, one final note on clip to Canvas. I'm turning on my original editable repeat tile here. What is important with this preview mode is that it brings your eye back to that final tile. And what we're going to do when we create our templates is we're going to give ourself a live preview. Traditionally, most people in affinity designer work with tile on one side and then a live preview on the other side. But if you work in something like Illustrator, what you find is that Illustrator has a pattern maker and essentially it does the same thing. It gives you a live preview. Only the live preview is as you're working, it's on your artboard. It bases it off of these options you have in your pattern options. And you can change the design type from grid to brick to brick by column hex and then an offset. You're essentially working within an artboard. And then it's creating the pattern around it based on what you create in the center. Now as I said, when you're working in affinity designer, you'll create like a live preview mode. I'm going to show you an example of this. Here's an example of a live preview. I'm working within my pattern towel here and then it's showing up on the right hand side. But you can do this same process, you might see an illustrator right? In affinity designer. It's the same exact concept only. Instead of having your live preview off to the side, you just build your live preview around your original art board. I've seen other designers work this way. Like I said, usually it's done in Illustrator, but you can do the same similar process in affinity. Designer is a really great example of this. She does a fantastic job of highlighting and explaining automated patterns. I just consider it a live preview only. You're building that live preview around your original tile versus off to the side like you usually do. I'm actually going to show you both processes in affinity designer today. We're going to do the traditional side by side life preview and then we're going to go in and build our live preview. You can see your final pattern grow around your tile in its final stages as you're adding to that tile and finalizing the repeat. Basically we don't have to worry about moving and using the transform tools as we did in this example. But I wanted to showcase how it works because it's important to understand the mechanics of it. We're going to do that as we work through the templates. All that is it for my tips. Let's jump into the next process of building our two templates, examples. And then we'll jump into creating the templates for each individual pattern type that we're going to be working on today. 9. Symbols Explained: All right, before we jump into creating our two templates, what we're going to do is get a better understanding of what symbols are. Symbols are similar to what you might already know as like a smart object, but in an affinity. They're called intelligent objects. Basically, they're objects that can be placed repeatedly within your document. Editing any one of those symbols on the page will automatically and instantly update all of the other instances in that symbol, which is really fantastic for building seamless repeating patterns, you can link and synchronize and edit really easily. I really do agree with affinity. They call them a game changer when it comes to basically creating any repeatable element. Affinity has a great wealth of information on their website when it comes to like tutorials and education, the different tools and studios that you utilize in the app. I just wanted to highlight that really quickly. Explain what it is and why it's important. We're going to be utilizing symbols to create a live preview of the repeat that we're building. 10. Creating the traditional full drop template: I'm in my art gallery. What I want to do is set up a file. We're going to go into our new option here. We're going to select new document. I'm just going to set up a pixel based file. If your document units are inches or anything else, you can just change it to pixels. You can make it as big or as small a file as you want. Just remember what your total parameters are. For me, I'm just going to do a 2000 by 2000 pixels square, then I'm going to keep it at 300 DPI. If you're working in, say, something like a print on demand site like Spoonflower, they might suggest different settings for your DPI. It might be something like 150. Do whatever works for whatever platform you're using. But say you want to print it out, you might want to go higher in terms of your dots branches. I'm going to make sure for this first live preview template we're going to create that our option for create art board is turned on. You'll know it's turned on because you're basically toggling this little switch from gray to white in our other preview that we're going to create. It's going to be turned off, but for this one we want to make sure it's turned on and then hit. Okay? All right. The reason why it's important that our artboards were turned on is because what we're going to do is create an additional artboard off to the side that will house our live preview. This is the more traditional route of building patterns in affinity designer. Why I like this and why I think it's really helpful is that you can see your pattern in real time being built as you work within your pattern tile here. What we're going to do now is add an additional artboard that is two times the size of our original. My artboard is 2000. By 2000, this new one should be 4,000 by 4,000 What we're going to do is making sure that Artboard is selected. Just click on your black move era tap where it says Artboard. It'll be outlined in blue. I'm going to go into my Document menu and I'm going to select Artboards. And what this does is gives us our option to add in an additional Artboard. You'll see this little pop up in the upper left hand corner area right next to your Edit menu. You'll see something. This is Document. We can scroll through and change the different sizes of the artboard that we're going to add in. I'm just going to keep it as document and then I'm going to hit the little plus sign that's right next to it. And it's going to add another artboard in the exact same measurements. But what we have to do is make sure that this is 4,000 by 4,000 We'll go into our transform studio, and then we'll go into dimensions. And we're just going to update the dimensions. Instead of 2000. By 2000 we're going to change it to 4,000 by 4,000 and then hit, Okay, we've created the live preview area. Now I'm going to tap on my transformed studio to move it out of the way so you can see what I'm working with here. To make this process a little easier, I'm going to go up into my upper right hand corner here and turn on my magnetics. It looks like a little magnet. Then I'm, I'm going to create a rectangle on top of my first artboard. And this is going to be the element that we're going to be working with to create our symbol. I'm going to go onto my left hand side, select my rectangle tool here, and then I'm just going to create a rectangle. I'm going to update the color really quick just so that it's easier for you to see. I'm going to use this mustard yellow. Then I'm going to go back in and adjust the placement. You'll start to notice that these green and red lines are popping up. That means that it's lining up exactly to the edges of our artboard. We want to make sure that this rectangle is 2000 by 2000. Without a stroke, you can go into your color studio. I know we updated the color, but if you tap on the stroke, you'll see a black stroke. We want to make sure that that is turned off because that ends up impacting the final view of your live preview. And if you export your final tile with a stroke, it will have a stroke outline and it will create issues with your seamless repeat. Just make sure you go into your color studio and then turn off your stroke by tapping on the stroke and you can either tap on the quick colors that has like a white square with a blue line through it and that will remove the stroke. Or you can just swipe up with your finger on the stroke and it will remove it. You just want to make sure that there's no stroke because it does cause issues. If you leave that on now, we're going to go into our transform studio really quickly and just double check that our dimensions of the square are 2000 by 2000, and if they aren't, you can go in and edit it. Then you also want to go in and just double check your position and it should be at 00. If it's not, then you have to go and revise the placement so that it's right smack dab in the middle of. Your pattern tile here. Once we're done, I'm just going to deselect by tapping outside of the art board. Then we're going to turn this into a symbol. We're going to select it with the black arrow tool. Then we are going to go into our symbol studio. It's the fifth option down, right underneath your color studio. Once you tap on it, you'll get this little pop up in your upper right hand corner. And what we want to do is select that hamburger menu. And we're going to add a symbol from selection. And it's going to create a symbol out of the square. Basically, anything that we do, the square, add to the square, et cetera, will show up ever we make copies in place, that square. Now what I want to do is make duplicates of this. Since we have a 4,000 by 4,000 preview that we need to fill, we will essentially need four of these 2000 by 2000 squares, one for each quadrant. If we were to divide this up into four sections, one of these will fit into each of those sections. I give you a visual here, you can see what I'm talking about. All right, my lines are imperfect, but this is essentially the idea. Each of these squares will go into each quadrant of the bigger square. I'm going to get rid of these lines just so that they don't get in the way. All right, so what we'll want to do then is duplicate this symbol four times so that we can add those into our artboard. You can either go into your Edit menu and select Duplicate. Or you can do your swipe down to access your Quick options and you can duplicate it four times. Now that I've duplicated this four times, I can move these into my new artboard. And as you see, because we have our magnetics turned on, I'm going to zoom in so you can see this a little bit better. Our placement lines will pop up. You just want to make sure that you're placing everything exactly in line with this square. If you notice that there's any ghosting of lines, I don't know if you can see it. I noticed that. But I honestly think it's just a glitch in the program because sometimes people will see lines, but your final tile exports just fine, you get these hair lines. But you could also just go in and double check that each of your symbols is placed exactly where it needs to be. For example, this first one should be at 00 for block one. So we can go into our transform studio at the bottom here, just double check, our position for X and Y should be at 00. The next block which is block two, it's the upper right hand quadrant. The next one should be at 2000 for X and zero for Y. The lower left quadrant should be at zero for X and 2000 for Y. Then your final one should be at 2000 for X and 2000 for Y. If you know that those are all placed correctly, then what we can do is select all of them. Again, just double check, making sure that there is just a fill and no outline. We can go into our layers. And what I like to do just group all of these together by going to our group options here, it looks like a folder selecting group. Once I placed all of the rectangles, what I like to do is just go in and rename and organize my layers here. I'm going to tap on Artboard two, I'm going to select my three menu, and then I'm going to tap where it says Artboard two. And I'm going to change the name from Artboard two to Live Preview, just so that I know what I'm working with. And then I'm going to hit, okay, go back out into my layer, select Artboard one. Then tap on my three menu and rename this to be pattern tile. Once I've done that, what I like to do is just lock this background in R board one just so that I don't have any issues with it moving. I'm going to select lock. That way I can't move it, but I can still revise and edit. You could always go back and unlock it to change the colors and things like that. Then I like to have my pattern tile on top and live preview on the bottom in terms of the orders of my layers. So I'm going to tap on my live preview and then I'm going to drag it so that it goes underneath my pattern tile. Then once I'm done with that, what I like to do is again, just lock the live preview. That way none of those tiles can accidentally move. I have everything separated out, but it's just nice to go in and make sure that I don't mess anything up. So I'm going to select that live preview grouping. Go into my three menu to get my layer options, and then select Lock. And then I'll go out of layer options and then tap on my layers to pull it through. Now what I want to do is test this. I'm just going to go into my Shape tool. I'm going to select a diamond. I'm going to go in and make sure that I have a color that's easy to see. Then I'm going to go into my layers to make sure I'm working in the symbols. You have the pattern tile as the art board. We want to tap where it says symbol, we're going to where it says symbol and tap on that little drop down carrot, so that it's facing down. And then we're going to tap on the actual symbol rectangle. And you know you're on it because you have a little orange line the left of the little icon that's showing the preview. And then we can select our shape and create the shape within the symbol. What you'll notice is that I'm going to pull in the layers here. Whatever we're doing to this tile here will show up here on the right hand side. With this though, we still do have to keep in mind placement of manual work when it comes to like figuring out the mathematics. But I keep my tile figures round numbers just to make things easier for me. All right, now that I've created the shape that I'd like, as we can see already, it's placing it in our life preview. What we need to do, because we've placed this on the left edge, we need to make sure it's copied and paste it onto the right edge. I'm going to go into my quick options here. I'm going to duplicate this. Then I'm going to go into my transform studio, because we're moving from left to right, we're going to use our X axis. We're going to tap on the X under position select plus 2000, because 2000 is the size of my artboard. Then we're going to duplicate that again. We're going to move this to the top of our artboard here. I'm going to create like argyle looking effect and I want to make sure this is right centered in my artboard. I know that it is, because I get these little red and green lines showing me that we are right in the center. Then I'm going to duplicate that diamond. And then I'm going to go into transform. And I'm going to go into my y axis, because we're going from the top to the bottom. And I'm going to tap on where it says Y and select plus 2000. If we were going from the bottom to the top, we would select -2,000 and then hit. Okay. We've created like this argyle plaid looking type pattern. I'm just using a flat background color and shapes. What's really nice again, is that we can see the pattern come to life in our life preview using this type of template. Once I've created this template, what I'm going to do after I've tested it is go in to my pattern tile and select all of the shapes on my symbol layers here. Then I'm just going to select the little garbage can icon. It's right in your layers afterns. Or it's in the lower left hand corner. And I'm going to delete those. Then I'm going to save this as a template. What I'm going to do to save this as a template, what's really nice is that affinity designer let to open up and create files based on templates. This is going to be our traditional, seamless template. I'm going to export this by selecting my document menu and then tap on export as a template. And then I'm going to rename this traditional repeat template. And then I'm going to, I'm going to go on my ipad, go into affinity designer. And then I have a specific folder for this class and the templates And I'm going to tap on that, hit Save, it's going to save it as a template. And what's nice is that you don't have to have these templates, like a bunch of these templates ready to go in your gallery. You can just close these out because you'll be able to access them by selecting new new from template. You can go into your folder and then you can pull up the template there. And that just keeps your gallery a little bit more organized. This is one great way of still utilizing the templates, but not having to have them all taking up space within your gallery. 11. Creating the half drop template: Now that we're done with a more traditional preview template, let's begin working on our next one. So we're going to set up a new file, we're going to tap on that new document option. Then what we're going to do is create a rectangle template. Since we're going to do a rectangle half drop, we want to do file where it's wider than it is taller. We want to make sure we are in pixels. If your document units say inches, change it to pixels, then we're going to change our page with 4,000 and then hit okay in our page height to 2000. I'm just going to keep round numbers to keep things easier as I'm working. Then we want to make sure our artboard is turned off and you want to make sure it's gray so you have no artboard turned on. And then we're going to hit, okay, We are going to be working with a rectangle, half drop. Before we start building out the template, I want to explain how a half drop pattern works, essentially what we're doing when we're creating a half drop. I'm going to create a quick little visual for us that lie. Unlike the straight repeat where it matches exactly at the side bottom, that's going to match at the top, but the side is going to go down by half of the length of your rectangle. So I'm going to make a few copies of this rectangle just so that we can see it. All right, essentially. All right, we have a rectangle here. I'm going to change the color of the outline to be black just so that it's easier to see here. And then I'm going to duplicate this a few times. All right, when you're working with a half drop repeat, you're still going to meet at the top and bottom, but side is going to go down by half. What I'm going to do to show you how this works is I'm going to turn off my life preview mode by tapping on my life preview mode, selecting the drop down, and turning off clipped canvas. We can see how this works outside of the canvas board with magnetics turned on. I'm going to pull my first rectangle to the top, That's how it's going to match. And then I'm going to pull this next rectangle off to the side, and then I'm going to drop it down by half. You'll see the little lines popping up showing you that you are in fact in the correct place. The top and bottom meet just like a regular repeat. The only difference is that we're creating like the staggered effect with the sides. I'm going to duplicate this a couple of times, so we can see it would go up by half, then this next one would go down by half. It creates like a brick pattern. This is essentially like a half drop. Repeat is like a brick pattern only you can do half drops as rectangles as well as squares. That's why I want to highlight a different way of going about creating a half drop that isn't just a traditional square repeat. This is essentially the mechanics of how this works. What we're going to be doing is essentially building out using symbols, this exact same process, so that as we build in the center of our tile, the rest of the repeat will grow on the outside of it. This is very similar to what you might see in Illustrator. I'll show that example once more. Illustrator essentially does the exact same thing. The only difference is that they have like a panel for you to just select options, and it automatically does it. We can see here you have your tile in the center, and then whatever you add to the center of that tile is basically added around it. And we utilize an intelligent object called the symbols to be able to make that happen in affinity designer because we don't have these pattern options that you might find in products like Adobe. All right, so now what we're going to do is build our life preview within our tile here. We're going to go into our rectangle tool. We're going to select the rectangle tool, I'm going to make sure I have a color that's easy for you to see on the board here. Making sure magnetics is turned on. I'm going to create a rectangle then I just want to make sure that it's lining up with all my edges will be 2000 by 4,000 All right, so now that we've created this rectangle, I'm going to go into my transform studio just to double check to make sure that the position is 00 and that the width is 4,000 and the height is 2000. Then what I want to do is go into my symbol studio here and we're going to select the hamburger menu and add symbol from selection. Then what we're going to do is Making sure that our clipped canvas is turned off. We are going to duplicate this six times so that we have our top and bottom repeat, and then our two sides. I'm going to go into my Quick menu here and duplicate this six times. Now what I'm going to do is start moving them into place again, making sure magnetics is turned on. I'm going to select my move tool and then very carefully start dragging my tiles up, making sure those red and green lines show up, showing that I've met them in the proper place. I'm going to drag this next one down, and then I'm going to go to the next one and drag it to the right and then bring it down halfway. Go back to the center, drag it to the right, and then bring it up halfway because we have magnetic non, we see our placement is correct because we have the red and green markers showing that we have placed that correctly. Now we're going to go out to our left side, drag it straight out, and then bring it up to the halfway mark. And then tap on the center again and bring this to its final placement. What I'm going to do is to ensure that none of the surrounding elements move. I'm going to lock everything in place. You can, if you opt to add additional rectangles just to fill up the space so that you see a full proper repeat. Or you can just keep the six that you have, but you can add three additional to fill up the repeat towards the top. It just might make your file a little bit bigger. Now that we have everything in place, what I like to do is go into my layers and then just group all of the surrounding elements outside of that center rectangle and lock them. This bottom rectangle right here, this bottom symbol, is your main tile. What I'm going to do is select all of the rectangles outside of that and group them together so that I don't move them and nothing happens to them. I'm going to group them by selecting all of them by tapping on my first one and then dragging right across all the additional ones. Then I'm going to go into my Layers options here. I'm going to select the folder icon, and that will give me my dropdown menu where I can select Group and it'll group everything. And I'm going to rename this by tapping on that layer group. Tapping on my three dot menu to get to my layer options. And then tapping where it says Group. And I'm going to name this live preview. And then I'm going to hit okay. And then I'm going to lock it so that nothing happens to it. I'm going to go to my symbol, my original rectangle symbol. And I'm going to go into my transform studio just making sure it's still at 00 from my position. I'm going to go back into my layers. Go into my layer options by selecting on that three menu. And then I'm going to lock that as well, that way it doesn't move. We're going to be working in this key area. And what's nice is that you may be able to see this or you might not. I'm going to zoom in and share a little preview of this with my screen recording. But there is a slight rectangle so you know where you're working. But what I also like to do is in my layer studio, move my symbol to the top and leave my life preview towards the bottom. That way I don't do anything to it. Now what we can do is just like test this out. Then after we've done that, what I want to do is remove all of the color from the inside of the tile so that when we export it, you have the option of exporting it as a transparent PNG. To do that, we are going to just go back into that seamless repeat, Select them all, Go into that seamless repeat, and then select those little dropdowns. And then tap on each rectangle and highlight the rest by dragging right over each of those rectangles, and then going to our color studio and removing the color. It'll remove the color from my center tile as well. If you notice you have a white background, you can just go into your Document menu and go into your Canvas. And then select transparent canvas so that you have a transparency. And you'll know it's transparent because you'll get that white and gray grid. It's hard to see. Now what we're going to do is start to work on testing this really quickly. What I'm going to do is add a background by just selecting my rectangle and then selecting a color fill. And then dragging across that I have a background behind my original art board. I'm going to make it so that it's easy to see on screen. Then I'm going to resize it and then I'm going to drag that rectangle so that it's at the bottom of my layer set up here. I know it's my background. I can rename it from Rectangle by going into my three menu and my layers options. Tapping words as rectangle and changing it to background And then hitting okay. And then again locking it so I just don't move it then if needed, I could also resize it really quickly before I lock it so that it's not too far outside of my original. Now that I've done that, we can test out the repeat just so that you can see, it's just a bit easier. I'm going to turn on my outline really quickly so you can understand how this repeat works. And two bits of tips when we're placing elements and motifs within this original tile. Here, I'm going to go into my pattern tile. I'm going to make sure my pattern tile is selected. And then I'm going to go into my shape tool and I'm just going to select a shape. I'm going to go into my color picker. I'm going to remove my stroke by just swiping upwards. Tap on my color fill. I'm going to change it to white just so that it's easy to see on this board. What I find is important when you're creating a half drop is when you're working in the confines of your original pattern tile. You can work on the edges, which is what's nice with this of doing things because it'll pop up automatically as you see your repeat build. But for a half drop, you just want to make sure that you don't put anything over the center line around this original edge. And then between the half drop, because it's going to throw off your pattern. You want to make sure that any elements you put are right above this middle line here. For the half drop on the left side or right below it. Same for the right side. Anything above that center line or anything below it. I'm going to show you why. I'm going to create this cloud shape. And then I'm going to adjust the number of bubbles so it looks more like a flower. If you're noticing nothing is happening, that's because you want to make sure that this element is inside of that pattern tile. I'll open up my layers menu, tap on that cloud and then drag it right on top of the pattern tile. What I'll do is I want to make sure that it's right below that center line. Because how this works is anything on the lower left will show up in the upper right and lower right will show up in the upper left. You don't have to worry about placing those elements, you can just do it to one side and they'll pop up automatically on the other. As you see, anything that you create will show up on all the tiles. You only have to do it to one side. For these edges, you can either do the top or the bottom left or right, whatever you feel comfortable doing. I'm going to duplicate this and then I'm going to drag it up. We're starting to see that placement show up. Then I'm going to duplicate that cloud once more, and then you'll see that process happen here. If we place it on the top, it'll show up in the bottom. I'm going to remove my stroke by tapping on it in the color studio and then swiping up with my pencil. Then what we can do is just finish testing this out to make sure this is working the way we want it to work right now, keep in mind this looks a little wonky because we don't have additional tiles above. If you wanted to add those additional tiles above, you could. This gives me a general idea and it looks like the repeat is working just fine. Now that we've tested this, what I'm going to do is just go into my original pattern tile, select all of these elements, then I'm just going to tap on that garbage can in our layers options here and it's going to delete them. I have everything set. Everything that I need is locked. I have that background added. You can update the color to something else if you want. You can keep it white. You can remove it fully once you export, so that you have a transparency. But I keep it there just for now to make it easier to see what I'm working with. All right, now that that's done, let's go into our document menu and we're going to export this as a template. It'll save as an affinity template that you'll be able to access when you load and set up a new file from templates, half drop rectangles, repeat a template, save and then save it Wherever in your file system that you will have these stored for me. I have these under my course 32 templates, and then I'm going to hit Save. Then we're going to go back out into our gallery by hitting this back button. We are going to just test to make sure we can set this up. So you can either hit templates and go into your file. Or you can select new and then new from templates and then find your file. 12. Creating the diamond template: Now that we've created our half drop template, let's jump into creating our diamond template. So we're going to just set up a new document, and we're going to make this similar to the last file. So we want to update our document units from inches to pixels. We want to change our page width and height to 2000 by 2000 at 300 DPI. But again, if you need to have a different DPI setting based on wherever you're having your work printed or if you're working on a POD site, you can update that there. Keep your color format RGB if you're working online. But if you are printing, make sure you connect with the printer to make sure what color format they need. I'm going to turn on transparent background. Then you don't want to have create board turned on, you want to make sure that is turned off, everything else can stay the same. And then you can hit. Okay. We are essentially going to be doing the exact same thing that we did with the half drop, this diamond repeat. The only difference is that it's going to be in the shape of a diamond. We want to update our color fill here. It's something that we can easily see and make sure we have our outline turned off. I turned that off because I find that if we have outlines and you accidentally forget to turn them off, sometimes they'll show up in our seamless repeat, which will create a break in the seam. I just work with just color fill when I'm setting these templates up. Then we want to go into our rectangle tool on the left hand side, make sure your magnetics is turned on. Then just make sure your preview mode is off and that clip to canvas is off. Now we're going to create a rectangle by dragging our apple pencil across our shape here. And then we want to make sure those red and green guidelines pop up so you know you are exactly where you need to be based on your artboard size. You could also go into your transform studio and just double check that you're with in height and your dimensions are 2000 by 2000 or whatever dimensions you originally created your artboard at. That your position is zero for X and zero for Y. I'm going to tap on my transform studio. That way it'll go in, so I have more space here on my screen. Then what I want to do is rotate this so that we get a diamond. You can hold your finger down and it will allow you to rotate in 15 degree increments. To hold my finger down, I'm going to tap my apple pencil on that little rotator arm. Then I'm going to put my finger down and then I'm going to rotate three times in 15 degree increments so that I get a 45 degree angle. Then what we have to do is resize this so that it fits inside of our artboard. To do that, keep your finger down. Tap on one of your corners, diamond shape and then drag in. Then you'll see those green and red guidelines pop up on one side, and then we can do the same thing for the other side. Then you'll see those green and red guidelines pop up. Once we've done that, then we can begin to set up our seamless repeat by turning this into a symbol. We'll want to go into our Layers menu, make sure the whole entire layer is selected. And then we'll want to go into our symbol studio. And then making sure sync symbols is turned on. Go into our hamburger menu, tap on, add symbol from selection. For this to work, what we're going to do is essentially each edge of the diamond, we'll have another diamond touching it, and then we can create an entire fill. What we'll do is go into our layer studio making sure that whole entire set is selected. Not just the rectangle itself, but the whole symbol. We're going to go into our shortcuts, and we can select Copy. And then we can paste this four to eight times. Whatever you want to see in terms of how full the template needs to be, I'm going to paste it eight times. Then what's nice too is that you can just highlight those layers and you can duplicate them in groups of two or four or however many you select. I'm going to tap on the first in the layer group and then drag right to select more. And then you can go into your edit menu here, that three dot menu. Or you can swipe down with three fingers and then hit Duplicate. This bottom symbol is our original. What I want to do really quick is just rename this bottom symbol is our original. I just want to quickly rename this pattern tile. We know that's the one we're going to work on. I'm going to tap on the three menu here in my layer studio that gives us our layer options. Tap where it's a symbol and update it to pattern tile. And then hit Okay. And then I want to lock it so that I can't move it. We'll go through and move these additional copies. We're going to select that first one, then we are going to move it to the upper right hand side. And then you'll see everything is lining up because you'll get these red and green grid lines. I'm going to tap on the next one, bring it down to the lower right hand side again, making sure those grid lines pop up. I know it's exactly in place. Pop on the next one and then repeat this process to get all of these filled. What I'm going to do is essentially fill the inside corners of this X with the additional shapes. I'm going to pull this here and again, you'll see those green and red grid lines pop up. You know, you're in the right place. Pull it up for this one, pull it to the right for this next one, and then pull it to the bottom. Essentially, you're just making a bigger diamond shape. Then what I want to do is go through and group all of the outside edges here by tapping on the first in the series and dragging right to select the rest. Then selecting that folder icon. And then tapping on group, and it'll group everything. I'm going to rename this seamless repeat by tapping on my three menu. Tapping where it says Group, and changing it to seamless repeat. And then hit, okay, go back into my layers, drag this to the bottom so I know not to work on that grouping. And then go into my layer options and then lock it just so that I don't have to worry about it. Then really quick we can test it and then we can remove the inside color and add a background to test it. I'm just going to select the pattern tile. I'm going to go into my shape tool and I'm just going to create a shape. And then I want to make sure it is a color that is easy to see. Then going into my layer studio, remember if you don't see anything pop up, we need to make sure that layer is on top of our pattern tile. So I'm going to tap on it and I'm going to drag it so that it goes right on top. Then everything will pop up once we've added our element to our pattern tile. If we move it around, we see that everything shows up on the rest of these tiles. We know that our template is working properly. What we're going to do is just remove that background so we don't run into any of those issues. When we're building our pattern, we're going to go into our pattern tile. Select that little carrot to get your drop down menu. Tap on the actual rectangle in your layer studio. Go into your color studio, then tap on your fill. And then you can either swipe up to remove the fill or go down to your quick colors and select the No Fill option. What we'll do really quickly is just select the pattern tile and the seamless repeat, so we can see the outline of where everything is, you'll see a blue outline. We can go in and you can keep it as is like this, and then your pattern can grow around it with a transparency. Or you can go into shape tools. Select your rectangle tool, deselect everything by either tapping on the outside of your screen or hitting that X in the lower left hand corner above the trash can. And that will de select everything on your screen. Go into your color studio, update your color so that it's something easy to see. And then just drag a rectangle behind everything. You just want to make sure that it is wide enough and tall enough that it completely goes on the outside of our seamless repeat. Once I've done that, then I can go into my layer studio, tap on that background, drag it to the bottom so that I know it's our background. And then go into my three menu. And rename this by tapping where it says Rectangle and changing it to background so that I know it's our background color. And then hit Okay. Then what's nice is again, when we utilize this preview mode, if we tap on it, it's going to clip everything to the inside of our original tile. We don't have to worry about having any issues with that final repeat. Then again, if we want to see what's going on on the outside as we're building a repeat and seeing the full repeat in whole, then we can turn it back off. You can tap on the little windshield wiper icon, and you can select Preview Mode. Or you can select Clip to Canvas, and it will show you what your final tile will look like. Now this is complete, we're going to export this template. We'll go into our document menu, Export as Template. And we're going to name this our diamond repeat template. And then we're going to hit Save. And then you're going to select the file or folder that you have everything saved and I have my Course 32 templates. Then I'm going to hit Save. Now we can jump into our final template that we're going to create today, which is going to be for our more traditional like stripe. 13. Creating the stripe template: Basically for our stripe design, it's going to work essentially like a traditional straight repeat, similar to what we did here for the old school way of doing things. Only we're going to build it around the pattern tile. We're going to select new, new document and we are going to set up template. You can either do it 2000 by 2000, 4,000 by 4,000 whatever size parameters that you like. I'm going to create a 2000 by 2000 file, Make sure your document units are pixels, and then update your page width to 2000 and your page height to 2000. We're creating a square. I'm going to keep my DPI at 300 and then make sure artboard create artboard is turned off. Remember that little tago icon will be gray when it is off and it'll be white when it's turned on. I'm going to keep my color format, RGB. I'm going to turn on transparent background. Then I'm going to hit, okay, we're going to start off with a square like this. This is going to be our artboard. We're going to be creating a basic straight repeat, just as we've done before. We're going to go in and update our color story. We're going to go into our color studio. Remove our outline, tap on our color fill. Update the color fill to something that is easier to see. Go into our shape tool here and we're going to select our rectangle. Make sure magnetics is turned down in the upper right hand corner and then drag across your artboard here with your apple pencil to create your shape. Then again, making sure that those green and red guidelines pop up to make sure that your shape is exactly 2000 by 2000. But you can also go into the right hand side and select your transform studio. And just double check your dimensions. And it should be 2000 by 2000 or whatever size parameters you created. Then it should be at 00 for your x and y in terms of your position. Now that we've done that, we are going to turn this into a symbol. We're going to go into our symbol studio, making sure sync symbols is turned on. Go into your hamburger menu and then just making sure that rectangle is selected. When you're in your symbol studio, go into that hamburger menu and then add symbol from selection. Once I've done that, I'm going to duplicate this eight times so that I can create a full square around this. Because we're doing a straight repeat where each side and top is going to line up. I'm going to duplicate this eight times. I'll go into my Edit menu. Or you can do your quick options using your gestures and swipe down with three fingers and then just hit Copy and Paste. Or once you've duplicated this eight times, you can just go into your layer studio and just double check. And you can double check that you have nine layers total, your original symbol layer, plus eight additional layers with that symbol and paste. Once I've done that, what I like to do is just go down to my original symbol layer, go into my layer options and select that three menu. And just lock it in place so that I don't move it out of place. That just makes the process easier. That way I don't have to worry about accidentally nudging it. And then I can just work with the additional symbols. What I'm going to do is tap on this layers studio so I can pull it in, you can see what's happening here. I'm going to select my move tool, that little black arrow. I'm going to tap on my first square here. And then I'm going to move it to the right. Because remember, anything that you put on the left of your board has to show up on the right. We're essentially lining up our left and right and our top and bottom because we are creating a straight repeat when we are working with creating stripes. I'm just going to pull the next square up and then the square after that down so that it lines up. And you'll know everything is lining up because we have those green and red guidelines showing us. Again, just make sure you have magnetics turned on. I'm going to tap on the next one. This essentially creates our full repeat, but I like to have all corners filled as well so that I get a better view of the entire repeat as a whole. Once I've created like this cross shape, going to go back and pull in the next square to our corner Again, you'll see those guidelines pop up and repeat that same process here. Pull that to my right corner, making sure those green and red lines pop up to show me that I am exactly where I need to be. Then the final square here, everything should be placed. You can just go back through and double check everything if you need to, make sure you don't have any issues. If you're noticing that there is like a little gray line, that's okay. That's your actual art board. You want that there so you know where you're working? I have everything set up here now. I want to test it quickly just to make sure that it shows up exactly where I need it to be. We're going to be creating stripes. So I'm just going to create a thick stripe using the rectangle here. What I want to do is make sure I'm working only in this main symbol. What I'm going to do is Organize myself and tap on my original symbol. And then go into my layers options by clicking on that three dot menu. Tap where it says symbol and rename it to Pattern Tile. So that I know this is the file I'm going to work in. And then hit, okay. Then I'm going to go into these additional ones and select them all by tapping on the first and then dragging right on any consecutive ones after that. And then I'm going to go into that little folder icon in my layers and select Group, so that everything is grouped together. This is essentially our seamless repeat. I'm going to rename this group by tapping on my three dot menu, tapping where it says group, and then renaming it seamless repeat, and then hit, okay, then going back out of my layers options, tapping on that group and dragging it towards the bottom. I know not to touch it and I'm going to lock that entire group by making sure that that layer group is selected. Tapping on my layer options, which is at three menu, and then selecting the lock key. Then you can see this is our outer edges and this is our main pattern tile. We are only going to be working in this main pattern tile. Then what I'll do is let's update the color in my color studio here just so that it's easier to see. I'm going to select this gray tap on my color studio to pull it back in. Then I'm going to create a rectangle that is like a shape that is like a straight line if I was to create a stripe and then I want to make sure that that layer is on top of my pattern tile. So I'm going to go into my layer studio, drag that rectangle layer and put it right on top of my pattern tile here. Then you'll see that everything starts to pop up. Once I've done that, I can make another copy of that, duplicate it, drag it to the next side, and then duplicate it again. And everything should be filling up within my tile here. That is essentially how we create. That's basically showing up in all of the tiles. We know our pattern template is working properly. It can go back in and delete these lines as well to remove the stripes. I can go in and just add another shape instead, just to double check as well. The idea is that anything that you put into this should show up on the rest of your layout here. I'm going to add a star again. If you notice nothing popping up on all of your other symbols, just drag that layer right on top of your pattern tile. Now I can tell that this is working properly. I'm going to delete this star so that we can start to export this. And then I'm going to add a background and then remove the color background from my template. I'm going to select my rectangle tool. I'm going to update the color. And then I'm going to drag it so that it goes over. Then I'm going to go into my layer studio. Drag this all the way to the bottom by tapping on it and pulling it to the bottom of my layer set up here. Then I'm going to rename this by making sure that layer is selected. Tapping on my three menu, tapping where it says rectangle and renaming it Background. And then hit, okay. Locking that in place so I can't move it. And then I'm going to go into my pattern tile, Select that carrot so that it's facing downwards. It's going to open up my dropdown menu, Tap on my rectangle, then go into my color studio. And then I'm going to swipe up on the color fill to remove it. Or you can utilize your quick colors and it will remove all of the color from the pattern tile and all the additional symbols. Once I've done that and everything is locked in place, I'm going to tap on my layers studio to pull it in. And then I'm going to export this. I'm going to select my Document menu. Select Export as Template. And I'm going to rename this straight repeat template. That's the template we'll want to use if we're doing just like straight up and down or horizontal type line work when we are creating our repeats with lines. Then I'm going to hit Save, and then select the particular folder that I have set up, and then hit Save. Now we have all of our templates. That is it for building all of our templates. Now let's jump into actually creating our repeats using these three and some premade artwork and motifs that I created for this class. 14. Building the half drop pattern : Now that we've created our templates, let's open one of them up. If you still have them in your gallery, you can just tap and open. Or you can go into your new document options and select New from Template. And then find them in whichever folder that you saved them in. You want to open up your half drop? I'm going to open up my half drop file here. What I've already done is pulled some of the motifs that I had been working on over here. And then I'm going to update the background color here so that it'll be easier for us to see what we're working with. I think I'm going to do either like an off white or cream just to make it easier to see. Then we could always go back and update it. If you'll notice we zoom in, you're going to see this outline that is not going to cause any issues with your final exported tile. This is just showing you where your artboard is and I actually find this really helpful if you don't want to use lines to create where your half drops are happening. This just helps to ensure that you're only working within these parameters. What I'm going to do really quick is just pull in some of the motifs that I've been working with. All right, we are going to just start placing elements within our repeat tile here. I think I want to start with this Boulder motif here and we can resize it. To resize within parameters, you can just hold your finger down and pull from the corners. If you're having any issues with, just make sure that when you are resizing that you are holding your finger down on your screen and pulling in from your nodes on the right or left hand side here. This ensures everything stays in proportion. So I'm just going to resize this down a bit. If you're noticing that this isn't popping up in the rest of your layout, you just want to make sure that you drag it into your pattern tile. I have all of these outside of my artboard and I'm just going to group them so that I know I can go in and pull from these and copy and paste. I'm going to select all of them and then I'm going to select this little folder icon so I can group them all together. And tap group then this floral element here, I'm just going to tap on it in my layer studio and drag it so that it goes right on top of my pattern tile already. You can see the elements starting to pop up. Wherever I move them, it's going to move within the layout. What I'm thinking is I'll use these elements as like filler for the inside and then play around with some of these smaller pieces for our edges to fill things out. I'm going to duplicate this floral motif a few times and pull it over, and then I'm going to duplicate it once more. Already, you can see our repeat starting to form, but obviously it's very evident how it works. The way you want to conceal that is by utilizing filler motifs and adding things to the edges so that things start to flow together. I think I might utilize this row one as well. So I'm going to go into my layer group. I'm going to tap on that row. I'm going to duplicate it. Now that I've duplicated it, I'm going to pull it over. I'm going to resize it a bit as well. Then I'm going to drag it so that it goes right on top of my pattern tile here. That way it'll show up. I'm going to duplicate that and pull it off to the side. And then I'm going to use some of those tips and tricks I shared with you. I'm going to use my flip horizontal option so that I can flip it so that it's facing the other way. And frame some of these center pieces here. Then I'm going to duplicate that again, and then use that as another element for the left side of this flower. So I'm going to flip this horizontal once more then I'm just keeping in mind how these are all being placed. Once I've done that, I'm going to duplicate this right leaning rose once more. I'm going to go and find it in my pattern towel here. I'm going to select my three menu and just tap on Duplicate. And then I'm going to drag it over. Then I'm creating these really nice framed effects with the roses that they lean into, these middle flower elements here. Again, if we want all of these to line up, we can go into our layer studio here and just select them. Tapping on the first and then dragging right over the additional ones so that they're all selected. Then we can go into our alignment options again. You can either access them in the top middle here or you can go into your transform. I'm going to tap on that. And then I want to align them at the bottom. Then that way now that they're all selected together, I can move them as one piece. And we can group them all if you want it to as well. Just to make it a little bit more organized, you can rename this group roses. You know what you're working with. You can do the same thing if we go back out of our layer options, you can do the same thing to these larger pink flowers. Then we'll tap on the first drag, right over the second drag right over the third. Then we can go into our Group folder here, Tap on Group, and then click on R three menu in our Layers Options Group. And then rename this pink flowers. I just like to organize my layers as I can, especially if I'm going to be working with other people or sending these out or say you want to license something. Oftentimes you'll find that sometimes patterns and designs aren't always used exactly as they're created. People like to go in and recolor things, refine or move elements. Making things organized within your layers helps in terms of just how your file is set up. And I think of that as a good customer service thing. Now that I've done that, we're starting to see our design come to life. Now I want to pull in some smaller elements. I have these big flowers, and then I have these medium sized flowers. I want to pull in some of the smaller motifs here and see what we can do with those as well. I'm going to select some of these red ones in my motif group here. Then once I've done also, I will get rid of this grouping because I already have them in a file outside of this design and it just cleans things up. I'm going to go into that group with my motifs. Tap on that little red flower, select duplicate. And then drag it over here onto our artboard. I'm going to select the pink one as well. Duplicate it and drag it onto our board. And I'm going to drag these out of the actual layer grouping as well. I'm going to tap on it and drag it out of the layer group folder. And then do the same with this red one and drag it out of the layer group folder. And then close that folder up. Then I'm going to resize some of these. This pink one is large, I'm going to resize this one. Then I'm going to take this layer with the red one and drag it right on top of my pattern tile so that it pulls up into the rest design. And then do the same for this softer pink one as well. We start to see things taking shape and I can play around with the placement of where I'll have these. Then I can start to duplicate these more. Then I can play around with where I put them. I like placing them on the edge here. It gives this nice effect. And then I'll take the pink one and place them in between the larger flowers here. I'm going to duplicate and then drag it over. And then I'm going to take this red one and make another copy. And pull that over to the other side here. The effect I'm going for a folk art inspired design, pulling in some traditional Mexican florals and ideas, but in more modern color palette. Because this collection is inspired by Flom Mexican culture and things like that, it has a bit of that Swedish folk art vibe. But you'll find that that's very similar to what you might see in Mexican folk art, especially with florals. I'm going to play around with just adding more elements to see what we can do to fill this out. But already you can see print coming into its own, and you see that it's a seamless repeat. We've built it out. As you zoom in, you see how this is working. I think I'm going to use more of these pink ones. All right? And then as I work, I just try to fine tune the overall motifs, working it as if I'm working on a puzzle. For this one, I want it to feel full, but I don't want things overlapping. I like this idea of almost feeling like a vine where the flowers are growing and looping and creating these tendril feeling shapes. As you look at the print, I have these blue flowers as well because I have some blue within the other designs, in my other motifs for this collection. What I'm going to do is make a copy of that and see if that works with anything. And then I'm going to drag that copied motif out of this layer group. I'm going to close that layer group by tapping on that little carrot. Then I'm going to drag this so that it goes onto my artboard here. I'm going to resize. Then I'm going to drag that layer right on top of my pattern tile so that it pulls up. And I'm going to see what adding this blue does to the overall design. Adding that touch of blue just fills up the space a little bit more. And I like that it gives a contrast in color because I have a lot of pinks and reds and whatnot within here. I think this is a fun addition and I really only needed to add a couple of these to create that overall effect and feel as I'm working through this that I like where this is and I think this is a good finalized repeat. The best part of this is that it makes this whole process a little bit faster. As I'm working through things, you just have to pay attention to where your pattern tile is as you're working so that you don't run into any issues. But the way we've set up our layers helps alleviate that, because we've locked that seamless repeat and we've pulled it to the bottom, and then we've added our background towards the end. And then you know that the pattern tile that you're working on is at the top. What I'll do now is tap on the group with all of my motifs. And I'm just going to toss that in the garbage because I don't need it anymore. Then what we'll do is clip to our canvas just so we can see how everything is looking for our finalized tile and then possibly update the background color here. Remember, you can go into that little windshield wiper icon in the right and it'll clip your final repeat into the final tile itself. We also, if we want to change this background color, play around with the colors for the background. I could even go as dark as black. This gives a more traditional feel to the overall design. I think I like how this looks. I'm just going to go back in and look at it as a whole once more to see what the final repeat looks like. Then we can export this. Now that we're done with that, I'm going to clip to my canvas and then I'm going to tap on my Document menu and we can export this file. I'm going to tap on my Document menu. And then I'm going to click on Export. And then I'm going to rename this. Then you can save it as a PNG J Peg. Whatever you deem necessary based on whatever you're working on. Whether it be a specific printer or if you're doing something like print on demand. Then I'm going to hit Okay. And then I'm going to save it into my Course folder and then hit Save. All right, that is the first print that half drop, and then we can jump into our next print, which will be that diamond repeat. 15. Building the diamond pattern : Now that we've created our first print using that half drop, let's jump into creating using our diamond template. So I'm going to open that up. I already have some motifs that I've already pulled on the off side of our artboard so that we can start to build this out. What I want to do is utilize this little monkey concept to be part of the center of the motif. I have to size him down a bit. If we remember, when we look at our set up here, if I were to add some color, I'll tap on the layout itself. You see the diamond shape here. We'll want to work on ensuring that whatever we add fills in that shape. All right, now that I have some of these elements, I'm just going to make a few copies and then I'm going to also group these motifs together. So I have them separate out from where I'm working in my layer studio here. I'm just going to tap on the first drag, right over the next one. And do that till they're all selected. Then I'm going to tap on this little folder icon and tap group. That way I have these off to the side and then I can duplicate as needed. So I'm going to tap on the little monkey, I'm going to duplicate him twice. And then I'm going to bring them over to my artboard. And then make sure I drag those copies out of my layer grouping here so that I can move them to the proper layer that they're supposed to be on. All right, I'm going to drag them onto my artboard. This first one here, I'm going to keep as is the second one though. Again, I'm going to utilize my tips. I'm going to flip this horizontal so that I create like this little frame with them. All right? I'm going to select the first one and drag it, drag that layer so that it goes right on top of my pattern tile here and everything will start to pop up. I'm going to take the second one and do the same thing, drag him so that it goes right onto my pattern tile, and now everything is starting to come together. It reminds me of that game that we had when we were younger. It's like we had to put little monkeys on a tree. I don't remember what the game was. If anyone remembers, leave it in the class discussion. But I like this idea, especially with the Flo inspired collection. The whole idea of the Albriz, the imaginary animals that were fantastical. I made him very simplified because I didn't want it to compete too much with the floral elements that I'm going to be pulling in. I thought this was a fun hero concept that we could utilize for this design. Because we have this template pre set up the actual print, and the overall repeat starts to come to life as we're building it out. I'm going to go back over here and select another element to copy. I think I'm going to use this bigger floral piece. I'm going to duplicate it. And then I'm going to drag it out of the layer grouping, close that layer grouping, then take that floral piece, pull it over here, resize it, that it might fit in between these two little monkeys. Could also be that I have monkeys on the brain, because my little one, my 12 month old, loves listening to the monkeys jumping on the bed song. Now that I've placed it on my artboard, what I'm going to do is take that layer and drag it so it goes right on top of my pattern tile and it starts to fill in the shape. I can already tell that I'm really liking how this feels, but I think we might need some smaller, more thin looking elements to add in to fill up the space. Then what we can also do is turn on magnetics if you want to really place things in key positions right in the center of your motifs and whatnot so that it fills the space a little bit more strategically. Once I've done that, I think I might take this set here, this twiggy looking set of flowers. I might increase the thickness of the stems, though I'm going to tap on the group that this motif is on, tap on my little drop down carrot. And then go to my curves at the bottom, which are the green curves. And then tap on my stroke studio. And adjust the width of this just so that it's a little bit easier to see. Then I'll tap back out of my stroke studio, open my layers back up, close that group, tap on it, go into my edit menu, copy it, and then paste it. Then I'm going to drag that set out of the layer group and then pull it over to my artboard, Resize it, play around to see where I might place it. Then if you notice anything happens with those strokes again, just open that group back up before you place it into your design. And then you can go in and adjust the size. I think I'm going to change up the color of the flowers though, because we have a lot of orange going on. I'm going to go into the layer set here, open them up, and then tap on the square star that I have. And then click on my color studio. Then I'm going to select my color picker, my eye dropper tool. I think I'm going to pull in this pink for the outside. And then I'm going to update the inside little clouds that are the centers of the flower. And I'm going to change them to yellow so that it matches this flower a little bit more. I think that gives us a little bit more variety in terms of the placement of this. Now that I've done that, I can close that layer group by just tapping on the little carrot so that it's facing towards the group versus down. Then I'm going to figure out where I want to place this. I think placing it here will work nicely. I just want to make sure it doesn't go into the arms of the monkeys. Towards the bottom, I'm going to drag this layer group and place it right on top of my pattern tile, and it starts to add it in. I think this works really nicely. I've been playing around with placing blue into these designs. I'm going to go through and I'm going to select that additional motif that I have here, the blue flowers, And I'm going to duplicate it. And then I'm going to drag that out of my layer group. And then I'm going to resize it because I think it'll work at a smaller size here. But I think I might want to recolor the stems instead of this black color to match the green of the pink bouquet that we have. All right, now that I've updated that, I feel like this offers a little bit more contrast. And then I just want to make sure that the red that I have matches the red and this main flower here, All right? And it's important to make sure your colors match so that you get that cohesiveness within your design right now that I've updated that motif and it looks the way I want it to look. What I'm going to do now is pull it into my pattern tile. So I'm going to tap on that layer group. And then drag it so that it goes onto my pattern tile and then it'll start to fill in the rest of that shape. All right, I think I like all of the elements placed here. What we can do now is play around if we want to keep that background color and then decide if we want to add any more motifs. Whether it's like the filler motifs to this to fill this out of it, or if we like it light and airy like this. First let's look at the background color. I'm going to go into my layer studio, make sure all of the additional elements are closed, go into my background, and then I can play around with the color that we are going to use for this. We could do something dark again if we want. Black could work really well to this one. I think I do like the darker effect with this one. Instead of doing a pure black, I think I'm going to go with more of like a gray, but that has more of a greenish undertone to work well with some of these stems. This looks great. So I'm going to keep this as is. You can see your full print here. And then what we'll do is turn on our preview by clicking on our little wind windshield wiper icon to clip everything to our canvas. Then this is your final repeat. Again, you really don't see the full repeat as you're just building with the rectangle. Having that live preview that grows around really helps to give you the final effect. Now that I'm done with this, I'm going to clip that. I'm going to look at this once more and decide if I want to add anything else to this to fill this out or if I think this is good. As busy as I do have some additional like strokes and dashes and things like that that we could use, I can go in and I can copy that. Go back out into my gallery and then go here and paste that off to the side. And update the colors that I think for this we can either do the green or we can do the blue. I think I'm going to go for blue. Then we can take some of these little marks and then see if they work anywhere. I'd have to resize them a bit. Then we can also break them apart by just tapping on them, double tapping, and then pulling some of these out so that you can use them in smaller amounts and re, arrange the overall placement. What am going to do now that I have those? I'm going to drag them and place them onto my pattern tile. And then we can see how it looks filling more space in, it just gives you a different effect and a different feel. Then we can just duplicate these and place them throughout all. I think I like adding in like the bits of filler motifs here. It makes the repeat look a little bit more full bodied. All right, now that I added those filler, I think this is great. This is a fantastic final repeat. Now that that's done, I'm going to turn on my preview. This is my final pattern tile. What I'm going to do is export this by tapping on my document menu. I'm going to export, and then I'm going to update my file name. Then again, you decide whether or not you want this as a PNG or J Peg. If you're creating this with a transparent background, it'll be important to save it as a PNG. Then you'll want to update and remove your background color so that you have that transparency when you export it as a PNG. Can save it as a Jpeg. If you have a background that utilizes color, you can also save it as a PNG as well. I'm going to update this to my collection name. I'm going to keep everything here the same. I'm going to hit okay. And then I'm going to save it in my template. And then hit Save. Then also something to keep in mind, what I like to do is save the editable file as well. I'm going to go out into my gallery by tapping on that little back button next to the affinity designer logo in the upper left hand corner. Then I'm going to go to the file where I have this design and I'm going to tap on my hamburger menu. I'm going to hit Save As, and then I'm going to rename this to my print name. And then you can add something like editable so that you know it's editable, or you can just save it as a F design, which tells you that you can go in and edit the file. And then I'm going to save it. And I save it in the same place that I have my final PNGs and Jpegs of the pattern tile. That way I have everything in one place and I know where everything is. And then I can always go back and edit, and revise or refine, or update colors if needed. 16. Building the stripe pattern: Now that we've finished our diameter repeat, let's jump into our stripe repeat. We're going to be utilizing our straight repeat pattern, just the four by four block. You can utilize that live preview like the traditional way, or you can just use the one that we've created together that gives you the live preview around your pattern tile. I'm going to update the color for my background really quick just so that it's a little bit easier for us to see we're working with. And so you can see that little tile outline. I'm just going to keep it white for right now. Then I'm going to go out into my motif like file and pull in some of my motifs that I think I might use. What's nice with stripes, you can create just basic stripes or you can create the stripe, a fact using motifs as well. I'm just going to past some of these on the outside of my artboard here. All right, now that I have them. But I'm just going to show you a really simple way to create a stripe. We can utilize our brush tool or vector brush tool. We can go into our brush settings and we can select an interesting brush. And then we can update the color really quick by going into our color studio. I'm just going to pick a color that's easy to see. Then on the left hand side, you'll see your options pop up here. This is how opaque or how transparent it is. I'm just going to keep it at 100. And then this is your brush size. I'm going to create a line. I'm going to adjust that line just a bit. I'm going to go into my layer studio. I'm going to select that curve and then I'm going to drag it that that layer goes right on top of my pattern tile. Now it looks a little funky because our curve goes out. And we want to make sure that when we're building these stripes to keep them seamless and to keep them flush, we want to make sure that they fit right inside of our tile here. What I'll do is go in and adjust the effect of this by selecting my node tool and connecting everything. And then it gives us a nice flushed out, seamless stripe. You can do this with different widths, you can create stripes with the motifs themselves. But what we can do now is just duplicate that, and then move it over. And duplicate it again. And you get just a very basic stripe effect, right? But we can take this a step further and we can utilize these shapes and the different motifs that we have to create a stripe effect as well. I'm going to delete the hand drawn stripes. I'm going to select them in my grouping here. And then you could either go to the lower left hand corner or you can go to the layers options here and just tap on that trash can and it'll delete it. What I'm going to do is play around with this idea of creating stripes with motifs and actual stripe bands as well. I think I'm going to do a color band and then a band with some of these motif elements as well. I'm going to go into my rectangle tool and I'm going to go into my color studio and I'm going to pick a color to fill. I think I'm going to fill with this yellow here. I'm going to go into my color studio, make sure have no color in my fill or in my stroke right now. And then I'm going to tap on my fill and I'm going to go into my color picker and I'm going to change it to that yellow by tapping on that yellow. And then go back into my shape tool and I'm going to create my first stripe here. Then again, you can turn on magnetics, little magnetic or that little magnet icon in your upper right so that you can line everything up exactly and get your red and grad guidelines. I'm going to keep these thinner. Once I've placed that, I'm going to go into my layer, tap on my rectangle layer here, and then drag it goes right on top of my pattern tile, and then we're getting our effect here. Then I'm going to duplicate that by tapping on that layer. You can, you can use your gestures, your quick gestures and 23 fingers and swipe down and then duplicate it. And then I'm going to drag it to the other side. I'm starting to get my striped effect here. Then I'm going to start playing around with some of these motifs. I'm going to select the cactus here. I'm going to tap on it in my group here, I'm going to duplicate it. And I'm going to drag it out of my layer groups here so that I can drag it onto my pattern tile. I'm going to select drag it over here, resize it because I think I want to have a few of these to create the striping effect here. Once I've done that and placed it on my artboard where I want it, I'm going to duplicate it. And then drag them into my pattern tile. Go into my three menu, select Duplicate. Drag that down so I get the effect that I'm looking for. And then duplicate it once more. And then I'm going to flip second duplicated motif by going into my flip options here. I'm going to flip horizontal. Then I'm going to select both of these by tapping on one and then dragging right over within these layer groups here. And then I'm going to drag them so that they go right onto my pattern tile. I think I'm going to resize these just a bit so that I can get three to fit in here. Just dragging it down, I want to drag this so that it covers the front of these two additional ones. I want to drag this layer above that first one. All right, already we can see we've created a stripe effect using the motif versus just a traditional stripe. What I'm going to do is go into my pattern tile, select that rectangle that's yellow, I'm going to duplicate that again, move it to the right. And then what I think I want to do is recolor it using that pink from the flower in the cactus, making sure that rectangle is still selected. Tapping on my color picker, and then tapping on that pink flower, it will give me an updated color. Then we could re, use this set again, or we can try an additional element. I think I might use this floral motif here. I'm going to tap on it in my grouped set here. And then I'm going to duplicate it. And I'm going to drag it out of my layer group here. And then I'm going to move it over to my artboard. And then I have to resize it. I think I'm going to rotate it just a bit so that it's more upright. And then I'm going to start playing around with where I think the placement will work. Then I'm going to drag that motif that it goes right onto my pattern tiles. So that it starts placing it all throughout the design here. Now what I want to do is duplicate this a few times. I'm going to go into my Edit menu and then Duplicate and then pull it down and then flip it. I'm going to flip and rotate icon. I'm going to flip it vertical and then I'm going to select that original one by tapping on it and then dragging right over the next one. I've selected both of these motifs. And then I'm going to duplicate those and drag those down. Then if I need to, I can drag these so that they go in the order that I want so that the leaves don't cover the actual flower. As I look at this, I think these up top are a little too tight. So I'm just going to play around with the placement and adjust where these are. If you need to turn off your magnetic so that you can move things a little bit more with a fine tune effect, then you can do that. Once I've done that, I'm starting to see the stripe effect coming to life using these motifs. Now what I want to do once more is duplicate that yellow stripe and pull it to the right. And then maybe make one more set of these cacti to fill it out. I'm going to go into that original yellow rectangle in my layer grouping within my pattern tile. Go into my Edit menu, select Duplicate, and then bring that right to the right of that floral set. But make sure my magnetics is turned on so I know I'm matching up with the top and bottom. That gives me just enough room and just enough space to fill with the cacti. And then that'll be our striped print finalized. I'm going to select these cacti and I'm just going to group them because they're already in my pattern tile and I have them exactly the way I want them. So I can just group them tapping on the first, dragging right over the second, and dragging right over the third. I can just group them by tapping on the folder selecting group, and then I can copy and paste that whole entire group. I'm going to do the same thing with the flower ones too, just so that everything is organized. I'm going to tap on the first flower and then drag right over the next until all of them are all selected. Tap on this folder on Tap on Group. That way I can keep track of what I'm doing. Once I've done that, then I can just completely copy that entire group of Cacti by tapping on that group. Going to my Edit menu, select Duplicate. Then I can just drag this over to fill that final spot. Then it gives us this final effect. I really like creating stripes with this live preview. It makes it so much easier, you don't have to worry about things not lining up again, you can go vertical or horizontal. And there's even tricks for working with the diagonal ones as well. But yeah, this is the final effect using both color black stripes as well as motifs placed together in the format of a stripe. And then you can see the full repeat. It is seamless and it creates this really lovely effect. And that is the final print. What we'll do is go into our live preview. We could also get rid of any additional motifs off to the side that are grouped by going into our layer studio, tapping on that group, hitting the garbage can. That way we just keep our files nice and clean and organized. Then we can go into our live preview and clip to canvas. This is our final repeat pattern. What we'll do is then go into our document menu, select Export, update your file name, and update the file type that you want to utilize. And then hit okay, save it wherever you'd like. Then once again, you could update the background if you want it as well. I think I'm going to keep this white color just to give myself a variety as opposed to just always utilizing the dark backgrounds. But once I'm done, I can go out into my gallery and just like what I did with these other prints, I'm going to save this as so that I have an editable version. That's all three of the more complicated print concepts, the diamond, the half drop rectangle, and the stripe that you could add some more variety into your repeat portfolio. I like these just because they're a little less common and you can get some really beautiful effects with your final repeats. Again, I really like this concept of building your live preview around your pattern tile so that it just makes it easier to see it live and come to life as you're working on it. Now that we're done building our repeats, let's jump into working in our cell sheet. 17. BONUS: Showcasing Your Project with the Sell Sheet: Now that we're done creating our repeats, what I want to do is utilize a cell sheet template that I've created. I have a great video on Youtube that shows you how to use not just the cell sheet, but also mock ups for you to place your patterns in. This is just an example from an old project. And walk you through how to do this. In that video, I'll leave it linked in the class description, but I want to walk through how to place and utilize these really simple cell sheets that have created that you can showcase your prints and your patterns and then highlight the print on something like a mock up. I'm not going to walk you through the mock up process, but I will leave a link to the Youtube video that walks you through how I use mock ups in affinity. But I'm, I'm going to give you a bit of a tour and how to use this sheet. I'll use this as an additional asset within the class resources for you. All right, so what we're going to do is use this template to basically showcase our print as a larger image. And then some additional supplemental mock ups to showcase how would look on product. You can opt to place the mock ups on the larger image or you can opt to place them in the lower images here. I'm just going to place my print, so that is front and center in this top box here. I have everything set up as an artboard. Everything set up on this one artboard. If you select this little drop down arrow, you'll be able to access the editable type here, as well as any additional information that you want to include. I suggest naming the collection and then what the print is called and then adding in your skew number and then having information about how to contact you. I have like my name, my website, my e mail, and then my branding off to the side. Then these squares here are just for placement only so you know where to place your imagery. Then when you open that board by tapping on that little dropdown carrot, you'll see all of that type. And then also I have the boxes labeled so that it's easy for you to figure out what goes where. You could also just like tap using your black arrow tool. But I just, again, like to keep my layers organized. I have the large hero image labeled, the left bottom square and the right bottom square. For this large hero image, I'm just going to fill it with one of my patterns. I'm going to go onto the left hand side and select my fill tool. Right now it shows that it's a gradient fill, but if you tap on the square and then select that gradient fill, tap on it, get these options towards the top, closer to the left hand side. Right now it currently says solid, but if you tap on this, you can scroll through or you can use those little right and left arrows. If you scroll down to bitmap, it will allow you to fill with a bitmap Jpeg or PNG file. In our case, because the final tiles that we are creating are seamless, it'll work very nicely with this. We're going to place from files, then I'm going to go into my Course 32 Templates, where I have all of these files saved. I'm going to find my monkey print here. Once it places it, it's going to be quite large. You'll obviously want to resize it more. The print is shown. Once you place it, you see these two arms. One allows you to scale and then the other allows you to rotate. I'm just going to scale this down a bit so we can see more of the print. And then once I'm done, I'm going to tap on my black arrow tool, my move tool, and then just tap on the outside of my artboard to deselect. Now that I have the main print here, I can go in and place the mock ups that I've created for it. I'm going to select my left bottom square and then I'm going to go into my Document menu. And I'm going to select place so that I can place an image I'm going to place from files because I have mock up saved within my file here. I'm going to select this baby Muslim Pant and then hit open. Then what you'll need to do to place your image, you have to drag across your artboard. Obviously this image is larger than the square. What we'll do then is go into our layer studio, tap where that image is, and drag it so that it goes right on top of the left bottom square so that it crops it into that specific shape. And then I'm going to tap on my move to my black arrow, tap outside of my artboard to deselect everything. Now I'm going to do the same thing here. I'm going to place another image into this right bottom square. I'm going to go into my Document menu, select to place from files, or you can place from images depending on where you've saved yours. I'm going to go into my Document folder, and then I'm going to place this little ones I've created and then hit open. Then I'll drag my apple pencil across my screen and size as needed. Then the same thing, in order to crop this shape into that square shape, I'm going to tap on the layer with the ones and drag it so that goes right on top of my lower right square. And then it'll basically crop it in. You can re size if you need to so that everything shows as you'd like. And then you can rename this name this because I've been just doing a series inspired by my cultural background. If you guys don't know, I'm Mexican and Puerto Rican, American, then I'm going to name my print monkey monkey. Do if you find that the text frame you have isn't big enough, that's okay. You just have to resize it all. Once I've updated that, I can go back in and just double check to make sure everything else that I wanted to have updated is updated again. You can replace my logo with your logo, update your contact information here as well. Then this is a really simple cell sheet that you can utilize to showcase your artwork in a portfolio or on your website. Once you're done with updating all of this, you can go in and oport it by selecting your document menu here, tapping Export. And then you can export as a PDF, a Jpeg, whatever you'd like. Update the file name. And then I'm going to hit Okay. And then I'm going to save it into the same folder that I've been saving everything before. And then I'm going to hit Save. Then the cell sheet has been saved and then you can use this to e mail out to showcase your prints and highlight the work that you've been doing. You can place multiple prints on this as well. You don't necessarily only have to do one and then have everything repeated. I just wanted to highlight how it will work. Again, if you want to learn how to utilize mock ups. I have a really simple Youtube video on my channel that you can check out, and I'll leave that linked below. But I just wanted to make sure I could give you some additional assets that you can use in a cell sheet is always super helpful when it comes to showcasing your work as a surface pattern designer. Now that we are done with our cell sheet, we are finished with this class. I hope you found this really helpful and informative, that it inspired you to get creative and experiment with new and different repeat types like the diamond repeat and the half drop, And there's a ton more. But I just wanted to give you some additional options that you can use for your print portfolio. 18. Course Outro: Thank you so much for creating with me today. I hope this class has helped you get comfortable with the affinity version two interface and gain the confidence that you need in creating more complex pattern types. And I also hope that it's inspired you to add more complex patterns to your growing portfolio of repeating pattern designs. Remember to make sure to check out the class resources for your project. Templates, a self sheet template, links to sites for mock ups and links to a Pints board and my spoonflower shop, all with surface pattern design inspiration. Also, don't forget to share your project in the class project gallery or if you feel up for shared on social media and tag me on Instagram at Bella Sophia Creative. I'd love to see what you created or even offer some helpful tips if you need them. Finally, please consider leaving a class review. These reviews are so helpful in ensuring that teachers get engagement, which in turn helps our classes overall in the search algorithm. Thank you so much for joining me in this class. I will see you in the next one, Bye.