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.