From Sketch to Wrapping Paper...and so much more!

1. Introduction: Welcome to this introduction to From sketch to wrapping paper. I'm an low folate, a blogger, illustrator and pattern designer living in Mill Valley, California I sell art prints as well as other products with my patterns on them on society six as well as on spoon flour. Do you see patterns everywhere on the mug you use for your coffee in the morning or on a notebook that you write your journal in on tote bags that you take to the supermarket? This class, from sketch to wrapping paper, will help you bring your own designs toe life. We'll start with sketches, and we'll bring them into the computer by scanning them. Or just taking a photograph of them will be doing the rest of our work in Adobe Illustrator , and you can sign up for a free trial at adobe dot com. Once they're in the computer, you'll learn how to pick a color palette. How to move your motifs around to create a very pleasing arrangement, and I'll teach you the step by step process of creating your first repeating pattern. Once you have a final design that you love, we will send it to a printer and you'll get your own special, unique wrapping paper delivered to your home by taking from sketch to wrapping paper. You'll feel pride in creating your first repeating pattern inspired to continue on this exciting path as a new pattern designer and joy at what you've been able to accomplish. One of the most exciting things about pattern design is the feeling of joy and elation that you experience when you create your first repeating pattern. And the cherry on top in this class is creating a real product with your very own unique design on it. Are you ready to experience this incredible feeling with me? I hope so. Hidden role and let's get started. I can't wait to see you in class Bye for now. 2. Scanning Your Artwork: Hi there. Welcome to class. What we're going to do right now is scan your artwork using your scanner. What you're seeing right now is my desktop. This is a picture of a beautiful place called Stinson Beach in Northern California. And so to find my scanner, I go up to the apple menu. I go to system preferences and I find the printers and scanners and double click on that. And then I know that my scanner is this office jet 7 60 Siri's. So I click that I click on scan and I opened scanner. You'll hear some noise in the background while my scanner is warming up. And what it's doing right now is it's creating an overview scan of the sketches that I put on the flatbed. So once you see the image actually show up, I'm going to walk you through the settings here on the right hand side of the page, and your scanner may look different, but the settings should be very, very similar. So here is my image on the left hand side here. And then what this is telling you is that it was from my flat bed. I didn't put it through the document. Gator, I didn't use the flatbed. You can select black and white or color, depending on what your artwork actually is. Minus obviously black and white. I select here under DP I, which is dots per inch. I usually pick something fairly large, like 600 because I really want the artwork to be very detailed. And to be it a great resolution. You don't necessarily need to pick 600. 300 would also work. I wouldn't go any lower than 300. Then I'm going to scan it to the desktop. I've called it sketches for wrapping paper. The format that I'm picking is a J. Peg. I'm leaving image correction alone and type alone. So before I hit scan. If I hit scan now, it's gonna tell me to select an area to scan. So all I need to do is click with my mouse and drag over the area that I want to scan so that there is a box around it now and then I hit scan. It's now scanning the document called Sketches for Wrapping Paper. My scanner shows a progress bar down here, which is kind of nice. So you know where you are in the process. And as I said you were Scan or you may know where your scanner is. It may be on your desktop, and B You may be able to just double click it from there to engage with it, but and that should be easy. If I'm sure you've used it before, if you have one. And then, um, settings, as I said, should be fairly similar. So we just heard my scanner finish. I'm gonna close out of these two windows and you can see that it's right over here and it came up beautifully. It looks fabulous before we move on to the next lesson where we're importing these into illustrator. I just wanted to show you that I did take a picture off my artwork as well, and you can see that it's a little bit grainy. I took it with my iPhone, and obviously the background is coming in. I took a picture of that, I think, on my wooden table, so it's a little bit dark, but it will definitely still work, so I don't want you to worry. If you don't have a scanner, I will definitely show you how to import a photo of your artwork and what we need to do with it once we're inside Illustrator, and that is what we'll do next, So I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Digitizing Your Artwork: Welcome back in this lesson We're going toe open up Adobe Illustrator and import The scanned sketches that we took will also do a version where we import the photograph of the sketches that we took and once were inside Illustrator, We will vector rise them So the first thing is to open up, illustrator. So I have Adobe Illustrator here along the bottom of my toolbar. I'm going to click on that and I'm going to create a new document. I generally pick a square size and I usually work in pixels. But you have lots of different options here that you can explore at your leisure. You can pick got 8.5 by 11 piece of paper, in which case this would be set two inches or whatever size you want, so I'm going to keep it a pixels. I'm gonna kick keep it a square. I do a lot of instagram posting, and so I generally work in the square format, but you can pick whatever you'd like. So here is my art board. You can with your finger. You can move it slightly over the top of your miles to reposition it so that it's in the center of your screen. And then what we need to do is we need to go find are scanned image, and then we'll also go find our photograph so that we can scan them. We can bring them into this document and actually create vector artwork out of them. So what we do first is we go to file place and the documents are on my desktop, which has been selected here, and I can see them both. I can see my sketches and I can see my photograph. So I'm going to grab the sketches first and double click on it. And then I'm going to click and drag to place it inside my document. What we'll do next, now that it's actually inside, are are on top of our art board. Here is we're going to do something called Image trace and image traces actually, up here on the top of the menu options. I believe this is because I'm using Illustrator CC. If you don't see it up here, you can go toe window and then click on image Trace my papa boxes already open because you can see a little check mark right there. But if yours doesn't have a check mark by it, you click on it and then the pop up box, with all of the details around how the settings for Image trace will show up. It's over here on my desktop, on the right hand side. Here's says image trace in here, all of our different options. So what we're going to do is under the first preset, we're going to click on default so that we see the drop down menu with a bunch of additional options. We're going to click on black and White logo because we're dealing with a black and white sketch. If you were dealing in color, if you're if you had scanned, were taking a picture off colored or worker, a painting or watercolor, you would pick one of the color options here, and I can do that in another lesson. But for now, we're going to skip. We're going to stick with black and white, so we're gonna pick black and white logo, and it's going to start to actually render my drawing. You can see that it didn't pick up some of these skinny airlines, and I'm glad that it's showing us this because one tip I have for you is when you are doing hand sketched work. If you can use a very black pen that has a nice line quality to it and keep the lines fairly thick, you won't have to do as many adjustments when you're in this image. Trace process. However, if, like I did, I wanted these lines to be skinnier. We can make sure we still pick them up by going back over here to our different options. Clicking on Threshold Where there's a little slow There's, um, slider. Click and drag it to the right until you get up to maybe 1 80 or so, and it will render the drawing again. And look how crisply those came out. It came up really, really nicely. The last thing I do with Image Trace is there are advanced features that are open on my desktop here. Yours might be closed, so you may be seeing in Miss Trace, and it may look more like this under advanced. There's this arrow pointing to the right, and if you click on it, it will now point downwards and it'll show you these additional options and what I select is ignore white so that it ignores the white background paper that was that My motifs air sitting on top of if you will. So if it's rendered it and it looks great, we're going to need to expand it now and again because I'm an illustrator CC you and you may be in an older version, expand may not be actually up here at the top of the screen, so if you don't see it, you'll find it under object. Expand a little pop up comes up and you just click, OK, and now you can see that this has actually turned our motifs into vectors because they're all sort of a slight blue color. What we do next is with this still selected the boxes still has this. It still has edges around it, you right click and hit on group. And the reason we're doing that is because we want to be able to work with each of these individual motifs as we start to build our pattern. Generally you need to do that at least once, sometimes twice. So I just did the right click. One more time on group is still listed as an option. So I'm gonna click it again. And now I should be good to go. What I like to do before moving on is I like to organize my art board a little bit as I start to think about the pattern that I'm going to be making. So one thing I want to do is I want to make sure that I can move each one of these motifs around and that I don't lose any of the interior details. So what I do is I click and drag on them to see if they actually are already grouped. And this little half daisy is not. You see, I lost some of the interior little dots, so to move it backwards, I clicked on it and I clicked and dragged to move it to move it back where it was before. You just hit Command Z and it will go back to where you want it to be. I'm going to do that again so that I can move this half Daisy back to where I need it. And now I'm going to click and drag over the entire daisy. I can't really tell. But what happened is it now turned these other little dots. That's this light blue color. And I'm going to hit command G on my keyboard to group that entire motif together. I'm going to click and drag over this daisy as well and do command G to group it. And then I'm going to move it over here. I'm gonna actually organize my little flowers over here, and I'll do it with this last piece is well and move it over. As I mentioned, just from an organizational standpoint, I like to move like motifs together with, like, motifs. Because that way, as I start to think about the pattern that I'm going to be creating, I sort of have in my mind all right. Well, how many different motifs do I have to play with? And in this particular case, I have the's daisies, which will be my hero items in the pattern. I have these little acorns, which I may or may not use. And then I have these different leaf motifs, which could end up being nice for me to use a swell. And so I like to just organize my art board a little bit by having these, like items near each other. I'm gonna move these tall, skinny guys. Oops, movies tall, skinny guys over here. And I know that I have sort of two different options, which is nice. They're similar, but slightly different. I really think this is a pretty gingko leaf motif and some very happy to have that and no doubt will work with it. And then I also have this one, which is a little bit rounder. I'm gonna put this one down here, So before we move on, I want to do the same process with Well, first of all, let's save our document. This was my bad. You want to save your document fairly often. So before we move on, I am going to do file save, and I'm going to call it wrapping paper, skill share and hit OK. And then he hit okay again to make sure that I now have a document with the name on it up here and it's been saved and you definitely want to make sure you save your work fairly often because you definitely don't want to lose your work if your system should crash. Adobe Illustrator is pretty is really a wonderful program, and it's fairly stable, but you just never know. So you want to make sure that you're saving your work. So what I'm going to do now is the same process. But I'm going to import the version of our art my my sketches that we took a photograph of . So you both do the same. We're gonna follow the same steps, so file place we're going to. I know it's on my desktop, which is selected. I we called it photo of sketches for wrapping paper, some going to double click on the photo, and then I'm going to click and drag to place it on my art board. It looks really different from the other one. That scanned version was much whiter, but this is gonna work just as well. So once we've placed it on our art board, we're going to want to go to Image Trace again. And since I don't want Image Trace to use its default settings, which are over here, I'm going to adjust those. But also just as a quick reminder. If image traits is not open on your desktop, just go to window and select image trace minus selected because It already has the check mark next to it in the presets for image trace. You want to click on default, select the black and white logo cause we're working in black and white, not in color. We're gonna let it render. And it actually came out on the first try. Really? Well, it got mawr of my skinny little lines in this particular daisy than the scan version did. Now I'm gonna go back over here. I'm not gonna play with threshold because it came out just fine. I am going to go down to advanced. And again, if advanced is an open. You want to hit this little arrow until it's facing downwards, and then go to ignore white and click on ignore weight so that it has a check mark in it. It'll render your artwork one more time. Now we're ready to expand it. We can click expand here this time, or if you can't find it, go to object and hit expand. But this time I'm going to hit it from here, which actually saves you one step because it expands it without that pop up box showing up just kind of nice. Then we're going to right click and un group again, and then I'm going to do that one more time. And in this particular instance, there is we didn't need to do it. A second time on Group is no longer an option, and so we can click away from our document and we know that we're ready to go. I'm going to select this black bar up here which got rendered. It was in the background of my photograph and just delete it and then we're going to go through the same. You'll go through the same steps. If you click and drag a motif and you've lost a little bit of it, just do command Z to go backwards and then click in drag over the entire motif and hit command G to group it. So I'm not going to go through that process again since we did it with a scanned version of my artwork. But you were basically ready to go now, and we will move on to the next lesson where we will start to create our pattern together. See you there 4. Playing with Color: Okay, Now we're jumping into some of the really, really fun stuff. We are going to create a color palette, and from there we will create our repeat pattern. So there are a variety of different ways to select a color patter palette or to build your own. The first way is you can use readymade pallets that are actually in your swatches panel. So if your swatches panel is an open, you can goto window and go toe window and select swatches. Mine is already open. So it has the check mark right next to it, or what you can do is over in your swatches panel. You can select this drop down menu and scroll all the way down until you see open Swatch library. Word has this arrow and then over here are a whole bunch of default or already made color palettes that the people at Adobe Illustrator have created. So you can explore them. For example, you can look at the various options that are under flowers, and they actually if you hover over the file, what looks like a little file folder, you can see the name of them. So this is a device This is a red rose. This is a yellow rose. This is an iris, and if you click on one of thes, you basically click on the little file insignia, and then it will move it over into your swatches panel, and then you can use those colors in your artwork. I don't have a tendency to pick the default ones, but there are Tana von, so you should definitely go explore them. What I do instead is I do a combination of picking from other artwork I've already done, or from a photograph that I've taken myself either outside in the yard or while during walk , because there's incredibly beautiful colors in nature. So in order to create my own, what I do is I go to the rectangle tool here on, and I actually want to create a circle because I prefer to have my color swatches actually in a little circle. So I'll right click to open the fly out menu and I'll pick Elliptical tool and then I'll drag. But while holding the shift key so that I'm making a perfect little circle, it's going to be black at the moment, but we'll change that in a second. I'm going to de select by using the hitting the like victor on my keyboard. And then I'm going to copy a whole bunch of these square these circles across the top that I'm gonna fill with my colors. So I'm gonna hold down the option key until I see the two little arrows. And then I'm going to click and drag and hold the shift key so that it keeps it out exactly the same line. And then I'm gonna hit, release, and I want to duplicate that action by command D d like, um, like dog. And you could basically hit command D or control de on a PC several different times, and I usually try to line up something like 12 colors or something like that. So what have they got? 2468 10. So, well, that will be good for now. So then what I like to do is I will import either a photograph or some artwork that I've done previously, and I'm gonna pick colors off of those. So I have to wear readymade that I prepared in advance for this class, and so I'm going to go to file place and we've done this before when we imported are actual sketches and then I'm gonna pick the hydrangeas and this stingy instance and beach picture that I love so much I'm gonna select both of those in his place. And then I'm going to drag and drop them on my art board, sort of side by side so that I can see them. I'm gonna make this one a little bit bigger. It's a little bit harder to see. And then what I'm going to do is I'm gonna click the first of my circles and then I want to get to my eyedropper tool and my eyedropper tool. The fastest way to get to your eyedropper tool is by hitting I on the keyboard and all of a sudden you're cursor turns into a little eyedropper and then I'm going to pick some of these pretty purples that I have in my hydrangeas and you can click on the next circle if you want. Or a shortcut which will allow you to toggle back and forth between selecting the circle and selecting your color is by holding down the command or the control key on the PC and then hit the next circle and it collects it. But you're still now. Once you've released that movement, you now still have the eyedropper. So I'm gonna select a slightly darker purple that I'm going to do it again. I'm hovering over the circle. I'm hitting command and clicking on the circle. And then once I release the circle, I still have the eyedropper. Let's do a couple of blues and just and even later, purple. There's all kinds of of great theories around how to do color and a person who I highly recommend to as a fantastic class. On color in skill share is Bonnie Christine. She, first of all, has incredible skill share classes on building repeat patterns using Adobe Illustrator. She's an incredible teacher and walks you through from soup to nuts how to do an incredible variety of patterns. So I highly recommend those classes and then in particular, she has a plaice about color, which is also just fantastic, and I also highly recommend it, um, so I'm just basically going along and clicking the colors that I like, and I really it's really important to have boats and lights and some darks and it's You also want to make sure you've got a neutral and I haven't actually picked anything from over here. So maybe I'll pick something that is, um maybe I'll see if I can get some other sort of either of super light blue. Yeah, Super like blue would be nice and on guy Want something dark, much darker, Dark, dark, agree, so that I've got basically a variety of sort of purples and blues and greens and a couple of neutral colors. But I've got a couple that are nice and dark so that I would have the on some darks as well . So once I've actually selected these colors, I can obviously get rid of my artwork, the photographs, rather. And then I'm going to select all of my cute little circles. And once they're selected, I'm going to go over to the swatches panel. And again, you confined your swatches panel by going window swatches if you need to. And then what you want to do is you want us click on the little it looks like a file folder . And when you hover over and it says new color group, so you click on that and then you want to give. You don't have to give your color groups names, but I like to remember what they are. So I'm gonna call this hydrangea colors, and it just you can leave these selections alone, selected or work, and includes watches for tent and then hit. Okay? And now you have that over here and the next part of off color palettes That's important, at least for me is I want to make sure I have this for any other document I create in the future and so assumes I've imported it essentially over into my swatches panel. I want to save it. And so I'm going to go to this drop down menu again, and I'm gonna go all the way to the bottom, save Swatch library as a I and you'll you'll get a pop up with swatches as the sub folder, which is great. Then what? We want to call it aside rangers hydrangea colors and then hit. Okay. And so then when I go into a new document, I'll actually be able to go to this fly out menu, go to open Swatch library, go to user defined, and then I'm going to be able to find my hydrangea colors. It's right here, and I can use it in another piece of artwork or in another pattern. So that's really, really helpful. Okay, so now that I've got my colors, you can either leave them here as reference or you can delete them because you have them all over here. But what I like to do next is I like to color in my motifs, at least with an initial set of colors before I create my pattern. So, um, there to several different ways to do this one I'm going to show you is we're gonna fill this motif in, so I've selected it. And if you want to get in, zoom in a little bit closer. You just hit command or control on a PC and the plus sign, and then you could move into your motif a little bit to see it a little bit more closely. So once it selected, I'm going to go over and use what's called the paint live paint bucket tool. You can actually get to it by a keyboard shortcut K. But I generally just selected over here in my left hand options so you, you pick it and this flower was already selected. So now it's showing all of my different vector points. I want to not have it be black, which is what you're seeing on the screen right now. I want to go over here and pick one of these colors so that my cool paint bucket has that color in it. And then all I need to do is hover inside of the flower and then release, and it will fill it with that very pretty color. Now, if I click on the selection tool by hitting V on my keyboard so I can sort of see what that looks like, You know, that could be pretty. I'm not sure I love the black surrounding the outside of the flower, and so I'm going to select it again. And one thing that's critical toe to remember when you're using the live paint bucket tool is you're creating in effect. And so you can see now when I've selected this flower that it has these very different, um, points along the bounding box and that is telling you this is actually an effect that's been applied to the flower and you have to expand it in order for you to be able to continue in your pattern design work. So we're going to go up to object expand. It's also appear on the newest version of Illustrator, but if you don't have that, then it's under object. Expand and then just leave these alone. You don't have to change any of those settings and just click. OK, you can now change the color if you want to, but you can proceed and you won't have any issues actually creating a pattern once we get to that step. So what I want to do now is I'm going Teoh, select the live pink bucket again, and I'm actually going to create going to pick a very, very, very light color. I think it's this color and I want that to be the this sort of exterior on line on the pattern, as well as potentially those inside small lines. And so I'm going to go around my piece of art and or my daisy and continue to click on anything that sort of black. Um, if you want to get the you can play around and decide, Do I want to just have it be this line or do I wanna have it be the lines all the way that actually did the whole flower. So I'm gonna go backwards, command Z to go backwards. And if I only wanted to be the teeny, tiny interior lines, you have to sort of hover very carefully until that's all you're selecting so that you are selecting those tiny little interior lines, but not actually the entire flower. So I'm gonna do that as I go around here and see if I like it better. I might leave the interior stamens black. We might see if you think that those dots look okay or if that's still kind of too harsh looking. This is, of course, completely a matter of taste. But I want to show you how to do this, cause it's on an important part of the process. So now I'm gonna hit V and my qwerty keyboard toe basically release the work that I've done . And now you see this is stolen effect. So I'm going to go when I'm gonna expand it by clicking up here this time and on Ben, I'm going to see if what we think of that. It looks like I forgot one of them over here. And I'm not sure that I really like the dots very much either. So I'm gonna zoom way in, so that will be easier for me to do this. And, uh, the second time I'm going to click the zoom tool over here on my left hand toolbar. You can also use the on the keyboard and I'm going toe do, uh, click and drag over the item to go way, way, way in. And now I'm going. Teoh, hit the Teoh. Go out of the zoom tool. I'm going to click on the uhm I'm going to select the flower. I'm going to click on the paint bucket tool again. I'm still have the right correct color that I want you selected. And so now I'm going to be able to go in here and select the items that I actually want to turn into this color that I think is gonna make this much prettier than having it. Um, with any black on it, I have to pick them individually. Because of that click and drag, I will color the entire flower this light off white. I only want to pick these individual little circles that are on the inside of my artwork. And so there you have it. Now I'm gonna hit V for Victor on my keyboard one more time. It's still showing that it's an effect. So I'm going toe, expand it so that we're good to go. So I'm gonna now's you out and you consume out by hitting command and the minus sign on your keyboard so they consume back out and see kind of where you're at. So I'm going to continue to play now with the colors, and I will do this in time lapse so that we can move through this quickly and then I'll be right back. So one thing I want to show you with this particular element is that you can tell that it actually is broken into a couple of different pieces. If I highlight this part of the stem, you can see that it's not connected to the bottom part of the stem. So if I actually want to create this to have the all in one color and be one complete object on the fly out menu shape, Builder Tool is the first option. I'll click on it and then what I want to do is I just want to drag through the flower two or this sort of like a stem and and now it's basically created one entire shape from it. And so instead of using the paint bucket tool, I could just select the color that I want from my swatches panel. And it will turn the whole thing into that color once once you click on it. And so that is now great, because it's basically both cleaned the object up a bit by having it be one shape. And if I want to change the color can, it's just it will now change the color of the entire object. So I wanted to show you how to do that as well. We're ready to move to the next step, which is actually to create our pattern, and so I will see you in the next lesson. 5. Creating a Repeat Pattern: all right. So welcome back. I want before we start creating the actual pattern I want obviously point a few things out . As you can see, things are a little bit different on my screen. So what I did when I was off line was I recovered. My aren't work picking a very much narrower pattern. Uh uh, palette rather color palette. And I think it's really pretty. And I've actually used this color palette before, so I know it really works and what I also did, and I forgot to mention this when we were playing with color is I obviously eliminated a bunch of the elements that we initially scanned in. I just decided that my pattern was going to be very pretty if I made it a little bit simpler and just used the's three hero flowers and then two other design elements which are sort of leaves. And then finally, I created a new little spot graphic that actually is the interior of this flower. I don't know if you can actually tell, because the color is this is ah, very pretty sort of gold color. But what I did is I was able to actually recreate that as its own little motif, and I think it's really pretty. So I'm gonna use that sort of is a little bit of a spot graphic that I think at some additional dimensionality Teoh the pattern that I'm going to create. So let's jump right in tow. How to make a pattern. What I like to do to start is I like to create my bounding box, and my bounding box is really what I'm going to create, the pattern inside off and also kind of around cause it's going to overflow across the edges now what I did is I just dragged and dropped a pretty much of a square in the center of my art board. But if you go up to look at the dimensions here, the width is 7 21 and the height is 70 to those numbers are going to be hard to remember, and one of the things we're going to need to know, need to remember is the actual dimensions of our box. So what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to delete that box and then, with my rectangle tool still selected, I'm just going to click on my art board and release and you get this little pop up box and I can enter the dimensions that I want to use, which actually makes it a lot easier because 1000 by 1000 is super easy to remember. So I'm going to put those dimensions in there and hit OK, And so now I have a bounding box that I can deal with, and I'm gonna be able to easily remember that it's 1000 by 1000. So I'm not going to create my patterns over this version because I'm going to make it a little bit lighter by changing the opacity. So I click on the opacity up here at the very top along the menu bar, and then I can click on the slider and I'm gonna move it down to about, you know, 30% so that it's a really nice sort of neutral background. And the other thing that I want to do is I want to, uh, lock it in place so that it doesn't move at all. As I'm creating my repeat and so toe locket. I can goto objects and lock, or I can actually do command to which is a super helpful keyboard shortcut to know. So now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna bring my motifs on top of the board, and I'm going to start to create my motif, and I'm noticing that there actually in the back. So I'm going to select them and do object arranged, bring the front so that they're fully in the front of my document. And, um, I'm going to make sure that that's true for all of them. So I'm gonna bring them all onto my board, and then I'm going to bring them to the front, and then we should be good to go. So as I build my pattern, a couple of really important things to know that are critical to the pattern making processor to the repeat to creating a repeat is that anything that crosses the top boundary of this bounding box is gonna need to be repeated on the bottom. And anything that touches the left hand side is going to need to be repeated along the right, and I'm gonna show you exactly how to do that as we build a pattern. But what I wanted to do first was tell you that rule so that you kind of know that as you're building elements and you're having them touch and then the other thing that's super helpful when you have a fairly simple pattern like this is you're gonna want to make duplicates of these motifs and change them slightly so that they don't look so obviously repeated in the exact same orientation. And what I mean by that is, with this flower selected, I'm going to hold down my option key until I see the two little arrows, the black arrow and the white arrow. And then I'm going to click and drag the flour and move it. And once I release it, I have a duplicate. Then what I can do is I can resize it to make it a different size, and I can either rotate it by moving my cursor to one of the edges, and then you can see it turns into two arrows with an arc in between them. And if I click and drag with that being shown, I can obviously rotated so that it also looks different. So that's a very helpful way to create, sort of get some more mileage out of your motifs, if you will let me do a different example with this one. So I'm going to again hold down the altar option key, and I'm going to duplicate this flower. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to right click and go to transform, reflect and their two options in this reflect box. One of them is horizontal, and one of them is vertical. The horizontal one is selected and someone hit, okay, And so now this flower looks a little bit different from this one because it's oriented. It's flipped horizontally, so that's another really good thing to know how to dio. And finally, once you make additional duplicates of your elements, you can use those various techniques to make sure that the pattern has additional interest to it and that every element is not repeated or moving in exactly the same direction. So I wanted to show you how to duplicate how to reflect and how to rotate objects and to re scale them so that they're in a different size, because that helps you build a much more interesting pattern. So as I continue to build my repeat here I am going to actually pause the video and I'm going to do a lot of work, sort of off screen so that you don't have to watch my entire process. This part can be very time consuming it. Super super fund. But it can be very time consuming. And so I don't want to you to have to watch my every move. I want to sort of speed up to a place where on much more march farther along in the creation of this pattern on DSO when I come back, I will have almost finished it. But I will show you exactly how to copy anything that's touching across the body, the top and how to copy anything that's touching along the left hand side so that we can continue to make progress in creating the actual final repeat. The third cardinal rule that I'm gonna tell you now is we're going to need to repeat this bounding box and have a copy of it behind. So we're going to copy it and we're going to put it behind everything and that actually holds all of the different elements of your pattern and that that holder, if you will needs to have no stroke and no Phil on it. And I'll go through this again when we're actually doing it, because it makes more sense when you're actually doing it live. But let me pause the video. Now build my pattern up and then we'll come back and we'll do. Those three key things will repeat, will copy anything that touches along the top of our pattern and will make sure it's copied to the bottom. And then we'll copy anything that touches the left hand side and ensure that it's on the right. Um, if you build as you're building your pattern, if you actually have something along the top and the bottom that are overflowing this boundary, we can deal with that. No problem. We'll just have to make sure that anything that's touching the bottom gets copied and gets moved and duplicated on the top, and that holds true for the right hand side as well. So let me build more of my pattern, and I will be back when it's almost complete. Welcome back. I did a lot of work offline. I decided to sort of save you the time of watching my every move by creating the majority of my of my pattern off line. But I'm now back and you can see that I have made a lot of progress. I also decided to actually create a layered pattern by layering some of the elements on top of each other. And now what we're gonna do is we're gonna go through the three cardinal rules of making a repeat pattern. And what those rules are is anything that crosses the top of your bounding box needs to be repeated along the bottom, and anything along the left hand side needs to be repeated on the right. Those are the first to cardinal rules. So that's why I wanted to pick a size for my my bounding box. That was gonna be super easy for me to remember. So let's copy the elements across the top. This background still needs to be locked, and it is. You can tell it won't move. I'm going to click and drag over the elements that are along the top that are touching basically this top horizon. Then I'm going to right click on my mouse, go to transform and move, And since I'm moving them from top to bottom. Vertical E. I'm going to put zero in this horizontal box and 1000 in the vertical box. I click inside distance to make sure that it duplicates the 1000 value. And then I'm not gonna hit. Okay, I'm gonna hit copy, because I want to leave them at the top and copy them along the bottom. So I'm gonna click copy, and then you can see I now have those duplicated along the bottom. I'm going to do the same thing along the left hand edge. I'm going to click on everything that touches that edge, right? Click, transform, move. And since this time, where we are moving them horizontally from left to right, I'm going to enter 1000 in that as that value change Vertical to zero. Click on the distance box so that it repeats the 1000 pixel value and hit copy again. And now I have everything that I need to have replicated around the box itself. Now, that was a sort of rule number one Rule number two. Rule number three is before we can drag this into our swatches panel to test it as a repeat , we need toe. Unlock the bounding box in the back and you can do that by going toe object. Unlock all, and we need to create a copy of this box and paste it in back. So we're going to do command, see to copy it and then command be like, boy to copy it behind or be like behind. And then we need to make sure that that copy has no stroke and no Phil. So right now you can see it's got a slightly orange tinge to it, so I'm going to click on this None to make sure that both of these boxes show no color whatsoever. And there there's nothing in the Phil. There's nothing in the in the stroke, and then the final piece is to click on every dragon, drop on everything or dragon. Select everything on your entire pattern, including your bounding box, and then just click and drag and move it over into your swatches panel and you can see it show up right here is a tiny little pattern. Then what I do is I slide over to the right and I grabbed my rectangle tool again and I drop it in. It's gonna keep the same dimensions I had most recently, which is 1000 by 1000. I'm gonna click, OK, I'm going to de select it by hitting V. So I've back on the selection tool and then I'm going to click on my pattern. And there you go. Now one. A couple of things that I learned from Bonnie Christine is when you're testing out your pattern there a couple of key things to look for. And one way to do that is actually to scale back from the pattern, meaning to make it smaller, which you can do by scaling it. Just like we scaled objects when we were creating our repeat and moving our motifs around. So with this pattern selected, you want to right click and go down to transform and select scale. And then we want a decent, like transform objects. That's why this became so tiny, so de select that and it'll populate back to inside the square. And then if you go upto this uniform entry here, you can either enter putting it put in a number like 100 if preview is selected, you can now see what you're changing. So again if I can also hover over this number. I mean, I'm no, actually not clicking in that box. I'm just hovering over it. And with my finger on top of my mouth, I'm basically going from right to left with my finger toe. Make the scale of the pattern smaller and smaller and smaller, so I can sort of see it better And see if I if there any glaring things that pop out at me now, this pattern I love this pattern and that made this pattern before and so I wanted to show you how I made it. I think that it might be it has nice movement in it, although this is very dark. And so maybe this element should be a little bit lighter. So it's not Maybe doesn't jump out and you quite so much. I did make sure that it was behind other objects so that it wouldn't be too jarring. We may want to play with some different color options for this pattern now that we actually have it there. You know, there's some areas where this more holes than others, which we could fill in and you can figure out sort of where those are by seeing where the white space is and recognizing the elements that are around them. But because of the layered pattern, I don't think it's really necessary for me to fill in any more space. I think it actually works pretty nicely like this, and what we can also do at this stage, as I mentioned, is go up to the re color, artwork or tool, which is up here, and we can click on it. And then, if we'd like to just rotate through the colors that we have already put into the pattern, you can use this randomly change color order, click on it, and then it will change colors on the fly using the cult. I think I have five colors in it, so it'll just use those five colors. It won't introduce any new colors into your design, but it will rotate through them. And so you can. You can decide who is there something that actually looks more interesting to me. Does this showcase something in the pattern that I might want to change? Or is there one Are there one of these colors that I like better than others and frequently in the pattern design business. You're saving multiple copies of a pattern in at least two color ways to showcase. So it's fun to rotate through this and then decide which one you like best. And if you land on one that you think is really pretty, I think this is a really pretty one. You just hit, okay, and now you have a second color way in your swatches panel. And so what I like to do is I like to make thes a little bit smaller, my squares a little bit smaller, and then I'll duplicate my squares and I'll put them side by side so I can see this is almost the same. I just changed a couple very, very small on ways in which the pattern is rendered, and I think it's kind of nice because that this is hard to see cause I'm so far away. But I think the first pattern that I made the gingko leaf as well as this long, skinny leaf might be a little bit too jarring because they're so black. And where is this one is much softer because it's sort of been that very nice gold color but you can play around with it infinitely and have an incredible, incredibly, incredibly fun time. So the great news right now is that we're basically at the stage where we've created our pattern. And now all we need to do is actually create an account with an online resource that I use called stationary H Q. And we're gonna import our pattern into that resource and order wrapping paper, so I will see you in the next lesson. 6. Print Your Wrapping Paper!: Okay, we're in the home stretch. You guys are doing absolutely great. I am so excited that we're now at the stage where we're going to create the final document in the correct file dimensions and file type that we can upload to stationary H Q, which is the online printing service that I use to have my wrapping paper printed at. So once you've got your final pattern, you need to open up a new document by going to command and and when you get the pop up box that shows up to create a new document, I have already set up the dimensions that I know we need. So what you need to do is here. If this is still set on pixels, you need to select inches because the file size for stationary H Q needs to be the size of , ah, regular piece of wrapping paper, and for them that is 20 and 1/4 inches by 29 inches in 1/4 and it needs to be portrait orientation. So as soon as you put in 20.25 and 29.25 and clicked on portrait orientation and make sure you're in inches, just it create. Once we have this format set up, we're just gonna go back to our pattern. We're going to click on the pattern and do command, see to copy it, open up the new document and do command V to place it. And then it's not obviously in the correct size, so all you need to do here is hit. Delete. Go to your rectangle tool again, either by selecting it in the menu or hitting em, and then click in the intersection of the two lines at the top. And what may show up here is the dimensions that you use to create your pattern. I tested this out in advance, and so that's why it's already populating 20.25 for with and 29.25 for height. But just enter those dimensions and click OK, and now you have the file in the correct size for one sheet of wrapping paper. Now what we need to do is we need to save it, so we're going to go up to file save, and I'm going to call it wrapping paper test and save it as on Adobe Illustrator file first so that we always know where it is and that we can go back to adjust it in the future. If we want to create a new version a new color, for example, then we're going to go back up to file and go toe export and export as and we want to export this actually as a J peg. So you're going to select the format down here from the bottom, go to J Peg and hit export. You want to make sure when this pop up shows up that you are in fact, on C m y que the toggle switch will allow you to pick other options. But for any print work that you're doing, you want it to be C m y que. You want it to be at the, um, a good resolution. I usually am here. We may need to make it slightly smaller, and we'll test that out when we go on to the printing site. And then I also have it at 300 dp I cause I wanted to be a scripts pus possible, and also its aren't optimized. So hit okay, this part because it is saving it at a very high resolution Takes a little, you know, takes maybe it takes less than a minute, but you have to wait for it to basically finish exporting and station er h Q. If you're not familiar with them, is a printing service, and you can actually have more than just wrapping paper made through them. You can put your pattern on mugs, which I've done in the past. You could also have notebook covers made with your beautiful artwork on them, and I'll show you that in just a second. So we have completed saving the file in that format. So now what we're gonna do is go to our browser and open up safari and or whichever one you like type and stationary. H q dot com and then we're going to sort of click on it. It's gonna show up now. I already have a log in. You probably don't, and so what you'll need to do is you'll need to create an account, and that's very easy to do. You just need to give them your email and then set up a password. And so I know that my, um, my information is in the system already whereas you would register and go through the registration process. Let me put in my password. It's hard for me to talk and type at the same time. I'm going to log in. Make sure put my password in there correctly. Excellent. So this is the first green you're going to see. And over here it lists all of the products that they have. And so, as I mentioned, they've got wrapping paper that got books and journals. They've got all kinds of they've got some fun business supplies and also school supplies so you can explore that. But we're gonna go straight to wrapping paper, and we're going to click here to order. And then here I'm just gonna put new tossed pattern floral pattern and I'm going t I'm I like Teoh. Select the opaque paper stock. You can do it in glossy if you want glasses a little bit more expensive. And I've ordered it No paid before, and I think it's really beautiful. I'm just gonna order 10 for now that I'm going to go to next. And then here it's going, Teoh, it's gonna load for us a, uh, upload button where we're going to that we're gonna be able to click on and actually upload the file to fit in this box that will be able to actually see are wrapping paper on their site before we hit. Sort of add to cart and it takes them a minute for that to get get prepared for us. But you can see that we have the correct artwork. Artwork size, 20 inches in 1/4 by 29 a quarter. And as soon as it stops spinning, we're gonna be able Teoh upload artwork. Then here. What we want to do is we want to choose or file, and we have our wrapping paper test JPEG right here. Now it is pretty big. It's 56 megabytes. So we'll have to see whether or not it tells us that that is actually too big or not. And if it is, we will show you how toe how we can fix that. But in the past, I've been able to upload even a very large file format, and I think that they're expecting that because they know you're using both vector or work and that you want to have it in a very high resolution so that you're wrapping paper comes out really, really crisp. So we're gonna wait for that to finish until the it's all completely uploaded. And as you can tell, it doesn't really take that long. And then we'll move on to the next step and go to the cart and actually placed the order. So give it. Let's give it one more minute and then a Z I mentioned before, As we're waiting for this to finish, we're going to see it pop up in this box. And so, for example, when you look at it, if you decide well, I really would like to change the scale a little bit. You can then go back into Illustrator and play with your size and determine whether you want it actually to be smaller or if you wanted to be larger or if you decide I've changed my mind. I want to change the color and do a different version, or if you've got several versions. What I did the first time myself was I had two different color ways that I absolutely loved . And so I uploaded both files one by one and ordered robbing paper of both and then Um and then I kind of got that. I got very hooked on this process because the wrapping paper is beautiful and I sold some of the holiday market and it was incredibly successful. So I highly encourage you to learn this process because it's first of all, an incredible feeling. Do you actually get your own wrapping paper delivered? It's such a nen credible thrill to see your artwork actually on a real object, whether that's wrapping paper or a mug or notebook. So there you go. So it's showing up. It's looking beautiful. It's definitely fitting in the window properly. And so now we're gonna add it to the cart, and I am not going to actually place an order. But what you would do here is you would change your quantity. If you wanted to change your quantity, you would make sure that you've got your shipping address and all of that great information in here, and you would proceed to go to if there was coupon you'd enter it here, or gift card. You'll basically then, once you've entered all of your information, go to check out so I cannot wait to see your final wrapping paper when it arrives. I'm very, very excited that we've gotten all the way to the stage. And I'm just going to leave you with a couple of final tips in the last video. I will see you there. 7. Thank you!: Well, that's a wrap no pun intended with from sketch to wrapping paper. Thank you so much for taking this class. I hope in the process of creating your first pattern, you came away with an incredible sense of pride in this accomplishment and that it brought you joy in starting to pursue your dream of a career and pattern design, and that you have also been able to share your beautiful wrapping paper with your friends and family. I look forward to seeing you in another class, riel. Soon I have a variety of other classes here on skill share. Another popular one is called Create Awesome Videos. It's specifically for social media, and I walk you through just in three simple steps. How to create really engaging social media videos to post on instagram and your other social media channels. I also have a really fun mixed media class that's called create and sell mixed media art prints, and after we go through the mixed media part of the class together, I then show you how to create your own account in Society six. And Society six is the Print on Demand Company, where I upload both my art prints and my patterns to sell on a variety of products, So please check that class out as well. And then finally, I have to. In fact, I think I now have three watercolor classes on the platform, and my most popular one is called Watercolor Flowers, and in it we do five watercolor flowers together. So please check those out and mention them to your friends as well. I would really appreciate the support. And don't forget to recommend this class so that other people confined it. I would really appreciate a quick review and also a thumbs up and let's stay connected. You can follow me on Instagram at an lethality art. I also have a website and the fallen art dot com, and I published a weekly blawg on my website. You can also join my private Facebook group and art club. Just go to Facebook, enter ANS Art club in the search button, and then it'll pop up and you just have to answer request to join and then just answer to short questions and I will let you in. It's a fabulous community of students, both new and ongoing students as well as a great place where I am live every Wednesday at noon, Pacific Standard time to talk about art and creativity and engage with all of my students. So I would be super thrilled if you would join me there so that we could connect more directly. And again. Thank you so much for taking this class. Bye for now. I will see you again soon.