Half Drop Pattern Party in Affinity Designer V2 for Spoonflower

1. Welcome to the Pattern Party!: Hi, friends. Are you ready to celebrate all the birthdays that happen in your life? I'm just getting over our biggest birthday season in my family. Lots of birthdays. I decided to do a class based on celebration and fun and parties because I love to throw a good party. But I also love making designs for these parties. Welcome to H Patty half drop pattern party in Affinity Designer two for Spoonflower. Today, we're going to be working on half drop patterns and celebrating those in your design work. Imagine your pattern as a really fun dance party. But instead of people, you've got your squares, and in a regular pattern and all your squares are lined up perfectly. But in this dance party, we want to shimmy things a little and move them just off to the left or off to the right, down a little bit. It's a little party. Instead of those straight perfect lines, you have a little bit of a zigzag added to your design. That's what a half drop pattern looks like, and it can add that extra flare to your dance party or pattern, and I have people saying, Wow. Today, I'm going to walk you through downloading your perch handmade template through affine designer, and I'm going to show you how to create your own template for future reference. You know just how to do it just in case you accidentally lose that template. Because I know for me, sometimes I actually work in it and Now I don't have it anymore. So I'm going to help you with that. We're going to look at inspiration on my Unsplash page. You know how much I love splash for finding inspiration, and I have a new collection all party related. Okay get those disco balls out, get those umbrellas going, find the inspiration because it's okay to have that inspiration instead of trying to think it up on your own. We're also going to work together to upload our designs to spoon flower. Spoonflower is that great fabric website where you can upload your designs and have them shipped off and printed for any occasion and whether it's wallpaper or fabric, your designs come to life. With your own collection of fabric ready to sell or use on your own. Check out this great workbook that comes with the class today and all the actionable steps for moving forward with today's class. I'm also going to include how to download those high resolution photos and mock ups from spoonflower to use on your own website. Okay. Don't be afraid to get funky with your patterns and embrace the hat embrace the half drop in your designs. Let's get ready to celebrate and have fun and make some really fun magical patterns. I'm Katie from Perch handmade. Welcome to this intermediate class in surface pattern design on Affinity Designer using your iPad. You are going to need some basic knowledge of how to create designs within Affinity Designer for this class. But sit tight. I'll walk you through everything, and we're going to just have some fun today. So let's get started. 2. Understanding Half-Drop Patterns: Are you ready to start understanding what exactly a half drop pattern is in surface design? Sit back and I'll walk you through exactly what a half drop pattern is and why they're so useful. Like I mentioned before in this fun dance party scenario. You've got your patterns and they're laid out in square blocks usually. A regular pattern, they're going side to side, like a square dance, but we want to shake things up a bit and we want to add that shimmy and shake to our designs. A half drop pattern is where every other column is shifted halfway down. Take a look at these blocks and let me show you how they create this staggered or zigzag effect. They totally enhance your visual interest in your pattern. Here are some more examples of the fun half drop patterns. See how they go over and slide down a bit in your design. Setting things off just a little bit. In the next lesson, we're going to go over your template and how to create one for yourself. Follow along. 3. Template Guide Creation Adventure: Are you ready to get started with our template guide creation adventure. Is it an adventure? Maybe it's a dance party, whatever it is. Let's get started, and I'll first show you how to upload your template in AffinB designer. Make sure that you have it downloaded into a file on your computer or on your iPad. Let's get going. I have my Affinity Designer app opened already. I like to keep my designs and projects set up in more orderly fashion. I'm going to open my patterns project first so that when I open my new template, it will go straight into my patterns file. Let's open your imported document. What we will do is I'm going to go to my templates and I'm going to find my four by 2000 and open that one up. Okay. And that instantly opens into your project, and you're all set to go. If you've If you'd like to just sit back and watch right now, feel free to use the imported document for today's class. But let's now walk through actually creating your own template for yourself, and I'll show you how to save it as a template as well. First, let's create a new document within Affinity Designer. Click on New and hit new document. I'm going to go up to my 2000 square preset. But if you need to change it on your own, go to pixels in document units. Click on the 2000 by 2000. Click. Make sure you set as 300 DPI. I'm going to create this in CYM K because Print companies love CYM K by using CYM K. First, I can share it later as an RGB. I'm also going to make sure create artboard is set and then I'll click. I have my first artboard already set. I'm going to come over to my layers panel and rename it right now by clicking on the layers and then clicking on the three dots here. This one, I'm going to rename pattern. I like caps on mine, but that's my personal preference, and I'm going to hit. Now, this Rard is going to be called patterns, so you can see it there. Now, I'm going to create another art board by going to the hamburger up at the top here and clicking on artboard. I'm just going to take it so my snapping tool is on, so you can see the red line, and I'm going to just bring a box. It doesn't matter what size because I'm going to make sure to use transform tool and resize it to double the other size other artboard size, 4,000 4,000. And that one is all set. Now I'm going to rename this one by going back to layers, hitting the three dots. When you tap on the name up here, then you can rename it. Again, I like the cap locks, and I'm going to write preview. That way, I know which one is which. I have pattern and I have preview. Let me show you how to create the pattern preview within this document. So first off, I'm going to go back to my patterns layer. Make sure I'm tapped on that. And I'm going to create a square within that. Make sure my snapping is turned on, and I'm going to come over here, see how I have the x to the green and the red lines. That means I can fill it in perfectly. So it's still 2000 by 2000. If I need to check that, I can go to transform tool and check it 2000 by 2000. And I'm going to set the background color. I'm just going to give it a little bit of a pink background so you guys can see that better. Actually, let's go for F Balu. I'm realizing I'm on my HSL sliders. Let's go to CYM K sliders just to be sure. And I want to make sure I have this perfect color for the outside the stroke. So first, I'm going to hit the eye dropper and pick up that color. I'm going to go to the stroke and tap on that because I want those the fill and the stroke have to be the same. I always bring that up to about a 0.5. So you can tap if you If you tap on the stroke and the tap on this number here, I can hit 0.5, and that way, it gives it a little bit of edge. I know it doesn't seem like anything right now, but it helps later in the preview. Now, I'm going to hit that rectangle button and see this little guy here. First off, if you need help knowing where your things are, hit the question mark in the bottom, and we're going to find symbols. This symbol, I'm going to tap on this and hit the sandwich, make sure my rectangle is chosen and hit a symbol from selection. That puts my rectangle right there. Now, I also grouped it and gave it a orange line. What we are going to do is now use that group to copy into our preview because later on, we will add all of our pattern designs into this sync symbol. But for now for the template, we can just pop it in here. Now we're going to take this because if we want to drop it into the preview, we can just drop it in from your synced symbols. Let's go to the preview. And we can go back to sync and insert this one. We want this up in the corner. The easiest way to do this is we want to make sure we have this set to zero. That's your x axis. X is your horizontal access. Y is your vertical access. We want the horizontal and the vertical to be at zero, and that gets it perfectly into the corner. And no overlapping. The next one we're going to do. We're going to add that again, go back to sink. We're going to add, we're going to insert it. But this one, we need it to go to the bottom corner. Let's go to our transform tool. It's still going to be on this side wall, so that's still going to be zero. But it's going down the page exactly to 2000 because our square here is 2000. And that gets it perfectly in line right here. What I'm going to do now because it works best to have columns is I'm going to first off, I like to keep them in the order. This one, I'm going to hold it till it covers and move it below. I know that this is the top and this is the bottom. I'm going to slide both to the right and hit group. And that gives me one group right here. Next, we're going to work on this column. The columns work best in the pattern design, setting it up for later, and your pattern details overlap properly. That's why I like to set up it in the columns. So let's jump back in and I'll show you how to build the second column. So now we have to add the second column and go back to our sink or the symbols and insert this one. This one, For the half drop, it needs to be in between the two. So first of all, our x needs to be at 2000 because we're moving over to this line. We don't want it in the corner. Let me clear this out completely and hit negative 1,000 Because we want it exactly halfway from the 2000, half of two is 1,000 or one, half of 2000 is 1,000, but we want it to move up, so it's negative 1,000. And then we're going to add in the second one. Insert, we're going to go to the 2000 rate here for your x. This one because it's dropped down halfway through, we're going to go to 1,000. Let me show you. We have our top one here. And then our middle one. I'm going to move that. It's top middle. You can see there's no space. It's lined up perfectly. If you keep coming here, it's 2000 is negative 1,000. Then we have 1,000 because that's halfway between this one. The bottom one, 1,000 plus the 2000, it's going to be about 3,000. Our last one, we're going to add in Still, we want the x at 2000 and the y at 3,000. I'm going to move that one slide it to the bottom, so we have one, two, three, and I'm going to slide those all to right and group them. I'm going to move this down and it doesn't matter you could name them or you could not name them, but I'm going to keep it same. You want to know what I'm going to also do. I'm going to take this pattern layer so you can see a little bit better. But let's say, let me go like this. Point let me actually do three. Three, and I'm going to change the color just so you guys can see the color. You can see the design is that zigzag pattern and this will be your preview. You'll work on this one, or you can work on this one, and you'll see the pattern happening live while you're working on it. I've included all the math for this and the block positions in the download workbook for you. So you have reference to look at while you're working on your project and building your own. Have fun making this template. Oh, I almost forgot. Let's show you how to export this template. Let's go back to it. I'm going to go back and change this out. I'm going to change the size to 0.5, and I'm going to change the color, it's the same color. I'm going to keep it as the blue for myself. Actually, you know what I'm going to change it to white because I know I like to work on all white background. This is my template, so I want to start with a white. Remember, we have our pattern with our sync block, and then you have all of your groups. And they're all set. You've got them named, you've got your preview, you've got your pattern, and then you have your preview, right? I'm going to move this to the top as well. So it is the same order pattern pattern preview left, right. Okay. Now to save this as a template, go to your hamburger up top, and we want to export as a template. I'm going to rename mine as 2000, underscore half drop, underscore arch and made. Actually, I'm going to call this half drop original as well. That way, I know this is my original template, and I will change I will change this later on, but when I'm saving each document. Then I can hit save, and I already have mine in my templates, my pattern originals, and I'm going to save it to my pattern templates. I love to keep a file just of templates. So I know exactly where to find them. I also keep it in my favorites on my file things, so it's all set to go. All right. Okay. Now we've got that part done and we'll be ready to move into the next lesson. Our next lesson, we're going to be looking at inspiration on my unsplash account and look for that in your downloads in the notion file that I've given you and it's a fun link and full of fun It's called clavation Let's look for that in the next lesson. 4. Finding Inspiration: Let's Party! : Are you ready to find inspiration for your design today. Let's party. I've given you in your downloads the inspiration file or URRL sorry, for my unsplash account. So let's take a look at that now and find all the inspiration you need for creating your designs today because you don't have to come up with it on your own. I like to give you guys the inspiration files or pictures in Unsplash. Unsplash is great because you can use the photos to gather the inspiration and as long as you're not using unsplash plus, you can use them license free, and just give credit to the artist who gave you that inspiration, especially if you're sharing on social media. But let's take a look at that now, and here are my collections, here's my party file. I'm going to click on that. There it is. First off, I love to dance. I love to have party. Why not add little dancers to your mix. Maybe it's disco balls. Maybe it's neon. There are so many design elements here to create fun birthday, dancing, celebrations and use any of these. I love a good watermelon. Actually. Unpopular opinion, I don't love a godadovala but they look great in pictures. Ice cream cones, pinatas. I have a bunch of boys, so dinosaurs have definitely been in the mix. So have fun using splash to gather inspiration. And Explore all the collection to choose what resonates with you. In the next lesson, we are going to start designing your patterns together. I'm going to show you how to make some really simple patterns just to get the foundations of creating your patterns and the mathematics down. Follow me in the next lesson and we'll get started. 5. UPDATE: RGB Color for Spoonflower: Hey, friends. So it's come to my attention that spoon flower, unlike other printing companies, actually prints in RGB. So everything I told you or I'm about to tell you about printing in CYM K. It's true for a lot of printing companies, but not for Spoonflower. If you go to their website and you can go to their Spoonflower health, that's where you can find save as an RGB. Also, it does mention saving as 150 DPI for the best resolution for Spoonflower. But from what I know is, I always still do 300 DPI. Because if I want to send it somewhere else, a lot of companies request 300 DPI. And that way, if I want one pattern on two different companies, then I don't have to remake the pattern. It also mentions how to convert to an RGB if you are using photoshop. But I'm going to show you how to do it using A FNB Designer. First, I want to show you how to convert your document that we might have already made from CY MK to RGB. And you can do that in affinity designer by going to the hamburger top, hitting convert, and it gives your options right here. So I'm going to tap on CYM K and slide it to RGB eight. And that's perfect. And then I hit the check mark over here, and that converts it. And you can kind of see right off the bat it the colors changed because RGB is a little bit brighter. If you want to create your own new document, come to new document, and you can use your template or let me just show you just in new documents. So color format. This is where you can change it. CYM K, RGB, keep it at R GB right here. It's pretty much always default as RGB, and then you create your art board and so on. But if you're making a new document, that's how it can come in. If you open a new template, Let's find that template from before my pattern original 200. And I might have given you that in the CYM K. So let's see. Yes, it is. So your template. I'm going to put a new template with the RGB into the system, but come up and change it to RGB like we did before, with the hamburger convert off, and then change it to RGB. And then you can keep going from there and create your document and your pattern. Again, I just want to reiterate that with Spoonflower, I've come to learn that they use RGB instead of CYM K footprinting. So create all of your patterns in RGB if you're posting them or putting them onto Spoon flower. All right, thank you. Bye. 6. Create Your Party-themed Design Element: Are you ready to get started? For today's project, we're going to create our very own party themed half drop pattern in Affinity Designer to on your iPad. It's really simple, follow along and let's get started. Okay. So we just created our pattern and preview. We opened this document and created it together. You can work on this one directly since we've already saved the template. If you haven't saved the template yet, do so, follow along and your first big lesson and save that template. Okay. So we're going to start off by just working in the pattern design here. I'm going to work directly in the center, and I'm going to look at my party themes and make a decision. I think today, I am going to go for doughnuts because they're easy. And like I said, I'm going to show you a simple design to create for this class today. So that you can follow along and really get to know the mathematics behind it. But I will show you some fun tips and tricks for creating your designs, okay? Okay. Let's get started today first by downloading the sorry importing the color palette. From your color swatch here, go over to swatches and use the hamburger at the top and import palette. I always use an application palette rather than a document palette, because in an application palette, I can use it for every project and every document that I create. Hit as application palette, and I've given it to you in your resources. Hit party party. I already have mine, so I'm not going to download mine now, but when you hit this button, it'll go right into your swatches. To bring that up, tap on the swatch name and find party party in your file. We have this fun set of colors here and I'm going to pick just a hot pink maybe for my doughnut. And I'm going to come down here and go to my shape tool. Remember, you can find out your tools by hitting the question mark over here. If you want to hand draw, you can draw with a pencil, or if you're comfortable with the pen tool, go ahead and use that. But since I'm just making a dout today, I'm going to use the donut tool actually and it'll make a perfect tout. If you want to use an ellipse, you can use an ellipse. But I'll use a donut today because how easy is that right? And from here, if I don't know if you could see that, but I hit the red circle and I can bring the center to be smaller. I want a nice big doughnut. That's what I want. I'm going to hit the move tool here and I'm going to work on just how my dougut design is going to look today. You know what I also want? I want to add a little bite mark to my doughnut. Let me actually hold off. I'm going to duplicate this I'm going to make sure my dout is connected or is chosen. I'm going to have three dots here and I'm going to hit duplicate. And the top dout I'm going to make a tiny bit smaller. And I can move it from the center by holding two fingers down. And bringing that in the bottom piece, you know what? I want it to be brown, like the color of a doughnut, right? And I'm going to turn off my outer layer color, and it looks like I have a color on that one. So I'm going to turn that off as well. There I have my doughnut. And we're all set. But I want to add that bite mark into my doughnut. First off, let me show you how I do that. First off, I'm going to select both of them by sliding to the right. I'm going to hit the three dots up here. I'm going to hit convert to curves because I want to be able to cut into my circle, and I can't cut into it unless I have it turned into curves rather than the doughnut or ellipse tool. Then I'm going to come over here to my knife tool. Remember, Okay. Question mark, there's my knife tool. I'm going to come into that, make sure those are both selected still, and make sure I don't have it on straight line. Let's think of that. There we go. I've cut through all four of those layers, and let's see what happens when I turn those two off. Is that the look that I want? Maybe maybe not. I'm going to use two fingers to go back and recut my design. Still on the knife tool, cut through those layers, turn those off. I think it's about there, but I want to I'll fiddle with it. I'm going to now get rid of both of those. Slide both of them and hit the garbage can. While I still have I'm going to make sure both of them are chosen here. I'm going to hit my nodes tool and I'm going to bring these in a little bit. I hit my nodes tool and then just slide over on those to grab all those center nodes, and I'm going to bring it in just a little bit. There we go. There's my sheep. I like it better there. And we're all set. But guess what? I think my doughnut needs sprinkles. I'm going to go back to my colors. I'm going to now just use my pen tool and set pen and then come up here and you can change if you want to use it like a normal pen tool, or if you just want to make little lines that don't connect afterwards, just hit it on line and make sure your stroke is the color you want and your fill is empty. And I'm going to change the width. Let's see. I'm going to come up here and hit three and let's see how wide that is. That's a good size. And just start making fun little colored designs for your sprinkles. So here are all my sprinkles. I'm going to see how this is getting to be kind of large here. I'm going to put all my sprinkles into one layer or one group. So I'm going to Okay. Click on the top one, scroll to the bottom, two fingers. That gets all my sprinkles and then I'm going to hit the file button and hit group. That puts them all into one place here. Same with the doughnut. I'm going to slide to the right since there's only two of them. I'm going to hit group on that one. I'm then going to rename them. I have sprinkles then I have my doughnut. I want to take my sprinkles and I want to put it onto just the pink layer. What I'm going to do is open this up and it's going to be masked clipping. It's going to be a clipping mask by sliding it until the whole line turns blue, and then I don't have it on the outside extra pieces, and it's all set and it's inside. Our whole doughnut is right here. Now, What I can also do is remember that sync. If I add that to the symbols, I can take my doughnut, hit the symbols, and then I can add it from the selection. Then later on, I can pop that in and have it fill the space, how I want it to. First, I'll explain that a little bit better in a minute. But first, I also need to pull this doughnut down into my block symbol. And so if I pull it over the top, it pops right in and look already. We have a half drop pattern working for us. 7. Design a Party-themed Half-Drop Pattern: Let's get started. I'm going to walk you through all the steps and show you the mathematics to it because vectors are mathematical designs and it creates your perfect repeat. Don't be scared. It's really easy. If you need to follow along in the workbook, follow along with the workbook. Why don't we get started? Let me get my readers on so I can see what I'm doing. Let's work on creating the math of it, so we can get more than just one. If you want to keep it like this, feel free. But I want more than one donut on my page. Let's walk through and show you how to position them on to your document, so it matches up perfectly. I'm going to make this dout a little smaller, go to my move tool and bring the size down. The first thing I'm going to do is fill in the borders. Let's start with the border over here. Now, let me show you something. I have it off the edge here, but see how it creates over here. You can't see the other half, and that's where this math comes in. I'm going to fill in the left side, but I'm going to duplicate it to get to the right side. First off, I want to hit duplicate and then I'm going to come to my transform tool and I'm working on the x axis. This side to this side is the x axis. I can tap with one finger. It's always a little bit better to tap with your finger on this one rather than your apple pencil because the apple pencil can accidentally change this number a little bit. And we don't want that number to change yet. But what I can do because I'm moving from this side, the left side to the right side, I'm going to add the width of my pattern block, which is 2000. So this number is still here and I'm going to hit plus, and then I'm going to hit 2000 hit, and it immediately sends it to the other side. Okay. I like to group my pieces that are on each side. And so I'm going to hit group. See how it's not lining up. I added the 2000, but because I need to move it down on the y axis. Remember, the y axis is only 1,000 instead of 2000, I'm going to add this number 1,000. Now it adds and lines up perfectly. Okay. And this group is here, if I take it away, watch what happens? Watch what happens if I try to move one. The other piece isn't moving. So you have to make sure that if I have them in a group like this, I can't rotate or I can't say I want to rotate one. I can't rotate and the two fingers to go back. I can't rotate my group either because watch what happens over here. You can't rotate. But I can move it left or right for up or down as long as I'm not going into those corners. Is a second I go into those corners, see how this piece is not connected. We'll show you how to use the corners or show you a corner piece in a minute. Okay. That one's all set. I'm going to offset it a little bit more. I don't want it perfect on my lines, and I'm going to lock this group so I don't touch it. Now I can come back over to the symbols button, find by doughnut and insert it. Now, see how it's not showing over here because it's not within this symbol. I'm going to rename that so I just know that that one's pattern. So that's my doughnut. I'm going to I'm going to keep this doughnut a little bit bigger. I am. I am going to let me lock that pattern. I am going to rotate it. I can flip it, and I'm going to make it a little bit smaller. Let's see. Let's have this one facing down. And I am putting this one in the corner. Let me show you, we're going to have to first, I'm working on the top and bottom. Actually, this one might not work that way. Let's keep it lower because this bottom piece is here. I'm going to have to get it to come over here. Let's make it a tiny bit smaller, little bit bigger than this one. Here we go. Remember, I need to duplicate it. Duplicate I'm going to take the bottom one because I want to move the bottom one down and hit my x axis, and this one is just going to be plus 2000 because I want it to go top and bottom, right? But I also need one to be on this side and down because let me show you those two. Let's that one. Let's rename this group two. This one, I'm going to rename group one. Okay. So group two, I'm going to move it into my pattern symbol. So see on this, I still need to get it over to the side. It's not quite lining up here, but it's not lining up on this side at all, so I need to get it over here. So let's duplicate this one again. This one, I'm going to move over. But because I'm going from right to left, I need to subtract on the x axis. Subtract 2000 and I want to bring it down. So I'm going to add 1,000. And that's still part of this group here. So if I show you, I've got one, two, three, I can move it all along. I only need three pieces to make it work because I don't need anything on the corners on all four corners. I just need one, two, and then three in the center. Let's see if I can move this around just a tiny bit to offset it. I'm going to turn off my magnetics just for a minute so I can get it. I see how it's got the little corners here, but it's offset it just a little bit. I'm going to turn my magnetics back on because my last piece I'm going to add into the center maybe on the top and bottom. I'll show you how that will work as well. Let's go back to our symbols. Add my donut in and insert. This one moved into preview because I was working and showing the preview, but that's okay. I can move it and move it into pattern right here. And I'm going to move this right into my pattern now so we can see didn't go. Ove it and hold it into the pattern. So I can see where I want to place it. If I want to rotate it a little bit, That one's already going in that direction. It's I like to have them in different directions. Turn off my magnetics tool so I can move it around a little bit. Okay. Now over here, I have an extra piece. Did you see that? I just saw that that line was there and it's not on this side, so I know it's here. I'm going to tap on it. I'm going to hit the button there to delete it. I go back to my doughnut. I think that's where I want to keep it. I'm going to pop it here, because it's not on the x axis, I only need to move it to the top on the y axis. Again, let's duplicate it, the three dots, duplicate. Actually, you can also Click on it and hold one finger down and duplicate and tap on the y axis and I need to bring it up so I have to subtract 2000. Again, I'm going to slide to the right and group. I'm going to rename right now that it's group three. Okay. All right. So I have my doughnuts. I have my different sizes. I can see in my preview that it's working right. Remember, we don't want to rotate it at all. So 22 fingers back to get back to that position. And this is where you can also come in here and rotate. You can rotate If you can get to pieces, you can click on it here, but you got to make sure you're on the right section. Fight. Yeah. You've got to make sure you're on the right selection. See how I just move the one out of the three and then there's an extra piece. So two fingers to get back. Okay. I really just like to not work in my preview, and I like to lock that one, so I don't accidentally move something over here. I like to work in my pattern. That's my personal preference. Okay. And I think the different sizes and everything works great there. Let's give it a fun background color. So I have my pink donut. Do I want to go blue? Do I want to go purple, kind of like that purple? How about yellow? Yellow. Yellow is for me. So remember, we've got to get both of the pieces, the fill and the stroke, the same color. And you're all set to go. Look at that fun pattern, we just created using the math, remember to use the book, the workbook, and just remember to adjust and work on the borders and then work on your center design. And if you're working here, remember to step back and look at the whole pattern and see how it is lining up in your design. There is something I've noticed sometimes and I didn't notice it today in this pattern because we made it pretty simple. But sometimes the elements in the pattern if they're overlapped, let's see if I can make it happen. Okay. Sometimes if they're overlapped, yeah. So I overlapped here, but in the preview, it didn't line up quite correctly. And that's because your patterns and your previews and your layers are they have to go in order. And just remember your preview is just for you to see where things actually are. So bring your pattern back. Two, and this is the piece that you'll share with the world, right? This is the piece that we'll share to spoon flower, especially. You can share this one I guess you can share this one, but it won't show properly sometimes, and I don't exactly know why that happens, but it's just your preview. Don't get alarmed if you see it doing weird things like that. By applying the mathematics on the x and the y access, you can create the precise visually appealing half drop patterns, but it is really all about the math, and it doesn't have to be scary. Again, look at the workbook for your clues and as you get more the hang of it, it'll get easier and easier and you'll be creating patterns so fast. Okay. In the next lesson, we're going to upload your fun pattern into spoon flour, and I'll show you just how to do that. Okay. So follow me over there. Okay. 8. Exporting Your Files: Let's get our files ready to share with the world and share into spoon flour. Follow along, and let's look how we do that right now, okay? First off, we need to save our pattern as a JPEG and high resolution with the CYM K for printing and spoon flour. To do that, we need to hit the hamburger top and hit port, and make sure it's set to JPEG and make sure you rename it. I'm going to come over and I'm going to say party doughnuts And I always have a underscore with my brand name. That way, when I put it into spoon flour. You know what? I might even say, go back to the beginning and say pink pink party doughnuts. The file name is really important for the SEO and saving and finding things in anything online. So I have the name. I'm going to go like this and copy it. So I know it for later if I need to switch anything up, which I just realize I might need to do it right now because I need to change it to the area to pattern, and my pixel format, I'm using the format for the document, which is CYM K. But like I said, can you can make sure it's CYM K or you can change it to RGB if you're saving it and sharing it for social media. Okay. But again, we want CYM K. We want it 2000 by 2000. That's the size I want to share it as and make sure the quality is 100%. If you're saving it for RGB for social media and web, make sure your quality and size are smaller. I always change the quality to about high quality. Usually, let's go 75%. That's my go to, and if it's social media like 1080. That's for social media. But we're not doing social media today. We're doing our spoon flour. Again, oops. I want to C YM K, right? And then I have the name. It's all set and then I hit. And I have a spot. It's I save all my patterns into my pattern file. These are my vectors, and then this is my pattern. And so I know that they're all 2000. Sometimes I put the year on. So I'm actually going to do that right now. Okay. So that's 52024. That way, I know that way I know when I created this pattern in case I putting it in a collection or saving it somewhere else. Okay. So that one's saved, right? Find a good spot where you're always going to know where your patterns are. You can put it by year, or you can whatever works best for you. Organization is key for me, and when you get to creating so many patterns, it's super helpful. 9. Uploading to Spoonflower: Are you ready to get your patterns uploaded into spoon flower? So here is our spoonflower website. It's great for creating your designs and uploading your artwork. First off, I'm going to click log in because I have an account, and I want to make sure I can get mine going. If you need to sign up for spoonflower now is a great time or you can watch me and you can set yours up in a little bit. I'm going to make sure, I'm not a robot and hit log in, and the website takes a little bit to run, but that's okay. One thing You'll see up in the corner in just a minute. I need to put my glasses on so I can see this better. I don't know about you, but I'm a little bit getting to that age where I need readers. You'll see always this little guy likes to pop up all the time. When it's your own account, you'll see the little person up here and mine is percham I'm going to go straight to upload a design. This is the old version here, but I'm going to show you the new version because if you're new to spoonflower, this is the new Beta version, and The literally just got this one going recently since I started planning this class. Bear with me what you're going to do is hit choose your files. Here they'll tell you, upload your design, art or photo. JPEG and PNG are accepted 40 megabytes max it says 150 DPI, but I always work in 300. That way, I can size down or I can change the sizes. Okay. So you can choose your files. Here's my pink party doughnuts. I'm going to click on this one and upload. If you need to if you have a whole collection and you want to upload more, you can do that. And I believe it used to be up to eight at a time. You do want to confirm that you created this. You own the rights and Make sure you read through this. You can't have any trademark or talk about any other sports teams or TV shows, films, or what have you. That's all licensed material. You can't use that on spring flower or anywhere else. But make sure you agree to their terms and continue. Give it a minute. Here we go. And as you can see, it says you're using the Beta version of this page. This is the newer version. If you want to go to the older version, you can hit it Beta. But we're going to use the new version. And first thing we're going to do, see how it's set as private. After you go through the system, you will see you can set it for sale. It does show in the new one that you are using a 2000 by 2000 size. This is your file, and also your title. For now. So first, we're going to edit that title. I'm going to, you know, go through and Click all of that out of there because I don't need it. I do like to click through and always have my name in the title. It helps with the search if people need to find me. Then this is where you'll come through and write a description, keywords, have fun with the pink donuts, perch and and you can completely add more to that. You really should add more to that, use up the space because this helps with people finding your pattern. Let's go through and we can add tags to your design, which again, will this one's kind of a novelty because it's you know, because it's the doughnuts. And these all help you to add tags to your design. You get 13 tags total, and this is where you can just come through and type in some other things about it. I'm also going to always add into this my design name. I have per handmade, I have let's say yellow because I am using the yellow color, I'm using pink. I'm writing doughnuts. And party. And I have celebration. And I have a couple more. Anyway, I can fill those in in a little bit. You can add it to a collection. So I have collections here that I could add it to. One collection I might add it to is my sampler collection because I like to print the samples. An additional instructions you can add here. Again, this is another place to help define your pattern, right? Especially if it's going into a collection, you can add that collection into your additional. Then I'm going to hit save. The sampler, I'll show you in a little bit. You can create full fabric designs. So as you can see right here, there is it's not matching up. So I'm going to have to edit. Okay. And I'm going to come over here and change the repeat to half drop, not half brick, and I'm going to hit save. If I want to, I can scale it down in size. So if I want it smaller on the page or bigger on the page. I like the big ones, actually. Yeah. I think I like the big ones right now. So I'm going to keep it. The Where did that go? Well, you can see it's working over here. I'm going to edit the wallpaper. Not that I probably won't make this a wallpaper, but let's see what happens. I'm going to hit Save. I'm going to come back up to the top and see this spot here. It says not proofed. If I click on that, you used to have to hold on. Okay. It used to be that in order to proof your design on spoon flour, you had to order it and see the sample in person and make sure it all lined up. Now with the with their new proofing system, you don't have to do that. So let me show you that again real quick. So I'm going to hit start. What it does, and I'm going to hit. It tells you how to do it, you click and drag and scroll to zoom in and zoom out, and I'm going to hit okay. And you can click and drag it. It takes you to the very closest corner to make sure that you don't have any white lines or anything or any color coming through. If you turn this pink spot off here, you can tell that nothing is on this design anyway, it's all seems to be working properly. I have found if I used arrows on my keyboard, I can move it over a little bit easier and faster, if I use my mouse, I could scroll in and scroll out. It's it's really about just checking your design and making sure that it's lining up perfectly. And we zoom out so you can see you can really see the pattern. I always brings put to your pattern in the center that you've created and you can see the other spaces around. Now, I don't know why, but I don't know if you can sometimes you can see little pieces that aren't working right right here. But if I zoom in on that, I know that piece is working. That's just a little bit of a glitch in their system at the moment, and maybe they'll fix that in the future. But I don't see an issue really. I'm going to hit looks good. If you do see an issue, Click C N issue and it'll tell you I'll tell you to leave and make corrections. I'm going to keep looking and then I'm going to say looks good. Now I can make this ready with one click to set it to be for sale. I'm not ready to do that yet because I still want to fill out all of my tags, make sure all 13 tags are used. It's really crucial. I want to maybe add more to my details and such. I'm going to hit save to make sure everything is saved. All of my design elements were saved. Here's my preview. You can choose how you want it previewed and the size. I want it as a fat quarter rather than the yard for that's my personal preference. And if you want to change the preview fabric, you can change it for if you want a 54 inch fabric, you can change the size that you want it to be previewed. I'm going to keep it as, you know, the 42 inch, and then I'll hit save. And let's see what happens. This one is still not working right, but that's okay. And that hasn't changed. But let's go over, click on my little person and let's view my design library and see what I can find there. Okay. So there it is. It's set as collection as the sampler. If I want to go into a collection, let me show you with one of my old collections. So give it a minute. Here is this newest collection that I have created and I just got the sample for. Let me show you the sample real quick. It's really pretty. Okay. So this is that collection sample. So like I said, I love to create I love to get a fabric sample, and this is the sample set of this collection that I just created. And it's really nice because you can fill in a yard of fabric for a very reasonable price. And you can I want to get that back up there and see how the colors are printed on the fabric. Again, you don't have to do it for the new proofing project anymore, but I love it because I want to make sure my colors are printing properly. So the way you do that is coming back to this page and you are using the PA yard and you can just start designing in the same collection. But what I do is I click this fill 1 yard up to 42 designs, which is great and pick a fabric. Design their project and you just drag and drop the pieces into the squares. So with this fabric collection, I wanted to see the full pattern. So what I did was filled in four blocks. To make sure they worked right. When you're all done, you can hit Add to Cart and you can go through that process. So there you have it, we have created a fun design and learned how to fill a fill yard a fabric to proof for yourself. If you do want to sell on spoon flour, you do have to go through the process and fill in your tax information for selling. But we're not going to go over that today. In the next lesson. I'm going to show you how to use the mockup photos that Spoonflower creates as downloads for your own website or personal use to share your designs online. You don't have to create the mock ups yourself, and I'm going to show you the way to download high resolution photos for your website from Spoonflower. Met me in the next lesson. 10. Downloading Your Spoonflower Mock-up: Friends, are you ready to start downloading your spoonflower mockup. I'm not sure if you know this, but you can download any of the mock up photos on spoonflower for your own collection. You know how you click on a picture and hit Save? Well, most of the time, you see it on spoonflower especially, and they're small. But I have a trick to show you to download those high resolution, those bigger photos for your website or for sharing on social media. So let's get started and I'll show you how. If you need to follow along in your notes in the workbook because it'll help you visualize it a little bit better. I know for me, that works the best. I like to see it and I like to look at my notes. Follow along and let's jump right into that. So here we have Okay. Here we have our design library, and you can go to your little guy up here and go to Design Library, and you can choose your designs from there. I'm going to click on this guy. You can do this a couple of different ways. Because I don't have this one that shop right now. I'm going to go into way into my design library and choose my file. And I can go to any of these and let's say I just want to go to let's say I want to go to this pillow. I'm going to hit by I'm not buying it yet, but it's getting me to the page that I need to see. But what I'm going to do is right click on this one, and I'm going to open my image in a new tab and I'm going to open that tab and see how small it is. This is if you right click and hit download or save, it's going to be this size, and that's much too small. Come up to the URL and click on this and you have this whole URL here, but right smack in the middle, there's an x. That's your extra small. If you double click right in the middle of that, it will change, it will just highlight that one and using your keyboard, just type in the letter L and hit return. It makes your file picture that much bigger. That is just changing it to your largest size possible. Now you can right click on it and save image as. This is where you'll save it to your pattern file, and if you want to change the name a little bit, but it does show everything by per made. It shows the name and it gives it a file number. It might just be easiest to save it like that. Okay. So there it is. It's saved. If I found it in my files later, I know exactly where to get it. Having your pattern on a mock up is so important for helping others to visualize your pattern out there in the world, right? So using the high resolution, larger file mock ups from spoonflower helps you to promote your brand and helps to have continuity in all of your spoonflower designs because you're showcasing it exactly how they're going to purchase it on spoonflower and It's great because you can use since you're selling on spoon flower, you can use those anywhere, anytime at any location on the web to promote yourself and promote your spoonflower shop. I hope you have fun learning this quick tip. It's a really good fun one and it's just great for getting your images out there. 11. BONUS: Quick Tip: Hey, friends. So I want to share a quick tip in affinit designer with you. Say you have a project and there's some overlap and you're not quite sure how to get rid of the overlap. I have a really quick and easy method to do this. Let me show you in my half drop pattern that's all about donuts and. Let's jump in. So here I have my pattern and it looks okay. But if you zoom in, you can definitely see there's this overlap happening, and I want it to work out, so it follows the line with the outside part of the donut. So let me show you what we can do. I want my donut topping and my donut bottom to be selected. If you do a slide to the right on both of those, then you've selected both of those layer groups. Then you're going to come down over to your shape builder tool, and if you hover over it, if you've got the right pencil apple pencil, it'll show up. If you need to find it, you can always click the question mark and find the shape builder tool. Let's click on the shape builder tool. And as you can see, it's highlighting all of the areas that are a part of this shape. And I don't know if you can see right here. You've got that extra line here that is part of this doughnut with a quick click on the extra piece. It'll show up as some blue lines, and you come up to the top here and hit the subtract button. You guys. It's that simple, really easy. This might be one of my quickest tips yet, have fun, create your patterns and use that shape builder tool because it really comes in handy. All right. Bye. 12. Thanks, Friend! : Friends, I hope you enjoyed celebrating birthday season in my household with me today. We had a lot of fun making a simple design. But you can take that information that you've learned about the mathematics in half drop patterns and put it into effect with all of your patterns moving forward. You can make really fun elaborate designs or keep them simple like we did today. I hope you had fun learning more about half drop patterns and walking through the process of creating your own pattern template to use over and over and over again. We learned the importance of using inspiration for creating your designs because they don't have to be all in your head, right? And using unsplash makes it really simple to go through those designs and pick and choose what elements you want to add for your half drop patterns. Learning how to create those half drop patterns can be a little overwhelming, and I hope we simplified that today with learning the mathematics and it's just adding and subtracting on your x axis and your y axis to create those half drop patterns to make those Simo zigzag shapes designs. I can do this. Then I was able to help guide you through the process of uploading your new fun exciting design to spoon flower to create a world of patterns and fabric or wallpaper that you can use and maybe you make a fun birthday present for somebody with the patterns you created. Make sure you share your project today with everybody, and when you're sharing on social media, make sure to use my hashtag creating with PHM There it is. Hey, friends, I'm Katie from Perchanmd. If you are looking for more classes from me on pattern design, I have a plethora of classes using Procreate and Affinity Designer, whether you're making assets or making Mocanile designs. You can find the perfect class from me to you. Thanks for joining me today. I'll see you next time. Bye.