Hand Drawn Half Drop Repeat Patterns: IPAD EDITION

1. Intro final: Hello, everyone. I'm Christina Hawkins a Swedish American, you can say a surface pattern designer in illustrator. In this class is like a spin off of my first-class, elaborate, hand-drawn, half draft repeat patterns. But this time I'm going to be showing you how to complete the pattern using your iPad pro. I love drawing by hand, but being able to skip the steps of having to scan and then edit and just digitally draw directly on the iPad in vector because I'm going to be using the program adobe draw. There are of course, many ways that you can adapt this technique to suit you and how you like to work if you would like to continue to create your lines by hand or if you'd like to use a program that's roster like procreate and then, image trace that in Illustrator, that's fine. But today I'm going to be showing how I like to use Adobe draw to make a vector lines and everything's colored, also so then we bring it into illustrator, all we have to do is make sure that the swatch fix together and we can continue on with that. I think it's a great tool and I hope that this class will be helpful for you if you like my first class and you would like to learn how I use the iPad to create the same pattern. This class is geared toward students who have previously taken my first class. If you haven't taken already, feel free to check it out first. I think you should have intermediate skills for drawing and using the programs because I won't be going so completely super-duper into detail about the programs Adobe draw and Adobe Illustrator. In the following videos, I'll be sharing my process of creating the swatch, how I bring that into the iPad to start on the coloring process. I will show you also how I color and draw in Adobe draw, and how I use that program. Then I will show you how I bring the swatch that I've created on the iPad into Adobe Illustrator to finalize it and make it a working repeat pattern. Then of course, I will always share with you how I tweak colors and make sure that I come up with a good final image. Then that's pretty much it. I will also share how you save your swatch that you can use it to print on Spoonflower or other print on demand site or we are going to be sending it to a client. I hope you enjoy the course. Lets get started 2. Supplies & how to final: You'll need a few supplies for this class. Because I still haven't figured a way to do this technique in the iPad by moving different layers around, I still will be sketching on paper. You'll need two pieces of paper, the exact same size. They can be any size. To show you I'm going to be using A5 paper, but the image that I'm going to be drawing today, to save time, I've already sketched out my motif on slightly larger paper. You will also be needing an iPad Pro with the Apple pencil, so that you can draw in the program, Adobe Draw, that I will be showing you. Then you will need a regular computer with the program Adobe Illustrator to finalize your project. That's it. Let's get started on the sketching process. I'm going to bring you in a little bit closer so I can show you how that process works. If you would like a little bit more detailed instruction, you can feel free to go to my first class library hand-drawn half drop repeat patterns, and check that out because my explanation is a little bit more detailed, and if you'd like to see my process of really making all the details when I draw and sketch and stuff like that. This time I'm just going to do a quick overview. Here we are at my desk and I have my two pieces of A5 paper. This is gridded but it can be plain paper, doesn't matter. For this purpose of drawing in the iPad it doesn't bother me that there's lines here, could potentially help me. If you're going to be scanning and during that process use plain white paper otherwise the lines will be irritating. I usually sketch with a pencil and have an eraser on the other hand so that I can make changes. To make it easy to see, I'm going to be using a marker to show you how this process works. When you're creating your pattern, when you're drawing, you line up your pieces of paper on a certain side. You have to be rather accurate. Make sure that there is lined up as humanly possible and then you start drawing, and when you're creating some motif like I like to do with branches and stuff like that, everything that starts on one page goes to the next. Everything that's drawn at the top of this page, you align with the bottom of the next page. Here we go. We align those together and then you can continue to draw like that. Same thing with this side. Everything that you draw connects to the opposite side. We can continue, we can do the bottom as well. Everything that you do on the bottom has to connect to the top of the other page. Then you just continue drawing certain items and connecting them when they come to an edge with the other paper. I see something that's very open over here, so we should add details over here. Like this, and this corner, it needs a branch. I love doing those tree of life patterns using this technique. I think it works really well to create a nice flow. Then once you have the first structure of your pattern, then you can go in and add all your leaves and stuff like that. My only tip is that if you are drawing something larger, like if you're going to add flowers or something, maybe not draw it on the seam because it going to make it a little bit more difficult to tweak it and stuff like that later, or when you're fitting it together, I mean. When you fit it together, there's a lot more areas that you're going to be changing. Maybe in the seams to just have simple leaves or some other simple details. Then you can save your large detailed flowers or birds or whatever you're drawing, to areas that are not exactly by an inch. When you're drawing your pattern, you can check how the flow is looking from tons of different angles. That's why I love this technique. You can see where it's missing things, where it looks empty already, and how it's working together, how things are aligning vertically and horizontally. It's a really useful technique and I really like it. I hope that this quick overview gave you an understanding of how to create these patterns. It's just a matter of making sure to align your pages. When you draw over one edge, you continue onto the next edge. Don't picture it now, its not. Flip your papers, put them in the same direction. Side to side and side to side on the other one, up and down, and top and bottom on the other one. That's it. Just keep going until you got a sketch that you're happy with, and then we can move on to the next step. Like I said before, I already sketched out the design that I will be drawing today, previously, to save time and stuff like that. Here it is. It's hard to see you with because it's in pencil, but it is like a lemon tree. I thought that would be very pretty. I have worked on that and like I said, I used slightly larger paper. As you can see, I made sure to keep most of the lemons and stuff not on the edge. Here you have a few that are very close, and I do have one that is going over the edge. The lemon is pretty easy shape. It's not like a flower with a million different petals and stuff, so it should be fine. Let's move on to the next step. 3. Photographing final: Now that your sketch is raised time to get it photographed. This is a really awkward thing to show I feel. But don't mind my prego belly but were going to photograph your work. I'm going to use the iPad just to make it simpler process quicker. But you can of course, use a regular camera or your phone. Just try to make sure that you're taking the photo of both pieces of your paper at the exact same angle. Try to make it as square as you possibly can. To make it even easier, I have lined up my two pieces of paper to make one Swatch. This makes it even easier because then you don't have put together two photographs. You've already made the swatch. In my previous class, I showed you to do the vertical but this time I'm going to show horizontally putting together. You can put the pattern together either way. I think this horizontal format works better for iPad since you'll be drawing on a horizontal surface. You can of course draw vertically by more comfortable having it horizontally. Here we go. 4. Drawing on the ipad final: Okay. So here is my sketch that I had photographed using the iPad Pro. I used my iPad to photograph just to make this step even quicker and easier to have to switch from a drive. I don't have to transfer my photo from my phone or a regular camera. The quality doesn't have to be perfect. You just have to be able to see your lines and what you're thinking. I photographed these two pieces of paper together horizontally this time just because I think that will make it one less depth, one last side that you have to fit together. It also is a nice format horizontally working on the iPad, I feel it's a good format. You could, of course, work horizontally with the two pieces of paper like I showed in my first course and the work that way. But I think it's just nice to be able to work on your entire print and it fills up the screen nicely like this. So that's a little tip to photograph them together. When I photographed, I made sure to align them as perfectly as I could and then tried to align them with the table and tried to photograph as flat and perfect as you can. You can use a grader or something as well on your camera. The only thing I need to do now is edit the photo slightly by cropping it so that it's only the piece of paper. I'll do that by just pulling in the edges. I can see already that I haven't done a perfect job. Pull and cutoff slightly. It's not 100 percent necessary that it's exactly perfect. You're going to have to tweak it anyways no matter how well you photographed. But I did pretty good. There was only a couple of millimeters there. So that's finished and I'm just going to bring it into Adobe drop. All right. So I'm going to create a new project. I'm going to need to make my format and name it pixels units. Because my paper's in centimeters, I'm doing in centimeters. The width is 56 centimeters by 36 centimeters. I can have max 20 layers. It says for this size should be fine. I'm going to choose that and then the first step is, of course to bring in my picture. So I create a new layer. I create a photo layer, images, I open that up and add the last image. Okay. Then we just have to fit it to the screen for the page and then transform. It's pretty good. The form, put the sketch is the same size as the art board now. I'm just going to move my other triangle layer on top to make sure that we're not going to draw on this photo layer because that'll be a bummer and I've done that plenty of times. So make sure that you have a new layer that's totally free, that you haven't drawn anything on and use that to start trying. My style is that I do little outlines and I fill in with flat color. So that's what I will of course be doing first. Adobe draw is pretty easy program. There's not much that you can do in here its just simply picking one of your brushes. You have your layers here. The brushes my favorite is the just symbol round regular one. You can have the choice of changing the opacity if you wanted to do that, and you have a change to color in here. It's set on a black that's not black. So that's what I usually use because that's what I like to have on, a black that's really black for my lines. Then you have the size button as well that you can adjust. Now, it's at eight but I usually like to go down pretty small to like 3. We can test that out to see if six could. I think so. Of course, because this process becomes so much easier. You're skipping like three steps of drawing with pen on paper and then potentially messing up, here I can erase mistakes. Then also it's really nice that I can add digital color to this as well before bringing into Illustrator. So I don't have to do that process in Illustrator either. This is very easy. I can just show you quickly how I would color in this lemon, then I do the line first. So there's [inaudible] lemon, and then go in and choose a nice yellow color. Then you just hold and it fills. So it's very easy process in this. I'm just going to keep drawing. I'm going to delete this. Take a little bit more time to do that. I will be posting a time-lapse, which is cool that you can do in this. It automatically creates that. So let's keep trying. 5. Edit swatch final: Welcome to Illustrator. I'm going to bring in the file that I created on my iPad, could magically just press the open in Adobe desktop apps and then you press Illustrator and it'll pop-up here. Here we go. Adobe drill file has opened into Illustrator, and now we're just going to set up the file a little bit before we start working on making it seamless swatch. To bring in your color palette, because it doesn't show up here, you can just simply select the entire thing. Press this folder for new color groupers. Here we'll pop up all the colors that you used in your piece. That'll be helpful when we need to make sure when we are going to be making it seamless. That's good. Then I have all my different layers here I didn't name them which is stupid but it's all right. It is not that complicated, though, the one that you can't see is my image which was the photograph that I took up my sketches. I'm also going to lock something. I'm going to lock my background color because I'm not going to want to swatch the background color. I find that's way too tricky. You would have to clip out exactly everything to the swatch size. That's a step that I just like to skip. I think it's much easier to add the background color afterwards and have it separate, but that's how I like to work. If you would like to work on the background as a part of your swatch, go for it. You just have to make sure that it's going to be the exact same size as the back or as your art work swatch. In my case, it's 56 centimeters by 36 centimeter. That's also another thing that we need to check that the artboard is the size it's supposed to be. Now I have it in points. I'm just going to have to go back to preferences and units to make sure that we have it in millimeters. I've got to add a little zero here because it was centimeter. Here we go at my artboard. The background color I'm no so concerned with maybe I'll even hide that. It doesn't get distracting. I might just need that later when I'm going to collect, I thought it matched quite nicely. Then another thing I wanted to talk about when I was drawing, since this isn't a piece of paper and you can go outside the edges. I made it easier on myself and actually did draw the full leaf or the full lemon on the edges or the parts that dropped down. Just to make my life a little bit easier when I'm going to put this together. That's that part. Now we're just going to start creating it together, we are going to have to erase and fit all this until they fit together. Let's start with the first step, which is transforming. You have to find layers with my different elements so that I could take them away or test different things like I have my little dots separately. I have a layer of lines separately because I did the shading as a separate layer for certain things. I have the shadows as a different way because this is something new that I have tested out. I've never really done shading or 3D effects, whatever this is something I was playing with. It's not perfect, but I don't like to do things perfect. This is still an abstract artistic approach. I don't know. Then I have my color layer. That's just a run through of my different layers. But anyway we're going to select this entire thing. Let's make a copy of this that we're going to group and manipulate and then we can have all of these separate files as a backup in case we mess up. Let's do copy, new layer and then I did that. I pasted it. I'm going to do "Command group," so it's altogether in one group. We're going to hide all of the other layers. There we are. My line to the artboard again, where I had drawn it. This way if I mess up, which I do all the time, we have a back-up plan. We have all this separately layers again. Anyways, I'm going to select this grouped image and then we're going to right-click, transform, move. I'll do one of the tops or bottoms. We're just going to vertically move it the exact same height that the image is already. It's 36 centimeters, 360 millimeters, like so. I went to the bottom and then because it's a half drape or brick also it's same thing, you're going to move it half of your art board size to either side. 56 divided by 2 is 28 with zeros that'll make it centimeters. Let's preview that. Yes. we are going to be working on this bottom corner, make sure you paste copies so that you can see what you're doing, copy. In layer ten is where we're working. This extra one is the one that we are manipulating. Let's lock that one. We don't want to work on that one. It's just there to help us. Now we're going to zoom in and see what's happening. It is these three sections that we need to fit together again. This is a part of this that is a little time consuming. But it's okay, It's worth it because you get a pattern that's quite nice. I like to use the eraser tool to just erase a bit. You can go back in drawing again to match. Then I use the blob brush to make the black lines and make it connect again as well as possible. You can either use your mouse to do this part, you can use a tablet or you can connect your iPad with Astropad if you have that, so that you can draw on the screen I think that makes it easier and that's how I am working. I'm going to quickly just set that up so that I have that drawing. Then I go open up Astropad. I'm just going to zoom really close so that I know what I'm doing. All right, then I add the blob brush and then I'm going to see what size it is. I think maybe 0.2 should be okay. Let's test it. That's way too fat. I go back then I'm going to go into blob again and we'll try one. That will be much better. Then as I said, here I have the colors over here to the side from my palette, and this seems to be this one I think, for the background color you can start with that. It's [inaudible] [inaudible] definitely the darker one. I'm all over the place. Just black. We have one edge and it looks pretty okay, I think. Stick together. Fashion. Go there section so we'll zoom in. Again, I use the eraser to get rid of a part of this topic. It was also going to shave off a little bit so that the angles will match up a little bit better. Now I start with the background color, I guess, otherwise you could always do the black lines first and then draw the color and then draw behind. We'll start with this. I get my pink. Perhaps in need to change the blur brush. Changed the blur brush, add the light pink. There we go. Then maybe my shadow color, it's this medium pink. Then the black for the lines. That section is finished. Then in this section, to just do this same process all the way around. Placing it over here to connect these sections and then I draw the sides. We're going to manipulate one top section or bottoms section. You either choose the top to fix or the bottom, I'm choosing the bottom so that I will fix these three sections. Then I'll fix these two sections, so three then you come to this stem here, and then you choose one, either the left side or the right side to fix and I only have this small branch that I need to connect. I'm just going to continue doing that and then I will show you the results in a little bit. We'll use time left in fixing. Okay, so there I have edited all of my edges with the things that are going to be going over the edge and stuff like that. Hopefully this works. Now we're going to test. That actually does fit together. 6. Pattern make final: Here's the exciting bit to see if this actually worked. I'm going to group all of the new things so that they are attached to this old piece, Command G, they're all grouped together. Now we're going to test the swatch. We're going to go when everything's selected, you go to Object, Pattern, Make, here your pattern options. Right now automatically it goes to Grid, and we're going to do Brick by Row. If you had made your swatch on top of each other like the vertical way, then you would have picked Brick by Column, but I did horizontally, so it'll be Brick by Row. There we go. As you can see, it did tiles because where the edges of the artwork is instead of the tile size that I wanted to be, and we can see that it's not my art board size that I need it to be. It's going to be width 56 centimeters 560 millimeters, and then 360 millimeters high. There we go. We see that it automatically goes down and melts into each other, and then this overlap is going to depend on which side that you manipulated, so if you just double-check and see if this makes sense. I think so. It's hard to tell here, let's do a 100 percent. Here we can see that some of the pieces aren't, so I think maybe it should be this one we'll test, but that looks like, there we go. At least the bottoms are correct to have the bottom part should be overlapping the top, and then the same thing for the other side, we'll test that. I'm not really sure what's going on over here. Why is it doing this? It looks good over here, but not good over here. I'm not really sure actually why. See what's going on. It's not showing that bit. I'm not sure why, how come. It looks good over here, so it doesn't make sense. But at least it all lining up, as you can see, this lemon overlaps the leaf over here, which looks nice. Still have this little mess up which I'm not sure why it's happening. We're going to have to think about it. But let's just say that it's done because it did fit together properly like it's supposed to. Just something wacky going on over here, which I'm not sure why. But yes, you can see, it's all lined up perfectly, and hopefully yours is as well. I hope that I've explained the process in an okay fashion. But just make sure that you have Brick by Row, if you did create your pattern swatch horizontally rather than vertically like in my first course. The brick offset should be a half. Make sure that your tile swatch sizes is the exact same size that you've been working both on paper, and then Illustrate your artwork or art boards size, make sure you don't size tile to art, and then you have to overlap. You have to fiddle with yourself, depending on which side you changed. If you had edited the top section, and the left section, or the bottom section, and the right section it depends. You do this something you have to fiddle with, and then the copies is always good to just be able to visually see how your pattern turned out. Here I have 3 by 3 copies and I can see that there's not that many opening spaces. Maybe here is going to be a problem. That's something we can look at in a little bit, and then dimming your copies down or up can be helpful. Let's press ''Done'', and we'll test it out here IN illustrator to see if that same wacky thing happens or what. Let's see. Let's just make a rectangle, big one, and we'll fill it with our new pattern, I did up. Let's zoom in and see that section. Where is it? It's right here. That's still being weird. I'm going to have to go in and figure out what's happening here. One thing you can't do, is edit things in the actual pattern maker. It might make your computer insanely slow, but it's still an option if your computer is strong and is willing. I can color directly in here. I wonder if it's a problem because this section is outside of the tile. But I grouped it all, that usually helps, but I guess not today. Let's see, so that we can color in this section again, let's just try coloring directly in here, and see if that works out for us. That's done. That takes things. Where's my branch? See any work in this? Where was it? Was it away? It's over here. I can't see anything so I think maybe that it got fixed that way. But again, I don't really know why it was doing that. I assume it was because it was outside of the swatch tile, and now that's good. Let's add a background color. Press the ''Rectangles'' or ''Copy'', and then copy B or Command B to make a copy in the back, and then I'm just going to fill it with that light pink color that I had. There you go. Now it has the background color. Now we're going on to look at it, see if we are pleased. I think I'm pretty pleased there's overall good flow. Maybe this sections a little empty, but I think it's not too empty. It's not like an eyesore, it's not like Allie or anything. A good way to test a pattern is to zoom out quite far and it starts looking even more abstract, and you can see if there's anything that's really sticking out. Here you can see that it becomes stripped, which I like. It comes with a diagonal throughout there, but that's not in annoying way. Let's say I'm pretty happy with this. I think it looks nice. I really like this process. I think it becomes a little bit more digital. Look, it's a little bit more perfect. The lines are perfect when you do image trace, it's usually a little bit imperfect, and you can either love or hate that look. I Iike both. I like the look of this with a clean lines and I can really decide exactly how they're going to look and that's how they're going to look in the end process. When you use a pen and ink, it becomes a surprise, when you image trace, and you can't really control how the computer is going to interpret your lines at all time. I like both looks but this is really nice that it normally is efficient, and you can see the colors come to live as you're designing. I don't know, I really like this process, and I hope you do too. 7. Recolor final: As you know, I love color. A previous class, I discussed all about the Recolor Artwork tool and it's one of my favorite tools in Illustrator. We of course have to play with that in this course as well really quick. We can't just have one colorway, that'd be boring. I really do like this light pink, blue, yellow scheme, I think it's very fresh and feminine, but let's just see what we can come up with really quickly. Let's make a copy of this pattern test. Here we go, we'll zoom in a little bit. A little piece of the old one while we do the new one just a little bit, I want to zoom in. Something like this would be good I don't have another color palette in mind right now so I thought I would test some color palettes that I used in my previous course, the All About the Recolor Artwork Tool. I'm doing a lot of plugs for that one, but it's really good and you should go check it out if you want to learn more about this process, but I think to just keep it simple I'll just test out some of those palettes. I'm going to open up my user libraries, User Defined and have my Skillshare color palettes. I think this one would be interesting to try and this one because they have the yellows and the pinks but slightly different, we'll just test those out. They're added here to my swatches library and now I can go in and recolor this one, just select it, press the "Recolor Artwork tool," and then select one of these color groups and then we're going to use the Randomizer to move it around until we find something that looks neater, that's neat. I think it's a little boring of me to really wish that the lemons will pop out this yellow. The look that I want to go for this one, all right, let's test the other color group because I'm not getting this one to work right away, like this look. Another thing that you can do that you can learn more about in my course that I talked about way too much already is that you can go in and manually change colors, I want the highlights to be the lightest color, need to switch those out and then I want the lemon to be pink so I should switch these ones. There we go and then this color, that's fine from the swatches. Go pretty and then the backgrounds, boring that it's also pink so let's try something else really dark. I'll just keep it like this just to have a different look. It's something of course that you can fiddle with forever and ever. I have two color palettes for this piece. I still really like my original one, but the other one of course, is something that you could play with forever and ever. Yeah, that's how you simply work with color and you can keep going until you find 50 palettes that you like, or if you original palette is just perfect or anything like that, but I think it's always good to play with different colors because maybe you'll come up with something that you wouldn't have thought of right away and get a totally different look, it's especially helpful if you created this pattern awhile ago, it's not selling or you're not loving anymore. You can go back, give it a new life with different color palette and it can become on of your new favorites and celebrate away maybe. 8. Save swatch final: In this last section, I want to share with you how to save your swatch so that you can send it to a client if you sell to design or you're going to upload it to a print on demand site such as Spoonflower or something like that. So you find your swatches over here that you created. Here is the original color wave the first one and then this second color wave will be the second, and if you continue to create color waves are going to be saved as separate swatch files over here, but we'll take the original pattern and we just pull it out to your working space, and there is your swatch. The swatch part is that, we'll zoom in is not the outer edge. That's just extras, it's this little rectangle in the middle. So we're going to make art board that fits exactly to that size. So I like to just zoom in really quick, really far end. Make sure that you hit the anchor on that side in one corner, and then go to the other corner and hit that corner. Here we go. Yes. There's your swatch. You can see it just had some extras hanging off the edge. We also want to add a background color to this swatch. So we just take the rectangle tool and, we have that nice light pink color that we wanted to use as the background color, we get a rectangle on top and then send it to the back. Arrange, send to back. Here we go, we essentially have a swatch now. I like to keep it untrimmed. I think this helps to make sure that you won't have any weird white lines when you export. You can, at this stage, export your art board as a PNG or JPEG or a TIFF or something like that and it will save your swatch. I'm going to show you how I like to or I prefer to save mine. I'd like to just save my Illustrator file like this, and open up the swatch in Photoshop, and that way I can decide the size and all of that. I will show you how to do that now. So I'm just going to save my file and then I'm going to open up Photoshop. Hopefully my computer is not going to explode now that I have two huge programs open. Now that you have Photoshop open, we can open up our Illustrator file in here. Go "File", "Open", here's my lemons, AI file. I also saved as an EPS because I was testing out what's better, but I think that this is the best way. So "Open", in here you the different artwork that you had in your file, and we're going to use this one which is our swatch. You're going to be rasterizing your swatch now, so now it's going to become JPEG or PNG or a TIFF or something that you can't edit. But here, if say your fabric company were going to be printing it on fabric and you know that you need to have it as a 12 inch repeat, you can automatically write down that the width has to be 12 inches. You can decide on the resolution 300 is great. If however, you are going to be uploading to maybe Spoonflower, then you have to change it to a 150 because that's what they require. You can change the color mode to CMYK. So these are all the things that you can do, and I think this is really easy to just be able to do that directly here in Photoshop, which is really nice. I'm going to choose 300. I just have nice big file and that's it. Press "Okay" and then here we have our final swatch, it is 12 inch wide and it's nice quality. You can of course check to make sure that it's lining up correctly, but yeah, this is what I would upload to Spoonflower or search and search. That's it, use your final swatch. I hope that you enjoyed the course. 9. Outro final: That's it. You have completed your final repeating swatch and it's all recolored in different color ways and I can't wait to see them. I hope that you will share them with me in the project within our project gallery, so everybody can critique nicely and see what you came up with as well and how you have made my process your own and how you've tricked it to fit your style and how you like to work. That's it. If you'd like more content from me, you would like to get in touch with me, the best place is Instagram @emmakisstina. I'm also on YouTube, though there hasn't been much content there lately, but maybe in the future. But let me know in the discussion down below somewhere if there's any other courses that you would like me to cover, I'll be happy to do that. See you in internet then. Bye.