Transcripts
1. How to Design Fabric: From Sketch to Print-Ready Patterns: So Have you ever imagined what it
would feel like to see your own designs
printed on fabric, ready to turn into a
beautiful piece of clothing, decor, or even a custom project that you come up
with on your own. If you've dreamed of
bringing your ideas to life but didn't
know where to start, you are in the perfect place. This class is
designed to give you the confidence and tools to
take your creative vision from a simple sketch to a seamless repeating pattern
ready to print onto fabric. You'll learn the entire
process step by step in the simplest and most
approachable way possible. The end of this class, you'll be holding fabric
that you designed, something that truly reflects your personal style
and creativity. And this Skillshare class will cover how to take a
hand drawn sketch, vectorize it in
Adobe Illustrator, create a custom color palette, and turn it into a
repeating pattern. Even if you've never
done this before, I'll be here to
guide you through every single step
of the way so that you can feel confident and inspired throughout
the entire process. Hi. I'm Bonnie Christine. I'm a surface pattern
designer and educator. I'm thrilled to be on
this journey with you. Over the past decade, I've had the privilege
of working with some of the world's top
brands and teaching thousands of students
just like you how to take their creative ideas
and make them real. I've been where you are excited but also a little
unsure on how to begin, and I can't wait to show you how simple and rewarding
this journey can be. So let's get started together. I can't wait to see the
beautiful fabric designs that you create and the sense of accomplishment you'll
feel once you hold your very own custom
fabric in your hands. Thank you. And
2. Turn Your Ideas into Digital Designs: Hello there. Welcome to class. In this lesson, we're going to make sure that
you have everything foundational at
your fingertips in order to get started
as simply as possible. I have a couple of tools
here that I want to go over. I have a regular piece of paper that will be great for sketching on.
It's nice and clean. I also have a piece
of tracing paper. This is optional, but I'll show you how to use
it here shortly. Then I have some basic tools. A nice pencil. This is a black wing.
Then I also really love having a nice black
thin marker or pen. This has a really nice,
just solid ink tip on it. I will link all of these resources in
the class resources. This is another great option
for a nice black ink. Then if you want to
play with any paints, you can grab your paints. Now, I have a couple
of very simple brushes here and my favorite winds
are in Newton paint. You can use
watercolor or gouache or probably just about anything
that you have at hand. There are three different ways that you can create artwork. The first one is going to
be with ink or pencil. Now the focus in this class
is going to be to create really simple shapes and the key here is going to be
to make them closed. If I were to come in here
and draw, let's say, a leaf, I want to make sure
to come back and close it. This is going to be
important as we move our illustrations
onto the computer. Again, it is specifically so that we can get started
as simply as possible. You can do petals
or flower shape, but you want to simply
make sure that they are closed in order to move on to the next part of
our lesson here. Now, if you're working with pencil or let's say
you end up having a smudge mark or mistake
or something like that, a piece of tracing paper
comes in great use. I'll just slide this underneath.
Then you can come back. Again, this is a bit optional, but if you want to make
sure that you have the best scan when we come
to the computer as possible, you can take a nice black pen and just trace over
your own marks. That way you end up with
a really nice final piece of paper in order to scan in. Now the next way that you could play if you want is
with some paint. Of course, you don't
have to do this, but I wanted to
make sure that you knew how in case you do. I'm going to add some
of this squash from Windsor and Newton over here to my paint palette, let's see. I want to actually use a
fairly wet brush for this. Again, our focus is going
to be on closed shapes. I can come in here and start making some maybe leaf shapes. You also don't have to worry about the color at this stage. We're going to be able to
use our digital tools right inside Adobe Illustrator in order to change the color later. At this stage, you want
to make sure that you're focused on the shape, the final shape that
you want to create. Now, we'll also be
building what we call motifs once we get
inside the program. So you can create all kinds
of different shapes here, like petals or leaves, even things like marks and squiggles are going
to work really well. Once we get into
Illustrator, I'll show you. So even something like marks can come together to make a really
beautiful pattern. So have fun making marks. Again, our focus here
is on solid shapes, and we'll take them over to
the computer and be able to make something really,
really beautiful from them. It's now, if you're looking
for some inspiration, one of my favorite
things to do is to gather vintage magazines
and books that have all kinds of fauna and local
birds and flora that you can look at to use as inspiration for your
sketches, your paintings. This is just all things
from an old book that I've either cut out
or saved along the years. Give yourself some time
to gather inspiration. Maybe you need to go visit your local library or do some
collecting or go antiquing. Or just take pictures of things out in the world as you
go explore as well. But I wanted to take some time to think about what you
want to draw first. What do you want to create
for your repeating pattern? Now, it can be as simple
and it should be as simple as you can possibly make it for this first pattern of yours. Let me show you a
couple of examples of things that are going to work
really well for this class. We're going to use an approach called what you see
is what you get, meaning exactly whatever you have on paper is
what is going to translate into Illustrator in order to keep this as
simple as possible. Here are some nice
mushroom shapes. They're good enclosed.
Here's a nice bird shape. Again, every part of the
bird is a closed shape, meaning if that branch was
open on the end like this, we wouldn't be able to utilize the exact method
that I'm going to be teaching you. In this class. You want to go ahead and make
sure to close that shape. This is a nice butterfly
shape and a couple of flowers done in pencil that are going to
work great as well. Now, if you're using paint, here are a couple of other
examples that again work well. Single color, nice contrast on these is really going to scan
in and work beautifully. Here's one lots of leaves. Now these are some open shapes, but I'm going to keep it just like this when I get
into Illustrator, meaning I'm not going to
try to color this in. I'll show you that.
Then this one is a smaller piece of paper. Spilt some water on it. That is going to scan and work
really nicely as well. Here is some things that I
have pressed from the garden. These are also going to work. If you want to add
something like this or maybe skip the
drawing part altogether, you're more than welcome to go find and forage different items from around maybe your yard or the garden or
the grocery store. And bring them in
in order to scan. Again, I've pressed these, so they're dry and they're
also nice and flat, which means that they're going
to scan in really nicely. However, if you are
going to do this and you don't have time to
dry or press something, you can also just look for nice flat shapes that
are going to fit on your scanner or be able to take a photograph of them nicely. From here, we're going
to move into taking these items and getting
them digitized. So now that you have your
artwork, your doodles, your little things
that you are ready to take into the computer, we're ready to document those, and there's two ways to do it. You can either use a scanner or take a picture of
it with your phone. I'll show you both ways. Now the first will
be if you want to simply take a picture
of it with your phone. Now the most important
thing will be to make sure that you aren't
skewing it in any way, so you want it to be
completely level. Then ideally you want even light and no edges
or shadows in it either. I'm going to come in
just right on top of this and then take
a simple photo. Now the other way
is on a scanner. Now, I'm using a simple
Cannon PixMa scanner. You can use anything
that you like, but I will link all the resources
in the class materials. And with this approach, what you'll do is simply
scan your paintings, put those down and scan it in, or you can do your sketches. Or you can also simply scan
in your pressed items. So this is the one that
I'll do to start with. I'm going to add a couple
of others here as well. And we'll simply scan this one. Now, I'm over at my computer, and I'm going to work to scan in a couple of the items that
we've been working on. So I'll go ahead
and click Overview. That way, I get to see a preview
of what's on my scanner. So here I have a little
pencil sketch and a pen sketch of a butterfly
and a couple of mushrooms. Now, my scanner automatically detects the different motifs, if you will, or illustrations. But if yours doesn't, it's probably just
going to scan in the entire thing also
completely fine. I want to scan this in in
black and white at 300 DPI. I'm going to save it to
my desktop as a JPEG. And if you're able to
do image correction, what I want to do is bring the contrast up just
about as much as I can. When we get into
Adobe Illustrator, the higher the contrast, the better the vector
result will be. So with that, I'll go
ahead and click Scan. Now you can see I
have those over here on my desktop. They're
going to work great. Now I'm going to work to scan in one of the paintings
that I worked on as well. Okay, so I'm going to do the same thing with the
manual adjustments, and this one has some parts on it that have
gotten a little smudgy. I really want to focus
on this area right here. I know I want to use this motif, so I'll just draw a little
marquee around that area. Again, if yours doesn't
have that capability, no worries, you'll scan
in the entire thing, and that's going to
work great, too. I'll go ahead and
click Scan. Okay. Lastly, I'm going
to scan in a couple of the found items
that I have, as well. These are pressed
leaves and flowers. Great. So for this one, I'll do the same thing
with the contrast, and I'm going to make this
marquee just a little smaller. But go ahead and scan in
all three at one time, and I'll go ahead
and click Scan. Okay, now it's your turn. Go ahead and work to scan in all of your different motifs,
sketches, paintings, found items, any
element that you want to be able to work with right
inside Adobe Illustrator. Now, don't forget the
other way you could do this is to take photographs
of them, as well. Either way, you'll want your photographs or your scans transferred over
to your computer. I'll meet you in
the next lesson. Okay.
3. Polish Your Design in Adobe Illustrator: Welcome back. In this lesson, we get to dive in to
Adobe Illustrator. Now, we're going to
keep this super simple. So even if you've never
used this program, you're going to be just fine. The first thing you need to
do is just open the program. Now, if you've never downloaded
Adobe Illustrator before, check the links below this
lesson to learn how to do so. You'll have to download
it from something called Creative Cloud over
on Adobe's website. Once you have the program,
you'll click to open it. Now let's click on New File. You'll get the new
document dialog box. Now, I am just going
to use a letter size. This should be a preprogrammed
option for you as well. Now, there are a couple
of things to notice here. You can choose what unit you
want Illustrator to use. I'm going to select pixels, and you should do the same. Then we will simply leave everything else the way
it is and click Create. So we have our very
first document. Now, the rectangle
is your artboard, and that's where
we'll be working in order to build our repeat
pattern for this lesson. Now, the other thing is that Illustrator can be complicated. There are many, many,
many tools and lots of different ways to structure your documents and
things like that. But we're in Start simple. So we're going to do it
as simply as possible. Order to get your version of Illustrator looking as
close to mine as possible, I want you to come up to Window, choose workspace, and
click on painting. That is going to probably change the way your
toolbars look, and yours will mimic mine
just as closely as possible. So now I want to work to get
our images into Illustrator. There's a couple of
different ways to do it. You could simply drag
and drop them in, or you can come up to
file and choose Place. Now you'll go to your desktop
or wherever you saved your scans and choose the ones that you want to place
inside your document. Now, you can do one at a time, or you can click on one, hold down the
Commander option key, and click on all of the ones
that you want to place. I'll do these three
and click Place. You can see that my
marquee says one of three, and all I need to do
is start drawing at the size that I want to drop these images inside my document. So I'm going to do
one, two, and three. This part doesn't
matter too much, and it also is
completely fine that we're spilling over the
edges of our artboard. We're just going
to be using these to create vectors from, which is so incredibly fun. Okay, so you will need to learn a couple of
keyboard shortcuts to make your time here in
Illustrator feel fun and easier. So the first one is rotate. So you'll have your black arrow, and this is how you select
things on your document. Now, to rotate these, I want to rotate them to where they're facing right side up. You'll tap R on your keyboard. Now, everything that has a keyboard shortcut also lives over here in your
left hand toolbar, and you can hover over it to see the keyboard
shortcut, as well. So R for rotate. Going to drop this little teal marquee in the middle here, which indicates what
it's rotating around, what point it's rotating around, and it automatically gets put in the exact
center, which is great. So I'm going to start dragging this to the right to rotate it. And if I want to
constrain my rotation, I can tap the shift key, which is going to
make sure that it rotates an exact increment. So that's 45 degrees,
90 degrees, okay? And then I'll release my click. Now to go back to my arrow, what I need to do is select
it over here in the toolbar, or you can use the
keyboard shortcut V to go back to the black arrow tool and move
something around. So with the black arrow tool, again, that's V
on your keyboard. I'll select this one, and then with it selected, tap R on my keyboard
to rotate it. I'll hold down the Shift key
to constrain that rotation, so it's exactly 90 degrees. Now I'll tap V on my keyboard, move this one around, tap R for the Rotate
tool, and rotate this. I'm going to hold down shift
to constrain that as well. Let's move on to
creating vectors. With whichever one you want
to start with selected. You'll open the Image
Trace dialog box. Now, to gain access to that, you'll come up to Window
and click on Image Trace. Now, one thing that
I really love to do is add it to my
toolbar over here. So if you just drag it, select and drag and drop it, you'll see that blue bar, and you can add it
permanently to this toolbar. Then you just have to
click on it to open it. With this selected, I'm
going to open Image Trace. If you don't have
anything selected, image trace is all grade out. So if you don't have
access to any of this, it's likely that you need to select an image, then
it all comes back. Let's open our advanced
tool bar, as well. I want to go to the
Black and White logo. This is the one that
you're going to use for all of our time together. I'm going to select
black and white, and that has automatically
created vectors. But there's a couple of settings that you'll want to
pay attention to. The first one is the threshold. The higher the threshold, the more black it's
going to pick up. The lower the threshold, the less it's going to pick up. So for this one, it
looks like we need to be somewhere in the I don't know, upper 75th percentile ish. Okay? So you can eyeball it. Now paths are literally
how many paths you have. If I zoom in, don't worry about this. I
just want to show you. If I zoom in here, if I go
all the way up on paths, you can see how it's literally
more complex, complicated. And if I go down, it
becomes much smoother. So depending on the
look that you want, I'm going to hang out
somewhere here in the middle. Then I want to make sure
to click on Ignore Color. This is going to
take the white away. So to illustrate
this, I'll undo that. Let me just draw a box here. I'm going to color this orange
and send it to the back. This is, again, just
for demonstration. So you can see that my mushrooms here has
a white background. If I select Ignore color, it's going to ignore
the white background, which is essentially
what we want in the end. So with that, I
will click Expand. Now, when you click Expand, this kind of pops out into
vectors, and you're done. I'm going to zoom back
out to my artboard. There is a keyboard
shortcut for that, which is Command or Control
Zero on your keyboard. So if you have Zoomed
in or zoomed out, you can always get back
to the full artboard by tapping Command or Control
if you're on a PC and zero. You also have access
to those things right down here in the
bottom left hand corner. You can zoom out. You can zoom in. Let's go away Zoomed in. I'm so Zoomed in, you can't even tell where I'm
at on my document. And then you can always
go back to 100% there. Okay. I will select the
orange box and delete it. And then I also have a
couple of stray marks here. So by default, this is
all grouped together. So with it selected, I'll right click
and select Ungroup. Then all I want to do
is move my elements, and then I can select anything
else that's kind of stray, clean it up by tapping
delete on my keyboard. Now let's move on
to the next one. This is one that I painted. I'm going to come up to preset
Toe Black and white logo. If you get this,
you probably will. You can just select Do not
show again and click Okay. So I need to increase
my threshold to pick up all of those
little pieces there, and then I'll also
increase my paths a bit. I'll make sure to
click Ignore color, and now I'm ready to expand. With that still selected, I'm going to right click
and choose Ungroup. And then I will work to move these over to the left
hand side of my artboard. So again, I just have
the black arrow tool and I'm clicking on them
and dragging them over. Okay, it doesn't matter
if they overlap. We're going to come
back to them in a bit. I can clean up this area by selecting it and tapping
delete on my keyboard. There's one more to do.
This one should be fun. So with this selected, I'll come to default and go
to the black and white logo. I'll increase my threshold
to make sure I pick up all of those
little bits there and increase my paths a bit
just because I really like the texture that it brings and then choose Ignore White. Perfect. Now I'll tap expand, right click and ungroup this. And then I am going to bring it all over to the
left hand side. Okay, so I'll zoom out here and show you how I
do that as well. So we're going to bring
this over just like so. One easy way to zoom in and
zoom out is the Command plus and the command
minus on your keyboard. So if you see me
zooming in and out, there are a couple of
different ways to do it, but if you want to
zoom in and out, I think the easiest
way for you to remember right now is either in the bottom left hand
corner or using that Command plus or
minus if you're on a Mac. It would be Control plus or
minus if you're on a PC. Okay, so now it's your turn. All you need to do is go
ahead and vectorize all of the different motifs
that you want access to when it comes
to building a pattern, get them vectorized simply
in black and white, and move them to the left
hand side of your artboard. I'm going to meet you in the next lesson where we're going to start
playing with color. I'll meet you there. Okay. T.
4. Choose + Play with Colors: Hi there. Welcome back. We are in Illustrator. You'll see that I've done a couple of
things to my document. So first, I have completed scanning in all
of my different elements. I have a couple of
new things here, but I made them the same exact way that I've
already shown you. These are some new
elements here, as well as some clouds and some lines that
I've drawn as well. So everything is in vectors
in black and white. I've also brought in a
couple of new images for us to use to create a
custom color palette. Now, these pictures
are from my garden, and so you can pull colors from any photograph
that you choose. I personally love doing it from pictures
that, number one, I've taken, number two, are from nature
because guess what? Nature creates the best, most balanced color
palettes that you can find. And so I've placed these in my document the exact way
that I placed our scan JPEGs. So take a moment and start flipping through
images and choose a couple that you
would also like to pull colors from and place
them in your document. You have your images placed, what we want to do is
create just a series of black squares in order to fill and pick colors
from these images. So the easiest way to do this is to use the rectangle tool. Now, it's over in your
left hand toolbar. The keyboard shortcut for that is M, if you want to use that. So I'll select M on my keyboard and just
start to draw a square. Now, mine is automatically
filled black. That's perfect. If you
need to change the fill, it's over here in your toolbar. Now, a couple of
ways to do this. You can just come in and
start drawing squares. They don't need to be the
same size. It doesn't matter. You just want black squares
on your document, okay? Now, for those of
you who are loving the keyboard shortcuts
and you want to learn something
new, follow along. There's something really fun you can do to make this
quick and easy. You'll grab the selection tool
that's V on your keyboard, and you can start dragging
this over to the right. Now, hold down this shift key to keep it in line
with the first one and also hold down the option
key to create a duplicate. Okay? So you can see this. I have the shift and the option
key held down right now, and you can see
the double arrow, which means I'm going
to make a duplicate, and then I can just drop that. Now, before I do anything else, if I want to duplicate that same action with
everything still selected, I can simply tap
Command D or Control D, if you're on a PC
over and over again, Command D to duplicate
the last action, which makes really
quick and easy work for creating these squares. Okay? So however you choose
to do that, all good. Now we get to start
filling them with color. So I'll select the first one, and I'll zoom in here a bit. Then I will use the eyedropper tool to start picking colors
from the photographs. The eyedropper tool is
over here in your toolbar. The keyboard shortcut
for that is I. Now I can start picking
colors from the image. Now, to move on to
the second square, you'll need to gain access
to your black arrow tool. That's V on your keyboard. Click on that and then I
on your keyboard to get back to the eyedropper tool. You can click around
as many times as you want until you find just the right color and then
move on to the next square. So one of the keys to a really great color
palette is enough contrast. So you want to have some
really light colors, as well as some really
dark colors as well. Another key is a
really nice neutral. So I can show you afterwards how to tweak these colors a
little bit if we need to, but get as close as you
can to what you want now. I think I'll move over
to this color palette now and get some of these
golden rod yellows. Oh, that's a nice brown. I also want to make sure it
pulls some of the blues from the sky. It's okay. You can pull as many
colors as you want. It's okay if you pull too many, it's also okay if you
don't pull enough because we can always
come back and get more. Okay, let me show you how
to tweak a color now. I really want a nice,
creamy white color. And so with this one selected, I'm just going to
double click on the fill color to get
access to the color picker. Now I can just drag and drop this around to
wherever I want. You can see it
updating right here, and this is sort of
what I was going for is a nice creamy color. Then I'll select Okay. I've got a color palette I think I
can work well with here. These two pinks look almost
the same, don't they? So I'm going to do this one. Click on that, double
click on the fill, and I think I'll either go
lighter with it or darker. I think I'll go lighter
with it and bring it into more of a peachy
color and then click Okay, so you can always tweak
colors as you go as well. So now I will select
all of these colors, and over in the Swatches
panel at the bottom, you'll click on the folder
that says new color group. You'll get this dialog box. You can click Okay,
and then all of your new colors have now been
added to your swatch panel. Now you can select all of
this and just delete it. I know that feels wild to just delete
something like that. But now you can begin putting color on
some of your motifs. So I like to call this
just tossing color on. You don't have to be making
any decisions at this point. You can just start to
toss the color on. You can select more than one at once, if you want, as well, just to start seeing
your illustrations in color instead of
black and white. So this is really
when things begin to come alive. It's super fun. Okay. So, I missed
one right there. Now in the next lesson, we'll start to build motifs
and illustrations out of these and start building your repeating pattern.
I'll meet you there.
5. Design a Seamless Repeating Pattern: Hi there. Welcome back. Now, this is such a fun lesson. Now we get to make a
repeating pattern. And so for this lesson, I am going to show you
two different ways to make patterns in Illustrator. So we'll be making
two different ones. There are two methods that
I personally love to use, and they have to do with when
you draw the bounding box. You can draw it first or last. And the method is really
a little bit different. So we're going to start
first with the method where you're going to draw
your bounding box last. Let's get into it and
you'll see what I mean. Our first pattern, I want to
do something pretty simple. So I'm only going to use a single motif and show you how I would make
more of a geometric. We'll probably do a version of a half drop repeating
pattern for this one. So I'm going to take this
little fern guy that we scanned in vectorized
and colored up. And so for this, we're going to use a couple of
keyboard shortcuts. I am going to select this guy, and then I'll start
dragging it directly down. I'm going to hold the shift
key down to keep it in line. You see it's directly
in line there. And then I'm going to
hold the option key. That will be the Alt
key if you are on a PC. And this is going to
tell Illustrator to make a duplicate or copy
the one above. Okay? So then I'm just
going to release it. Now, if you remember back from the lesson where
we worked on color, it's the same exact
thing that we did with those
little black boxes. Now I can hit Command
D on my keyboard to duplicate that action
as many times as I want. So now I have an
evenly spaced line of four of these little ferns. Now I'm going to
select all of them. So let me move them over here, and I'm going to do
the same exact thing, but now I'm going to
move it to the right. So I'll start dragging it
to the right with my mouse. I'll hold down the shift key to keep that directly in line. The option key to
make a copy of it. So I'm going to drop it
somewhere around right there, and then I'll hit Command D
in order to do that again. So I'm actually building out my repeating pattern
kind of visually first. Now, this is the middle row here is something that can
be kind of fun to play with. You can bring it
down about halfway. This is something called
a half drop repeat. So if I don't do that, this is just called a
simple brick repeat. But if I drop the middle row halfway down, it's
called a half drop. Then I also think
this middle row is kind of the
place to have fun. We could also maybe
turn this upside down. So I'm using the rotate
tool to do that. The keyboard shortcut for
that is R on your keyboard. You could also let me undo that. You could also play
with reflecting. O is reflect, and that brings this just into reflection there, and then drop it down,
which is interesting. And then maybe you could
rotate it as well. So lots of options there, but something like this, I
think looks really nice. It's going to be a super
simple but impactful pattern. So from here, we really
have to find the repeat. So I'm going to zoom in and
begin to just visually find where this pattern that I've now manually built begins to repeat. What I'm going to do is
grab the rectangle tool. The keyboard shortcut for
that is on your keyboard. And I'm just going to
pick a point here. It really can be any point. You could go from the
bottom here or the top. I'm going to choose
kind of the top of this little fern
frond right there. And I'm just going
to start drawing until I find it
again over there. There it is right
there. Now I'm going to go down until I find it
again, and boom there it is. Now, you could keep
going if you want. It doesn't really matter,
especially if you want to play with one of the
motifs in the middle. But technically, that repeats right there from top to bottom
and from left to right. I will go down one more
to pick up this one right here just so that it's a little bit easier to
see what we're doing. I'm going to drop
that box right there and change the color to
maybe this kind of cream. And now I'm going to
with it selected, right click, come to a range
and select send to back. Let me show you what
we're working on now. This is technically
your repeating pattern. Now, we can delete anything that falls off of the pattern
because it won't be included. But this one just barely, but it does overlap the
bottom line right here. So the trick to a repeat an Illustrator is
that everything that crosses the left hand margin gets duplicated on
the right hand side, and everything that covers
the bottom or the top gets duplicated on the opposite
side, as well, exactly. So while this is probably
going to repeat, it's likely not
going to be perfect. And so in order to do that, we need to check
all of our margins. So I'm going to
select the box here. And if you come up
to your toolbar and the top bar of
Adobe Illustrator, you'll see that you've got
the width and the height, and the dimensions
are a bit obscure. It's got decimals
involved with the pixels, and it's also constrained, which means that it's going
to keep the ratio exactly. So I want to change this. I'm going to deselect and break that chain so that I can manipulate the width
and the height exactly. Then I'm just going to round
to the closest whole number. The width is now
going to be 164, and the height is
going to be 209209. You have to remember
this number. You can always click back
on the square to check it. So it's 164 by 209. So this is how we're going to check our repeating pattern. I need to delete everything that falls off
the right hand margin here. Then I'm going to
duplicate it again. Remember, I with this 164. I'm going to select everything that crosses over this
left hand margin. I'll right click, come to
transform and select Move. And then horizontally, we're
going to move 164 pixels. We're going to go
zero up and down. I have my preview checked so
I can see where it's going. And then instead
of clicking Okay, I'm going to click
make a copy of that. Okay? So now we know
those motifs are exactly 164 pixels to the right, and we did 164 because that
is the width of our repeat. Now I'm going to do the same thing for the
top and the bottom. So it doesn't matter which one, but I'll choose the top. I'll select everything
and hit Delete. Now let's double
check. This is 209. So I'll select everything that
crosses the bottom margin. This time, I'll come
to transform and move. This time we're going
zero horizontally, but we're going to go 209 up. So interesting to go up
is actually negative 209. If I were moving it down, it would be positive 209. And then I'll click Copy. Now, we have a perfectly
repeating pattern. Now, in order to actually
make the repeat, we have to tell
Illustrator to do so. And the way that you do that is you select your bounding box, your repeat margins, and you're going to
make a copy of it. So the keyboard shortcut
for that is Command C, and then you're going to paste
a copy of it right behind. Now, to paste behind
it's Command B. Now, you can't tell, but there's one behind
there, as well. If you don't want to
use keyboard shortcuts, you can select copy here. See, that's Command C and
then paste in back Command B, and that's under
your Edit panel. Okay, so now with the one
in the back selected, I need to give it no fill. So I'm going to select this and give it no fill and no stroke. So now, it's just a blank box. Do you see that back there? So I'm gonna undo
that. So they're directly on top of each other. This is the trick. If
you miss this step, your pattern will not work. So now with everything that's going into this
repeating pattern, I'm going to select
it and simply drag and drop it over to
my swatches panel. You can see it's
dropped a pattern right there. Now let's test it. I'll grab M on my keyboard
for the rectangle tool, and I'll draw a big rectangle, and I'll fill it with
our new pattern. And you can see that
it repeats perfectly. Now, if we want to change the scale to look at it a
little bit differently, we can right click and come to transform and select scale. Now you can deselect
transform objects, and then you'll just be
transforming only the pattern, so you can see it at 50%, or you can just scroll with your mouse here to see what it looks like as you go
up and down. Okay? So this is super
fun. It works great. Sometimes, especially if I'm
doing a pattern that I want to work with no regards to the background first,
something like this. I like to place my motifs where
I want them and then work the margins to create
the repeat at the end. So now I want to show
you a little bit of a different way to make
this repeat pattern, and that will be one that we
draw the bounding box first. Before we get started, I want to do a little
bit more of a complex. I'm going to move this over here a little bit of a
more complex motif. And so I want to work on
building out a couple of motifs that we can
use for this next one. I'm going to do is use this
series of painted leaves and flower tops in order to create motifs here
in Illustrator. So all I want to do is kind of drag one
set over at a time. I'll select both of
these and bring them, and just kind of build some flowers over
here to the right. I actually don't love that one. Let me use this one instead. So I'm going to build
them here. And then I also want to make them solid. So with this selected, I'll use the Shape Builder tool. That's Shift M on your keyboard. You can also find it over
here in your tool panel, and just draw through
that to make it solid. And then I want to do
the same thing up here. So I'll select this
outer shape and hit Shift M on my keyboard to
get the Shape Builder tool. Now, I covered up
the other part. So with it selected, I'll
just send that backwards. And now I've got this
little piece in here. I'll use Shift M
again to create that. And then I need to just change the color of this
little shape in here. Okay. What I want to do is build out I'm going to build
out all five of these. One of the important
things to do at this stage will be to select this and
just group it together. You can do that by
hitting Command G on your keyboard or right
clicking and selecting group. So now it's grouped, it's going to move all as one object. And I will come in and do the same exact thing for a
couple of these other motifs. Now, one thing that you
might see me do is use the rotate tool in order to rotate these to be in the direction that I
want them to be in. And so rotate again is
just R on your keyboard, and then the Shape Builder
tool is M on your keyboard. I need to ungroup
this one so that I only do one part at a time here. And then I'll do the middle. Then I'll group that one and
move it over to the side. So I'll let you watch as
I work on the next three. O. Okay, so I'm back. I've done all five, and one thing that
you'll want to notice is that I've colored
them in the same way. So, across all five, there are only three colors. This is going to make it
really easy to play with color when we get there
in the next lesson. Now I want to focus on building
this repeating pattern. So I'm going to move a couple of these things kind
of out of the way. This is just my
personal preference and how I like to work. And now I want to start with drawing our repeating
bounding box first. So this could be a
square or rectangle. It doesn't matter which
direction it goes. So I'll select M on my
keyboard and click once in order to now define
the width and the height of the rectangle
that I want to build. So we're just going to
try something here. Let's go 500 pixels wide by, let's say, 700 pixels
tall and click Okay. So this looks like a
pretty good size to me. I will change the background
color a bit here. Actually, let's go maybe
to this dark green, okay? And so now I will start placing my motifs over on
the bounding box. I want to send this to the back, so let me select it and
arrange and send it back. So now I just want
to work on building out something here on the
left hand side to begin with. If you can start to envision
what this might look like, you can see that this
overlaps the top. And so I might go ahead
and drop it down so that I can see what I'm going to be
working with in this corner. So let me select just this one. I will move it, and this time, I'm going to go
zero horizontally and positive 700 to go
down and click Copy. So I need to adjust this one
just a little bit, okay? So this is looking good. Now what I want to
do is go ahead and replicate everything
that crosses over to the right hand side. So then I'm just working
to fill in the middle. So I'll select all that,
transform, come to move. This time, I'm going 500 to the right and
zero up and down. So I'm going 500, remember, because this is the
size of my box. It's 500 pixels wide by
700 pixels up and down. So now what I want to do is
start kind of building in the middle portions
of my motif here. I think, let me just
play a little bit. I'm just gonna be kind of
eyeballing, eyeballing this. Let's go ahead and move this one down so I can see what
I'm working with. Okay. So now I'm out of motifs, which means that I
get to make copies of the ones that I've already used and play with them as well. So I'll just select
this one and hold down my option key to basically
make a copy of it, and then I can do that to build in some different things
here along the way. Now, one thing that I love to do is use the reflect tool or the rotate tool in
order to really help these kind of give them a different
look, if you will. Let's see if I can fit
this one in right there. I'm going to go ahead and
drop these two down so that I make sure I'm not overlapping
anything down here. So transform and move. We're going 700. Click Copy. Okay, so that looks really good. Now let's see if I can
work this area right here. Maybe we let those
overlap a little bit. Okay. So what I'm going to do is try to
fill in this space. Now, you don't want to move just one thing that crosses
over any of the margins. You can move something in the middle without
worrying about it, but you don't want to move
anything that crosses over a margin without also
moving its partner. So, this has a partner
right up here. And so I could select both of them and move them together, which is going to
ensure that they remain the same exact
distance apart, which is going to make the
repeat still work, right? I'm gonna rotate this
guy a little bit. So I think I just
need basically, like, a leaf to come in to fill
in this area right here. And so what I might do is just take one from this
guy right here. So in order to do that,
I am going to make a copy and then let me just ungroup it. I'll
get rid of that. And then what I want to do is
maybe just erase the stem. So one tool we haven't used
yet is the eraser tool. That is over in your toolbar. The keyboard shortcut
is also Shift E. And so with any items selected, you can come in and just erase any part of
it that you want. Now, I think I can
bring just the leaf in and kind of fill in
that space right there. So I think I also want to grab this and its partner and
move it down a little bit. So let's give this a try
and see how it works. Now, I'm pretty confident
that it's going to repeat because of the way
that I built the motifs. But if you ever have a problem and you
want to double check, you can do the same
thing we did last time. You can delete
everything on this side, copy it over from
the left hand side. So I'll just go ahead and do it. That'll be 500 to the right, zero up and down,
and click Copy. Then we can do the same
thing from top to bottom. We'll delete everything on one, grab everything from the other, transform and move
zero, left and right, and this time we're going
700 down. We'll click Copy. Okay? So pretty confident that this is going
to repeak correctly. Now, do you remember
what we have to do? We have to make that clear, no fill, no stroke background. So with the background
selected, I'm going to copy it. That's Command C, and
then paste it behind. That's Command or Control
B if you're on a PC. Again, those are up
in your Edit panel. If you want to copy
here and paste it in back, you can
do that, as well. It's selected, you can see
it has this dark green fill. I need to make sure that it has no fill and also no stroke,
just for the record. Those have to both be blank. Now I can select everything
that makes up that pattern and drag and drop it over
to my swatches panel. And then we can
test this pattern to see what it looks like. Oops, see, I had my
stroke selected there. So I'll click on the fill. Then we can click on this
pattern to fill this one. So I'll transform this one in scale just to see
what it looks like. I'll deselect transform objects so that I can just
play with the pattern. And, you know, for
a quick pattern, this looks pretty good. I think this one was
really, really fun to make. Now we have two
repeating patterns that are ready to go to print. And the next lesson, I'll
show you how to play with color and change the colors of these using something called
the recolor artwork tool. And then we will work to export it ready for print.
I'll meet you there.
6. Prepare and Print Your Fabric Design: M Okay, my friends, we're back in our document, and we're ready to play
with color and then export this file for print
on your very own fabric. So I want to introduce you to something called the
Recolor Artwork Tool. Disclaimer. You are
going to love it. You might get a little
obsessed with it. So let's start with this
first pattern, okay? I will select it, and then
up in your top toolbar, you have a button
called Recolor Artwork. So let's click on this. You
are going to get this panel, and what I want you to do is
click on Advanced Options. Now, I like to also
go ahead and select open Advance recolor artwork
dialogue upon launch. That means that you won't have to do that last
step ever again. So you've got two colors here, and then anything that's in your swatches panel is
also going to be here. So the color palette
that we created just a couple of lessons ago
is here as color group one. So go ahead and click on that, and then it will populate a new color option
for you to choose. Now, at the bottom here, you can randomly change
the color order. So you can just
begin clicking on this to see some new
color variations. Now, do know that
you can't go back. There's no back buttons. So if you see one and
then you miss it, you'll have to try to
remember what it was. You can also drag and
drop these around up here if you want something
slightly different. You can also click on the new
Row button to get access to everything that you have in that color palette
and then begin to drag and drop things
around, as well. This is super fun to play with. If you land on one
that you like, you can click Okay, and then
you can say, don't change. Okay. So now let's come down
to our bit more complex one. I'll select this. Click on
the Recolor Artwork tool. This time it jumps me directly to the Recolor Artwork
advanced panel. I'll select this color
group and then start working through some
different color options over here as well, which, my goodness
is already so fun. So you'll have so
much fun playing with this feature
in Illustrator. Remember, you can add
new rose in order to play with
different variations. You can drag and drop this. Let's say, bring this up to
change the color as well. So I think, let me just try
this green really quick. Mm. Okay, that's beautiful. So I think I am going to go with this variation
and click Okay. Now I want to show
you how to take this and export it for a
ready to print file. So in order to do so, I'm going to open a new file. I'll click Command N to do so. You can also come up to
File and select New. You can see that's Command or Control N if you're on a PC. Now for this one, one thing that I want to do is
come to color mode. And we're going to
change it to RGB. Now, this is only because we will be using
spoon flour today, and Spoonflower recommends
designing an RGB. So now I'll come back. I'm going to select
my pattern square, and I just want to copy
and paste it over. So Command C to copy that and Command V to paste
it on my document. I'm going to zoom
out a little bit. Now, one really amazing
thing is that you can get access to that original repeat that you built anytime
that you want. All you have to do is select something that's filled
with the pattern and then come to the fill and
drag and drop the fill back over to your
swatches palett, okay? So now I can get
rid of this square. So now I have back access
to the original repeat. That's also been recolored. So from here, we want to work on exporting this
for spoonflour. Now what we want to do is
export the actual repeat. So in order to do that, I'm going to take
the background. I'm going to make a copy of it. That's Command C,
and then you can paste it in place or in
back. That's Command B. You already know that
one. With that selected, what I want to do is
come up to Object, select Artboard, and click
on Convert to Artboard. This is going to turn that
background into an artboard. If you want to get rid of
the original artboard, you can do that, as well.
Just select it here. Come to artboards, make sure the correct one is selected,
and hit the trash can. So that will just delete
that first one altogether. So now your artboard matches the repeat bounding box of your pattern, that's
going to be important. I do know that this
is also when you set the scale for your fabric. So if you wanted this to be, let's say, bigger and
make a copy of it, you would need to scale it up at this point to the size
that you want and then make a copy of the
background and then change that to
an artboard, okay? And then you would export
the bigger version. Likewise, if you wanted
a much smaller pattern, you could do the same thing
with making it smaller. So I'm going to go
with what I have here. Okay, so before we export, there's one more just little
trick I have to tell you. And it's to make the
background color spill out from
over the artboard. And this is just one way to ensure that you don't get
any lines in your repeat. Don't ask me why it
works, but it does. So in order to do that, you can take the background square, and with S on your keyboard
for the scale tool, it doesn't even matter how much. Bring it up to where just the background spills
out over the edges, okay? Trust me on this one. We'll come up to File
and choose Export As. Here, we're going to choose
JPEG and use Artboard, and then I'll name this floral
fabric and select Export. Now you get these JPEG options. You want to make sure, again, that you're in RGB, quality is set all the way
up to ten, which is the max. Now, for spoonflour,
you only have to use 150 PPI, so 150. And then you'll want
to make sure that this is art optimized unless you have a lot of type
or fonts on your document. So likely art optimized is what you'll want,
and then click Okay. Now, I can show you that
that indeed repeats. I'll come to my desktop, grab this and drag and drop
it over to my document here. So this is just a JPEG. You can tell that because
it has this blue box on it. This is the vector version. This is the JPEG image version. And I can just start
dragging and dropping this aside itself to
show you that it does, in fact, repeat seamlessly
from top to bottom. See that? So now let's head over to Spoon flower and
order some fabric. So I'll go over to
spoonflower.com. Now, go ahead and make
an account or login. Once you've done
that, you'll click on Artist Corner and
select Upload a design. From here, you'll choose your file there's mine,
and I'll click Open. You'll need to agree that
it is indeed your design. And you'll see your design here. Now, Spoonflower calls
you to proof this design. So it currently
says, No proofed. You'll click on this to
go ahead and proof it. Now, this pink outline
is Okay, ready. This pink outline is
where your repeat is. And so you can scroll
in and out just to make sure that all of the edges and everything looks
good, and it does. So I'll select Los good. Now you get to choose
what you order. For this class, we're
going to choose fabric, but you should also
know that there are so many different
opportunities for you to get products with
your artwork on them here. I'll choose to keep
this one private. You could also choose
to put yours up for sale and start as
spoon flower shop. So this all looks good. I'm going to select buy. Now you get to choose
your fabric type, as well as the size. So if I wanted to do 1
yard and choose something like the signature cotton or
something else like velvet, or linen cotton canvas or any of their
opportunities you can. I'll go ahead and click X out of that and simply
add this to cart. And my fabric is
on its way. Wow. Great job. I'm so
proud of you for making it this far and for
really coming alongside me, dipping your toes into the breathtaking world of
surface pattern design. Whether you're still
sketching or finalizing your P pattern or maybe
you're ready to print, you've already made
huge strides towards turning your creative
vision into something real, and that is worth celebrating. But we're not just done yet, so now it's time to
bring everything you've learned together and
complete your class project. This is really where
the magic happens. So you can find all
the details about your class project in
the class details below. Now, to make sure
that your designs are perfectly prep for printing, I've also created a free fabric printing essentials
guide just for you. So this workbook, it's going to walk you through
every single step, how to prepare your files, choose the right fabric, and upload your design
for printing so that you can confidently order
your first fabric swatch. It's packed with tips on
ensuring color accuracy, scaling your design, and my personal recommendations for where to get your
fabric printed. Plus, it'll help you avoid
those most common mistakes, so you can rest assured that your first print will
turn out beautifully. So don't miss it.
Download your copy. It's in the class details right below and get ready to
bring your design to life. So head on over to the class
resources to learn more about your class project
and get your free guide. Trust me, I'll make the fabric
printing process a breeze. Lastly, I just want
to encourage you to engage with this
incredible community. So share your project,
leave comments below. Let us know if you
have any questions, and check out your
fellow students' work. I'm always popping into the
gallery to give feedback, so don't hesitate to ask questions or show
off your progress. Thank you so much for
joining me in this class. I can't wait to see the beautiful patterns
that you create, and I'm even more excited to see where this journey
takes you next. My friends, I'll see you soon. Bye for now. Thank you. Y.
Bonnie Christine, Surface Pattern Designer + Artist
