How to Design Gift Wrap: From Sketch to Print-Ready Patterns | Bonnie Christine | Skillshare
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How to Design Gift Wrap: From Sketch to Print-Ready Patterns

teacher avatar Bonnie Christine, Surface Pattern Designer + Artist

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      How to Design Gift Wrap: From Sketch to Print-Ready Patterns

      1:49

    • 2.

      Lesson 1: Turning Your Ideas into Digital Designs

      12:48

    • 3.

      Lesson 2: Polishing Your Design in Illustrator

      10:38

    • 4.

      Lesson 3: Choosing + Playing with Colors

      9:29

    • 5.

      Lesson 4: Designing a Seamless Repeating Pattern

      24:54

    • 6.

      Lesson 5: Preparing and Printing Your Gift Wrap

      9:30

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About This Class

In this class, you’ll learn how to transform your sketches into seamless, repeating pattern designs that are ready to print and use for any occasion. Whether it’s for meaningful gifts, personal projects, or your creative business, this step-by-step guide makes surface pattern design approachable, fun, and rewarding for all skill levels.

Hi, I’m Bonnie Christine, a surface pattern designer and educator passionate about helping artists bring their creative ideas to life. I’ll walk you through how to turn a simple sketch into a polished, professional-quality design, perfect for creating stunning, one-of-a-kind wrapping paper.

Don't miss the bonus lesson! To make the most of this class, be sure to download the FREE Gift Wrap Printing Essentials Guide—it includes a step-by-step guide to ensure your designs print as you envision them PLUS the BONUS LESSON: How to Design Ribbon and Tape and Mock-Ups and Social Share Images to showcase your work! 

In This Class, You’ll Learn:

  • How to turn your sketches into digital designs: Use Adobe Illustrator (download your free 7-day trial of Illustrator here) to digitize your ideas, no matter your experience level.
  • How to polish your designs: Refine your artwork with easy-to-use tools to create professional-quality results.
  • How to create a custom color palette: Choose and play with colors to bring your pattern designs to life.
  • How to design a seamless repeating pattern: Learn the key technique for designing seamless, print-ready patterns.
  • How to prepare and print your gift wrap: Get your files ready for printing and explore options to bring your designs to life.

You’ll Be Creating:

Your very own custom gift wrap design! From sketch to seamless pattern, you’ll follow a simple process to create a wrapping paper design that reflects your unique style.

For extra tips, tools, and inspiration, don’t forget to grab your FREE Gift Wrap Printing Essentials Guide. It’s the perfect companion to this class and includes step-by-step instructions to ensure your designs are print-ready, plus mock-ups to help you share your beautiful gift wrap!

This class is perfect for:

  • Beginners curious about surface pattern design.
  • Designers looking to expand their skills or portfolio.
  • Creative entrepreneurs interested in offering custom gift wrap in their business.

Even if you’ve never designed before, you’ll find this class approachable, fun, and filled with techniques you can use again and again. By the end, you’ll have a completed project and the skills to keep creating designs for any occasion.

Ready to take the next step? Don’t Miss the Bonus! Grab the FREE Gift Wrap Printing Essentials Guide to make sure your designs print perfectly. Here's what you'll get:

  • Avoid the Most Common Printing Mistakes: Don’t let easily avoidable errors derail your beautiful work. This guide covers the most frequent pitfalls—like color misalignment, pattern sizing, and file setup—and gives you simple steps to ensure flawless results every time.
  • My List of Trusted Printing Partners and Tools: Finding the right printer can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Inside, you’ll find a curated list of my trusted printing partners and tools, taking all the guesswork out of the process. These resources will save you time and frustration.
  • Bonus Lesson! Design Tape + Ribbon: Learn how to design custom ribbon and tape with a technique so simple, you’ll wonder why you didn’t try it sooner! It’s a surprising way to create a fully coordinated gift wrap set that looks professionally made.
  • FREE Mock-Ups & Tutorial: Showcase your work like a pro with high-quality mock-up templates and step-by-step instructions for creating stunning visuals—perfect for social media, your portfolio, or client presentations.

Click HERE to download your FREE Gift Wrap Printing Essentials Guide now and start creating with confidence!

Let’s dive in together—I can’t wait to see what you create!

Also✨ Meet the team! We're honored to have the support of our experts here to support you. While interacting with us, you may be hearing from Bonnie Christine, Mia Kindle, Nikkita Cohoon, Kiley Bennett or Ashley Rodgers. We’re here to answer your questions and make your journey as fun, inspiring, and supportive as possible.✨

Love,
Bonnie Christine

Meet Your Teacher

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Bonnie Christine

Surface Pattern Designer + Artist

Top Teacher

Why, hello!

I'm Bonnie Christine, a surface pattern designer, artist, and educator with a heart for helping you bring your creative dreams to life. As a completely self-taught designer, I understand the challenges of starting from scratch--and the incredible joy of turning those first steps into a thriving creative career. Over the past decade, I've worked with leading brands and taught tens of thousands of students, sharing the tools, techniques, and encouragement they need to build their own paths.

My goal is to make learning simple, inspiring, and packed with possibility--so you can skip the overwhelm and dive straight into creating a life and career you love.

Looking for resources to support your journey? I've created a FREE 44-Page Guid... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. How to Design Gift Wrap: From Sketch to Print-Ready Patterns: You've ever dreamed of seeing your own designs printed on beautiful custom gift wrap. But maybe you weren't sure where to start? Well, you're in the perfect place. This class is all about giving you the tools, techniques, and the confidence to turn your creative ideas into something tangible, your very own unique gift wrap design. Step by step, I'll guide you through how to take a simple sketch or idea and transform it into a seamless repeating pattern. Ready to print on wrapping paper. By the end of this class, you'll have your own custom gift wrap that's ready to be printed and used for any occasion. How exciting is that? I'm Bonnie Christine. I'm a surface pattern designer and educator, and I'm so thrilled to be your guide in this class. Over the past decade, I've had the privilege of designing for some of the world's top brands and teaching thousands of students, just like you, how to turn their creative ideas into reality. Like you, I once wasn't really sure how to move forward. I was excited but a little uncertain of where to start. That's why I'm passionate about making this process simple, approachable, and, well, filled with joy. In this skill share class, you'll learn how to take your sketch, vectorize it in Adobe Illustrator, create a custom color palette, and build a seamless repeat pattern. So whether you're completely new to surface design or maybe you have some experience, this class will guide you through each step in a really fun and encouraging way. So let's dive in together. I can't wait to see the beautiful designs that you create and the joy that your custom gift wrap will bring to all of your special occasions. 2. Lesson 1: Turning 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 Windsor and 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 for your simple class. Again, the focus here is going to be to start as simply as possible. 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. 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 a 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. 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 a 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. 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 foam. 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. And 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. So 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 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 scam. 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. Lesson 2: Polishing Your Design in Illustrator: Okay, my friends, welcome back. By now, you'll want to have downloaded Adobe Illustrator. If you haven't done that yet, head over to Adobe to download it from their website. Once you have it installed, you will click to open it and then select New File. Now, I'm going to choose the letter preset. This is a standard piece of paper size. It's easy to kind of wrap your mind around, so I suggest you do the same. Now, I also like to work in pixels. If you don't have your set to pixels, you can do that right here. And we'll leave everything else just the way it is and click Create. Now, this is our brand new document. The rectangle on the page represents your artboard, which is what we'll be using to design inside the program. Now, a couple of things if you've never worked in Illustrator before, your page might look a little bit different from mine. Illustrator is a complex program with many, many different tools and options. We're going to keep things as simple as possible. And so what I want you to do to get yours looking as close to mine right off the bat is come up to Window, select workspace and choose painting. Now that will likely rearrange your setting a little bit to look more closely to mine. Now the next thing we want to do is bring in our scans or photographs. They both work the same way. They're both probably JPEGs, right into Illustrator to start getting them vectorized. And so there are a couple of different ways you can do this. You could drag and drop them in from your folders or finder, or you can use the place command. If you come up to file and select place, you can come to your desktop or wherever it was that you had your drawings and select the ones that you want to place inside your document. Me, there are three that I want to place, and so I'll just select all three, hold down command to click on the other ones, and then select place. Now you can see my arrow has one of three and a preview of what it is that I'm going to be dropping on my artboard. So I'm just going to start clicking to draw the size where I want these to be dropped. And it doesn't really matter at this point. You just want to get them onto your page. That one's going to be small. It's fine. Okay, so there are a couple of keyboard shortcuts that you'll want to get familiar with as you work in Illustrator. The first one is the Black Arrow tool. You can see this Black Arrow tool now is how I select things and move them around. You can always find it in the top left hand toolbar, and you can also always get access to it by tapping V on your keyboard. So any tool that we use is located in your left hand toolbar, you can grab the keyboard shortcut for any of them by hovering over it, and it'll tell you right there what the keyboard shortcut is. So the next one is Rotate. We have two images here that we need to rotate to just get them facing straight up. So I'll select this image here of the little butterfly, and rotate is R on your keyboard. So I'll tap R. You can see it got selected in the toolbar over here as well, and there's your reminder of the keyboard shortcut. When you tap R on your keyboard, it is going to drop a little teal marquee right in the middle of your image. That's showing you the mark of where it's getting rotated around. And so with that, I'm going to come over here and start drawing kind of in an arc shape to the upper right hand corner of this image. Now, you can just kind of eyeball it or you can hold down the Shift key to constrain it to 459180 degrees, okay? It's up to you. If you want it to be exact, hold down the Shift key, and it will constrain it for you. Now I'll tap V on my keyboard to get access back to the black arrow tool. I'll bring this one around, tap R on my keyboard, and rotate it up as well. I'm holding the Shift key to keep that directly in line. Now, I think this one is a little bit too small, so I also want to increase the size. There's one more keyboard shortcut. It's S on your keyboard for scale. So I'll tap S. You can see it's over here as well, scale. And I want to start dragging this up in the upper right hand corner to increase the scale. Now if this is all you do, you can also kind of skew it a bit. And so you'll want to hold down the Shift key again to constrain that to make sure that it's not getting skewed in any way as you increase or decrease the size. So now we're ready to turn these images, your sketches, paintings, and found items into vectors inside Illustrator. In order to do that, we're going to use a tool called Image Trace. If you come up to Window and select Image Trace, right there it is, you will get this pop up dialog box. So you have to have an image selected in order to get access to this. Meaning, if I click off of here and I don't have anything selected, this is all grade out. So if you don't have access to any of these options, you'll probably need to click on an image in order to bring this to life. So from here, I want you to use the black and white logo preset. You'll click on that, and this has automatically changed to vectors. Now, there are a couple of settings I want you to pay attention to. The first is threshold. A high threshold is going to pick up more black, and a low threshold is going to pick up less. This one actually looked good pretty much right in the middle. Now, paths are how complex or how many paths are getting built into the lines themselves. I typically bring mine up, but it kind of depends on the image. A lower path threshold is going to give you less lines. So something in the middle or upper 75 percentile range is going to probably be the best. Lastly, you're going to want to choose Ignore color. Now to demonstrate this, I ought to draw a square back here. Don't worry about how I'm doing this. I want to show you, for example, that right now there is a white box behind all of our images and scans. And so when you select, ignore color, what it does is punch that out. It takes it away, which is essentially what we want. With all of that selected, I'm going to choose Expand, and that has turned our butterfly into vectors. I'm going to get rid of this orange box and then move on to our next illustration here. One is really only for this one particular motif right here that I want to get access to. So I'm going to use the same preset, the black and white logo. This time, I want to bring the threshold up a bit so that I can pick up some of the lighter areas, and I'm also going to bring up the paths pretty high, as well. Now, noise, if you bring this down, is going to bring in more detail. Did you see that? So I'll take noise up and you kind of lose some of that. You bring it down, and it builds it back in. So I very much want the texture here. It makes it look like it was painted, which it was. And then I want to select Ignore color, and then I'll click Expand. So now I want to clean this up. It automatically gets grouped after you use image trace. So from here, I'm going to right click and select Ungroup. And then I want to come in and probably just delete some of the things that I don't really want access to anymore. You can draw marquee around it to select more than one thing at a time. Actually like this one, so I'm going to keep that one. So now I want to work to group the individual motif back together. So right now it's in a bunch of different elements. So what I'm going to do is again draw Marquee. I'm just holding my mouse down as I draw over that. And then you can right click and select group or use the keyboard shortcut Command G on your keyboard, and then I'll move that one over. I'm going to select this one as well and then tap Command G on my keyboard to group that one together. Now we can do the last one here. With it selected, I'll use the black and white logo. That looks pretty good, right off the bat. I'm going to increase the threshold just a little bit and the paths and decrease the noise, and then I'll choose Ignore White or ignore color and then select Expand. So with that selected, I'll go ahead and right click and tap Ungroup and then move these elements over to the left hand side of my artboard. Now I can select anything here I need to and just kind of clean it up. I'll tap delete on my keyboard. One more thing that you might need to know is how to zoom in and zoom out on your Rboard. And there are a couple of different ways to do it. We're going to keep it super simple. So Command minus zooms you out. Command plus zooms you in. That is, if you're on a Mac, if you're on a PC, it'll be Control minus and Control Plus. Can also get access to these percentages in the bottom left hand corner. You can say Zoom out. You can zoom pretty far in or you can say fit to screen, which is going to pop you back out to the size of your artboard. Now it's your turn. Work to get all of your sketches, your paintings, your found items vectorized inside Adobe Illustrator and brought over to the left hand side of your artboard. This is where we'll pick up in the next lesson and start creating a custom color palette. I'll meet you there. Okay. Is 4. Lesson 3: Choosing + Playing with Colors: Welcome back. We're back in our document, Inside Illustrator, and I've done a couple of things, as I'm sure you have, as well. I have finished scanning in and vectorizing a couple of other motifs over here exactly the way that we did before. And the additional thing that I've done is I've brought in two images. These are both pictures from my garden. Order to pull colors from. So this is what I would love for you to take a moment, grab your phone, scroll through your images, and pick out a couple of pictures that you would like to pull colors from in order to build a color palette. So a little trick here is that nature always makes the best color palettes. So you can always start there. You can change colors as you work. I'll show you how, but I love to be able to pull colors directly from a photograph that I've taken in order to build out a custom color palette for our projects here in Illustrator. So I've placed these images the same way that I placed our scans earlier, and we're going to get straight to pulling colors from them. So my favorite way to do this is to simply draw a couple of black squares in order to fill as we go. So in order to do that, I will select the rectangle tool from the toolbar and left hand menu. The keyboard shortcut for that is, if you want to remember that. I just want you to start drawing a simple square. It's probably going to already be black. If it's not, though, you can change the fill color right here under your swatches panel. So you could change the color. Again, I like to start with black. Now, one thing that might trip you up is if you have your stroke on top here, that means you're giving it an outline. You see now it has a red outline. So if you ever get tripped up over that, you want to give no stroke and then just click on the fill to bring the solid square to the front and then just make sure that that is what you are selecting. I'll choose the black square, make it black, and then I want to make a couple of copies of this. Now, one way to do this would just be to come in and start drawing more squares. You can absolutely do this. They don't need to be the same size or anything. Those of you who love keyboard shortcuts and want to try a new one, let me show you what this is. I'm going to leave these and start over. I'll tap M on my keyboard, and then I'll start drawing a square. I'm going to hold down Shift in order to keep that a perfect square just for fun. And then with that selected, I'll tap V on my keyboard to get the selection arrow. And I'm going to start dragging this over to the right. Now, I want to hold down Shift to keep it directly in line, and then a new keyboard shortcut is the option key. This is going to allow me to drop a duplicate of whatever it is. Do you see the arrow has two arrows now? So I'll drop that. Now, if I don't do anything else, there's this really cool command in Illustrator. That's Command or Control D, and it duplicates the last action that you already made. So it's a really easy way to do the same thing over and over again. If I went too fast, you can rewind and go back. You can simply draw some squares. They don't need to be perfect or match or anything like that. They just need to be black squares. So now we're going to use the eyedropper tool to start pulling colors from the photographs. So I'll select the first square, and then I'll tap eye on my keyboard for the eyedropper tool. You can also find it over here in your left hand toolbar. And I'll start picking up colors from the picture. I'm going to scroll in some so that I can get really close. I want this kind of blushy color, so you can just click around your photo until you find a color that you like. Once you're there, you can move on to the second square. So V on your keyboard for the selection arrow. Click on that and then I on your keyboard to get back to the eyedropper tool. And then you can go pretty quickly in between those two as you move along here. One trick to a really solid color palette is making sure that you have enough variation, not only variation, but enough contrast between the different elements. So you want some light colors, some dark colors. That one's pretty. I always love to have a neutral, so kind of a creamy color. I might have to come down here to get. Well, I'll grab this one, and I'll show you how to lighten it in just a minute. And so you also want some dark colors, even a dark green or dark black in order to pull from. And then I really wanted some blues in here, so I'm glad this guy has them. And then let's come back over here and do one more pink. Hmm. Let's do a bright pink. Okay, so this looks like a pretty good color palette to me. There's one color that I think is missing that I would really love, and it's just a nice, creamy neutral. So I'm going to duplicate this square, any square you can duplicate. And then I want to just kind of use the color picker to pick my own color. So I'll double click on the swatch fill right here, and then I can bring this color up, and it's going to automatically change right here. So if you couldn't get the exact color that you wanted, don't fret. You can always come over here to the color picker and pick whatever color that you want. So I wanted something really neutral like that. I'm going to click Okay. And then this color, I wanted it to be a bit more peachy. So I will open the color picker, and I'm going to come down to my oranges and kind of make it a bit more peachy. Peachy peach. Now this one is sticking out to me. I've got to change it. I'm going to bring it down to a peach, as well. Okay. I'll select Okay, and now we need to get our colors over to the Swatches panel. So, super easy, all you do is select all of them. Come to the bottom of the Swatches palette and click New Color Group. You can name it if you want, or just leave it as it is and select Okay. All right? So now you've got all your colors right here in the Swatches palette. Hey. Good job. So now I can just get rid of all this. That feels crazy, right? Just select it and delete it. Now it's time to start adding color to your black and white images. So we'll just be coloring these one solid color, and you can choose that color now. So you can select one and then tap on whatever color you want it to be. And I like to call this tossing color on. Just get your elements, your motifs, get them out of their black and white stage so that you can just start to envision what they could look like as illustrations instead of black and white vectors. So I'm just going to have fun and toss some color on so that I can see what I'm working with. Now, this one I will throw a color on, but I want to show you something about this, as well. I'm going to do that same keyboard shortcut. Again, if I start dragging this over to the middle of my keyboard, but let's say I want to make a copy of it, I can just hold down the option key that gives me those double arrows, and then I can release, and it's going to just copy that for me. So if I wanted to fill this shape in, there's a couple of different ways to do it. One of the easiest is called the Shape Builder tool. Now, the keyboard shortcut for that is Shift M on your keyboard. You can also find it over here in your left hand toolbar. There's ever a tool that you're looking for that you can't find. You can come to the three dots at the bottom and scroll through all the tools that you have access to. So this one, again, is called the Shape Builder Tool. You'll know that you have it active when you come back to your illustration and the solid areas that are closed in kind of have this grid inside of them. So if I want to just color this whole thing solid, I can simply draw straight through it, and it's going to color it solid for me. You can grab the selection tool and click off and back on to exit using that tool, and then you can change the color of it however you want. So now I have two variations of that little butterfly, a solid one and an outline. So now that you have your motifs all colored with a custom color palette, well done you, we will meet in the next lesson where we're going to start building our repeating pattern. I'll meet you there. 5. Lesson 4: Designing a Seamless Repeating Pattern: Hi there. Welcome back. We are here inside our Adobe Illustrator document. We have worked on our art, gotten it vectorized, and made a custom color palette, as well as colored them. So the best part is here. Now it's time to actually make our repeating pattern. Now, there are two different ways to make a repeating pattern that I want to teach you. Talk about them in this way. There's one where you draw the bounding box first, and there's one that you draw the bounding box last. And they both give you different amounts of flexibility when it comes to creating repeating pattern. So the first one that I'm going to make is going to be one where we draw the repeat bounding box last. And so I'll just dive in and you'll be able to wrap your mind around how we do this. And so I want to do something that's really simple for our first pattern. So I think what I want to do is just grab this single motif here. This is one of the elements that I painted. See that my brush was pretty dry and it's really loose, and I think it's going to make just a really simple yet beautiful gift wrap option for us. And so what I want to do first is scale this down a little bit. So I'm going to click on it and then tap S on my keyboard and just scale it slightly. I'm holding down the Shift key to make sure that I don't end up skewing it like that. So the shift key keeps it in line. Now I will move this up with the direct selection tool, and what I want to do is start making a copy of it. Now, this is just like we did with those black boxes when we made the color palette as well. So I'm going to start to drag this down. I'm going to hold down the Shift key to keep this constrained and in line. And the option key or the Alt key if you're on a PC. To make a duplicate. That's going to make a copy of this particular motif, and then I'll just drop it there. Now, before I do anything else, if I want to replicate that action, do you remember what we do? We tap Command D on the keyboard. So I'll zoom out a little bit. Now we have four of those elements. So I can do the same thing with this entire line. Now I'll bring this over to the right, Hold down the shift key to keep it in line, and the option key to make a duplicate or sorry, a copy of that. And then I'll drop that one and then tap Command D to make a duplicate. So this is already a repeating pattern, right? You can tell that it's repeating. We call this a block repeat. Now, if you want to take the center column here and start to drop it down about halfway, this is something that we call the half drop repeat, okay? Now, another really fun thing to do, depending on what you're creating is potentially play with this middle section, maybe you want to turn it upside down. So I'm using the rotate tool to do this. That's R on your keyboard. And then if you again, hold down the shift key, it will snap it to where it's exactly vertical. And then you might have to play with the placement a little bit again, maybe something like that. Or maybe you want to bring these in to where they're a bit closer, then I'll bring this one in as well, something like that so that they look tighter. The other thing that is fun to do with this kind of middle row is use O on your keyboard for reflect and see what that looks like reflected around itself. So I am very much liking this. The other thing you can do is play with alternate rows. I don't think I like that, though. We'll leave it right here. So now what we need to do, we've set the motifs like we want them to be in a repeating pattern. Now we have to visually work to find the repeat. So let me show you what I mean. I'm going to choose any point in the kind of bottom right hand quadrant of this particular motif. So I think I'll just choose maybe the very top of where this breaks right here. Do you see that? So I want to grab the rectangle tool. That's M on your keyboard, and I want to just start drawing. And at this point, I'm really just eyeballing it, but I want to get as close as I can. I'm going to draw a square starting at the top of that point to the top. Se I'm about to hit it on the right hand side in the right hand corner. I'm going to hit it right there, and then I'm going to bring it down until I find it again. And there it is right there. You see that? Now I can zoom out and know that that really just about represents my repeating pattern. I can right click and go ahead and send this to the back, and I'll change the colors so that we can see what we're doing. To make this easier, this is a really tight repeat. The other thing that I could do is go ahead and bring this square down to even the second one right there. Do you see it right here? So I did that using the scale tool. Let me just start over. I'll again, grab the rectangle tool. I'm going to start drawing here. I'm going to hit it on the right hand side, and then I'm going to bring it down. Right there is the first time it repeats. Right here is the second time it repeats. You could really do either, but I think for you to follow along with me today, a little bit larger like this. So I'll zoom out, and here's what you need to know. Anything that doesn't touch that square or rectangle can be deleted. Now, this pretty closely probably repeats pretty exactly, but it may be off a little bit because after all, I eyeballed it. So what I want us to do now is ensure that this repeats perfectly. In order to do so, I want you to select the background come up to your top tool bar where you can find the width and the height. Now, if you don't have that, you can come up to Window and click on Transform. It's also going to give you the width and the height right there. It is currently set to this broken chain, and that's what we want. Yours may look like a linked chain. If so, I want you to click it and turn it into a broken chain so that you can change the dimensions free of one another. So we have a pixel here that is add a decimal. And again, you can be doing this here in the Transform panel or up here in the top tool bar. I want to just round to the nearest whole pixel. So I'm going to take this one to 156. And then I want to take the height to 276. So now they're whole pixels. Now I want to replicate those edges so that they are exactly placed in 156 and 276. So these numbers, you'll have to remember, not mine, yours, of course. But whatever yours are and the whole pixel, you'll want to remember. So jot them down or know that you can come click on this rectangle to get access to those at any time. So let's use 156 first. I'll select everything that crosses over this right hand margin, and I'm just going to delete it. Now I'm going to select everything that crosses over the left hand margin and replicate it. So we're going to right click, come to transform and select move, and we're going to go over 156, the size of our box to the right and zero pixels up and down. Now, I have preview selected, so it jumps over there for me. And instead of clicking Okay, I'm going to click Copy to make a copy of that. Now we know that it's perfect. I need to do the same thing for the top and bottom. So I'll delete everything across the bottom, select everything that crosses the top margin. Right, click, come to transform, select, move. This time we're going zero left and right, and we'll do 276 down. So interesting 276 down is positive 276. If you are moving this up, it would be negative 276. Now we'll click Copy. So just as a reminder, we got those numbers from our background. It's 156 to 276. Yours is likely going to be something entirely different, but you will use your numbers. We know that this repeats. Now we need to turn it into a repeating pattern. So the trick to that is to select your background, make a copy of it. That's Command C on your keyboard, and then paste a copy of it behind. The keyboard shortcut for that is Command B. Now, you can also get access to those right up here under your Edit panel. You can copy Command C and then paste in back Command B. We have two of these here now, right? So with the one in the back, it has this cream color applied to it. We must have no stroke and no fill. This is what tells Illustrator, Hey, this is the repeating bounding box, okay? So no stroke and no fill. So if I want to prove it to you, you can see right there, we have one in the back that has no stroke and no fill. Now we want to select everything that makes up this pattern and drag and drop it over to the watches panel, and then we can test our pattern. So I'll grab the rectangle tool and draw a big old rectangle and fill it with our new pattern. Now, it repeats beautifully. Something that's fun to do here is to with it selected, right click and come down to transform and select scale. Now we want to make sure this is uniform and deselect transform objects. So now all we're doing is transforming the pattern, and you can just scroll with your mouse to reduce the size and see what it looks like as you take it down or up in scale. So this is a super simple pattern that is so incredibly beautiful, right? I'll go ahead and click Okay. So that is how you draw the bounding box last. Now, for the next part of this lesson, I want to do something that is a little bit more complicated. I want to show you first how to make a pattern with the bounding box drawn first, but also how to really build and create some of your very own motifs. In order to do that, I decided that we needed a fresh set of motifs. So I'm going to take you through exactly what I've done here, okay? These are just scans. There's nothing new here that you've not already learned. These are scans that I have done. So I've labeled them here. This one I painted with paint and a paint brush. I just use watercolor there. This I drew with a pencil. These are some leaves from my yard that I scanned in. These are some leaves that I painted with paint, again, just watercolor. These are a couple of other leaves from my yard, and then these couple of elements are, again, paint. So these are the scans themselves. If I come over here, I have gone ahead and vectorized these. So now they're in vectors using image trace, just like we did before. And now if I come over here, you can see that I've added some color to them. So that's all. I want to use these to show you how I might go about building some more complex motifs where things are really layered. So I think that I want to use this kind of group of flowers here. I'll select them all and then just scale them up using the scale tool. And what I want to do is maybe build in some little centers to this flower. And I think I just need maybe a different color. I will come in here and choose maybe this darker brown color for now. Let's turn them all brown and then come in and just layer these into the centers so that they have a little bit more going on here. Now, I don't have one for here, so I'll just copy this one by holding down option key, maybe rotating it around a little bit. Okay. Now I'll zoom out, and I want to build in some leaves around these. So let's just see what's going to maybe be cute. Yeah, I think I'll use these for now. Now, if you needed to change the layer of these, you can select it and come down to a range. You can bring it to front. You can send it to the back or somewhere in the middle, you can move it up one at a time if you need to, as well. Now, as soon as I like the way one set looks, I want to select it all and then just group it together. You can also just tap Commangi on your keyboard to do the same thing. So I want to build out as many different little sets of motifs here that I can. Okay. I think I'll save these for when I get to building over here. I've got these motifs that are going to be great to use, and I think I'm ready to start building my pattern. So I also want to make sure that these are a solid color. I want to select them and use Shift M for the Shape Builder tool to just go ahead and make those solid. So let's begin to create this pattern. This time, I want to put the bounding box first. So I will select the rectangle tool, and rather than come in and draw something, I want to just click once. That way, I can type in the width and the height to be whatever I want. So why don't we go with, let's say, 700 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall and click Okay. So we'll use this to create our repeating pattern. I'll give this a kind of cream color, and I want to go ahead and send it all the way to the back of this document. So we'll need to remember 700 by 600. And what I want to do is start to build out everything on the left hand kind of margin over here. And I'll be using the rotate tools and the reflect tools in order to build something out that I think is going to flow pretty well. So again, rotate is R on your keyboard, and reflect is O on your keyboard. So I think I want to do a couple of little I don't know, groupings. Oops, that's not grouped together. A couple of little groupings of flowers. Let's see if I can use some of these in here as well. Okay. So from here, I think what I want to do is go ahead and drop this one down because I can see it's going to overlap and kind of come into this area. So this is 600 pixels tall. So with just this one selected, I'll come to transform, come down to move. We'll go zero, left and right, and then we'll go down, which is a positive 600, and I'll click Copy. So, see, I can tell that I want to bring these up a bit so that they're not touching that one. Now let's go ahead and duplicate this margin with the one on the right. That way, I can see what I'm working with. So I'll select everything that crosses over this left hand boundary. I'll come to transform, select move. And this time I'm going 700 pixels to the right, zero up and down, and I'll click Copy. Now I can work on the top edge. And so I am out of motifs, which just means I'm going to make a copy of some of these and reuse them. But a great way to do that is just to maybe turn them around and reflect them around themselves. You could even change the scale if you wanted to to ensure that they don't look like an exact copy of themselves, but they're all still very related. I'm working on just a kind of simple all over floral print, and I want it to just flow and be kind of summary and very natural. To make a copy of these, I'm holding down the option key as I move them around the document, so you can do the same thing. Oops. Okay. Let's go ahead and drop this one down so I can see what I'm working with down here. I'll select it, come to move, and then we're going zero, left and right, and positive 600 down. So I think I want to build out something here. This is looking kind of funny. Okay, let's see if I can fit this one up at the top. We'll come to transform and select Move. This time we're going up, so it's going to be negative 600. And I can see that's overlapping, and I don't really want it to, so I think I'll move this one a bit, like so. So it's really just working almost like a puzzle piece to find a flow. You can play with this until you find something that you like, and then we'll test it and see what, if anything, needs to change. So you can play with as many or as little motifs as you want. The fewer colors, the easier it will be to recolor once we get to playing with colors, that'll be in the next lesson. And so I just want to work with a couple of these extra little leaves and motifs to see if I can find a flow here that feels like, you know, it's going to go well with the pattern. You. Okay. I think I'm to a place where I'm ready to test this pattern out. One thing that could be fun is to I'm going to grab a couple of these little guys. We already use this set of little doodads, if you will, for the centers of the flowers. I actually think they would also be really cute to scatter along inside of the pattern itself with a new color. So I am just going to use the option key to drag these around and just fill in some of the open spaces that I think could use a little more filler or color or just something to liven it up a little bit. Thank you. Okay, so far, I've been really careful to match everything that crosses the top down to the bottom. Same with the left and right, but I'm not 100% sure that I did it. So at this point, I want to just kind of check all of my margins before we even check the pattern. So in order to do that, I'm going to delete everything that crosses the right hand margin and just put it back using the left hand for a guide. So transform and move. We're going over 700 pixels zero up and down, and we're clicking Copy. Okay? Now, this came on top of the flower. I want to just make sure the flour is back on top. Now we'll do the same thing with the bottom. So I'll delete everything that crosses the bottom, and then we'll move everything down from the top. And I'll click Copy. So why don't we go ahead and test the pattern and see what we think? In order to do that, remember, we'll grab the background, make a copy of it, and paste it in back. That's Command C, Command B, or control if you're on a PC. And with this selected, you'll give it no fill and no stroke. So it's back there. Now we'll select all of this and drag and drop it over to our swatches panel. If I come and draw a new rectangle, then I can fill it with our new pattern. Now, it looks pretty good. I can also come down to transform and choose scale. Remember, we'll deselect transform objects and just use our mouse to scale this down a bit to see how it's looking and actually think it's looking pretty cute. I think there's maybe area right here that I might like to fill in as well as here. So I think that area is right here that I want to work on. And so I think let's just maybe drop something like a new flower over here. So let's take this one up. I will come to transform and move, and we'll go zero, left and right, and then negative 600 up and click Copy. Let's see how that looks. I think this area right here is maybe standing out to me as well because these are just so similar. What if I came in here and with the middle one used Shift M to just close these off. And that way, it's going to look a little bit different than the one that's right underneath it. Okay, so let's re test this. I'll select it again, drag and drop it over to the Swatches panel and then select this pattern and fill it with the new one. Now we can come back to scale it down and see what we think. I think that flows really nicely. It's cute. Okay, so in the next lesson, we'll cover how to export these for gift rep and also play with different colors using a tool called the Recolor Artwork Tool. I'll meet you there. Okay. 6. Lesson 5: Preparing and Printing Your Gift Wrap: Okay, welcome back. Now we get to play with color. Before we go and upload our very own gift wrap design, I can't wait to show you. So first, I want to introduce you to a tool called the Recolor Artwork Tool. Warning you are going to love it. Maybe get a little obsessed with it. So let's take this pattern to begin with. So this was the first one that we created. When you click on the pattern that you want to change the color of, you'll see up in the top hand tool bar this little color wheel. And when you hover over it, it says Recolor Artwork Tool. So go ahead and click on that. You will get this dialog box. What I want you to do is click on Advanced Options. And if you want to skip that step in the future, you can click on Open Advanced recolor Artwork Tool every time. Now you'll see the colors here that are represented in the pattern. You'll also see all of the color groups that you have represented in your swatches panel. So you can have as many over here as you want. So if you click on the color group that we made just a couple of lessons ago, it's going to show you a new color option for the pattern that you have selected. Now, you can use this box randomly change color order to randomly change the color order. Super fun. So you can scroll through different options to see if there's anything that you like warning, you can't go back. So make sure if you find one that you like that you remember it. Now, the other thing that you can do is click on New Row to add all the colors to the panel here, and then you can drag and drop them around. So you can drag one up into the panel or change those around any way that you like. Let's see if we wanted to do something like blue and cream. You can select them to drag and drop them around as you see fit. Let's say that I want to go with something like that for this one. If you like it, you can click Okay. Then select No. Okay, so let's go over to this pattern and see if we can also find a color for this one that we like, new as well. So this one is a little bit more complicated. I'll click on it, select the recolor RW tool. This time we come directly to this panel. And now I will click on this color group and randomly go through different color options for this one. We'll see if we come across anything that looks good. I might make the flowers, cream, and then maybe the centers this yellow color. Okay, so I think that I like this. Let me click Okay, just so that I've got that one saved. Then I can come back and just play a little bit more. Oh, that one is really cute. Okay, let me play with this one for a second. I might change What if we made it all blue? I might change that dark green to a blue? Okay, let's go with this one. I like it. Okay, so have so much fun playing with color. You can always add new colors and just have a ball with it. Now I want to show you how to order your very own gift wrap. I use stationary HQ for all of my gift wrap. I love the rolls and also the sheets of gift wrap, as well. So what I do here is come up to products and choose wrapping paper. Then you have a couple of options. What I want to do is the custom wrapping paper sheets. So one of the best things to do when you are working with a company is to see if they have any downloadable templates. And stationary HQ does, oftentimes, they will. They have a Photoshop template and an illustrator template. So we want to download the wrapping paper template for Adobe Illustrator. So that automatically downloaded. All I have to do is click on it to open it, and this is the template for the wrapping paper sheet. So we can simply use their template. It has their bleed included as well. So all I'm going to do is, let's take this gift wrap, copy it. That's Command C on your keyboard. Come back over to your new document and paste it. That's Command V. And then what I want to do is add it to this wrapping paper sheet. So to do that, I'll just grab the rectangle tool, and it doesn't even have to be exact. I will probably make it a little bit too big and just draw it in here. Now, if yours did this and let's say it wasn't filled with the pattern, all you'd have to do is use the eyedropper tool to then click on the pattern to fill it with the pattern. So I'll click on this and delete it. Now, this is too little for what I'm looking for. So this sheet, if I look again, is 20 " by almost 30 ". It's 20 by 29 after it is trimmed. So if that helps you kind of give you some reference, I know I want this to be a little bit bigger. I think I'll right click Come to transform and scale this up. So now I want to deselect objects. I'm only transforming the pattern. And let's try 150%. I do want it to be a little bit small, but maybe even a little bit bigger, something like that. Okay? So I'm going to click Okay. Now let's come back over to stationary HQ. And the first thing you'll do is select upload artwork. So you can choose your file here. There's my PDF. I'll click Open. Now, you can hide those instructions right there and see a preview of your print here. This looks good. Now, I'm logged in. I've got wholesale pricing. You may or may not, depending on your business. But either way, it's a really affordable way to be able to get your own custom wrapping sheets. You can choose the quantity here, name the project if you like. The paper stock is between opaque and gloss. I typically always go with opaque. It's a beautiful map finish, but of course, it's up to you. Select the orientation if it matters. For us, it's portrait, and then simply click Add Decart. It's that easy, my friends. Now you have custom gift wrap at your fingertips. It is so much fun. It makes it so incredibly special to wrap all your gifts. I hope you enjoyed this. I cannot wait to see your gift wrap. Wow. What an incredible journey that we've just been on. I'm so proud of you for making it this far and really diving into the exciting world of surface pattern design with me. Whether you're still refining your sketches or working on your repeat pattern, or maybe you're ready to order your very own custom gift wrap. You've already taken huge steps towards turning your creative vision into something that's real and that's really exciting. But we're not quite done yet. Now it's time to bring everything together and complete your class project. This is where the magic really happens. So for your class project, you'll design your own custom gift wrap from start to finish. You'll find all the details about what to submit and how to do so on your class project in the details of this class below. Also got something really special just for you that is going to help you take your designs to the next level. So I'm thrilled to introduce the Gift Wrap printing Essentials guide. Now, this is an in depth guide. It's packed with everything you need to do to ensure that your custom gift wrap turns out perfectly. It covers file setup, resolution tips, and color accuracy so that you can be sure to just avoid any common mistakes. Make sure that your design prints exactly how you envisioned. Plus, it's filled with my best practices and a step by step checklist for flawless printing. It also includes an exclusive bonus lesson. Now, in this lesson, I'll show you how to design your very own custom tape. You could use this for things like washi tape or packaging tape. This is going to use a unique technique that really opens up a whole new world of possibilities. I'll even share my favorite printers and resources for bringing all of these things and extra touches to life. Together, this guide and the bonus lesson are designed to give you everything that you need to create a fully personalized gift presentation. So just head to the class resources to get your download and your free bonus lesson now. Thank you so much for joining me in this class. I can't wait to see the beautiful gift wrap designs that you create, and I'm even more excited to see how you'll take this newfound skill even further. Don't forget download the bonus lesson, upload your class project, and let's keep creating together.