Transcripts
1. Introduction to Class: I think everyone. I. Liz, an illustrator and surface pattern designer from Columbus, Ohio, and I'm so excited to take you through this class today. Kids prints are nursery prints are super popular right now, in for good reason. They often feature conversational, which means that they have a recognisable item in them, and sometimes they even tell a story no matter how silly it might be. And making these prints can really make you feel like a kid again and add a whimsical nature to your studio practice. So in this class we are going to explore a more illustrative and hand drawn approach to creating a repeating pattern, and this will allow you to add your own unique Sam Chiu at your kids design. I really look forward to taking you through it. In this class will explore technique, which will yield more sketchy and illustrative approach to creating repeating patterns. This will result in a hand drawn look for your kids design, allowing you to really add your own unique stamp to the pattern. I'm going to take you through how I designed these prints for my idea generation through sketching and finally developing them into repeating patterns also show you how to save your repeating pattern as a swatch in Adobe illustrator and how to say the tiling square so you can easily upload it to a website. Explain flower, and you can even order your own fabric with your design. This class is great for folks who already have some experience with Adobe Illustrator but maybe are interested in creating a repeating pattern or exploring his design or creating more of a hand drop factory eyes look for their images If you're looking for forever primer , I'm using Adobe Illustrator or creating some quirky critters that you could use in your pattern. I do have another class on skill share called from sketch to screen. It designed quirky critters using Adobe Illustrator, and that might be a great place to start. But otherwise I look forward to just jumping in with you. Thank you.
2. Class Project & Tools: for your class project. You'll be creating one conversational print and one co ordinate prints using a hand drawn technique, and you'll upload images of each print on the project page for this class and also love to see your sketching process. So if you could include a couple process images from your sketches or idea generation, that would be wonderful and would give myself and some other students more Teoh, respond Teoh and give you feedback to I look forward to seeing what you dream up in this class. Materials you'll need for this class are pretty simple access to Adobe Illustrator. I'm gonna use away come tablet, but you definitely do not need one for this class. The rendering. I'll be showing you an adobe illustrator's pretty simple and will require you to make any detailed drawings. You'll also need a paper and a pencil and access to a scanner
3. Finding Inspiration in Kids Design: all right. I brought some examples of kids designed that I really find inspirational. So I encourage you to kind of look around and see what you're interested in these air. Just a pair of little pants that my tattler has. But what I love about this is that use of sort of sketchy, hand drawn design, and you can see the line work is really dark. And then there are planes of salad color behind it. So I thought this was really nice and sort of similar to the technique that we're doing, so you might get some ideas from. It has really bold colors but pretty limited color palette. This book is my go to for inspiration. It's called Print and Pattern Kids, and it's by Bowie style. So I get out of my library. I recommend you can keep the night out for it, but there is a whole series of Clinton pattern books that they've released and is the kids specific one. So they just highlight different artists and designers who are working specifically and kids prince and there are so many different styles in here. Like I love this sort of clean you did palette of this designer. There's some really bright ones, some more hand drawn patterns that I really recommend looking at some of the used types of books. This is also a blogged that you can look at your just lots of wonderful ideas in here, and you can get a sense for what's popular and some of the aesthetic of kids design. And the next thing I'm just looking at kidsbooks. I have some around the house, and then we utilize our local library a ton. And so I really recommend just going to your library and looking at the Kids Children's Picture book section and you'll get lots of good ideas. First of all, this is a great book, but it's a Siris of a few books. But what I love about it is the illustrations are really unique. They utilize this really sketchy, hand drawn line work. Then you can see that the lines are all dark. The illustrator is using just playing blacks of color behind, and so this is really similar to the technique that we're using as well. Here's another mine. Emery. When Field Martin has, he's really beautiful, illustrated books, so you're getting a little glare there. She's a few of on This is called Dream animals. But I wanted to show you what I really loved here. So if you're looking for more sort of realistic look, this could be great inspiration as well. Then there's this, uh, this really clean, almost Scandinavian inspired design, which is used to create a prince in this book come 1000 Things, and the book has all these different sort of yet throughout it. But what I really find inspirational is this last page where you just see this pattern spread. So that is really sort of popular aesthetic, and kids design as well. This using small elements that air sort neatly laid out with the pattern. That's another idea. And finally, this is a great book guest on. But what I really find interesting about this is how the background is a painted, you know, looks like dry, brasher watercolor. And then this negative spaces left for the poppies, and then the line work is imposed on that. So that's just another way to think about ways that you can set up your composition or your design course. This isn't a pattern, but it's a just a great way to think about the aesthetic of kids design
4. Sketching: Alright, So I've got my theme. I think I'm gonna dio a woodland party of sorts for my team for my kids design. And I'm gonna use just a just some blank computer paper and a pencil that will give me a nice dark line. And the reason for that is because we're actually gonna scan this drawing right into the computer and use that Teoh make our vector image in a I And because we're using pencil, this is going to give us a little bit more of a hand drawn feel. So the first thing I'm gonna dio is I'm just gonna start sketching some types of images that I know I want in my design. And I definitely want a little character of sorts and I think that I want a little hedgehog , so I'm gonna just start by drawing Little nose has sort of, ah, gumdrop shaped body here. I'm not gonna worry too much about exactly how this looks, because I'm definitely gonna go through and edit my drawings. It's a good idea to draw way more than what you need or what you think you need. This is just kind of giving me an idea. It's a woodland party, so my head shot has to have a hat come out and a little bit. It was a happy little guy, man. It's all these little sort of textured spike surfer. Not exactly sure the specifics, Hedgehog. The reason why I chose the hedgehog is because my son, who actually is turning to this week, has a little stuffed animal had shot that goes everywhere with us, and it's really cute. He just started saying Hedgehog, but he says it different every single time. So I'm making this print for him and thought for sure a hedgehog has to be there. All right, so that's why did the head Shah guy I'm keeping this little guy's pretty simple. And I recommend that with any little creatures or critters or animals that you draw, we try a couple more. I don't know that I'm going to use them, but I'm just gonna draw them in my serve initial sketch here. The next fella I'm gonna make is a little well, dear. And again, I'm just starting with, like this elongated, gumdrop shaped. This is a little deer that standing up probably dancing or frolicking. Most of my creatures end up doing several years. This one is just happy as can be Bali, Teoh some antlers, some little spots. All right, so that fella, uh, maybe, uh, squirrel wearing a party hat and pants. That sounds like a good idea. You start with the nose here, and normally I start with the body because it's the easiest Teoh Visualize, but have been knows this. I'm going to draw the midline just so I haven't ideas to wear and go in this square. Are is resting maybe on a log. If you're interested in drawing, really simplify characters and you have a class one of my other classes on skill share. It's called from sketch to screen design, quirky critters using Adobe Illustrator. And in that class, I go a little bit, uh, just a little bit more into depth. How I would do simplified all kinds of simplified characters. So you're looking for a little more information there. Just want to spend more time doing some simple critters. I recommend that wine you do a little all whoa bunny jumping out of a cake or pop in over the side of a key pause some long years Is this a simple Well, bunny? A little bow, some frosting. No cake is complete without it. No, please, for the cake. Maybe some candles to put two. Because my son second birthday. All right, so there's some critters. And now what I want to do is fill in some other, get some other elements going indefinitely. You want some large scale and some small scale parts to your pattern? I recommend I've spent some time sketching, and I've come up with some different ideas and some things. I just drew the same thing again and again, which is a pretty sure fire I way of realizing that you want that in your design. So I had I ended up making a word association list, which really helped me out when it came to working on my design. So those were some ideas. Just a Can I get me going? Live sketch. So I drew some faxes with balloons wearing clothes, and then I sort of ended up drying the same thing again and again. So now it's a good time to start editing your sketches and prepare them to scan into the computer. This will make the whole rest of the illustrating and pattern making process a little bit more simple, So we want to retain the sketchy quality. That's why we use pencil on paper and we are gonna scan this directly into your computer. So as a result, these air not going to be perfect sketches the way this is rendered, it's not gonna be a clean graphic. You can if you want to make it a clean graphic. You can just either take a photo of thes or scan them into your computer and redraw them and illustrator. But what I'm gonna guide you through is this really hand drawn illustrate of look, that's a little bit more sketchy, so there are a couple things to keep in mind. The first thing is that any lines that are touching once they go into illustrator will all end up the same color. And that's not a big deal if you want everything to be this in color. If you do have anything that you want to be filled in like this moon, just make sure that the lines air touching so that it makes a complete shape. That's important. The next thing you'll want to dio is look and see if you have any layered images. I think this head Chuck has a lot of layers, and I want them all to be different colors. Which means I'm gonna have to break up my drawing. I want this face and the base of the body to be a peachy color. I want the for to be like a darker brown. I'm going to do away with the little legs here. I'm just going to simplify it more. I want the facial features to be a darker color and the cheeks to be like a blush. Then I want this party hat and little pom pom to be another color so none of these elements can be touching. So this is where the tracing paper comes. Just gonna, uh, first of all, I guess, picked the I drew a bunch of hedgehogs. Just gonna pick the one. You think I wanted this one. Take the one that I want And much like an animator from the fifties, I am gonna use my tracing paper. Teoh, break this head shot up by color. So I'm gonna start with the base shape which I want to be peach and I know that I want the nose and then the back of the body to all be peach colored. So I'm just going to make it one shape and leave it at that. I'm gonna move my deeper down when I do this kind of thing. I like to do it all in a line. So when I scan it in, I can tell which parts go go where? Because it can get kind of confusing if you're just making blobs of texture, which I often do like I don't remember where this life the next thing I'm gonna dio is the for here. Make sure on your paper you're far enough away from your next element that you could get like a mouse. Uh, you know, click your mouse in between. Just makes it easier thing I'm gonna dio or the facial features and these cause they're not gonna be touching each other at all. Um, I'm just going to do them all together, even though the cheek is gonna be a different color. That won't be a problem. And then I'm going to do there hat the reason why it's helpful. Teoh, do this country Singh paper as opposed to just drawing it again and again in separate elements on your original sheet of paper is because it helps you keep everything the same scale. So when see you scan it into the computer, you're not guessing, uh, what size is appropriate for your hedgehog for for instance. It's just all the same scale as long as you don't mess with the scale. When you scanned it in, then it's all set for you. All right, So I think the head shot is the only element that I'm gonna worry about this separation with. I am going to use a hedgehog. Put this aside so it doesn't get in the way. And I'm gonna use these leaves. And I've already thought about it. And what I want to do is have the whole outline of the leaf plus the vein one color, and then I'm just gonna draw, like, just a basically shape behind this an illustrator and just set it as a plane color. And that way I can make it kind of bleed out over the edge of the leave, and it will have almost like I'm this printed look to it, which I kind of want I like that in perfect misprinted sketchy effect. I'm gonna do the same process with the balloons here in the mushroom and just gonna fill in the top with color. And then I'm gonna color all of the's probably white or cream color. And I think that will be fine if any of them are touching. I can just use my eraser tool, Teoh, create a separation there. Since it's not, it's definitely not a precise drying here. And then this moon, I'm just gonna color in with a solid color. Same with the stars. So I am ready to scan in. I know which elements I want. I'm actually just gonna pull start to indicate next next to the elements so I know what to scan in, and then I'm ready to scan. So spend a little time picking out which sketches you want to keep. Which ones you want a skin and how you want. It's a look once you're in illustrator and even if you conditional eyes the completed pattern, um, and that will help you determine which elements you want to separate like this and which ones you're OK either. Filling in with just a solid color or you want to just make a basic color background before . So with that, I will see you at the scanner.
5. Transferring to the Computer: all right, I'm ready to scan my elements. I am starting with my hedgehog, which is the only element I had used tracing paper for because I wanted to make sure that I could bring in all the elements separately, but keep them the same scale. And I did that because I just want to make sure I can easily that all of the elements different colors. So with that one, I just loaded it into my scanner because tracing paper is a bit translucent. I just went ahead and put a piece of plain white people behind it. Just how may get a little bit more opaque with this scan, I don't have a special scanner. I just have a like a regular office scanner. Think any scanner would be pretty much but sufficient for this project. So I'm just however you open your standard in your computer, go ahead and do that. I have to go into system preferences and then I go into scan open scanner, and it's just gonna go ahead and give me ah little preview ist. And as I open it Oh, I like to new black and white Stan and then the biggest thing is the highest resolution that you can. Ah, which for me is 600 D. P. I I recommend scanning in. At that size, I'm gonna scan it to my desktop, and I'm going to name it, um, head shot. We're gonna go ahead and do Joe pay. So because all I just have a few elements on here, and I specifically drew them so that they're a little bit separate enough so that it's easy . Teoh, use an illustrator. I'm just gonna scan them in altogether. But I dio want Teoh draw a little bounding backs so I don't have to worry about all the rest of that white page. So I'm gonna just bring it in kind of close, and that's probably good. And I did that because I clicked Use custom size, and that allowed me Teoh, create my bounding box. So once I'm all set, I'm just gonna hit scan, okay? And now I'm going to go ahead and switch pages. All right, so I just hit overview eso I could get an image as to what I'm about to scan in for this next page. And for me, this is the last page. It has all the elements that I would like on it. But you may have multiple pages going, and that's okay, too. You'll just repeat this steps. So I'm going. Teoh, First of all, moved this bounding box over. I put little stars next to the elements that I knew I wanted to scan in for sure. And those I can easily erase an illustrator, so I'm just not gonna worry about them on, and I'm going to take these bit by bit. And the reason for that is because it's a bit easier to bring in your elements section by section Ah, rather than a whole entire condensed page like this one where I did not organize it very well. When I was sketching, I was just drawing. And that way it's a little bit easier to clean up each image. So I'm just gonna bring in little groups that a time I'm going to start with these leaves. And I'm doing the same process that I used before. Same settings, highest DP. I available black and white, and I'm gonna go ahead and make sure I rename each one, um, with the identifying the elements that are inside. So I'm going to start with leaves, and then I just adjust the bounding box so that it fits into so that my element fits into it. No need to do an overview for this. I trust that that's gonna work. Hit scam If at any point, I'm not sure, I just have them going right to my desktop for easy access. And I can just go ahead and look and say, OK, that is pretty much what I'm looking for. No need for perfection. Now I'm gonna move my bounding box over. Actually, I'll probably do this little squirrel next. Not one that I start, but one that I might want. So I'm at least gonna bring it in to my best to cut out outside elements. But like I said before, if a little bit of the next store element comes then then that's okay. All right, I'm gonna move my founding box again. So it just moved through, uh, all your element. Try Teoh, scan them in smaller sections and I will see you back here. - I see something I like to do to keep everything organized is I like to make a separate folder just for that prince. I put all my elements in here. It's also nice just to keep those scans in the event that you want to use them for another project in the future or something happens to your file and you need to go back and replace an image. It's good Teoh to store everything at every stage. So I'm gonna go ahead and move into Illustrator, I'll see you there.
6. Working in Adobe Illustrator: I'm going to start by opening the program. We're gonna create a new document and I'm going Teoh, go ahead and walk you through some of these presets. So especially for a pattern I like to work in a square. It doesn't really matter what size I usually work 2000 by 2000 pixels, and that's what I'm gonna do for this project. So I recommend you do the same. But if you have a different size that you prefer, you can go ahead and do that. I do recommend just keeping it square. And if you don't see pixels over here, you can go ahead and hit the drop down. And then so after pixels, I'm gonna go into advanced options, make sure that you are working in rgb color and that you're working in the highest resolution possible, which is 300 pixels per inch. Then I click create, and the first thing I'm gonna dio is bringing my images. And so I went ahead and save them into a folder, and I'm just going to select them and then drop them right into my file. So I don't recommend changing the size of them right now. until you're actually putting your pattern together. And that's because you did this out of specific scale, especially any elements you separated using tracing paper, you'll want to make sure that they are consistent with one another. So I have them all in a little pile here. Just gonna go ahead and separate them. So I have all of my elements separated, and I'm gonna go through one at a time and use the image. Trace tool, Teoh Vector. Rise them. So what you'll do for this is go up to the top of your adobe illustrator window and you'll see mysteries. If you're set up, doesn't look like this. You can do one of two things or both. I am in the painting mode of Illustrator. That's typically what I work in. If you're says something else up here, you can select the drop down and move through these different modes. The's just changed the tools that are available to you, so I work in painting. Um, most of the time you can. Also if you if I'm ever using a tool and you don't see it or you need a tool and you don't see it, go to window, It's a draft down and then you can just select the tool that you need. So if you need image trace, you select it and it will pop up Ah, whole separate box with that tool in it. So now I can see him in trace two ways. So what I'm gonna dio is go in to Image Trace and I'm gonna select sketched art and you can see it already has done something. And I lost, like, 90% of my image. So what I'm going to dio is up with the threshold a little bit. Just makes it a little darker if you don't get everything that you need all of the lines that you made. If you don't see them, you're gonna wanna up the threshold, then once you can kind of see everything that you need. Teoh, your lines are complete. Then what you can do is hit the advanced drop down right here, and you can start to adjust the hands and I just want you to keep in mind. This is sort of a fine tuning tool which helps can act little white spots in a line. If it's not complete, this will make your file bigger really quickly if you select a higher number of paths, so just keep an eye on the number of anchors as you're moving through. Of course, some settings. We're gonna add Blackmore anchor points because what that's doing is it's helping more of your image come through, and so that's fine. But you just want to make sure that your entire file doesn't contain these images, which have tons and tons of paths in anger points. I also like Teoh, adjust the noise level so that I can pick up some of the more sketchy areas of my drawing. So my idea with most of these elements is that I'm actually going to draw shape behind them . So I don't necessarily need these lines to be complete, because I'm not gonna fill them in as a complete shape for the most part, So I'm not too concerned about that. If you do want to fill them in as a complete shape, you're gonna want to make sure that all of your lines connect, and I can see here that this example would not work as a complete shaped like you could not use the life paint tool or anything like that, because these don't match each other. There's an open spot here, so in that case, you would want to go through and adjust your threshold in order to make that connect. But I like this look and pretty happy with it. Another note is to make sure you select ignore White. So what that does is it takes away all the white parts of the paper and just leaves you with these black lines. And so once I'm all set, I'm gonna hit expand, And then I'm gonna go through and do this with all of my elements. So I'm gonna show you how we do it with these mushrooms because they do want a different effect slightly with these and that is going up the threshold. I do want to fill these in as a complete shape, so I want to make sure that my line around the outside of the mushroom doesn't have any gaps in it, so that looks pretty good. We're gonna see if I can get a little bit more noise in here. Let's see, just sometimes I like to play around and just see, what would it look like? if I went totally one direction or another. But I think I like That was some extra little specks. Ignore why that looks good to me. I'm gonna hit expand, and then I'm actually just going to move this over to the other side, going Teoh Ungh. Group this. And that's because I have a bunch of other stuff that came in with this image that I don't want. So I'm gonna delete it now before I move on. So the mushrooms air done. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and just work through using image trace for the rest of my elements and I'll meet you back here. So I've brought all of my sketches into illustrator and I've used image Trace Teoh make them all vectors. So the next thing I'm gonna do is set my color palette and I have already picks an image. I actually made a little image here of colors that I wanted to use, and I saved it. But what you can dio if you have a photograph or something that you really like the colors of and want to set a color palette, I'm going to show you how to do that. Really, quickly. Just have my image up here. And I know there are 123456789 until 11. Colors that I'm gonna use. So I'm going to go over to my rectangle tool, which for me, was hidden under the Ellipse tool here. And I'm just going to make 11 rectangles. I'm going to make sure they have a fill color, but no stroke color. I'm going to hold down shift as I drag out my square where my rectangle and that keeps it a square. I'm just gonna make three gonna go over to my direct selection tool, which is them Black Arrow. I'm gonna highlight all three, and I'm gonna duplicate these three squares, so have highlighted them all. I'm gonna hold down option and shift to keep them in line. That option duplicates them. Shift keeps them in line. And I'm going Teoh drag. Just simply drag him over to the right. I'm gonna release my mouth before I release those two buttons. I mean, repeat that, but I'm gonna highlight all of them, slept options, start to drag them, and then hitch our hold down shift and move them to the right, Release my mouse and then release option and shift. Okay, so now what I'm gonna do is use the eyedropper tool. I'm gonna select whichever box I want to change. And basically, I'm gonna take both colors and put them into these squares here. So I select my first square. I'm gonna hit the eye for eye dropper. Alternatively, you can find it over here on your side menu. I just left my first color. Go back to my black arrow. The direct selection tool. I'm gonna move onto my next color hit. I did that Grey in there, and I'm just going to repeat this process until all of my colors air loaded. Alright. So I've put all my colors from my picture into these little square so I can go ahead and delete this picture, and then I am going Teoh, highlight all of my squares and I'm gonna go over to my slashes menu on the side here. And if you don't see it again, select your window, draft down, go down and select swatches. And what I'm gonna dio is go, Teoh, this little icon of a folder which is at the very bottom of the swatches menu when you have her over it, it says new color group and just gonna click on that, uh, color group. One is a fine name for me, but if you want to change it, Teoh kind of identify your color set here, that's fine. And then click. OK, And I have saved these colors up here, and I am really like to keep my document as, like, empty as possible. So I'm gonna delete these other ones because I don't want them. So they load in sometimes thes preset colors. So I'm just going to click on the group up here deleted. I don't want that one. I don't want these shades of gray. I'm gonna delete it. I'm just using that trash. Can I gone here? Get rid of all of these colors except black and white. So I slept the 1st 1 and then I hold down shift, select the last one, and it will highlight all of them and then use that trash can deletes election. Okay, so I'm here. I just have these, uh, colors that I want to use, and I'm gonna go ahead and start painting my work and colorizing it I did. Scanning and vector rise more than I actually want. I think that I just want a few of these elements to carry forward, and some of them I'm just gonna save for later for another design. All right, I'm going to start with this little hedgehog, which I broke into parts just going to show you how tow pilot back up on to itself and make it a hedgehog again. So I want the body to be this, like, peachy color that I've made. So I'm just gonna highlight it and then select that swatch and then I'm gonna use the life paint tool because I know it's a complete shape, Teoh, fill it in. So I'm just gonna hit the letter K for the shortcut. You can also go over Teoh your menu on the side here and select the life paint bucket which looks like a little paint bucket with a couple of squares that it's filling up. If you don't see that, it's hidden under this shape builder tool. The next thing I'm gonna dio is take my little head Shug, for here. Just gonna select all of it. I'm gonna hit command G just to group it all together, and then I'm going Teoh, we pick this sort of poker color. That's pretty good. Gonna move it out. You're trying to layer elements, and they're not like quite where you want them to be. This for was in the background or something. You would just go to abject, select a range and then bring to front. And that would bring your element forward. Sometimes they get kind of stacked up on each other. Next, I'm gonna dio all the facial features. Except that Sheikh. Yeah, I'm just going to make them this dark blue. Then bring him up later on, right on top of my little head. Drugs fees. This is the little cheek would make it a pink. Then my party hat. Let's see, maybe t all put it right on top there. Okay, This is an example where my party hat is in the back, but I want it to be in the front, so I'm gonna go object arrange bring two friends a little thing on top of the hat. I didn't have it can float up there. All right, That's pretty good. Select all of it. Group it together. Men have a Q A head shot. I'm gonna go ahead and paint this mushroom because this is an enclosed shape. I'm just going to use my life paint bucket to make it all one color. But the only thing is the use little spots. I want them to be white or cream colored. And I can see already that I've one area where the spot is touching the outline, and therefore, it's all gonna end up the same color unless I separate it. So I'm just gonna use my racer. I'm gonna go in and just draw line and problem solved. All right? I want my outline to the dark blue so that it kind of goes with the facial features of the hedgehog. And then I'm gonna make just the mushroom top, this orangey color when g reddish color. And so to do that, I'm gonna use the life paint bucket. You slept the color. I would like that orange and then just tap where I want it. So that's pretty good. And then I want all these spots to be cream colored. So I'm going to select one, hold down shift and just keep selecting them until I have all the little bits and pieces and nooks and crannies that I want to be cream colored selected that I'm just gonna hit the color I want and move on to the next mushroom, which I'm going to do exactly the same way. All right. Mushrooms are all set. I'm gonna go ahead and group each one just to make sure it can all stay together. And I like the play here of color versus no color. There's no color in the stem of the mushroom. And I think that that looks kind of nice. I like I'm gonna leave it like that the next way I want to show you how to color her, how I'm gonna color. These are the leaves. And the reason for this is because I'm gonna draw shape behind the leaf so it looks kind of like offset an offset prints a little bit. So I'm gonna pick my color for my lead outline. Germany's yellow, maybe like this one's kind of were courage. And then what? I'm gonna dio and I'm gonna use my weight come tablet for this, but it's not necessary. This is pretty just pretty basic shape. You could probably do it with your mouse without a problem. We're gonna go over to my side bar here and select my pencil tool. Then I'm gonna pick the color that I want. So I'm gonna start with this yellow leaf, and what I'm gonna do is the orange behind it. So I'm gonna draw she and I'm gonna mimic the shape of the leaf, but not make it lineup. Exactly. And then right now, I have no feeling no stroke, and I'm just going to hit this orange. You can also just go over to your swatches and hit the color and make sure it's just filling. It's the fill color I supposed to this drug color. And then I wanted to be behind my Leafs. I'm going to go up to the very tap go object a range send to back. All right. And I like the look of that. I'm going to repeat it for my other leaf from the different color. So back to the pencil tool. I think I'm gonna do this like darker orange. Offset it this way. And then again, object arrange send to back. Actually, I'm just gonna make this on a little bit bigger. It was a little to offset for me there. Okay, so I have to leaves and pretty happy with that. I think I'm just gonna leave it at those two. And those are the three main ways that I'm going to color these elements. So I will meet you back here after I'm done colorizing them.
7. Composing Your Hero Pattern: Theo time, you're working with repeating patterns. It's really nice to work in pairs or small collections, which would be a group of maybe six patterns which work together. And the reason for this is so that you have it some patterns that you compare together in certain situations. An example would be that you could use one pattern for a pillowcase and the other for Do they cover often times when you're working in pairs, as we are for this project. Or if you're working in a small collection, you'll have at least one more complex prints, which seems to sort of anchor the patterns together. And that's often referred to as your hero Prince. This pattern and it typically has lots of different elements working together before dealing with kids to sign. It usually has lots of characters in it or some characters. So as you're thinking about your conversational print, it's really nice to think about what elements could go on to become a more simple and more quiet coordinate print. Alright, so I've got all the elements that I want to use for my pattern colored. There were some that I have fact arised and then decided. I probably don't want for this pattern because I just want to keep it a little bit more clean than that. So we're gonna go ahead and move these little guys over to the right. These other ones, I didn't use its nice to just save him. And can I have him live somewhere in Vector World on your computer? Because you might want him in the future, especially if you're thinking about turning this print into part of a collection which might have 10 or 12 patterns in it, Then you can. Then those would come in really handy. Okay, the next thing I'm gonna do is just make this everything a little bit larger and actually going to do it one at a time. So I'm gonna go ahead and start building my pattern. One thing you want to keep in mind when building a repeating pattern is that anything that goes off the edge on any side has to be repeated on its opposite side. So anything that goes off the edge and the tap needs to be repeated in the exact same point as on the bottom. Anything that goes off the edge on the left has to be repeated at the exact same point on the right and in order to make your pattern look pretty seamless, it's a good idea. Teoh have elements off of most of the sides. So I'm gonna show you how to do that. I suggest building the top edge and then the left edge, then building your pattern in words and then leave a little space on the right and bottom edges because you know you're elements are gonna be repeated over there, So I'm gonna just start placing some elements and show you what I mean. So actually like to leave most of my elements over here and just use duplications of them in my pattern. So in order to duplicate an element, I'm going Teoh, hold down the option key, Select my element. Move it over, Teoh. Just any spot and then release my mouse. Then release my option key and that will duplicate it. Alternatively, you can copy and paste the element as well. So I'm gonna go ahead and start by pushing this hedgehog up and actually went to be alone with smaller think all right. And then I'd like another had chug, but going the other way. So I'm gonna go ahead and go back to my actually might go up to this head child since I changed the scale, I'm gonna select option drag my headshot, aghh down, release my mouse released option. And then I actually want to flip the direction. And this is something I recommend when using the same element again and again is transforming it a little bit. So you'll go toe object, select the first option, which is transform. I'm going to go ahead and reflect, and I always select preview so I can see what it's gonna do. And I'm just gonna reflect it this way, vertically. So that's what I wanted gonna select. Okay. And I'm gonna have this one kind of going off of the left edge here, and I'd like to lay out my larger or more important elements first, and then fill in my smaller elements around that it's gonna have this headshot came out in the middle. I'm gonna go ahead and repeat this one. So again, I'm just gonna hold down option Jake it over. I'm just gonna eyeballing what I think will look good. Um, this It's a lot of trial and error. Okay, I think I'm going to do the balloons next. Is there a pretty large element? Although, I don't think I want that many of them. Mm. Start here on option. Should I think I kind of want this on to go behind my head shots? I'm gonna go object, arrange send to back. And that's gonna help me layer where these elements are. And this also gonna flip. So I'm going to go object. Transform reflects. Okay. I can see it that it's gonna run into when I repeat the head shot that's over here on the left. It's gonna be right about here, and I can see it's going to get It's gonna kind of cover up the balloons. I might change their position a little. It is okay with me to lay your stuff, but just kind of want to give it a little bit more space than that. All right, I'm gonna go ahead and start with this mood like this to go behind the hedgehog. I like these two colors together. The code, the head shot and the color of the moon. I'm gonna hold down Option. Pull it over here. object Transform flecked. Okay, Mingo in a couple different ways. Maybe it's up here. Okay, I'm gonna move on to the mushrooms. You can put them in the middle. Now, I think, actually want more mushrooms than what I had originally planned. So I'm just gonna repeat one of these Hold down action, uh, object transform. I'm gonna reflect it. And then I'm actually just gonna change this scale. Little, maybe a little smaller. I just did that by holding down shift and pulling in on one of the corners. Same with this option. Move it over to the side. I'm gonna hit, transform, reflect, make it go the other direction. Okay? And then again, hold down shift and make it a little bit smaller. Okay? I like that little grouping and the mushrooms air. Really fun. I think I'm your scatter some Peter around. That's a little too lined up. So I'm gonna keep working, and I'm gonna go ahead and lay out the rest of my elements. And I'm only gonna were really worry about working in the middle, the top and the left side. All right, so I'm at a little bit of road black here and I just I can't really figure out exactly where to go next. So whenever you hit that point, I recommend starting Teoh, transform your elements a little bit. So we're gonna go ahead and make sure that all the elements that are at the top here are repeated at the bottom. And I'm going to do that by just dragging my mouse across anything that hangs off the tap going object, transform, move. And I don't want to move it Any points horizontally because that would be right or left. I just want to move it down to the bottom, so I want to move it vertically. That would mean I want a positive number here, and it has to be exactly the same size as your square. So I'm going to move it down. 2000 points or 2000 pixels. If I wanted to move it up 2000 pixels, I would just put a negative right in front of here like that. But I don't. I want to move it down. So I'm gonna leave a positive number and the number you're moving it is always the size of that dimension of your square. So if you're square is 500 by 500 pixels. Then you would move your elements down 500. So just something to keep in mind. It does take a little bit of time playing around with it, especially if you start putting elements on other sides of your canvas and kind of moving them back and forth. Once I'm all set here, I want to make sure that I hit Copy. I don't want to just move those elements. I want to put elements that are exactly the same down at the bottom, Something hit. Copy. And there we go. I'm gonna do the same thing on the left hand side here, and I always build on the top in the left hand side because any time I move it, it will be a positive number, so that makes it a little easier to start out with. So I go toe object, transform, move. And then now I don't want to move it vertically. So I'm gonna turn that 20 I want to move it horizontally, and I want to move it. Right. So that's a positive number, you know, Put in 2000 and then hit. Copy. So now I can see where what's going on here? Another note. If you have elements that are layered, like this trio right here, I have a moon. I have balloons and a hammerhead shark. You want to make sure they're in the same order here as they are here. I have run into that mistake several times, as I've been making patterns and not caught it right away, so just double check that. So now that I have some of my name elements laid out, I'm gonna go ahead and, uh, work through the middle here and I'll get back to you when I'm all set. All right. So changed a few things on my pattern, but for the most part, I'm happy with how it looks because I changed so much of it. I went ahead and got rid of everything that was hanging off the side in the repeating section. So I'm gonna go ahead and repeat that now. - I thought Okay, I think I'm happy with this. And now I'm ready to see what it looks like as a pattern. So there are a couple steps left. One of them is to draw a square. That is exactly the size of your canvas. The easiest way to do that is to use the rectangle icon. Just click once, and then you're gonna want it to be 2000 by 2000 or the exact size of your square. I'm don't worry about the color right now. I'm gonna use my align tools, which looked like this. If you don't see them, you can go to your window, dropped down and find a line Click on that and it will show you the line tools. I want to align it horizontally in vertically and that will lined it up exactly with art word. Now I can see I lost my pattern here, and that's simply because my square is sitting on top off my pattern. And I wanted to sit behind, So I'm gonna go object, arrange send to back. All right. Now I can start thinking if I wanted ah, background color. What? I want that to look like actually, for this I do really like the idea of just white in which he's in. Just bring the waste where, but it's can explore warming it up a little. Grayish bluish, right. That actually looks pretty nice. But it does wash out my pattern, especially mill had shots a little. I don't leave it like that for now. And see you have your square in the background. Leave just your square selected. And I want you to copy and paste it directly behind itself. So you can go command, see for copy and to me and be peace and back. And then you want to do it. No stroke in no fell. Alternatively, you can copy and paste on. And then when you paste it, just select the peace and back option. Then you're gonna highlight a vory thing. All the elements that hang off your pattern, all your squares. Uh, just a reminder. If you locked anything for some reason, unlock it before you do this. So if you have any almonds, you laugh so you couldn't move on. You went to unlock them at this point. So I have everything highlighted my transparent square, my colorful square and then all of my arms. And I'm just gonna select it and move them over to my slashes. You'll see a green plus sign. Just drop it over there in that has made your pattern. Now it's a good idea to test it. And I'll tell you, I make, uh, probably half a dozen versions of the same pattern, because when I test it, I'll see No, you know, mistake. I made an element. I forgot to repeat something like that. So, um, I always draw a rectangle. Anime get larger than my tiling square. So that gives me a chance to really look at the repeat and see how it's doing. And I'm actually pretty happy with this. I do just want to see what it looks like with a white background so you can play around with your colors and see. See what works. Rio. Yeah. Once you're all set, you have your pattern now saved as a swatch. So I'm gonna show you how to say that in the next one.
8. Save Your Swatch & Make a Tiling Square: all right. The next thing I'm gonna dio iss save my swatches. So I'm gonna do that by going over Teoh my swatches panel here. I can see I have my parents watches. And I always like to save the colors that I used as well. And you can do that so that you could make coordinates easily that are in the same color family. Or you can re color the pattern if you like. I'm gonna go down Teoh my swatches library menu, which is the icon that has it Looks like a little stack of books. Select the draft down, save swatches. And I have named this file hedgehog party print. You can name it whatever you want and hit save. So if I ever want to pull those up in a different file, I would just open that same panel, go down to user defined, and then I'll see the hedgehog party print and that will pull up exactly what I have on the right hand side here. The next thing I'm gonna dio is make my tiling square, which means that I'm just taking a little snapshot of my art board and the reason why you might want to Tiling square is because if you wanted to upload your fabric to a website like spoon flour, they don't want the whole pattern swatch you made in a I They want your tiling square, and that's what the repeat. So how's of that? You'll want to adhere to the same rules Where your elements that go off the top side of your square. I repeated exactly at the same point on the bottom side and vice vers. So the easiest way to do that without moving any of your elements is Teoh. Just save your art board. So I'm going Teoh, go to file export export as and I'm just gonna leave it as head shock party print. Um, I like to use a PNG file select use art boards And then I just have one up here. But if I had made multiple art boards for some reason, I would select range and then the which ever art board I wanted to export. And then I am gonna name this something else. I'm gonna name it headshot party square. That way I know that that is what I want to put on Spin flower, OK and I always start by saving it at the highest resolution, and I'm gonna select okay, and then spoon Flowered wants a resolution of 150 pixels per inch on the swatch or the tiling square that you upload. So I do like to save a separate one at 1 50 And the reason why I always start by saving ah , high high resolution one at 300 pixels per inch is because if anything happened, you can always take that file and make the resolution smaller. Whereas you cannot take a file that has a lower resolution and make it larger. Once you cut that away, you've cut it away. So that's why I always make too. So I'm going to do the same thing file export export as, and then I'm gonna say Hedgehog Square 1 50 That way, I know that's the one. That's the slightly lower Resolution P and G file use art boards export. And then I'm gonna make sure I actually make it 150 pixels per inch instead of just titling it with that. And so I go to the draft down under resolution and hit medium 1 50 pixels per inch a man slept. Okay, I am just gonna quickly show you how to upload your tiling square to spoon flour. The recent why you might want to do this, if you're interested, is that it's an easy way to get your fabric printed up. So if you wanted to make something with it, I said that I want to make a baby blanket or little, I guess. Tattler blanket for my son with this print. So I'm going to go ahead and just uploaded to spoon flour in order some fabric. I'm just going to show you how to upload it, so spoon flour. You can go to the website. Just spoon flour dot com. You'll have to make an account. It's free to do that. You can, even if you're really into it. You can open up a shop and sell your designs. Teoh other people to anyone on spoon flour. Or you can just keep them for yourself. That's totally up to you. So once you're spoon flour, you'll want to go to design and sell and upload your design. They make it pretty easy, and you can see here that format recommendations which we adhere to So I just selected my file that I wanted to upload. I made sure it was the P and G file That was the 150 pixels per inch one. I confirm your copyright. So you developed it yourself. You own the rights to it and then hit Upload. So this is what it looks like for some reason. And I can't quite explain why the preview always looks a little bit more blurry than the actual Zain. So so long is your design is not blurry and you've saved it at the proper dp I and you started out with a pretty large square. So ours was 2000 by 2000 which is pretty large, then your it will turn out OK, eso here they're all sorts of options On the right hand side. I always work under the fabric one because I have actually have done wallpaper. But unless you're specifically doing well paper or you want to sell wallpaper, you'll want to work under fabric. And because of the way we set up our tiling square, we're gonna want to stick with the basic creepy and then you could make it at the scale a little bit different if you like, so you can get a sense as to how large you're looking here because thes air inches across. So if I'm dealing with a blanket, I think I want to make it a little a little bit smaller. Like maybe that I think that scale is gonna work for me. I'm gonna save that layout. Okay, so I saved that layout, and there are number of other things you can do here so you can just order what you like If you want to order your fabric. If you want to sell your fabric, you have to do something else. And that's that. You have to order a tests. Watch before you can sell it. So you've got to order the test watch. You'll get it in the mail and you'll make sure everything looks good. And then you will be able to make your design available to sound the marketplace. Oh, that is how you upload it to spoon flour
9. Making Your Coordinate Pattern : so to make a coordinate Prince. I didn't go back into my hero design or my sort of main print on Find some different elements that I am really inspired by and said Just starting by Looking back at my sketches , You can look back at the pattern that you made a computer kind of see how it turned out. But I was really drawn Teoh this little scribble I did in the head child's cheek. And so I was thinking, kind of open sickle, poking at for mine co ordinate That's multi colored, and we're gonna go ahead and follow through with that. But I'm gonna do a little scribble that instead of just a solid poke at. And then I think I might go had a make a plane color dot behind it. So it has a similar effect Is the Euro pattern, but a slightly different I'm not sure about that. I won't know until I see it, but because I didn't repeat the same element again and again, this dot will become really identifiable if I just use the same one, so I'm just gonna go ahead and draw a whole page of these little hand drawn, poking ass. All right, pretty simple. I'm gonna go ahead and repeat all the steps I took when it came to making my hero patterns . So I'm gonna scan this into the computer unit Vector eyes, these lines using in his trace. And then I'm gonna go ahead and color them, and then I'm going Teoh experiment with the adding some plain dots of color behind them and kind of see what works will kind of take you quickly through that process and meet you back at my screen in just a minute.
10. Final Thoughts: thank you so much for taking this class. I hope it was is wonderful for you as it waas for me. So just to recap in this class, we talked a little bit about what a hero prince is and what a conversational print is. And then how to develop a coordinate prints from that. And we also covered the development of a kids design. What Talibans typically go into kids design, And how do you create the simplicity that is typically at work in a kids or nursery prints ? Then we thought about where our print is going to live. And use that to help determine a little bit more about how we are going to actually design the elements in our prints and the print as a whole. Then we worked with Pencil and our scanner to create the sort of hand drawn, vector ized look in Adobe Illustrator and then colorized are elements created that into pattern, and now we are able Teoh usar pattern for a multitude of things, and I just want to remind you because it's vector. That means that you can you say, on a pretty large scale or a small scale if you like. That means that you won't lose any resolution as you change the size of your pattern. So for your project, I love to see what you've made. I just want to remind you to go ahead and upload your conversational prints and your co ordinate print plus sums examples of inspections to the project page in this class. And I absolutely cannot wait to see what you created with your pattern. Thank you so much for taking this class. I look forward to the next one.
Liz Trapp, artist
