Introduction to Quilt Design: Create a Quilt Mockup in Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] As an artist, showcasing your work in unique ways can really help you stand out. If you're a surface pattern designer, creating a quilt mock-up that features patterns from your collection, can really show how the patterns go together and to tell a story. Or perhaps you're a quilter, creating a quilt mock-up is a great first step to creating a quilt pattern that's more personal and meaningful than creating one from a pre-written pattern. Hi, my name is Julie Ray and I'm a textile artist, quilt pattern writer, and surface pattern designer based in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. I've been quilting and designing quilt patterns for nearly a decade. I've designed and created quilts as personal gifts, for commissions to sell as written patterns, and as a way to showcase my surface pattern design collections. I created this class because I think quilts are such a beautiful art form and such a wonderful way to bring a design collection together and tell a cohesive story. I love designing quilts and I wanted to share what I know about designing quilts with you to help you accomplish whatever your goals might be. For me, quilting provides a creative outlet. It provides a space for both play and precision, and it gives me the opportunity to work with a medium, fabric, that I find so satisfying. It also offers me the opportunity to slow down, which is really important in our fast-paced world. You might be wondering, why design a quilt mock-up? There might be a number of reasons depending on your background and your goals. If you're a surface pattern designer, chances are you've considered working with the fabric industry. A quilt mock-up is the perfect way to showcase a surface pattern design in a portfolio and to set yourself apart. Or perhaps you're a quilter who's interested in getting into quilt pattern writing. Designing a unique quilt, and creating a mock-up is an essential first step. Regardless of your reason, I hope that this course offers the tools you need to create a quilt mock-up that will help tell your story. You may be thinking, but I don't know anything about quilting. If that's the case no worries. Whether you're an experienced quilter or have never in your life sown two pieces of fabric together. I'll walk you through the process of creating a quilt mock-up in Adobe Illustrator. No quilting experience required. I'll take you through the entire process, from quilting foundation to final product, to help you bring your own unique design to life. As a note, if you don't have Adobe Illustrator, no worries about that either, I'll show you how to achieve the same process using graph paper and a pencil. By the end of this course, you'll have your own quilt mock-up that features your surface design collection or your own custom color palette to use in a portfolio, to share on social media, or to use as a template for your own real-life quilts. You'll leave this class with everything you need to know to continue creating many more quilt mock-ups in the future. I look forward to seeing you in class. 2. Course Overview: Quilts are all around us. They are symbols of home and comfort, often passed down as air and are beautiful pieces of visual art. If you're a surface pattern designer like me, a quilt mock-up is the perfect way to show how all of your designs go together, making it the perfect way to showcase a collection. In the first lesson of this course, we'll cover some of the foundations to ensure that whether or not you have any quilting experience, we're all on the same page. We'll cover some quilting terminology, the anatomy of a quilt, and we'll look at a few of the most common layout so that you can start thinking about your design. In the next lesson, we'll open up Adobe Illustrator. I'll walk you through setting up your document and workspace. In the lessons that follow, we'll dig into some of the tools in Adobe Illustrator and use them to create some of the most common blocks used in quilting. If you don't have much experience with Adobe Illustrator, no worries. I'll be breaking down the process in a beginner friendly way. In the resources section you'll find a document that lists out all of the keyboard shortcuts that I'll be using in Adobe Illustrator. This could be a really helpful reference especially if you're new to the program. If you don't plan on using Adobe Illustrator, I'll also show the same process using graph paper and a pencil. Once we've created a collection of basic blocks, we'll dig a little bit deeper. We'll take some of those blocks that we've created and begin to combine them together to make new shapes. Next, we'll learn about where to find inspiration for your quilt design. I'll share some places that I commonly find inspiration for my quilts and some of them might surprise you. From there, we'll talk about color. I'll show you how to create a custom color palette in Adobe Illustrator. We'll talk about some considerations for color, whether you're planning to use solid colors or prints and patterns in your design. From there, we'll take everything that we've learned and create a quilt mock-up together. I'll take you through my process for creating a quilt mock-up and show you some of my tips and tricks for an efficient workflow. Finally, I'll offer some suggestions for using your quilt mock-up. We'll talk about how to export your mock-up for optimized use, whether you're planning to use it in a portfolio, or share it on social media, or use it for your website. I'll also share some next steps, especially if you're interested in taking your mock-up and actually having a real quilt created from it. Throughout this course, I'll offer some exercises that will provide you lots of practice to develop the skills you need to create your own quilt mock-ups. For the class project, you'll be designing your very own quilt mock-up either in Adobe Illustrator or on graph paper. Your quilt mock-up might feature your surface pattern design collection or a custom color palette that you've created yourself. All you need to get started is the desktop version of Adobe Illustrator and again, if you don't have Adobe Illustrator, grab some graph paper and a pencil. I'm so excited to see all of the designs that you come up with. I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Quilt Foundations: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we'll cover some of the foundational information related to quilting to ensure that whether or not you have any quilting experience, we're all on the same page. The information in this lesson will help provide you with a solid foundation on how quilts are typically designed so that you can begin to think about your own quilt design. Quilting is a method of stitching together layers of cloth traditionally to make a blanket or a bed covering. Although today people make quilts for wall hangings and pillows and a variety of other items. A quilt typically consists of three layers. A quilt top, which is made up of smaller pieces of fabric that had been cut up and sewn back together to create a unique design, a layer of batting in the middle and a quilt back, which is typically made from a single piece of fabric. In this class, we'll be focusing on the quilt top as that's the design that you'll be creating for your mock-up. A quilt top is generally made up of fabric that has been cut up into smaller pieces and then sewn back together to create various designs. Shown here on this slide you can see three common quilt blocks, a Sawtooth Star, a Log Cabin, and a Flying Geese block. There are so many other quilt blocks out there and really no limit on what block you can create. Many quilt blocks are made up of sub-blocks, as you can see in this Sawtooth Star example. This means that smaller blocks are created first and then arranged to create the main block. Let's talk about some different common quilt layouts so that you can be, and to think about how you might lay out your quilt mock-up. Block-based designs are constructed from rows and columns of blocks. The block might be the same, may be repeated to create a pattern, or they might be different and unique, creating a more asymmetrical look. A block-based quilt can have stashing, which is a strip of solid fabric between the blocks or the block might be sown directly together. Block-based quilts are often created on a grid, but they can also be arranged in many creative ways. Medallion quilts are distinct from block-based quilts as they feature a central block with the different elements built around it. These quilts can be a great option if there's a central element or motif that you'd really like to highlight. There are so many other quote layouts out there that don't fall neatly into either of these two categories. You can choose a block-based design or a medallion style for your mock-up if you'd like to stay more traditional, however, you need not be limited by these two options. Feel free to think expansively. Just as a side note, in this course, we won't be working with actual fabric, but we are creating a mock-up of something that is generally made with fabric. That being the case, you might hear me refer to different fabric such as solids, prints, patterns. You might also hear me talk about repeats. Let me just take a moment to explain what I mean by those. Solids refer to fabric that doesn't have any pattern or print on it. It's just a solid color. A lot of quilt are made using only solid fabrics. Prints refer to printed fabric that has some design on it. Patterns refers to the pattern of artwork that's printed onto fabric. This isn't to be confused with quilt patterns, which are the written instructions that one might follow to create a particular quilt design. Finally, a repeat refers to the fabric swatch in Adobe Illustrator that is designed to repeat seamlessly in order to be printed on some substrates such as fabric. If you're not a surface pattern designer and you're not familiar with what a repeat is, don't worry about it, you'll probably be using solid colors for your mock-up. I encourage you to stop and take some time to explore some different quilts in your world. Maybe you have some quilts in your home or a quilt shop in your neighborhood that you could visit. If you don't have access to quilts in your area, there are so many examples of quilt that can be found on the Internet. A quick search on a platform like Pinteres or Instagram using a keyword like quilts, modern quilts or block-based quilts will provide many examples for you to explore. The idea with this search isn't to copy, but it's just to familiarize yourself with all of the possibilities when it comes to creating a quilts design. In this lesson, we covered some foundational information about quilting, such as, what is the quilt and what are some of the components that make up a quilt. We also talked about some of the different layouts of quilts that will hopefully start to get your wheels turning as you think about the kind of quilt you'd like to design. In the next lesson, we'll work to get our document setup so that we're all ready to start creating. I'll see you there. 4. Document Setup: [MUSIC]. Now that you have the big picture of quilt design, let's get our document set up. If you don't have Adobe Illustrator, you can follow along with graph paper. I'm using a Rhodia Reverse grid book. I will often sketch a design out in paper and pencil before moving it to the computer. The first thing we want to do when working with paper and pencil is to determine the scale. I'm using a pen to make it easier to see on the video, but you're welcome to use pencil. The first thing I'll do is up in the corner, I will mark out one square on the grid. The first thing I want to do is try to decide what unit will be represented by one square on this grid. Since none of our practice blocks are going to be very large, we'll keep it simple and make this one square inch. That means that each side of the square is one inch long. Let's set up our document in Adobe Illustrator. First we'll start a new file. You have some options here in the right-hand panel. The first thing I want to look at is my units. When I'm quilting, inches is the unit of measurement that I mostly use, so I prefer to use that in my markups as well. If you prefer, you may also use centimeters. I'm going to click on inches, and I want to set my artboard to be 40 inches by 40 inches which is about 100 centimeters by 100 centimeters. This will give us a generous workspace. The color mode, you can choose CMYK or RGB. For now, I'm just going to stick with CMYK then I'll hit "Create". Let's do a few more things together to set up our workspace. You can come up to View and click on "Show Grid." A grid is really useful when creating quilts and quilt blocks because it will help ensure everything lines up properly. Then I'm going to come back to View and make sure Snap to Grid is checked. Next, let's check the spacing of our grid. To do that, you can come up to Illustrator, Preferences, Guides and Grid, and this looks good. You want to have a grid line every one inch. If you're working in centimeters, you can set that to be one centimeter with two subdivisions. This will create a guideline every half inch or half centimeter. Now it looks good so I'll click "Okay". Next, let's set up some of the tools that we'll be using. Come up to Window. The first one I want is Pathfinder. If you don't have a check to pathfinder, feel free to click on that. I will just keep that over here. Let's come back to Window and make sure we have Transform. We'll pull this over here. Swatches we have, but if you don't have swatches, make sure you have swatches checked as well, and I can see my swatch panel here. The last thing we want to make sure we have is Stroke. Stroke is checked, I've got that down here. I have my swatches set up here and my strokes set down here, that looks good. For creating our quilt markups, there's a few tools that you'll want to make sure you have. The first is the selection tool which looks like a black arrow, direct selection tool which looks like a white arrow. The pen tool. In addition to the pen tool, you'll also want the add anchor point and delete anchor point tools. We'll be using those to modify some of the shapes when we're creating our blocks. The shape tool but right now mine is showing the rectangle tool, but if I long click on it, it comes up with a few different options, we'll be using the shape tool a lot. A few other tools you might find useful, especially when we get to coloring our blocks is the eyedropper tool and the magic wand tool. If you're not seeing some of these tools in your side panel, you can click on these three dots and look for it here, and all you have to do is click to add it to your tool panel. Go ahead and take time to make sure your document is set up, then you'll be all set for the next lesson when we begin creating our quilt blocks. I'll see you there. 5. Creating Blocks: Squares and Rectangles: Now, that you have your document set up, you're ready to start creating some of the basic blocks that are commonly used in quilting. In this lesson, we'll work on creating squares and rectangles, which will be the foundation for all of the blocks that we'll create going forward. First of all, make a square together using the graph paper. You'll remember that we set our scale so that each square of the graph paper represents one square inch. Let's make a four inch square. I would mark my beginning point and count down four units. Then over four units. That would be a four-inch square. Let's move into Adobe Illustrator. I'm going to come over to the rectangle tool. If you don't see the rectangle tool here on the sidebar, it might be hiding under one of the other shapes. All you have to do is long click on the shape panel and select to the rectangle tool. The keyboard shortcut for the rectangle tool is M. There are a couple of ways to make a square or a rectangle. The first is just to click and drag until you have the shape that you want. You can see that my rectangle is snapping to the grid lines, which will ensure that the measurement of my square or rectangle is to the inch or half-inch. Now, if you'd like to make a square, hold the Shift key, and that will keep your proportions constrained to a perfect square. I can see over here in the transform panel, it tells me exactly the size of the square that I've made, so I can see I've made an eight inch by eight inch square. The other way to create a square or rectangle is to click on the artboard and then a dialog box will appear where you can input the measurements of the square that you want. Let's say I want a four inch by eight inch rectangle and I can click "Okay". When I'm building blocks, I like to keep the stroke at black. We'll talk about color in a later lesson. For now, if you'd like to distinguish the shapes by fill color, I suggest just using the gray scale. Let's say I want to copy this exact square on the other side of the rectangle that I've made. Again, there's a couple of ways I can do that. The first is to select the square, and I know it's selected because it's highlighted in blue. Then I can go to Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste, that will create a copy of that square. Then I can drag it to the location that I want. Another way is to select the square. I can hold it and drag it and while I'm dragging it over, I'm going to hit the Option key, and that will make a copy. Squares and rectangles are going to form the foundation of all of the other blocks that we're going to make. If you're still getting used to the tools in Adobe Illustrator, I suggest taking some time to practice making some squares and rectangles of different sizes, putting them together and copying them. In the following lesson, we'll create the next quilt block, the half square triangle. I'll see you there. 6. Creating Blocks: Half Square Triangles: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we'll learn how to make the half-square triangle block. Let's make a half-square triangle on the graph paper. I have my scale set to one inch. I'm going to begin by making a four-inch square. Then to make this into a half-square triangle, I'm going to divide the square in half diagonally. From one corner to the next, I'll draw a line. In order to distinguish these two shapes, I'll shade one side. To create the half-square triangle, we're going to start with a square. You can either make a square by clicking and dragging and holding down the Shift key, or by clicking and typing in the measurements that you'd like. I actually think I would like to make mine 6 by 6 inches. I'm going to delete this first square that I made. I have a 6 by 6 inch square. In order to make a half-square triangle, I need to delete one of the corner anchor points. I'm going to select the Delete Anchor Point tool. Then I'm going to come over and click on one of the corners to delete that anchor point. Now, I have half of a triangle. One thing you'll notice is while creating all of these blocks is that the final block is always a square or a rectangle and that's so that when a quilter is piecing these together, they can sow them along on the straight lines. In order to make this into a square, I'm going to highlight the triangle that I've made and I'm going to copy it. To do that, I'm going to hold this shape, I'm going to drag it, and while I drag it, I'm going to hold down the Option key to make a copy. Then I need to rotate this. In order to rotate, you can go to Object, Transform, Rotate. I want to rotate this 180 degrees, so I'm going to click 180, and that flips it around to the direction that I want. Then I can fit those together and now I have a square. Let me undo that so I can show you another way to rotate. In order to undo, I'm going to click Command Z. Another way to rotate this piece is I can click on it, I can click the R on my keyboard, which is the keyboard shortcut for rotate, and then I see this little blue marquee showed up. That's going to be the point of rotation. Then I can click anywhere around the triangle and I can begin to rotate it. Now, if I want it to rotate a perfect 180 degrees, all I have to do is hold the Shift key, and that will restrict the rotation to 45 degree increments. Then I can unclick, go back to my Selection tool and then fit these together. Just like we did up here in order to differentiate these two pieces, I'm just going to fill one of them with a gray. Once I have this block together, I'm going to group them. I'm going to select both by dragging my Selection tool over them, and then I can go to Object, Group. The keyboard shortcut for that is Command G. Now, I can move these as a single unit. There's a half square triangle. In the next lesson, we'll work to create a flying geese block together. I'll see you there. 7. Creating Blocks: Flying Geese: [MUSIC] The next block we're going to create is a flying geese block. A flying geese block is always twice as wide as it is high. If I make this four inches high, then I need to make it eight wide. Then I'll measure down and over. Next I need to make a mark halfway between these two corners. What I'll do is I'll mark that spot and that will guide me where to draw the diagonal lines. Starting at this bottom corner, I'll draw a diagonal line. This is why I sometimes like to use a straight edge. Draw that straight up and then bring it down to this corner. Then I can shade to distinguish that shape, and there's a flying geese block. Let's move into Adobe Illustrator and create a flying geese block there. We're going to begin with our rectangle tool. For this one I'm going to click, I want to enter my proportions. A flying geese block is always twice as wide as it is high. Let's see. I want a flying geese block that's eight inches wide. I want to make sure it's 4 inches high. I'm going to make this white to begin with. In addition to this rectangle, I need two squares that are equal to the height of this rectangle, so I'm going to select the rectangle tool and click here again and instead of eight inches by four inches I want two squares that are four inches by four inches. There's one and I'm going to make a copy. Let me zoom in a little bit. Go to view. Zoom in. That's good. [NOISE] I want to add an anchor point at exactly the halfway mark. I like to use the squares as a guide because I know this is eight inches long and this square is four inches, I know that the length of this is exactly half of this distance. I'm going to line up this square right on top and then I'm going to select the rectangle. I'm going to come over to the add anchor point tool. I want to add an anchor point right here where those lines intersect. That point should be exactly half the distance. Now I'm going to select the Delete Anchor Point tool and I'm going to delete these two corners, leaving behind a triangle. I'm going to give this triangle a color. Let's add a gray. Now in order to make this block a rectangle, I'm going to add two triangles to either side of this larger triangle. We're going to do that the same way that we began the half square triangle block. Selecting one of these squares, I'll select the Delete Anchor Point tool and I'm going to delete this point to create a triangle. I can place that here. This is why having the snap to grid feature enabled is super handy when you're creating quilt blocks because I don't need to worry about it being a pixel or two off and leaving a gap. Then I'll do the same thing to this square. I'm going to select it, choose the Delete Anchor Point. I'm going to delete this Anchor Point here and fit that together and this is a flying geese block. Just like we did with the half square triangle, let's group this together. I can select that whole group, come up to object and group or hit "Command G" and now I can move this as a single unit. Let's zoom out. One handy way to zoom out all the way as to hit "Fit Artboard" in Window or Command zero is the keyboard shortcut for that. We have quite a little collection of blocks we've made. In the next lesson, we'll work on making Half Rectangle Triangles and Square in Square blocks. I'll see you there. 8. Creating Blocks: Half Rectangle Triangles and Square in Square Blocks: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we'll work to create two blocks, the half rectangle, triangle, and the square and square block. If you're using graph paper, go ahead and follow along making these shapes as I demonstrate them in Adobe Illustrator. The next book will create is the half rectangle triangle. It's very similar to the half square triangle, but instead of the final block being a perfect square, it's going to be a rectangle. To begin, I'm going to select the Rectangle tool. The half rectangle triangle doesn't necessarily need to fit inside of any particular proportions. I often create half rectangle triangles that are twice as high as they are wide. Let's go with four inches wide and eight inches high and select, Okay. To create the half rectangle triangle, we use the same process that we used to create the half square triangle. With my rectangle selected, I'm going to choose the Delete Anchor Point Tool and I'm going to delete one of the corner points to create a tall right triangle. Then what I need to do is make a copy of this, so I can do that by selecting this triangle and dragging it over, holding down the option key. Then I need to rotate it 180 degrees, so I'll select R on my keyboard and rotate it, holding down the Shift key to make sure it snaps right into place. [NOISE] Then I can move this over and join those two together. [NOISE] Let's give, I'll give this one a fill. Then I can group these together up to object group and that's our next block. The next block we're going to make is often called a square and square. It looks like a diamond shape, just like all of the other blocks. We're going to begin the Rectangle Tool. For this, I want to create a perfect square, so I'm going to hold and drag and make sure I hold down the Shift key to keep those proportions constrained. That looks good. If I look over in the transform panel, I can see that I made a square that's 10 inches by 10 inches. [NOISE] Similar to when we made the flying geese block. What I want to do next is I want to add an anchor point exactly halfway between each of the corners and I'm going to do that to each side. What I like to do is to make another shape to use as a guide. Since I know this shape is 10 inches by 10 inches. I'm going to create another square that's half of that five inches by five inches. I'm going to click using the Rectangle Tool, and I'll type in five inches by five inches. [NOISE] Let me make that white so I don't confuse myself. I know that where this line intersects, that's the halfway point. Using the Add Anchor Point Tool, I'm going to add an anchor point. I forgot to select my shape, so make sure that the square that you are adding the anchor points to is selected. Now I can choose the select Anchor Point Tool or add Anchor Point tool rather and I'm going to add an anchor point here. I can move this down, line it up. [NOISE] I'll add an anchor point here [NOISE] and I'll quickly add these last two without using the guiding square. I have my anchor points added. Now we're going to delete the anchor points at the corners, so using my Delete Anchor Point Tool, I can click on each of these corners to make a diamond shape. Now the last thing I need to do is I need to add a triangle to each corner to make sure that my final block is the shape of a square. The square that I made as a guide square is actually just the size that I need. Since the distance between this point and where the corner of my square will be is five inches. I need to have a square that's five inches by five inches. Using my Delete Anchor Point Tool we'll delete that anchor point to make that into a triangle and then I can fit that triangle right there. Since this shape is exactly the same for each of these corners, I can just duplicate this. I'm going to drag it up. Hit "R" to rotate, and hold down the Shift key to make sure it rotates exactly the amount that I need. Then what I can do is I'm going to click on this triangle and then hold down the Shift key to select this one as well. I can copy both of these at once. These are just some of the shortcuts that I like to use, I'm going to drag that over, hit "R" to rotate, and then I can rotate both of these shapes together, holding down the Shift key right into place. I'll select [NOISE] all of these. Group them together and voila, let's zoom out so we can see what we have. This is a square and square or diamond block. In the next lesson, we're going to learn to make blocks with curves. These include the inset circle, a half circle, and a quarter circle. I'll see you there. 9. Creating Blocks: Curves: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're going to create some blocks that have curves. These include the inset circle, the half circle, and the quarter circle. These may seem a little bit more complex, but they can really add a lovely variety to a quilt design. Let me show you how I would go about making the inset circle on graph paper. I always begin by determining the center point of the circle. If I would like to make a circle that's 6 " in diameter, I need to count three from the center point, that's the radius. The radius is half of the diameter, if you remember from school math. I'll count three from the center point up and three down from the center point and make a little mark and then from that center, I'll count three over, and I'll count three over in the other direction. Now I'll connect these four points with a curve making my circle as even as I possibly can. You can certainly use a compass or some other tool to make a perfect circle. But I find I don't generally need to be that precise. Now I have the shape of a circle, and I can go ahead and enclose this in a square. From this point I'll come up to the corner. For the half circle I'll follow the same process, but I only need to mark off three of the points because this bottom is going to be a straight edge. From the center point, I'll count up three over three to the left and over three to the right, but I don't need to count down. Then close in, connect those with the curve. For the quarter circle, you followed the same process, but this time you only mark two points out from the center, one over and one up or down. Now let's look at making an inset circle in Adobe Illustrator. Even though we're making a circle, we're still going to begin with the rectangle tool and I want to create a perfect square and I do want control over the size of the square. I'm going to click and let's make a square, we'll try 8 " by 8 " and [NOISE] I'm going to zoom in. The keyboard shortcut for zooming in is command plus, it's a little too much. If you could, the minus, it will zoom out. Here's my base square, 8 " by 8 ". I want to create a circle that fits within this square. I'm going to come over to my "Shape Options" and I'm going to long click and find the ellipse tool. The ellipse tool works very similarly to the rectangle tool. All I need to do is click. Since my square is 8 " by 8 ", I also want to make my circle 8 " by 8 ". Let's give this a color just to keep these two distinct. Now, I could just lay this on top and call this done as a block. But I really like to have each piece separate that way if I ever did want to take this mark-up and have it made into a quilt. I have each piece on its own and I can break it down into its component parts. The easiest way to do that is to select both of these shapes together. We're going to come up to the "Pathfinder tool". The Pathfinder tool has lots of different options for how to combine and break apart shapes. For this particular instance, we can click on the "Divide tool" and if I select "Divide", it grouped them together. I have to right-click and ungroup but then I can grab each of these pieces individually. I just hit "Command Z" to undo that and let's regroup this object group. There's an inset circle. I'm going to do "Command Minus" to zoom out. Next, let's do a half circle. Let's begin with the same structure that we had before. Since we're doing a half circle, we can use the same width, but we will only use half the height. I'm going to long click on the "Ellipse" so that I can grab the rectangle tool. I'm going to click on my art board and this time I was still want it 8 " long, but I only want it 4" wide. This rectangle will be my base, but I'm going to duplicate it and I'll show you why. Then I'll come back over and select the ellipse tool. I want to create a circle that's still 8 " by 8 " and then we're going to cut it in half. I'm going to select, "Okay", let's give this a color. Now we're going to use this rectangle as a guide to cut this circle in half. Right now this rectangle is going behind the circle and I want it to come in front. I can "Right Click", "Arrange", "Bring to Front". I will align this rectangle up right on top of that circle. You can already see the shape of the half circle here. I'm going to select both of these shapes, come back up to my "Pathfinder". The second option is called "Minus Front". It's going to delete everything that the front shape overlaps. That leaves me with just a half circle. Now I can bring this half circle over to my initial rectangle and we'll do the same thing that we did with this inset circle. I'm going to select my half circle. I'm going to divide just to ensure that each of these is broken into its own component parts. There's my half circle. Now the quarter circle is a very similar process. We are just going to essentially cut the half circle in half again. For the quarter circle, let's actually start with the circle this time. I'm going to click once and let's make this 10 by 10 just to vary the shape a little bit and click "Okay". Fill our circle with gray. Now, I want to cut the circle in half and in half again. I made this circle 10 " by 10 ". I'm going to come grab a rectangle that is 10 " wide and 5 " high. We'll give it a different color just to avoid confusing ourselves. I'll bring this rectangle in front and line it up in front of the circle so that I only have half of it exposed. I'll select both of those together, come over to my "Pathfinder Window" and select "Minus Front". That leaves me with a half circle. Now I'm going to do that again because I want a quarter circle. I'll come over to my rectangle tool and this time I can make a square, that's 5 " by 5 ". Make it white. You can leave it the same color, but I like to have it a different color to avoid confusing myself. Then I'll bring this square over, Iine it up right in front of that half circle. Select them both. Select "Minus Front" from the "Pathfinder Window", and I'm left with a quarter circle. Now, the transform panel shows me that this quarter circle is 5 " by 5 ". That's how big I'll make my square. I'll click 5 " by 5 ". Make that white. I'm going to send this to the back. I'm going to "Arrange", "Send to Back" and then I can line it up with this quarter circle. We'll group them together. There's your quarter circle block. Before you move on to the next lesson, make sure you pause and take some time to practice creating all of the blocks that we've learned in this lesson and in the previous lessons. In the download section, there is a resource that contains all of these blocks for you to use as a reference. Be sure to keep it on hand for continued practice. In the next lesson, we'll take the blocks that we've created here and combine them together to see what different shapes we can create. I'll meet you there. 10. Combining Quilt Blocks: In the last two lessons, we worked to construct some of the most basic quilt blocks, either in Adobe Illustrator or on graph paper. In this lesson, we'll take those blocks and begin to combine them together, to see what unique shapes and designs we can create. If you're working on graph paper, you can play in much the same way, you don't necessarily have the same advantage to be able to copy blocks and rotate them. I'll often start with pencil and paper and intuitively sketch out some shapes before I even move to the computer. This process really allows your hand to guide you. I will sometimes just with my pencil, sketch out some shapes that I have in mind and come up with a rough plan. I'm not measuring anything here, but I have in mind a quilt that, it has half blocks like that. Now I might just start with some half square triangles and see how they come together. I'll make these blocks fairly large. [MUSIC] Let's see what it looks like to work with some of these blocks in Adobe Illustrator. I might take this square and square shape, I'm going to drag it over and hold on option to make a copy, and then I might take my flying geese and drag that down as well. Now, I would like my flying geese to be the same length as this square. I'll come over to my Transform panel, and let's make this an even number. Next to the measurements here you'll see this little chain. Right now it is unchecked, which means it will constrain the proportions to make sure that the width and the height stay in equal proportion. If I click on this and turn it off, then I can adjust the width and the height separately, but I actually right now want to keep the proportions restrained. Let's make this a four inch by four inch square. Now look at the flying geese. If you remember, a flying geese is twice as long as it is high. I want this length to be equal to the square, so let's make this four inches wide, and because I have my proportions restrained, it automatically changed the height to two inches. See if we can line these two up together. I'll make a duplicate of this flying geese, so holding down my "Option" key, I'll drag this up. I'm going to duplicate both of these, so I'm going to "Hold the option" key down, as I drag these. I would like to flip these around so that they point in the opposite direction. I'll select both of those, hit "R" on my keyboard for rotate, and that puts the cursor right at the center, which is where I want it. Then I'll move these around and I'll hold the "Shift" key so that it will rotate a perfect 180 degrees. On there, that's an interesting shape. Let's see what else we can make. I do think I'd like a square. Let's just give this square a gray. I think I'll grab the quarter circle. I'm going hit "Option" to make a copy. Let's make these the same size. Highlighting my square, make this four inches, and we'll do the same with this square, four inches and hit "Return." Let's put these together. I'm going to bring another quarter circle over to this side. I'm going to try a half square triangle. Let's bring that down here. I would like this half square triangle to be the same size as these other squares. Using my Transform panel, I'll make this four inches and it automatically changes the height to four inches. Place that there, rotate it around. I would like to change the color of this half triangle. Since I have this grouped together, there's a couple of ways to do it, but what I like to do is just "Double-click", and that brings this into isolation mode, then I can click and isolate this shape. Then using my Eyedropper tool, which is over here in my tool panel, the keyboard shortcut for that is "I", I can click on the color that I would like it to be, "Double-click" outside to get out of isolation mode, and then I change this to match the same color, I turn it around. That might make a new leaf. Let's try one more. This time I think I'd like to begin with a square again, so I'm going to grab my square, hold on the "Option" key and drag that over. Let's try using the half rectangle triangle. Let's make sure these are the same size, so I'm going to change the size of the square to a nice easy number, let's do four inches again. This, I actually want to fit two of these across this square. Rather than making this four inches wide, I'll make it two inches wide. I'm going to bring this block over here, let's line these up together. Now I would like to reflect this over to the other side. The easiest way to do that is to go to "Object", "Transform", "Reflect', and I would like to reflect it vertically, I want to reflect it over itself and I want to make a copy, so I'm going to click on "Copy." I can grab it and pull it over to that side. You grab both of these, not the square. I would like to bring them down, and I'm going to drag them down holding the "Option" key. That's actually cool, it makes an arrow shape. It's not what I was going for. I'll rotate these around, and now I'd like to rotate both of these on the sides. I'll select down four of these half rectangle triangles, click "R" to rotate, rotate them around. I'll hold on "Option" to make a copy and "Shift" to snap that right into place. This made a version of a sawtooth star using half rectangle triangles. Now if I were going to include this in a quilt pattern, I would want to add, squares in the corners here, to make sure that my final shape is a square. Let's do that, I'll hit "M." I'm just going to click because I know that this square needs to be four inches by four inches. I can just put that in manually here. Put that here, I can drag it over, hit "Hold option" to make a copy, and select both of those, drag them down, make a copy. As you can see, once you start combining these shapes together, the possibilities are truly endless. Before moving on to the next lesson, take some time to play around combining these blocks to make different shapes. Here are a few exercises to help you practice combining shapes together. See if you can recreate the blocks shown here. Take a moment to pause the video and take a screenshot of this slide or look in the resources section for a document called quilt block practice, these are available there too. Here are a few additional blocks for you to try out. In the next lesson, we'll talk about where to find inspiration for your quotes. I'll see you there. 11. Sourcing Inspiration: [MUSIC] In the last lesson, we learned how to create some of the most basic blocks used in quilting, and we saw how they can be combined together in interesting ways. Before we begin arranging these blocks to create our final mock-up, I wanted to take some time to talk about some different places you might source inspiration for your design. One place you might begin looking for inspiration is in books. There are many books out there with examples of quilts and quilt blocks. This is what I use as a reference. It's called 5,500 Quilt Blocks by Maggie Malone, and in it are literally thousands of examples of different quilt blocks. This is a great way to get a sense of the different combinations and styles of quilt blocks that can be created. Check the sewing or quilting section of your local bookstore or library to see what options they might have to offer. You can also look around in your environment for inspiration, I find lots of interesting geometric shapes in architecture and tiles. Nature can also be looked to for inspiration. There are so many different abstract shapes and elements that can be pulled from nature and used in a quilt design. If you're not feeling particularly inspired by the architecture or natural elements in your area, there are so many places online where you can find ideas. Websites such as unsplash.com offer royalty-free images and can be a great place to find images to provide inspiration for your quilt design. My first quilt design, the kiln quilt was inspired by the garlands of marigolds that I encountered during my time living in India. From these photographs, I sketched some shapes to represent the blooms and took color inspiration from the photographs to create my mock-up. Here are a few other examples of quilts that I've designed, along with an image that represents the inspiration for that quilt. Now it's your turn to go out and gather inspiration. Take a walk through a park or a city looking for shapes, colors, and moods that inspire you. Gather three to six photos to use in the upcoming lessons. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to build a custom color palette from a photograph that you've taken. I'll see you there. 12. Creating Color Palettes: [MUSIC] Before we begin designing our final quilt mockup, let's talk about color. Color can completely change the look and feel of a quilt. Having a few different options to play around with as you design your quilt can be really helpful. If you're working on graph paper, gather your preferred color medium and swatch out a few color options on a blank piece of paper. I'm using markers because they'll show up better on the camera. Colored pencils are also a really great option as our watercolor paints or any medium you have where you can access a variety of colors. What I have here is just a strip of white paper. I'm going to take a few of the colors that [NOISE] I want to try out and just swatch them. [MUSIC] I can take these and cut them out. Now I just have five colors here. You can certainly swatch out as many as you want to play with. I encourage you to create a lot of swatches. If you have a little library, it will offer you a lot of options for playing around. I like cutting them out because I can arrange them in different combinations, set them on top of each other and next to each other to see how they might interact in a quilt. There are several ways to build a color palette in Adobe Illustrator. I'm going to show you my process for sourcing a color palette from a photograph that you have on hand or that you took in the previous lesson while you were gathering inspiration. I've opened up Adobe Illustrator and I'll open a new file. For this process, we'll just use a standard letter-size piece of paper. I'll go to Print and select Letter, and I'll hit ''Create''. I'm in my workspace, and the first thing I'm going to do is place my photo into my document. In order to do that, I'm going to come up to File, Place, and that will give me access to the files on my computer. I saved this to my desktop and I'll click on Place. In order to place the photo into my document, I can just click and drag. The size doesn't matter. The inspiration for the quilt design that I have in mind is a lotus flower. This is a photograph I took while traveling in Sri Lanka of some lotus flowers that have vendor was selling to give as an offering at the site. I'm going to try to create a color palette from this photograph. Now that we have our photograph placed, let's set some swatches. I'm going to use the rectangle tool. Come over, click and drag, and I'll hold down the Shift key to make a perfect square. This doesn't have to be a perfect square, but I like to keep things clean and tidy. Come up to my selection tool. I want to give this a fill but no stroke. I'll come click on the stroke over here and give it no stroke. Let's fill it with black for now. Then I'll duplicate this square a few times to set my swatches. Holding down the option key, I'll move it over and I can continue to copy this. You can also use the keyboard shortcut command D to duplicate that last action. I can just keep hitting command D until I have the number of swatches that I like. I might just pull this down. I don't know that I'll need these many swatches, but this will give me lots to work with. Now I'm going to select this first square. With it selected, I'll come grab the eyedropper tool. The keyboard shortcut for the eyedropper tool is I. Then I can start clicking around my photo, find some colors that I like. I think I'll start with a light neutral and come back to my selection tool to select the next square. Hit I for the eyedropper tool and keep clicking. For this process, I like to click around and intuitively choose colors that I like. One shortcut to toggle between the eyedropper tool and the selection tool is to hit "Command". If you hit command, it brings you back to the last selection tool that you used. If I hit "Command" that allows me to select the next square, and when I release it, it will bring me back to the eyedropper tool, it's a handy shortcut. [MUSIC] One thing I'm trying to keep in mind as I'm selecting colors is to make sure I have a range of values. I'm trying to make sure I have a nice range of light values and dark values. This will help make sure that my color palette has enough contrast. Here I'm trying to pick up a little bit darker gold color and I'm not really able to pick up the color that I like. What I can do is find a color that's close and with that square selected, come over to my fill and double-click, and I can manually drag to find the color that I like, something like that. [MUSIC] That looks good, I think I'll delete this last swatch. Now that I have a nice color palette, I want to add this to my swatches panel. In order to do that, I'll drag to select all of the squares. Over in my swatches panel, I'll click on the folder, and that's going to add a new color group to my swatches library. Now, these are the standard default colors that Adobe Illustrator comes with. I don't think I'll be using any of these, so I'm going to clean this up. To do that, I'll click on this folder and holding down the Shift key, I can come and select all of these and then come down to the little trash can that says Delete Swatch. Not just tidies up my Swatch Library, leaving the colors that I'll use. Now in order to use this color group and other documents, let's save this to our swatch library. I'll come up to these three little bars, come to Save Swatch Library as ASE. Let's give this a title, I'm going to title this Lotus. I have a little notice that came up. I'm just going to click "Okay" and that will give me access to this color group and other documents. Let's add a bit of life to these blocks that we've created. First, I'm going to clean up my color swatch library by selecting all of these, and then I'll import the custom color palette that I created. I'll come up to these three bars, go to Open Swatch Library, User Defined. The name of the color palette that I created for this was Lotus. Then all I need to do is click on this folder to add it to my swatches panel. Now I have access to these colors. I'm going to go ahead and select some of these shapes and just begin to throw on some color. You'll remember for a shape like this that's grouped together, you can either right-click and ungroup it in order to access these shapes independently. Or alternatively, you can double-click to go into isolation mode and then select these independently. I'm going to quickly go ahead and throw some color on these blocks, and you can do the same. [MUSIC] For this block, since I know I'd like all four of these that are shaded gray to be the same color, I can use the eyedropper tool, the keyboard shortcut for that is I. [MUSIC] Well, I've got some color on these blocks. Undoubtedly I'll be trying other color combinations with these blocks, but it's nice to have some color on them. In this lesson, we created a custom color palette. Now you may not have your color palette completely decided yet, and that's okay. Having some colors to work with will be really helpful as you begin to bring your full quilt layout together. In the next lesson, we'll discuss some considerations if you plan to use prints and patterns in your quilt, I'll meet you there. 13. Using Prints and Patterns: [MUSIC] There are a few additional things to consider if you plan to use repeat patterns or prints for your mockup. As mentioned in a previous lesson, pattern refers to the design that is printed onto fabric. Many patterns consist of motifs, which are the individual elements that make up the design. Patterns will naturally contain more than one color. This is a mockup of a quilt I designed that features one of my pattern collections. You can see that although each of these prints is made up of several colors, if I zoom out, you can see how each print reads is almost a solid color. There's a light neutral, a light pink, a deeper mustard yellow, and a dark gray. Zooming out on each of your patterns to identify the primary color can help ensure that the colors compliment each other and offering of contrast. The size of the motifs in a pattern and the size of the quilt blocks are important to consider especially if you're planning to use your surface pattern design prints and the quilt mockup. The beautiful motifs of larger scale, more detailed prints may be lost if they're used to cut small pieces. Consider scaling large prints down or designing a quilt with large blocks that will show off bigger motifs. As you design your quilt in Adobe Illustrator, I recommend creating it on 100% scale so that you can see how your patterns will look in each block. Another important consideration for using printed fabric is the direction. Fabric can be one directional, two directional or be considered an all over and be placed in any direction possible. Let me show a few examples. This rainbow fabric here, I would consider one directional. That means that there is a right way for it to be. If it were oriented like this, or this, or this it would be considered sideways or upside down. This would be another example of what I would consider a one directional print. The motif here is consists of trees that are all oriented in one direction. If I were to turn this in any other direction, the motifs would appear sideways or upside down. This is an important consideration for quilters. When quilters are cutting out squares to arrange in a quilt, they often want to use their fabric efficiently. Having printed fabric that's oriented in only one direction means that they have to be a little bit more mindful about how they cut their fabric. Here are a few examples of two directional prints. This print is considered two directional. If it's oriented this way, or this way, either way it appears to be right side up. However, if I orient it this way, it appears sideways. This offers a little bit more flexibility than one directional prints for quilters. However, is still slightly limiting. Stripes would be another good example of a two directional print. The best option for quilters are all over prints. This would be an example of an all overprint. In this design, I can orient it in any of the four directions. It doesn't have an obvious direction to it. Here's another good example of a fabric that could be oriented in any direction and not appear to be upside down or sideways. These offer quilters the most versatility and how they cut and arrange the fabric that they use for their blocks. Here's an example of a piece where you can see how directionality comes into play. In this example, there's two squares using a one directional fabric and you can see how in the way they're laid out, this one appears to be upside down, whereas this one is right side up. In this piece, we can also see how scale comes into play. You can see here that the fabrics that are at a larger scale. These large beautiful motifs get cut off, whereas the ones with smaller motifs seem to fit this scale better. Another important consideration is balance. In a pattern collection, it's important to include coordinating prints and blender prints, which are the smaller scale, less detailed prints. This is especially important for quilting. If all of the prints are big and bold, the quilt will feel busy and the shapes will be indistinct. Balancing out the more detailed hero prints with simpler prints can offer a place for the eyes to rest and really allow the hero prints to stand out. If you're planning to use your designs from a surface pattern design collection and you'd like to practice adding your designs to these blocks instead of solid colors. You can go ahead and copy and paste your design swatch tiles into the document with your blocks and that will add them to your swatches library. I can go ahead and delete them and then instead of using solid colors, I can click on a shape and fill it with a design. This will really give you a good sense of how your designs look together and see if you need to make any adjustments and scale or color. [MUSIC] Before you move on to the next video, take some time to add color or patterns to the blocks that you've created. In this lesson, we've discussed some considerations for using prints and patterns in your quilt design. In the next lesson, I'll walk you through my process of creating a mockup for a block based quilt. I'll see you there. 14. Final Mockup: Block Based Quilt on Graph Paper: [MUSIC] In the previous lesson, we created some custom color palettes and worked on adding some color and pattern to your quilt blocks. You have everything you need now to build your own quilt mock-up. In my opinion, this part is the most fun. I'll take you through how I approach arranging blocks in different ways to create a layout and then invite you to create your own. If you've been working on graph paper, once you've arranged your blocks in a way that you like, you can redraw the whole quilt on a single piece of paper. You may need to scale it down so that it fits. For this block, I treated each square as if it were one inch. That makes this block 16 inches by 16 inches. I'm envisioning this on a quilt where this block is repeated three times horizontally and three times vertically. That means the finished size of my quilt is going to be 16 inches times three or 48 inches square. Now, this paper doesn't have 48 inches across. So what I would do on a clean piece of paper is rescale this. Rather than having this square represent one square inch, I can instead have it represent two square inches. I'm just going to indicate that in the corner by writing two inches. That means that this block that's four inches by four inches, when I redraw it over here, it's only going to occupy two squares because each square represents two inches. Once you've determined your scale, you can go ahead and redraw your quilt with all of the final blocks. [MUSIC] You'll notice that when I originally drew this block, I used half square triangles. When I redrew it here, rather than having two half square triangles, I combined those to make one flying block. That just eliminates unnecessary scene. [MUSIC] When just the lines are drawn, it can be a little bit hard to envision what it will look like. That's why I like to go ahead at this point and add some color. Adding color is like magic; it really helps reveal the shape of your quilt. Depending how you color it, you can have a completely different quilt. [MUSIC] I ended up changing the design a little bit from what I had originally planned. This first version that I made just felt a little flat. It didn't flow in the way I had envisioned. Rather than having these blocks repeat straight across, I shifted them down. I have one here shifted down and up. I'll maybe redraw this and play around with using a couple of different colors. But overall, I like how this flows much better. In the next lesson, we'll create another block based quilt, but this time in Adobe Illustrator. I'll see you there. 15. Final Mockup: Block Based in Illustrator: In this lesson, we'll work together to create a block-based quilt using Adobe Illustrator. When setting up your document for your quilt mock-up, it's important to consider what size you have in mind for the quilt. Quilts can range in size from an 18-inch square pillow cover to a slightly larger wall hanging all the way up to a quilt made for a king-size bed, which is often over 100 inches wide, especially if you're planning to use patterns from a surface pattern design collection, it's really important that you create your quilt mock-up, true to size. This will give you a true representation of what your patterns will look like in the quilt. Let me set my units to inches. I want to create an artboard that's 60 inches by 6 inches or approximately 150 centimeters. This is a pretty standard measurement for a throw-sized quilt, which is what I plan to create today. I'm going to keep my color mode as CMYK, everything else looks good. I'll hit "Create", so next, I'll go up to View, Show Grid, and View Snap to Grid. Then I'd like to copy over the blocks that we created to use as a reference. I have those here, so I'll select these, come up to Edit, Copy or Command C and edit paste. I have in mind a block-based quilt. I'm going to be using some patterns from a collection of mine. Let's start by cleaning up our swatches panel. Click on these hold down "Shift", hit the trash can to delete. I have here the designs that I'd like to use for this quilt. I'll go ahead and copy these. Edit paste, and when I paste them into this document, they'll automatically get added to my swatches library. Once those have been pasted and I have the swatches here, I can go ahead and delete them. I've set my artboard to be 60 inches by 60 inches. I'm not 100 percent sure that my final quilt will be those exact measurements, but that's approximately what I'm aiming for it. If I'm planning for this to be 60 inches wide, and I'd like three blocks that repeat across the top. Each of those blocks would need to be approximately 20 inches 20,40, 60. I'm just holding that in mind as I build my block. You can get really precise and do the backwards math to figure out how large each component needs to be. I tend to be a little bit looser and make adjustments as I go. I'm going to start with a square. I'll click the rectangle tool. Let's just start with something that's 2 inches by 2 inches. We're going to start with a small square. Let's start to build this out. I'm going to copy this block up in the corner. I'll change the pattern design inside, so when I'm building out a block, I tend to be very organic about it. I sometimes have a loose idea and then make adjustments as I go. I think I would like these four squares surrounded on two sides by another pattern, perhaps this one again. I'm going to bring this square over to the side. Now I'd like one that goes across the bottom. I believe it's 4 inches. I'm going to create a rectangle that is 2 inches tall and 4 inches wide. As I'm piecing this together, I'm really thinking about how it would go together as a quilt. If these were squares of fabric, these two would get sewn together first and then this would get sewn on top of it. That's why working in squares and rectangles is so important. Now that I have this, I can actually delete these three, because I know this is the one I want to have repeated on all four sides. Let's come up. I think I'm going to use a half rectangle triangle. Let's bring this half rectangle triangle-down. I would like to half rectangle triangles to fit on this edge. Coming up to my Transform panel, I can see this edge is 4 inches. That means that this half rectangle triangle needs to be 2 inches wide. I'll make this 2 inches. Let's see, I think I'd like to give this pattern. I have this very sparse neutral for the background. I'm going to take this, I'm going to make a copy and move it over. Then I would like to reflect the surround. To do that, I'll click "Go to Object" transform reflect the vertically is what I'm going for, I'll click "Okay." Now I can take these, hold down the option key, move it down, R for rotate, to rotate those right there. I'm liking how that looks and how those patterns go together. To finish this off as a perfect square, I'm just going to add a square of the background right here. I'll click, believe it needs to be 4 inches by 4 inches. As you practice fitting different shapes together, you really build a nice workflow and get a good sense of the measurements and proportions. That's the block that I have in mind. Let's take a look at the size of this. If I select the entire block, I met 18 inches, I was going for 20 inches, so that's pretty good. I need to add a rectangle to fill in these gaps here, and I'll just use this background color. This is my main block. If you'd like, you can group your block together with all of the elements selected. The keyboard shortcut for that is Command G. Let's see how this looks as it's repeated for the quilt with everything selected, I'll hold down the option key and drag it over. It should snap right into place. Sometimes the bigger elements, they don't snap quite as well. I'll do that one more time. Now I'm going to grab all three of these, hold down the option key, drag them down. I'm not going to use these reference blocks anymore, so I can go ahead and delete those. I like how this looks, but as I look at it, I think it would be nice to have a bit of stashing to separate the blocks. They look a little clustered together. What I'm going to do is delete all but one. I'm going to add a 2-inch wide rectangle here looking at my Transform panel, I know my block is 18 inches by 8 inches. Using my rectangle tool, I'm going to make a strip that is 2 inches wide and 8 inches high. We'll add that here. Now let's repeat this across and see how it looks. I don't need the strip on the other end, so I'll just take the block and move that over. I think this bit of stashing in between the blocks looks really nice. Let's take this set piece of slashing and we're going to repeat it on the bottom. What I think I'd like to do on the bottom is rather than having one long piece of stashing that goes all the way along. I think I'll create a small square just to add some variety and break up that negative space. I'll hit M for the rectangle tool, I'll make a small square that's 2 inches by 2 inches and I'll use this for the most contrast. Grab those, copy those over then I'll copy this. Let's repeat this whole thing down and see. I think I can delete this bit of stashing on the bottom. Yeah. I like that a lot better. I like how the stashing in-between really breaks up the space between the blocks. You can see I kept the stroke on. You can imagine this as being where the seams and a quilt would be. In other words, this would be where the two pieces of fabric or sewn together. But now that I have the mock-up complete, it's sometimes nice to remove the stroke to really get a full vision of what the quilt looks like without these distracting lines. Let's select this all. I'll select the stroke and give it no stroke. There we have our block-based quilts. In the next lesson, we'll create one more mock-up together, this time using a medallion-style layout. I'll see you there. 16. Final Mockup: Medallion Quilt: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we'll create another quilt mock-up together, but this time we'll use the medallion layout as the foundation for our quilt. I have my document set up in the same way that I did for the block-based quilt and I copied over all of the blocks that we created to use as a reference. Another thing I'd like to do is delete some of these color swatches and import the color palette I created. To do that, I can come up to these three bars, Open Swatch Library, come down to User Defined, and I'm going to select my lotus color palette. I'm just going to click on this folder that contains the colors that I'd like. The last thing I'd like to do before beginning my design is I'd like to place my inspiration photo nearby to use as a reference. To do that, I'll come up to File, Place and it's this one of the lotus. I can drag and open my photo here. Let's begin designing. Looking at the shape of this flower, I'm thinking that I would like a medallion quilt layout for this, something with a center and then having some different shapes, perhaps triangles coming out from that center block. I'm going to start with this one. I'm thinking about this quilt design, I think I would like a simpler design with larger blocks. Because of that, I'm going to make the center block quite large, maybe go 10 inches by 10 inches. I'll make sure it's roughly centered on the art board. I might change some of these colors. Because this block is grouped together, I'm going to double-click on the center to go into isolation mode and select just this one piece. I think we'll go with a nice orange in the middle for now. I think I'll use a neutral off white for the background color. Double-click outside of the shape to get out of isolation mode. I think I'm going to try my flying geese block next. This time let's hold down the Option key. I would like to fit my flying geese block right on top of the center square. Since the center square is 10 inches, I'll want this to be 10 inches wide. I'm going to click on this little chain because I want to constrain the proportions. Let's make this 10 inches wide. That should make it half as high. That's great. We'll put that there. Because I have snap to grid, they should line up perfectly. I think I'm going to copy that again. I'm holding down the Option key to bring another one of those up. Let's reflect this down. I'm going to pull down the Option key, bring this down. With those selected, I'll hit R to rotate, hold down the Shift key to make sure it lines up perfectly. One trick I often use when I want to rotate something around the center like this is I'll select all of these blocks on top, hold down the Shift key to select these two blocks on the bottom, I'll hit R for rotate, and then it'll begin to bring these around, and while I do that, I'll hold down the Option key to make a copy and Shift to snap at 90 degrees. That's just a quick and easy way to get the blocks on the top and the bottom to repeat on the sides. I'm liking the shape of this. I'm envisioning these triangles to be like the petals, and I think I want those to be white. I could go and select each of these triangles individually, but a shortcut is to use the magic wand tool. The keyboard shortcut for the magic wand tool is Y, and it's this one here. With the magic wand tool, I can click on any color and it will select every piece in the document that's the same color. Now, it picked up some pieces that I don't necessarily want to change right now. So what I can do is, with my selection tool, hold down Shift to deselect some of these pieces that it selected that I don't necessarily want to change. [NOISE] I might change those to, let's try this light pink. Then I'll hit Y for the magic wand tool and select these yellow triangles. Then using my eyedropper tool, I'm going to change those to the background color. That gives a little bit better impression of petals radiating out from that center. I think I'd like to add some half square triangles next. I'd like this half square triangle to fit here next to the flying geese block. This flying geese block is five inches high, so I'll make this half square triangle five inches by five inches. Double-click to go into isolation mode to change the color of each of these pieces, make that a slightly darker purple color , maybe that one. I'm not sure about that yet. We'll try that. I'll probably end up changing that later. Let's duplicate this a few times. I think rather than having all of these the same color, I'm going to change one of these to be a little bit darker just to add some variety. That looks good. Up in this corner, I think I'd like to add a square using the background color. I'll use the rectangle tool, make a square that's five inches by five inches. Set it into place. Now I think I'll take this entire section and copy it into each of the corners. I'll grab this section, hold down the Option key to bring it down, rotate it so that it's oriented properly, and then I can grab both of these sections together, hold down the Option key and drag them over into place and then hit R to rotate them around. I don't think I'm going to be using any of these other blocks. I'm going to go ahead and delete this for now to give myself a little bit more workspace. I'm liking this design. I'm noticing that I have a few gaps to fill in. I think I'll just fill those with a rectangle of the background color. [MUSIC] That's looking really good. One thing I'm noticing about this design is that my eye is drawn from the center outward. I feel like it would benefit from something perhaps in the corners to draw the eye back in. So I think I'd like to add something up in each corner, perhaps another half squared triangle. So I'll grab this triangle, bring it over, hit R to rotate it around. I think I'll change and give it the same color as the center block. I think that will add a bit of cohesiveness to this design. [MUSIC] We could use the keyboard shortcut R to rotate these around, but the other option would be to reflect them. In order to reflect, I'll come up to Object , Transform, Reflect. I'd like to reflect them vertically and I'll click "Okay". I think the final thing I need to add is a couple of rectangles, and I'll make these the same color as the background. There it is my final quilt mockup. I don't need my reference photo anymore, so I'm going to go ahead and delete that. As I mentioned before, when I'm designing, I like to keep the stroke on, it helps me see the boundaries of each of my blocks and helps me visualize where the seams will be if I were to make this into a real quilt. But now that I have the final design, those lines can be a little bit distracting. So I'm going to select all of this, come over to my stroke, give it no stroke. By removing those lines, you can really get a good sense of what this design looks like. Your quilt mock-up is now complete. In the next lesson, I'll discuss some options for exporting and using your quilt mockup to share in a portfolio, on a website, or on social media. I'll see you there. 17. Exporting for Web and Print: [MUSIC] Now that your quilt mock-up is complete, let's export it for use in your portfolio or in social media. Let's go ahead and export this mock-up for sharing on Instagram. We created our quilt mock-ups to scale. This is 50 inches by 50 inches. I don't need a document this big for any of my purposes. I believe the ideal size for a square post on Instagram is a 1080 pixels by 1080 pixels. I'm going to come up to my Window, and I'm going to open my Artboard's panel. This gives me access to my artboard. The artboard is just this space that's defined by this line. You can think of it like your canvas. If I double-click here, I can get access to some details about my artboard, and I create an art board that's 60 inches by 60 inches, which I know is way bigger than I need. If I'm planning to export this for Instagram, I can change this to 1080. If I type in px, for pixels, Adobe Illustrator will calculate the conversion for me. By 1080 pixels. My artboard is now 15 inches by 15 inches. I can use those same measurements to resize my quilt mock-up. I'll open up my Transform panel and I'll make this 15 inches by 15 inches. If your quilt mock-up isn't a square, if you've opted for a rectangle, all you need to do is make sure that your longest measurement, whether that's the width or the height, is 15 inches, is the same size as the square, and then you can fill the background with a neutral color, perhaps white. Now that I have my quilt mock-up resized, I can come up to File, Export, Export As, and I'll title this lotus quilt mock-up, and let's just save this to my desktop. I generally use PNG for something I'm uploading to the web. JPEG would work just as well. Make sure you click on "Use Artboards". I can click "All", I only have one artboard, and then I'll hit "Export". Since the intention for this is to be used on a screen on Instagram, 72 PPI is sufficient. I want to make sure I select "Art Optimized". I can keep the background color as white and click "Okay". If you're planning to export this for use on a website or digital portfolio, the process is very much the same. However, if you're planning to export this for use on print, it requires a little bit of extra consideration. Once I export this, it's going to be converted to either a PNG or JPEG, which is a pixel-based format. That's important because once I do that, I would no longer be able to enlarge this image without losing quality. It would appear pixelated. Let's say I'm planning to use this mock-up in a print portfolio, and to the pages of the portfolio are 10 inches by 10 inches. I know then that I'm not going to need this image to be any larger than 10 inches. I can safely resize this quilt mock-up to be 10 inches by 10 inches. Let's go ahead and do that. I can do the same to my artboard. Let's come back to Window, Art boards, I will change my artboard to be 10 inches by 10 inches. There are certainly a few different ways to do this in Adobe Illustrator. I like to use my artboards for exporting. It's just the way that I'm most familiar. Let's zoom in. Now let's go ahead and export this. I'll come up to File, Export, Export As. Again, I'll save this to my desktop. Let's title this Lotus Quilt Mock-up 2. You could choose either PNG or JPEG, either really will work fine. Let's choose JPEG this time just to see what options come up. I want to use my Artboards, and I'll use All, I only have one, and I'll click "Export". We're not going to talk too much about color mode here, but in general, if I'm planning to use this for print, I'll use CMYK, and I'll choose RGB, if it's something I plan to use on the web. I want to make sure the quality is up to 10. The resolution is also something to note. If you're planning to use this for print, you want to keep this at 300 PPI. If you're planning to use this on a website or digital portfolio, you can safely choose 72 PPI. Make sure Art Optimized is selected, and then you can click "Okay". If you've created your quilt mock-up on graph paper, go ahead and snap a photograph, so that you can share it with the world. In the next lesson, we'll talk about some options if you're interested in having your mock-up made into a real quilt. I'll see you there. 18. Fabricating Options: [MUSIC] A quilt mockup is a great way to show off your surface pattern design collection in a portfolio or on social media. But having a real quilt to touch and feel will really bring your ideas to life. Perhaps from your mockup, you'd like to make a quilt for a gift or to honor a special occasion or maybe you want to make a quilt to bring with you to meet an art director or to quilt market. How remarkable would it be to hand an art director a quilt featuring your designs so they can hold and feel the final product? You may be wondering, how can I go about turning my mockup into a real quilt. You have a few different options. If you're not interested in making the quilt yourself, there are many talented quilters out there that work on commissions and have the skills and ability to take your mockup and create a real quilt from it. The modern quilters guild would be an excellent resource to help connect you to local quilters in your area. I've included a link to their website in the resources section. If you would like to make the quilt yourself but have never quilted before and aren't sure where to start, check back soon. I'm planning on creating a course for beginner quilters. In that course, I'll walk you through the entire process from beginning to end of creating a quilt. That will help give you the skills that you need to bring your own quilt mockup to life. Be sure to check back. 19. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Congratulations. You've done it. You've gone through the whole process and created your very own quilt mockup. In this course, we've learned some foundational information about quilting. We created some of the most common quilt blocks, talked about where to source inspiration, created our own custom color palettes, and taken all of that to create a final mockup featuring our own color palette or surface pattern design collections. Feel free to go back and review any lesson as needed, as you continue to create more mockups in the future. If you have any further questions, I invite you to please ask on the discussion page. I'm here and available and would love to support you throughout this process any way I can. I highly value your feedback. Leaving your review will help others find it, and it will also help me continue to create quality content. Don't forget to share your final project in the project section. If you need to share your project on social media, be sure to tag me so that I can see and continue to spread the word of the beautiful work you're creating. Thanks so much for joining me.