iPad Surface Design in Affinity Designer: Vectors, Textures, Artboards, and Repeat Patterns

1. Surface Design in Affinity Designer iPad App: Vectors, Textures, Artboards, and Repeat Patterns: Hi everyone. I'm Liz Kohler Brown, I'm an artist, designer, and teacher. Today I want to show you how to use the app Affinity Designer to create surface patterned designs on your iPad. Affinity Designer is a powerful design program that combines a lot of the tools you see in programs like Photoshop and Illustrator into one app. There are few things that makes this app so perfect for surface design and a ton of other projects. First, you can see a live preview of your pattern as you create it, so it's easy to place your repeat elements in the right place and move them around as you add elements to your pattern. Unlike a lot of other design programs, Affinity Designer has no image size limits. You can create large images for a print on demand slides, client work or large art prints. Because you can work with vectors, you can easily make changes to the colors, sizes, and textures of your drawings without losing any image quality. You can also set up art boards so that your inspiration, repeat block and finished repeat square are all on the same document. You can also work with both vector and raster images. Whatever project you're working on, you can create the exact image type that you need. Affinity Designer makes it easy to export your files in all of the common file types. You can easily move your files into programs like Procreate, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Affinity also makes it easy to save the vector shapes you create so you can quickly use them and other illustrations. You can also use text in Affinity Designer and you can even import your own fonts. One thing I love about this app is it's not subscription-based, it's a onetime fee, and it's not that much more than Procreate. In this class, I'll show you everything you need to start designing patterns in Affinity Designer and share all of my vector assets with you as free downloads, so you can start designing patterns as soon as you get the app. I'll also share with you a set of 70 images of textures that you can turn into raster or vector texture patterns for your repeats. I'll show you how to turn any texture into a vector and a raster texture for your patterns. I'll also talk about the differences between vector and raster file types, so you can choose the one that works best for your project. First, I'll show you how to create color palettes and how to set up your document for a live pattern previewing. Some will cover how to create vector shapes using the pen, brush, and pencil tools. We'll go over how to create any shape you can imagine and how to turn a photograph into a detailed vector. Next, we'll create a basic repeat pattern using vector shapes and adjust the colors, sizing and spacing using the live repeat preview. Then we'll create a detailed floral repeat combining textures, hand-drawn elements, and vectors made from photographs. I'll show you how to adjust the colors and sizing of all of your repeat elements, so you can tweak the pattern to be exactly as you want it to be. Last, we'll create a half drop repeat with detailed vectors made from a photograph combined with hand-drawn vector elements. Half drop patterns hide the repeat block seam, so your patterns flow seamlessly, rather than appearing blocky and predictable. We'll look at ways to add variation to your pattern so the repeat blocks are virtually invisible. All you need to take this class is your iPad, the Affinity Designer app and your stylus. I'll be using the Apple Pencil, but you could use any stylus or even your finger. Let's get started. 2. Vector vs Raster: I want to start by talking about the differences between vector and raster images because Affinity Designer lets you use both. It's important to know the differences so you can choose the best file type for your project. If you already know all about vector and raster images and the differences and uses, you can feel free to skip this video and move on to the next one. The biggest difference between these two image types is that raster images are made of squares or pixels, and vector images are made of anchor points connected by paths. This means that you can easily resize vectors without losing any quality whereas rasters when you're increasing the size of an image, you're increasing the size of the squares. If you make it really big, the squares are visible or if you make it just a little bit bigger, it just looks blurry. That will never happen with vector images. Another big difference is the document size. When it comes to raster images, the document size increases as the image size increases. That's not necessarily true with vectors. The size of the image is more based on how many points and paths are in your image. You could have an image that's like 40 by 40 inches, and it's not necessarily any bigger than an image that's 2 by 2 inches if you're working with a vector. A really big difference with these two file types is the final use. Usually, you see raster images that are detailed textures or photographs, anything you take with your phone or camera. Those are all raster images. Whereas more simple shapes and illustrations tend to be made with vector images. You can turn a vector into a raster and vice versa. The difference is, if you want to create a vector out of a raster image, you have to trace it by hand because you need to create those vector paths and points in order to produce the vector. Whereas it's really easy to turn a vector into a raster image, you just save it as a PNG and it automatically becomes a raster image. The bottom line is if you use raster images, you have to know the final size of your image before you start. Whereas if you work with vector images, you have a lot more flexibility with sizing. Throughout the class, I'll talk about a lot of these differences in context so you can get a better idea of when you should choose vector or raster images. 3. Gallery and Settings: Now let's go ahead and open the app and take a look at the gallery, and how to create new images and folders. You'll see when you first open the program, there are only a few options at the top. You can click the ''Plus Sign'' to create a new document or folder, you can click the ''Question Symbol'' to get help from their help documents, and you can click ''Settings'' to adjust the app settings, and we'll play with all three of these. The first thing you'll do is click the ''Plus Symbol'', so I can see all of the options there. We can create a new document, and then it'll ask us a series of questions about that new document. We can open from the Cloud. If you store things on Dropbox or iCloud, you can import images like a PSD file and AI file, JPEG, any image type, you can import from your photos on your iPad, and you can also make a new project. They call folders projects. I'll go ahead and create a new project, and I'll title this ''Surface Design'', and I'll click "OK''. It takes me back to my gallery, and there's my folder down here at the bottom. Now that I have that, I can just click and drag things into my folder. If I click on the folder, I only see those three things. But can make it a little easier once you get a lot of things in your gallery. I'll click the ''Back Button'' to go back to the gallery. Next, I'll click the ''Question Symbol'' here. This page will tell you everything you need to know about Affinity Designer. If you ever have a problem, you can just come in here and click the ''Search Bar'' and type. Sometimes they have video tutorials if you're connected to Wi-Fi or just an article, so you can really learn a lot just by reading from there if you have a specific problem. I'll click the ''Close Symbol'' to go back to my gallery, then I'll click the ''Settings Tab''. I adjusted a few settings, and I just want to show you which ones I changed. In case you want to change those in yours as well, our interfaces will look the same. One thing I turned on is ''Show Touches''. What that does is it gives you a little blue dot every time you touch somewhere in the program. I did that so it's easy for you to see on the screen. But there's no need for you to turn that on unless you want to. You can also adjust the ''Undo Limit'' if you're having performance problems with the program. The undo limit means how many steps back is the program remembering? If you ask it to remember 1500 steps, then it's going to take the program a lot of processing power to remember all of those steps that you did in the past, so that you can undo back, back, back several times. What I do is I just turn this down to maybe 100, because that'll help improve the performance of the program. Next, on the ''Interface Tab'', I adjusted the ''Background Gray Level'' to 72. When I first opened the program it's pure black, and I just wanted a little bit of gray in the background to make it easier to see my Canvas. You can also turn on ''Show'', ''Undo'', and ''Redo Buttons''. What that does is it gives you a little symbol down here that's undo and redo. In this program you can tap two fingers to step back and three fingers to step forward, so you really don't need those buttons unless you just like to have them down here to use with your other hand. Then on the ''Color Tab'', I didn't adjust anything at all. On the ''Tools Tab'', I did adjust the ''Allow canvas rotation and all tools''. What that does is it allows you to turn your Canvas like this. Whereas if you don't turn that on, you can't actually turn your Canvas, you'd have to turn the iPad itself. The final ''Settings Tab'' here is ''Fonts''. This allows you to import fonts. If you get a free font online or you create your own font, you can just click the little ''Cloud Symbol'' here and you can save it to your Dropbox or wherever you saved your font, you can import it directly to here, then you'll see it show up on your list, and it'll automatically be there when you open your next document. I've gone ahead and added in two fonts that I created, and I have a class on how to do that, so you can check that out if you want to learn how to make your own font. I'll click the ''Done Symbol'' and that takes us back to the gallery. The only other thing there is to know about this gallery, is that you can click this little three ''Menu Symbol'', they call that the ''Hamburger Symbol'', click that one time and then you get some options on each document. You can close it, which means it's gone from your gallery, and it's basically deleted from the app, so unless you've saved it in your cloud or anything like that, it's gone. You can rename it, you can duplicate it, and save it, which allows you to export. Let's go ahead and start playing around with color and art boards. 4. Artboards and Color Palettes: Next I want to show you how to create color palettes and art boards. You can make a color palette from a photograph or you could find a pallet online. I'll also show you a color tool that I like to use. You can use your art boards for organizing things like your inspiration, your color palettes, your sketches, just to stay organized and keep everything close to your seamless repeat block. One tool that you might like is the Adobe Color tool. If you open up a web browser and type Adobe Color tool, then you can click on the top, it says "Adobe Color Wheel". I'll click on that. You'll see that it helps you choose colors that go well together. As you move these sliders around the circle, the colors adjust. You can go in towards the center to get a more muted tone and out towards the edge to get more vibrant colors. You can also adjust the type of color families. I like to use compound colors because that gives you a little bit more variation. As you slide around here, you're getting some nice color palettes. Once you find a set that you like, you can click the power button and the home button at the same time to take a screenshot and that saves it to your photos. Now I'll go back to Affinity Designer and start creating a color palette. First, I'll click the plus symbol, and then click "new document". Then you'll see several different options here. The first is the dimensions. I'm going to click here and enter the pixel dimensions. It allows you, if you click this little arrow to work in different types of measurements. I always work in pixels in this program. I worked into this one time and my repeat didn't match up perfectly. I would recommend is always working in pixels. I'll enter 2000 by 2000 pixels and then over here, these are the default options and I never change these. It's really just reading what's already on your iPad, that type of iPad, the device, the type of measurement, and you can change that here, and also the color space. If you're working on a project that requires CMYK or another color space, you can adjust that. But I don't mess with any of those options here. In terms of the DPI, this is only necessary if you are working with a raster image. I'm going to choose 300 DPI. That's the standard DPI for print, but you can go higher than that and then you can choose your background. Do you want a transparent background? I don't, I like starting out with a white background. The final option here is create art board and I always select that because I like to work with art boards that allow you to have different squares with different content in each one. Maybe one for inspiration, one for color, one for your final repeat. I'll go ahead and turn on "create art board". Next, I'll click, "okay" and then I'll zoom out so I can see a little more space on the canvas. I want to create another art board that's for my colors so I can put my drawing here and my colors on the side. You have a few options to create an art board. I'll click the little menu symbol at the top here and click "art boards", and that changes this menu down at the bottom. If I click "insert art board", then it just makes another art board that's the exact same size as the first one. You can see it calls that art board two. This is like having two separate documents open. I'll click two fingers to step back. Rather than clicking "insert art board", you may just want to draw a certain shape. You can just click and draw and then you take your finger off, and that creates the art board and you can drag it to move it to a different location. You can also get a specific size for this art board if you click the little transform tool down here. Right now it's 2436 pixels wide. I would like it to be the same width as this piece, so I'll change it to 2000 pixels on this "width" option and click "okay". I'd like it to be double the height. So I'll click 4000 pixels. Now, it's 2000 by 4000 pixels. Next I want to add in the photo, so I'll click the little menu, same one as before. Click "place image", import from photos and find my image. You get this little option that says "drag to place the image" and it disappears really quickly. You'll notice that the image is not here because I need to click and drag to make it appear and then I can put it at any size I want. Once you let your finger go, the size is set. You can drag it, but you can also adjust the size of that photo as well. You can click the same transform tool and enter specific dimensions if you want to change the size of the photo. I'm going to leave it how it is, and I want to start creating my colors down here from this photograph. I'll click this rectangle tool over on the left. Click and drag, and I'm just going to create a little color swatch. Once you click and drag, it's going to automatically fill with whatever color was already in your color palette. I happen to have a gray, so it turned my rectangle gray. We can move this rectangle by clicking the "move tool" and then putting that in place. If you want that to snap to the edge of something like the edge of this photograph, you can turn on magnetic down here and that'll help you get things lined up. Then I can use these little resize bars and magnetics helping me get it straight side to side with that photo. I know I'm going to pull a lot of colors on this photograph, so I want to go ahead and duplicate these rectangles down the page. In this program, if you put down two fingers and then drag, that allows you to duplicate whatever you just made. As long as that item is selected when you click on it, so for example, you can go up here and it selects that first one. Or you can drag any of these as long as you select them and keep your two fingers down, you're duplicating. You just have to remember to remove your two fingers so you don't accidentally keep duplicating things. Now that I've got all those squares, I can start changing their color. I'm going to click the little color dot here and drag this eyedropper to find a color in the sunflower. I like that yellow color, I'm going to stick with that. I'm going to click on my very first rectangle. On my color dot section, you'll see I have the color selected, but it's not changing my object yet. We've got three different circles here for color. We have the color we've selected. We have the fill of the shape or the interior of the shape, and we have the stroke. The stroke is the outer border of the shape. We can change the size of that stroke and the color. I want the stroke, the border, and the fill to be the same color. I'm going to click that yellow and that changes my border. My border is really thin so you almost can't see it. But if I zoom in, you can see it there. I'm going to swipe to change the fill here. You want to be sure both of those circles have the same color. You just swipe, click on your yellow, swipe again, and click on your yellow again. I'm going to repeat the same process with some other colors. Click and drag that color dropper, find the color you like, click on the rectangle, click on the color dot to change the stroke. Swipe, and sometimes if you swipe too fast, you switch the stroke and the fill. If you swipe a little bit slower, then it changes which one is visible. Again, I'll continue the same process to fill all of these colors. I'd like these colors, but I do wish there was a little bit more variation. I'll go to the color I want to change and then I'll go to swipe around this color wheel. You can see if I click on the fill, then I can change it as I move around this wheel. I can be keeping an eye on all of my colors and decide what color is going to go best with this set. Even if you use a photograph as your color inspiration, it's fine to make changes. Sometimes I'll start out with a photograph and then get almost completely different colors than what you see there just because I changed my mind about what set I want to use. I'm going to continue this same process filling all of these colors. One last thing you can do, you'll see there's a recent colors section down here and whatever you've most recently used will show up. I want to change my stroke to be this turquoise that I just used. I'll click my recent colors and make sure stroke is selected here and then click that one time to change the stroke. Once you're happy with your colors, we can go ahead and save this set of colors in our color palette. I'll open the color tool again and click swatches. That's going to bring up saved colors, and you'll notice that a lot of saved colors come with the program and you can also create your own. The first thing I'll do to create my own is click this little hamburger menu in the top and you'll see the option "add current fill to palette". That means whatever is filling the shape you're working on will be added to your palette. You can add an application palette, which means you're creating a color palette that will be visible no matter what document you're working on. Whereas add document palette creates the color palette just for this one document. If this is just for a single project, you can click "add document palette". But if you think you might use this color palette again on different projects, click "add application pallet". I'll click "add application palette" and then I want to change the name from unnamed, so I'll click the hamburger menu and click "rename palette". I'll call the sunflower palette and click "okay". You can see it changes the name right here and then I want to start adding these colors to the palette. I'm going to click and drag my eyedropper to get that first color. You have to add a fill to the color palette. I have to click on that to make it a fill and then I can click "add current fill to palette", and there it pops up. I'll do that again, drag my eyedropper onto the pink, click to make that a fill. Click the menu and click "add current fill to palette". I'll repeat this same process with all of my colors. If you decide you don't like this palette anymore, you can click the hamburger menu to remove it or rename it. That's all of the options that you'll need for making your first color palette. 5. Creating a Background: Next, I want to take you on a quick tour of the basic tools and functions of the app. We'll look at ways to create a Vector that's any shape at all, and a few adjustments that you can make to your Vectors. I'm going to zoom in so I can really see my canvas here. The first thing I want to do is just create a background. I don't want to work with a white background. I'm going to click my Layers panel and you'll see everything we created is on our Layers panel. The layers panel is a little bit more complex than something like Procreate, because you have various levels of hierarchy. The first hierarchy is the Art board.The Art board is like its own documents. You'll see there's Art board one and Art board two. The second hierarchy would be groups. If you group multiple layers together, then those would be in a group under a specific Art board.The next hierarchy is shapes. Each rectangle that we created when we added these colors is in its own shape, and then the photos in its own shape as well. All that's on Art board one, and I don't want to see that anymore. It's just in my way. I'm going to just click that little arrow to collapse it. Now, when I'm working on Art board one, I have to make sure that I'm selecting art board one. That's going to keep the exporting process really simple. Just make sure whenever you're working on a specific or board, you click the Layers panel and make sure you're on that Art board. I want to start by just adding in a simple background. I'll click the plus symbol and click Vector layer. Everything I do on this Art board, I'm going to do as a Vector. I'll click the rectangle tool and then just click and drag. That's going to fill with whatever color I was using last. Then, I can just go to my palette and change the color. I'm going to work with that gray background. I also want my square to be perfectly on my Art board. I'm going to click this transform tool down here. Then, I'm changing the dimensions of this rectangle to 2,000 by 2,000, which is exactly what my Art board is. Then, I want to change the location of that square so it's perfectly on my Art board. If you think about the Art board as a set of pixels, pixels zero is here and pixel 2,000 is here. Same thing for top to bottom pixel zero is here and 2,000 is here. It goes the same for the bottom. I want the square to be at 0,0. Right now it's off the canvas. On my x-axis, I'm typing zero, and that moves it over this way. Then, on my y-axis, which is up and down, I'll click zero. Now, it's perfectly aligned with the edges of that Art board. I'm just going to make sure that shape has a fill and a stroke of the same color. Right now it has a fill of gray and a stroke of pink. I'll click on the pink and change that to my gray that's on my sunflower palette. If you don't do that, you'll notice that there's a tiny little colored line on the edge of your Art board and sometimes that's hard to see when you're zoomed out. Then you'll export it onto a print on demand side. You'll notice there's a pixel line. Just always double-check the stroke of every shape as you work on it. 6. Drawing Tools: So next, I want to start creating shapes. We're going to play around with some of the drawing tools over here. There are a lot of tools in this program. I just want to do a quick overview and show you here if you click this question symbol, everything is labeled. If you ever forget what something is, just click on this question mark and it'll show you all of the labeling. Starting on the left side here we have home to get out of this document, move tool to move objects, node tool to adjust shapes and we'll be playing around with that in a minute in case you're not familiar with nodes. Corner tool to adjust the corner of a shape. Pencil tool to draw shade with the pencil, a smooth line. A vector brush tool so you can play around with a lot of different strokes and textures. The pen tool, which is good for creating smooth curves or polygons. The fill tool is helpful for creating gradients, and so we won't be using that one today, same with the transparency tool and you can use the vector crop tool to cut an image or cut a vector that you just created. We've used the rectangle tool but hidden within that tool, if you click on it, there's also a lot of other shapes. So you can make circles, ovals, and all these other shapes that you see here. Next we have the text tool where we can add fonts and then we have the color picker tool, which I typically just use that from the color studio over here. Then you'll see over on the right, there are brush options. So if you click the brush tool, then you can select your brush options. There's the layers studio which we've already used and looked at layers. There's assets which are saved images and we'll be playing around with those. We will use some layer effects and adjustments. Those are mostly for [inaudible] images and then you can play around with your fonts in the text studio. We'll be using the transform studio a lot to move images, resize images and then we won't be using these two, but these are helpful if you want to look back at your history and see what you did on your document. One more important thing to know about this program is that you can work in the vector studio, which we've been working in, which reveals all of the vector tools that we looked at over here. But then you can click the second option here to reveal the pixels studio. So that shows you a lot of different tools that are different from what you see in the vector studio. So we'll be going back and forth between the pixel persona and the vector persona and you can see when you change, it gives you a little pop-up to tell you that you're changing to that persona. Persona just means how you create your images, the settings that go along with that type of images so we'll look at some differences as we work today. So back to the vector persona, I'm ready to start creating some shapes. Before I create any shapes though, I just want to lock my background because I don't want to accidentally move that around. So I'm going to click on my rectangle layer, and I'll click on the three dot menu here making sure that layer that says rectangle is selected and on that three dot option, I'll get all these different layer options, opacity, making it visible or not visible, locking it, and a few other options that we won't use today. 7. Pen and Pencil Tools: Next I'm going to create a new layer for my shape. I'll click the plus symbol and click vector layer. Now you can see we have a few different layers going. We've got an art board. We have a layer, and on that layer we have a shape, which is our rectangle. On this new layer that I just created, I'm going to grab a tool and I'll start with the pen tool. I'm going to choose this yellow as my first color, and let's just tap with this to start with. As you're tapping, we're creating dots known as nodes. These nodes are controlling the shape. If I want to fill that shape with a color, I go back to my color palette and click on the fill, and then click that yellow. Now we have a filled color and it has a stroke that's yellow and a fill that's yellow. If I don't like the shape of this, I can go to my node tool and then I can just click and drag those nodes. This is the wonderful thing about vectors. It's really easy to adjust shapes and make them exactly as you want them to be. The pen tool is also really nice for creating curved lines. I'm going to grab the same tool, the pen tool, this time I'm going to tap. On my second tap, I'm going to drag. I didn't pick up my finger after I tapped, I just set it down and then dragged. You can see it starts creating this curve, and as I move my pencil around, it changes the curve. This is really helpful for creating a drawing with a very specific curve. Again, I just click and drag and then I can move that curve around. I'm just going to continue that same process. There I can create a really smooth shape. One thing to know about the pen tool is these little handlebars are really important. I'm going to just click two fingers to go back to start the shape over. If I click and drag on my second node, then you see this handlebar here is pointing in this direction. That's the direction my next curve is going to go. If you want to change the direction that the curve goes, you put down one finger and that allows you to move just one of these handlebars. I'm going to move this handlebar down here. When I create my next node, you can see it's directing it in that direction so then I can continue. The pen tool is really something that takes a lot of practice. This is something great to just play around with some abstract shapes or maybe practice making a certain curve. I'm going to fill this shape with yellow, so it has a stroke of yellow and a fill of yellow. Actually, let's make this one a different color to make this a little easier to see. We've looked at adjusting the nodes on the polygon shape but we can also adjust the handlebars. As long as you've got that node tool selected, you can play around with adjusting these curves, bringing them in closer, farther away. If you have a specific thing you don't like how it is and you're having trouble selecting, just zoom in more. It's really easy to change either the node or one of the handlebars. Next, I'm going to switch to the pencil tool. I've got the pencil tool here and I don't need to create a layer each time I do this because it's automatically creating these shapes on different levels. I've got my layer which contains my shapes, but then each shape is like its own layer. I'm just going to go ahead and start drawing with a pencil without creating a new layer. You can see it's extremely thin right now. Let's say you want to have a thicker border so it's easier to see, we're just going to click and drag on this little circle here and that adjusts the border. This is true for all of these little circles that you see in Affinity Designer. You can just click and drag on that circle and it starts changing the size. That works for brush tools and several other tools that we will come across today. The pencil tool makes it really easy to just sketch out simple shapes. It also has these nice options down here that help you and they're called controllers. Let's say for example, you want thick to thin relating to the pressure of your brush. I'm going to change this to brush defaults, and then as I press harder, it gets thicker. If I barely press, it's thinner. There's a few other options here that you can play around with. There's pressure, there is velocity, so the faster you go, the thicker it goes. Play around with these, try some different lines. You can also click this tiny little white arrow and get a stabilizer, which makes it easier for you to create smooth lines. If I turn down the stabilizer and draw, it's not very smooth but if I turn up the stabilizer, it gives me this little rope to pull my line along to make it smoother. We can increase that even more and make a really smooth line. There's the rope stabilizer, the window stabilizer which has a similar feel, and then no stabilizer. You can play around with those and see what works best for the shape that you're making. I just want to fill this with my next color. I'm going to click the fill and click turquoise. One last awesome thing about this pencil tool is the sculpt option. If you turn on sculpt rather than drawing, you're refining. If you look at all these little nodes here, what this tool will do is help you smooth out areas that are not smooth. For example, this is a little node right here. You can just go over it and get a little more smoothness. I've noticed that I didn't close my shape properly here. If you zoom in, you can see we've got two different paths that don't actually ever connect. What I'm going to do is get my node tool. Let's just delete that node, and just connect these two. You want your shapes to close. If they're not close, they're not going to fill properly, and you'll get these weird little open spaces. If you see these little strips where colors are appearing, you probably didn't close your shape fully. You can just go back and like I did, delete some nodes and make sure the two ends are connected perfectly. Let's go back to our sculpt pencil tool and just drag over that. We're just getting a little bit more of a refined edge. You can see there are a ton of options here to play around with depending on the shape you want to create. 8. Brush Tool and Geometry: The next tool we'll use is the Brush tool and the Brush tool, once you select it, you can also go over to the Brushes studio and choose what kind of brush you want to use. If you click over here, you'll see there are a ton of options that come with the program. I'll grab this dry acrylic and just brush across the page and you can see we get a brush line effect here. I'll click two fingers to undo and on the width, I'm just going to bump that up and you can see the brush size is displayed right here. As that gets bigger, you can see how your brush is going to look. Let's change our color for this last one that we do with the brush and then I'll just create a circle. These are really nice because this is creating a vector for you, but it looks like a raster brush. There are a lot of cool textures and things that you'll discover in that Brushes menu. The problem I'm seeing here is I didn't make my shapes the same size. I'll just click the "Move" tool and just start playing around with the sizing and you can see, because we're on the same layer, it's really easy to just select different shapes and then you can use the Rotate tool or the Resize tools. You can also put down one finger to keep the proportions of that shape or you can forget about the proportions and just drag it around like that. Now that I have the shapes created, I want to play around with some different options for combining them with other shapes. With my Move tool selected, I'm going to click and drag and you can see as I do that, it's selecting all the shapes. Now all four of these shapes are selected, just like we did with the color palette, I'm going to put down two fingers, click and drag, just to repeat this a few times. Next, I want to play with intersecting some shapes with these shapes. I'm going to create a polygon by just clicking with my Pen tool, a little triangle that goes across all of these, and let's make this one brown so we can really see it. Now that I have that new shape, I can use that shape to change these other shapes, I can cut them, I can divide them. I'll click the "Move" tool and I want to be sure that the shapes that I'm using are connected. I'm going to put down one finger and that allows me to select multiple shapes at the same time. Whatever you want to adjust or combine or divide, those need to be selected. I'm just going to work with this yellow and brown right now. I've got both of those selected. I'm going to click the "Menu" tool and then under Geometry here, you'll see all of these options: Add, Subtract, Intersect, Divide, and Combine. If we click "Add", it adds these two shapes together and uses the color of the first one to color the second one. Now, this is a single shape that works on its own. Now that we have that new shape, we can use it for combining with other shapes. I'm selecting the pink and the yellow. I'll click that tool again and click "Subtract". Now, I've subtracted that yellow shape from the pink shape. Now the pink shape is just this little hamburger shape. This is great if you want to divide something in a very specific way. One thing you'll notice here is that the shapes have very rounded edges on them and you may or may not want that. What I'm going to do is click this little brush tool here with this shape selected and I'll click "Advanced" to get some other options. These options are going to change how these shapes end and intersect. The first option is the Cap and that changes how a line ends. For example, if I draw a line with the Pen tool, then the Cap can be rounded, flat, and flat beyond the node. Going back to my pink shape, I can look at how things join, join as a rounded edge, join as a flat edge, or join as a right angle edge. You can also align the edge against these nodes. You may not need these options depending on the shapes you're making, but it's helpful to know that that little menu is there in case you come across a problem. I just want to look at these other combining options. I'm going to create a new polygon to go across this row of shapes. I'll select yellow and brown. I'll go back to that little menu and click "Divide". What that does, is it divides the shape by the other shapes. Now, we have different pieces that we can take apart and play around with. This would be a great way to create an abstract repeat where you just create a bunch of shapes, let them cut each other part, and then arrange them on the canvas. That would be a good way to get to know these tools if you're having trouble wrapping your head around the vector issue. Let's look at one more option with these and I'm going to select all of these circles on this single line. I'll click "Combine". What that does, is it combines that shape into a single shape and uses the color of the first selected image. As you can see, there are a ton of different things you can do here, we could swipe the brush stroke over these, we could use the Pen tool over these. There are so many different ways to combine these shapes and colors in this program. One last thing that may be helpful, is the Deselect button. Sometimes, you get a lot of things selected and you just want to step back and deselect, so that's the option right down here. You can also select something and then click the little trash can to delete it or you could select multiple things and click the trash can to delete them all and then two fingers to step back. One more thing you may want to do is group items. Sometimes, it can get really confusing. You can see we have a lot of shapes going on here and that can get a little complicated. Let's say for example, you want to be able to move all your pink things at the same time. I'm going to go to my Layers panel and click on the first pink thing, swipe left, and you have to do this slowly. I noticed if you swiped quickly, it just didn't work well. Now, I have everything pink selected, and I'm going to click this little symbol here, it looks like two puzzle pieces coming together, and it's the group symbol. Now, you can see that group is on its own layer and it can be moved independently. Let's go ahead and start setting up our canvas for our first repeat pattern. 9. Creating a Master Document: Now that you know the basics of the Affinity Designer app, let's go ahead and set up a new canvas that will show our seamless repeat live preview to the right of our repeat blog. That way as you're making adjustments to your repeat, you can see exactly what it's going to look like as it repeats across the canvas. This is probably my favorite thing about Affinity Designer. You can set up your canvas so that anything you change on your repeat is automatically shown on a live preview. This makes it so easy to adjust your repeat elements so that they're exactly as you want them to be. That was one of my biggest struggles working in Photoshop is it's so hard to know exactly where to put a repeat element. I want to show you how to setup your canvas and create this kind of canvas as a template so you can always use it moving forward. I'm going to go back to my gallery and click the plus symbol and click new document. I'll enter the same size, 2000 by 2000 pixels. Affinity Designer doesn't have limits like Procreate for how large you can make your file, but working at a larger size does slow down the speed of the program somewhat. I'm going to work at 2000 by 2000 so that you don't have to wait at all in between my steps but obviously you can work at any size here. You can even do 10,000 by 10,000 pixels or whatever size you need, but you will notice that you have to wait just a little bit in-between steps to allow the program to have time to process. Again, I'm going to adjust my DPI to 300. I'm not going to turn on transparent background, but I am going to turn on create art board and then I'll click okay. What I like to do is create my art board to be four times the size of my repeat square. The first art board is 2000 by 2000. If I click my menu symbol, click art boards, drag one out here and then click the transform studio. I'm going to change the size of this new art board to 4000 by 4000. In terms of position, it doesn't really matter where that is. You may want to get it out of your way, or you may want to have it right up next to your repeat. Either way works well. Next we're going to make sure we are on art board 1. We want to be creating this new shape on art board 1 and you want to see it selected. We'll click the rectangle tool and draw a rectangle on this board. You can change the color here. I'll just change the stroke and the fill to white and then I'll go to my transform studio and make this 2000 by 2000 pixels. It's the exact size of my art board and then I'll change the x and y axis points to zero zero. It's meeting right at the top of that art board. With that rectangle still selected and you can go to the layers menu to make sure that rectangle selected. We're going to click the symbols studio and that's the little circle here and remember if you can't find it, just click the question symbol and it says symbols studio. We want to make sure that is on, which is the blue dot to the right rather than the white dot to the left. Then we'll click the little menu symbol and click add symbol from selection. Add symbol from selection as turning this into an item that if we duplicate it somewhere else, it synced to that original item. What we'll do next is copy this shape to our art board. Making sure that that symbol selected. I'll go to the three dot menu. Click copy. Click on art board 2, make sure art board 2 is selected. Click on my three dot menu and click paste. That's pasting it in the exact place it's supposed to be. I'm going to click paste a few more times so that I have four total. The only problem is they're all in the same place and I want them to be stacked right beside each other, just like a basic repeat pattern is. I need to move this over and if you think about the canvas with this being zero and the other point being 4000. I need to move this over to the halfway point. That would be 2000 on the x-axis. I'll click the x and click 2000 and that moves that shape over 2000 pixels. I'll click on the next shape, and that one needs to go down, so that's going to be the y-axis. I'm going to put that 2000 pixels down the y-axis. The next one, it needs to go down and over. First we'll do x-2000 and then y-2000. Now we have four squares, one in each corner and then we have our original symbol over here. You're going to do all of your work on your original symbol. What we want to do first is just test and make sure this is all set up correctly. I'll click on that symbol and click on my rectangle that I created originally. Let's just change the color of that rectangle to be sure this is working properly. I'm going to change my stroke and fill to gray. You can see as soon as I do that, my art board too is automatically populated with that color. If I create a new layer, I have to be sure that that layer is on the symbol layer, so that's the layer that has orange on it. I'm going to take that layer, click and drag onto the symbol layer so that it is orange. If it's not orange, it's not going to sync to your second art board. That's one thing to double-check if you're having an issue. Let's go ahead and get another color and just test this out. I'll get my pencil tool and increase the width of the pencil tool and draw a shape. Let's change the color so you can see it's automatically populated on our repeat block. Next we'll look at how to actually make the repeat elements match up. I'm just going to delete that. You can leave your original rectangle whatever color you want it to be. I'll go ahead and change my rectangle layer to be white. Now this is like my master document so I never want to have to do those steps again for a 2000 by 2000 pixel canvas. What I'm going to do is click the back button, click on that item and click rename. I'm going to call this master 2000. This is my template for that size canvas. If you want to work at different size canvases, obviously you'd have to repeat that same process for each size that you want to use, but now I never have to do that again if I'm making a 2000 by 2000 pixel piece, because I can just click that little menu symbol and click duplicate. Then I can start working on that new document. 10. Basic Repeat Elements: Now that you have your master document created, let's go ahead and create our first repeat pattern. For this piece, we're going to create a basic repeat pattern, which means that the blocks of the repeat will meet side-by-side. The first thing I'll do is open the master document copy that we just created. I never want to use the master, I'll always use a copy of it, so that I don't have to redo that repeat canvas process again. I'll click on that image and then I just want to be sure that I'm always working on Art Board 1. I never want to work on Art Board 2, so I'm just going to collapse Art board 2 so I can't see it and just let Art board 1 be visible. I'm going to start by changing the color of my rectangle. I'll click "Swatches" and go to a color palette I created for this project. I'm going to use a gray shade for my background, and so I'm setting the fill and the stroke for that same gray color, that's really important. Now, I'm going to that new layer that I created, or you can click "Plus Vector Layer", just double check that it's showing orange, so that it's going to duplicate to your main art board. Now I'm just going to choose a color that I want to work with first and start creating some shapes. For this project, just go with whatever shapes work for you. I would suggest just choosing a shape like a triangle, a circle, you could do some ovals. You could use the Pencil tool to draw leaves. Whatever you want to do here, just choose one or two shapes and repeat those, just so you can practice the process of creating the pattern. Don't worry so much about the final result of this pattern, the goal is to learn how to create a repeat in this program. Before I move on with the shapes, I want to change my corner settings. I'm going back to that brushstroke symbol here, click "Advanced" and I'm going to change these to be all sharp edges, because I want these triangles to have sharp edges. I'm going stick with that layout and with each of these shapes, I'm going to get the Pen tool and create another triangle that cuts through them. Let's get brown for this one, and I'm going to let this triangle cut through that triangle. I'll get the Move tool first and place it somewhere on this triangle that works for me. That looks good, and then I just want to be sure both of these are selected. I'll click the three dot menu symbol and click "Divide". That's cutting these shapes at the places where these meet. If I deselect, then when I select these shapes, I can click the trash symbol to remove things that came off the edge. I'm going to repeat that same process with all of the colors and shapes that I want to use. But as I'm doing this, I'm going group these shapes because these are all three separate items right now and I want them to function as one item. I'm going to get my Move tool, and let's click and hold one finger down and tap on each one so that all three are selected. Then I'll go to the Layers panel and click Group. Now this is one group and I can move it around the canvas, independent of all the other objects that I'm going to create. I'll do one more and then I'll just repeat the process as I speed up my camera. I'm on a new Layer, I've got my Pen tool, create a triangle, choose the stroke and fill. Create another triangle, choose a different stroke and fill, get the Move tool and put that triangle into place. Make sure both of these are selected. Click "Divide", deselect everything, and sometimes you have to double-click to select something. If it doesn't select on the first time, just tap it again and deleting those extra pieces. Selecting all those three, going to my Layers panel and clicking "Group". Now these are grouped as one single object. Now I can still select individual objects. Let's say for example, you're working on this and you realize, "You know what, I don't really like that brown with that red." Click on that one time to select the group. Click on it twice to select just that shape and then you can play around with some different colors with that shape. These are really easy to customize. Once you get these group, you can still play around with a lot of different options. I'm going to continue the same process and just fill the canvas, staying within the border to get all these triangles down. You can see as I work on this piece, that sometimes I'll just use both hands because it makes the process a lot quicker. You can reach that Deselect and Trash button over on the left and switch between tools, and then you use your other hand to create the shapes and adjust colors. 11. Building Your Repeat: Now that I have a few shapes on the Canvas, I want to start creating my repeat pattern so that I know how many more to create. The first thing I'll do is choose my first block that's going to go on the edge. I'm going put this piece on the edge. If it's up here, it needs to repeat down on the bottom. The first thing I'll do is just click "Duplicate" so now I have two of that exact shape. Then I want to move it down the Canvas, the exact amount of pixels that the Canvas is tall. Go to the transform studio, and on the y-axis, which is up and down, I'll click that button, rather than entering a number, I'm going to click the plus symbol, 2,000. Whatever that original number is plus 2,000, and that's exactly the amount down the Canvas. You can do that with any number both on the x-and y-axis. I'll repeat that same process here, let's put this brown piece right on the edge, click "Duplicate", "Transform studio", y-axis. I'll click "Plus 2,000", and that moves it right down there. You can see as you do that, your repeat starts to fill in and the places where the squares meet it starts to match up. I'll repeat the same process over here on the left side. Duplicate. This is going to be our x-axis. I'll click that symbol plus 2,000, and there it is on the right side. Now I'm going to continue that same process, filling up the sides of this Canvas and then putting some more triangles in the middle to fill in that empty space. You can see this is where the process really becomes fun, you're really just fitting these pieces together like a puzzle, and this is where you decide, is this pattern going to be really tight? Everything's really close together or is it going to stay more loose like this and scattered? You could also, if you want to do a little bit of filler, you could add in another layer. Let's say for example, some little black triangles, rather than doing the process that we've been doing, we could just create some simple black shapes like this and scatter those around as fillers. I'll add those then we'll see how they look. I'd like to have one of these fillers on the edge. I'm just going to stick it over here on the edge and do the same process, duplicate, and then move it over on the x-axis. I find that, if you don't put some of these filler images on the edge, it ends up creating a boxy look in the pattern. I always go through and just add in a little bit of variation so that the pattern is a little bit different in each area. I'll continue adding in these little dots. This is where I always just step back and just take a second to look over the whole pattern and maybe come over here and adjust some things that don't look quite right. This is really the subjective part of the process, there's no way to know when these are finish. One last thing that you may need to do is adjust something that's on the repeat edge. You want to be sure if you adjust the one on one side that you're also adjusting the one on the corresponding side. The only adjustment you can make is moving things up and down, left and right. You cannot change the size of anything that's on the edge of the Canvas. I'm going to select that first red triangle and then hold down my finger and select the second one, so now I can move both of these red triangles at the same time. That's okay, I can do that, but I can't adjust the size like that because you can see that totally messes up the repeat pattern. If you need to make any changes, you can do that or if that one's just totally wrong, just delete it and put a new thing in that place and duplicate it and move it again. I think you can see the basics of this process. Let's go ahead and export this file. The first thing you want to do is be sure that your image is selected. I like to just select art board one by selecting the rectangle, that original rectangle that we made. Then you can go to this three document square and click "Export". There are a ton of export options depending on what you need, you could do a PSD file if you want to keep the layers and take it into Photoshop, you could do an SVG file if you want to take it into Illustrator and work with the vector shapes, you could do JPEG if you just want to put it on your website as an example image but I really recommend if you're going to do a raster image, use PNG not JPEG, because I exported a JPEG image and it didn't export correctly, there were little white lines on the edge. Just double check before you start exporting that you're using PNG or if you're going into a computer-based program, you're using PSD, SVG, or PDF. I'm going to use PNG. One thing you'll notice is that you have the option of what to save. You can save the whole document that saves both our boards. You can save the selection which would be the thing that we've selected, which was that rectangle. We don't just want to save the rectangle, we want to save a whole art board, so I'm just clicking and scrolling down, and I'm going to click art board one. The area that we're saving is art board one, the file type is PNG. The type of PNG is 24. That's set already I don't touch that. Then I don't use anything else on this page. It's all set for standard image types already. Next I'm going to click "Share" and you can click "Save image". You could take it into procreate if you want to add some textures or something else to the image, you could save it to your Dropbox, If you just want to store it, you could e-mail it to yourself. There are a ton of different options here depending on what you want to do with the file. I'll just click "Save Image" and then it'll be in my photos. Then you just have to click "Cancel" to get out of that export window and then go back to your library. Then I'll just go to my photos and there's my repeat block right there. Let's go ahead and move on to a slightly more complex repeat pattern, where we can combine some textures with some vectors made from photographs. Now that you know the basics of how to create a repeat and Affinity Designer, lets take a look at some inspiration, so you can decide how your final repeat pattern will look. I created this Pinterest inspiration board with a ton of different styles of repeat patterns. You can create any of these in Affinity Designer, any style like this is totally possible in this program. The first step is just to decide which of these types of styles or similar elements work for your personal style. You may want to go with something that has a botanical theme like this piece or you may just want to start with some abstract shapes like this. You could also do an animal print some pieces that weave in and out of each other, or you could create some complex line drawings and make those match up on the repeat edge. I would definitely go with something that works with your level of experience. Something like this would be great for a beginner, just create some simple shapes and fill them with some pattern or if you're more advanced and you want a little bit more of a challenge, you may want to start with something that has a little bit more complexity to it, and requires a little bit more planning like this leaf piece where you would have to draw the leaf and then let it hang off the edge and then draw the other leaves on the interior after you've taken care of that edge. There are a lot of different styles on here to choose from. I recommend just breezing through here and seeing what stands out to you, what speaks to your personal style and what doesn't speak to your style, that helps you know what to avoid. We'll start with a floral pattern, and I'll add in some hand-drawn leaves and some flowers as well, similar to this but with a little less detail. Let's go ahead and get started on our next pattern. 12. Creating Textures from Photos (downloads password here): So far we've only worked with vectors and vectors are wonderful because they can be resized without losing any quality. So I really prefer to work with vectors. But there are times where you need to work with a raster image because something is way too complicated to be made into a vector. We're going to take some pictures of textures and turn those into raster and vector images so you can see the difference and see why one might be better than another in certain cases. To get started on this piece, just like we did with the last one, I'm going to click on my "Master Document Hamburger" menu, click "Duplicate" and then I'll click on that "Copy" and that's where I'll start my repeat pattern. First, I'll make sure that I'm working on art board 1 and I want to change the color of that rectangle to a light gray color. Next I want to add a texture background to this piece. But one thing I don't like to do is create my textures in this document. When you create textures, it gets a little bit complicated with the layers and I just don't like to mess with my repeat layout. I'm going to go back and create a new document, 2,000 by 2,000 same size. You want to do this at whatever size you're creating your final repeat so mine is 2,000 by 2,000 but you may have chosen a different size so go with whatever your repeat square is going to be. Same thing, 300 dpi. We don't need to create an art word for this because this is just going to be one single image. I'll click "Okay". Now I want to insert some texture into this document. I'm going to be using a texture that I took a picture of and I also want to share with you a ton of different textures that I took pictures of. You'll see that this folder has some fabric texture, some gravel, some rocks, grass, all kinds of things. You can start taking your own texture pictures too because once you see how simple it is to turn this into a texture and even a vector, you'll be seeing textures everywhere. Feel free to use any of mine and I'll show you how to download those. You'll find a link to download all of the textures that I created in the about section of the class. I'll also put a link in the project section and the discussion sections so it'll be easier to find this link and you will need a password to get into this page and I'll show the password on screen right now. Once you get into that page, you'll see a whole list of resources including all of the apps and things that I mentioned today. The Pinterests inspiration board that we just looked at, the texture photos that we're going to open now, the Affinity Designer app, the Imaengine app that we'll use in a few minutes and also a list of free image resources that I pulled from and you can use those for personal and commercial use. I'll go ahead and click on "My Texture Photos" and that's going to open this folder with all of these textures in it. When you find one that you like, you can click on it one time and then you'll see on the right side here three little dots. Click on that and click "Download" and I'm using Safari here so if you're using a different browser, it might be a little different so try Safari if you have any trouble. Now that I have this open, I can click and hold to get the Save Image option. I'll click that one time and that just saves it to my photos. If I go back to my photos app, there it is. Now I'm going to go back to Affinity Designer to that document that we just created for the texture. Click the little menu symbol, "Place Image", "Import from Photos" and then I'm going to choose that image that we just downloaded and then you'll see drag to place your image. I'm going to zoom out and just drag until this fits nicely and when you're working with rasters, you always want to drag bigger than you need and then size down. You never want to drag small and then size up because the program is going to drop this picture in at whatever size you originally set. So you want to start large and go smaller because this is a raster, not a vector. I've got this placed nicely on the Canvas, I'm happy with how that looks so I'm ready to turn this into a texture. First, I'm going to click on the adjustments tool over here on the right and remember you can click the question mark if you can't find it, it's called adjustments studio. I'll click "Adjustment Studio" and then I want the option that says threshold. Everything on this list make some adjustment to your photo so you can play around with these other options but for now we're just going to use threshold. I clicked "Threshold" and you can see that the image disappeared. That's because my threshold is currently set to zero. If I click and drag, then I start increasing my threshold the amount of texture increases. You can go as far as you want with this, you can do this a tiny bit of texture, a little bit of speckling or you can go really extreme. It really just depends on your personal style. We're going to be changing the color of this from black so you'll have to imagine it in whatever color you are going to use, maybe cream or green or whatever it's going to be. I'm going to go with about 50 percent for this image and then if you go to your layers panel, you'll see that this is actually two separate layers. You have the photo itself and then you have the threshold adjustment. The threshold adjustment is like a mask on top of that photo. It's not actually attached to the photo, but I want this to be one thing. I can start playing around with changing them and removing the white. I'm going to click the little hamburger symbol to get those layer options and then I'm going to click "Merge Visible." That's going to merge every layer that's visible right now. What that does is it creates a new layer so I can make those first two layers invisible. That creates a new layer that is not only a single layer, not a photo with a mask over it, but it's also cropped. I've got the texture at the exact size I need it to be for my repeat. The next thing I want to do is remove all of that white and to do that, I need to go to my pixel persona. I'll click the "Pixel Persona" on the top and then I need to choose a selection tool. I'm going to use the flood selection tool that's going to flood an area and select it. What you'll see when you click that tool is that there are some options down at the bottom here. This says contiguous, which means selecting a single area. If I turn off contigouos, you're selecting anything with that same color. I'm going to turn that off so it's not highlighted. That way when I click one white area, all the white is now selected and you can see that if I zoom in that it's all moving. I'm going to zoom out, I've got all of that white selected and I'm going to click the "Trash Can." That just deleted all of the white and you can see it just changed in the layer's panel. If you want to test that, you can create a new layer. Let's just create a vector layer below that pixel layer and I'll just get blue as my color. Go back to my vector persona, get the rectangle tool and just put that blue rectangle behind there so I can just test this texture. If I click the little x, that will deselect everything so it's a little bit easier to see and then you can see that this texture is here and everything looks fine. 13. Creating Raster Textures: Next, what I want to do is turn this texture into a seamless repeat. As it is right now, it's not a seamless repeat so it wouldn't work well for my pattern. What I'll do is click on that layer that contains my texture and duplicate it three times so I have four total. Then I need to move these squares to each of the four corners so that I can start working on the repeat seam. Just like we did with the last one, I'm going to click the move tool and make sure that first layer is selected, then I'll click the x-axis. I'm going to move that over 1000 pixels, so halfway across this Canvas. Then I need to move it up 1000 pixels. On the y-axis, rather than plus, I'm going to do minus 1000. Plus is right and down, minus is left and up. I'll repeat the same process with all of these squares so that each corner contains a piece of the square. Now that I've moved those into the corners, I want to merge all of these onto the same layer so I can start playing around with erasing and painting to make this repeat seamless. I'm just going to swipe left on each of those four layers to make sure all four are selected. Then I'll click the hamburger symbol and click "Merge Selected." All four of these are on one single layer and it's cropped to the Canvas. It looks okay from this distance but if you zoom in, you'll see that there are these little straight lines that cut across this that makes it look just not really realistic. I'm going to get black as my color and click the vector brush tool, go to the brush studio here and choose a brush that matches my texture. Whatever your texture is, you want to try to find a brush that's going to work well with the same texture. Before I do that, I want to be sure that I'm in the pixel persona because the pixel persona is going to give me access to a lot of other brushes. I've got the brush tool selected, then I'm just scanning over to the pen section. I'm going to use the variable felt pen because I can see that if I draw with this, I can make it kind of look like these other spots. I'm just going to go through and try to make this look seamless, just play around especially at that seam area and make sure there are no gaps. You can also grab the eraser to remove areas that don't look natural. You can also copy and paste. Let's get the free-hand selection tool, circle a texture and tap and hold, click copy then tap and hold and click paste. Then if I get the move tool, I can put that texture anywhere on the Canvas to kind of hide part of that repeat seam. That kind of process is really helpful if you're using a pattern that has straight lines or some kind of order. These chaotic patterns are much easier to make seamless. If you're working with a pattern that has some lines to it or some streaks, that's going to be a little bit more tricky and is probably going to require some of that copying and pasting. I want to make sure I'm on my main texture layer here. I'm going to go back to my brush and just brush and erase as I work on this piece. You want to be sure if you're removing any material, you want to use the eraser. Never go through and paint white because that's going to change how your texture appears on your repeat. Once you're happy with how that looks, if you did some copying and pasting, you want to make sure you merge all of those layers. My drawing is on a different layer and also this little spot that I copied and pasted is on a different layer. I just want to make sure all of that's on the same layer. I'm going to swipe left on each of those, click the little hamburger menu and click, "Merge selected." Sometimes when you click that, it'll take just a minute for the program to respond. Once that image is all on one layer, you can click the little document symbol, click "Export." Then on the area that we want to save, I'm going to choose selection without background. What I've selected is that layer and I want to be sure that these blue dots are all around this layer to show that it's been selected. Then back to my export page on area, I'm clicking selection without background. That's going to save only the black parts with no white behind it. I want to be sure that PNG is selected here. You'll notice that sometimes it takes a little while for the image to process especially if it's a really large file. Once that is done, you can click "Share" and then save image. Now that we have of our texture saved, I'm going to go back to my homepage and go back to my repeat document that I was working on. I've already added that texture in. I'm going to click on the documents symbol, click "Place image," import from photos, then we're going to import that image. Drag to place your image. I'm dragging that across the Canvas. Then as usual, we need to set this to be the exact same size as our Canvas, which is 2000 by 2000. We need to have this block at 00. Next, I want to change the color of this texture. I don't want it to be black. I'm going click this layer FX menu and it literally says FX. Once you click that, you'll see the option color overlay. If you turn on color overlay and click at one time, you get this little color menu down here. Then you can start playing around with different color options. I'm going to take a minute to choose a color that works for my pattern. I'm happy with that. The one downside of this texture that is a raster image. If you ever wanted to have this repeat at 5000 by 5000 pixels, you can't because this raster repeat is giving you some limitations. I want to show you an option to turn this into a vector texture. I'm going to make that invisible and go back to my gallery. 14. Creating Vector Textures: To turn this texture into a vector, I'm going to use a different app because Affinity Designer doesn't yet have a tool that turns a photo into a vector. They have gotten a lot of requests for that, so it may happen soon in the future, but for now, I'm using the app called Imaengine. I'll put a link to this in the class resources page. This app is so easy to use. You just click on it. Click "Import a photo". I'm going to find that texture that I just made. It's just asking you to crop, if everything looks good. I'm just going to leave it as it is. Then I'm going to click "Go." Now, this is turned into a vector texture, so you can go through and choose some different options. With these really complicated textures, it may not be possible to use all of these options. I think there's probably only a few that work with something this complicated. But we're also going to use a picture of a flower where we can use all of these different options. The reason it can't do some of these textures is because, this is so many paths and strokes. As you can imagine, if you had to create this out of the vector tools in Affinity, you would have to create so many points that it overwhelms the program a little bit. That's one downside of working with a vector in these programs is, this is just a lot of information for the iPad to process. But I do use vector textures. I'm happy to wait for them to process. I'll show you the one that I'm going to use today. Once you're happy with how that looks, if you don't like the level of detail or something like that, you can play around with these sliders to adjust the amount of strokes and the amount of freckles and the threshold and the detail. Play around with those until it looks as you want it to. Then you can click "Share" and you'll see the option to save it to different programs or you can click "Open in." I'll click "Open in," and then click "Copy to designer." You'll notice if you already have another image open, it won't let you do that, so you have to go back to your gallery in order to be able to do that. This is now a vector and you can see the points by clicking on the node tool and zooming in and clicking one time. You can see this is full of probably thousands of tiny little points. At this point we can play around with them and move them but it is going to make the program slow down a little because it's just having to manage so much information here. This is definitely an option. You may find that your repeat pattern isn't perfect after you do this, so drop this into your repeat document and see if it looks good. If not, you may have to make some adjustments to these little edge pieces. I'm going to go back to my repeat document. Rather than using a texture that is a raster, I'm going to use a texture that's a vector that I've already created. I've created that and saved it as an asset. An asset is a vector that you've already created and chosen a color. It can also be a group of vectors together. I'll show you how to make these assets in a little while but for now, I'm just going to insert one. If you want to insert the same asset into your image, just go back to the class downloads page and click and hold" My Affinity assets," "Open in a new tab," and then it should say the option "Open in designer". If not, click "More" and find Affinity Designer on that list. That will give you all of the assets that I'll be using today. Once you do that, you should be able to click on this little box here and then scroll over until you see the asset list called Liz Kholer Brown. I'm going to click on "My texture" one time and click "Insert." I'm just going to put it basically in place and then go to our "Transform" menu and make this the exact size of our Canvas. What you may find is the texture isn't set down in the correct place. If that's the case, you can just click and drag it into the "Symbols" menu, and then it should populate onto your repeat Canvas. One thing you'll find when you use this program is that there will always be a little white line unless you really zoom in, then you'll always see a little white line between your repeat blocks. That isn't actually in your image. It's just part of the way the program displays this repeat display on the right here. I'm happy with how this image looks, but I do want to change the color. I can just go to my "Color" menu and click on a color. Another thing that is cool about Affinity Designer is that a lot of these little menu buttons are adjustable. If you just click on the colored circle and just push up or down, the color changes a little bit. I do that sometimes just to make tiny adjustments to the color. When you do this "Click and Drag" option, you can also move your pencil or stylus left or right to change the hue. There are a lot of options with making tiny adjustments to your colors. I find it's easiest to select over here and then view it over here. I'm just zooming in to just get my eyes on this color combination. I'm happy with how this color combination looks. Now, I'm ready to start creating my other repeat options. So I think you can see there are two different options for creating textures; the vector and the raster option. Both have their pros and cons. The vector takes up a lot of processing power on your iPad, whereas the raster, it has its limitations in terms of resizing and blurriness. Choose the one that works best for you, or just don't use a texture at all. 15. Isolating a Shape: Now that we've added this texture background, let's go ahead and start adding in some repeat elements to our Canvas. The first thing I want to add to my repeat is a rose. I have a picture of a rose that I took and I have a ton of flower pictures that go along with my class on botanical illustrations. If you need some pictures of flowers and leaves, I share a ton of those in my botanical class. Check this out. I'm going to go ahead and pull a rose that I made for that class and you can see this image is just a picture of a rose and it's in a dimly lit room and I'm just taking a picture here with my iPhone. What I'm going to do with that picture is remove the background because I want to make a vector just of the flower, not of my hand or the wall. I'll create a new image, a new document and we can put this at any size, let's do 2,000 by 2,000 again, just to keep it simple. We don't need a transparent background and we don't need an art board. I'll click "Okay" and then I'm just going to place my rose image on the Canvas. Again, it says, "Drag to place your image." I'm just going to drag that into place and I want this to be pretty large, and then I'll just use a little turn signal to turn it over and put down one finger to lock that. I'm just going to cut my hand off there and let this be in the center of the Canvas. I want to remove all of this cream backgrounds. To do that, I'm going to go to my pixel persona, click the "Flood selection tool." Again, we're going to turn off contiguous because we want to select all around this flower. I'm going to click one time and just see how much we can select with that one click. Actually it looks like this photo needs to be rasterized. Rasterizing makes an image editable. If you have any trouble with any of these tools, just click on the photo, click the "Options menu," and click "Rasterize." Rasterizing just turns it into a photo that we can now use with all of these tools. Now if I click one time, it selects everything. Anything you take with your iPhone or a regular camera will probably need to be rasterized, so you may just want to go ahead and do that when you pull the photo into the program. Another thing we want to do is select more spaces so that in select some of these shadows. I'm going to change the mode here to add, because I want each click to add to the selection. I'm going to click again, and it looks like it added a little bit too much because it took some of that leaf into account. Now I need to go to a slightly more refined version of the selection. I'm going to click this little tool over here and again, click the questions symbol. If you have trouble finding it, it's called the Refine selection tool. I'm going to click that one time and you can see it turns everything that's not selected red. This is selected, all of this background, and this is not selected. What you want to do is paint over the areas that you want selected. On the adjustment section here, you can click foreground, foreground is what's selected, or background, background is what's not selected. If I click background, I can paint on the background or the unselected area, and that area becomes selected, or I can change it back to foreground and paint on an area that should be selected, and then that area will be selected. You can also change your brush size, enlarge the size of the brush change here. I'm going to change it to background and just paint over all these areas of the leaf that should have been selected. It doesn't have to be perfectly to the edge, this program is smart, it understands what you want, so you don't have to get exactly to the edge, you just have to get close and that let's it know, oh, you made a little mistake there, you need to select that area too. Continue the same process, just making sure everything is selected correctly. Another adjustment tool you can use here is Matt. If you select Matt, you can just paint over the area that's wrong and that's telling the program you need to take another look at that area. Like here, it selected an extra pixel and I don't want that, so I'm just going to breeze over that area and it fixes it. You're basically just telling the program there's a problem here, fix it. This is a really nice way to just clean up a photo and of course, this is helpful for not just making textures for your repeats, but there are tons of different applications you could use this with. I'm going to continue the same process until this is nicely selected. Once your selection looks good, you want to be sure to click the check symbol. If you don't click the check symbol, you will lose all of that work that you just did to refine your selection. This is a really important step. Click the "Check symbol," and now the entire background is selected and the rose is not. Now I can just click "Delete" and then I just have a nice row shape there to work with. I'm going to click the X symbol so that nothing is selected, and now I just want to export this image, so I'll click the "Menu," click "Export," and make sure the whole document is selected. Click "Share," save image. Then I can go back to my Imaengine app, but I just want to be sure to click "Cancel" and go back to my gallery so that Imaengine can open my new image here. 16. Vector Generation Options: I want to show you one more app for creating vectors from photographs on your iPad. The thing I like about this app, it's called Adobe Capture, it's totally free, so there's no fee to download or use this. The thing I like about Imaengine is that it stylizes the vectors a little bit so they look a little bit more like a drawing. Imaengine as a paid app, I think it was about $6 when I bought it, whereas Adobe Capture is free. I wanted to show you both options so you could choose. If you want something more stylized, you can go with Imaengine, if you want something more realistic, you can go with Adobe Capture. You'll notice if you download the Adobe Capture app it asks you to sign in to the Adobe Creative Cloud. You don't actually have to have a paid Adobe Cloud membership in order to use it, you get some free space if you setup a free account. So that's what I did, I went ahead and signed up with my email and created a password and it's totally free. The only limitation is they cap you at how much data you can store, but then you can just go through and delete some old images. So the storage limitation is really not an issue. So I'll go ahead and open the app, and once you create your Adobe Creative Cloud account and you sign in, you'll see your gallery. So you can go ahead and take a picture if you click the camera symbol, or you can use a picture that's in your library. I'm going to use that rose we just created, so I'll click on the picture symbol, and then click camera roll. So when you first click on the image you'll see that there are parts that won't look quite right. I'll reduce the threshold on the side, and you can see that it improves things on this side. But what it's doing is taking directly from the photograph and turning it into a vector. It's going to be quite detailed in terms of the number of points. That's another nice thing about Imaengine, is that it reduces it into something manageable for the program, but I think this is still a really helpful tool for creating vectors in some cases. Once you're happy with how the vector looks, you can click the check symbol. Then you have the option to refine by erasing vector points or painting new ones. There's this weird little strip over here, I'll click the eraser, and just drag over that and all those vector points are being removed. That's really helpful if you want to adjust your vector shape at all. You can also crop the image by just dragging these little points, or you can smooth the vectors. So to do that you turn smoothing on and it smooths out the overall layout of these vectors. Depending on how complex your image is, that may take a little bit of time. So I'm not going to wait for this since I don't really want to use this version of the image but if I click the X here, I can go back to my gallery. You can see that I've created some vectors here of some more simple shapes, and this is what tends to work well with Adobe Capture, things that are somewhat simple. But you can also do something that's slightly complex, like the scissors. I just took a picture of a pair of scissors, put it in this program, and adjusted the threshold a little bit, and now I've got a really nice vector of some scissors. So I'm going to go ahead and export this, and I want to bring it into Affinity Designer. So before I do that, I need to make sure that everything that I had open previously in Affinity Designer is closed. So I want to meet back at this gallery homepage because Affinity Designer won't allow me to import things if I'm in a document. So I'll go back to my scissor image in Adobe Capture, and I want to click the little export symbol here, and then export as SVG, that's going to make a vector file for you. Once you click that, you should get a little pop up with a bunch of options and I'm going to click copy to Designer. Now I have a vector of my scissor image, so I can click the Move tool, to resize it. I can click the Nodes tool, if there's something I want to adjust about that image. One cool thing about the Adobe Capture app is that it splits your shape into many different shapes. So if you look at the Layers panel, you can see how many parts there are that make up this image. So probably you'll want to group these to keep your seamless repeat process simple. So I'll click the Move tool, drag to select everything, and then click the Group button. Now, I have this scissors on a single group and I can resize them, I can duplicate them and move them around the canvas, so you can see how this Adobe Capture tool is really helpful but a little bit different from the vector Nader app, which gives you a stylized look. 17. Creating Assets: I'll click on "Imaengine," go to Home, import photo, and click on that rose that we just isolated, and you can crop it a little bit because we don't really need all that white space, and then click "Go." Now we can start playing around with levels of detail. You'll have to ask yourself here, do you want a thin outline or do you want more of a dark two-toned piece? I like both options, so I might try both, or just play around with whatever works for your personal style here. I don't really like all these tiny little things, I might erase those. I'll show you how to do that here. Once you're happy with how that shape looks, you can either click the share button and save it or if you want to remove something like, I don't like those little speckles, I'm going to click "Editor." Click "Erase," there's a little eraser tool there, and then you can adjust your eraser size. I'm just going to zoom over some of those, and I'll just remove that little part of the vector. That's one option for erasing. I'm going to undo that so we can also look at the option in Affinity Designer. I'll click "Back." I'm happy with this image, so I'm going to click "Share." Again, I'll click "Open" and choose Affinity Designer on the list, it'll just automatically open the document for me. If I click the nodes tool and click on this image, you can see all the nodes that make up this image. One of them is a line that's along the edge, and I really don't want that, so I'm going to click and drag and remove that line by clicking the delete button. There may also be some little ones in here that I don't like, so I'll click and drag and delete. I'll repeat that same process until I get rid of some of these fractals that I don't like. Once you're happy with how that works, you can click the move tool, click on your vector, and you can either click "Copy" and then just paste it into your new repeat document, or you can save this as an Asset. An Asset is something that's saved on this little menu, and when you first open Affinity Designer, there will be a huge list of Assets. They were Assets that weren't really relevant to what I do, so I just deleted them all. It seemed like it was more geared towards people who do design for software and apps. I just deleted all of those by going to the Asset and clicking "Delete category." "Are you sure you want to delete the category?" "Yes." If you want to create your own Asset category, you can click that little menu and click "Add category." Then you can click on the menu again and click "Rename." I'm just going to call this Susan Brown and click "Okay." That'll be your category. Now you need sections in your category, and those are called subcategories, so I'll click "Subcategories." Then the new menu appears for that subcategory, and I'll click "Rename." Let's call that flowers. That'll be Susan's flower category. We can create another subcategory and rename that, let's call that leaves. Now you can go to your flower and it's selected. The first thing I like to do is adjust the color because whatever color you save is what that Asset will be set to on the Assets menu. What you'll notice is, I put all of my Assets in cream because the background of the Asset menu is black. If you save it as black, it's black on black and you can't see it obviously. On Susan Brown's Asset menu under flowers, I'm going to click that little menu and click "Add Asset from collection." Now this Asset is saved on this device in this app. Any project you're working on, you can pull this flower in. You could do this with your signature, your logo, any shape that you use often, you could make a whole set of leaves and then just build a pattern out of it with your Assets. Feel free to play around with my Assets that I've already created and also try making some of your own. Another cool thing you can do with Assets is save multiple things as an Asset. I'm going to create a new vector layer and put it under this flower that I just created, then I'm going to get pink as my color, as my fill, and my stroke. I'll get the pencil tool. Let's actually bump up the width of the pencil. I'm just going to swipe all the way around this rose. Let's make the fill pink as well. Now, we have some cream and some pink together. I can select both the flower and the cream or the pink. I've got both of those layers selected on the menu, then I can go to my Asset Studio for Susan Brown and click "Add Asset selection." That's adding them as separate objects, so that's one option. Another option, if we group those items, I click the "Group button," so now these are grouped. If I click on the "Group" and click "Add Asset from selection," I'm adding that flower and that paint together as a group. That's a cool thing to do because then you can just click on it, click "Insert." There it is. We can turn it around. We can do it again, insert again, turn it around, and then we can click on the pink by double-clicking in the pink area and change the color. Now, we've got a green flower and a pink flower together. You can imagine there's so much you can do with this when you start saving your own Assets and combining them together and creating a lot of these photograph base vectors. You can get a ton of detail in a really short time by just reusing pieces that you've already created. Let's go ahead and go back to our repeat document and use some of these flowers. 18. Placing Elements: We've already added in our texture, I'm ready to add in my first flower. I'll click the plus symbol, click vector layer and it usually drops it outside of our symbol menu that we needed to be in. I'm going to click and drag it onto that word symbol, and then it pops it into the symbol category and has that orange line that we need. I'll go to my assets menu. Click on "My rows" and click "Insert." Let's move this around a little bit, turn it. I'm going to change the color to a dark gray. Remember if you want to constrain your proportions, just keep one finger down. I like how that flower looks, but I think it needs a little bit more. I'm going to get my pencil tool and choose a light pink color. Let's deselect that flower so that we're not confused here. I've got my pencil tool selected, my light pink color, and I've got my pencil width on about 17. I'm just going to trace this flower and I'm not worried too much about going outside of the lines. We can always adjust that later or you can just let it go outside of the lines a little bit sometimes that looks nice. I'm going to change that fill as well. Now the problem is the pink is over the gray, so we just need to click and drag that pink underneath the gray. Then you have to decide, do you want these to be perfectly right up against each other? If so, click the node tool and then you can just start bringing things in like that. Personally, I like when it goes a little bit outside the lines. So I'm going to leave it how it is. I'm going to create a new layer and that layer is going to be cream. I'm just going to add a little bit of highlighting. Actually, I want to use the same color that's in my background. I'm going to click and drag that eyedropper tool to get that color, then I'm going to grab my pencil tool and just do some little circles in this gray color. They can be circles, they can be whatever shape you need them to be till they look like a little bit of shading here. I might bend the shape a little bit because I didn't like how that turned out. I've got my node tool and I'm just playing around. Then I can go back to my pencil tool and get a little shape in there. These are just the highlights on the edge of the rose. Obviously this is optional, but it adds a little bit of extra visual interest to the piece. If you decide at any point that you want to adjust the color, that's super easy to do. I'm just going to select all of these curves that I just created and then just click on the color. I just wanted to brighten that up a little bit, and I'm going to do the same thing on the texture so that they match each other. This is the awesome thing about this program. As you're working, you can just constantly be adjusting and moving stuff around so that it looks exactly as you want it to. I'm happy with that rose and I just want to merge all of the rose pieces together because right now as you can see, we've got all these little curves spots, we've got the line-drawing, we've got the pink and we want to make sure that these stay together as a single unit. I've got all three parts together and I'm going to click group. Now these work together as a group. I can click "Duplicate." Let's move that one up here. Then I'll go to the transform studio and click "Flip." You can click "Rotate," you can flip vertically and horizontally. Whenever I duplicate an object, I always flip it and turn it and just trying to get a little bit of variation going. One thing you'll find as you start creating these pieces is that you want to make little changes to a very specific point. If you just click one time, like over here, that selects everything. You're selecting every single thing on the art board, and that probably isn't what you want. If you click twice, you can select a specific group. If you click three times, you can select a specific item. For example, I don't like that little white piece and I want to change that. So I'm going to go 1, 2, 3, and there that white piece is selected. You may need that as you get more and more elements on the Canvas, that makes it a lot easier to adjust. Now that I've created that first flower, I've done the exact same process with another flower. I'm not going to show you that because you've already seen that whole process, but this is the same idea with just a different flower. When I drop it in, it's cream and I'm just going to change it to the same color that my other flower is, and then adjust that. I think rather than a pink background with this one, I'm going to go with a green background. I'm going to group that just like I did the last one, the background and the flower itself. Then just click "Group" and then I can duplicate that group. This is where I try to really keep my layers organized because things can start getting confusing if you don't organize your layers. I just make sure all my groups are not collapsed like that. I like to just keep them straight so I click that "Arrow' so that everything's in a straight line. I'm just going to play around with duplicating these flowers a few times. I'll do the same process that we did in the last video. I'm going to let this rose beyond the edge of the Canvas. I'm going to click it and click "Duplicate," and then move it over on the x axis plus 2,000 pixels and there it is on that side. Now I know I need to move that group. I'll take just a minute to place all of these flowers just as I want them to be. Obviously, if you wanted more variation, you could do a lot of different flowers. You don't just have to use two or three flowers. But for now, I'm going to go ahead and move forward. 19. Adjusting and Organizing: I'm going to use my pencil tool to create some leaves, and I'm going to change the controller of my pencil tool to Brush Defaults because my Brush Defaults are pressure sensitive, and if you're using Apple Pencil, that's going to be true for you too. I'm going to start by just drawing the shapes, and then I'll just do some really loose leaves. These don't have to be perfect. In fact, the more imperfect you make them, the more realistic they'll seem, so don't worry too much about these being perfectly accurate to a real leaf. I want to fill the leaves, but not the stem, with a color, so I'm going to put on my finger and select, with the Move Tool, all of the leaves, but I'm not going to touch the stem. Once that's selected, I can go to my fill and choose a different color. I'm happy with how that looks; I like the light green-dark green combination, so I'm just going to make sure all those leaf elements are selected and click "Group". Now, I have a leaf group. Those can be scattered around the canvas. One thing I've noticed about this program is that sometimes it thinks it knows where you want to move a duplicated object, but it's wrong, so sometimes, you'll find you duplicate something, and it drops it on the other side of the canvas. If that happens, just click on something else and then go back to that item, and then duplicate it, and it should drop it down right in the exact place where it currently is. You can see that none of my leaves are showing up on my regular repeat document, and that's because I didn't drag them into the Symbols layer. If you forget to do that, it's no big deal. You just select everything you want to go into that Symbols layer, and just drag it and drop it right on that word that says "Symbol", and then it'll populate onto your repeat canvas. I'm going to add a couple more leaf types in, but I'm going to just use one of my assets because I've already created these for this document, so I'll just click on my asset, click "Insert", and just make sure it's going into the Symbols group, click and drag, and then I'm going to set the color for that. One thing you'll find is that if you try to put a fill on a straight line, it's going to add that fill straight across. Like for this branch, this fill doesn't really work, so I need to go to that group and turn off the fill, for the branch, and just give it a color for the stroke, and then I can go back to my leaves, and they can have the same fill and stroke. You can see, as I add new things to the canvas, old things need to be adjusted. I'm spending a lot of time just playing around with the placement; rotating things. A repeat pattern is really just a puzzle, and you can just keep playing around with the puzzle until it looks right. I think this is really the fun part. I think the planning can be difficult because you have so much doubt about your idea, and you don't think it's a good idea; you don't think your colors are right. This is the point where you can just forget about all that and play around with your elements and just move them around the canvas and see what happens. Don't worry so much about there being some perfect layout that you're searching for. I'm going to add one more leaf type, and I want it to contrast with my other leaf types, so I'm going to let it be a long, skinny set of three leaves. You can really play around with these, in terms of being a solid fill, like these are, or being one color with the stroke and one color with the fill. There are a ton of different options when it comes to pieces that can fill in the canvas. I've decided I don't really like that piece, so I'm just going to make that invisible for now. You can see how it's really just a matter of getting everything down and then playing around with the options as you go, and again, zooming out, getting a birds-eye-view of this and just turning things around, looking at your repeat pattern and seeing what doesn't quite fit or what needs to be adjusted. I'm happy with how this turned out, so I'll go ahead and call this piece finished. I do want to show you one more piece that gives the option of hand-drawing everything. Rather than creating your repeat out of images made in Imaengine app, you can just hand-draw. You can see, I hand drew these flowers, a really loose drawing, with a simple fill, and then I just added in some outlines of leaves and some cream, solid leaves. This is another option if you don't want to go through the process of turning a photograph into a vector. You really don't have to do that. You can just hand-draw everything. 20. Half Drop Canvas: So next we'll create a half drop repeat pattern. The two previous pieces we did were basic repeats, which means the block set right beside each other with a half drop repeat, each block, rest halfway down the previous block. The benefit of doing a half drop repeat is that the pattern tends to flow seamlessly a little bit better than a basic repeat. Sometimes other basic repeat, the block is really obvious and some of the repeat patterns appear redundant. Whereas the half drop pattern, it really flows diagonally down the page and it makes it really difficult for people to see your repeat theme. The first thing we're going to do is create a master document for our half drop repeat layout. I'm just going to duplicate my master 2,000 document that we made when we originally set up the Canvas. So I'll click duplicate on that. If I click on that image, you can see this is set up perfectly for a basic repeat, but I want this to be set up for half drops, so these two are setup fine. But the ones to the right need to be shifted halfway down. I'm going to select both of those. Make sure both of those are selected. Click the transform menu. Then I want to go down 1,000 pixels, so that's halfway down the first block, which is 2,000 pixels tall, halfway down would be a 1,000. So I've got those two and now I want to have one up here so that my whole square has repeat area in it. So just click on that middle one. Click "Duplicate," and then I want to move this up 2,000. I'll do a minus 2,000. Now, we have two blocks here and 1, 2, 3 blocks here to show our half dropped repeat pattern. Now, I'll go back to my gallery. Click "Rename" on that document, and I'll call that master 2,000 half drop. So that will be my master documents for half drop patterns and the other will be for my basic repeats. I'll duplicate one of the half drop ones so I can start making my new repeat pattern on that document. 21. Combining Assets and Drawing: The first thing I'll do is color my background. I want to be sure I'm on art board one. Go to my rectangle and choose my color. I'm going to go with that light cream color. I'll create a new vector layer and make sure that's on my symbol folder. I'm going to use assets for almost everything in this pattern. Let's start with just dropping in. I'm going to do some chickens and leaves so I'm going to start with dropping in a chicken. I'll insert that, make it blue, and I'm going to make it blue as the fill and the stroke, and then one finger down to constrain the proportions. I'll repeat this same process with all of the chickens I want to use. I'm sure you can guess how I made these vectors. I put them in the Imaengine app just like we did with that rose, and it created this beautiful detailed vector shape. The one thing you want to be careful of when you do this is you want to use images that are free for personal and commercial use. You wouldn't want to create a vector out of an image that isn't your personal property or you don't have permission to use. On the class resources page, I made a list of a bunch of image resources that have free for personal and commercial use images from a lot of different sources, including vintage images, vintage illustrations, modern images. A ton of different options there. You can find whatever works best for your repeat pattern in terms of style and error. I'm going to go ahead and do the same process with the leaves I want to use. This is how I always like to start my repeats. I like to just dump a bunch of images on the Canvas. Sometimes I'll dump 10 or 20 things and then remove the ones that don't really work. I like this method because I think it's a lot less pressure than trying to come up with stuff as you design your repeat. For me it works well to gather everything and then start putting it together, but you can certainly be making your repeat as you do this. It's totally up to you. I want to add one more thing onto this Canvas so I'll create a new vector layer. I want to be sure that's on my symbols layer. I also want to trace something to create this layer. I'm going to click the "Place image option" import from photos, and what I've done is save this photo of an egg that I got from the website Unsplash. This is a site that has images that are free for personal and commercial use. I just say I'm going to trace just to get this basic egg shape. You could get some splatter effect from here. You could just get the general shape, it's totally up to you. Just be sure the image is free for personal and commercial use, of course. Let's go to that new layer I created, and make sure that layer is above my picture layer. I'm going to get my Pencil tool and just go around. I think I want to get a smaller rash, and you can see that's not perfect, so I might get my Sculpt tool. It works well in some cases and not in others. You could also use your Nodes tool to just totally adjust how the shape is laid out. I'll take just a minute to play around with that. I'll make my photo invisible just to get a look at that image. If you're not happy with how that looks, one thing you can do is increase the size of the stroke. Even after you've painted it, you can just click this little brush symbol here. It's called the Stroke Studio, and you can just slowly increase the size of that until it looks right for your composition. I'm going to do that and I also want to add some little speckles. We could add speckles by adding in tiny little circles using the Ellipse tool. That's one option. We could use the Pencil tool to just make little marks as our speckles. I like those speckles better than the perfect circles so I'm going to go with that. I tend to zoom in and out a lot because I just like to get a lot of different angles for a piece. Sometimes something looks really good close up and then you zoom out and you just can't even see the details. When you're adding tiny things like this, you just want to be sure that when you zoom out that it looks good and it's even visible. I'm happy with how that looks from far away so I'm going to go ahead and group those. Every time I clicked, I was creating a dot so you can see now I have a huge list of dots on my Layers panel. You don't have to individually select those, you can get your Move tool. Click over here in the gray area, and then just drag. First, make sure your art board one is selected, and then you can select all of those at once, then we can just click "Group" and now that is just one group that we can easily duplicate and scatter around the Canvas. Now that I have all of my parts, I'm going to go ahead and decide on scale. I think I'm going to make the leaves quite a bit smaller than the chickens. I obviously wanted chickens to be the main important part of this and then make the eggs a little smaller. Now I've got several large chickens. I think I'm going to duplicate each of those once, so that I have two of each chicken. After I duplicated it, I'll flip it, and maybe squish a little, rotate it a little. Just make it look a little bit different than the original that I'm duplicating. 22. Half Drop Repeats: Because we're working on half drop for this piece, let's say for example, we're putting something on the top here, so I'm going to put this chicken on the top, and then I'm going to click "Duplicate" on that chicken, and then I'll move it down the canvas plus 2,000. So for half drop, that's perfect. The top and bottom can be exactly the same. When it comes to side to side though, we're going to have to consider the half drop orientation. So I'm going to put this on the left, and then I'm going to duplicate it. Now, I want to move it over and down. I'm going to type on the x-axis, plus 2,000, and on the y-axis, I'm only going to go down 1,000. That means this part of the repeat matches up right here. If you have trouble with your math, just check over here, zoom in on your repeat and make sure everything is matching up correctly. I'm going to continue the same process and place all of my chickens on the canvas. One thing to keep in mind is that things that I place on the bottom half will have to go up here. For example, I'm going to duplicate this item on the left, we're going to go plus 2,000, and then we need to go up 1,000. You can see this part of the canvas will match up with that part of the canvas. We can take a look over here and make sure that is staying true. If things get a little confusing, you can always make some layers invisible. I tend to do that if it gets a little bit overwhelming on the canvas, and then you just have a little more space to organize things. Remember, if we want to adjust something that's on the side, we need to select the corresponding repeat element. So for half drop, what's right here corresponds with what's up here. Now, we can adjust those. We can't resize them, but we can just shift them around a little. I wanted to just shift this one in because I think I can fit another chicken right there. When I'm creating a repeat, sometimes I will add more elements, but another option is just to make things bigger, so I had some things in the center that I felt could be upsize a little bit. So I just bumped those up, and now I can start placing my leaves. I'm happy with how this repeat turned out. Obviously, you could add textures, you could add more illustration elements. There are so many different things you could do once you get this basic setup, and I think you can probably see how different from the basic repeat. This repeat, it's really hard to see where the seams are because the blocks are actually offset a little bit so the eye isn't reading straight across the page, and seeing the same chicken over and over, it's more shifted down. I hope you'll try the half drop because I think it really makes a better repeat than basic repeats in most cases. But I think you can probably see at this point how much versatility this program has and how many options you have once you get started. So I'm going to go ahead and call this piece finished. I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start trying out surface design in Affinity Designer. If you liked this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to design and paint on your iPad, like how to create botanical illustrations, recipe illustrations, and a paper cutout effect. So check those out on my profile if you want to see more. Also I share a lot of free downloads on my site so if you want to get more downloads like the ones you got for this class, check out my website. I would absolutely love to see some of your repeat patterns, so please share what you make. You can do that here on Skillshare in the project section, or you could tag me on Instagram or Facebook. You could also join the Facebook group I created for iPad artists, illustrators, letters, and digital planners. It's a place to get opinions and advice on iPad drawing, painting, and digital planning, and get inspired by digital creations from around the world. So if you love creating things on your iPad and want to join other people around the world in conversations, sharing ideas, and seeing each other's work, check out the group to the link on my website. If you have any questions about the process you learn in this class, please feel free to reach out to me. You can reply to my discussion here on Skillshare, or you could contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Ba-bye. 23. Bonus Video: Affinity to Illustrator: One last thing I want to show you how to do is take your patterns from Affinity Designer into Illustrator. This is helpful if you do client work and they require.ai files, or if you're doing some licensing of your designs to a company that requires.ai files, or if you just want to do some specific type of editing in Illustrator. If you are just uploading to print on-demand stores, you probably won't need this step. But if you ever think you'll need to take your designs into Illustrator for any reason, this process will be helpful for you. The first thing I have done is created the patterns just like we did in the class. I'm going to find that pattern in my Affinity gallery, and click on the menu symbol and click "Rename". I just want to make sure this has an identifiable name so it's easy to find in my cloud storage. I named this Floral Repeat 1 and I'll click "Okay". Then I'm going to open the file. Next, I'll go to the "Menu" and click "Export". Once the Export page opens, you'll see there are a ton of options here. I'm going to go through step by step just to view options that I choose. First at the very top, I choose "EPS" as the file type. That's the file type that's going to translate best into Illustrator. The next thing I'm going to change is on the Rasterise menu. I'll click the little drop down arrow under Rasterise and choose "Nothing". Because I want this export to rasterise nothing. I want to keep all of the vectors that I created in Affinity. I don't change anything else on this page, so I just go with all of the defaults. Depending on your file size, this may take a few minutes to process. If you look right above where it says Cancel and Okay at the bottom, it will be processing for a short time and then finally you'll see the file size once it is ready to share. Next, we can click "Share". Then, sometimes it takes just a second for that menu to pop up if it is a large file. Then we are going to choose some type of cloud storage. You could use Dropbox, Drive, you could do Cloud, your Creative Cloud, whatever you would like to use for your cloud storage. I'm just going to use Drive. This is where the file name becomes really important. I'm saving it as floral repeat 1.eps, and then I'll just click "Upload". This step will take some time depending on your file size. At this point I usually just go make a cup of coffee, or get a snack, and then come back and it's ready. Now that the file has been uploaded to my Google Drive, I can click on it. If you can't find it, you can click the "Search-bar" and type the name. There it is right there at the top. I'll right-click, and then click "Download". It will say, this could be a dangerous file, but you created this file so it's fine you can click "DOWNLOAD ANYWAY". Again this may take just a couple of minutes to download depending on your file size. Once it is ready, I'll click the button down at the bottom to open that menu and click "Show in Finder". So there it is on File Finder. I'm just going to click and drag it onto Adobe Illustrator. You'll notice a couple of things when the file opens. If you zoom out, I'm clicking "Command minus" to zoom out, the artboard isn't in the right place, it's over here. Also the layers are grouped in a way that doesn't work for me. I'm just going to zoom out all the way so I can see everything. With the Direct Selection Tool selected, I'm going to click and drag all the way across these two items and then I'm selecting everything. I'm going to go to "Object" and click "Ungroup". Now all of these objects are functioning separately, nothing is grouped to anything else. Now once everything is de-selected, I can zoom back in and go to my background. I just want to click on that gray background. Whatever color your background rectangle is you want to be sure that you're selecting that and not your texture. Double check that you're clicking right on that rectangle. Then when you zoom out you can just double check, make sure that square is right along the edge of your rectangle. Now I want to make my artboard the size of that rectangle. I'm going to go to the toolbar here and click the "Artboard Tool", and I will double click that which will open a menu.Then you'll see the Preset menu and you can just select "Fit to Selected Art". We've selected our artwork, which is our background rectangle, and now we want to fit our artboard to that size. I'll click that, "Fit to Selected Art", and then click "Okay". Now if we click back to our "Direct Selection Tool", you can see that the artboard has been moved away from that small area here, and now it is right around my repeat. Depending on how you're setting this file up, you could go ahead and delete Artboard 2. We could drag and select it, and then just click "Delete". If you just want to work with that repeat file you can do that. Also, even though you can't see these items that are off the artboard, they're still there. If I for example, click on this pink flower, I can drag it down and see that the whole shape is still there even though I can't see it on the artboard. That's just a quick tip on how to preserve everything that you created in Affinity and get it cleanly into Illustrator.