Learn To Create Arts and Crafts Patterns - Part 2

1. Introduction: Hi there, I'm Bärbel Dressler, a pattern designer and online educator. I love historical patterns and styles and believe we can learn so much from the masters before us. Their ideas, designs, and how they have influenced and develop this craft. Studying historical patterns can also teach us a lot about the fundamental building blocks and tools of pattern design and composition, and help us understand how to accomplish beautiful flow and balance in our own work. With my courses about classic pattern styles, I want to help you learn more about pattern design history and how to design advanced and high-quality patterns. This course is the second in a series about the arts and crafts pattern style and design era. In the first course, you learn how to design arts and crafts pattern in a category I call trailing. In this course though, you will learn how to design arts and crafts patterns in a category I call serpentine. We will study and learn from the authentic, iconic, serpentine patterns by William Morris and his colleagues, of the Arts and Crafts movement. As always, I will break it down and study the characteristics of the style from its influences, themes, and motifs to composition and color. Then I will give you a step-by-step process for how to create serpentine arts and crafts patterns of your own. This is an intermediate to advanced course, and to To able to follow along properly with the steps to create a pattern, you need to know how to manually build a repeating pattern in Adobe Illustrator since that's the tool that I will teach in this class. But if you're skilled in creating patterns with Photoshop, for example, you can definitely follow along and apply these steps to that program as well. If you're a novice pattern designer, you can still take this course and you will learn about an important era in design history about composition principles, techniques, and process for designing patterns and motifs in general. All right, are you ready to learn how to create a classic serpentine arts and crafts pattern? Then let's get started. 2. Class Overview: Hi, and welcome to class in this course about the serpentine arts and crafts patterns style. In this lesson, we'll go over the class project, the tools and materials you need, the class resources, and how to share your class project. First, I want to remind you that this is the second part of a series about the arts and crafts patterns style. If you haven't watched the first course yet, I strongly recommend to start with that one because there, you will get an introduction to what arts and crafts is and also the history behind the arts and crafts movement and style. As you may have guessed, your assignment and class project is going to be to design your very own serpentine arts and crafts-inspired repeating pattern using the characteristics, techniques, and methods that you will learn here in class. I say inspired pattern because I think it's important to understand that creating historically inspired patterns doesn't necessarily mean we have to design a pattern that looks exactly like that style or is historically accurate. The most important learning is to understand what makes a specific style and the principles and techniques behind it. Then you can use that to explore your own style by picking out the elements and characteristics that resonate with you and incorporate that into your own process and work. Before we start creating our own patterns, we're going to take a closer look at the characteristics that make up this design style. Then I will share my step-by-step process to create a serpentine pattern. For this, you'll need some materials and tools to follow along. For planning your pattern, you'll need a stack of Post-it notes, a ruler, and perhaps scissors. For drawing your motifs, you need paper. Ordinary copy or printing paper is what I usually use. For preparing your motifs for scanning and vectorizing, you will need a fine liner, anything between 0.5-0.8 is what I usually use myself. You'll need a lightbox or tracing paper. For vectorizing, editing, and assembling your motifs in a repeat, you'll need a computer and Adobe Illustrator, or you can, of course, use a tablet and apps like Procreate, Fresco, Affinity, or Illustrator, if that's what you prefer. I won't demonstrate the steps in those apps though, only in the desktop Adobe Illustrator version. To help you further to design your pattern, I have created a pattern design workbook where you can document your steps. You will find the workbook by clicking the Projects and Resources tab, and then on a computer, you'll find it on the right side below the green button. As with the trailing arts and crafts course, I also provide an email workshop as a companion to this class with extended coaching to help you design and create your pattern. You'll find a link to sign up to the workshop in the About tab in this course. Then you can share your serpentine pattern under the Projects and Resources tab. You create a project by clicking the button that says Create Project. There you can upload a project cover image, name your project, and include descriptions and images of your process, and the final pattern of course. I also want to encourage you to check out your fellow student's projects. Sharing your work can feel so vulnerable sometimes, so getting a nice, supporting, and encouraging comment can mean the world, and connecting with other pattern design colleagues is so important and rewarding. Okay, that was some of the formalities about the class project and the tools and materials you need. In the next lesson, I will give you a recap of the different arts and crafts pattern categories that I have defined. 3. The Arts and Crafts Pattern Categories: In this lesson, you'll get a recap of what I mean when I talk about arts and crafts patterns and the different types that we can find within this style. Arts and crafts was a movement between 1870 and 1920 that started in Britain and then spread to other parts of Europe and North America. The superstar of the arts and crafts movement was, of course, William Morris, who among things, designed patterns for fabric and wallpaper. They are still reproduced and extremely popular today. His patterns have also had a huge impact on the evolution of pattern design and influenced many designers after him. Even today, more than 130 years after his death. When studying arts and crafts patterns, we can see that there are different pattern types within this style. To make it easier to grasp and learn, I defined a set of arts and crafts categories on which I have based this course series. The categories are, trailing, serpentine, scrolled, and paired. But there are more, for example, millefleurs and arabesque inspired patterns. The trailing and serpentine patterns can be quite similar in some aspects, but also very different. They both depict plants with long trailing branches with flowers and leaves in a seamless structure, that continue on and on over the surface with no specific beginning or end to the motifs themselves. But where the trailing patterns depict a more naturalistic growth and anatomy of the plants, the serpentine has a more stylized form, often with geometric and imaginative embellishments. The trailing patterns have an organic flow, and the serpentine is more structured and symmetrical in its appearance. The most prominent feature of the serpentine patterns is the meandering branches and stems that make up the foundational structure of the designs. Some patterns are combinations of serpentine and the scrolled and paired categories, for example, Lea and Honeysuckle. In the next lesson, we'll take a look at the influences for the patterns in this serpentine arts and crafts category. 4. The Serpentine Patterns Influences: In this lesson, we will take a closer look at the main influences for the development of the serpentine patterns that designers of the Arts and Crafts movement, or in general, highly influenced by different types of oriental and Asian design styles, from arabesque to Indian florals, Chinese and Japanese art. This is very clear in some of the serpentine patterns. For example, in Indian with its characteristic stylized and decorated branches, pedals, and leaves that you often find in Indian chintz textiles. That influence is also visible in this pattern by Lewis Foreman Day and in Cray by William Morris. The arabesque influences are obvious in these stylized flowers here in Evenlode, two different daffodil patterns, and Avon. The most important influence to the serpentine patterns are probably Italian Renaissance textiles. William Morris was fascinated by their velvets, brocades, and damask, with patterns of broad meandering vines and simplified motifs in a diagonal direction. Examples of patterns with these Italian Renaissance influences are Wandle, Cray, Wey, Norwich, and Hammersmith. But this specific serpentine structure wasn't just inspired by the arabesque Indian florals or Renaissance designs but also something much more local. William Morris had a special love for rivers. In 1881, he relocated his company to Merton Abbey Works, which was right by the River Wandle in Merton, sorry. After the move, he designed a series of patterns for a printed textiles with the theme of this flowing serpentine movement through the design of climbing branches, leaf tendrils, and growing shoots. He named the series after English rivers in Southern England, for example, Evenlode, Wey, Kennet, Cherwell, Cray, Medway, Lea, Avon, and Wandle, which was named after the river outside his window. As with the trailing category, the overall theme in serpentine patterns is always the local English nature and growing plants as the ultimate decoration we need for our homes, whether it's indoors or outdoors. In the coming lessons, we will take a closer look at the characteristic elements that make up the serpentine style. 5. Characteristics: Composition: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're taking a closer look at the compositions of the serpentine patterns. By composition, I mean the way the pattern elements are laid out and combined. The backbone of the serpentine arts and crafts pattern composition is the main branch, of course, from which the other main motifs like flowers and leaves are attached. They provide two types of compositional direction; the vertical, as in Daffodil and Evenlode, and the diagonal as in Wandle and Cray. From a functional perspective, almost all arts and crafts repeating patterns are, in general, one-directional. Which means they are to be used and viewed from one particular angle. The reason is the intended purpose, which usually was home decor, such as wallpaper and furnishing fabric. Many serpentine patterns have additional branches and stems crossing over and under the main motifs, filling out the spaces in an elaborate and dense layout. Some patterns have smaller, flat, and simple stems and flowers and leaves that provided a dense and decorative filler background, highly influenced by arabesque designs. Other background fillers can be small, so-called [inaudible] dots, or other small abstract or organic shapes which were inspired by Indian and 18th century European printed columns. Then we have repetition, how the motifs, were repeated across the design and to make the seamless repeat. Most patterns had a so-called straight repeat, where the motifs were repeated straight, horizontally, and vertically. But there are a handful with the so-called half drop repeat too, where every second column of motifs are shifted a half distance down. All serpentine patterns have a more or less tall repeat, depending on the direction of the serpentine structure. Patterns with a vertical direction are often very stretched out like Kennet and here Evenlode. [MUSIC] But also the patterns with a diagonal direction have tall repeats. But some like Wey and Windrush are close to have square repeats. Most serpentine patterns seem to have two altering main larger flowers connecting the meandering branches, like here in Wandle. But some have just one large main flower and some smaller complimentary flowers, like here in Wey. To sum up, the typical serpentine layout and composition has a vertical or diagonal structure and direction with elaborate and often layered and intertwined motifs in a dense layout, either in a straight or half drop repeat. The repeat is always more or less tall, and most patterns have two altering main flowers connecting the branches, but some have just one. Next, we're taking a closer look at some common serpentine motifs. [MUSIC] 6. Characteristics: Motifs: In this lesson, we're going to study the serpentine motifs and details up-close. Let's start with the branches. As I've mentioned before, branches are the backbones in most arts and crafts patterns, and certainly in the meandering serpentine patterns. In the serpentine patterns, there is always a main plant which has the meandering shape and movement to it. Many patterns also have additional plans for complimentary and contrasting motif elements, such as side branches and shoots. For the meandering main plants and their branches, I've identified four branch types. The first type is basic, a plain branch with no embellishments or details except for the outlines. There are typically quite thin, and examples of patterns with this type of basic main branch is midway and kennet. This type of thin and basic branch is also used for the complimentary plants and any side branches and twigs. The second branch type is the dotted branch, which is very frequent in serpentine patterns. As here in Hammersmith and in Norwich, and seaweed and caret. These dotted branch are quite basic too, with plain edges and outlines, but with a decorative texture of dots that creates an impression of shade. Some just have one line of dots running along one side of the branch, others fill the whole branch. The third type is what I call, the ribbon branch. A version with lots of details and embellishments, just like beautiful ribbons and lace. Here's Windrush by William Morris with decorated borders that reminds of stylized paisley adornments and elements. It's quite imaginative and mixes different details in the same branch. As you can see, the center of the branch is also filled with dots. Wandle is also a great example of a ribbon branch with layers of embellishments, double borders, and a center with stripes and dots. Or in these two patterns, both named Daffodil and designed by John Henry Dearle and they are decorated with meandering plants and simplified flowers within the main branches. In this pattern called Indian, the branch has been divided into scallop sections that contain small sprigs, and leaves, and flowers within. In the fourth branch type, the backbone isn't really a true branch like in the other types, but is made up by curved or scrolled leaves overlapping and continuing one after another, and create the serpentine meandering movement and flow. I call this type the leaf type. Here it's the center veins that make up the main branch, so to speak. Examples of this, you can see in this pattern by Lewis Foreman Day, which can actually be categorized as a mix of the leaf and the ribbon branch types with a stylized and embellished center vein. As you can see, the leaves and their centers make up the meandering structure overall. The same goes for Lea, but here, the center veins aren't more basic with new embellishments, but together make up a meandering structure. Actually, the Lea pattern can also be fit into the scrolled arts and crafts pattern type. We have the basic, the dotted, the ribbon, and the leaf branch types. When it comes to the typical leaves, we find three main shapes depending on the type of plant of course, but a very common leaf type is the lobed leaf in a variety of sizes and forms, from smaller to stretch seaweed looking versions to large, a Candace looking leaves. Then we have long leaves with straight edges as with the leaves from tulips, and lilies, and daffodils, and of course, the small basic drop-shaped leaves. The hero motifs are of course, the large flowers. Often recognizable species like tulips, percentum, poppies, carnations, sunflowers, daffodils. The more stylized serpentine versions have imaginative flowers with lots of embellishments inspired by Oriental and Asian styles. Then we have background motifs and fillers, and there are a number of versions and combinations of that. A common background or filler motif is this type of simple scrolled and curly sprouts, sprigs with flat and simple leaves, flowers, and buds. This type of motifs are highly influenced by arabesque designs. Some patterns have a background of leaf silhouettes with no contours or details, which creates a nice depth. Another common filler is dots, as you can see here in Lea, seaweed and golden lily. The last characteristic is color, and I'll see you in the next lesson for that. 7. Characteristics: olor schemes: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at serpentine colors and color schemes. The color palette of the authentic 19th century serpentine arts and crafts patterns are more or less the same as with a trailing category, but with a bit more indigo use. This is a lot because the serpentine patterns by William Morris were created during a time period when he was exploring and experimenting with natural dyes such as indigo dye and indigo discharge techniques. According to friends and visitors to the Merton Abbey Works at this time, Morris constantly appeared with his arms up to his elbows in indigo blue. Many of the original color palettes of the serpentine arts and crafts patterns had dark indigo blue backgrounds with small white background filler motifs created with his discharge technique. Other common original colors were madder red, yellow, and moss green, as a result of Morris trying to use natural color dyes. From these colors, lighter shades were also created, like light blue, yellow and pink. In general, the colors created for printed fabric were of the primary colors of blue, red and yellow, and secondary colors of green and orange. In the Trailing Arts and Crafts Pattern course, you can learn more about how William Morris designed colors schemes for his patterns. In general, in arts and crafts patterns, we can also find three common colors scheme principles. The first one is the monochromatic color scheme where the design is woven, printed, or dyed in one single color, plus white or uncolored, but where are the color can be in 2-3 shades which created variation and depth to the design. Here are some examples of patterns in monochromatic color schemes. Then, we have the limited color schemes where the designs have only 2-3 colors in one or two shades each, plus white or uncolored. The third color scheme, I call them multiple color scheme, with four and even up to six colors sometimes in 2-3 shades plus white or uncolored, like in these designs. The patterns were often applied or printed on an uncolored or non dyed fabric or paper, which accomplished the white elements in the pattern and could therefore become the second or fifth or seventh color unit in these three color schemes. Now, it's time to get hands-on and start creating your own serpentine arts and crafts pattern. In the coming lessons, I'll guide you through my step-by-step process for this. 8. Planning Your Pattern: In the first step of creating a serpentine pattern, we will first plan out our design. This will help you design your motifs and the pattern composition with more intention from start to finish. The first thing I decide when I plan my pattern is to define an end purpose for it. What will it be used for? What surface or product? This decision will affect many design aspects in the following steps, like the scale of the pattern, the level of details, direction and spacing of the motifs, number of colors, and repeat layout. When you work with limitations like this, your creativity will flourish. Step 1, decide what your serpentine pattern will be used for. Is it wallpaper, interior textiles, bedding, fashion, or fabric, for example? You can write down your end purpose in the workbook. The next planning step is to explore a theme. A theme is the specific subject or topic that you want to design your pattern around. To design an arts and crafts pattern, the theme of plants is already a given, but in an extension to that, you can specify this theme further and it can be as simple as having a theme of garden plants or imaginary plants or trees or roses. It can also be more conceptual or story-based, like trying to capture a specific sentiment or a memory. Decide on a theme for your serpentine pattern. Next, it's time to consider the composition. Now, you have to visualize your design. Here are some composition aspects to consider. Complexity. Is it going to be a complex pattern including just one or two several plants? Will it have one or two layers? Will it have lots of details? Or will it lean towards simplify motifs? Then we have spacing. Is it going to be a dense or sparse pattern? Direction. Is it going to be one-directional or non-directional, for example? Then based on the end purpose, the theme, and composition choices, it's time to consider what motifs to include, flowers, only leaves, trees, and what types of flowers or trees will you use. Which motifs will look good in a pattern designed for your end purpose? What plants will support and build the theme? How will they work in the composition you want to accomplish? If you want to make a simple pattern, you choose just one or two different plant motifs perhaps. If you want to create a more varied and complex pattern, you need more plant motifs. A tip is to make a list of 5-10 alternatives to choose from, then decide what plants you want to include and write them down in your workbook. At this step, you can decide what type of color scheme you want to use, a monochrome, limited or multiple colors. But you can also leave this open for now and try them all out before you decide. Another planning step we'll do is to decide on what tools and techniques we're going to use for creating and coloring our motifs, but we will come back to that in a little while. Now, it's time to explore your motifs. practice how to draw them and make a few options to choose between. In the coming lessons, you'll get some exercises for drawing and exploring some serpentine branches, leaves, flowers, and small fillers or background motifs. 9. Exploring Your Motifs: Branches: In this lesson, we're going to explore different types of certain time branches inspired by the different branch types that we studied before, and also do some drawing practice so that we will be super prepared for when it's time to put everything together and create our final pattern designs. Let's start with how to create the serpentine branch shape. The main serpentine branch is, in its foundation, an OG line. An OG line is a combination of two curves facing opposite directions so that they create a stretched out S. When copied, reflected, and repeated, it creates the serpentine shape or flow. When we create a serpentine branch for a pattern, we basically only have to create one OG shape or motif which we can reuse, or we can of course make a couple of more versions of the same foundation to create some variation, for example, to vary the side branches or leaves or the details inside the branches. But we'll get to that. You can also choose to create a narrow OG or a wider OG. Now, I want you to practice drawing some serpentine branches based on the branch types that we've studied, and start by drawing a plane serpentine branch, and try out different widths and perhaps a couple of side branches. Then creates some broader branches and explore different dotted looks with only one line of dots along one of the sides of the branches or two lines or several like covering the whole branch. Try also to vary the size of the dots. One row with larger and perhaps in the middle of the branch you have rows with smaller dots. Lastly, draw some more broader branches again and create some so-called ribbon branches. Try different designs with layers of borders and details in the center, like geometric shapes, lace-like details or those paisley-like details. Here's the thing, I want you to explore at least five versions of each branch type. That's right, five plain branches, five dotted branches, and five ribbon branches. Try to come up with different details for each version or to draw it in a different way for each version, because if you make a number of options like this or alternatives like this, you get to have a choice. Then you can choose the best branch design for your pattern to create at least five alternatives of a motif like this I call the principle of five, and it's a process that will help you step out of your comfort zone to dig deeper into your imagination and help you create something new and original. Of course, all that practicing will also improve your drawing skills. Go ahead and do that. Draw five plain, five dotted, and five ribbon branches, and perhaps this will result in a completely new serpentine branch type. Next, we are going to explore some serpentine flower motifs. 10. Exploring Your Motifs: Flowers: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're going to explore different types of flowers that are common in the serpentine patterns. Let's start with what I call the lobed flower, which could be a stylized peony or poppy perhaps. It can be drawn as seen from the side like this or a little bit angled or from above. For this side version, you can start with marking out the overall shape and size of the flower on the paper and then at the bottom, start by drawing this lobed petal. Then you build on that until you filled the whole shape. [MUSIC] Some of the petals on the sides like this can also have turnovers to their sides. To draw those, I like to start with the back of the petals, so to speak. Then the turned over side with some pointy lobes like this and then continue with the part behind everything. [MUSIC] Another version of this lobed flower is with turned over petals, which are very typical for William Morris flowers and inspired by medieval art. Now, we have to imagine the curved direction of the petal. It goes down like this, curves and goes up. To draw that, start with a turnover like this and then continue with a back of the petal all the way up to the other side and then connect the two sides with some pointy or rounded lopes. Then add a little line like this, implying that the petal is curved. [MUSIC] To make this turnover in the other direction, you draw the turnover again like this, continue with the back, which is now the top of the petal, connect the sides and complete it in places where it's necessary. I find it a lot easier to start with some guiding lines when I draw a complete flower like this with turned over leaves, where I mark where I want each petal and how it will curve. [MUSIC] Small advice here is to not make too many or too small petals. For the lobed flowers seen from above, you can start with a couple of curved or turned over petals as well. [MUSIC] Then surround them with layers of lobed petals. Again, don't make them too small because you may want to have space for some shading lines. You can also create another type of center for these lobed flowers with stylized pistils. Start with the center and just make little curves or just rounded shapes and then add lobed petals in layers surrounding it. Some of them can have turnovers too for variation. Always create variation if you can. [MUSIC] Now, let's explore some more arts and crafts flowers like those daffodils. They are really fun to draw and very simple. You can start out with this stretched out bell-shape and then surround it with three or four pointy petals. [MUSIC] Or you can draw the center a bit more naturalistic with something that looks almost like a little trumpet shape like this. Then surround it with some pointy petals again and then there are versions that have very stylized and imaginative centers that look a little bit like candy cones, I think. Then you can decorate those petals a little bit, make some centers on them or give them some textural or shading lines. [MUSIC] Then we have this sunflower looking flower with large centers and pointy smaller petals. Here you also start with a center and draw in the petals. Try to vary the petals a little bit here too with curves in different directions and perhaps also make some petals at the front of the flower that are curved upwards. [MUSIC] Then add some texture in the center, for example, a simple grid like this. The fourth flour I want to show you and that you can explore is a more oriental version with arabesque and Indian floral influences. For a simple one, start with some kind of center, perhaps just a drop shape like this and decorated with some simple flower ornaments. Then surrounded with some petals like this. [MUSIC] For a little bit more elaborate flower, start with some larger leaves or it could also be petals in the front and to the sides, and then add a center. Then surround that center with some more stylized petal that you also decorate with ornamental or floral details. [MUSIC] Okay, so now I want you to try these versions out too and practice join lobed flowers, daffodils, sunflowers and oriental flowers. As with the branches, apply the principle of five and draw at least five versions of each flower type and make each version a little bit different, add some other details or directions of the flowers. See what you can come up with. Next, we're going to draw some leaves. 11. Exploring Your Motifs: Leaves: In this lesson, we're going to explore drawing some different leaves. Here, you can either create some new branches to attach them to or attach them to the branches that you drew before. Let's start with some smaller lobed leaves, and I'm going to add them to this plain branch. Lobed leaves in various shapes and lengths are probably the most common leaf type that is used in serpentine patterns, in arts and crafts patterns in general, I would say. In the trailing arts and crafts patterns scores, you will find more drawing exercises where you can practice the lobed leaves. But in general, when I draw lobed leaves like this, I like to start with some guiding lines that implies the shape and direction of the leaves and the curve of it, and also where to place the lobes. These guiding lines can of course also serve as the leaf veins. I always start with the center vein and then some side veins, and then I draw the contours of the leaves with those as my direction. Then let's draw some more basic almond or a drop-shaped leaves to another of the branches. Make a version with straight edges and another version with prickly edges. You can also explore different types of veins for your leaves from just a simple center vein with just a single line like this, or with some side nerves to one or to both sides of the center vein. You can make them sparse or lots of them. Then let's create some larger acanthus-inspired leaves wrapped around the branch like this where it crosses over in one place and under in another, and make them curved and scrolled and with turnovers. If you want to learn more about how to draw acanthus leaves, you can check out my course called Drawing The Acanthus. Then let's also explore some of those oblong, straight leaves as if for tulips or lilies or daffodil plants. Here, the key is to create variation with curves and twists to the leaves. You can also vary with the edges and create straight or a little bit of more wavy edges. In the next and last drawing lesson, we're going to explore and practice some of those arabesque inspired background motifs and fillers. 12. Exploring Your Motifs: Background & Fillers: In this lesson, we're going to practice drawing those small background motifs that are often used in arts and crafts patterns, and especially in many of the serpentine patterns. As I've mentioned before, these types of small motifs are highly influenced by arabesque ornamentation. They're basically just silhouettes, flat and quite simplified, but still with lots of details. They aren't very difficult to draw but require a bit of patience though. Start with drawing the branches, just lines and curves, and scrolls in a spares distribution. Start with a curve or an OG line. Then pick a spot somewhere on it where you start drawing a new curve or OG line, or perhaps a scroll and then you continue like this until you have a larger area covered. Make sure that each end has a bit of space around it so that you can fit in a little flower. Then go in and dress it up with some simple little flowers, perhaps bell-shaped or round with pointy or rounded pedals, and instead of flowers, you can also add berries or little fruits in some places. Then continue to dress it up with some small leaves, just plain or with a couple of lobes perhaps. If you find some holes or empty areas, where the distribution of these little motif elements feels a bit uneven, you can also add some simple twigs here and there. For your serpentine pattern, you can, of course, choose other types of fillers too, like dots or larger silhouette branches and leaves. Exploring your motifs like this has given you some options to choose between, to give yourself a creative choice, and also to make sure that you create the best motifs possible for your design. The next planning step is to choose the technique and tools that you're going to use for creating your pattern motifs. But I'll see you in the next lesson for that. 13. Tools & Techniques For Creating Your Motifs: There are two routes for creating your motifs; drawing them separately and then compose them into the repeat layout in Illustrator, or by drawing the full repeat layout with the motifs together from start. Then there are two routes for coloring your motifs as well; the gouache technique, where you draw up the motifs, or the full repeat design with pencil and paper and then color them with gouache, scan, and vectorize in Illustrator. Then we have the illustrator technique where you drop the motifs or the full repeat designed with pencil and paper, then ink the outlines, scan and vectorize and add color and details in Illustrator. There's, of course, other techniques and tools that you can use, for example, drawing, inking, and coloring in Procreate or other tablet apps. In this course, I will show you how to create the full repeat and color it in Illustrator. But if you want to, you can, of course, choose to create your motifs separately, and to color them with gouache or other media if you want to. Now you have to make two decisions: are you going to create separate motifs that you assemble into the full repeat in Illustrator or are you going to create the full repeat of motifs from start? Which coloring technique you'll use, add the colors in details with gouache or in Illustrator? Either way, the best way to go about this is to first draft the pattern structure. In the next lesson, I'll give you some tips for drafting serpentine structures using the posted technique. 14. Drafting Your Serpentine Pattern Layout: In this lesson, I will show you how I draft up a structure for my patterns and explore how the motifs will be laid out and repeating using Post-it Notes you may recognize this technique from some of my other courses, but this is a great way to understand the elements of your pattern right from the start and help you know what you need to do. The most commonly used repeat layout for a serpentine arts and crafts patterns is the straight layout, so this is what we will do too. All serpentine patterns have a more or less tall repeat, but some like Wey and Windrush have a bit more square repeats. Here, you have three proportions for the repeat to choose between: a full square, a tall rectangle, and a bit of a shorter rectangle. For the square repeat, we can use the Post-its as they are, and for the tall rectangle repeat, we need to cut two Post-its in two. For the shorter rectangle, you cut a piece of the bottom of the Post-its first and then in half. Now we have some composition structures to choose between as well. We can create a very simple version, which is this one with just one main branch and flower motif that are repeated. Here, the branch is just one and the same ogee shape that creates this diagonal direction. A little bit more complex version of that is to alter between two main branches and flower motifs to create some more variation, but still in the same type of diagonal direction. A third version is where you reflect one of the branch motifs, which creates this vertical direction. For the most simple structure with only one main flower and branch motif, you can start by just drawing in a circle in the middle of the note just to mark out where the flower is going to be, and then copy that to the other notes. Then connect them with an ogee line like this, and copy that to the other notes as well. Now you can make the flour and the branch more detailed and add more motif elements like additional branches and flowers and leaves. You don't have to be very detailed here because this is just a rough draft just to figure out what motifs you want to have and where they're supposed to be located, and the overall shapes of them. For a bit more complex diagonal design with two main flowers and branches: you start the same way. You draw a circle for flower number 1 in the middle of the note, and then at second flower in the middle where all four notes meet, and then connect them with an ogee. Then copy that to all notes, and then add the second branch and copy that to all notes. You can define the flowers a bit more. For example, if one is to be larger than the other, have a rounded or pointed petals. Then you can start sketching in the other motifs. Do a few at a time and copy them to the other notes. This way, you can see how the layout develops. You can make adjustments to the distribution of the motifs, add details where there seemed to be holes and so on. Again, it doesn't have to be pretty or very detailed, it's just a rough draft. When I'm pleased with the overall impression of the layout, how the motifs are varied, distributed, and creates a nice flow, I grab another Post-it with the same proportions and use that to try to find a good place for defining the repeat boundaries. I want to fit as much as possible within this square with as little of the motifs as possible spilling over the edges, but a little bit is fine, and then I draw around it. This now marks the area of the full repeat that I'm going to draw later in a larger scale. For the diagonal design, you can of course, also use a tall repeat, and here is one that I have created for a diagonal pattern where I used the shorter rectangle proportions. For the vertical design and layout, we need to use the tallest proportion. For this, I'll use the cut in half Post-its. For this one, you can start by marking out the first flower here, where the two top notes meet, and then the second flower right here, where the two left Post-it meets, and then connect them with an ogee line to mark out the branch. Then copy all this exactly to all four notes. Then we'll draw in this second ogee, but in the other direction, and then copy that too to the other notes. Now you have your vertical serpentine structure that you can use to sketch out your motifs, the leaves, and any additional branches and flowers. At this step, we don't have to draft the background layer and it's motifs either, because when we have our main motifs for the foreground like this, we can use those to fit in the rest. Now, create your own draft or rather make several versions to explore the best option. Next, we're going to sketch up the motifs and the repeat design. 15. Drawing The Foreground Layer: In this step, we're going to start drawing the pattern design and its motifs for the foreground layer based on our repeat layout drafts that we created in the previous lesson. Now we're going to use the draft to draw the final foreground motifs on another piece of paper, and in a larger scale. The larger scale, the better, but an A3 sized paper will work just fine. I like to scale up my draft and draw my final repeat on top of it using a lightbox. To do that, you can scan and import it into an Illustrator document where you increase the size and then print it. Here, I have two scanned post-it drafts, one diagonal and one vertical, and an artboard in A3 size. I'll place one of the post-it scans on the artboard and scale it up as much as I can, but only enough so that I can still see the full repeat and its motifs inside the artboard, because I want to have a nice overview of all the motifs in the repeat. I think this will be enough because here I can see the complete group of motifs with the flower and branch, and the other motifs here as well. Before I print this, I'm going to take down the opacity a bit just so that the lines will be a bit softer. Because when I draw on top of them on my lightbox later, I don't want them to be too strong so that I can't see my pencil lines, plus it saves me some ink in my printer at the same time. Now, I'll print this image on my artboard and then I'll do the same thing to my other scan draft. Now, I can place the printout on my lightbox and use this as guiding lines as I start drawing my motifs. But first, I measure up and draw the borders of my repeat so that I know what size it is. This particular repeat happen to measure 20 by 30 centimeters, but it doesn't have to be these even numbers. A second way to do this is to divide your post-it draft into a grid like this, and also mark the section where you want your repeat borders to be. Then draw an equivalent grid, but larger, on another piece of paper. Then you transfer the marked repeat draft square by square to the large piece of paper. There is the third way you can do this, and that is to draw your motifs separately and not together in the full repeat design. It may feel a bit easier to do it this way. If you want to use this technique, a tip is to create a couple of versions of your motifs, especially some smaller side branches and leaves, so that you can have some flexibility and options to pick from when you assemble them into the repeat later in Illustrator because drawing them separately creates a higher risk that they won't fit perfectly together in a snug, dense layout. Now, I'm going to draw my two repeat designs using my motif explorations that I've done before. I started out with one of my main flowers. Now, I'll draw one of the other ones in the corners. When I have this first corner motif, I now want to copy the shape of it to all corners as well. For that, I am going to trace the outer shape of the flower on another piece of paper. I also have to mark the corner so that I can align it with the other corners, and then trace the shape of the flower. Then I can use this trace to copy the flower shape everywhere. This helps me see where I can continue to draw the other motifs without coming too close or overlapping with the flowers. Now, I'm going to draw in the main branches. I think I'll attach some leaves to the main branches here according to my draft, and some additional smaller branches and flowers. Here, I drew a small stem with a flower and some lobed leaves. To make sure I didn't draw too close to the other motifs, I copied the main branch to over here as well. I think I will copy the large flower here in the middle to the right as well, so that I know what space I have to play with. I'll copy this little flower up here down to here. Then I'll continue with this space and draw in another of those small carnation-looking flowers. I'm almost done. I'm just going to add in some more details here and there, some shading lines perhaps in this flower. That will have to do. Now, I'm going to draw up my other repeat with a vertical direction as well. Next, we're continuing with our designs by drawing in the background motifs. 16. Drawing The Background Motifs: In this step, we're adding in the background motifs for our serpentine designs. There are a couple of techniques for drawing the background motifs as well. One is to use your foreground repeat design as a guide. Then you place a new piece of paper on top of it and draw in the background motifs. This way, you can design the background layer and it's motifs perfectly aligned with the foreground layer. This one's great to use for those arabesque inspired winding and scroll twigs' and small simplified flowers. Also, if you want to have those silhouette motifs or a bit larger leaves and additional branches. The second option is to draw the background motifs separately to be arranged in the repeat later in Illustrator. Again, if you choose this type of technique, create a bunch of motif alternatives to pick from and that you can assemble in different ways. If you want to have a dotted background, you can either draw them in by hand at this point as well. But you can also add them directly in Illustrator. I'll show you a couple of techniques for doing that later. For this pattern, I want to use those low arabesque twigs and scrolls. For the other one, I want to create a dotted background, which I'll do in Illustrator. Now, those copies I did of the motifs to all corners and all sides are really helpful to see where to add the background motifs. I don't have to draw any background elements where are these large flowers are. But I may want to draw some that continue behind and especially behind the smaller branches and leaves, to create a natural growth and flow of these low motifs. I'll just finish this and then I'll see you in the next lesson where we're going to trace and ink our designs, and prepare them for turning them into vectorized motifs. 17. Prepare Your Design For Scanning: In this lesson, we're going to turn the sketches into digitalized objects. To digitalize your motifs means to take them from paper into an image file on your computer. You can do that by photographing it either with a scanner or some kind of camera, like your phone or iPad, but scanning is the best option to ensure a nice and clear image. When using a camera, you have to have good lighting and also angle the camera properly to make sure the image won't be skewed. I warmly recommend getting an A3 scanner. It doesn't have to be an expensive or fancy one, as long as you can scan in in high resolution of at least 300 DPI, and I rarely need more than that for my purposes. But before you scan your drawings, you have to prepare them a bit to make sure that they are optimized for scanning and then vectorizing in Illustrator. For this, we need clear and distinct lines that the scanner can register properly. For this, we're going to ink the contours of our motifs. When I ink my motifs, I use a fine liner with a fairly thick nib, anything between 0.5 and 0.8, and that will create a line that is distinct enough for the scanner to register properly. If you use a small nib that creates a very thin line, some parts of it may be lost sometimes. When I want to create a brush effect with a bit of a thicker outline, I use a brush pen with a fairly small brush nib. My favorite is this one, the Sakura brush from Pigma. If you want to go about it in a historically authentic manner, you can use a really small, thin, ordinary watercolor brush, for example, or a dip ink pen. When inking your motifs, there are some things I want you to consider, the final result, as in how the motifs will be colored, details added, if they will have outlines or not. If you're intentional about this when inking, it will be easier and less to edit later on. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate this. If I want my motifs to have lots of different details, as in shading and colors, I have to decide if I want all of the details to have contours or not. If I only want some contouring or line work in a flower like this, for example, I only ink the lines where I want lines in the final motif because the details and other colors will be added in Illustrator later on. But if I want my flower to have lots of contouring and line work, I ink all the lines in my sketch. If I want branches without contours, I have to really mind the shapes created inside the outlines. If the outlines are attached to other motifs, if I want to remove the branch outlines later, a tip is to sometimes ink some motif elements separately and then assemble them later on in Illustrator. Another thing to consider is if you want to easily color the shapes created inside the outlines or use the shape builder tool in Illustrator to merge the lines and shapes inside the contours, then the contours must be closed. There can't be any gaps. So based on that, go ahead and ink your motifs and I'll let you watch me ink some of mine. When you're done, you scan or photograph your inked motifs and also the pencil drawings because they can be useful to use as guides when adding those details that we haven't inked yet. In the next lesson, we're going to vectorize and edit the design before we give them color and details. 18. Vectorizing Your Design: In this lesson, we're going to vectorize our motifs. Import your scanned images to Illustrator by pulling them from the folder where you saved them to a new Illustrator document. Now we're going to turn this image and its black lines into vectorized objects that we can work with. With the image selected, click the "Image Trace" tool, and this settings window appears. If you don't have this shortcut here in your Tools bar, go to "Window" in the top menu and find and click the option called "Image Trace" and this settings window will pop up for you. Make sure your image is selected to activate the Image Trace tool. If it's still grayed out, just move your image a few pixels like this and Illustrator will find it. In this box called Mode, choose the "Black and White" option. For the threshold value, you can just keep 128 for now because that usually gives a pretty good results for lines like this. Then click the little arrow symbol next to "Advanced" to expand the settings options. Here we have some extra settings that we can play around with as well. But I'll keep them as they are for now. If you want to easily change the color of the shapes inside the outlines, you can leave the box that says "Ignore White" unchecked. But if you want to have a more loose effect and for example, color your motifs with a blob brush tool instead. You can check this box to only keep the black outlines and not the white surrounding it. Now, hit "Trace" and see how the outlines turn out. If you need to, now you can adjust the threshold values up here to tell Illustrator to register less of the black or more. Less will make the lines thinner and more delicate, and more makes them thicker and more distinct or saturated. Now, illustrations like this with quite a lot of details contain a lot of data which can make your document large and slow to work with. To prevent this a bit, we can simplify our illustration and decrease the data by adjusting the path values over here. If you take it down a bit, it will simplify and smoothen out the lines a little bit. After you've found the look that you like, expand your traced object by going to "Object" and click "Expand". In the next lesson, we're going to test our repeat a bit for the first time, and also prepare it for some color. 19. Editing Your Design: In this step, we're going to test our repeat for the first time to see how it matches on all sides. We will edit and make necessary adjustments so that it will be prepared for adding color. Since I drew some details of my motifs on separate papers, I will first bring them together to see how they look. But first, I'll get one of them another color so I can still differentiate them from each other. This looks okay, but I still need to do some editing. Now I'll go over the outlines of all the motifs a bit, polish up any mistakes with the Eraser tool or the Smooth tool, or add to it with a blob brush tool. For example, if some shapes needs to be closed, and also check that the shapes created inside the outlines look the way you want them to, especially if you plan to perhaps remove the outlines or color them in the same color as your backgrounds so that they won't show. I'll go ahead and do this for all my motifs, but in the magic world of video, this will only take one and a half second. That was fast. All my motifs are now polished, and I have also group them. Now it's time to check how our repeat design is working. Will it match correctly when repeated up and down and to the sides? Now remember the repeat measures of your repeat drawing. For mine, this was 20 by 30 centimeters, remember, and the other one was 18 by 36 centimeters. Now we're going to find out these measures, but in pixels instead. Make sure that the document is set to the same unit as your measures. In my case, centimeters. You can check or change that here in Document Setup, then create a rectangle or square with those measures. I'll make one for each of my designs, then change the document setup back to pixels. Select a rectangle and now round up the pixels to even numbers. Then you have to make sure this little link icon is crossed out so that you can change the proportions of your rectangle. The pixels that you now have are the measures that you're going to use to create the final pattern swatch. You may want to make note of them, write them down somewhere. Now I'm going to copy this repeat a few times to see how the pattern looks. Before I do that, I'm actually going to remove the background motifs though so that it will be easier for me to see and not so messy. I'll select everything, right-click, click Transform, Move, and then copy it horizontally, the same distance as the repeat width. In my case, that's 567 pixels for this design. Click Copy, and then copy it once more to the other side and then down and up until you have surrounded your original repeat. Here is the first glimpse of how the pattern will look. Now we can also see how it matches along all sides. I think this works pretty good. There are some bits here and there that are overlapping, and there are some gaps, so I'm going to edit that. First, I'd like to give all the copies another color so that I can see the original clearly. Now go over the motifs and lines along the borders of the repeat. Here I need to extend the lines of the main branch a bit so that it meets the flower. For that, I'll grab the direct selection tool, which is the white arrow tool. Then with it, I'll select the black lines. Click on one of the little anchor points. Now I can extend it like this to make it connect with a flower contours, because together, they create a closed shape for this main branch, which I will need when I give it color with a paint bucket tool in the next step. Now also remember to only make edits on the original repeat and not the copies because we're going to erase the copies since they are not correct anymore. Now I'll go over this and then my other repeat. Now we are ready for coloring and adding details. I'll see you in the next lesson for that. 20. Coloring Your Design: Before we color our designs, we have to have some nice colors to work with, so let's start by creating a color palette. It doesn't have to be perfect at this point and be prepared for changing and adjusting the colors as you progress, but it's nice to have something to start out with that are not the standard Illustrator colors over here. In fact, I'm going to remove them, besides the black and the white. Now let's assume that you want to start out with a multiple color scheme which means a final color palette of maximum six colors plus a white or in this case, we want some sort of off-white, but to find the right color combinations, we create a first draft of a color palette with more colors that we can then choose from. Create about 15-16 squares with the Rectangle tool in any color. There are different ways for finding and sourcing colors for your palette. You can use the color picker up here, or what I like better, double-click on the color swatch over here and use this lever here to find the color and then the color picker to find the right shade and saturation. You can also draw colors from a photograph. Select a square, and then the Eyedropper tool, and try out different places to find some colors that you like. If you want to create an authentic arts and crafts color palette, choose colors like indigo and earthy tones of red, yellow, green, pink, light blue, and perhaps orange or brow, and don't forget off-white which should be a warm tone. When you've filled all your color squares, review them and place them next to each other and see how they work together. Move them around, mix and match and finally pull your six favorites and an off-white to the side. Select all and create a color group with them by clicking the little folder icon over here in the Swatches panel. You can name it if you like and click "Okay", but keep the other swatches though in case you want to go back and use one of them. If you want to, you can now also make a color plan as I show in the trailing arts and crafts lesson. There you can dedicate a color to each motif element just like William Morris did. Now it's time to color our motifs and add some more details to them. I have also copied that repeat again to close the shapes at the branches. First let's color some bases, and the fastest way to do this is to use the Paint Bucket tool, so select all your motifs including their copied repeats, and then I'll also hide my blue edges by pressing "Command-H" so that it will be easier to see what I do. Then select the Paint Bucket tool and a color. It actually doesn't matter what color you use at this step because we just want to give the shapes inside the outline some color, and then we can change that later, so just slap some color onto your motifs by clicking inside the outlines of the shape you want to color. After you're done with the Paint Bucket tool, you have to expand, so with the object still selected go to Object and Expand, and now everything that's selected is also grouped. The gray copy repeats too, so to get rid of them without ungrouping everything and making a mess, you can use the White Arrow tool again, click somewhere on a gray object, then go to Select, Select Same, and Fill Color, and now only all the gray motifs are selected and I can delete them. If you want to, you can ungroup your colored motifs and regroup them the way you want to as well, but now I see that I forgot to give some color to this flower and leaves down here, and since it's an open shape, I'm going to copy this flower down to here to close the shape, and then I'm going to use the Shape Builder tool to color this one too. If you want to use the Shape Builder tool, my advice is to not select too many objects at once, or it will give Illustrator some really bad headache and make it really slow. With the Shape Builder tool, you don't have to expand afterwards, but it does sometimes group objects, and I will also use the Shape Builder tool to ready my background motifs. Now it's time for some detailing. Now I'm going to show you a technique that I often use, for example to create an effect of depth and shade in a pedal or a leaf, or to add details. For this, I use the Blob Brush tool and go in and paint a layer of shade for example to this flower, and then when I have my outlines of the shade shapes, I'll fill it in with the Shape Builder tool. This may look a bit weird right now, but just wait until I bring the contours to the front and re-color this thing a little bit, and here is how it turned out. I still don't have the final colors of course, but now I have some more details. Now I'm going to add some more details to my other motifs and then also color my other repeat. In the next lesson, we're going to create the pattern swatch and test our final pattern. 21. Create The Pattern Swatch: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to put it all together and manually create the pattern swatch. Here I have my finalized motifs or repeat designs and I have colored and recolored my motifs a few times and I've also added some details here and there. For this one, there are a lot of dots so I created some dots here on the main branch with the blob brush tool, where I just used different sizes of the blob brush tool and painted the dots like this. I've also added some shading lines and textural lines. Then here I have my background layer for this design and for this design, I'm going to create a dotted background and I'll show you how to do that. But first, I'm going to assemble this one and create a pattern swatch from that. I'm going to put this one aside for now and I'm going to start with creating a background rectangle. Now I'm going to use those measures again for this repeat. I'll grab the rectangle tool and then my pixels for this one was 567 by 850 and I think I'm going to give it a dark blue background. Let's see I want to have the same as I used for the contours. So I'll select my background and then the eyedropper tool and just pick this one just to make sure I get the same one. This will make the contours disappear against this background, but I could also create a background that's a little bit lighter and then my contours would show. Now I'm going to place this one somewhere here, crossing this and this border. Now I'm going to reorder this and I'll do that with my rectangle, and I'll go up to object, arrange and send to back, so now it's behind everything, the background motifs as well. I think I'm going add those now too, and let's see if I can find the place where they are supposed to be. Somewhere around here I think, something like that. Perhaps I need to move that just slightly. There, I think that works good. Now I'm just going to repeat and copy these so that I cover the whole rectangle and all borders so that they cross all edges. I'll select all of it and just start moving and copying it. Then I'll grab both of these, then let's see if I have everything. Well, I need some more fillers up here, so I'll just find that one now. This one, it's crossing over here too. I'll have to copy this up to the top border. Time to test, and this is the most exciting step of all. I'll zoom out a little bit and then I need to select my background and make a copy of it. I'll press Command C on my keyboard and then paste it behind this rectangle, and I'll press Command B for that. Then I'll give that copy behind a no stroke and no fill over here, and then select everything and pull it to the swatches panel. Let's see if I did things correct now if it worked. I'll create a larger rectangle and I'll fill it with my pattern. Yay, it worked. I think everything repeats as it should and I think this color way works really well too. That was that. I'll remove this one again and now it's time for my other one. So I'll just move this aside for now and I'll do the same with this. With this one, I need to create a rectangle as well and then my measures for this one was 510 by 1020 pixels. I don't want that for my background, so let's see. I think I'm just going to choose a really dark background for this one as well. I'll have to reorder and bring it to the back and then I'll place this one and move it and copy it as before. Then I'll select both of these, copy them down. It looks good already. Now I'll select my background and copy it Command C and paste it behind, Command B. Give that copy no stroke and no fill and drag it to my swatches panel and create a larger rectangle to fill my pattern with. Yeah, that looks really nice too. Perhaps I don't even need a background or any fillers. But now I'm going to show you how to create a dotted background first, just to see how that will appear as well. But that and to finalize this pattern, I will show you in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 22. Creating A Dotted Background: How to create a dotted background? We could actually, which is with a Blob Brush Tool like this, start painting little dots like this. To do that across this whole background rectangle will take a while, so I'm going to show you a technique that will make this a little bit faster. I've made some examples here. One thing you can consider is what type of layout or look you want for your dotted background. Do you want it to have this more scattered layout or do you want to have more of a structured layout like this? You don't have to decide for just one, you can create a couple of different options and explore and try them out. Another thing you need to think about now is the size of your dots. That also goes together with how much space do you want between your dots? Do you want it to be a more dense layout or a bit more sparse layout? To decide this, you just have to try them out and explore. One thing that you can do is with your pattern try a little bit just like we did before. I'll just create a full structured layout like this, and see what that looks like. Here's a bit of a structured layout, but you can also see if you want to have more of a scattered layout, and then also try the density if you want to have lots of space or a more dense layout. There are some things you can think about and explore. Now, I'm going to show you a little trick. We don't want to draw all dots manually, so we're going to create a dot pattern first. But one thing that Illustrator won't let us do is to have a pattern within a pattern. So I can create a dotted patterns swatch and then fill my background and use that. We're just going to create the pattern repeat and group that, and then we'll repeat it across here a few times. We want to have a dotted repeat that is divisible with the measures of our background rectangle. The measures for this one is 510 horizontally. If I would divide this by something, let's say five, I could fit five dotted repeats in here, and 510 divided by 5 is 102. If I divide my vertical measure here by 10, that will also create 102. I can create a dotted repeat with the measures of 102 by 102. Then I can just repeat this really easy across, so that's what I'll do. I'll create a square. I'm going to build a dotted repeat on top of this. I'll grab my Blob Brush Tool and I'll grab light color like this, and now, I'm going to start with creating a bunch of dots. I don't have to place them in any particular order just to have some not perfect circles, but just a little bit organic shapes to them. Just to create a few like this, so I have a few to pick from. Now, I'll just grab these and place them. I'll create a scattered repeat for my pattern. I think that's going to be really nice. I'll just place them out like this. A fairly sparse layout too is what I want. Then I'll just reuse all these dots by copying, by Press option on my keyboard, and then I'll just do this until I have filled almost my whole square. Just try to create an even distribution of the dots as you possibly can not to create any alleyways, or holes, or lineups. Creating a scattered dotted pattern like this can seem really easy, but it's actually the opposite. It's quite difficult to create an even distribution like this, especially if you want to have a more dense layout, that can be really tricky sometimes. But I'll see if I manage. Before I go on and get any closer to these edges, I am going to repeat the dots crossing the edge and copy them down to repeat them perfectly on the opposite horizontal border. Then I will add in one more dot here, and I'll copy this row to the other side as well. Now, I know how to fill in the rest. I may have to move some of them around just to create this even distribution. As I said, it's easier said than done. Let's see how this works. To test it, I'm going to create a pattern swatch from it. I'll select my background, make a copy of it by press Command C and then paste it behind Command B. Give it no stroke and no fill, and then I'll create a swatch from it, and let's see what it looks like. I'll fill this. If I scale it down, way down, I can now see if there are some holes or alleyways that I think will draw the attention too much. I think there are some lineups and an alleyway here, yeah, that one. I'll just try to even this out a little bit and see if I can create a better flow. All right. Let's test that again just to see if I did any changes. That we'll have to do. There are still some irregularities here and there that I think I would have to take care of. The next step is to select all dots, but not the ones that are crossed in the bottom and one of the sides. Then I'll deselect my background and bounding box. I'll group the ones that I have now selected by pressing Command G. This is now my repeat for the dotted background that I'm going to use. Now, I'm going to move this aside, and so I have this group so that I can move it around easily. I'll select my dotted group and place it on the top corner like this. I'm going to copy this one across the whole way so that it repeats perfectly like this over here as well. Then if I press Command D on my keyboard, I will duplicate this action that I just did. I'll press Command D a few times, and now, I have filled this top row, and I'll select this whole row, deselect my background. Now, I'm going to repeat it down the same way and I'll press Command D. It's a perfect repeat so that it will be seamless with no cutoff dots here. I have this green white color on my dots. If I want to try some different colors, a great thing now is to group all these dots so I can, with just one click, select all of them, and change the color. I'll zoom in really close because now my dots and my background and bounding box is also selected. Deselect this by pressing down Shift and then dragging my cursor across this border. That will deselect the background boxes. I'll zoom out and I'll group this by pressing Command G. Now, all of the dots are grouped and I can easily just grab them again like this. Time to test this and create a new pattern swatch with a dotted background as well so place these here. Since I created the dots, after I created my main motifs, they have ended up on top of them. I'll just grab my main motifs and bring them to the front. I still have my bounding box behind here. All I have to do now is to select everything and make another pattern swatch. I'll create another large rectangle and throw my pattern with it, and here it is, my pattern now with a dotted background. I think that it works really well. It flows nicely. There is no place here that really disturbs the eye. Now, I have these really cream white dots, which is the same as the main branches and it's pretty busy, I think. I think I'm going to create another version with some darker dots, and I'll pick a pretty dark pink for this instead. I think this is going to turn out better. I'll create a new pattern swatch from this and see what that makes out of it. Are you ready? Here we go. This softens and calms it down a little bit and just creates a better balance and harmony in the pattern. I can see, there are some things here and there that I could do to improve this pattern. I could, for example, make this contour here a bit thicker to match up with this one. I think I would also add some center veins or some nerves in the leaves just to add a little bit of more detail to these additional branches. But overall, I'm really pleased with my two patterns. I have this one and then I have this one, two serpentine patterns. For this pattern, I actually used a monochrome palette, a red in four shades plus the white or off-white. Altogether, this makes five different color variations. For this one, I used a multiple color scheme with four colors plus white. I used red, yellow, green, and blue in different shades. Altogether, it has 10 variations, which can be a bit too many in some cases. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to reduce the number of colors to a limited or monochrome color scheme, and at the same time recolor, it. 23. Recoloring Your Design: In this lesson, I'll show you how to reduce the number of colors to a limited or monochrome color scheme and do some recoloring at the same time. For this, I'm going to work on this pattern and give it a limited color palette with only three colors in a couple of shades. One way to do this is to use the Recolor tool either by dragging some colors from the left side like this to change the colors on the right side, and at the same time I'm reducing the number of colors. But this usually doesn't give the best result because it can make some of the objects look weird or not matched together. You can also create a specific and new color palette with limited colors and save it to your Swatches panel. Then in the Recolor tool, you can select that and use the Random feature here to explore different combinations of that. You can also lock some colors that you want to keep in place for some elements by clicking the arrows here. But I find it quite difficult to find a combination that works well this way too. But you know me, I like the manual way to be in total control, so I almost always use the original repeat and go in and manually change the colors in some places or the places that I want, and sometimes use the Recolor tool on just a selection of the objects. In the Swatches panel, I have created a color group with a limited color scheme. The first thing I'm going to do is to change the background color to this darker or mid-tone green. Then I'll select one of the repeat groups, double-click it to go into isolation mode where I can work on it without interfering with anything else. Here I will make some manual color changes. I'll start with the contours, I'm going to zoom way in, and since these contours are grouped in different ways, I'm going to use the white arrow tool to select just one outline object. Then I'm going to use the Select Same feature. Go to Select, Same and Fill Color, and now all my dark blue contours are selected. I can give them another color, and I'm going to give them this dark brown color instead. Then I'm going to change all the cream or off-white objects in the main branch into the same color as these light green leaves and branches. Then I want to change all the red and mid-tone pinks in the flowers to that mid-tone green as well. I'll change the darker red to the mid-tone green, and then the light pinks to that same off-white or really light green that I had for the branches. This reduces the different shading details in the flower too, so I simplify it at the same time. I also want to give the centers of all the flowers another color. For that, I want something that pops a bit, so I'll use this dark yellow. Now I'm going to do the same thing with the other flowers, this pink one and also the blue carnations or corn flowers, they may be. I've reduced the number of colors to three now. The last thing I want to do now is to change the color of the background motifs as well to the same off-white as in the other motifs. I'll go out of isolation mode and select the background motifs beneath this one and change it to the other color. Now I'm going to delete all the other repeat groups and copy this recolored version and the background to all places and make a new pattern swatch with this one. Now it's time to test it. Voila, here is the version with a limited color scheme. Now I can easily turn this limited color scheme into a monochrome by, for example, exchanging the brown contours to a dark green and the flower pistils to a light green. Here's how to do that quickly with the Recolor tool. Create two rectangles, and now I'm going to find a dark green one and I'll give one of them this mid-tone green. Then I'll double-click my swatch down here and pick a dark green. Now I'll do the same with this one and find a light green. Then select the pattern and the two colors and click the Recolor tool. Now I just have to switch the two colors, the brown with the dark green and the yellow with this light green. I'm not sure about this light green, so perhaps I'll just give it the same green as the background. That will also keep the numbers of shade down. That's how you can recolor, and explore different color schemes for your pattern, and reduce the number of colors. We are actually coming to the end of this course. In the next and last video, I'll wrap this up and talk about some next steps. I'll see you there. 24. End Note: We are coming to the end of this course, and if you have followed along and done the steps with me, you now have a serpentine arts and crafts inspired pattern already that you can include in your portfolio or perhaps upload and sell on print on demand services like Spoonflower. But there is more. Right after this video, I have included two bonus lessons with two drawing exercises where you can practice how to draw typical arts and crafts tulips. If you would like some extended coaching for designing your serpentine arts and crafts pattern, I have created an email workshop to help you make progress on your design. The workshop consists of a number of email sessions with bite-sized steps of the design process that you have now learned. You subscribe to the workshop through the link in the About tab in this course. If you like learning about classic patterns like this, you can also check out my other courses about creating patterns in different historic styles like [inaudible] Indian Florals, Paisley, and [inaudible] Just go to my profile page and there you'll find all my courses. If you want to connect with me outside of Skillshare too, you can join my Bearbell Newsletter and my Facebook group called Pattern Design with Bärbel Dressler where you'll meet other pattern designers who also love these classic styles. Let's connect on Instagram. You'll find me @bearbellproductions. You can also join Evolution, which is my pattern design membership and community, where you'll get weekly content about historic styles and pattern composition. You'll get drawing exercises and assignments to help you get really good at designing patterns and find your own style. Evolution opens for our new members twice a year. In the About tab of this course, you'll find a link to where you can learn more about Evolution and sign up for the wait-list to get notified when we open up for our registrations again. In general, you will find all the links you need in the About tab or on my profile page. That's all for this time. I hope you had fun and learned a lot of useful techniques in this course, and remember to post your class project. Don't forget to stay on for the bonus drawing exercises. Until next time. 25. Bonus Lesson 1: Drawing Simple Tulips: So in this first tulip drawing exercise, I have picked out these four examples of how you can draw a stylized, quite simplified tulip flower. So you have this one here with a couple of extra petals sticking in from behind. Then you have another one here that's sort of basically a drop shape where we have added some side petals. Then we have another version of this one which is much more taller and narrower and with also this drop shape and some side petals. Then we have another version that I think it's quite typical for arts and crafts tulips. It's a little bit more stylized in perhaps, I don't know, a Gothic manner. We have this shape here characteristic with this little curve or this little eyelid here in the junctions between the petals here. Then just like this one where you have a couple of them in the back as well. To draw them for this one, we can create first a circle as our base. Then on top of that we attach the petals. Here we want to have this little curve. So we can start with that, and then just add the side petals. Then when you have the basic lines down you can adjust it. See if you perhaps want to extend it down here a little bit just to get the shape that you want. This one is very simple in its execution actually. This is a good base flour flour that you can start with. Then you can add your own details and your own imagination to what you can do with it. Perhaps you want to add another edge like that's a bit wavy. There are many ways you can vary this one. Then we have this drop shaped tulip, also with pointy petals. Then we can start up here to create this bend for the second petal and then you continue it down to the bottom. Same here, do this little curve first, I find helpful. Then attach the petal in the bottom like that, and then another petal coming out here. This one shows a tulip that's a bit more open or blooming. Of course you can vary this one as well. You can create one that's just with three petals like that, or you can add even more petals. You can also make the edges with another style, like little curves or rounded edges like that, or pointy. Then we have this oblong version. I'm going to have to squeeze it in here. You just make this really tall drop shape. Again, start with a curve of the side pedals. This one you could see in the examples of some of the original designs that was in the first video. Then we have this one. Start also with some kind of drop shape, well, perhaps not all the way. Then we have a side petal. Then add that little eyelid down here. Then sort the edges a little bit more. Then you come down connecting the lines like that. Then you can add some more petals if you like and you can do them just like this, or you can do another version where you add some more. Then you can design the bottom here and a little bit different. You can just make it like this. That's quite frequently seen in some of the arts and crafts tulips, I think. You can just do like this and attach just a little bottom like that. Then of course, there would be a stem attached when we create the complete composition. So this is a really simple tulip flower and a few versions and alternatives. As I showed you can vary them in many ways. So start off really simple and then you can add some more, can change some, and just see what else you can come up with to create your own original art and crafts tulips. 26. Bonus Lesson 2: Drawing Lobed Tulips: For this exercise, we're going to step it up a little bit in complexity and create more stylized version, but not a simplified. Here we have three different tulip versions in different stages, we could call it. Here's one that's a bit more like a bud, and as you can see, it's a little bit in the way that we drew the wild rose buds. Then we have one that's a little bit more unfolded, blooming a little bit more, where the petals opening up and where you can see three petals. We have a one that's a bit more bloomed even, where we can see even more petals. What's typical for these ones are these edges. This is also very simple, and I'd like to start with the foundational circle. Then you start with this one of the sides and just enter this really rounded line. You create the pet side of the petal, the back of the petal really, and you can do with some S-shapes. You add some of these lobes, and then you create that islet, and then you add the others petal. You can do this one a bit further down perhaps, and you can make it really closed like this, or you can just make it a little bit more open and some side lobes. This one is coming in from behind like that, and then you can adjust this. Let's erase some of the lines so I can see it better. I think the islet needs to be a little bit smaller for this one. Just play around with this type of tulip, and then the key for this one is to add some texture, some textural lines like this, not too many though, something like that perhaps. You can also vary this one. As you know, there are so many different tulip species. Some of them have these lobe or spiky edges of the petals, and some are just really smooth. You can create different versions of these as well. I mean you don't have to have these spiky edges. You can just do more like a wave like that, and perhaps even have something coming in from behind as well. There are many ways to do them. Then we have the next one here, the second one, where we have one that's a little bit more open. Create some bottom of the tulip and then do a curved back of the petal. This has this vase shape or arm shape. This one is a little bit more tall and narrow, perhaps in proportion than this one. Let's sketch out that first petal like this, just a little islet, and then we have another one coming up there, and then I want a middle one. Then we can decide on how we want the edges to be. Also something to play around with. You can now also experiment with these texture lines. Do you want less or more? Here also some lines coming up there. Then we have the third one. For this one, I would like to start with the center petal, and then you can make this symmetrical, or you can make it a little bit varied. Like this here, I have a little islet coming down over here. Then let's see if I can create some nice side petals. This one is opening up even more than this one, and then I have another one over here. Here we have petal sticking up like that. They don't have to be symmetrical. You can add more petals if you want to. Then you add the edges that you would like to have. For this one, we're going to do something that could be more like a parrot tulip. I don't know if it's called that in English, but in Sweden, we call one of the tulips species that we can buy in the stores as parrot tulip, because they have the shape of a parrot beak, I guess, and they have these frilly edges. Then add some texture lines. These are just really rough sketching lines that we can now refine and edit and alter until we find the ultimate version that we like. The next step would actually be to trace them onto watercolor paper, for example, and with just really thin, refined exact lines. If we would do this the way arts and crafts designers did, we would color them in with gouache or watercolor. I'm going to show you an example of how that can look. This is just me trying out this technique, where I have sketched out the flowers onto watercolor paper and then mixed some gouache colors. Here I had used four colors, two for the flowers and two for the leaves. Then I painted the base of the flowers, just all the pink, and then I added the darker red contours. For that, I used those sketching lines that I had created. All of this is my guiding lines for the contours later. It's actually in these details that we can create this look and feel of arts and crafts patterns or the motifs used in their patterns with these texture lines and the shading lines. Now I'm really excited to see your sketches, and if you feel like it, go ahead and try and color them in with gouache or watercolor. Make it really simple with just adding the contours and texture lines like the I did here. I'll see you in the Facebook group.