Learn to Design Arts and Crafts Patterns - Part 1

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm [inaudible] , pattern designer and online teacher from Sweden. Besides being passionate about pattern design, I'm also a huge history nerd and love historical pattern styles. One of my absolute favorite styles is arts and crafts. It's compelling pattern designs have some genius quality to them that has mesmerized people for 150 years. It's one of the most admired styles today and has influenced and shaped both the interior and modern pattern design in many ways. As you know, arts and crafts patterns are quite complex with intertwining layer motifs and compositions that can seem very difficult to create. But in this course, which is the first in this series, I will start demystifying the secrets and how to create arts and crafts patterns. In this class, you will learn about the background of the arts and crafts pattern style, its influences, and the design principle that shaped it. We'll take a closer look at the characteristics of arts and crafts patterns when it comes to theme, composition and layout, typical motifs and color schemes and I will share my process for designing these complex designs in manageable steps. You will also learn about the different types of patterns you can find within the arts and crafts style. To make it a bit easier, I have divided this into four categories. In each part of this series, we'll take a closer look at each category. In this first part of the series, you will learn how to create patterns in the category I call trailing. These are patterns with a flowing structure of plants and flowers in one or two layers of motifs. You will also get exercises to practice how to draw motifs in the arts and crafts style, and how to draft a straight repeat in the old fashioned way. At the end of this course, you will have an arts and crafts pattern of your own to include in your portfolio or to add on a print on demand services perhaps, or to use for producing your own products like fabric, home textiles, and wallpaper for example. This course is for you who want to level up your pattern design techniques and train your eye for what makes a flowing composition. It's for you who want to improve your drawing skills and explore your design style. But it's especially for you who have longed for creating patterns in the arts and crafts style. This is an intermediate course and you will need to have basic knowledge of using the essential tools in Adobe Illustrator. Since that's what we'll use to color our patterns and create the final digital repeat. If you're ready to learn how to create arts and crafts patterns, I welcome you to join me on the inside and let's get started. 2. Welcome To Class!: Hi everyone, and welcome to the first part of this course series about how to create arts and crafts patterns. I want to be able to create patterns in the arts and crafts style, but they seem so advanced and complex and I don't have a clue how to do that or even where to begin. This is probably the number one comment I get when asking what my students would like to learn and what my next course should be about. Arts and crafts is a complex style in many ways with its intertwining and layer motifs and compositions. But we can learn and accomplish anything by studying, practicing, and taking things step-by-step. That's exactly what I did when I tried to figure out how to create an arts and crafts pattern on my own awhile ago. I did tons of research, studying the patterns up-close, dissecting them into their smallest elements, to trying to figure out how they were done. Then trying and testing out different techniques and methods for accomplishing this style and look after a lot of trial and error and practicing, I finally managed to create an arts and crafts pattern on my own. This type of process of studying and figuring out how to create a specific type of patterns is how I have developed both my artistic and technical skills. But the most valuable outcome of all this is, that this way of learning has also helped me explore and discover my own personal design style and create a process for how to design advanced and complex patterns. Like in the arts and crafts style or [inaudible] or Indian florals and Damask for example. In this course series, I will show you how to create arts and crafts patterns using my process. That step-by-step will help you create a pattern in the style of your own. I believe we can learn a lot from history because it's such a treasure trove of knowledge and inspiration. What is art and craft really? Well, that's something you'll learn about in the first lesson. I'll see you for that in the next video. 3. What Is Arts And Crafts?: The term arts and crafts doesn't refer to a specific pattern design style, if we are to be correct. Even though many associate arts and crafts with the pattern designs by William Morris. The more correct definition is that arts and crafts has been used to describe the art and design that was created in Britain and Northern America between the 1870's to around the 1920's. To be even more specific, it was used for the decorative and applied arts, which entails all kinds of design and art principles, not just patterns for wallpaper and textiles. Arts and crafts includes architecture, interior design, stained glass, metal work, painting, illustration, sculpture, wood carving, pottery, embroidery, furnishing, wall hangings, tapestries, carpets, but also clothes, jewelry, and gardening. Arts and crafts is also a term that refers to the group of artists, designers, and craftsmen during this time, that base their work on a set of principles that was largely influenced by the social circumstances in the Victorian society and culture. Together these groups became a force called the arts and crafts movement. That would change the way people viewed and value the decorative arts and its creators and at the same time created a new design trend in architecture, interior decor, gardening, and fashion. Even though the arts and crafts movement includes many different designers and products, it's the patterns by William Morris and his business Morrison company, that have become the poster name for this historic design era. The fact is that he was a design icon and influence to many of the contemporary designers and their work. His specific design style was in many ways what shaped the general arts and crafts style as we perceive it today, at least. But within the arts and crafts movement, there were many more successful designers that contributed to the development of arts and crafts design and the styles that followed. In the next lesson, I'll give you a background and brief history of the arts and crafts movement and some of its key designers and their work. 4. The History Behind The Arts And Crafts Movement: In this lesson, I will tell you more about the background and circumstances that led up to the arts and crafts movement and what it stood for and this will give you a context to the principles that shape the work by the arts and craft designers. The 19th century in general was an era of enthusiasm to everything new and machine made. All the progress and opportunities that had come with the Industrial Revolution created a special atmosphere and energy that's characteristic for this period, also called the Victorian age. In 1851, the first great exhibition took place in the Crystal Palace in London.It was a big event to show off the superiority and splendor of British Engineering Innovation and its products coming from all corners of the empire. The exhibition was a success with over six million visitors from all over the world, but it wasn't a complete success. Many people thought it showed a weakness and lack of taste in British to sign and this created debate and discussion in the art press especially. In general, people had started to react to the not so positive impact that the manufacturers and mass production had on society and especially the conditions for the workers, as well as how it had changed the landscape and environment. Just to read a Dickens novel to get a glimpse of that side of the coin. Now circles and groups of artists and designers and craftsman, started to form and who didn't like how the mass production affected the quality of both the design and the production. They especially despised, how it had detached the worker from the design process. Every worker had just become a cog in a great machinery, which in their eyes lead to demoralization of the workers as they could not take pride in their work anymore. It was only about profit and not about good design or true workmanship anymore. Other cultural groups wanted to create a change and reform how the applied and decorative arts was viewed and valued by the public and to raise its status to be equal to the fine arts. For example; there weren't a lot of opportunities to exhibit designs and products within the applied and decorative arts to the public and one battle was to reform the Royal Academy, who only favored fine arts and painters in their exhibitions. Even architecture and sculpture, were severely misrepresented. When the Royal Academy refused, despite the harsh criticism in the art press and the cultural society. A separate committee was formed with the objective to create a place for designers, artists, and craftsmen to exhibit and show their work to the public. It was now that the term arts and crafts was coined during a committee meeting in 1887 to decide on a name for this exhibition. A book binder named T. J, Cobden-Sanderson, proposed the name Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. The first exhibition took place in The New Gallery in 1888 and was followed up the two following years and after that continued every third year far into the 20th century. Around 1920, the arts and crafts design era came to an end because of how the style and techniques changed so much and the First World War was also a turning point that changed this industry forever. This was the history of the arts and crafts movement and its style but we can get a complete picture without telling the story of its key designers. Join me in the next lesson where you'll learn more about William Morris and some of his peers and what influenced their work. 5. William Morris & The Influences Of Arts And Crafts Design: To tell the history of arts and crafts and what shaped this design style is to tell the story of its key people and what influenced them. This can be told through the life and work of William Morris. William Morris was born in 1834 and came from a wealthy family in wealthy Stowe in northeast of London. He grew up in a picturesque landscape close to nature with forests and meadows far from the fuming factories. He was very intelligent and read and wrote a lot as a young boy, fascinated by romantic medieval literature and art and love stories about knights and fair ladies and fairy tales. He spent a lot of time in nature studying ruins and churches and other old buildings. When William Morris was 16, he visited the grid exhibition together with his mother and as many others, he wasn't impressed by all that splendor and display of new products. Instead, he thought it was a vulgar abomination. Victorian design in general was an eclectic collection of different styles and influences. A lot thanks to new innovations and transportations that brought the world closer. With product streaming in from all corners of the vast British Empire, people became obsessed with exotic cultures and archaeology and all historic areas. Japanese and other Asian and Oriental design and products also became extremely trendy and popular. All these different sources influenced Morris as well. But for him, the Victorian design was exaggerated and cluttered with ornaments and just a lot of reveling and sentimental nostalgia. In his opinion, it was all created to fool the consumers and have no integrity or quality. There were three key figures and their work that highly influenced William Morris and his thoughts on design and how it was connected to society. The first one was a guy called Pugin. He was a part of the Gothic Revival Movement that formed during the eighteenth century and that drew inspiration from medieval and Gothic imagery and sources. The Gothic Revival Movement was huge during the nineteenth century and is the reason why so many public buildings and churches from this period are made in a Gothic style. Pugin thought Gothic design was superior to all others because it was true and honest. It didn't try to look like or be something else. Also, in the medieval and Gothic society and culture, the craftsmen and the workmanship was much more appreciated according to Pugin, which was integral for good design, and this could only be created in a good society. All of this spoke to William Morris. Another early influenced to William Morris on what was good design was the book grammar of ornament by Owen Jones. This became a classic Victorian reference book for ornamental design. In the book, Jones built on Pugin's principles that design should be true and honest. He took this a bit further, stating that design should not be created only to be admired or to sell something. Design should first be created out of function, then ornament and deep core could be added. He also thought design should be created in context of the environment where it would exist. He also said that good design could only be inspired by nature. All of this actually became cornerstones of the arts and crafts movement later on. When William Morris was 19, he came to Exeter College in Oxford to study literature and the classics. Here he developed his values further together with his new artist friends. It's also where his love for everything medieval group, for example, through the illuminated manuscripts he started in the Bodleian library. Now he got acquainted with the writings of another key figure, John Ruskin, who questioned the commercial success of mass production and how it created human misery. He too was a fan of Gothic architecture and what it stood for. Ruskin argued that the worker needs to be involved in every stage of the production to feel pride in his work, which was integral for creating good design. This was undermined by the industrialization and it's commercialism. Inspired by all this, William Morris and his friends formed a group called The Brotherhood with the agenda to rebel against all commercialism and materialism created by industry. At first, William and his best friend, Edward Burn Jones, had planned to become church clergyman. But during a trip to France, they changed their minds after seeing the impressive architecture and medieval paintings, they decided to become artists instead. Edward Burn Jones decided on a painting career and William on architecture. After graduating, he went back to London to learn at the practice of George Edmund Street, who was also into Gothic architecture and the Gothic Revival Movement. At streets practice, William met Phillip Webb, who also became one of his best and lifelong friends alongside with Burn Jones. Now enters another key figure in Morris's life, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who he had also met at Exeter. Rossetti was a poet and painter already with some success, and he was one of the founders of the group called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This group was also rebelling against something. But for them, it was the current trend to imitate the Renaissance style of the famous century artists Raphael. Instead, they were inspired by the period before that truth and honesty in medieval and Gothic Art, of course. Morris admired Rossetti and his work very much and when he realize that architecture wasn't his thing, either, Rossetti convinced him to become a painter instead. Now something very important happened. But to hear about that, you have to go to the next video where we'll continue this lesson. Quite the cliffhanger. 6. Continued: William Morris & The Influences Of Arts And Crafts Design: Rossetti had gotten a big commission to decorate the walls of the debating chamber of the Oxford Union, and now he invited Morris and Burne-Jones to come help him. The frescoes they painted for this project depicted typical medieval scenes from the King Arthur tale. But the funny thing is that they didn't really know what they were doing, and the paintings got criticized quite a bit for their strange proportions, and after a year, the frescoes had almost completely faded, because they had painted them on top of a wet surface. But this was a very important phase in William Morris's life and start of his new career. During this project, Morris also met Jane Burden, his future wife. They married in 1859 and moved to the Red House, which was designed by William's friend, Philip Webb. The Red House is often called the first real arts and crafts house, and of course, there were no furniture or decor existing on the market that would do for Morris. So with the help of his friends and wife, he designed and made most of the furnishing and decor for the house himself. This was also an important step toward the founding of Morris, Marshall Faulkner and company. This company included Rossetti Burne-Jones, Philip Webb, and some other friends and associates. The company description was fine art workman in painting, carving, furniture, and the metals. So arts in combination with crafts. The firm, as the company was nicknamed, became a great commercial success from the beginning. The first products were designed for friends and family mostly. Morris and his partners did everything themselves in a true arts and crafts spirit, from designing to the making. For example, they produced decorated tiles and embroidery products. But the most important product was the production of stained glass for churches and other buildings with a rapid growing demand for their beautiful work. What was so cool about their stained glass is that they all collaborated and worked together. Burne-Jones and Rossetti designed the central figures, Philip Webb designed some of the other elements and the lettering, and Morris was responsible for the color schemes. There is another and tragic side story to Morris's life here that affected his work, especially his writing and painting. This was the affair between his wife and his friend, Rossetti. It was a strange story and destructive time for him, but one that he seemed to accept. The fact is that in 1871, the Morris couple and family and Rossetti together leased and moved to Kelmscott Manor, where the affair between Jane and Rossetti continued. Business-wise, things started to take a bad turn as well. William Morris had been the major financial investor in the firm, but after a few years, it started to drain his own financial resources. Much because of the decline in demand of stained glass and furnishing, which were the main income sources for this firm in the first years. So Morris was forced to make some changes and reconstruct the company in 1875, which ended with excluding some of the partners including Rossetti, and yay for that, I'm on Team William. Despite all that drama, William Morris had become a smart businessman. So when things in the market changed, he adapted and expanded his work in wallpaper and textile designs instead. The firm that now is called Morris and Company started to get commissions for complete interior decoration, and the business grew. In 1876, Morris opened a showroom on Oxford Street where the customers could see samples of wallpaper, tapestries, embroideries carpets and sketches of complete interior designs. To have your house decorated by Morris and Company became very popular among the rich. William Morris himself wasn't all happy about this. He thought many of his customers didn't understand or truly appreciate the quality and craftsmanship behind it, but would only follow a trend. It's said that he once expressed that, "I spent my life in ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich." This was actually a frustration for him all through his career. He's strived for equality in society and good design available for everyone, but in his endeavor to create good and honest design and high-quality with true workmanship, his production methods of hand printing, for example, only made it possible for the wealthy to buy his products and services. At this time, another icon of the arts and crafts enters, John Henry Dearle. You may not have heard of this designer before, but the fact is that he is actually the designer behind many of the patterns created by Morris and Company and that are still mistakenly thought to be designed by William Morris himself. Dearle started working for Morris and Company in 1876 as a shop assistant in the New Oxford Street showroom. He soon advanced and started to work with producing tapestries together with William and also became a part of the design process and created his own patterns for wallpaper and textiles, highly influenced by the style of William Morris, though. Actually, in the late 70's, Morris spent less and less of his time designing and turned more towards his engagement in social reforms. Dearle took over more and more. From 1888, it was him that was responsible for designing all textiles and wallpaper. The first arts and crafts exhibition took place in 1888. Morris and Company was one of the major exhibitors, of course, and now William Morris was very much regarded an icon and designer superstar among his peers. His skills and patterns had influenced them and their styles in a big way. In his last years, his contributions to the movement leaned more towards giving lectures on design and the decorative arts, inspiring a new generation of artists and designers, such as author Heygate Mackmurdo, Charles Voysey, Lewis Foreman Day, Christopher Dresser, John Dando Sedding, and Walter Crane, of course. One I particularly want to mention is William Morris' daughter, May Morris, who also worked for the firm and as with Dearle, she created many of its designs for wallpaper and textiles. For example, Honeysuckle, an iconic pattern that many still think that was created by William Morris. Just like her father, May Morris was multi-talented, a writer, crafts-woman, socially engaged, but her artistic specialty was embroidery. In 1885, she became the director of the embroidery department at Morris and Company. In 1896, William Morris died, only 62 years old. The cause of death was, according to his doctor, simply being William Morris. It said that his last words were, "I want to get the mumble-jumble out of this world." Until the very end, he fought his battle for making the world a better place for people with social improvements and good design. William Morris was one of the key figures of the arts and crafts movement and the force behind its values and principles of design. In the next lesson, I will summarize those design principles and how we can interpret them as pattern designers of today. 7. The Principles Of Arts And Crafts Design: [MUSIC] In the previous lesson, you got the story of what influenced William Morris, and the designers of the arts and crafts movement. You also learned about the values that formed a set of principles that was the foundation for their work and dictating how to create good design and quality. In this lesson, I'm listing all those principles and try to give an interpretation on how we as pattern designers of today, can use these principles for our own work. The first principle is that design should be created in context to the environment where it will exist, not for its own existence or for admiration only. William Morris designs were initially created with a complete interior in mind where every piece and product had its place and worked in harmony with the whole room. Every wallpaper or furnishing fabric, or rug he made was created with intention and designed for a specific purpose. That's how we can use this principle too, not to create a pattern just for its own existence, but with intention and a purpose right from the start. Of course, we must be able to create from our own hearts desires once in a while, but if we want to create patterns that will work well on specific products optimized, we need to take that into consideration. For example, a wallpaper. For what room will this pattern work? Is it the kitchen, or living room, or for bedroom? When we create with intention and purpose, we will do our best work. The next principle is that design should first be created out of function, after that is achieved, ornament and decor can be added. In Morris's work, there were never anything redundant or any unnecessary details. This quote by him captors it all. "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." This can be applied for how he designed his patterns as well. In his patterns, you will never find an element or shape or a line that shouldn't be there or that doesn't make sense or support the overall impression. Every motif has its job; whether it's to carry other elements or to fill a space and add to the brilliant flow. When we create our patterns, we should also start with the function. How will the pattern be constructed and built in order to do its job and create the impression that we want to accomplish? When we have the basic pattern structure, we can start adding the decorations with motifs, and details, and color. Our third principle is that design should be true to purpose and its materials, and also honest in how it's created. It shouldn't imitate or look like something that it's not. This is why the arts and crafts style was created in a two-dimensional matter. With simplified and stylized plants and animal motifs that didn't try to look real, but only borrow the beauty from nature and used it in a manner that complemented the interior. That's how we can apply this principle as well to stylize the motifs to suit our purpose, the product and surface we are designing for. The next arts and crafts design principle is quite easy. It's to use nature as you source of inspiration. All arts and crafts designs are inspired by nature with motifs of foliage, flowers and animals and fruits. There are no abstract or non-figurative designs. That's pretty straightforward when it comes to how we can apply this as well. But still keep the third principle in mind to not try to depict nature realistically, but in a stylized way. The last principal is a little bit tricky for us though, and it's that the designer should be involved in the whole process from design to making. For William Morris, this meant learning and practicing every craft behind his products, from designing and drawing, to embroidery and weaving, to dying and printing his own fabrics. But for us who may not have the opportunity to do all that, how can we have use for this principle? Well, first of all, it's all about learning the craft of design and get really good at it. Then it's to source your own materials. Another thing to practice this principal is to try many different techniques for creating patterns, both for how to create motifs by hand, with different types of media, or digitally using different tools and apps. It's also good to have an understanding for how different products and materials are produced and how they act. To be involved in the whole process can also mean that if we design for a company, we can be a part of the process of producing the product as well. As much as we are allowed to checking the sign offs, visiting the printer when starting production. For example, I have a friend who's designing patterns for wallpaper and for every wallpaper collection she is present at the wallpaper factory, making sure that the colors schemes are exactly right, and then everything comes out as intended. So that was a compilation of the design principles that can help us keep the right focus when we start designing our own arts and crafts patterns. In the coming lessons, we are going to study the different characteristics of arts and crafts patterns and also divide them into different categories. But let's start with common themes that were used. So let's meet up in the next lesson.[MUSIC] 8. Characteristics: Themes: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at some of the themes that we can identify in arts and crafts patterns. This will help us when we are about to come up with ideas for our own patterns, and stay within the theme that allows us to create an arts and crafts expression. The general theme of arts and crafts patterns is nature, as you may know already, but it's more to it than that. There are some sub-themes here that we can use as inspiration. One sub-theme is wild flowers. These are motifs that the arts and crafts designers sourced from meadows and along rivers of the English countryside. For example, in this pattern by William Morris called Daisy, where we can identify some commonly depicted wild flowers. Besides, one of William Morris' favorites, the Daisy, which this pattern is named by, we can also see primrose and columbine flowers. In this pattern called Woodland Weeds by John Henry Dearle, we can see corn flowers, forget-me-not, and king's lily. Here's another designed by Dearle called Thistle, and that doesn't require any additional explanation. In this pattern, Blackthorn also by Dearle, he has besides the obvious blackthorns, also included king's lily again, wood anemones, forget-me-nots, and daisies. Then we have a sub-theme depicting foliage of different trees or bushes. In this one called Oak, by Dearle, it's so simple and yet extremely sophisticated. In this pattern by William Morris, he has used a pomegranate tree for his theme. Here, we have another classic by him that's very trendy right now for all kinds of products from wallpaper, to bags, willow bow. Then we have the sub-theme inspired by the English gardens. Here we have Trellis and Strawberry Thief by William Morris, which are great examples. Then there is this pattern by John Henry Dearle called Garden, filled with tulips, and lilies, and other common garden flowers. In this one, we find Hyacinth, more tulips, and something that I'm guessing to be peonies and perhaps Christmas bros. Another theme that's perhaps a bit more far-fetched is rivers, but not as depicting rivers literally, but using the impression of how the rivers flow in the serpentine manner. In these patterns by William Morris, and that are actually named after English rivers as well. Last arts and crafts theme I want to share with you is something that has drawn inspiration from medieval tapestries. That's patterns with a more zoomed out perspective depicting whole trees or landscapes and scenes like these patterns by Charles Voysey. Next, we're taking a look at composition and how arts and crafts patterns can be structured. 9. Characteristics: Composition: In this lesson, we're going to look at the different types of the composition of arts and crafts patterns. The first type of composition you will find is something we could call a simple composition. It's flat and has one layer with only one or perhaps a couple of different plants or motif elements with more or less space in between them and no background or filler motifs. Then we have a type of composition that I call an all over, which is also flat with one layer, but now with a mix of motifs with both larger flowers and leaves in combination with smaller ones. Then we have something we can call a filler composition, which is still flat but has two visible layers with larger main motifs in the foreground and small fillers in between them that are made up by small twigs or just marks and dots. Last composition is something more dynamic and not as flat. It has more depth for the two layers, but with a much more complex background layer and motifs that are intertwining. In the next lesson, we're going to look at some pattern examples and how they have been repeated. 10. Characteristics: Repeats: When I started studying arts and crafts patterns, I thought that most of them would be created as a half drop repeat just because of how they hide the edges of the repeat better than, for example, a straight or diagonal repeat. But I was wrong. Actually, the most common repeat in arts and crafts patterns, seems to be the straight repeat, where the pattern is repeated straight, horizontally, and vertically like this. Here are some examples of arts and crafts patterns with a straight repeat. Even these patterns with reflected and double motifs, are arranged in a straight repeat. There are patterns done with a half drop repeat as well and this is when the pattern is repeated up and down perfectly aligned vertically. Then to the sides, but with a half distance down like this. Here are some pattern examples with a half drop repeat. Variation of a half drop, is a so-called brick repeat. This is where the pattern is repeated straight to the sides, perfectly aligned horizontally. But then, when it's repeated down or up, it's with a half distance to the sides as well. Brick repeats are rare among arts and crafts patterns, but I managed to find one. This is COMPTON by John Henry Dearle. Next, we're going to take a look at the typical layouts of arts and crafts patterns. 11. Characteristics: Layout: There are some reoccurring structures that we can see in arts and crafts patterns. That's what we're going to look at in this lesson about how the patterns can be lay outed. First, we have patterns where the motifs are arranged in a more realistic way. In the way that plants grow with branches and foliage, flowers and fruits in a trailing layout. Then we have a version of this but more stylized with the motifs arranged along a serpentine structure and layout. It can be in a vertical or diagonal direction. The third layout has a structure of circular and curved lines with branches and leaves that are scrolled. Another layout is with a double structure with motifs that are reflected along a vertical line. This double or reflected layout can also be in combination with the previous layouts, the trailing, serpentine, and scrolled layouts. The last layout is organized in a more geometric structure with the main motifs arranged in more separate way in a grid or diagonal manner. Another characteristic to mention here is that all art and crafts patterns are directional. They are to be viewed from a specific direction, much because they depict naturalistic motifs of growing plants and also animals to be viewed sitting on the ground or perched up on the branches. Now, if we look at all these different compositions, repeats and layouts in arts and crafts patterns. We can collect them into different categories. Let's take a quick look at those categories in the next lesson. 12. My Arts And Crafts Pattern Categories: As you now have seen, there are so many different types of arts and crafts patterns that we can make with many variables to consider, like themes and number of motifs and how they are stylized, then there are different layouts and compositions with one or two layers, then they can be done in a straight or a half drop repeat, even a break. To have some order in all this and be able to learn how to create arts and crafts patterns in a manageable way, I have created a set of categories from these variables. The first category is called trailing. It's based on the layout version of trailing branches and foliage with flowers and fruits and animals, this category has typically one layer with the foliage of one or perhaps two plants from trees and bushes, but also other trailing garden plants. It's created with a straight repeat, but it can have a second background layer of small and simple fillers too, if we want to. This is the category that you will learn to create in this first episode of my arts and crafts series. The second category is called serpentine, based on the serpentine layout and patterns, it has a front layer with a mix, a large and often very stylized garden plants and flowers. The Background layer has smaller, thinner motifs, and this one we will do with a half drop repeat. The third category is called scrolled. This one also has two layers, the foreground layer has a layout and structure of scrolled branches and leaves from trees and bushes and both wild and garden plants, it's pretty wide and what type of motifs we can add here. In the background, there is a layer of more elaborate and detailed foliage of leaves, some small flowers that scrolled category, we will create an a half drop or straight repeat. The fourth category I call paired, and what characterizes this category is that the motifs are reflected along a vertical central line and with paired motifs on both sides, and all done in a straight repeat of course. In this category, we will make an all over composition with only one flat layer of both wild and garden plants. My thought behind these specific categories is that in each course, you will practice something new, and when you have taken all four courses, you will have a set of skills so that you can use and mix these variables in the way you want to and be able to create a wide spectra of different arts and crafts patterns. Next, we will look at some typical motifs in the trailing patterns category. I'll see you in the next lesson. 13. Characteristics: Motifs: In this lesson, we're going to study the typical motifs used in trailing arts and crafts patterns. First, we have the backbone or fundamental structure of the trailing patterns, which of course are the branches. They are the skeleton and framework on which all the other motifs are attached. In a trailing pattern, you can use one or two, sometimes even three different types of plants, but with one dominant plant whose branches will make up the main structure. Some trailing patterns have two layers, one front layer and one background layer. The front layer has larger and more distinct and dominant motif elements including the branches, and the background layer often has branches that are smaller, more simplified, and used as fillers. But I'll get back to those fillers in detail, later on in this lesson. In this pattern called Jasmine by William Morris, there are two different plants. The Jasmine with green thin branches, and a secondary unidentified plant, but that has thorny details. See how the branches are done in a basic, simple way with no contours or other details for shading or texture. But they're varied in the way they turn and how they are forked and split into smaller branches, and in some places, the branches cross and intertwine. Even though there aren't many details, they have still managed to create variation. The same goes here in Sweet Briar by John Henry Dearle. Here's another example. No contours or details in the branches, but they're varied with some small twigs here and there, and with branches in two different colors. In Oak Tree by Dearle, the branches are also very simplified. No shading or texture, but with many side branches and twigs. Here we have another example of how to depict branches. This is a pattern called foliage, also by John Henry Dearle. It's also done in a very simplified way, but with darker contours, see? In this pattern called Bramble by Kate Faulkner, the blackberry branches have no contours, but lines following the length of the branches and have been added to create texture. Then there are thorns in a darker green shade. In Bird and Pomegranate, Morris has added some lighter details to create an impression of highlights. The branches also has some detailing with smaller twigs here and there. In this pattern, Tom Tit by Dearle, the rosebush branches have both contours and some shading with lines following the length of the branches, and also some smaller marks around the thorns. In Honeysuckle by May Morris, the branches have more detailing, both with contours and how they are divided in smaller sections as well as textural lines. Here in fruit, the branches are all about contours and details with hatching lines along one side of the branches, that creates shading and texture at the same time. We can conclude that the branches of trees and bushes are done in a very simplified manner. The detailing is mostly in the way they split into side branches and twigs, and how they bend and curl into a nice flowing impression. Their main task here is not to be highly decorative, but to be the structure and the foundation of the patterns. Now let's take a look at some typical leaves. The leaves together with the branches make up the important and decorative foliage that's characteristic for trailing arts and crafts patterns. If the pattern is made with one plant, there is obviously only a one type of leaves, but to create variation, there are depicted in different ways. The arts and crafts designers were very fond of and experts at creating the leaves from different angles and with decorative turnovers and twists. If the pattern is made with two or more plants, the leaves are usually different in shape and size, and this is a great way to create variation and use forms and shapes that complement each other. This is an important principle to create flow and harmony in the pattern. You will see this a lot in arts and crafts patterns, and when you choose plants for your patterns, this is a good principle to apply too. Now, these patterns here are not in the trailing category, but in the serpentine and scrolled categories. But they're such great examples of how to use complimentary plants and leaves, so I wanted to show them here as well. The way arts and crafts leaves are depicted are of course, also more or less simplified and stylized. Some general shapes are oblong and narrow, with or without simple nerves and textural lines, and they're are forked or lobed leaves, very simply executed or with some more flair. There are shorter, more rounded leaves with straight or prickly edges depending on the plant, of course. The next typical motif category is large flowers, or we can call them the halo flowers. Here we have the large and lush flowers with lots of petals, like tulips, and here would poppies. Then we have a mix of other types of flowers like roses, and marigold, chrysanthemum, and peonies. Then we have some examples of halo flowers with very specific looks, like honeysuckle and iris, and lilies. That large flowers are often varied with smaller or let's call it medium-sized flowers. They can be with some detail or very simplified. An obvious favorite among arts and crafts designers of this category, is roses. Then we have the small flowers of course, very important motif elements. As complimentary flowers to create contrast and variation to the large halo flowers. For these small flower motifs, all kinds of garden or wild flowers were used, like daisies forget-me-nots, hyacinth, daffodils, all kinds of bell flowers, primrose, and pimpernel. The trailing category patterns often depict plants that carry fruits and berries as well. Some favorite fruit motifs are grapes, and here you see oranges and lemons and peaches, and a particular favorite seemed to be pomegranates. Here we have an example of blackberries, in this pattern called Bramble by Kate Faulkner. William Morris's favorite theme and motifs were birds in foliage, and birds are included in many patterns of the trailing category. They come in various shapes and sizes, but more often you see smaller birds that you'll find in your garden, like sparrow, tit, and thrush. There are of course more majestic birds like cockatoos and peacocks. Even though they are more common in serpentine patterns, some examples of trailing patterns have a background layer with smaller leaves and stems, that are usually no more than twigs and lines or silhouettes. Their job is to be fillers in the spaces in-between the halo motifs of the front layer, and create an even impression that will complement the front motifs without stealing the attention. Some fillers are just marks or even dots, very simple but so decorative. The typical arts and crafts motifs are more or less stylized. In the next lesson, you're going to get a drawing exercises to practice this. 14. Drawing Exercise: Basic Leaves: In this first drawing exercise, we're going to practice how to draw some basic and stylized leaves with variations. When drawing a stylized version of a plant and its different elements in an art and crafts manner, for example, a leaf, the principle is to refine the way the leaf looks in real life and turn it into a version that doesn't look like the real thing anymore, but reminds of it. This can be done by simplifying some details and exaggerating others. The most simple, basic and universal leaf is this one. It can be a leaf from many different plants like apple tree leaves or citrus and laurel for example. It has this more or less drop shape, a pointy apex and base, or the base can be rounded. This leaf can be varied in so many ways. We can stretch it out and make it more oblong in narrow, like the leaf of the willow or on a rowan leaf. Other ways we can create variations is with the edges. You can make them plain and straight with smooth edges, or you can make them a bit irregular and wavy or prickly. We can also vary the leaves with the veins and the nerves. These can be varied in so many ways as well with more side nerves or just a few or just on the one side. We can also draw them from different angles, like seen from the top just straight on, or from the side a little bit. We can also make them turned over or twisted where you can see the backside of the leaf a little bit. That's a very typical characteristic in art and crafts leaves. Now let me show you some examples of how to vary these leaves with turnovers and twists and nerves and so on. Drawing a basic leaf is, for starters, really simple, especially when it's seen just from above. But no matter how simple it is, I always use directional lines for where to place the leaf. The most simple version of a basic leaf here is just, here is the center of it, it's my directional lines, it shows me where I want to place the leaf on the paper for once, but it also gives me the direction of the leaf, like literally, how I want it to tilt. Here I am drawing a straight leaf, so it's not curving or anything. When seen straight on from above, you see both sides of the leaves equally. But if you want to see a leaf from the side, like from an angle a little bit, I'm going to draw my directional line, then you see the part that's further away, it appears to be thinner and then you can draw the part that's closer to you, a bit thicker. This will make the impression that the leaf is tilted or a scene from the side a little bit. But my tip here is to always work with the directional lines. This comes really in handy when you start drawing more complex or varied leaves. For example, if I want to make a curved leaf. I'm drawing it like this is a little bit of an S curve perhaps, and then I'm giving it some body, my outline, and then it's just easier to follow the direction when having this directional line. Now, I can really sense that it's curving and now the outlines are following that and enhancing that impression as well. If I want to make a steeper curve, it's going to be so much easier if I have the direction to draw from. Besides giving them an angle or a curve, you can add other variations to a basic leaf, for example, I'm drawing another leaf like this, and in all of these leaves you can only see one side of the leaf, like the upper part of the leaf. But perhaps you want to create some details where you can pick a glimpse of the underside of the leaf, so then you can add a little turn over where the edge of the leaf is folded up a little bit. I can leave it like this, of course, but I think that it doesn't really make sense with this bulgy part here. What I like to do is make this a bit more straight because this is where the leaf is folded. This makes it look a bit more real. This is a turn over on the side of the leaf, but you can also make it on the top of the leaf. Again, I'm drawing some outlines, and then instead of making it at at the center of the, or at the side of the leaf like this, I started over here instead. Now, it looks like the top of the leaf is turned over. You can also use your directional line for taking bearing for your turn over. For example, if you want to make a leaf where at the top is curved or turned over towards you like this, you can do the directional lines, start with that and then it shows you how the leaf is curving towards you. In this example, you need to create a flat space on top here where the fold on the leaf appears to be and then you can add a side here to this one, and then also the right side here, and then, let's see, we add this one. This right side of the leaf here, this is the right side of the top of the leaf and it needs to connect to the right side of the bottom of the leaf as well. Now, it's easy to see how to meet up with the other side of the leaf. Behind this turnover, this side here, this is the left side of the leaf, it will connect with the left side of the top of the leaf as well. You could alter this. Now, it appears as if the top is folding towards you, but you could alter this really easy and make it look like it's turned over away from you by just defining this line and erasing these ones. Now, it looks like it's turning over the other direction. Another fun detail to add to your leaves is to make a twist. This can be a little bit tricky, so it needs some practicing definitely. Start with a curved leaf like this, and then you start with one side of the outline, one side of the leaf and sketch it like this, and then it crosses over to the other side and meets up at the apex of this leaf. Then you go in up to the other side and it's crossing over too, but instead of just crossing, you can just stay over there and then it continues on the other side. Then you can smoothen this part out a little a bit as well. Now, it looks like this is the underside of the leaf showing, and here is the upper side of the leaf showing. Now you can do the opposite, so that this part will be the upper side, then I would start with this side instead, cross over and meet up there. Then you do the other side and you stop and it continues on the other side, and then it comes over there. Then you can smoothen out the lines a little bit if you need to. Now this is the upper part and here is the underside of the leaf showing. You can make a double twist or as many twists as you want to, then you have to create perhaps a little bit longer leaf to make it easier. Then you cross over the centerline twice instead. I'm drawing first one side of the leaf and it's crossing over, there is the first twist, and then it crosses over again, the second twist, and it meets up with the apex, the top of the leaf. Then I come in and do the other side of the leaf, and there it comes in behind, and then it continues over there and it stops and then it continues on the other side. Now it appears to be twisted twice, so here's the upper part of the leaf, and here it's the underside, and here is the upper side again. These are the basic outlines of the leaf and now you can go in and add some details and variation in the edges of the leaves. Perhaps you want to have like a wavy edge or a little bit regular instead, and perhaps you don't want to have this whole line, the vain through the leaf like that but just a little bit, and you go in and add these details that will add the character to each leaf. Or perhaps you want to have like a prickly edge, because perhaps it's a rose leaf or something, and then only some side veins on one side. Then you can also just add some texture. You don't have to have a center vein or nerves like that, you can just add a little bit of textural lines. There are many ways you can add character to the leaves. As your exercise, I want you to draw up a branch like this with some forks and smaller twigs, then dress it up with leaves in various shapes and complexity with angles and edges, twists and turnovers. Then you can vary them with different edges and veins. If you need some help to get started, I have created this branch structure that you can also find in the workbook. You can use it as inspiration to draw from or print it out and draw directly on top of it or trace it. In the workbook, you'll also find some leaf illustrations for inspiration and reference to the variations that you can play around with. But I want to encourage you to come up with your own shapes and details and edges and veins as well. In the next drawing exercise, we're going to draw something that you often see in arts and crafts patterns. Leaves that have lobes in various ways. 15. Drawing Exercise: Lobed Leaves: In this drawing exercise, we're going to practice how to draw a bit more varied leaf shapes that are branched than forked with lobes and tabs like this. This type of leaves are very common in arts and crafts patterns, and will be very useful when you create your own arts and crafts patterns. You can use this type of leaf to depict leaves from several different plans, both for the hero plants but also for smaller secondary plants, or even plants in a background. For example, a variety of wild flowers like thistles and anemones. A very basic lobed leaf is this one with three tabs, like a stylized vine leaf perhaps. Then you can elaborate on this one and add more tabs that can be varied a little bit. You can make them wide or narrow. Then we can make leaves that are almost like branches; longer and stretched out. To these ones, we can add veins and also texture. No matter the complexity, I always start with planning out the overall structure of a leaf with guiding lines or the directional lines, just like in the previous lesson with the basic leaves. But with forked or lobed leaves, I also use guiding lines for where I want the tabs. Let's make a really simple, the basic forked leaf first. Here is my first guiding line, and then I add another guiding line where I want the lobes to be, and then add the outlines. It's the same principle all the time. These guiding lines here may as well be the nerves or the veins of the leaf. With them, I can, right from the start, decide how the leaf is going to curve, and the direction of it. I can make more details and more lobes. Using directional lines like this just makes it so much easier to know where to draw the outlines and the overall shape of the leaf. When you start drafting the outlines, other leaves like this, you follow that guiding line, and just dress it up, and give it body. It's almost like the directional line is the skeleton. Now, I'm giving it flesh, or a body at least, just really makes it easier to give it its shape. Now, you can choose if you want to have a wide leaf like this, or you can make it more narrow. Just make the outlines closer to the guiding lines. Once I have this basic structure in place, I can add more details and more side lobes like this. Let's make a larger one. With a basic structure, the skeleton like that, you add the overall shape, then add some more details if you want some, and you can have more lobes if you feel that there is room for it. You can also create turnovers, and twists, and other variations like I showed you in the previous lessons. Perhaps here I went to have a turnover, that's easy to do. Perhaps here there is another turnover like that. You can make twists as well, but then I would plan that a little bit from the start. You can build up your lobed leaves like this, and you can give them all kinds of shapes. It doesn't have to be this type of shape either. You can give them even another look as well, like this. Then you create other types of lobes. If you create a wood anemone flower, you would create another type of lobed leaves. But then it's good to observe that original flower and see how that looks, and then create the lobes, and the structure according to that. When you've found a shape that you like, then you can add some more details. For example, you can add different types of veins, like this one here. We could give just a really simple vein like that, or you could make it like an outlined vein with a filling or a blotch, remember? Then you can just use the guiding line for this as well. This is a vein that you usually see with acanthus leaves, for example. Speaking of acanthus leaves, so these are variations of how you normally draw an acanthus leaf with lobes like this and different tabs. If you want to learn and practice more on how to draw these types of lobed leaves, you can check out my other course called Drawing the Acanthus. There you'll get lots of more exercises, for example. Then you can also add some texture. You can add these little extra marks here as well to highlight that there might be some raised part of the leaf there perhaps. These textural lines can be done in many different ways, some just a little bit or a lot. You can also draw some extensions to this nerve, which is quite typical for arts and crafts patterns, where you start where the center nerve is, and then create these side nerves coming out from this one. You can play around with different ways to add texture, and detail, and variations to this. As your exercise, I want you to draw up a branched structure, again, like this, or you use the one that you will find in the workbook, and dress it up with different types of lobed leaves, with variations in how thin or thick they are, with wavy, or curved, and twisted, and turned-over details, and perhaps, also crossing over each other. In the next video, we're going to practice how to draw large hero flowers. 16. Drawing Exercise: Large Flowers: In this exercise, we're going to practice how to draw those lush hero flowers with lots of petals and in a couple of variations. The type of flower I'll show you in this exercise, can be drawn with the same base and structure but then varied, for example, scenes straight from above like this or from the side. First, let me show you how you can draw these flowers scenes from straight up above, without any angle or anything and the principle is actually the same how you draw them. You can vary the size of this center a little bit and you can vary the look of the petals, if they are narrow, or wide, or spiky edges and so on. First let's try this one, that could be like a chrysanthemum or something perhaps. The first step I do always is to make the directional lines, so this time it's about marking the size of the flower. These are the outer boundaries of it and then I mark the center, so this center is quite large and so the petals here are quite narrow and they are sticking out from the center, but they are varied a little bit so you can create them a little bit bent and facing different directions, just to create some variation, and here is even a little turnover. Just do these little guiding lines and if you want to, you can then refine them and see if you can create some variation right from the start and perhaps you want to have one that's curved a little bit like that. Then you start fleshing out these little narrow petals, so they are a bit more narrow at the center or towards them, they start at the bottom of the petal and then they become a little bit wider at the top. Just roughly sketch them [inaudible] first and you can adjust them a little bit, perhaps some of them are shorter than it should be that longer. When you are pleased with the shape of your petals, you go in and draw a second layer like this one. Here we have a second layer of petals and again, I advise to start with some guiding lines because it's more fun and it's just easier to make sure that you create some variations and add some body to these petals as well. Always when you draw like this, squint your eyes once in a while and see how everything feels. Then when you have all the petals in place, you can go in and add some of these stamens or center details, play around with some shapes. This is the chrysanthemum with narrow petals seen from up above. Now, if we would draw this from the side as seen a little bit with an angle, we start with an ellipse here instead, and then we can start with some directional lines again for these little petals, just make them really basic at first and then up here, they are coming in like this and then you can alter them with some different directions for the petals once you've settled in with this one. Then you can start giving them some shape, these little petals. This flower is quite fun to draw, and after you've drawn this one a few times, you'll get the hang of it and you can start experimenting. Then we can add another inside layer of petals, so here we can just go in and draw some more. Then we need some outer petals, unless you want to have this more bud like flower but let's add some outer petals. We'll just do some guiding lines again and here we can make a bit of variation, perhaps, here's one that's even turning over like that and here comes another one like this and just see what you can create with some outer layer petals as well. Then go in and give them some body as well, perhaps this one can have a turnover too. Once you start drawing turnovers like that, you're going to want to do it all the time and let's make some details in the center here and I'm just going to make this one a little bit different. I always have to come up with new ways to do things. This was the chrysanthemum, then you can add variations to create other types of flowers like a peony perhaps, or a tulip, or some other type of flower and then you just vary the petals, the way the petals look. Let me show you how you can draw a flower that has a little bit more broader petals like this, and you see here there are some more layers of petals that are turning over like that. Instead of having the petals peeking out, straight out like this so you can see the whole center, here, it's more of a closed flower so let's see how we can create that too. Again, start now with the first guiding circle like this, so here we're going to draw all those turned up over our petals inside of this and then we're going to do some outer petals that are sticking out, outside of the circle. Let's start drawing the first layer of petals and it's actually this one here. You start with one petal somewhere and that's your starting point, and then you can start building on this adding more petals. Here is the first layer of petals and now we can bring another layer on the inside, so you add some layers here in the inside, different shapes and sizes, and now we're going to add another layer outside of this one but we're going to stay inside of this circle more or less, but we're going to add a little bit of another turned over petal, that is crossing over into this first layer that we just created. Let's erase these lines, and some are larger, there, now it's getting really lush. Now the next and the last layer of petals is sticking out so I'm just going to make this really rough just to show you how you add that. Then you can actually add some turnovers on these guys as well, just to create some variation, so like I did here. Here you have a little bit of turnover there and here. When you fill in these lines here, you can refine your petals a little bit and then you can also add these textural lines, these ones here, that are giving the flowers some more depth and some shade, and then you can finish off with some center details. You build up the flower petal by petal from the inside and then inwards a little bit and then expanding with some outer petals too. This type of flower, you can also alter a little bit, vary by making prickly or pointy petals instead. Here's another version of drawing a flower from the side, which is this one, so this one is quite easy, you can also make an initial outline for where you want the flower to be, and then you start at the bottom with a first petal, and then you build on that, and also trying to make some variation in the petals, so that they are going in different directions, perhaps a little bit curved like that, so you just build on it like this. The closer to the top you get, the narrower the petals become and then you can also add some textural lines and you can also add some variations here, like, if you have some petals sticking out at the bottom, here are some guiding lines and here I want to have something that's more of a turned over, a petal with a little bit of turnover and perhaps the stem. But this is straight from the side and this is from a little bit of an angle also bit from the side and then we have some straight from up above. Now for your third exercise, I want you to experiment with these flowers, so you draw a couple of them from straight up, from above like this and some with an angle from the side and then you use that basic structure, where you start with the center and then build the petals out from that and vary the petals with some different curved petals, prickly petals, narrow, and shorter and just play around with it and see what you can come up with. Next, we're going to draw some more simple and smaller flowers that can make great contrasts to these large, lush ones. 17. Drawing Exercise: Small Flowers: In this lesson, we're going to draw a couple of small flowers that can be used as complimentary flowers and also for a background layer. These flowers are quite simple and basic, but very important as they make up the contrasting shapes and motif elements to those larger and more complex hero flowers, for example. Contrast and variation is everything in good design and especially in arts and crafts patterns. But even though these flowers may seem basic, they can be varied in many different ways too. By adding specific details, we can create them as simplified versions of specific plants like forget-me-nots and daisies and primrose and pimpernel for example. These small flowers are really simple to draw, still I use guiding lines to make them as even a neat as possible, which is quite important when you create stylized motifs. They're not supposed to look sketchy at all. They're quite symmetric, but still with a hand-drawn look. For these small, tiny ones that could be forget-me-nots perhaps. I always start out with a circle for deciding on the size of the flower. Then I draw that little center I know the size of that as well. For these four petaled flowers, I draw a cross and start shaping out the little petals. Really simple. But the key here as I said to make them symmetrical but not perfect, they need to look hand-drawn still, and also so that they are evenly distributed more or less and also that they are the same length of the petals all over. That's why I use these guiding lines.Then you can create more petals. This one had four petals, but then I can make five petals. I go about it the same. Let's make sure that they become quite even. This one ax you can see has these two side petals are sort of tucked in behind the other one. This actually reminds a little bit of a violet I think. This one is a bit larger, so I'm making a larger circle. Again just to cross through now I create the outer petals, the two here first and then I come in and start them from behind the other ones. Here is another five petaled flower where I created the petals of that larger or taller, longer. Here we can do the same. The outer boundaries first and some guiding lines and then add some of these extra little leaves sticking out like that. For this one you can see it's just where I have altered the center. Instead of making these little dots, I made a larger center actually. The petals can be a bit shorter perhaps. Create this criss- cross center. Then here is another funny little fella where you have a really large center. I don't know what type of flower this is, sort of a mini sunflower. Then you create perhaps this time I'll create six petals and I divide it like that and just really short petals this time. Also a way to vary the flowers. This little guy here, also very decorative. Starting with the center and also I'm marking where the petals are to be, making them distributed as symmetrical as possible and even. Then I just make this little heart-shaped petals instead. When I outline these, I can choose to have these outer outlines go all the way into the center or just make them stop here. This is also a way you can vary them. You can add these little shading marks at the center. Then a variation for this one is this, which I would say is a daisy flower. I have the center and then I just make some guiding lines for my petals. Shape every petal, but make them with this type of outer edge at the top of each petal. They can be a little bit curved and bent each petal to make some variation. Then we have these little star ones. They are really really simplified. Here I just create this cross, create a center. I could make the outline as well just to make sure that I have them quite even and just add these four petals like that. Then when I go in fill them in with a fine liner. I can refine the edge and then I can also add some details on the petals like that. Then this one is so pretty as well. A little bit larger, larger center that has this grid center very stylish very stylized. Then you can add some petals like that. This is a little bit of a sunflower. The characteristic here besides the criss-cross center are these textural lines here. So go ahead and create some small flowers just like these. To help you and guide you, you make these guiding lines for the petals where you can decide how many petals you want. You can have four or five, you can even have six petals or you can have more. You can add some extra details like these leaves or, you can make different centers. You can make them small or medium or quite large. You can make them with dots or criss-cross, or what can you come up with when it comes to adding variation and coming up with some new decorative details here. For this exercise, I want you to draw up another branch or use one of the branch structures from the workbook and add these little flowers here and there. Explore and practice how you can create variations and add some different details in the petals and also how you can distribute them in an even layout in these branches. If you want to, you can add some small leaves as well. If you want to practice drawing more leaves and flowers examples, you'll find some bonus exercises at the very end of this course. Next, I'm going to show you the process that I'm using for designing this type of patterns. Let's meet up in the next video. 18. Planning Your Pattern Intention: Okay. It's time to get creative. In this lesson, we're going to plan our patterns and having a nice and clear plan for your pattern. All the other steps are going to be easier, and also you'll be more intentional and focused throughout the whole design process. In the projects and resources section of this class, you'll find a workbook that I have created or you can write down all the ideas you come up with and the decisions you'll make. So download the PDF, print it out if you want to, and let's get started. First, let's decide on what type of surface or product you will design for. This will decide many of the variables that you have to consider for creating your pattern, like the size and format of your pattern repeat and eventually the print file. Knowing what type of product or surface you will design for, also tells you how many colors you can use and the amount of details, and also what types of motifs, layouts, and compositions that will work better. An example to illustrate this is the difference between designing for a wallpaper and designing for fabric used for clothes, for example. If you want your pattern to be for a wallpaper, it can be directional, that it is to be viewed from a specific direction. If you're designing for fabric though, for quilting or for fashion, you may want to have a non-directional pattern that can be viewed from any angle because that will make it more useful and not create as much spill in the prediction. You may also want to give scale some thought. Wallpapers can have larger motifs than stationary and packaging, for example. If you want to make your pattern available for licensing or purchasing, for example, to a wallpaper company, you have to make sure that it can be used for different printing techniques that are used for wallpaper. If it's printed digitally, there are no limits in number of colors and you can print gradients and very small details, and you don't have to consider the repeat size and format as much. But if it's to be printed in larger volumes, you have to use the traditional printing techniques to be cost-efficient. Techniques like surface print or gravure print. Then your pattern can only have up to six colors in addition to the background color, and the repeat size is 53 times 53 centimeters or anything that can be divided with that. Also, give the context some thought. This was integral for the arts and crafts designers and their patterns and art. If you want to design for a wallpaper, what rules will it be suitable for? A wallpaper for a kitchen may need a different expression than one for a bedroom or a children's room. This can affect your choices for theme, motif elements, scale, and color schemes. Just think about it, fabric for bedding has a very different context than fabric for a coat. Okay, time to take some action. So give some thought to what type of product and surface you're going to design for and write down your plans for your pattern in the workbook. When you have an intention for your pattern, it's time to start brainstorming around themes. 19. Planning Your Pattern Themes: A theme doesn't have to be complex at all. It's just an idea that can guide you when deciding on what type of motifs to include in your pattern. It can be as simple as Spring, or Easter, or the woods, or garden flowers, or it can tell a little story. Take Strawberry Thief, by William Morris for example. This pattern was inspired by the birds in his garden that kept stealing his strawberries. A theme can also be an ode to someone you know, or want to remember, like their favorite flowers or a specific tree. Or things that you associate with a situation or a specific memory. Having a theme will help you in the next steps of the process. For example, where to look for inspiration and source materials. The only thing to be careful about though when it comes to themes are Seasonal themes. If you're designing for a wallpaper or something else that you don't change frequently, you may not want to have a Halloween or Christmas theme. Time to take some action again. So now, take a few minutes or what you need, and brainstorm around some themes for your pattern. Try to come up with at least five themes and jot them down in the workbook. Now it's time to brainstorm some ideas for what motifs to include in each of these themes. 20. Planning Your Pattern Motifs: In this lesson, we're going to brainstorm around some objects and element; as in different plants, and trees, and flowers, and perhaps animals that will make up the pattern motifs, and build and support the themes that you've come up with. Tip here is to not stop at the obvious motif ideas that pop up right away. Give it some more thought, because it's not always the first idea that will be the best. Actually, the first ideas are often the cliches. If you dig a little deeper, you will find something novel and perhaps even better. Sometimes, we have to kill our darlings and step out of our current references and expand in order to create a masterpiece. When you have jotted down some motif ideas for each theme, I bet there will be one that speaks to you more than the others, so circle that favorite, the one that you decide on, and save the other ones for later patterns, perhaps. Next, we're going to plan around the pattern composition. 21. Planning Your Pattern Composition: In this lesson, we're going to plan what type of composition our patterns will have. But first decide on what type of arts and crafts pattern category you're going to create. Trailing, serpentine, scrolled or paired. But for this first part of the course, we're going to focus on the trailing category. When it comes to your pattern composition, do you want to have a dense pattern with little space between the motifs and perhaps with fillers. Or do you want to have a spares composition? Do you want to have one or two layers? You want to have just one or two types of plants or perhaps many, or throw in an animal, for example, a bird here and there? After you have decided on your pattern composition, take a second look at your motifs. Will they work for the composition you want? Are there enough motif elements, or do you need some more or less? A tip here is to use at least two different types of plants that creates variation and contrast. For example, two types of leaves, one larger, and one smaller, or one with oblong pointed shapes, and one with more rounded shapes, or flowers. One larger flower with lots of details, and one smaller, more simple. You can of course have more than two plants and motif types, but you should probably not go over four or five. If you're creating a pattern with two layers, a good rule of thumb is to have a larger more complex motif element in the front layer, and smaller, and simpler in the background layer. Next, it's time to decide on what coloring technique you'll use. You want to color it digitally in your computer, or on your iPad perhaps, or paint it with gouache. In this class, we're going to color our motifs and patterns digitally. You can skip this step as well this time, and we will focus on analog coloring in a coming class. The next step is about gathering inspiration and source materials for when we're going to start drawing our motifs for example. I'm going to talk a bit about that in the next lesson. 22. Gather Inspiration: This step in the planning process is about gathering inspiration for the expression you want for your arts and crafts pattern. It's also about finding source materials to use for drawing our stylized pattern motifs. You can also use these images for pulling colors to your color palette later. Here are some examples of what you can do for finding and gathering inspiration and source materials. For example, go outside and take pictures of plants, leaves and flowers. If you want to use plants that don't grow where you live, you can go and visit a flower shop or a botanical garden, for example. You can, of course, also search for a reference images online using Google and Pinterest or look through magazines and books. An advice is that if it's not your own pictures, gather a diversity of images to reference to be sure that you don't trace or copy someone else's work. Be sure to create your own version from multiple sources of images. If you want to, create an inspiration board, you can, for example, pull your images into an Illustrator document so you can see them all side-by-side for an overview and easy access to come back to. This inspiration board can also be used as a working document where you later create your color palette by pulling colors from your photos and images. This document and inspiration board, is also very handy and smooth to reference when we start drawing the motifs for our patterns. This is what I want you to do now. Gather images of things that represent an expression that you want for your pattern. Also, find plans to photograph and collect images of objects or plants depicting the motifs you want to include. Lastly, find things to photograph or images that include colors that you like and want to explore for your pattern color scheme later. In the next lesson, we're going to explore our pattern motifs a little bit so that we have something to choose from when we start drawing the real thing. 23. Exploring Your Motifs: You can of course, start drawing the complete design right off the [inaudible] but I really recommend you spend some time to practice drawing, the motifs that you are going to use in your pattern first and explore some different ways to depict them. This is what you can do. Sketch up three to five versions of each motif, and try out different angles and turnovers, and details of the leaves and the paddles and center on the flowers and so on. For this, you can use the drawing exercises from before to guide you. Then refine each sketch a couple of times and try out new ways to draw each one. Think about how you can simplify some parts and how to exaggerate others then choose the versions that you think work the best and set the other ones aside you can use them later perhaps or another time. After you've found the best versions for your motifs, it's going to be easier to create and draw the composed repeat design. Next we are going to create a pattern structure and the backbone for our patterns. 24. Drafting The Repeat Structure: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're going to draft the framework and structure of our patterns using the Post-It trick that I have learned from my fellow Swedish designer, [inaudible]. Here's a trailing arts and crafts pattern that I've made and as you can see, it has two layers. One foreground layer with detailed larger flowers, leaves, some branches or stems in this case. Then there is a background layer with small simplified curly tweaks and tiny tulipish flowers. Now I'll show you how I built this pattern. The first step is to draft the overall repeat structure and layout of the motifs of the foreground layer. This step is important to get an overview of the distribution of the motifs and the overall flow of the pattern. This is where we'll use the post-it notes. I'm going to use my light box here. I think it's going to be easier for you to see what I'm doing when I'm beginning to draw on my post-it notes. I like to place my notes on top of an ordinary piece of printing paper. This is just an ordinary A4 printing paper. You'll need a stack of Post-it notes, just ordinary ones, and a pencil and, definitely an eraser. You'll need a ruler and then you will need some black fine liner. If you don't have a light box like this, you don't actually need one for this step because the Post-It notes are fairly see-through, so you'll manage without one. We're going to create a straight repeat. Since we're you seeing square post-it notes, their repeat is going to be squared as well, which is actually pretty good for designing for example, wallpaper and fabric, where you often need to have a square repeat box. But you can also grab two notes at once like this. Then cut them in half so that you will have four tall rectangular notes instead. Then you use these, then your repeat will be tall rectangular. This helps you create a different type of impression for your repeat or for your motif composition. But then you can create a square repeat using these by combining two of them next to each other. You'll get a square repeat but with a double design. Let's just get started here. I'll grab my first note and place it somewhere like this. I really recommend now when you begin with your first pattern like this, to go really simple, not overdo it or create too many or too complex or too small motifs. So go pretty big the first time definitely. That's what I did with my tulip pattern as well. I'm going to show you how to do this to make it as simple as possible for the first time. Then you can evolve and build and create more and more complex and detailed motifs and combined more motifs and perhaps use more plant types in the foreground and so on. For this one, I'm just going to create this foreground with the tulips. You can start with distributing and placing your main motifs. For me, that would be placing the tulips more or less. Let's see. I'm just going to make this really stereotype tulip shape here. In this step, you're not going to draw any details or anything. This is just drafting the overall layout. Then I'm going to have like a stem coming down like that and perhaps one over here. Try to refine them a little bit so that it's going to be easier to see through the paper. Now I'm going to grab my second post-it note. Now I'm going to trace this one and create the exact same lines. You're going to change this many times before you are done, I promise. There so now we have the first overall structure. Now let's continue with placing second flower. I'm going to have one, that's connecting these two over here. Then I might place some of the leaves here as well. I'm going to have one that's stretching all the way over here and one over there. Let's see. I think this one needs to go up a little bit like that because then I wanted another one like this. Now I'm just trying to place out some different motifs. I'm going to do this spiky or lobed tulips. These are just really rough sketches. They are going to be refined many times before we're done here. Something like that. Now I need to trace all of this that I've now drawn so that it is repeated on every note the same way. I'm going to start with this one. [MUSIC] Here I can see that these ones are clashing. That's something I need to consider and perhaps change after this. Here, this one I need to get on this note as well. Now on to the next one, trace everything on each note. Now I have an overall sketch, and here now I can see if I need to make some adjustments. Like over here is big quite a bit empty space so perhaps I want to move this one up a little bit. But let's just go for this now an example. One square is representing the repeat, which can be duplicated and repeated up, down into the sides to create the full pattern. In the next step we're going to transfer this structure that we've now created to a larger piece of paper where we can start drawing the motifs and the full repeat thoroughly and with all the details. To do that transfer smoothly, we need to find a section of this overall structure where even motifs are as clustered together as possible and where we can collect as many of the motifs and elements inside of a square and where as little as possible of the motifs are hanging off of the square edges. If they do, we have to find places where we can easily split the motifs up, for example, in the junction between stems and leaves. Now I like to use a fine liner and come in and fill in the lines. Some of these motifs or a set of the motifs where I can see more clearly now where I can draw this optimal new repeat square. [MUSIC] Then I can use the posted stack and try to find that square where I have the least of the motifs hanging off, and there I draw a new square or the repeat boundaries. Now I need to grab my ruler and make a grid that's going to make it easier to transfer onto a larger piece of paper. Split this one into 16 equal squares. Now I have my initial pattern's structure ready. This is just a draft. I can definitely see that as I do my next version of this, which you will see in the next lesson, I will probably do some adjustments and this flower will be moved up a little bit just to make sure that I distribute the motifs more evenly and creates a better harmony and flow in the pattern. As I go along through all of these steps until I have my final repeat, I will do a lot of changes and redrawing and reworking. Be prepared for that. This was the posted technique using a square tile like this. Let's go to the next step where we're going to bring this up another level with more detail and up in scale. [MUSIC] 25. Drawing The Foreground Layer: At last we have come to the part where we actually designed our patterns and draw up the repeat. We're going to do this in a traditional analog way, which I think is very appropriate as we are designing arts and crafts patterns. Now, I have to warn you a little bit. This step can be a little bit tricky the first times, but my advice is to not get too hung up on making it to perfect as we have lots of opportunity to fix and edit mistakes in Illustrator and later on. I will also encourage you to create several tries, and iterations, and edits, and versions of your pattern design. First, we have to prepare the paper that we're going to draw our repeat on. The larger you can draw the pattern repeat design, the better so that you can fit enough details into your design. But since we're going to scan in the designs that we now we'll withdraw, it has to be able to fit into your scanner. I have a large A3 scanner, so I can easily use an A3 paper and be able to scan that as a whole. But if you have a smaller scanner, a trick is to take two smaller papers, for example, two A4 or two letter sized and tape them together like this. Now, we're going to cut this into a square to match our posted pattern structure draft. The cut paper should be this size so that when placed on an A3 sized paper, for example, there is some margin around on all sides. Measure up a square, like this. If you're using the tape together papers, a tip is to center the taped edges and you'll understand why in just a bit. You can use scissors or roller cutter like this to make really straight and even edges. When you have your squared paper, draw up the same grid of 16 squares as you did on the postage draft. Now, using the postage as reference, start to transfer the sketch lines from that to the paper, square by square until we have the whole structure sketch in the larger scale onto your paper. Use really light and easy to erase sketching lines at first. Then when you have the whole structure in place, you go in and draw more refined and detailed outlines of your branches, and leaves, and flowers, and other motifs that you have in your pattern plan. Now you can reference those motif explorations that we did so that you know exactly how to draw in your motifs. Squint your eyes now and then, and take an overall look at the motifs. Are they nicely distributed or are some of them too close to each other? Are there uneven, empty spaces? Everything that draws the attention too much, you can now edit and redraw until you find that nice flow. Also, don't draw the outlines all the way out to the edges, save an inch or so. When you're pleased, cut the paper in four equally sized squares, and if you have a tape together paper and have centered the edges, you can now easily just cut the tape to separate them. Then switch the squares around like this so that they end up in the opposite corners and tape them together again. Now draw in the missing motif pieces in these empty spaces in the center now and connecting the outlines and completing all though motifs. Again, squint your eyes and take a look at the overall flow of the repeat, and edit, and move, and redraw things that you're not happy with. Now it's time to refine and fill in these contours with a fine liner or thin brush pin. First, separate the tape together, squares again, and arrange them into the original square and tape together again. Now grab a new piece of large paper and place this on top of your square pencil drawing. If you have a light box like me, it really comes in handy in this step. But you can also use a window here or a tracing paper. Now we're going to place this paper as strategic as we can. In my case, I've managed to create motifs where there is just small parts of the motifs that are missing on some signs, like these leaves here and here, and then also the stem part over here and here. When we now trace these lines, we want to make as whole and complete motifs as possible. If I have some margin, I can actually extend and draw these parts into complete motifs. This is going to be a lot easier in the editing process. Ideally, I would place my tracing paper like this. Now I have margin to extend the branch here from here and this leaf to overhear, and then the same with this part of the leaf over here as well. But sometimes the paper isn't big enough to do that, and the motif is extending far beyond to be able to draw the full motif at once. Now I'm going to pretend that this is the case for me as well, so I can show you how to handle that later. I'll just center my paper like this. Now this part of the leaf won't fit over here. I will have to fit these two pieces together later instead to make a full and closed shape. Time to start inking. But first, mark your corners like this, and I'll show you why in just a little while. For this, I'm choosing my favorite, its a brush pen with a very thin brush tip. It's from pigma. This one creates a more dynamic and a little bit of a thicker line. One thing to consider right now from the start is, if you want to have some of your motif in different outlined colors, for example, if I want to have these flower outlines, then the dark red, and then the stems, and perhaps the leaves in another outline color. Then I have to make sure that these contours don't touch, otherwise we're going to have to divide them layer in Illustrator. But another trick is to trace them on different pieces of paper. On this paper, for example I'll trace the stems and the leaves perhaps, and some other details may be, and then I'll use another paper to trace my flowers, so I'll just get started. Now I can also tell that, I would like to have the stems and my vein outlines in the same color, but not necessarily the outline of the leaves in the same color. So I might trace those on different paper. You have to plan a little bit in advance in order to make your workflow as smooth as possible. Here I have inked all the contours for the stems and the outlines of the veins. What I still need is this part here, I need to have down here a swell. In order to connect that, I mean, I could ink this over here and then I would have to connect them later on when I have digitalized everything. But a smarter way to do this is to actually just move this paper a line with the corners here and now go in and continue drawing like this so that I will create complete outlines right away now. I can now just grab another piece of paper, place it on top here, and now I'm going to draw corners on this one as well. Now, I'm going to go in and ink the outlines of the leaves so that I will have them separate. I'm going to go ahead and ink these ones as well, and then I'm going to show you how I will extend this leaf. What I have left here now is to make sure that this leaf will be whole. Let's see. This part over here, I can extend in this area instead of drawing the bits over there. To do that, I'll move it up here instead, align it with the corners, and so here I can continue this one over here and create the complete leaf motif like this. I have this little tip of the leaf over here, that is the tip of the leaf there as well. But since it will reach outside of the boundaries of my paper, I'm not going to do that. So what I'll do instead is just to fill in the tip of the leaf where it is in its position, and then I'll show you how we can connect them afterwards. I have the little leaves left and also the flowers. Let's see on what paper that would be good to use. I think the leaf paper would be perfect. Now, I want to have some texture lines or shading lines on the flower petals and also on the leaves a little bit. I think actually that the lines on the leaves are going to be a part of the vein outlines. But for the floral textural lines, I'm going to draw them here. A little bit of extra details like this is what sometimes makes the big difference in the motif. Now I'm going to pencil in first my nerve lines here on the leafs just to make sure that I don't over do it or something. I think I've found it nice way to go for these nerves. Now I'm just going to fill them in as well. Now I have filled in everything that I need here. I have my branches or the stems, in this case, with the veins, and the nerves, and also some shading lines for the flowers. Then here I have the contours of the flowers and the leafs. My front layer is now ready to be scanned. So I'll set this aside, and the next lesson we will take on the background layer. 26. Drawing The Background Layer: For the background layer, we go about it the same way as with the foreground layer. Start by preparing a large square paper like before. Now you can draw the background layer by covering the whole space. Then you don't have to consider the foreground layer motifs at all. Or you can draw in motifs only in the empty spaces in between the foreground layer motifs. You can even draw motifs where some of the background motifs intertwine with a foreground branches coming in behind or in front, depending on what type of plants you've chosen, of course. If you choose that type of background, you need to use the foreground drawings to show you where to draw. For my pattern, I will make both these types of background layers to show you how to do them. I'll make one with, very small and simple motifs of twigs and flowers that will cover the whole paper. A second one where I draw in branches and leaves and small flowers that will intertwine with a foreground layer motifs. I'll start with a simple all over version. Again, leave the edges, because when you've covered the paper with your motifs, you cut it in four pieces just like before, switch them around and taped together and drawing motifs in the empty sections and the center, completing and connecting the motifs. For my other background design, I made my light box again, and now I'm using my foreground drawings and placing my background paper on top, aligning with the corners. Now I can see where to draw to match it with a foreground motifs. I'll make some of the background branches crossover the steps over here. Then I'll do the same process with this one as the other one. Cutting in four switching around, filling in the empty centers to complete the motifs. When you have your finished background pencil drawing, grab a new large piece of paper and trace it with a fine liner. Again, make the motifs cross over the edges of the square in order to make them complete shapes if possible. Next we're going to bring the foreground and the background layers, inked drawings into Illustrator and digitize them. 27. Digitalize & Vectorize Your Design: In this lesson, we're going to bring our repeat design into Illustrator and turn it into a digitalized version. The first thing we're going to do is to scan our inked repeat drawings. I have an A3 scanner, so I can scan the whole drawing as is in one piece. But if you have a smaller scanner, you can cut your drawing in two pieces and scan separately. If you don't have a scanner, you can try to take a picture of your drawings with a camera or your mobile camera, just make sure it has really good lighting and no shadows, and also not to skew the image. Here I have placed one of my foreground layer drawings on my scanner flatbed. As you can see, my interface in Swedish, but I'll translate as we go. You can do some settings here to optimize the scan. First, it'll select "Black & White" and "300 DPI" to get a good resolution and that the scan registers enough data in your drawing. Then in the box called scan to you choose or create a folder where you want to save your scan. I'll create a new one called trailing flowers. Then here we name our scan and I'll call mine trailing scan, for the format JPEG is fine. Then here at image correction, you click on the arrows and select "Manual". Here you can play around with the brightness and contrast handles to make as crisp and clear image as possible. For this one, I'll take the brightness down all the way and the contrast up, which will make the lines very defined and a bit thicker, and the background completely white. This going to make it easier for Illustrator to register the lines properly when we vectorize them using the trace tool later. Now I draw a marquee around my illustrations and hit "Scan". Then I'll do the same with all my ink drawings for the foreground and the background layers. The next step is to turn these scanned illustrations into vectors in Illustrator. For this, I'm creating a new document. I'll name it trailing flower. I'm choosing an A3 size here and starting out with millimeters, CMYK is fine and 300 DPI and click "Create". Now I'm going to import my scanned illustrations into this document. I'll find my scans in the folder, select them, and pull them into my Illustrator document like this, and place them so I can see them all. Now, I'm going to vectorize them using the image trace tool, which is this one that I have saved over here in my right tools panels. But you can also find it under "Window" and "Image Trace". I'll do this one first, and I'll select the "Image Trace" tool and here we need to do some settings too. Under "Mode", choose "Black and White". Now we're going to play around with some of these values here. But first click "Ignore White" down here, and also preview. Then threshold here is the value of how much data is registered from your scanned image. Less makes Illustrator register less data, which results in thinner lines and it can also cause gaps in your outlines. If the pen line is a bit thin, for example, more will register more naturally and make your lines thicker. I'll start out with the default at 128 and see how that will look. In paths high, it will keep the look of your lines more close to the original with more details, but also make the document much more heavy. Low would simplify the lines with less data. Try to keep it as a lowest possible, but still keeping the look that you want. In corners, more will give the lines sharper edges and corners, and less will make them softer. I'll play around with these until I find the levels that I like. I think this here looks good. Since I'm going to trace several illustrations, I'm going to save these settings as accustomed preset that I can use again so that I don't have to play around with these values again. I'll come up here to "Manage Presets" and click "Save as New Preset". I'll name mine inked outlines, and click "Okay". Now I can access this in the presets and using this makes my process a bit smoother and faster. Also make sure that my illustrations will have a similar look. Then I need to go up to "Object" and "Expand", to expand and finalize my new vectorized outlines. Then I'll go ahead and do the same to all the other ones. Here I have all my foreground and background illustrations vectorized and expanded. They are still grouped and I'll keep it that way for now. Now we're going to do some editing to prepare our motifs for coloring. 28. Editing Your Motifs: Welcome back. In this lesson, we will edit and prepare our motifs to make them ready for coloring. First, we need to fix mistakes and polish our outlines a little bit. After expanding your motifs will be grouped and somehow it's grouped twice. I'm pressing Shift Command G twice to ungroup my motifs. I'll start by removing bits and pieces that I don't need. What I'm going to start with is to fix any mistake, and I can see that I have some like where I have slipped with the fine liner a little bit. Over here, for example, so I'm using my Eraser tool and just going in here and removing some of the black outlines. Then I've used the Smooth tool to smooth out some of the lines here. Then if I need to add some more, I'll just use my Blob Brush tool to fix this junction here, for example. Now I'm going to go ahead and polish up and fix mistakes for all of these illustrations. My next step now is to put these ones together. Now I'm just going to align them together like this. I'm going to color this one red now, so it's going to be easier for me to see the different elements here. Now I can go in and I'll Select just this black here and see if I can move that a little bit. But, even though I have different outline elements like unseparated lines, if I make them crossover, I will also make a closed shape if I select them together. But over here, it won't do that. I'm going to go in and fix that right away. The best way to do this is probably to use the Blog Brush tool and go in and draw a new line. Then I'll erase this one. Now if you have cut off motifs because when you drew them they didn't fit on the same paper, like from my leaf tip here, now is the time to merge them together. I'm double-clicking on the black outlines to get into isolation mode, and then I'll move this one over here, and then I'll select both and go to Pathfinder and merge them together like this. Then I can go in with the Eraser tool. Now I have a closed shape there as well. I'll group these ones together now. This one works as it is, but this one I need to do some work with. This is quite complicated actually. First, we're going to move my other motif groups away a little bit, so I can have some more space for this one. Now I'm going to match up these edges here and also these two here to make sure that I can repeat this whole section to the sides and up and down without these motifs interfering with each other. I'll start by copying this one here, I can see where to match it because I have actually drawn some doubles here. I'll press Shift as I move it to keep it straight, vertically aligned and then Option to make a copy. I'm going to give this one a red color, so with that I can distinguish the different elements easier. Then the same for this one, and here I also have some doubles, so I'll just align it and press Option to make a copy, and I'll make it red as well. I think I'm going to bring this original to the front. Now I'm going to edit this black original version and with the help of these copies to just make sure that they align and don't overlap. From zooming in here, and I can see right away that there is some clashing going on here. I think I'm going to erase this one. This little curve here is going to be down below. This piece is actually a bit redundant, so I'll just remove that. This one though, I want to move to the other side. Because I also wanted to add a little bit of a stem here. All my little flowers have a little stem like that. That we'll have to do, and I'll go back here, I'll zoom in again. Here I can see that I have another double. I think I'm just going to keep the one below. These two I need to merge somehow. I think the easiest way here is to grab this one, and then I'll move it below here. Now let's see if we can merge these two together. What I'll do here is to just erase a part of this one. Then by selecting both of them, and then using the Blob Brush tool, I can merge them together and at the same time fixing the line a little bit. That one's taken care of. I think I'm going to move all of this up again. I'm having an empty space here that I need to do something about. Then I'll go over to this part. I'm going to test this out again to see what it looks like. I'll just make another copy here on this new edited version. I can see that I made some mistake over here so I'll double-click and then I'll just erase a bit of this one, also this one is too way too close, so I'll redo this. Otherwise, I think it looks okay. I'll remove this extra copy and then I'll check the left side as well, and I'll color it yellow just to see what happened here. Up in this corner here I think it looks a little bit empty. I'm going to draw some extra twigs to fill that out. We'll see if that works in then the end. This background layer is also done. The next step we can do is to simplify these to bring down the number of anchor points. I'll zoom in quite close so I can see the lines, then I'll select this group, and I'm going to press Command H to hide my edges. Then I'll go to Object > Path and Simplify, and this Settings window comes up. The default is 75 percent. It's simplified all these lines and made them look a bit different now. If I bring this up a little bit to 95 percent, it's going to keep more of that original look, and I think that this works pretty well actually. Here I actually decreased my number of anchor points to half, which is really great. I'll click "Okay" and keep that. Now I'll go ahead and do the same with the other motifs as well. I've mentioned that we need to have closed shapes a few times now. The reason is so that we can use the Paint Bucket and the Shape Builder tools when we color our motifs later. We've taken care of some cutoff motifs already, but I still have one place that I need to fix, which is this stem over here. This is not closed yet. The end of this stem here is going to be on top of this flower here. The top of the flower here is actually going to help me enclose the stem shape. I'll start with making a square the same size as the square paper that I drew my repeat to sign on. In my case, it was 26 centimeters, which is 260 millimeters. I'll give it a really light gray background here. Then I'm going to send it to the back. When I create my digital repeat, I like to work in pixels. Now that we have our repeat square measured up in true scale in millimeters, we're going to change our Document Setup up here and change it to pixels instead. Then select the square and check the measures up here. Now let's round them off to even pixels, and memorize the numbers. For me it's 737 and then place your front layer motif on the square, and with it selected, right-click and choose Transform and Move. Now we're going to copy this one below this original one. Zero pixels horizontally, then 737 pixels vertically, and then press Copy. Here now I can see how they actually overlap a little bit. I'm going to copy this one to all the other sides as well. I need to move these guys over here, and then I'll copy this one to the left. Here is the first glimpse of our foreground patterns. The first thing that I will do now is to fix the stem here. Another thing that we can do now is to see if there are some motifs that are not evenly distributed or it doesn't look great, but I think mine look pretty good. This is my original motif and this is the one that I'm going to repeat later on. Now I'll zoom in and I'm actually going to lock my background square. Now I'm going to zoom in here and I'll Ungroup my original motif, and then I'll also Ungroup this one. Now I can only select the red outlines here, and also the black top of the flower. Now I have these parts overlapping and I'm going to use this Shape Builder tool over here to cut these off. I'm going to click here on the red stem only, and then over there. Then I'm pressing V for my Black Arrow tool, click somewhere else to Deselect. Now I can Select my red outlines again and double-click to get into isolation mode. Now I can just erase these little bits. Now I have this really clean, cut pixel exact where the top motif and the bottom motif touches. That was actually that. I don't need this now, and not this now. I need to still have this flower here to keep this shape closed. Double-click to get into isolation mode, and then I'll delete all of these. I'll group this just in case. Now the foreground and the background motifs are ready for coloring. But first we need to go and take a look at how the arts and crafts designers worked with color, and what will make up an arts and crafts inspired color scheme. I'll see you in the next lesson for that. 29. Characteristics: Color Schemes: [MUSIC] William Morris and the Arts and Crafts designers were brilliant at creating beautiful and harmonious color schemes. In this lesson, we're going to take a closer look at this important characteristic. First of all, let's answer the question of how many colors to use. Some of the Arts and Crafts patterns had only one color in two or three tones, so called monochromatic patterns, but most of the designs had multiple colors. Now I'm going to show you something really cool. This is a design drawing for the pattern design Wreath by William Morris. On this paper, he has explored and documented the color scheme for this design, with notes to the left of the drawing where he has written down the colors used and the different motif elements. Let's take a look at what he's done here. This is what the notes say. He begins with something he calls the first acanthus, stating the colors used for it. Yellow green, which is given the number 1, then shade with color number 2, then its outline of vein as number 3, and then something he calls the blotch of vein as number 4, which is the filling of the vein. I love that term "blotch," so let's use that too. Then we have a second acanthus, with a color he calls blue green, color number 5, then shade is color number 6, the outline of the vein is color number 3 again, so the same color as the vein outlines in the first acanthus. Then the blotch of the vein is color number 5, that blue green he used before. Then he notes the small leaves and stems, where the blotch color is number 7, and the veins are color number 3, so same again as on the acanthus leaves. The background and the flower outlines are both given the same color, number 8. Then he continues with the flowers, where we have the white flower and the blotch white with color number 17. So here's a jump in numbers. We can guess that he addressed this color in a later step, perhaps. The dark gray in the white flower, which are the lines on the petals, is given number 9, and the light shading gray is number 10. The pink flowers have three shades of pink, number 11, 12, and 13. The blue flowers also have three shades of blue, number 14, 15, and 16. Then there is something he called the bosses of the flowers, which I believe is the centers of the flowers. Here the bosses of the pink flowers have a white background, which is given number 17, same as the blotch of the white flowers. The blue flower center background is a green number 9, so same as in the first acanthus leaf. Then there is something he calls the print of bosses, which are those little squares of the center, and they are given the color number 18. So altogether, this design has 18 colors, including the background. This design also shows a very common characteristic in Arts and Crafts patterns when it comes to coloring, which is that the outlines often are the same as the background. That way they merge together nicely and gives the design a sophisticated look, where it looks like the motifs don't even have an outline really. With a different colored outline, the design will have a more distinct, and perhaps sketchy, but also a bit more messy expression. This design has quite many different colors, 18. Is this typical for Arts and Crafts patterns, I wonder? Let's take a closer look at some of the most iconic patterns and see how many colors they have. First let's start with the pattern Acanthus by William Morris. I've tried to pull the different colors from this, but there is a risk that I haven't managed to identify all of them because it depends on the quality of the image a little bit. In this one, I found at least 12 colors, but it could possibly be more. This is Strawberry Thief, also by William Morris. Compared to Acanthus, this one has more vivid colors, and it appears to have more colors, I think. But in this one, I could only find 10 colors. This pattern by John Henry Dearle called Golden Lily also appears to have many colors, but I only found nine. Same goes for Leicester also by Dearle and Blackthorn and Pimpernel by William Morris, which seems like a very dynamic pattern. I could only identify eight colors. Now that is a great color scheme, I would say. The same goes with Bird and Pomegranate. This one called Seaweed by Dearle has seven colors from what I could find. Willow, which depicts only one plant, has six colors, including the background. What about Fruit? This one must have many different colors. It has at least 11 colors, probably one or two more. The conclusion is that an Arts and Crafts pattern with multiple colors typically range between 6 and up to 18 colors. Most of the color schemes have a couple of light tones and a couple of dark tones, and then several mid-tones or different colors in use. The background often has a dark color, but many of the patterns came in several color ways. That would, of course, vary with white or cream backgrounds, and some even with a mid-tone background, although that seems a bit more rare. Since the Arts and Crafts patterns always depict nature and different types of plants, there are, of course, a lot of greens, from a cool green gray, blue greens, to yellow greens. Another very typical color is indigo in different tones and shades. In many of the patterns, you'll find a splash of a vivid color, and this adds a compelling contrasting ingredient that makes the pattern interesting and exciting and make some of the motifs pop, but never in a way that it takes too much attention or it takes over the pattern. Finding the right color combinations for a design is probably the most difficult part of the process. The only advice here is to practice and try many different combinations. Next we're going to create a color palette for our patterns. [MUSIC] 30. Creating Your Color Scheme: It's time to create a color scheme and polit for your pattern. Grab your pattern, repeat drawing, and let's make some notes in the same way William Morris did for the Reef design. To first figure out how many colors need and also make some suggestions for the colors you want to use for the different motifs and its elements. For this, you can use the workbook again and find the page with the color scheme list. Start with the background color. My advice is to start with either a dark or a light background. A midtone background is something you can play around with for a second or third color away. A light background is typically more or less some kind of off-white, cream color, or really light tone of yellow, pink or blue. For a dark background, you can, for example, choose a dark blue, gray, green, brown or why not a dark red color? For my pattern, I am choosing a dark green, that will be color Number 1. Now let's decide on the outline color. For a light background, you can choose the same as the background, or rather a dark contour, just like in the fruit pattern. For a pattern with a dark background, the contours can be the same as the background as well, but you can also experiment with an even darker tone. I'm going to use the same color as my background so color Number 1 again, then onto the motifs. If you have a pattern with two layers, start with the front layer. For leaves, choose one base color and perhaps a shade color, and then a color for the vein. Depending on the vein, you choose a color for a vein outlines and one for the vein blotch. From my leaves, I'll have this yellow green for my base and a green gray as a shade. The vein outlines and the nerves have a slightly brighter green than the general outlines. For the vein blotch and branches, I'll use a light gray green and then I assign a new color number for each new color I add to my scheme. For my small leaves, I'll use the same yellow green for the base color and the same green for the nerves as in the large leaves. For your flowers, you can choose to use one color in two or three shades. For example, for the base shade of my flowers, I'll use this light red and then I have a darker tone of red as the shade color. Then I have an even darker red for my textural lines. When you're done with the foreground layer, do the same thing with the background layer motifs. My background layer motifs only need two colors. One for the little curly twigs and for those, I am using the same color as for the vein blotch and branches. For the little tulip flowers, I'm using a cream color. Remember that you can reuse colors and shades and use them in different motifs. A color used for a shade in the leaf can be reused for the center of a flower and so on. This will help you keep the number of colors down. For example, my total number of colors are nine, including the background color, and that can be too much, so I may have to reduce this. To do that, I could, for example, use the same color for the vein outlines and leave nerves as for the general outlines. I could also reuse a color for the small flowers in the background layer. Now, go ahead and do the same color scheme planning to find out what colors you need and how many. Next step is to go and find them. Here you can make use for those photographs that you took or the inspirational images you have collected. Another thing that you can do is to mix your own colors using guash or watercolor and make some swatches on a paper that you can scan an import in illustrator. Now go to your inspiration board and create as many squares as the number of colors you've defined with the rectangle tool, and then double them. It's always good to have some extra for playing around and comparing use and the shades. Now, you can select one square at a time. With the eyedropper tool, find colors and tense in those photos and images that can work for your motifs. You can adjust the colors by double-clicking on the swatch over here and this setting window will appear and where you can adjust the colors a bit if you want to, you can make it more muted or more clear and vivid or brighter and darker. You can also find and pick colors up here in the swatches panel. Play around with your colors until you have created a color palette to start with at least. It doesn't have to be perfect yet and you will most likely change and adjust it several times before you're done. Save your colors by selecting them all and then click the little folder here. This will save your colors in a color group here in your swatches panel. When you're ready, let's go to the next lesson where we'll start coloring our patterns. 31. Color Your Design In Illustrator: In this lesson, we're going to add color to our patterns and the motifs. Let's start by bringing in our color palettes into this document. For that, we need to go back to the inspiration board and save this color group as global so that we can access it and use it in other documents as well. I worked on my colors a bit more and created an additional color group that I want to use. First, I'll remove these default illustrated colors, so I'll click on this red one here and then press "Shift" and on this last one here to select them all and then pull them down to this little trash can, and now I'll save these two color groups as global by clicking this icon over here, and then save Swatch Library as ASE, and I'll name them trailing flowers. Now when I go back to my other document, I can click on this icon go to Open Swatch Library user-defined, and here I can select my Trailing Flowers color group, and click on the folders here that will appear in this pop-up and, now they will be accessible in my swatches panel. I'll keep this default colors because we will soon have use for them, and I'll keep this light gray background as well for now, and also keep it locked, and now I'll start with my foreground layer motifs. First, I need to organize them a bit and also give each group of shapes within this a unique color. Because soon we're going to use the paint bucket tool to fill these shapes with color. But when you use this tool, you have to expand everything afterwards, and then it will be grouped in a new way. In order to easily organize the outlines again, we can give them these unique colors so that it will be easy to regroup them using the magic wand tool. But I'll show you the ropes as we go along. I'll ungroup everything first, just so that I'll have a clean slate. I'll select all the flower outlines and group them together and give them this orange color. Then the flower shading outlines and they can keep this red color, and all the leaf outlines, which we'll get this blue color, and then the stem and the vein outlines, and they will get this green color. Another thing I want to do is to create a border here and here, where the stems and the flowers meet so that I can create closed shapes to fill in these with separate colors. I'll grab the blob brush tool and give it a yellow color, and then I'll draw a line between the stem outlines like this, and now I want to cut off the overlapping ends of this shape to make a clean shape. I'll select the yellow shape and the stem outlines, and with the shape builder tool. I click and the middle part here, deselect, and now you can delete these two end parts, and then I'll do the same on the other stem, and while we're at it, why not clean up all the overlapping contours with the shape builder tool to make a clean shape everywhere. Now we can start to fill in these shapes with colors. I'll select everything and select the paint bucket tool, and I'll start with my leaves. I'll select this yellow-green here and stir to fill in all the empty shapes in my leaves, and make sure I get all the separated shapes, then I'll continue with the veins and stems, and now thanks to the extra flower outline here at the bottom, and also the extra borders up here at the flowers. I have a closed shape that I can fill in. Now, I'll continue with the flowers, and now when everything is filled in, I have to expand them. Go to "Object" and expand, and now all the objects that I have selected and the new shapes I created with the bucket tool are grouped twice. I'll ungroup them, and since everything that I want in separate color groups have dedicated colors. Now, I can use the magic wand tool appear, to select everything with the same color and group them again. Next, I want to add some shade to my leaves, and for that, I want to make half of these big leaves in a dark grey-green, and so I will divide the large leaves in two-halves. I'll zoom in, and with a blob brush tool, I draw another yellow border from the tip of this nerve to the apex of the leaf. Then I'll remove the overlapping pieces by selecting the vein and leaf outlines and the border shape and cut it with a shape builder tool again, and then I'll delete these bits. Now, I'll select the border shape again and, this yellow-green base, and select the shape holder tool, and then, I'll pick this grey-green here from my color palette and draw over the base, and the border, to both unite them and give them a new color at the same time, and then I'll do the same to my other enlarge leaves. Another thing I need to take care of those border shapes I made between the stems and the flowers. I'll select the yellow shapes and the stem and where the shape builder tool, I'll merge them together. The next thing I'll do is to give some shade to my petals, and for this, I'll use the blob brush tool to paint in these shades. I'll select this mid red down here, and now I'll paint the outlines for my shade shapes. Then I'll select all these outlines, and with a shape builder tool, I'll fill them in by drawing with my cursor's through them all like this, and now I'll group these shade shapes as well. But now I can't see my flower shading outlines. I'll select the pink base color and the shade color and go to "Objects" and send backward until they appear again. Now I will give my outline shapes, the final colors. The dark green for the leaf and flower outlines and this other green for the stem and vein outlines, and lastly, the dark red for the flower shading lines. But now, when I look at this, I think it would actually look really great if the flower outlines also have that dark red, and I also want all the outlines to be on top of the other shapes. I'll select all the outlying groups and bring them to the front. This was the foreground layer motifs, and now I'll give my background layer motifs some colors as well, using the same techniques and tools, and I'll let you watch me while I work. Next, it's time to turn all of this into a digital patterns swatch and see how our designs turned out. 32. Creating The Final Pattern: In this lesson, it's finally time to put everything together and create the final repeat in Illustrator and see how our patterns turn out. We have actually made a lot of preparations with our pattern motifs already and even created the background square that will also be the pattern bounding box. But there are some more editing steps that we're going to need to do in this lesson as well. But first, take notes of those measures of your background square or rectangle because you're going to have use for them now. I'm starting with unlocking my square and placing my foreground motifs on top of it somewhere here in the left upper corner. As we're now going to create a straight repeat with the motifs repeated straight horizontally and straight vertically, I'm going to make copies to all sides of this square. With it selected, I'll right-click, choose Transform and move, and now this Settings window pops up, and here, I can now move and make a copy of my motifs exact to the pixel, which is necessary to create a seamless repeat. I'll start with making a copy straight down. In my case, that's zero horizontally and 737 pixels down vertically. If I would want to move it up, I'd have to make it negative and enter a minus before those numbers and press Copy. I have covered this left side of the square, and now I can select them both and copy them over here to the other side too. With them both selected, I'll right-click again, transform, move, and now I want to move them horizontally to the right. Here I'll enter 737 pixels. But if I wanted to move them to the left, I'd have to enter a minus sign before, and zero vertically and press Copy. Now I have my foreground repeat ready. I'll get one of my background layers, and I'll start with this one and see if I can find a place for it. Over here, like this, I think. I'll copy and repeat them like with the foreground layer so that I can see how it looks lined up next to each other. I can see that I have some empty spaces here and there and also that I need to edit some of my motifs a bit more to make them fit nicely with a foreground layer motifs. I'll start up here to fill in this empty space. I'll double-click to get into isolation mode. Now, I'd like to move around these little stems, and leaves, and flowers of it, but they're all grouped according to object type. All the leaves are grouped together and all the leaf nerves and so on. Now, I need to ungroup everything and make new groups with complete motifs instead. Now that I have everything grouped properly, I can go in and move the motifs to fit them in-between the foreground motifs and create a better and more even distribution if necessary. I can also manipulate and adjust some motifs if they don't work as they are. For example, I can cut off some leaves with the eraser tool and move it and rotate it to fit better. Then I connect it to the stem again by drawing with a blob brush tool. To fill this large empty space over here, we're going to borrow another motif from up here. I'll copy it down here and rearrange it a little bit. I think I'll see what this looks like now. I think it looks better, but I think I need to work on it further down on the whole repeat here. I'll delete these other backgrounds and copy this edited version below to make sure that I have all the edits when I make adjustments here as well. I'll double-click to Isolation Mode again, and I'll continue to do the same type of adjustments. I'll move and copy some motifs to reuse them, and move some around, delete parts and add others using the blob brush tool. Sometimes when you move one motif, it ends up behind another motif. To fix this, you can select both the motifs and go to the Layers panel and find the motifs in the list. Since they are selected, they have little blue squares to the right of them in the list. Here, I can find that little flower and click on its row and then drag it up and place it above the leaf motif, and that will bring the flower in front of the leaf. You can also draw a new object if you don't find any other to reuse. I'm going to go ahead and make some more of these adjustments and fill out the remaining spaces and do some fixes here and there, and be back in a second. Now, I'll double-click to get out of isolation mode, and I want to make copies of my background layer motifs to all sides, just as I did with a foreground motifs. Now, it's time to test my pattern to see how it works. To create a pattern swatch, I select my square background, press Command C to make a copy, and then Command B to paste it behind. With it still selected, I'll come up here to my Swatches Panel and give that copy no fill, and make sure it doesn't have a stroke either. I'll select everything and pull it over to my Swatches Panel like this until I can see a little blue line, and then I can drop it. Now, I'll draw a large rectangle somewhere on my canvas and then fill it with my pattern and voila. Here is the first look at my trailing arts and crafts pattern. I think it turned out really nice. But there is one more cool thing I'd like to show you on this one before I try out my other background motifs. In some places, it would be really nice if the background branches crossed over the large flowers stems, like here, here, here, and here. The easiest way to do this is to simply erase the part of the large stem that is in front. I have to select this front layer motif over here and go in with the eraser tool and remove these parts. But before I do that, I want to make a copy of this whole repeat and place it over here since I want these foreground motifs for my other background, and then I want them untouched. I'll get my eraser tool and get started. I'll make sure to erase some margin as if the small stem also had an outline. That makes it more distinct, and since the background branches and the stem blotch are the same colors, they would just merge together otherwise. I'll delete these front motifs and copy the edited one and now let's see what this looks like. I'll drag this over here to make a new patterns swatch and then fill my rectangle with the new pattern. I really like that. Now, I'm going to try out my other background and create a pattern with that too. This turned out really pretty too. But with a completely different look and expression than the first one. Which one do you like the best? My favorite is this one, and I think it's those intertwining branches that did it. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to recolor this type of pattern in an effective way. 33. Recoloring Your Pattern: In this lesson, I'll show you how to make the last edits to your pattern colors. The first thing we're going to do is to check the colors in the pattern. I'll use this one, my favorite. So what I want to do now is to see exactly what colors and how many that I ended up with. An easy way to do that is to select the whole repeat structure. Then over here at the swatches panel, click this little folder to create a color group of all those motifs and objects in the pattern. Now I can see the colors I have used and also count them. So I ended up using 12 colors. That's a few more than I had in my plan. So if I would like to decrease the numbers, for example, I could take away this brown here that I somehow used for the little dots in this small flowers centers. I can also change my second dark green that I've used for the leaf outlines and also the little leaf nerves, and use the same dark green as the background my green number one, remember? So to do that I'll select my pattern rectangle here and click on the recoloring tool up here. This is a really useful tool in Illustrator. It's quite sophisticated with a lot of features and it takes time to get acquainted with them all. Over here I have all the colors in my pattern. This is that brown and here is that second dark green. I'm going to exchange them to my green number one, which is this one. Now I'll pull this green from here over to this small brown swatch on the right. Then I do the same to that second green. Now everything in the pattern that was brown and that green has now changed to my number one green. I'll click okay and now it has saved a new version of my pattern in my swatches panel. Now I can check my numbers again by pulling out my pattern repeat from the swatch like this, and then save that as a new color group. As you can see this new group has less colors than the previous one, so I succeeded. So what if I want to change the color of let's say all the small background branches and leaves, without changing the color of the large stamp Lacz as well because they have the same color. So now I can't recolor the pattern, but if I go to my patterns structure that I just pulled out and now it's grouped, so I'll just ungroup it. Then I can double-click on this background motif here to get into isolation mode. Now I draw a rectangle and fill it with a color I'd like to change those leaf and branch motifs into. I will try out this new green color that I haven't used before. Now I select everything, click the recolor tool, and now all the colors of these motifs and the new green are listed here. Now I can switch places for this light gray-green in my branches and leaves and the new green. Here I can see how it looks and if I want to keep it, I click okay. Now this doesn't create a new pattern swot since it wasn't the pattern that I was recoloring. So what I have to do now is to copy this edited motif group again, and create a new swatch. Here is how that turned out with the new green color. The nice thing now is that since the background branches and leaves now have a unique color that doesn't exist anywhere else in the pattern, I can go in and recolor the pattern instead, if I wanted to try new colors for those branches and leaves. You can of course also use the recolor tool to experiment with new color combinations of your palette using this feature here, which will shuffle your colors around. In this type of complex pattern though it usually won't work that well and get crazy alternatives that don't look very good. Sometimes it can give you an idea for a new color, for a motif, or the background, for example. One last tip is to create a new color palette and save it as a new color group in your swatches panel, like I've done here. Important though, is to keep the same amount of colors that you have in your existing color palette and group over here. So with my pattern rectangle here selected I'll click on the recolor tool again, and here on this list on the right, I can click on my now alternative color group, and it appears over here and has also recolored the pattern with it. Now I can drag and switch these around to find the positions that I want. When I'm pleased, I can click okay and it has saved a new patterns swatch for me with the new color palette. So these are some tips for adjusting your pattern colors in your smoking new trailing arts and crafts pattern. Now, go to the next lesson where I have some final words for you. 34. Next Step & End Note: We're coming to the end of this course and I hope you have enjoyed it and learned a lot. If you would like to have even more guidance in the process of designing your own trailing arts and crafts pattern, I have created a three week long e-mail workshop as a companion, and extension to this course. During these three weeks, you'll receive 10 e-mails, each one with encouraging an actionable steps and extra resources that will help you move forward in your design process of making your pattern. If you want to join the workshop, you'll find a link to where to sign up in the box section of this course and also on my profile page here on Skillshare, and on my website, of course. You can join anytime and go in your own pace. When you sign up, you will also get an extended version of the Trailing Arts and Crafts Workbook that you will need and have use for in the workshop. Before I leave you, I want to encourage you to create a student project in the resources and project section of this course and share with me and your fellow students about the arts and crafts pattern that you create with the help of what you've learned in this course. In the project section, I have listed suggestions to what you can include in your project. There you will also find the workbook that I have created for this course. Another thing, at the end of every year, I select one student among the ones who have completed a class project in any of my courses during the year, and who will get my Skillshare scholarship. This is a free year of the skill share premium membership. If you want to connect with me outside of Skillshare, you can join my Facebook group called Pattern Design with Barbel Dressler or you can sign up for my newsletter and also follow me on Instagram @bearbellproductions. You will find more information on how to apply it to the scholarship and all my links on my profile page and also in the box section of this course. A reminder, if you can't get enough of drawing exercises, you will find those bonus exercises right after this video. These videos are tutorials that I shared with my mailing list as a prepping bonus before this course was published. The next part in this series about creating arts and crafts patterns is about How to Create Serpentine Patterns. Keep a look out for that one too. All right, that's all for this time. I'm looking forward to see what you make. 35. Bonus Drawing Exercise: The Tudor Rose: There is, of course, many different types of roses that we could draw. But it was the wild rose or the Tudor rose that was the queen of all roses in the arts and crafts patterns. As with most arts and crafts motifs, these two were mostly in a quite simplified and flat manner. Let's start with this one, a classic version of the Tudor rose. It has these double sets of petals, with some small leaves between every petal. As you can see, they are highly symmetrical and very stylized. The key to draw them is to be very methodical and to draw all similar shapes and lines together in steps. Let me show you how you can go about this. First we are going to draw a guiding circle for the outer shape. Then we're going to draw another circle inside of this one. If you imagine that here is the center, then you could do half the distance from the center to the outer line, somewhere here you will place the second circle, center circle as well. In an arts and crafts rose, and in the medieval style, there is always five petals in each layer set, so we need to divide the circle into five equal parts, roughly like that. Then also, let's do some extra guiding lines for the inner circle like that. Now it's time to start adding the shapes to the petals. We're going to start with the inside petals. The first thing we're going to add are these little loops here or junctions between the small petals. We're going to do that all the way around all at once. Just to make sure that they look symmetrical, more or less the same. Next, we're going to draw the corners of the petals, the rounded corners over here, and you do the same thing for every petal. Next we're going to connect to these. Then we're going to connect the little junctions with the corners as well. Drawing the same lines and shapes all at once, we start with all the junctions, then we do the corners all at once, and then connect them. This way it's so much easier to create that symmetrical shape and line. Next step, I'm going to add these little stylized turnovers to these petals. Now we're going to do the same thing. We're going to start with a bend along this guiding line here, and we're going to do the same shape to each petal. Now we'll do the opposite bend or curve like that. Just go around to each petal and do the same step for each. We're not going to draw them free hand like that, because when you do that, it's not going to look the same as much. The next step is to create these little leafs. Now, as with almost any classic pattern and it's motif elements, you use that S line. So you create an outline that's in the shape of an S. Then on the other side, it's just a curve, a simple curve. You could also, of course, just do a very symmetrical thing here like that, so that's up to you. But you can still do the S line, but do it in a symmetrical manner. The next step is to shape out the outer petals. We're going to start like we did with the inner petals. We're going to create these rounded corners, and you do go around and do that for all petals. Then instead of creating the petals that are curved this way, pointing out toward the edge, we are creating a variation. We're going do a curve that's facing towards the center instead. We always want to have variation in our motifs, and then connect them, the curves, and the sides, and to the center. Then we're now going to do this little leaves. Then we can finish it off with these little pistils. We missed one detail, I can see now. It's this line here that implies also bit of a turnover or at least a texture. We're going to do this methodically again, do all those curves, and then add the side curves. So that's this version. Then we can try this one, which also gives us variation of options of how to create the petals. We will go about it just the same methodically. Now let's get started to shape these petals. We're going to start with the curves of these small petals. Then let's just connect them to the center circle. The next step, now we're going to go right to the outer petals actually, and then we're going to add the details later, and we're going to do the same as before. Let's do the corners, the rounded corners of each petal. As you can see, we're going to now do a curve that's facing out from the center. We're going to use the guiding line circle and add this little curve outside of the circle. Now connect all these little curves. Then we will do some detailing. First of all, we're going to do these little leaves, and then we're going to do some texture or shading also. Now it's not going to be that visible with my guiding lines in the way. But I'm just going to do them like that, I think you will see them. Then for the outer, larger petals, we're going to do three lines like that to create some texture. That was a couple of examples on how you can draw the stylized medieval Tudor rose. Now it's your turn. Go ahead and try and draw this, practice it a couple of times. Also used this as inspiration for ideas of how you can vary the petals and the centers and so on. Then go ahead and draw your own version of the Tudor rose. 36. Bonus Drawing Exercise: The Wild Rose: This one is more a depiction of a wild rose. Just draw the guiding circle and the center. Now we're going to do some more guiding lines for the pedals. We're going to do the rounded edges. Then you can vary the petals. You can do them so they are a little bit flat or they can be rounded. They can have a little extra curve like that. Here it can go more free hand and you don't have to be as methodical as if you're creating something that's symmetrical. This one has a bit more of an organic shape to it. Then the key here are these shading or a textural lines that gives them this character and sham I think so. You can just go ahead and add some of that and do them fate coming in different directions and just make them varied. Then we can do an S shape to this one. Then here I created a double one coming out. You can do that. Then we have one that's a bit wavy. When I do them, I like to do guiding lines as well, otherwise they're quite difficult sometimes to accomplish like that. Then we have a long one. Then we can do this that's a little bit more than lobed. I'm going to have one coming up here and the one going over it there. We have these three lobes and this one is well, it's a bit longer than the first one. Then we would do the dots inside of this center. Let's quickly go over this one as well. Let's see, I'm going to need more space here, but I'm not going to have to make it so big. That larger center, let's do our guiding pieces of cakes. Now when we create these pointy petals, a tip is to start outside and make the S shape like this. Here you can also be a bit more methodical, although the aim here is not to be completely symmetrical. It's just easier to make nice shapes if you do it this way. I've found at least. Then you just shake them out, more of them, and make them connect with that center circle. For these ones, we're going to also add some details that are implying a bit of a turn over of the pedals, and these one's definitely very thin. Then we we'll do some petals, and this one is going to be divided like a snake's tongue. These little roses here, they don't have that much detailing or variations to them when it comes to texture and shade, but when we're creating patterns and including these, we would color them and in that step, we would add more details. We would create additional lines or shapes like this. This could be a white color and the rest of the pedal would be in a light red or pink color. Next I want to show you how to draw variations of this wild rose, and that is of course to draw the different stages of the rose from a very new bud to something that has started to unfold a little bit and then we have this one that's just ready to burst and blossom. These are of course two stylized, in a very medieval inspired manner. The way to draw this is to first struck with a circle like that. It's this one. Then here you add this little thing here, and then just follow this one and create a nice little bend like this. Then come in and create some lobes. Then here, the key is this little eyelet here. That's very characteristic for this type of rose. Then we have another lobe coming up here, and it goes up like that, and is not up as far as the left side. Just to add more variation and we have the little stem as well. Here we can add some texture as well. I didn't do that for this one, but it will be something like this. Also makes it so decorative. The next one we're going to do, the middle one. It's just really easy as well, and let's see if we can do a variation that's not exactly like this one. It's going to go down like this instead, and then we have these little eyelets down here. Let's start with that, and we have this center. Now, a bit funky. The last one, let's do that too. Now I'm going to start out with creating this chalice. Then we have the center, and here we don't have to do the eyelets because that's not really suitable for the junctions here. I'm going to do a bit differently. Then we have petal that's emerging, the center one. For these ones you can add some texture. If you want to, just for this exercise, you can go ahead and fill them in with a fine liner just for fun. I love filling in with fine liner and I know you love watching me do it. Perhaps, I should just go ahead and do that. I'm going to do that for this little fella here at least. Knock yourselves out and have fun drawing for roses. 37. Bonus Drawing Exercise: Rose Foliage: Other elements of the rose is of course, the branches and the leaves. Here you can see an example of an ensemble. I'm going to show you now how to draw them. I'm going to start with the thicker branch. As you can see, it's quite simple actually in its characteristics. It has these large thorns here and there. That to me is a very medieval style. Then we have these cut off branches. Someone is taking care of their rose garden and trimming them in the spring time and then emerging from this one. Actually, I think just, pretend this is not here, the upland there. That was a mistake I did. All right, but emerging from this thicker main branch, the backbone, is another branch that is thinner and it also divides into some foliage here. Those branches have just little thorns, just little marks like that. I really love that detail actually. Then from these thinner branches, we have these rose, characteristic rose leaves attached. Here and there we can stick some roses and different buds and so on. I'm going to show you how to draw this. Let's start with that thick branch with the large thorns. Let's make a directional line. I wanted to have it little bit irregular, so I'm doing this S shape like that. Now I'm sketching out the thickness of the branch. It can be even all the way because in a repeat pattern we will probably just have this continue over the borders of the repeat. I think that's quite nice and even. Now I want to have those cut off branches and I think it's best to do those in the bends like that. Start with a curved junction like that and then another one smooth like this. The characteristic of the end here is like you do it in a drop shape like that. Then lets have another one over here. It looks not realistic, is stylized, but it's just, it captures the essence of a cut of branch, don't you think? Let's continue, so you make this curve and another one like a bird's beak almost. They're quite exaggerated, these thorns, big and you don't want to get stung by them. Place them here and there on this main branch. I want to have some additional thinner branches coming out from this main one. I think here is a really great place, so I'm doing that rounded junction. I want this one to be a bit trailing and coming up like that. Then we're going to have another one coming up like this and then perhaps a small one sticking out like that. Then probably another one like this. Because you want to distribute the thinner branches and then when you attach the leaves into an even surface. Now we'll give this some more body. Here you can decide if you wanted to come in behind the main branch or in front. I think I'm going to cross over in front. When you have these forked junctions here, you do the same thing. Those little soft junctions. The rose leaves are attached to the branches in pairs. Well, first you start with a top leaf. Rose leaves are pretty rounded in their shape and with a pointed tip. Of course they are prickly, but we're just going to place them out now and then we're going to come in with the details. Then we have another leaf coming up like this. Now they are placed in pairs. These ones are pretty straightforward, they are not seen from the side too much. Then here you could do them attached upwards like this as well, but to create some variation, what can I do to do make them point downwards? Place some leaves in pairs like that and other branches as well. Of course, don't forget to place out a rose or a bud in different blossoming stages here and there as well. Now we're going to make the prickly edges. We don't want it to look realistic, we want it to be stylized. A real rose leaf has lots of prickles or points. You're along the edge but we're not going to do that because we want to simplify and just capture the essence of what a rose leaf looks like. So we're going to have prickles, but only a few. That's the trick. We're going to do like four prickles, perhaps five. Now we have the prickly edges, another detail we're going to add are the center nerves. They are always more or less bent or curved like this. Now we're going to do some extra detailing. Like two or three, just like with the prickles, not too many. What you can do now is to just add some more leaves, perhaps some more branches, and some flowers. Then when you are finishing up, you can add some of these little mini thorns along these edges. That's something that I would probably do when I fill it in with my black fineliner or that brush pen that I use. So that was the rose branches and the leaves. Now you can use these techniques and these elements and how to draw them and create your own ensemble and practice to create motifs for an arts and crafts rose pattern.