Transcripts
1. Course Intro: Hi everyone. Welcome back to my latest class. I'm Jenny Lezan and I'll be the one guiding you through this creative course. I'm a freelance graphic designer, illustrator, and educator based out of the mid west and I run Bella + Sophia Creative studio. If you want to learn more about me, check out my YouTube channel: The Freelance Life, to get the behind the scenes view of the work that I do as a freelancer and the work that goes into making classes like this one. I am a huge advocate for sharing knowledge in accessible ways and I've found that places like Skillshare and YouTube are great for that and they allow me to connect with a diverse group of people who are looking to learn and grow. This month, I wanted to dive a little deeper into building our creative skills in surface pattern design using the Affinity Designer desktop software. In my past surface pattern design classes, I showed you the basics of surface pattern design and building repeats on the iPad. In this class, we're going take this process a little bit further and explore how to create some of the most common surface pattern repeats; the full drop, half-drop, tossed, and brick pattern repeats. Expanding on the types of patterns you create helps add visual interest to your patterns. Choosing the right pattern repeat for your designs will depend on what look and feel you're going for. But the wonderful thing is once you have your motif drawings, you can keep experimenting with the different repeatedly outs until you get the result that you're going after by applying each of the techniques that we're going to go over. In this class, I will walk you through my process and how to make four of the most common surface pattern designs in Affinity Designer for the desktop. We will work on designing these patterns and creating a seamless repeat using the illustrative motifs that we've created, and then we'll also touch on some tips to help establish creating stronger repeats, as well as discuss the process for creating color palettes. This course is designed to give you all of the technical skills you need to start designing the full drop, half-drop, tossed, and brick repeat patterns using Affinity Designer on your desktop. But it doesn't go into as much detail as the surface pattern design intensive course that I have here on Skillshare. This class will get you comfortable with the tools and the studios in the software, as well as familiarize you with some of the layer effects, geometry functions, and the transform options that will aid in building a repeating pattern in Affinity Designer. We won't be going through the entire process of surface pattern design from concept drawing to final pattern, but instead we will be focusing on building and constructing each of these four pattern repeats. If you want to learn the very basics of surface pattern design using your iPad, Affinity Designer, and Affinity Photo, I would suggest checking out my surface pattern design intensive course for beginners. Learn how to create surface pattern designs on the iPad with Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. Make sure to check out the class resources for a resource guide on surface pattern design, links to a Pinterest board with surface pattern design inspiration, as well as access to the project templates. If you want to check out some of my surface pattern design work and other design and illustration work, make sure you check out my shop on Etsy Bella + Sophia Creative and you can also check out my website at www.bellasophiacreative.com or you can find me over on Spoonflower.
2. Course Project + Tools Needed: When it comes to your class project and the tools that you'll need today, all you need to take this class is a desktop or a laptop computer with Affinity Designer installed. Now when it comes to our class project, we're going to be creating four seamless repeats: a half drop repeat, a full drop repeat, a tossed repeat, and a brick repeat. They will all be designed in Affinity Designer. You can submit this to the course Project Gallery to share with your fellow classmates as well as myself. When it comes to the deliverables, when you're ready upload the following to the Project Gallery: your four final patterns, one full drop, one half drop, a tossed and a brick showcasing the final project and place your tile and then your seamless repeat preview all in one file on a JPEG within that template layout that is included in your resources here in this class. Who is this class geared towards? This class is geared towards anyone interested in learning how to create surface pattern designs using Affinity Designer on their desktop. Whether you're a season pro in surface pattern design or someone just learning how to use the software, I'll try to ensure that you will feel comfortable in the software and the course. I know that surface pattern design can seem daunting when it comes to the tech side of things, but for this class I wanted to show you how you can create some of the most popular styles of repeats that can help you grow your surface pattern design portfolio. I'll go through the steps in an easy to follow way. I'm looking forward to creating with you today. Let's get started.
3. Understanding the 4 Repeat Styles: Before we even get started in the design process, there are a few things that I want to note when it comes to understanding how each of these repeats are built. First, let's jump into understanding the full drop repeat. In a full drop repeat, artwork is repeated along the horizontal and vertical lines. Essentially whatever you put on the left side should be in the exact same place but on the right side. Then whatever you put on the top of your artboard, it should be in the exact same place just on the bottom of your artboard. The motifs are repeated perfectly along the vertical line of the fabric and it also repeats perfectly along the horizontal line. This is called essentially a square repeat because the repeat basically forms a perfect square. Rectangle shape repeats are also considered full drop repeats. If your horizontal repeat, for instance, is a bit longer than your vertical repeat, the overall pattern would create a type of rectangle, but the idea is still essentially the same. Whatever you put on the left-hand side should be exactly on the right-hand side and whenever you put on top should be on the bottom. The same thing would happen if the vertical repeat was a bit longer than the horizontal, so either is perfectly acceptable and considered a full drop repeat. Now when it comes to your half drop repeat. In the half drop, the artwork is repeated along horizontal and vertical lines just like in the full job repeat. But this time the horizontal repeat is staggered. Basically, the motif repeats perfectly on the vertical lines with the same on the top edges and your bottom edges. But when you look at your left and right edges, you're two-sided edges. Whatever's on the left-hand side, and whatever you put on the right-hand side should be in the exact same place but then dropped down exactly half of that vertical repeat along the horizontal lines. Now when it comes to the brick repeat, just like the half drop, the brick repeat unit is also very commonly used in service pattern design. It's really similar to the half drop pattern repeat, except instead of the repeat unit being stacked vertically in a column format, it's actually stacked horizontally. Your edges are going to match on the side, but you're going to basically offset your horizontal roll by half. The repeat unit is then offset by half in the horizontal roll, resembling a brick wall. As a result, just like with the half drop pattern repeats, brick repeats allow a design to look less formal and it's a little bit more difficult to figure out where that repeat is happening, starting, and ending. Finally, the last repeat that we're going to be looking at in this course is the toss repeat. When it comes to the toss repeat, a toss surface pattern design is basically defined as a layout in which your motifs are arranged in a really scattered but balanced way. This is probably one of the most popular layouts in the industry and it's a layout cell that most designers create when they start designing patterns. In a tossed random surface pattern repeat, the elements of the designs are scattered within the repeat unit. The unstructured nature of a tossed repeat results in a really organic and non-linear design. Oftentimes, it's non-directional and you'll make a stronger repeat if you think about your placement of your motifs, turning them upside down to the side, randomizing how they're placed throughout your artboard to create an even more beautifully organic random repeat. Those are the four repeats that we'll be working with today. Now let's jump into understanding color before we get into setting up our actual artboard and beginning the design process.
4. Color Theory and Color Stories: Before we get into building our design, I want to touch on color palette in the color wheel. Although we aren't creating motifs in this particular course, I still think it's important to keep in mind color. Even if you've created motifs already like what I'm showing in this specific course example, you can always recolor things. Keeping in mind color, theory, and things like that will be helpful in creating an overall successful looking surface pattern repeat. The first thing I want to touch on are some tools that I utilize when it comes to figuring out color dynamics and then also some websites that you can utilize to create color schemes. The first thing we're going to talk about is the color wheel. Color theory can help designers determine which colors look good together and color theory goes beyond just eyeing color combinations that look nice. This relates directly to the color wheel, because the color wheel can help artists and designers find harmonious color combinations based on the geometric relationships represented on the color wheel. I have a color wheel in my studio that I reference all the time beside my Pantone books and things like that. They're relatively inexpensive. You can get them at craft stores, you could order them online. But they're very helpful in coming up with harmonious color combos. In the traditional RYB color wheel, the primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. You can create secondary colors like orange, green, and purple by mixing the primary colors. Red and yellow make orange, yellow and blue and creates green, red and blue creates purple. Then mixing secondary colors and primary colors together, you get tertiary colors. This probably sounds a lot like elementary school art class, and that's totally where all of this stems from. Color theory also involves a color's darkness, or lightness or color values. While we're not going to jump into color theory too deep, I did want to highlight how all of this plays into your selections when it comes to creating your color schemes for your layouts. You can change your color's hue by adding white for a tint, which will basically give you lighter pastel colors. You can add black to a color to create a shade. Basically that darkens and dulls the color. When you add the color gray to a primary or secondary color or a tertiary color, it creates a tone. If a color is toned down, its brightness and intensity is lessened. When I'm creating color palettes, I like to think of these four following steps when it comes to picking colors. I like to clearly define the results that I want to achieve with my color options and basically create my color feels. What do I want people to feel when they're looking at my visuals? Then the next step is selecting a key color that reflects the needs of my project. Step 3 is then selecting a color palette based on the choice of your key hue. Pulling in those additional colors to my story and then step 4 is refining that color choice as I create. When I talk about color feels, I want to talk about the idea of the emotional response that you get when you look at a color. That's what comes to mind when I see color feels. Color feels to me play into the results that you want to achieve. Color can be hot or cold, warm or cool, light or dark, pale or bright. The aspects or the qualities of color refer to colors and color combinations that evoke an emotional response. We're going to touch on this just a bit. When we talk about hot colors, hot refers to red in full saturation on the color wheel. Basically red at its strongest. Hot colors are bright and attract attention, they are strong and aggressive and they seem to vibrate a bit. Then there's cold colors. Cold refers to fully saturated blue. They're calming but also dominating. Cold colors remind one of ice and snow and the cold colors give feelings that are the direct opposite of those hot colors. Then there's warm colors. All hues that contain red are warm. It is the addition of the color yellow to red that makes warm colors vastly different from hot colors. Warm colors are comforting and welcoming. Then there's the cool colors. Cool colors are based in blue. They differ from cold colors because of the addition of yellow to their composition and they make us feel renewed and they're soothing and calmed. Light colors are the palest pastels. They're light due to the absence of visible color in their composition. They feel almost like transparent, colors open up the surroundings and suggests airiness, rest and feel almost like liquid. Dark colors are hues that contain black in their composition. They close up space and they make it feel smaller. Dark colors are concentrated and serious feeling. Pale hues are the softest of pastels. They contain at least 65 percent white in their composition and have a diminished hue. Pale colors like ivory and light blue suggest gentleness and they're very calming colors. Then when it comes to bright colors, it's the amount of pure color within a hue that determines its brightness. The clarity of bright colors is achieved by the omission of gray or black. Bright colors are vivid and attract attention, they're exhilarating and cheerful.
5. Color Theory + Color Schemes: Now that we understand how the color wheel works and how different colors make us feel, I'm going to jump into understanding color schemes, basically the different color combinations that we could utilize in our layouts. There are lots of different color schemes, I'm just going to name a few of them. These different schemes aren't necessarily only the colors that you see on the slide. You can combine any color within the color wheel that fits the guidelines for this color. These are just some that I pulled up: achromatic colors, monochromatic, secondary, analogous, neutral, territory, clash colors, primary, and complimentary. When we're looking at achromatic colors, these are basically without color. These schemes use only black, white, and grays. Monochromatic uses one hue in combination with any or all of its tints and shades. In this case, a purple and then all kinds of different shades and tints of that purple. Secondary colors are a combination of the secondary hues of green, violet, and orange. Analogous colors use any three consecutive hues or any of their tints and shades on the color wheel. Neutral colors use a hue which has been diminished or neutralized by the addition of its compliment or black. A tertiary triad is one of two combinations of red-orange, yellow-green, and blue-violet or blue-green, yellow-orange, and red-violet. Clash colors combine a color with the hue to the right or the left of its complement on the color wheel. Whereas primary colors are a combination of the pure hues of red, yellow, and blue. Then complimentary colors you use direct opposites on the color wheel.
6. Color Resources + Creating a Color Palette: Now that we understand the color wheel, selecting colors, and all of the different tools that I utilize to create color palette, I want to highlight some resources that you can tap into online. The first place that I really like to go to to find color inspiration is Pinterest. There's tons and tons and tons of different color stories and color schemes listed on Pinterest and it's a great way to pull imagery, and an easy way to find photos that you can utilize for the tip that I'm going to show you on creating your own color story in Affinity Designer. You can search pins. I'm going to be sharing a Pinterest board with you all that has color stories that I've created and basically sourced on Pinterest. Pinterest is just a really great and simple way to find a plethora of different images that have really great color stories. Some of them are actual color stories created like this one for example where they pull out the colors individually and some are just photos that maybe I like the color and we can pull those colors out directly. Pinterest is a great place to find images that you can use for building your own colors stories. Another great place and I've included these in the color resource guide that I have attached to this class under the resources tab, but another great place to visit is colorhunt. co. There's just tons and tons of different color stories that have already been created. It's just a free and open platform for color inspiration with thousands of really trendy hand-picked color palettes. This is one great option. Another scheme generator is coolers.co and you can actually upload images and pull colors from the images directly, and they give you the actual RGB or hex code. This is a really great tool that you can use, but if you don't have access to the Internet at some point and you're just working on something, I'm going to show you another way to go about doing this, but coolers is a fantastic tool to utilize. You can actually create a palette from a photo. In the upper right-hand area, here you can select ''Create palette from color.'' Then you can browse and find an image that maybe you've downloaded and then just hit ''Next'' and it'll open it in the generator, and it'll create your color options from the generator. I really like using coolers a lot. It's really fast and simple and easy to use. Then another website I like a lot is colorlovers.com. That's another color inspiration website. It's more of a creative community where people from all around the world create and share colors, palettes, and patterns and they include things like trends and interesting articles. This is another really great option for you to find color palettes and things like that. It's an older websites, so I don't think it's been updated too much, but there's thousands and thousands of different color palettes already in there. It's just a great resource to tap into. Then the next option that I want to show you is how to use and set up your color story using the color guide that I've created. When you download these files, it's going to be in a zip file. When you open them up, you'll see something called Course 20 color guide. Just right-click it and open with Affinity Designer. You may need to install the fonts that I have included and you'll see this setup that I have so that you can create your own palette. I already have one example here. You may need to install the fonts and whatnot in order to view this properly. Make sure you do that first, but basically I've created like a little inspiration board that you can pull for your color stories, and you can do this by using a website like unsplash.com or Pinterest to find images that you might find pretty or that the colors look really nicely. You can look up and search words like monochromatic or bright colors. It'll give you a whole bunch of different options. Then what we can do is once you find something that you like, select it and then you can download it. Unsplash is a great option because it's royalty-free images that you can use. Just make sure you read to make sure if you're doing something for like say commercial work, make sure you check the license to ensure that you can utilize it in that way. In this case, I like the monochromatic feel of this. It gives me a really pretty combination of different purple. I like this color a lot. I'm going to select ''Download Free'' and it'll download into my downloads. Then what I'm going to do is go into my worksheet here. I'm going to select that white square under monochromatic, and you could update these to be whatever you want. I just wanted to include examples for you all and show you how to place these images. Then you could do this on your own, but what you'll do is you'll select that square. What we want to do is go to ''File" and then we're going to select ''Place". Find where you've downloaded your file to. Mine is just going to be in my downloads and then I'm going to select ''Open". You'll get this little downward arrow. Wherever you click, it will place the image. Your image might be too big, so you'll want to resize it. You can just hold Shift and drag in from the corner, and if you find that doesn't keep things in proportion, you can also select ''Command'' and then just drag it in from the corner and resize it. What you want to do is mask it within that original rectangle. What we're going to do is we're going to select that image, we're going to drag it below that rectangle, and then we are going to drag it inward so that it crops inside of it. Then what we're going to do is go to the left-hand side toolbar and we're going to select the color picker tool, and that is going to allow us to pick up the colors within this image. With the color picker tool, you can click anywhere on the image and it'll pick up that color. What you can do is go to your swatches and make sure that the outline is turned off. You'll know it's turned off because you'll see a white circle with a red line through it. Then you want to go to your fill color. What we'll do is just pick up colors from within here to create that monochromatic color scheme we're going for. With your color picker tool selected, you can just click on anywhere within the image and then go to your swatches panel, and then look for what looks like three squares and a plus and that's going to add that color to your swatches. I'm going to just keep going around this image and picking up color until I have six colors that I like. Once I do that, then I can update the bottom squares. What I'm going to do is click on these squares at the bottom. They're grouped together, so you may have to double, triple click to select each one individually. Then I'm just going to go in and select the swatch for the colors that I've already pulled in. I'm going to click on the next square, click on my next swatch, click on the next square, click on the next swatch, and just do that until I have all of the colors I've selected in these options, and I've created my monochromatic color scheme. What's nice is that if you're in say for example another file, you can just select these colors, copy them, and paste them into your new file and pull them off to the side from your art board and you'll be able to color pick from those as you work on recoloring your motifs. I left two additional ones open for you to choose colors and create a really simple color palette of your own using a photo, placing the image just how I showed you. Then if you want, you can also go in and change these as well, these top ones, and you just have to double-click inside of the file to access the direct selection of that photograph, or you can just go into the Layers panel here on the right-hand side and select where it says ''Rectangle'' and select that little drop-down area. Click on the picture and then delete it, and it'll give you space for you to place your own photo image if you'd like. Now that I've walked you through how to create the color palettes, now you'll want to work on the last two on your own. Then we can get started on building our first full drop repeat pattern.
7. Setting Up Your File: Let's start with setting up our file. We're going to have to launch Affinity Designer and once you have launched it, you'll get this popup. There's going to be a blank screen. What we want to do is go to the upper menu and we're going to select File, New. There's three key menus you're going to be working with: your main upper menu here, your tool menu on the left-hand side, and then your studios over here on the right-hand side, which include things like your colors, your swatches, stroke brushes, and your layers, which is what we're going to be working with a lot today. You can update your document units from inches to pixels if you prefer working in pixels. I'm just going to keep it at inches right now so that I have a visual reference when I test these out later and print them out just to see how they look like at 100 percent. What we're going to do is work on an eight-inch wide by eight-inch tall board. We want to keep our DPI at 300. Then what we want to do is make sure we select Create Artboard. Then we are going to keep our color format in RGB. Then we want to make sure we select transparent background because for me I like having transparency and then I can always apply a different color. But if you want to add a color to your artboard too, you can do that, but I prefer having a transparent background to start with because I have the option of going with color or without color depending on the use of my pattern. Then we're going to hit ''Create''.
8. Creating the Live Preview: Now that we are in our artboard, what I want to do is actually set up a live preview. This is going to allow us to see what our repeat looks like in full view. I'll show you an example of this before we build it out. If we look here, since we are working on a full drop, I wanted to highlight how the full drop mechanics work and also showcase how the actual live preview works. On the left-hand side, our board one is our pattern tile, and then on the right-hand side, the bigger artboard is our live preview. As we update this tile on the left, everything will update on the right. When we're looking at this full drop, this is what we're talking about when it comes to the elements and the motifs aligning at the top of the artboard and at the bottom and the left and the right. Now let's go back into our artboard and we're going to set this up as you see. With the preview, it's four of the original tiles to create an actual live repeat. What we're going to do is we're going to go into our file here and we're going to create a new artboard. Since we know this original artboard is eight by eight inches, we need to double this to create our live preview so it's going to be 16 by 16 inches. On the left-hand side in our toolbar, we're going to select "Artboard Tool" and you'll see these options pop up in the upper left-hand corner. What we want to do is keep size at document and then we're just going to select "Insert Artboard" and it's going give you the exact same replica of the original artboard. But then we're going to go over to our Transform tool here, on the right-hand side, yours may be towards the bottom. I'm going to bring mine up a bit so it's easier to see, what we want to do is go into our width and height and update these. Right now it's eight, you want to change the width to 16 and then our height to 16, and then press "Enter" and it will double in size. I also like to go through and organize my files. I like to organize my layers in my file system here. I'm going to select "Artboard one and I'm going to rename this tile, Pattern Tile, then I'm going to go into Artboard 2. I'm going to click where it says "Artboard 2" and it's going to highlight it. I'm going to delete what's in there then I'm going to update this to Pattern Preview. Then I'm just going to reorganize these by clicking on the layer and dragging it up so that Pattern Tile is first and then Pattern Preview is second. Now we have the base of what we're working with setup. Now that we have the base setup, what we need to do is place the pieces for our live preview. I'm going to go over to my right-hand side in my studios here, click on my "Swatches" and I'm going to make sure I have no outline and I going to click where the outline is. It's black for me right now and I'm going to select that little white circle with a red slash through it so that it removes the color. Then I'm going to click on the circle underneath that doughnut circle, and that's my full color. I'm going to update this color to something that's easy to see, like this pink and we're going to start to set up the live preview. What we use to do this is something called symbols. The first thing we want to do is go to the left-hand toolbar and we're going to select our rectangle tool. We're going to go into our Pattern Tile, Artboard 1, we're going to get as close as we can to the edges and we are going to create a square. One thing that I find to be really helpful to make sure everything is lined up is if I turn on magnetics. If we go to the upper menu here at the very top of your screen, you'll see something that looks like a U shaped magnet and that snapping. We're going to turn that on, and what you'll notice when snapping is turned on, you get these guidelines. Right now you see the green guideline pop up and then you'll see a red one for like the cross-sections and things like that. This ensures that your shapes are connecting to the edges of your artboard. But the other thing we can do also is go again into our transform studio here and we'll select this square that we just made and we can just double-check that the sizes are exactly the same, eight by eight. We don't want it any bigger or any smaller. Our width is fine, but as you see, our height is just a little above, so we just have to hit "Eight" and then select "Enter" and now our square is exactly eight by eight inches. You'll see that when we click and try to move it around, you'll get all of those guidelines, the red and green guidelines popping up to show that it's exactly centered on your artboard. Now what we want to do is turn this into a symbol which will allow whatever we put on this Pattern Tile to show up on the Pattern Preview. To do that, we need to turn on our symbols. If you don't see anything named symbols in any of these tabs on your studio side, on the right-hand side here we need to turn on Studios. To do that, we'll go to view, and then we'll go to Studio and then we want to make sure symbols is check marked. Then you'll get this pop-up and then you can just drag it into your right-hand studio area. What I want to do is click on my pink tile here, then I'm going to click on "Create" and then make sure Sync is turned on. You'll know it's turned on because it's darkened, if it's just gray, it's off. We want to make sure that Sync turned on. Now that we've done that, we can begin to pull these squares into our live Pattern Preview. What you'll notice is when that symbol is selected, you see a little orange highlight next to it. Select your original square and then we're going to copy it so "Command C" or you can select "Edit copy. " Then we're going to click into our pattern preview here and we are going to paste that square four times into this pattern preview. I'm going to select "Command V", or you can go to "Edit paste." I'm going to do this four times and you'll see four of these squares have been pasted in our pattern preview area. Now what we want to do is move our squares to the exact areas on this pattern preview that they need to be. The exact coordinates basically. We're going to select this first square and what we want to do is move it to our upper right-hand coordinate. What we can do is just move it if we want and because we have snapping on, it will automatically tell us that it's in the right place, but if you're having issues with that, we again can utilize our transform tool here. What we would want to do is update our x and y coordinates. Since we're just moving it from left to right, we just need to update the x coordinate and we would change it to eight. Now we'll click back onto the original square and what we want to do is move it to the right eight and move it down eight. In this case, we would go into our transform tool and we'll update the x and the y. We would update the x to 8 and then our y to 8 and it'll move it exactly to where we need it to be placed within here. Now let's go back to that original one again, this time we don't need to move it left or right, we just need to move it down. So we just need to edit our y coordinate. In this case, we just need to move it down eight, so we'll just hit "Eight" and then it'll move it exactly in place to where we need it. Now what we'll want to do is test our preview to make sure it's working correctly. To do that, all we have to do is just take a shape for now. I'm just going to click on my ellipse tool here. It looks like a circle and then I'm going to update the color just so that it's something that stands out. Though we can just go into our pattern tile artboard, and we can just create a shape in here. You'll find that if you hold Shift as you're creating a shape, it will give you exact proportions. You'll get a perfect circle and what I'm noticing is that my shape isn't showing up on my Pattern Preview. What you want to make sure you do always with your shapes is make sure that they are underneath your symbol. In this case, masked in. So we'll take that ellipse shape and we'll drag it to where it says Symbol and we'll drag it so that it goes right above the rectangle shape and everything should show up now. What you'll notice is that whatever you do here with this shape will happen in the live preview. This is a really great way to build your patterns because it makes it really easy to see what the final look of the pattern is going to be like. Now that we have our file setup now, let's go in and delete these shapes. We'll go into our system, select "File" "Save As" and we're going to save it as our Pattern Template Fulldrop. Then you can save it wherever you need to save it.
9. Importing Your Motifs : Now we can begin to place our motifs to create this full drop repeat. Now that we've set up our board, what we can do is begin to build out this first full drop. What I like to do first is update my background color. In this case, I think the pink isn't going to work, so I'm just going to go in, select my pattern tile, select that square, and make sure the rectangle is actually selected and that I'm going to update the color to white and then everything else in my pattern preview will update as well. Now what I want to do is start pulling in my motifs. If you've drawn your motifs as raster files, you can place them, you place the PNGs. Or if you've created them in something like Photoshop or Illustrator, or if you've created them directly in Affinity Designer, you can just open up that original file. If you're going to place images, say PNG images, what you can do is select File and then go into place, and then find wherever your images are and place them that way. Or what I'm going to do is actually open up my file that I have and copy and paste them over into my art board. I'm going to go to File, Open, and then I'm going to select Open Recent because it's one of the recent files that I was working on. I'm going to scroll down to my summer brights. I created a sticker set. I actually like how these turned out. I'm just going to go in here and I'm going to select all of the elements that I want to use and then I'm going to copy them. It could either go to Edit, Copy or select Command+C for copy. Then I'm going to go into my template and I'm going to select Command+V, or you can go to Edit, Paste and it'll paste them in. You can paste them into your art board. Or what I like to do is actually drag them off to the side and pull whatever I need when I need it. Once I've placed them and I moved them out, they're a little small, so I'm just going to resize them. I'm just going to individually resize them. To resize them and make sure you don't lose all your proportions, you can either hold 'Command and resize by pulling from the edges. Or if you notice you're having any issues with that, just hold shift and resize. Once I've resized things and I have them in the size that I want them, I can begin to build out my tile.
10. Tips for Creating Effective Repeats: Now that we're at the point where we're about to start creating our designs, I wanted to share some helpful tips when it comes to making your patterns. These aren't the end-all be-all, but I did want to share some tips that can help you as you look at your pattern layouts in your setups, and they'll ensure that they're effective, and cohesive, and well-created. The first tip I want to share is make sure your elements are cohesive and balanced. Balance will help your designs feel visually complete and harmonious. You want the elements within your design to work together as a group. Keep that in mind as you're looking at what you're creating and as you're placing your motifs. Make sure your colors work well together, and that any textures you use blend nicely, that the layout works with the motifs you have created, and that you were looking at the size of your motifs in relation to one another. The next tip I want to share is using contrasting elements to create visual interest in your design. You want to counter concepts. For example, softer colors, blending with a pop of color might look really nice, and it helps create this contrast in terms of visual when you're looking at your color schemes. Textured areas with plain areas of focus, again, contrasting, blank areas with areas that have a lot of texture and visual interest. Another way to use contrast is utilizing large and small motif designs to create something interesting to look at. Tip number 3 is create an area of interest in your design or a focal point. The idea is to have one area draw the viewer's eye in more. This helps to ensure that your design isn't too overcrowded and busy, so creating a key focal area within your layout, again, creates that visual interest that we're going for. A focal point can be created with a specific motif or a colorway. One motif can be more detailed than the rest, or you can select a color that essentially would stand out within your layout. The next tip I want to share is play around with your pattern repeat design type. You're learning four different styles to use in today's class. Don't be afraid to change things up if something doesn't feel right. For example, as a full repeat, try it in one of the other styles that we are working with today. Try it in a brick repeat, see what you can do with it in a toss layout, see what it looks like if you're creating a half drop. By changing the repeat style, you can change the look and feel of your overall design. Remember, half drops tend to make it harder for your viewers to find where the repeat starts and where the repeat ends. The final tip I want to share today is play around with size and placement of your motifs. Try creating your layouts with two or more motifs in varying sizes. Also flip and rotate your motifs so that they are not all facing the same direction. This can help give the illusion of your layout being random, even if you're placing things in very specific areas. Keep the spacing of your motifs balanced at equidistant if you're going for an area or field to your layout. But if you want a dense feeling layout, don't be afraid to overlap your elements.
11. Creating the Full Drop Repeat: As I mentioned, whatever you're putting on the left has to be on the right, whatever you have on top has to be on bottom. I like to build out my edges first and then fill in my center when I'm creating a full drop. I'm going to drag this rainbow and I'm going to bring it to my side here, and again, you want to make sure it's in your pattern tile underneath your symbol. You're going to select that layer and drag it so that it's under the symbol so that it pops up on all of the elements. Then I'm just going to start piecing everything together like a puzzle again, keeping in mind placement, and then making sure everything is dragged into that symbol element. I'll rotate things as well as needed just to fill up space nicely, and I'd like to build a one-side out first so that I can just make things a little bit easier for me and then have everything placed before I have to worry about moving it to the other side. Then keep in mind if you ever put anything in a corner, it has to be in the exact same place in all four corners. In the case of these little leaves here, what I'm going to do is copy that leaf and then paste it by hitting "Command C", "Command V" so it pastes right on top. Then I need to make sure it's in all of these edges, so I need to make sure it's over in this right-hand edge. We know that our square's eight inches, so we just need to go into our Transform tool. Since we're going from left to right, we're going to be working with our x coordinates and we're going to hit "Plus 8" and I'll move it exactly where it needs to be on the right-hand side. Now I'm going to select both of these now, and I'm going to click on one and then hold "Shift" and then click on the other. If you're having issues with this, you can just go into your layers as well and select them. Then once I hold "Shift" and click the other, both of them will be selected, and then I'm going to "Command C" for copy or edit copy, and then "Command V for paste or edit paste, and it'll paste that right on top. We know that since we're going from top to bottom, we're working with our y-coordinate so we'll go to our Y and transform, and we need to hit "Plus 8", and it'll drag it all the way down to where we need it on the bottom side. Now I'm just going to keep selecting these elements and pulling them into this left-hand side here and I think I have everything placed where I want it to be placed on the left-hand side. What I'm going to do now is, just take my Black arrow tool, drag it over these elements here, or you can go into your Layers panel underneath your symbol and select the first one in your options and hold "Shift" and select the last one, and that it'll select all of the elements on your art-board. Or you can just double, triple-click until you get your direct selection. But since I know that these leaves aren't going to be selected, we already have them in place, what I'll do is I'll just move them all to the top here and then I'm going to just select the bottom five elements here so that everything that I've placed on this side is selected. Then I'm going to copy these "Command C" and then paste them "Command V" or edit, copy, and paste in your menu, and then since we're moving from left to right, we're working with our x coordinates, so we're going to go to our Transform, making sure our Black arrow tool is selected, we'll go to our Transform, will go to the x coordinates and we're going to select "Plus 8" and it'll move it exactly where we need it on the other side of the board. Then if I zoom out a bit, you begin to see that the live preview is showing what this is looking like. Now we can start to build the top portion of this, so the thing is, I want to take some of these additional elements that I didn't use and pull them in. I'm going to take this red element here, these little red lines, I'm just going to increase them in size and I think I'm going to use some of these at the top here. Again, keeping in mind some of those tips, everything doesn't always have to be facing the same way, you can play around with placement, it helps to ensure that your repeat is a bit stronger, and then again, remembering everything needs to be underneath the symbol. I think I like this placement so far, I think I'm going to pull in some more of these flowers as well, some of these curved flowers and some more of the leaves. This is why I like having these off to the side, I just have a bunch of them copied and pasted it and I can pull from them and use them as I need. I'm just going to resize this leaf here, and then I'm going to re-size the flower as well, and I think I'm going to drag it in here and make sure that it's underneath symbols, and then just see how it looks as it's placed here. Then pull in that rose again as well, and play around with the placement to make sure it's not too close to anything we can see here that if I had it to the left more, it'll cover that leaf shape. I think this works for this placement here, so what I'm going to do is just select all of these elements by going into my layer, selecting the first rows holding "Shift" and then selecting the last of those like red stripes. Then I'm going to copy them and then I'm going to paste them, and then I'm going to go over into my Transform tool, making sure my Black arrow tool is selected. I'll go to my y-coordinates now since we're moving from top to bottom, we have to move these along the y-coordinate, and then I'm going to go to select "Plus 8" and it'll move it down for me. Now we're beginning to see this pattern fill up, so now what we need to do is fill in our center. Once I have my edges that what I like to do is just select them and group them and then lock them so that they don't get moved out of place unless I want to go back and move them out of place. I'm going to select the first in this selection, I'm going to hold "Shift" and then I'm going to select the last, then it'll select everything, and then I'm going to right-click my layers and I'm going to scroll down to Group, and I'm going to name this group outer edges. Now I'm just going to go in and start selecting some of these additional elements that I want to pull into the white space in the center. Like these Asterix signs or starburst, whatever you want to call them. Some more of the rainbows I think will work really nicely here as well. I'm going to pull all of those over, but I'm going to make a copy of them first. I'm going to pull them over and then into my pattern tile. Then making sure it's underneath the symbol so everything pops up and we can see what it starts to look like. I'm going to play around with placement of these and just pull them into key places. I think I want to pull in another rainbow as well, so I'm just going to make a copy of this original one over here. Then I'm going to pull it into my artboard, in my symbols. I think I might even resize it because it's a bit bigger than the others. I'm going to play around with the orientation of it, and I'm just going to start to play around with these additional elements, keeping in mind how they flow together in terms of the overall shape. I'm going to resize elements as I need them, and then drag them into the center of the tile, fill out the rest of this. Again, you can play around with your orientation. I'm going to right-click this leaf here, and I'm going to select, transform, and I'm going to flip it horizontally, and it'll flip it and it'll give us a different look. I'm just going to keep going in and fine-tuning the rest of these elements here, making sure nothing is too close or too far away. The main elements I'm going to have facing the same direction, but I'm going to play around with a little bit more of an organic placement for some of these other smaller things like the leaves and whatnot. This is going to be really similar to what we'll see with our tossed pattern. I'm going to pull in some more of these stripes. I'm just going to make a copy and paste that and just make sure it's underneath my symbol. I'm going to place this here keeping in mind the direction of the original. I'm going to play with the placement to make sure it fits nicely. Now I'm just fine-tuning, so I've pretty much got everything that I want to have in this pattern placed in it. Now what I'm doing is just fine-tuning the inside placement of these. What we could do if you wanted but I like the effect of a little bit of a stripe going through with these rainbows. What you could do is pull that rainbow up to your edge and revise your edges. It'll be more of like a diamond shape when it comes to the placement of these rainbows. I like the effect of having a bit of a stripe going across. But basically what we want to do now is just finalized and fine-tune the rest of the placement of the inside pieces here for the rest of your pattern repeat. I'll place the element, that blue and yellow element here instead of the azure just because there's a lot of red going on. It does bump up to the same one on the left-hand side, but actually, I think it plays nicely in terms of the color harmony here. Once I'm done fine-tuning everything and I like how everything looks and feels, we can export this. This is the final tile. We can see how it's working here in the preview. Let's save this. Then we can export this pattern tile itself, so we're going to select our black arrow selection tool. Click on the pattern tile or board, and then we are going to select ''File'', ''Export''. Then we're going to export it as you can select ''PNG'' or ''JPEG''. If you're going to have a transparent background, if you didn't want to have that white background, I would turn off that white background in my layers and then export it as a PNG, so you have transparency. But in this case, I like the way I'm going to keep it. I'm just going to export it as a JPEG at 100 percent best quality. Then we need to go down to the area. We want to change this from whole document because if we exported it as a whole document, it'll export everything on your artboards, including your elements that are outside of your artboard. We want to change this to our pattern tile so you're able to select the specific layers you want to export. In this case, we want to select ''Pattern Tile'' and then select ''Export'', and then we want to save it in whatever file you have set up. I have my class file set up on my desktop here. Then I will just change it to pattern template, full job tile. Then what we can do now is test it. Even though we're looking at the preview, I still like to test it on a bigger scale. What I'll do is I'm going to go down to the left-hand side, my tools here. I'm going to select my Rectangle tool and then I'm just going to create a long rectangle and make sure that there's no color and no outline. I haven't outline right now. I'm going to turn that outline off by clicking on the outline in my swatches and selecting that white circle with a red line through it. Then making sure I have my Move tool selected in that selection is outlined in blue. I'm going to go down to my Fill tool and I'm going to select that little rainbow circle. Then what you'll notice is once you select ''Fill'', you'll get these options in the upper left-hand side, similar to like the options we saw when we had the Artboard tool selected. But this time we want to make sure that the context is selected as fill, and then we're going to change your type from none to bitmap and this allows you to select a specific file or a JPEG or a PNG file that you would want to fill your shape with. We're going to select our full job tile and then hit "Open". Then it's going to be really big. What we can do is utilize these arms here and drag everything in to resize it down so we can see what it looks like. If it's really small, if it's at an angle, if it's really big, and this is just a really nice way to preview and look at and test your pattern out. Now that you're done with that, just hit "File", "Save As". Now we can jump into the next section of this class, which is working with half drops.
12. Creating the Half Drop Repeat: Now, that we've created our full drop repeat, let's jump into creating our half drop repeat. I'm going to reuse the same template that we created, we're just going to make some modifications and save it as a different file. Going back into your full drop template, let's just remove everything off of the actual pattern tile. I'm going to go into my layers on the right hand side, go into my pattern tile, open up my symbols, and then select all of the elements within there. Then I'm just going to move them off to the side here. Now, that basically creates a blank slide for us. I'm also going to delete this [inaudible] as well. With that done, I'm going to go into my file area, I'm going to select "Save As" and I'm going to update this from pattern template full drop. I'm just going to delete the end of it, and then I'm going to change it to half drop and save it in the same area and then hit save. Now, what we want to do is go into our pattern preview, and we're going to delete these tiles. We're doing this because we need to set up this half drop. Before we set up the half drop, I want to showcase the mechanics of the half drop. Let me pull another example that I have of a previously made pattern. This is the same example that I had with my full drop, but I wanted to showcase how this looks and works in half drop format. The setup is essentially the same, but what we're doing is we're creating it with an extra tile because we have to basically take our edges and drop them half a side down. With a half drop, you're repeating elements in the exact same place on your vertical planes here. Whatever's on the top is going to be mirrored exactly on the bottom, but the difference comes into play with our sides here. On the left side, whatever you have in the upper left hand quadrant will be in the lower right hand quadrant. Then whatever you have in the lower left hand quadrant will be in the upper right hand quadrant. We're doing this because essentially we are moving the tile over to the right and stepping it down a half. Basically, if this tile is eight by eight inches, it's going to move over eight, but then it's going to go down by four. Then you see how it creates this staggered effect. That's the mechanics behind the half drop. Now, I'll walk you through how to set it up. Going back into my pattern template here, what I'm going to do is everything is already set up with the symbol. We don't have to do anything with this symbol aspect of this because we're reusing the same template. That's the great thing about using templates is I can just resave it as a different file and edit it and revise it as I need. It just, again, allows me to work smarter, not harder. What we have to do is copy this pattern tile that has the symbol and we're going to paste it into our pattern preview. But instead of four times like we did before, we're going to paste it five times and I'll explain why in a moment. Let's go into our pattern tile, let's copy it either Command+C or CTRL+C if you're on a PC, or you can go up to the Edit menu and select "Copy". Then we're going to click on our pattern preview, and then we're going to paste it five times. We want to make sure that we are copying this symbol, not just the pattern tile itself. We're going to select that symbol layer, and then we're going to copy it and then go into our pattern preview and paste it five times. You'll know that the correct element is pasted because you'll see that little orangey red dash on the left hand side. We're going to do this five times and we can just double check over here on our right hand side, there are layers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and we have everything correct. What I'm going to do to better showcase this in a visual format is to divide up my quadrants. I'm going to divide this square in half horizontally and vertically. I'm going to go to the left hand side and I'm going to select my pen tool, I'm going to make sure I have a stroke turned on and I'm going to turn off any fill. I'm just going to make sure that stroke isn't easy to see color, so I'm just going to use black. Knowing that I have magnetics turned on up here, I'm going to find the center of my square. You'll see the green and red lines pop up, that's how you know you're in the center of that top portion of your square. Click and then hold "Shift". Then we want to create a straight line that goes all the way to the bottom. Then we're going to do the same process going across, so find the center of the left hand side. Click and hold "Shift" to create a straight line, and then click over to the right hand side. That is the first set of quadrant that we've created. But what I want to do is divide this top portion in half, and this bottom portion in half. I'm going to take this crossline here at the center. I'm going to copy it and paste it, and I'm going to drag it up. What I need to do though is drag it up so that it meets half the halfway mark. In this case, on the y-axis, it would be four. You see the red and green lines pop up, so you know you're in the correct place. But if you wanted to double check, you just need to go into your transform tool, look at your x and y, and just make sure your y is four. We're going to repeat that same process. But for the bottom quadrants, I'm going to copy it, the line, paste it, and then I'm just going to hold Shift and I'm going to drag it down. In this case, what we want to do is go to our y and we want to make sure it's at 12, that's going to be the exact center. The idea is if this whole square is 16 inches, each of these would be four inches, so it'd be four at the top. Let me put this intact, so it's easy to see. This would be four inches, this would be eight because it's a full quadrant, and then an additional 4 added to 8 would be 12, and that would be the third quadrant. Then an additional 4 added to 12 would be 16. That would be the whole length of this area here. We're going to do then is use these as our guidelines. Your center line is going to be at 0,8, this top line here is going to be at 0,4. This third line at the bottom is going to be at 0.12. We know we've divided this up clearly and correctly. Now, what we can do is start to move our squares over into these quadrants. We're moving these directly across the same amount, but then we're going down half a step. In this case, we're going to take this first square, click on it, go to our Transform studio. In our x quadrant, we want to select eight and I'll move it across completely. Then in our y quadrant, we want to select four because that's half of eight, and that is our half drop. We're going to go back to the original tile again, and then we're going to change our x coordinates from zero to eight. It's going to move it all the way across this time. Now, instead of dropping it down four, we need a drop it down completely to this lower right hand quadrant, which would be 12, then it'll fill that section. The reason why we have five tiles instead of four is because we have this extra tile up top here. We'll get to that in a moment. Now, we'll go back to our original pattern tile here. Now, because we're just moving downward, we don't have to worry about dropping things half a step. As I said earlier, the top portion and the bottom portion are mirrored. It's just the left and the right edges that are dropped by half of the measurement of the original tile. Since we're just moving it down into this lower left hand quadrant, all we have to worry about is our y position. We would just change it from zero to eight because it's moving down a full complete square. Now, we'll go back to that original tile again. This time we're going to move it to the right and up in order to fill this square. We would click on that original square, go to our x, change it to eight, it's going to move all the way across. But remember, we are dropping this by half at the bottom, so we'll have to move it up by half to fill up that top portion or the pattern wouldn't work properly. What we're going to do is, in this case, we're going to change our y from zero to negative four because we're moving upwards. You'll know everything is correctly placed because you'll have a square that goes off the edge in the top, and you'll have a square that goes off the edge in the bottom, and that creates our half drop tiling. This will be for our preview here. Now, we can delete all of these little guidelines, and let's save your file really quickly. Now, we have our pattern correctly set up for preview. I'm going to go back to my pen tool on the left hand side. I'm going to find the center of my pattern tile, and that green and red line will show up, and I'm just going to click, hold Shift so that I get a perfectly straight line. Then I'm just going to go and double check that my x is at four, and my y is at eight and it is. Then I'm just going to copy this and paste it. Then I'm going to hold Shift so that I can rotate it exactly 180 degrees, so that it basically divides our pattern tile in half vertically and horizontally, so we know where to place what. I'm going to go over to the left hand side here. Again, pull from the elements that I have. I'm going to keep this one a little bit simpler just so that we can have a little bit of an easier time in setting this up. Let's start building with this lower left hand quadrant. Again, I like to do my edges first. Remember that in order for it to show up in your preview, it has to be in your symbols. I'm going to copy it, and then I'm going to paste it, and then I'm going to adjust the placement. It's going to go across x plus eight because that's the size of our tile. Then it's going to go up half. For our y, we're going to do negative four. I'm going to bring the branch in now and I'm going to drag this into my pattern tile and in my symbols. I'm going to bring this into this upper left hand quadrant, and I'm going to hit copy after I've placed it where I want and then I'm going to paste it. Then I'm going to go over to my Transform tool, I'm going to bring it across eight and my x. Then I'm going to bring it down four in my y, so I'm going to sum plus four. I'm going to add in, I think this leaf here in the lower left-hand quadrant again. Making sure it's under the symbols so that it pops up correctly. I'm going to keep it here. It gives us some space between. I'm going to copy it and then paste it. Then again, I'm going to bring it over and up. We're going to go to the X in our transform tool, 8 plus 8. Then we're going to go up. We're going to select negative 4 and a Y. I think I'm going to put this blue flower right underneath, bring this to the bottom here, and just play around with placement, looking at this, making sure everything fits the way I want it to fit, and keeping in mind if it's going to interfere with any of the pieces already placed. I think this works fine. What I'm going to do is take this lower left edge here, copy it, and paste it. I'm going to go to my transform studio, I'm going to go into my X and select plus 8. Then I'm going to go into my Y and select negative 4 because it's got to go up. I think I like the way this is placed. I think I'm happy with my edges right now on the left and right-hand side. What I'm going to do is select all of these elements. I'm going to group them, I'm going to rename that group by clicking where it says group. I'm going to rename it edges, and then I'm going to lock it using my lock tool up here. That way they won't move. I can start to build out the top edges and then fill in the rest. You can always go back in and unlock it and revise as you need. It makes it so that this won't move and everything just stays in place. Now that we have our sides done, let's do our top and bottom. I'm going to work from top, and then I will complete the bottom portion. We have a lot of blues, greens, and yellows here. I think I want to pull in some pops of red. I think I'll use the red flowers and the red dashes and then combine that with some of these other elements, like the green leaves and things like that. Unlike when I was doing the sides because I have to keep in mind the half drop, I'm just going to place all of the elements that I want on this top edge first and then transform them and move them to the bottom. I'm also keeping in mind size as well. You don't have to have everything the same size. I've re-sized the leaf branch here and made it a little bit smaller. Then I'm going to reuse some of these elements like the red dashes and pull them over to the side just to give a little bit of a semblance of balance. I'm also going to rotate elements as well so that everything is facing in the same direction. Once I've placed everything on this top edge and I like where it is, then I'll go back through and select all the elements and then I'll make a copy of them and then I'll paste them. Then I'll go up into my transform tool. Remember, because we're going from the top edge to the bottom, we just have to worry about Y and we don't have to worry about the half drop at all or the half-step. Because we're just reflecting this. In this case, we just need to go to the y-axis and then we're going to select plus 8, and it's going to bring it all the way down to the bottom. Now's the time to look at everything, make sure there's no odd pieces or anything, and make sure nothing is out of place. Make sure it all looks like it's fitting together. Once we've done that, we can select our top and bottom edges. We can select all of the elements in our top and bottom edges, we can right-click in the Layers group, and then we can group them. We'll click where it says, group, double-click, and we'll rename it to top and bottom edges. We'll go back to the side edges and just fix that. I know I would just revise it to see side edges. That way you you differentiate the two. If you want, just like we did before, click on that layer and then we can lock it. Everything's locked in place. We don't have to worry about it. Now, we can begin to fill in the center. What I would suggest you do is go in and just delete your little guidelines. You can just start to pull additional elements. I think I want to keep repeating the same elements in here. I don't want to bring anything new in, so I'm just going to utilize the pieces that we already have. What I'm going to do is just start to bring elements in that I want to work into my center and start placing them. What's nice too, like I said in some of those tips, it might be a good idea to play around with the placement, rotate things, flip them. In this case, I'm going to flip this so that it's facing the other side. I'm going to right-click this element, I'm going to go to transform, and I'm going to flip horizontal. I'm going to drag that in over here because there's this nice little area that I think this will fit nicely in. I'm actually going to turn off magnetics now so that I can be much more detailed and fine tune these placements of all the different elements within the center pieces here. This is where we just start to work things like a puzzle. Where do pieces fit? How do they feel and look next to each other? Then I'll just like fill out the rest of this center. I think I like this layout here. Now that I'm done with this, I'm just going to save this once more, and then I'm going change this to my final pattern. I'm going to save it. Now that I've done that, what I'm going to do now is test this. I'm going to select this pattern tile and you'll know it's selected because it's outlined in blue, and then I'm going to go to file and we're going to export. We're going to export it as a JPEG. What we need to do is make sure that our preset is best quality or quality is at a 100 percent. Then we're going to change our area from whatever it is to pattern tile so that we know that just the pattern tile is exporting. We'll hit Export, and then we will save it in whatever file that we're working with. Now, what I'm going to is test it like we did before. Unlike the last test we did where we could utilize this fill tool, we're not going to be able to do that because this fill tool doesn't do a half drop fill. It just does a straight repeat, the square block repeat, where it repeats the element right next to each other. But in the case of a half drop, we actually have to build the repeat out by hand. We'll go and just click inside of our workspace and we'll go to File and we'll select Place. We're just going to place the tile that we created, and we're going to build this by hand. What we're going to do is just copy this a few times and paste it. We're going to build this like a puzzle. Keeping in mind that the way the half drop works is that it drops down by a half on the horizontal side. If we're to take this square, line it up with this, and then drop it down by half. It will line up and we just piece this together like a puzzle. Keeping in mind when we're looking at the vertical space, you don't have to worry about moving it by a half. It will just line up exactly on the top and bottom edges. We'll go down to the sides again and we can move it up half as well. We can just keep building this until we get a fill that fits whatever space we're working in. We just keep building this out until we have the pattern size the way we want it. That is basically how a half drop repeat pattern works. I think it does a great job of concealing where that repeat starts and ends. It's a fun way to get your eye working, get your brain working when it comes to building these intricate repeat patterns styles. That's the half drop. Now, we're going to jump into our next video, which is all about the break repeat.
13. Creating the Brick Repeat: Now that we've created the half job, the next repeat style that I want to go over with you quickly is the brick repeat. We're going to do this next because I feel like it works similarly to what the mechanics were for the half-drop. Before we start building this repeat that we see on screen, I'm going to go through the mechanics of it first. When we were creating the half-drop repeat, I'll pull up the example again. When we were building the half-drop, we were working from left to right. Basically our half-drop was on our side edges and then our mirrored areas were the top and bottom edge. We would move from left to right, we would move on the x-axis and then we would go down on the y-axis by half a step. With the brick repeat, it's pretty much the opposite. Our mirrors are going to be on the left and right. Then with this full pattern preview here, what we're seeing is that we're matching exactly on our sides. But when it comes to the top edges, we're actually moving down the full length of our repeat tile and then scooping that over either to the left or to the right by half. If you see here, if we look at our pattern tile where things are matching up, whatever is in your upper left-hand quadrant will be in your lower right-hand quadrant, whatever is in your lower left-hand quadrant will be in your upper right-hand quadrant. Then whatever you have on your sides is going to be mirrored exactly. It's a center like the opposite of a half-drop. But I just wanted to explain how the actual mechanics of this repeat worked. Because it can be hard and complicated to visualize it in your head as you're talking about it or reading about it. That's why I think it's important to highlight the guidelines here so that we understand where all of these changes and adjustments are taking place. Let's get started on creating the brick repeat now. To begin to build out this repeat, what I want to do is setup our Pattern Preview. We're just reusing that template. Let's just delete everything off the board and then select Save As, and then rename this as your brick template, and then hit Save. Now what we want to do because the pattern tile already has the symbol created on it, we're going to make copies of that. Just like what we did with the half-drop, we're going to copy it and paste it five times on our Pattern Preview tile. I'm going to Command V or go into my Edit menu and paste a total of five times. I'm keeping the lines up here from the example just so that we know where to move our actual tiled elements. Let's click on this first one. What we're going to do, make sure magnetics is turned on and we're just going to drag it over to the right quadrant here. You'll see the little green and red lines pop up. But just to make sure you can also go into your transform studio here, and what you want to make sure is that the x is at eight exactly. Then we're going to go back to this original again, and this time what we're going to do is start working to create our brick repeat moving on the y-axis. Basically whenever we're moving something down with the brick repeat, we have to move it left or right as well to create that brick effect. Because I have my magnetics turned on, it will snap right to that edge at the halfway mark or go into our transform tool just to have a more exact placement. We're going to be working with our y-axis first because we're going down on our board, we'll hit plus 8 to go down all the way to the bottom edge. But like I said, because we're creating the brick repeat, we're going to be moving that repeat tile to the left or to the right by half of that original numbers. Since our measurement was eight, we're going to move our x to the left by four. Since we're moving to the left, we'll use a negative. So negative 4, and it will move it into that first space. Then we'll go back to our original and then we'll go to our y again, and then we'll hit plus 8 because we want to move it down completely one square. But then this time what we want to do is move it to the right. Then we'll go to our x-axis, since we're moving from left to right and we'll hit plus 4 to fill up that centerpiece here. Now we'll go back to that upper right-hand quadrant and select our last square tile. We're going to be moving this down and all the way to this last section here. What we'll do is we'll go up into our transform tool. In our y-axis, we'll select plus 8. Just like what we did with our half-drop, we have to keep in mind if this was divided into three sections, this would be four, eight, and then 8 plus 4 is 12. So we would be moving on our x-axis plus 12 to fill in that final segment there. If the math seems complicated, it's okay, don't worry, just turn on your magnetics and it'll create the snapping for you. If we were to select all of these squares, you'll see that we have this nice brick tile created. Now that we have those elements placed, what we can do is delete our little guideline and then we can start building this pattern. I'm going to be using these rainbows because these do a good job of fitting that bricks style. Like usual, I like to start with my edges and then I work my way inside. Keeping in mind whatever you put on the left here will be exactly mirrored on the right. Then whatever we put up top, this is where the brick repeat is happening. We'll start with the top just so that it's easier to work with. I'm pulling that motif into my symbol so I can see what I'm doing. I'm going to just place it up top. I'm going to copy it and place another next to it. I'm just keeping in mind the placement, making sure I have some nice spacing. Then remember, whatever we have in the upper right-hand corner is going to have to go in the lower left-hand corner. I'm going to create my brick repeat with the top edges first and then I'll go into my side edges and fill in the center. With this first upper right-hand segment, let's copy it and paste it. Then we're going to go to our x-axis and then we are going to go our y-axis first because remember we're moving from top to bottom, and we're going to select plus 8 so it brings us all the way down the page. Then we're going to go making sure that's still selected to our x-axis, and we're going to select negative 4 because we're moving it half, and we're moving it to the left. We're going to go to our upper left-hand segment here, we're going to copy it and paste it and then we're going to go into our transform tool and we're going to go to our y-axis first, and we're going to select plus 8 to move it all the way down the art board. Then we're going to move our x to plus 4 because we're moving it to the right and we're moving it half of the total of our art board. We can already start to see this starting to fit into place here. Now I'm going to start to build out my sides, making sure I pull the rainbow into the symbol section and keeping in mind spacing that I'm going to need to get everything to play nicely on the art board. I'm going to copy this and then I'm going to paste it and I'm going to drag it down to fill my next area. I'm just going to rework the placement of these rainbows on the side, and then I'm going to select them, and then I'm going to copy them, and then I'm going to replace them on the right-hand side. I'm going to copy them, paste them, and then I'm going to go into my transform tool, go into my x-axis and hit plus 8 and it will bring it all the way across where I need it. I want this to feel a little bit area in terms of placement and almost have a bit of a maybe '70s or '80s vibe with the rainbows. Sometimes simpler is better. As I look at this, I think this works nicely and it gives off that fun bright vibe that I'm going for. I lessen the number of motifs I had in here. You still get that very brick style feeling, even though this is a rounded arc shape. I think it might be a good idea to add some clouds at the edges of the rainbow. But for now, like I said, I'm going to keep it simple. This is our final brick repeat with the rainbow. Let's save this now File Save As, save it wherever you are planning to save it, and then hit Save. Now what we're going to do is export this pattern tile and we'll test it out over here. Just like the half-drop, this isn't the tile that you'll be able to utilize the fill tool with, so you'll have to build it by hand. Make it through that pattern tile was selected. Let's go to File, and then we'll export it. Then export it as a JPEG. Make sure that your area is your pattern tile. Make sure your quality is at a 100 and then export it and save it wherever you plan to save it. Then what we're going to do is move over to the right-hand side in our art board and start to build there. To place the tile into our art board, we'll go to File place and then find that brick tile that you've created. Place it in. Then what we can do is begin to build this out. Unlike the half-drop, this repeat is going to fit together side-by-side. Where the changes happen is at the top and bottom. Let's copy this original and then let's start to build this out. If we pull it right to the side, you'll see it lines up perfectly. Then if we're lining it up at top and bottom, you'll see that it doesn't quite fit directly down, so we have to move it over a half and it will tile correctly in the center. Let's copy and paste this one and then we'll move it over to the side and it will meet and match there. We'll do it to the other side as well. Then we can just keep building this as we go. It creates that very prominent brick shape. If we were to select everything, you'll see that it's created that staggered brick shape. Now that we know this works and it's tiling correctly, we can move on to our next repeat style, which is our final and it is the tossed. Let's jump into that.
14. Creating the Tossed Repeat: Now that we've created the brick repeat, I want to jump into creating the tossed repeat. What you'll find is that this repeat can be done in either a full-drop or a half-drop style. I'm just going to have us do it in a full-drop style. But the only change really is that when you're placing your elements, you want to be strategic in the sense that you don't want it to look like you placed it in specific areas, but you want it to look and feel organic, and a great way to do that is to basically make sure that it's a non-directional layout. You want to basically work with the placement of your motives, rotate them, turn them upside down, place them sideways, see how you can play around with the overall layout of each of the elements so that they don't feel like they're only going in one direction and so that they feel as if they're being scattered on the fabric. I find that this looks like it was created by I rather than having a measured or a legal rigged feeling. Similar to what we saw with that first full-drop that we did, everything was in one direction. Everything was spaced out really nicely. With this, I often find that you can space things out, or you can group them together. It's okay to overlap too if you like that dense feeling of a layout. The first thing we need to do is open up our original full-drop repeat template. I'm going to go into Affinity Designer. I'm going to select "Open". I'm just going to open a recent because I have it as my most recent file. Then what you want to do is probably go back into whatever file you were already working on and drag those elements out of that file so you can copy them, and then paste them into your new working art board with your template. Let's select all the elements. I'm just going to copy them, and then I'm going to go into my template, and then I'm going to paste them off to the side of my art board, and then I'm going to right away just re-save this as my tossed file. I'm going to select "File", "Save As", and then I'm going to rename it from Pattern-Template-Full-drop to Tossed, and then I'm going to save it. Just like the full-drop, whatever you put on the left-hand side is going go on the right-hand side, and whatever you put on the top, it's going to be put on the bottom in the exact same placement. Then the idea though, is to rotate, flip, reflect all of these motifs so they're not going in one direction. The idea is that you're creating a non-directional print, but it's supposed to feel as if it's tossed or randomized even though you are being strategic in what you're doing, but you're being strategic and making it feel more organic. Let's start building this first, and then we can get into this in more detail. Like I said, just like in the full-drop or the half-drop, you're going to keep in mind the edges first. You can create this in a half-drop style as well, our half-drop that we created is a bit more of a tossed overall pattern because it's not fully one-directional. But for this one, we just want to make it even more randomized when it comes to the placement of your elements making sure that things are not all in one direction. Making sure that elements are rotated and flipped as you're placing them into the layout. I think what I'm going to do is focus on placing floral element on my edges, and then things like the rainbows and the stripes in the center mixed with a little bit of floral element in the center as well. Remember if you're noticing that nothing is coming up in your preview, just make sure you select those layers and that they're underneath, embedded within your symbol layer above your colored rectangle. I think while we're in here, I'm also going to change the background color because I feel like it clashes with this. So I'm going to go to my rectangle, go up in my layers, go to the rectangle in my layers, go up to my color swatches, double-click that pink circle, and update the color. I think I'm going to have this really pale, pale pink. I think it will work well with what we're creating here so it's not just white. We'll bring some of these blue flowers in as well. If you find that you're having any issue with placing things, make sure your magnetic is turned off and it'll make it easier to fine tune your placement of each of the motifs. I'm going to right-click this motif, and I'm going to go to transform, and I'm going to flip it vertically, and then I'm going to right-click it and select "Transform". I'm going to flip it horizontally. Then I'm going to select this green element. I'm going to right-click it and then I'm going to select "Transform" and I'm going to flip it horizontal as well. Then I'm going to bring in some of these green leaves. I'm just going to work on building out this left edge here, keeping in mind the placement of all of my elements within the style so I can see what it looks like in the preview, making sure nothing is too close. Everything has a bit of breathing room. I'm going to bring in another leaf. Then this time I'm just going to flip it and rotate it by taking that little arm that's off to the edge of it and rotating it with my mouse. Then if I hold "Shift", it'll rotate it in 15-degree increments. So I'm just going to rotate it till it's facing the opposite direction of the original leaf that we just placed down. Then again, making sure it's within the symbol so I can see what everything looks like. Now as I mentioned, within those helpful tips, another helpful thing to do when you're creating these toss layout is play around with size in addition to placement as we're doing right now. Try creating your layouts with two or more motifs in varying sizes. So we're going to pull a bigger motif in with the rainbow in a moment. Again, it creates more of an organic feeling overall layout. This can just help give the illusion of your layout being random, even if you're placing those motifs in really strategic and specific areas. When it comes to the overall feel of your layout, if you're going from more of an airy feeling layout, make sure that your motifs are balanced and equidistant. If you look at this, everything feels as if it's the same distance. But if you want a more dense feeling layout, don't be afraid to overlap things, pull them closer together and work with your motifs in that manner. Now that I have this edge completed, I'm going to go into my layers and I'm going to select all of these elements. I'm going to select my last element underneath my layer here, hold "Shift" and then I'm going to select the top most element on this left-hand side. Then what I want to do is copy it, and then I'm going to paste it. You can either do Command C, or Control C, if you're on a PC, or you can go up into your edit menu and select "Copy" and then "Paste". Then what we're going to do is pull this over exactly too low right side. We'll go up into our transform area here, and in the x area, we want to select plus eight so that it moves it all the way across to the right side. Once you've done that, you begin to see the repeat starting to build. Just keep an eye out for anything that looks off or odd and doesn't look like it belongs. My main concern right now is just these two leaves over here right next to each other. But we can always come back and revise if needed. Now that I have this sides done, what I like to do is just go through group everything together and lock it. I'm going to go into my Layers, select the first in that group, making sure I'm not selecting the stuff that's in the center, like the leaves here and this blue flower. I'm just going to select everything on my edges, and then I'm going to right-click and I'm going to group them, and then I'm just going to lock that group so it doesn't move anywhere. Then I can go back into building out the top portion of this now. I'm going to use some more of these flowers here and place them, and then I just want to make sure that it doesn't interfere with anything in this top area here, but I think this should be fine. No, actually it does. If we see here with us placing this here, you can already see it's going to interfere with that leaf there. May make more sense to move it or rotate it up a bit more, or just move this set of leaves just a bit. Once I have that place in the top, I can go in and add a few more elements, like these blue and yellow flowers here. I have them facing down into the left. I'm going to have them facing up and to the right just for a change, and then I'm just going to keep doing this to like fill up the top portion here before I finalize the bottom edge. Once I've placed the top edge, then I'm just going to go in and select all the elements in the top edge, and then I'm going to copy them, and then I'm going to paste them, and then I'm going to go to my transform tool, and this time because we're going from top to bottom, we're going to be working with the y-axis. I'm going to go into my y area in the transform studio and I'm going to select plus eight, and it'll bring down exactly where I need it to be, and now we have all of our edges done. Let's select all of the elements that are in our top and bottom edges, and I'm going to group these. I'm going to go into the Layer, select the first one in that set, and then I'm going to hold ''Shift'' and select the last one and it'll select all of them. Then on that Layer selection, I'm going to right-click and I'm going to select Group, and then I'm just going to lock it so it doesn't move, everything stuck in place. I don't have to worry about it, and then I can begin to build in the center. I'm going to place some of these rainbows here, and like I said, making sure how to play around with varying sizes when it comes to your motifs. I think this might be a little too big, so I'm just going to resize it down a bit and then I'm going to copy it, rotate it, and then place it over to the bottom right here. Then I'm going to rotate this one just a little bit so it fits better in this upper area. Then I'm going to grab some of these additional elements like the stripes, and then I'm just going to paste them in and place them where it seems like it might make sense. Keeping in mind the overall color schemes, and then I'm going to take some of these elements that we already have in the layout, but increase them in size like this set of leaves here. I'm going to place them right within the symbol, making sure it fits properly. Already you can feel the overall tossed feeling of these motifs. They don't all go in one direction. If you were to cut fabric out of this and make something, it won't matter in what direction it was facing. Because it could work in any direction because of the overall placement of the motif. I'm just going to keep filling out my center here with some additional elements. I think I like how this layout is. My only concern are these two leaves right next to each other. I'm going to go into my side group here. I'm going to unlock it by clicking on the Layer and then clicking the little unlock tool here, and then I'm going to open and expand this layer out. I'm going to find my top and bottom. I think I like where the bottom leaf is placed. I think my concern is this top edge here. Yeah, so I'm going to delete the top leaf here, so making sure I select both my left and my right. I'm going to delete the left one now I have to go and find the right one. I'm going to delete that one and I'm going to just place something else here. I know that's basically this little space right here. I'm going to place something that I think will fit nicely within that area without it being too close to another element. I think I'm just going to use another one of these shorter red flowers, and I'm going to copy it, paste it in, and I'm going to make sure I pull it to the right here. I've placed the red rose. I think I like it placement here now that I see it with everything. Now I'm going to just copy it and paste it, and then I'm going to go over to my Transform tool, and since I'm going from left to right, I'm going to go into my x-axis and I'm going to select plus eight, and I'm going to hit ''Enter''. I just want to review it to make sure it doesn't get in the way of anything else. Actually, I think this looks nice for our final piece. Now we can save this. We'll go up to File, Save As, and then save it in whatever file you are planning to have this saved in. Then select the Pattern tile itself, and then select File export, and then you can export as a JPEG or a PNG, whatever your need is. Make sure the area is your pattern tile and then select Export, and then save it to whatever file you have on your system, and now we can test it. Let's go into our left-hand toolbar here, we're going to select the rectangle tool, and then we're just going to create a rectangle. What we want to do though, is make sure that there is no fill here. In our color options here, make sure that the circle is in front, like the doughnut shape, and then we're going to select that little circle with a red line through it and it's going to remove our fill color. Then just make sure you have no stroke as well. Then with the fill selected, we're going to go to the left-hand toolbar and we're going to select our fill tool. Because this is a full drop repeat, it'll work perfectly using this fill tool. What we're going to do is make sure our context is fill and then change our type from none to bitmap. Then just find the most recent pattern you created and then hit Open and then adjust the size of it with the little arms here so you can see it and make sure everything looks nice and it makes sense. You can rotate it, and again, as you look at it make sure you don't see anything that looks off. I think this is done. I'm going to then go in and save the file once more, File Save As, and then that is it for each of these layout designs. Let's jump into the outro.
15. Course Outro: Great work today. Thanks for showing up, learning and creating alongside me. I hope you found this course helpful, that you're more comfortable designing a variety of seamless patterns in Affinity Designer. I hope you've enjoyed learning something new or a new way to do things that you already do today. Don't forget to submit your final project deliverables to the class project gallery for your classmates and me to the checkout. If this is the first class you have seen of mine and you want to learn more about me and my work, visit me online at www.bellasophiacreative. You can also check out more of my courses relating to the fashion and creative industries right here on Skillshare. Check out the class description box for some additional links to some of my other surface pattern design classes, as well as some of my classes relating to the fashion industry. Thanks so much for watching and creating with me today. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.
Jenny Veguilla-Lezan, Latinx Designer & Illustrator
