Live Encore: Draw Simple Repeat Patterns in Procreate

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] I love Procreate. It's such a game-changer ever since I discovered it. So much of my work actually migrated that direction because of how user-friendly it is and how many capabilities it has. Hello, I am Peggy Dean. I am an artist, educator, author, really whatever they let me do. You may know my Skillshare classes on fine art or creative entrepreneurship. I'm a bit of a dabbler also on Procreate. I'm very excited to continue that with you. Today we are going to be going over some very fun repeating patterns that are so simple in Procreate and super excited to dive in with you. You will walk away from this class with an adorable repeat pattern that you will be able to put onto a notebook or a shirt, or just a beautiful piece of artwork. This class was originally filmed live with the participation of Skillshare's community and it was lovely. So I'm really excited to bring that back around so that you guys can also participate in case you missed it. Thank you so much for jumping into this class. I am so excited to see what you make and see how you interpret this lesson. So be sure to share it in the projects. I can't wait to see what it is that you do. [MUSIC] 2. Importing Colors to Procreate: Hello, I'm really excited to be here today. My name is Dylan Morrison. I am a writer and editor in Cleveland, Ohio. I will be your host today for this amazing class about illustrating bright fun patterns in Procreate with Peggy Dean. Peggy, I'd love to turn it over to you and hear a little bit about you and what we're going to be doing today. Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining. I'm Peggy. But if you don't know who I am, my name is Peggy Dean, I have a terrible elevator pitch. I am a proud queer artist in the community. I have a wonderful wife who I love so very much. Those who know me for a long, long, long time you know Laura, you know that when I talk about her it's great. I am very proud to have this space and thank you for facilitating this to Skillshare. They're just so awesome, you guys know this. Without further ado, we're going to dive in. I do a whole bunch of stuff. Today we're going to be playing on Procreate because, why wouldn't we? We're going to be doing a pattern of sorts. I'm not going to lie to you, I have no idea what's about to come out, and on my side, it might be flowers, it might be rainbows. Whatever the case may be, feel free to follow along with me or create something of your very own. We're not going to get too crazy in-depth here, mostly for time reasons. But I will say that you can get as crazy in-depth as you want to because the principles of what we're learning will be across the board. It's very straightforward, especially with all the new updates that Procreate has done over the years. Listen, as a queer person for literally decades, how did I not know that there were flag colors that weren't just the gay pride flag? Excuse me, I had no idea. I felt like a fraud. But there's trans flag, there's a lesbian flag, there's bi, there's pansexual, all these beautiful colors of flags. I'll just do rainbows, like little cutie pie rainbows that can be repeating. If you look up gay flag colors. Here we go. We're getting into it. I think that this one is the lesbian one, just look it up. I'm going to take these colors and I'm actually going to put them into Procreate. See, I told you I'd bring it around. To do this, you have a few different ways to import color palettes that make it super easy. You can multitask if you have Procreate open. By the way, iOS 15 that's coming out, maybe by the time some of you are watching the encore of this class will have a different way to multitask that makes it a little easier. But for now, we just pull up slightly. We hover over Procreate and then go into split screen. I usually pull it so that this is only a third. But then you can open your new canvas. Here's where we start. You like how that segued into starting? You're going to create a new canvas and just make sure it's square. You can do whatever size canvas you want. Know that if you do intend on making a pattern for fabric or something, you're going to want your DPI to be higher. It doesn't really matter the size of the canvas though, because we're going to make it repeat. It's probably not going to be on the same one anyway. But for the sake of this, I'm just going to choose square that is just in Procreate already. We're going to go to our color palette. We're going to go to Palettes. We're going to create a new palette with the plus sign here, and then all you need to do is pull this image over. Don't create a new palette because it's going to do it on its own. Pull the image over and then it auto-generates those colors. That's a pretty cool way to import a color palette in case you did not know. What I will say is that there's obviously variations of tones in here. The reason why you see that versus the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 colors that are here is because this is not a vector-based image. All that means is when it's vector-based, it can isolate certain colors. You can't do that in Procreate because it's a raster-based system. If you zoom way, way, way in on that image, it's going to have little pixels that are connecting those two. It's going to pull everything in between. I know that that's the case, so for this example, it's not necessarily pull the exact colors. If I wanted to do that, I could easily just import this image. Then when you import an image, if you didn't know this, you can hold your finger down on it and it has a color picker, and then you can go into your color palettes and actually drop just that color in. Little tricks around creating color palettes. I'm a big color palette fan, so I had to share it. Basically, I'm going to be lazy and not import those. I'm just going to eyeball the general colors that are in here. Select them, tap them into the new one and call it good. That looks right. I am going to put them in order. If you didn't know, you can always press and hold a color and just move it so that they are arranged the way that you want them to be arranged, it's really helpful. Now, I don't need this anymore, so I'm going to swipe to get it out of there. I've got my color palette, I can set it as my default so that when I'm not in my colors and I'm on my desk, it'll show up right here. Another thing about Procreate is you can actually take the colors out from where they are and then just have your palette up so that it's over off to the side, so you don't have to keep clicking on your color wheel. That's a new one that I'll be doing today, which I've actually never done before. 3. Choosing & Organizing Brushes: Now is the fun part when we draw. I'm not going to go crazy with a bunch of unique brushes that you need to worry about because we want to play right now. You don't need to download anything. I actually have things organized in a different way and I'm going to explain it only because this is one thing that people have been pulling from workshops lately that has nothing to do with workshops, but it was the most valuable thing and I get so many DMs after, asking how I did it. I'm just going to explain this setup. I know that brush organization is so annoying sometimes. As you can see, I've got folders. Then beneath the folders, I have the brushes that would belong in those groupings. These aren't actually folders. They are technically brush sets. If I click on it, it's a brush set that has no brushes inside of it. Lisa Bardot, texture, big shaders, tool pick, copycat, whatever. Those are all her brushes. The brush sets, all I do is I just create a new brush set. I go and find the little folder emoji, then I type that in and I just drag all of the brush sets underneath those folders. It's the best because it makes everything exactly where you want it to be. I got my brushes and then I have Lisa Bardot, Trailhead, if you have anything like that, and then I have Miscellaneous, Watercolor and then I have Procreate. The reason why I have Procreate at the bottom is because I use them the least. However, I duplicated some brushes and moved them into a new folder called Procreate OG. Original Procreate brushes favs. I go in there and these are the Procreate brushes that come with that I love. I did that just as a cheat sheet for me. I think that will help a lot of you guys. You guys refocusing, it's clear on my side, it's probably just because it's via Zoom. I will show you closer because Zoom sometimes can make it look a little bit grainy. See how I have watercolor brushes are all underneath here. You can do that however you want to, but it makes it a lot cleaner when you're looking for brushes, especially of this type. That is so smart. I wish I could take credit for it. It was Jimbo of ShoutBAM. He's the one I learned it from. Either way, it's awesome. I want to use Nikko Rull, so I'm using that. The reason I love this brush is because it just has the coolest texture and it stays like a mono weight the whole time you use it and follows your brush. The only thing that's annoying is that it's so sensitive to the direction you're going that it can do this in the very beginning. Honestly, in that case, I'll just go in and just straighten it up like this and call it good. But it's one of my favorite brushes for the texture. If you don't like texture, just grab the monoline brush that's under Calligraphy. It looks like Calligraphy, Monoline. You might have to make it pretty big for it to do what you want it to do. Otherwise, you have to fill it. This is such an easy tutorial, you guys. That's why we're going over some Procreate tips and tricks. It's just one of the things I love including so much, is because there's so much to know about the platform. For that reason, I'm going to show you how to enlarge the brush real fast in case you do want it to be larger when you're doing this instead of having to fill everything in. Whenever you alter a brush, my recommendation is to always duplicate it first so that you do not affect the original settings because it's going to drive you crazy to have to reset it to its standard settings and then lose the one that you had. Then you'll see any brushes that were imported or duplicated are going to have this little Procreate symbol on the top right of that brush so that you know that's the edited one. Then you can click on the brush. Here are the brush settings and all you need to do is go to Properties. Yes, Properties of the brush. Then you'll change the maximum size. That's it. That's the maximum size that it can go to. You still have all that it was before. It's just that you are now changing your abilities of how large you can get with it, and then say Done. Now when I go back, you can see that the size is all the way up and it's humongous, which I probably don't need it to be that big, but now you have more control. It's really, really simple to change that. If you ever buy a brush and you're like, well, this is not rendering the way I want it to, check the size. Like those watercolor stamps you might buy, they show up this big but you want it to show up larger. That's also going to vary depending on your canvas size. Sometimes if you have a brush that's set all the way to high and it's perfect. Then you do a canvas, it's like triple the size. It's not going to be that big because it has to take up more space. 4. Creating Your Illustration: I'm going to just go in the order that is here and you are going to see my very terrible skills of making spacing correctly because I guarantee you some of these are going to overlap in the way I don't want them to, but that's okay. Oh, here's a pro tip, start with the smallest color. That way you're not going to make it so that you create a rainbow and then you don't have enough room for what you're trying to do. I'm not worried about my placement on where I'm putting this because you can obviously move them. Something I do recommend not so much because of color change or anything like that. But just until you have your structure down and the spacing down that you want is to do each color on a new layer. I realized that this is not always possible when you have a large file size and a small or gig option on your iPad, so if I'm doing a whole bunch of layers, I'm going to try really hard not to because this tripped people up before when I was going over this stuff and I felt really bad, and people are like, I don't have that many layers, I'm like what a rudy I am, rude head. What I want do real quick though, this white is a little too light, so I'm going to make it a little grayer by just coming in, dragging it down a little bit going back and sometimes this is what I'll do when I want variations of colors. I'll grab a new color and I'll just put it directly underneath the other one, because depending on what I'm working on, I might want both of those to represent what I'm doing. I do the same thing in branding colors, just having something that's slightly off will pop differently, so anyway new layer. This is where I'm going to struggle because I want to make sure it's lining up-ish, well that's not so bad. I want it to look hand drawn anyway. My point is if you overlap too much like this, then it takes away from the effect so spacing is cool. Next one, and I'm going to pick this pinky color, pink there we go and I'm just going to hopefully do this. I'm a little off, so I'm going to go a little bit in on this side and then the reason why I like to do it in layers is because I can select that layer and just bounce it over. I'm going to do the same thing here, hopefully it turns out cute and good. Remember handmade quality, it's always cute and the darkest. I was just going to say, my husband always says that whatever you make, if it has character that's actually the best possible version of it, so that's what I tried to step up. Exactly, I fully agree with that. I'm going to move this over-ish. 5. Adjusting Color & Cleaning Up: Now I have the option to do a couple of things. I can go to those layers and then if I see any weird overlap or like any empty areas, I can just select that color again and just fill it. That's one of the reasons why I'm okay with whitespace because I can just clean it up, go to the next layer that I want to clean up, select that color, cleaning up there. The other reason that I like to do layers is, let's say I have this done and I pulled colors that I thought that I wanted, but maybe the middle and the between is too dark, you guys, you're going to love me for this. [MUSIC] Rather than going to my color palette and moving these around and continuing to change it, if any of you were super upset that the re-color tool disappeared, and what that means is you can change the color of an element in live time so that you don't have to keep dragging and dropping. I thought it disappeared, but it did not. It is still there. Here's my hack around it, which I'm sure by the time you guys some of you watch this, it's going to be totally fixed and you are like, but it's right here. Listen, [LAUGHTER] in this update, it is not. What you do is you have to activate your quick menu. There's a few different ways to do that. I've actually changed my settings so that when I tap on the middle and between my two brackets, my quick menu comes up. You have to activate that. You can change how yours is activated under Preferences. [LAUGHTER] You go to your wrench icon, you would have Preferences, you go to Gesture Controls, as I'm guessing walking through. [LAUGHTER] It's fine. Quick menu, but I'm right. I'm right the whole time. That's what matters, right? Exactly. And then you can toggle on how you want that to be activated. The reason why I chose the middle one here is because before it activated, something else also activated. I think it's the color select. That's why I got rid of that option so that when I press it now my quick menu comes up. Here's why I'm bringing this up. If you hold down on one of the quick menu items and you scroll down, you're going to find re-color. Wow. It's there. It's way buried now, but it probably won't be forever. But it was one of the most frustrating things for those of us who used re-color all the time. That's how to find re-color. Now, once re-color is selected, you can't really see it, but in the middle of your screen, you're going to have this cross friend. That's the technical term for it. It's like a cursor icon. Two things. One, this is when I can go into my color palette. It was this color. But check it out, when I move this around now, it's live. I can see exactly what things are looking like and I don't have to keep dragging and dropping as I'm selecting new colors. Some of you know this already, it's my absolute favorite tool that Procreate offers. It's so simple, I realize, but it makes a huge difference because now I can save that new color. You can see how different it is, but it gives off the same vibe, but it's more balanced. I still have re-color on and I can pull it down and what happens with the floods, let's say that's what happened when I dropped the color in and it's not covering everything, it's your flood. Sometimes also, let's say everything was on the same layer, if I did a re-color, it's like the same as a color drop. When you color drop and before you release, if you pull it up and down, it's going to adjust the flood where the color goes. I'm just going to show you what I mean once all of this is merged. Because I'm happy with my colors, I'm not going to change them so now I can merge these layers together. If you miss that, it is a simple pinch all the layers together with your fingers. Now, if I wanted to re-color something, so I'll just go to that dark color. Let's say I want to re-color this one and the flood was all the way up, do you see how that tint changed? It grabbed everything that's on that layer and affected it all. It's not going to change to that color because all the colors are different, but it will change the hue. Let's say you did all of this on the same layer and you're like crap, now I can't adjust this one part, check your flood. If your flood's too high like this, when you do your colored up, I haven't lifted my pen yet, so I'm actually just going to while it's still on there, pull. It looks like this is pretty high up. There we go. You'll see the color drop threshold and you just want to pull it down to where it only affects the spot that you want it to. The same thing applies for re-color. It's just that you don't have to hold your stylist because it'll be at the bottom. Those are essentially the exact same thing and I just wanted to share that with you in case you get a little tripped up by it. Now that everything is merged together, I can clean up the bottom. Because I like the texture, I want to clean up with texture. Just a quick tip if you didn't know, I'm on this Nikko rull brush. Let's say I want the same brush on my eraser for when I do erase this, instead of having to look for it again, if I'm on my brush already, you have to be on your brush of the one that you're using. If I just take my finger and hold down on my eraser, a little pop-up came down and said erase with current brush. Now when I go to my eraser, I see that I have the same exact brush selected as I did. [LAUGHTER] Delaine your mind is blown. You are truly blowing my mind right now. This program is so amazing because it's like somebody sat down and was like, I want to do absolutely everything. Wow. I had no idea you could do that. I know. You thought you were coming to play with patterns today and all of a sudden. What I'll do here is I'll make this a little bit bigger and I'll draw a straight line so you see how it's keeping that texture. Actually I think I'm going to do it this way. I don't know how I want to do it. Who cares? This one actually doesn't have texture on the edge so it's really just texture in the center. But if you had a brush that did have texture on the edge, that shortcut would come in really handy. It's a moot point for what I'm doing, but that's okay. You learned the tip. 6. Designing Your Pattern: When it comes to patterns, that's where we're going to go here. Since this is like a simple rainbow, I could keep drawing these over and over and over. But for the sake of time, I want to get through this part so that you know exactly how to set things up. I'm going to take advantage of duplicating and duplicating and duplicating my own drawing. To do that, I'm just going to move this one over here. Here's the biggest thing to remember when you're planning and setting up a pattern is that, yes, you can go super close to the edges, but do not, under any circumstance whatsoever. Go off of the edge. I don't care if you make this so close and you get so close, do not go off the edge. Rule. Now, something fun is you can select it with the arrow, selecting everything on that layer. Remember I've merged mind together, so everything's on one. Then I can take this green friend and I can rotate it. I like to rotate mine. I think it's fun and cute. I wish I had drawn this a little bit longer, but it's fine. Then of course, you can resize it. Let's say I grab it, I resize it, let's resize it, and then I pushed it over here and then I deselect it. This is the part you have to commit to because Procreate is a raster based program and it doesn't save the raster of the original thing that you draw. Every single time that you resize it, it's going to get more and more pixelated, even if you're going smaller. If you resize, I keep it to a maximum of two and then I just commit to it. It's just something that helps me so that I don't lose quality in my actual drawing. It's annoying, but it is what it is. Maybe they'll fix it eventually. Now I'm going to my layer panel. I'm going to swipe to the left and say Duplicate. That's going to give me exactly the same thing, exactly in the same spot. I can select it and then move it. I didn't know it also does it on rotation. Emily is saying that it also does it on rotation. Of course it does. This theory to me, but I recently watched Liz Kohler Brown who has some awesome classes also. She uses Procreate a ton. She was saying that when you duplicate a whole bunch of layers, I've literally never done this, but she said that every time you duplicate, it can also change quality. When you duplicate, if it's the same item, always duplicate from the original bottom layer. News to me. Look like copy machine back in the day,. Right. It make sense. I don't know how true it is, but I mean, if Liz is saying it, she's pretty smart. It seems like she knows what she's talking about for sure. I'm just going to bring these in a few places, rotate a few, make sure I don't go off the edge. This is just a fun cute project. Then we'll see where it goes. If you have a blank space like this, that's okay. If you have a lot of blank spaces and you're like, but one would look really good right here because that's going to space it out, well, fret not my friends, we will get there. I don't find a space that I really want to put another one yet and so I'm going to go with this. This is so so simple and you can get as elaborate as you want with it. You can do layers of beautiful florals or whatever you want to do, the same rules will apply. I just wanted to give you something fun, that's easy, that will be consumable when it comes to building patterns. The one thing before you start to pattern build, you must, must create a new layer, pull it down to the very bottom, and fill it with color. If you want a white background, totally fine, fill it with white. Do not change the background color, create an actual layer. It's fine if you end up making this a JPEG and then pulling that in and that's fine because it will retain, but it's a good practice if you do this on Procreate. If you go to Photoshop, if you go to Illustrator, it's just a good practice to have the actual square B, its own layer of color. I'm going to just pull and drop a color. I'm a beige fan. I love backgrounds that are beige. It's just my jam. For the sake of interest, if this is bothering you so much like it's bothering me, I'm just really, really quickly going to just add a little bit of gray to it. But when you do that, know that if you do the whole thing, you will see edges. All I'm going to do is create a new layer in-between the background and my objects and I'm just going to pick a texture brush of some kind. I know that there are some, but for the sake of time, I'm just going to go into my own because I just want to quick splatter. I want to do stardust. Look at me having so much fun. Basically I'm just going to stamp this and then I'm going to pull some of these elements around. But notice that none of them are coming off of, see like this one. I know that this is simple, but that tiny one at the edge, I'm getting rid of it. Basically, I don't want anything going off of the edge because it will show up broken on your pattern. I'm just going to move a bit of the stamp around so that it's all over and so cute and so fun. Of course you can do this by drawing, but I am saving time. That's darling. Just so you know, those aren't blobs, they are tiny stars. No judgment from you, I won't hear it. 7. Creating Your Master Swatch: Now, we're going to make this repeat. Even if we don't collapse everything in this one, I'm still happy that all of these are on individual layers. That's what I want. I'm probably going to smash them all together eventually and you're like, why did I keep those on layers? Listen guys, work in layers, just do it because you don't know when you're going to want to return to this for whatever reason and move it around. A question from Lisa is, do I ever take Procreate files and put them in Adobe? Absolutely, and I will also render them into vectors usually with image trace because I'm very lazy. Not lazy, impatient, impatient and lazy. So once you have your main swatch, is like your first illustration part of it. I'm going to go back to my gallery, exit out of there, and now I'm going to duplicate the actual Canvas. So I'm going to swipe to the left and say duplicate. Now I'm going to open that new Canvas. From here, we need to fill in this space. How do I do that? You might be asking yourself, allowed to your cat. I will tell you. You'll go into your Layers panel. Now, no judgment from you. You could group these. Yes, you could select them all and group them and collapse them so that they're their own thing. I'm going to go ahead and be a rebel and commit to my process and make it one layer. I know wildly out of control. From here, I'm going to create four layers that look exactly like this, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate. Now I have four. Now what I want to do is I'm going to drag each of these squares to the opposite. So basically, I want one of these in the first quadrant and then the second, and third, and fourth. Think of them as quadrants. What will help you is turning on your drawing guide. So you can go to your wrench icon, you can go to Canvas, and then toggle on drawing guide. You're going to have a grid come up, say edit drawing guide, grid size at the bottom, and all the way up. All the way up will give you a perfect quadrant section thing. If you're distracted by color, if you're one of those people, it also has the ability to change the color of those lines, and change the opacity, and the thickness. It just lets you do everything which is fun. So I'm going to say done, I've got my quadrants. Now, I have four of these layers. I like to keep track of my layers, I also like to see what I'm working on. So I choose the top layer first so that I know it's there if that makes sense. Because if I was to grab this one and move it around, I'm not going to see it. So I start with the top layer, and I always do the same order. I pulled up the top-left, then the top-right, then the bottom left and the bottom right. When I select the layer with the arrow, I turn snapping on and magnetics on. This is going to help your layer, it will help it obey the quadrants. Mind the quadrants. So once that's selected, you can see how it snaps. You're going to move it to the center and see how it snapped. It had those beautiful lightening looking, whatever they're called. Yeah, it is a godsend because if you've watched my previous class before it was polished, you had to zoom all super far in, and just drag it just over the line and it was so frustrating. So this makes things so much easier. Yeah, that would drive me insane. Oh, it was so annoying and then it's so sad because so many student projects came in and it's like why is this weird white line here? It's because it was clunky but now it's not, which is great. I go to the next layer and I'm just going to pull that so that its bottom corner meets the top here. One of the things I'm going to say is if you happen to have it where it's not even for whatever reason, which does happen, and you de-select it, just go back. It doesn't matter how far you've come, go back, restart this process if you have too, because if it's not perfect, it will not line up. It's not a super tedious process once you get it going so just commit to the process, it will make you happier. So we're just basically doing a basic repeat. We're not doing half-drop, we're not doing anything like that. It's a basic repeat. My shapes are really simple, so it's not going to be like anything spectacular. Here's a good example. I actually did what I said I didn't want to do and there's a white spot, so I'm going to just press two fingers to go back to that where I was at, and then do that part again. That's because I was talking too much, and I wasn't really paying attention to the snap. I think that happens to the best of us. Oh, yeah. So I just want it to snap and sometimes zooming in will help it snap exactly where you want it because it's also easy to move your pen just slightly as you're releasing, and then it will come off of that snap, which is annoying. Just be aware that that can happen and now we're good. My dog, I don't know if you see it. I know she's trying to get out and she doesn't realize the doors open because she's blind poor thing, but she's on this side. Just like pushing into it is having the hardest time. Now you hear her tip toppies, which is what everybody wanted. Yes. We have been delivered the tip taps. You're welcome. Now we can see the empty spots. So once we've done this, what we've done is we've spread it out to where this spot that I was talking about before, it's just now connected with the other side. You can see the edge of this, if it was put right here, it would line up with the edge of that. So you have a repeat tile based off of this, but now's the time where you can fill in. I'm just going to add one of these right here. Now, one of the things that's frustrating is that these rainbows are not on their own layers anymore. That's why I say you can group them if you want to so that you can duplicate like individual parts and move those around if you don't want to have to go through this process again, but I'm the queen of workarounds for my own workflow. So I'm just going to collapse those, I'm happy with this repeat tile. Then I'm just going to come close to this one, and the reason why I'm coming close is because it's also grabbing that background color. So if for some reason I was going to duplicate this section and I grabbed a whole big chunk, since it grabs the background color, it could overlap one of these other elements, which is just annoying at that point getting close to it is good. Real quick, just for those who don't know. This s ribbon looking guy icon, if you select that, it's going to allow you to select certain areas in your illustration. Then to actually close that selection and grab it, you can either select the arrow or you can tap the dot that you started with. Both of those things will close that selection and then from there you can move stuff. I actually don't want to do that, I just wanted to share. So what I'm actually going to do is have this selection and then before I even close it, actually, you could do this when it's closed, it doesn't matter. Sorry, I made that confusing, but I'm just going to say copy paste. What that does is, if I open up my layer panel, it's going to have this new rainbow from my selection. So if I made this large and I turn this off, you can see the outline there. That's the reason why I'm keeping it close is so that when I drag it over here, the color of the outline isn't going to overlap some things, see how that would happen so it just helps me be more intentional with placement. Then I'm just going to drag this, maybe put it sideways, I don't want it to clash too much with what's going on and I could make it smaller, that might be fun. Yeah, I'll just do a smaller one up toward the top. Notice how I resize that a lot, but it's okay because I never actually released the selection. So I can play all day long until I release the selection and that's when it starts to get nasty. I'm going to make another one of those tiny ones just so I have a little bit of balance with size. Know this, if I put this down here because I think that's a good spot for it. When it repeats, these two are going to be super close together because this is what matches this. So just know that, you might want to put it somewhere else, like right here or maybe up high. I'll do three of them so that one can live here, and then one can live in-between. Who knows, this is going to be an interesting one, isn't it everybody? I think it looks awesome as somebody else who I didn't know about the various queer flags until I realized I was trans and it's like, oh, there's a whole flag, I have to figure all this stuff out. I think it's great. Yeah. You're doing good work here. Here for the job. Okay. 8. Making the Pattern Repeat: All right. This point, this is your acting master swatch; not the first one, but this one. This is your repeat tile. Everything that you put on here, same rule applied by the way, I didn't go to the edge, but everything that I put here is going to repeat. One of the reasons why I stayed away from the bottom is because these ones are so close to the top which are going to show up here. That's something you learn as you go, as you create patterns, is like how that's going to look. Now comes actually testing the pattern. When we test the pattern, we have the opportunity to then return here and move things and shift things, and that's why I say like working in layers is great because it just makes your job easier, especially if you're doing a really complicated layer upon layer, upon layer like beautiful botanicals and whatnot. But again, same principles apply. We're going to go back to gallery. One of the things that I do at this point, is I name this canvas. If you guys know me, I'm really quick with my workflow and very bad at organization. But what I will always do is name my master tile. I name it master tile or master swatch, but that just lets me know this is the repeat. This is what I'm going to put into designs or whatever. I'm going to duplicate that. Maybe duplicate before you name it because it just renamed it Master Tile again, which I don't want. Go in here. I'm going to do the same thing now. I have this flattened layer and I'm going to duplicate it so that I have four of those layers. Similar to what we just did, but different in the sense of, we're going to turn the Drawing Guide on, we're actually going to shrink these now. Instead of just moving them, we're shrinking them. The top layer, the top left corner will stay where it's at. I'm going to select it, instead of moving it, I'm taking this bottom corner, same thing with the snapping magnetics everything's on, and I'm going to take it and I'm going to resize it and let it snap to the middle. Go to the next layer, select it, and then I'm going to pull this one up to the top-right. Pull it up, let it snap into place, release. One of the ways before I release it, to test it, is to zoom in and see, is this lining up? It totally is, so I can deselect it. My Drawing Guide is on. I was like, what's that purple line? [LAUGHTER] It's your Drawing Guide guys. Don't be freaked out. I recommend changing that color to something that's not on your pattern at all, because otherwise you're like, how did this happen? Next layer. Now I go up here and I push that to the middle. Then I'm going to do that to the final one and bring that down like this. There, now I turn my Drawing Guide off and I have my repeating pattern. This one is very, very basic. There's not a lot of magic happening here. But let's just say, for instance, that this part bothered you because maybe you'd want that to be more centered in this space. That's where you can identify exactly where it's at, go to your previous canvas and just adjust it, move it over, and then just repeat this process. Another thing that I'll say is when this is done like this, this actually, because we didn't resize the actual tiles after, this also serves as a master swatch because you can see it repeats here. Let's say I put this design on like a notebook and I printed as an artist. What I would actually want to do is the next one, so go back to Gallery, you can say master on this one if you want to. I just use the word master so I know that it's a repeating swatch. You can say Repeat Tile. You can name things whatever you want. This is just my process. What I'll do from here, actually, is I could create a new canvas and do it this way, or I could just export a JPEG. I'm just going to duplicate the canvas because it's already in here. What I'll do is, I'll merge these, and then I like to make this smaller and just increase it in size a little bit and move it so that everything has a falling off point. Then that's my test. It doesn't look as much like a repeating pattern. Does that make sense? You're not seeing this, this, this? You're seeing it more as a whole. Then I can be lazy because I'm not actually using the swatch right now. You would not do this by the way, you guys. It's just bugging me so I'm doing it right now. Then I can go in and fill that empty space. Cheats. That is then what I could submit to a design of a scarf I'm printing or doing a drop ship type of thing. But that was basically a 15-minute-ish, 20-minute pattern. When you do this on your own, you're going to do this in 10 minutes. No joke. That's including drawing simple design. If you do more intricate stuff, of course, it's going to take longer the drawing part. But the pattern build in Procreate, like 3 minutes. It's really just dragging it to match up, filling the spots that you want to fill, and then moving it to your test tile, and then that's it. This is how all of my patterns always look. They're always my initial illustration, my master tile, the master tile that's actually a test, and then the one that's actually design. I usually say example or test or whatever of how it's going to look so I know it's not a repeat. 9. Q&A + Final Tips: There we go. I made it on time. I know we have Q and A, [LAUGHTER] but is there a way to lock the pattern in to the guides so we're not off by a fraction of a millimeter when I drag elements in place? Yeah. When you select something, that's where you would go to snapping and turn that on, snapping, magnetics and you can change the distance to make it even more fine. I didn't know that until right this second. That's the thing about Procreate, learn all the time. But one of the ways that I do it is just by zooming in before I release and actually visually seeing the connection. I'll show you one thing that I didn't go over that I did want to cover and I think that this is a question that comes up a lot. I'm just going to go back to my illustration layer It comes up a lot because people don't know how to use masks. I just want to bring this up. Let's say you didn't want to erase the bottom there and instead you oh, this just reminded me, when you exit a canvas and you come back into it, you can no longer press Undo, just so you know. There's no undoing. Just as an FYI. It made me think of it because I was like, so if we go back and don't erase, this is what you could do instead. Anyways, I promise everything is relative. [LAUGHTER] But let's say instead of maybe you're not sure that you want to commit to it erasing something, you can erase without actually taking away those pixels. Oh, another trick, two tricks in one. You know how sometimes you're like, oh, well, this is the rainbow I want to work on. What layer is it on and you turn them off and on until you find it. Here's a cute trick. I had to set this up in gesture controls. It's called layer select. I set this up so you have to set it up however you want. But I set it up to where if I hold this down and then tap with my stylus, you see Layer 1, you see Layer 5, you can see Layer 6. When I release, [LAUGHTER] it will select that layer. I know for some reason a lot of this, it's because of my duplication. They're all going to be named Layer 5, that be Layer 1. But basically, it's going to select the layer that you're on. Then you can make those edits to that layer, which is just a quick way to not have to go through and turn things on and off. You have changed my life. [LAUGHTER] I can't tell you how much time I've spent, frantically flipping through layers, when did I do this? I know. Really quickly, masks. I'm just going to give this to you straightforward. We're not going to get into it. I'm going to be straightforward. Let's say I want to get rid of something here, but I'm not committed to getting rid of it yet. That's a good way to put it. I'm going to select that layer. I'm going to select mask, not clipping mask. You guys know what clipping mask is. Mask something totally different. I know that's confusing. I do. But right now, we're talking about masks. We mask it. I don't know if you noticed, but my color changed to grayscale, so it's going to be white and black. Masks work in white and black. Black takes away white reveals. I know that that seems also counter-intuitive. It seems it should be the other way round, but when in doubt, just toggle to black or white, you're going to figure it out. Black, working on the layer mask, it's connected. You can see both of these are highlighted. You'll know which one you're working on because the brighter one will be the selection. If I select here, yes, this is connected. Notice, my color went back to a color. But then when I go to mask, it changes because it works in black and white. If you're on gray at all, it's going to make the opacity change. Just know that black, I can do whatever I want here. It looks like I'm erasing it, but in reality, it's a layer mask. Let's say I erased what I wanted to erase and then I switch to white because white reveals. I can bring those pixels back by coloring in white. It's a really handy trick if you want to work in destructively, which I totally recommend doing. Now, if I wanted that to go away, I could erase the layer mask or I could just toggle it off and on if I'm not committed to my non commitment of having a mask. Just little tricks like that. For those who don't know what a clipping mask is, by the way, it's basically, you create a new layer. It's not something that's connected to the layer like a mask is, it's a fully new layer. I'm going to do this opposite. Instead of applying a clipping mask, right now, it's just a layer on top of another layer. I'm just going to do this. If I look at my layers panel, you can see that the only pixels that show up on the layer below it are these rainbow pixels. When you apply a clipping mask, what that means is anything that's on the layer above a layer of a clipping mask will clip everything from that layer to only the pixels for the layer below it. You'll see that in your layers panel with this tiny arrow that is indicating a clipping mask. There you go. 10. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] I hope you guys enjoyed this class. I know that there's just so much that you can do with this. I would love to see your patterns as you worked along with me, and I'd also love to see the patterns that you create afterward. Be sure, visit the project gallery, upload your work, and selfishly I just want to see it. Thanks again so much, and I will see you next time. [MUSIC]