Mastering Surface Pattern Design with Midjourney

1. Course Promo: Hi guys, Welcome to this course on Surface Pattern Design with Mid Journey. Now what is mid journey? Well, mid journey is an AI image generator. And what that means is, by carefully engineering two or three sentences in seconds, we can create really high quality, tileable, and usable artwork for surface pattern design, with some tweaking and some finessing. We can change the style, we can change the look, we can change the color, we can change the field. And once we've done that, with some further tweaking, we can upscale, change the DPI, change the file type, and get our files ready for print on demand, or just printed onto fabric. Now, Mid Journey does have a paid subscription, which is a minimum of $10 a month on the basic plan. But as far as I can see it, the fact that you can get very high quality and insane usable images in under 45 seconds, it's a bit of a no brainer. So other than that, there's not much more to say other than, let's jump into the course and create some really cool surface pattern designs. See that? 2. Accessing Midjourney: Okay, I'm welcome to the first lesson of this course. So I'm going to be talking you through how to access mid journey so we can start actually using it. Now, if you've already got mid journey, then obviously you can go ahead and kind of skip this lesson and move on to the next storm where we'll look at prompting. But if you haven't got mid journey, then strap in. I'm going to give you a load of links and show you how to get, it's really easy, really fast. So I'm on mid Journey.com I'm signed in because I've already got a user account. You can see him signed in down here. Now, the reason I'm showing you this is very soon, and this is being recorded on 8 November 2023. And I think by 8 December, within the next month, we're going to be able to actually work completely within browser. Can you see it says imagine dot dot dot, Come in soon. Imagine bar is where you prompt what you want to see. So very soon we're going to be able to work directly in browser, but not yet. Now when you sign up to mid journey dot Carman maker login. You'll be able to tell once you log in whether it is doable in here because this won't be graded out. And if it is, then you'll want to go to Discord and download Discord. Simply click download. You'll need to log in with an e mail. Relatively straightforward, and once you've done that, we can't get started. Now you can see that I've got Discord by here. It's installed and I'm just on the Mid Journey server. So once you've downloaded Discord, you need to log in and it'll probably be pretty empty if you haven't already got it. And then we're going to need to come back to Mid Journey.com Now, as I mentioned in the course promo, you do need to pay for mid journey. I'm currently on the standard plan. It's absolutely up to you what you kind of go for if you're just giving it a go. Honestly, I would start off by doing a one month basic plan, $10 see if it's for you. I know that it is for me and I do use it quite a bit. So it made sense for me to get the standard plan as a next stage. So peck which subscription plan you want. You can actually start using it next. What I'm going to direct you to is the mid journey documentation. You've got a quick start guide here, so if you do struggle with anything, go to that and it'll give you all your documentation which looks like this. And you've got all of this stuff here going through absolutely everything. Well, more or less. Now in terms of getting started, once you've installed Discord and subscribed to the basic standard Pro or Mega plan, what you'll need to do then is you'll need to join the Mid Journey server on Discord. What you'll need to do is you'll need to open Discord. Press the plus button at the bottom of the server link list. I'll show you that. Now in the pop up window, click Join a server and Paste, or type the following URL. Now if we just look here, let's just bring this to the side. You can see I've got my little plus button here and it's popped up over on the other screen. Plus button here, join the server, and then you'll paste the link in and click Join Server, and you'll be ready to go. And once you've done that, it'll take you to, this is the Mid journey server, if I just go home, it'll take you to here. I'll load the stuff in here. So there's more getting started stuff, there's a little bit of support if you're just triiling out prompt chat where people are sharing prompts and stuff like that. So that's where you get started. Now, there may be for you, a little channel in here where it says Newbies, where you can start prompting and generating images. You can see within this guide, it says go to the Newbie channel or the General channel. And then you can start using the imagined command to start prompting certain things. However, the way I do it is I direct message the mid journey bot. So pop back into discord. Let's say you've already signed up to the server and basically what you want to do is go to something like, oh, I don't know. Let's just go to the discussion and you'll see there's members on the right. All you need to do is find the mid journey Bart, which will just be there, right click and then go to message. And what you'll do then you'll see these are all mine. I just do this within my own little, this is direct message in the barter, within my own little space. And now what I can do is type imagine and I'll just say Homer Simpson in real life, for example. Just because I was doing some Homer Simpson stuff earlier. Now in the next lesson, we're actually going to go through prompting for surface pattern design to look at keywords. And we're going to look at a few different prompts. We're going to look at how we start tiling stuff. We're going to look online for inspiration and stuff like that. And then we're going to look at upscale and all sorts. Okay, so that's going to be it for this session. Now what I'm going to do is just let you see that this is coming in. So it's looking quite cool. And then normally I'll keep a lot more than that as a prompt. If for example we look all the way up here. Actually not a lot, but you know what I mean? So we're going to leave it there. All the links that I went through with you, there we go. There's my finished result. All the links that I went through with you in here today, I'm going to share with you. So I'll post a document, a text document up with all these links. And yeah, hopefully you get that sorted and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. Cheers. 3. Generating our Patterns with Midjourney: Okay, and welcome back. Now in this session we're going to look at prompting for surface pattern design to get the designs that we want. So I've broken this down into a few different areas. These are things which we want to make sure that we cover. We want to obviously tell the software or the bot what we want to see. So is it animals? Is it flowers? Is it vintage logos, designs, illustrations, water color? What do we want to see? Another thing this is going to be important is colors. Another thing to consider is art style. So is it watercolor, is it art Deco? Is it minimalist and possibly era? If you think it's something out of the '90s, then tell it that. And another good one is specific designers, and we're going to put this into action in a moment. I found these keywords are really, really good. Simplistic and minimalist stuff tends to work a bit better, but not necessarily. But I've just found when you are doing something simplistic, using these keywords is good. Using surface pattern design is really, really key because that's what we're trying to create. At the end of the day, UHD resolution will often get us stronger, more refined results. Using the term seamless is again a key thing to do because that's what we don't want any seams in our pattern and using the term vector I have found to help. And we've also got to use this parameter. So what I'm going to do is I've got a few different prompts which I want to try now. What I need to do to start I'm message in the mid journey bots. So if I'll just go slash and hit imagine. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to bring up some prompts which I've literally, I've typed these out using this by here. So you'll notice that each of these prompt will say, what I want to see, The colors, the art style or era. And a specific designer. So this one a contemporary pattern featuring line art illustrations. So contemporary is the era. What I want to see, the style, the colors an artist and I'm going to have this style at the end. So I'm just going to copy this down to here, my prompt. And then I hit a type tile, so it'll be tileable. And then I'm just going to hit Enter and we'll see what it gives us. Okay, so here we go. Now what's interesting about this is it's given us quite a few of variations of leaves. So this one hasn't got leaves, but it's really, really nice. And you can see as this ends here, it'll be tileable to that side. We've got some leaves in here, here and here. So that's interesting, and I'll tell you why. If we have a look at Christina Forrest's website, you can see leaves, leaves, leaves, leaves, leaves, leaves, and some leaves in there. So that's quite a key trait of hers. Okay. So why I wonder now what I'm going to try is I'm going to try this prompt without the name Christina Forest and we'll see what it does. So if I just go to Imagine and I'm going to paste that again, but I'm going to remove now in the style of Christina Forest. Now let's see what we get if I just go D and then tile and enter. Okay, so this time we've got a few less leaves, we've got abstracts and organic shapes. Possibly a little bit of a leafy thing going on there, but this would be the only one. So you can see just by removing or adding the name of the artist, how much of an impact that has. So I'm going to try another one. Let's have at this one next. A colorful playful pattern illustrations of cats in the style of Daria Solak surface pattern design. I've got that in there this time. Seamless UHD vector illustration. So let's just go ahead and go image and type that in there. Let's make sure. I think I was missing a space, but there. Okay, I think we're good. So I'm going to hit Enter, so that one goes on. Now another thing while that's going through the motions is if we come to mid journey, you can also just type in here search prompts, let's go surface pattern. So let's get some inspiration for stuff. This one's really nice, they just use the term simple illustration, so we could do that again. 2000 social media symbols, watercolors. Wow, that's quite a long prompt. So you can copy that if you wanted to. And you can come through simple shape, but they've used the tile parameter, simple illustration, but they've used the tile parameter. And seamless, this one, obviously quite a long one now using the name Christian or which is interesting, inspired by the runway shows. Cool, so let's have a look. Right, this is looking really, really cool. I'm absolutely loving this. Is this tileble. Well, in next lesson, we'll check, look at that, Look at that, That is really cool. So let's have a look at our next one. I've got two more in here. Red strawberries with yellow and flowers green background in style of painted illustration by Anna Louisa Santy. And then this one. And then we're going to do this one as well. So let's just go and imagine, type that in. And let's go ahead and I'll do two at a time. Imagine, and let's get this bottom one so we can review and we'll see what they bring us. Okay, so we've got these done now. So let's have a look at this one again. I think this is going to be tileable, but this is really, really nice. Exactly what we asked for. Red strawberries with yellow and white flowers. I could have said daisies and the green background. It's taken the green background and some of them to be very leafy, but you know, that's okay. And I think this is going to be tilable. Now, we've also got this camper van one. I'm loving this one up here. It's kind of messed up, the camper vans by here, not going to lie. But again, this one's really, really nice as well. And just looking at it, it looks like these are going to be tileable as well. Which they should be, because we've used that prompt. Okay, but they're really, really cool. Now, just a little bit of an extra, in case you haven't used this before, We are going to use the upscaling parameters here later on. But let's say you really like this one, but you just want to get a little bit of a variation. Well, you can go V two, this is 1234. Let's get variations of number two. And when you come down here, it'll then do some variations of the one that you clip. Okay, and here they are. So these are variations of this one up here. And you can tell because it's got that blue background and there's a little, there's quite a few less camper bands in here and it seemed to got a similar amount and a similar blue background. Okay, so that is how to prompt specifically for surface pattern design. In the next lesson, we're going to use a website resource to check that all of these things are tileable. We're then going to look at upscaling next steps and we'll finish off of the class project. So I really hope you found that useful and that you enjoyed and I look forward to seeing you in the next video. 4. Checking the Pattern is Tileable: Okay, so in this lesson we're going to be looking at checking whether our textures are actually tidable by looking at it. I can say I think they generally are, but it's always good to do a check. So before we do that, we actually have to choose which one of them we want to upscale. Because at the moment, it's one sort of grid of images. Now we will be looking at upscale in a little bit more detail in the next lesson. So first of all, I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to say, right this one, number four, I want to upscale that so I get it on its own. I'm going to go and get Upscale, number four again. And let's just get another one. I love this one. Upscale, number one, Cool. So what's going to happen now is they're going to upscale. We can also do some more things then, but we'll get to that later. So I can either right click and go Save Image, or what you can do is you can view on Web and it'll open it. Let's just click Visit Site. It'll open your Mid journey profile. And now you can see it and download it from here. I've gotten used to just downloading it from here, but you can do whichever. So I'm going to go back to my images. What I've got is I've got a filter on to say show me only my up scales. If I showed you my grids, it would just be loads and loads of them and I get lost up scales because I just upscale these. Let's just refresh. Cool. I'm going to go for this one download and I'm going to go for which one was it? This one by here. And go ahead and down load. There we go. So I've now got them downloaded and the next thing we want to do is come to this website by here. So what this is going to do is it's going to check to see if our pattern or texture is actually seamless. I'll just check the edges to make sure, does it sit next to each other correctly? So I've got over here a little folder of all my images. You can see it but there. And what I'm going to do is one by one, I'm going to click and drag them in. So I'm going to click and drag this one. And there we go, we can kind of scale out, wow, at mental. And you can see that there's no harsh weird edges. It's all working really, really, really well. Arguably, there is this cat here that hasn't got a set of correct eye. So you could go back and then choose another one to kind of work with. Let's see, over here where that's happening. So, which cat would that be with the one eye it is this one by here. So, actually that isn't something to do with the border. You can see that actually the border is okay. It's actually within the image and you've got another one there. So again, you could take us into Photoshop, you could just choose a different 11. That's worked better, so let's now try it with the strawberry. Swung the, drag this in, and you can kind of see a little bit of a kind of border to a degree, you can see the grid. But it's really not bad. If we kind of zoom out and there we go, it's not too bad. But you may think, actually I'm not keen, I want to try another one, so let's try another one. Let's try the camper van and let's see how that, I mean, that one's worked really well. Like I said, I've noticed with the more complex designs, you do have a little bit more of a giveaway where the seams are. And with the more simplistic designs, I have found that to be just a touch easier. As you can see with the more detailed ones, it's not bad, but you can just see where the edges probably work. But you know, it's really not that bad. In terms of the time it took to create this. That's really good. Okay, so that's your tile check. Oh, I will be sharing the link with you for this, by the way. So don't worry about that. All links will be shared. So I'm going to leave it there for this one. In the next lesson, we're going to look at upscaling, what resolution do we need to have and making sure that we've got the correct resolution and all of that stuff. So I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 5. Upscaling our Patterns: Okay, so we're back now in this session, we're going to focus on upscaling. Now, it's really important if you're uploading your designs for print, it's really important that you understand what size they should be. Now I'm going to show you a website and essentially what we're going to look at is some guidelines. Now this is a guidelines for spoon flower, where you can upload some designs to try and sell and print on fabric. And they're given some common design sizes. And what they've got is a load of different pixel measurements here. So if we go to hours and right click, we upscaled and we have now downloaded from the Internet. And if we go properties, we'll see that this is 1024 pixels by 1024 pixels. Now that's not really that great when you consider all these different sizes and different websites will have different, different views and different requirements and stuff like that. And what I'm going to encourage you to do is wherever you're going with your designs, whether you're printing them, uploading them to a print on demand website or whatever, I'll now show you how to kind of resize these things and upscale properly. And you can upscale to different sizes, whatever you kind of need. So what we're going to do is we're going to go to this website and I'm going to give you all these links. Again, upscale media. And I'm going to say, right, I want to upscale this one, because this is the one that worked the nicest for me. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to drag this into the upload image and I'm going to then wait for this to load. And this is free, but you do get a limited amount of credit, so be spare in with it. You can pay. And there are other ones on the Internet that you can use. So what we can do here is it looks even better really by here. So what we can do is turn on enhanced quality. It'll just take a minute to load again. I always tick this. And now also, as well as enhanced quality, I'm going to say upscale four times and it's going to go to, I think, 40, 96 by 40 96 pixels, which is good enough for some of the print on demand websites. Okay, so now we've got a file which is going to be 40 96 by 40 96 like I mentioned. And we can go ahead and click Download Image. And then let's open this image once it's downloaded, here it is. And if we write, click and go to Properties, we'll now see in the details, we have got 40 96 by 14 96. So this is our upscaled image. So I'm just going to type upscaled pattern and the next thing, as well as spelling it correctly. But the next thing that you're going to want to consider is your dots per inch or DPI. This will currently be a DPI of 72 and for print, you want a minimum of 150. Generally, you want 300, and I know this is going to be 72 dots per inch. So I'm going to show you two different ways of doing it, one with Photoshop and one with something called Gm Gimp is the free version of Photoshop. So first of all, I'm going to go ahead and open this up in Photoshop for those of you who have Photoshop, and I'll just show you very quickly in there how to do it now. Also, if you want Photoshop, you can go and get a free trial as well. So I'm going to go ahead and open this, bring it across. So here it is. All I did when it opened is I simply just went ahead and drag this in like so. Now if I got an image and an image size, I can see here in this window that if I change it to pixels, yeah, we got 46 by 14, 96. But our resolution, our pixels per inch is this 72. And that's optimized for screens. We actually want it to be 300, so I'm going to go ahead and type in 300, but keep this to 40 96 by 40 96. There we go, like it was before. And basically it's just increasing the dots per inch. So if I just go, okay, now I've got an image which is going to have the correct resolution. Now another thing that you want to consider is some website will want different types of files. So from here we can go File and Save As, let's just click Save a Copy, so we get more options. And you can save as a Tiff, you can save as a PNG or Jpeg or PDF. Somewhere in here, I think. So whatever it's asking for, this is how you get there. So let's just go ahead for every in safe and say save as a Tiff, upscale pattern as a Tiff. And that's now got the correct resolution and I'll just click okay. So that's how you increase the pixels per inch on Photoshop. Now I'm going to show you the same with inside of Gimp. So let's go ahead and close this and type in Gimp. And open this. And again, I'll provide a link to download Gimp. It's just a free version of Photoshop. Okay, so when we're inside of Gimp, I just want to go and click and drag my file into here like that. So it's going to open and then I'm going to go up very similar to image and then down to print size by here. And within this box again, if we change this to pixels, we can see where pixels gone that point. Sorry, it uses just a different terminology. So 40 96 by 14 96. And again, instead of for this resolution, because a lot of people will call this resolution, but for the print resolution, we do want it 300 by 300 like that. Okay, So you just want to go ahead and click okay. And then again you can go ahead and just go file export as. And just give it whatever file type you like. It's not as nice of a window, but you can go ting whatever you want to do and then just click Export. But I've already got one, so I'm not going to bother. And there you have it. That is how you correctly upscale and change the resolution of your patterns so you are ready to put them on whatever websites or print them with whatever printer you want. Okay, So in the next lesson what I'm going to do is I'm going to summarize some next steps. And then there's going to be another video lesson where I just go through what your class project is. So I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. Cheers. 6. Next Steps: Okay, so before I go ahead and set your final class project, what I want to do is just bring your attention to this website here. For those of you who have now learned the skills and are really keen to see what you can do next to them. Maybe you're already selling surface pattern stuff somewhere, but maybe you just want to start out and see what's possible. So here's a website that I'm want to direct you to. You've got some print on demand shops and stuff like that, but if we scroll down, it's going to show you 14 places that you can start promoting and, or selling your work. So spoon flower is one of them very, very common one. And that's quite a good one as well. There's a lot of goods, customer support, but again, each one will have different revenue and commission and stuff like that. You've got this print me pretty print all over me. Graphic River, Creative Market. Some of these are different, some of them I haven't come across and haven't used. Spoon flower and print me pretty I have used before Graphic River, I'm aware of. You can just sell your digital files and then you've got more print on demand stuff. This is where you upload here people buy your files and here this is print on demand where red bubble, for example. You can get your pattern and say buy it on a phone case, buy it on an ipad case, buy it on a T shirt. So people can actually buy products with your design on it rather than buying your fabric or your design. Okay. And designed by humans, breadless, I haven't heard them public nor the society six I know quite well and in print. So you and Etsy, obviously a very well known one. So I'm going to give you this link and I think next steps for you, if you've enjoyed this course, you may just want to see, well, does anyone want this? Or I may want to print it on a phone case just for myself. And again, each of these different companies will have different requirements, different minimum resolutions. They may want different file types. So think back to the previous lesson on how you meet those requirements. Make sure you revisit that previous lesson just to kind of make sure that you can do that. Okay? So I'm going to leave it there for this one. And then in the next and final lesson, I will set your class project. Awesome. I look forward to seeing you guys there. 7. Class Project: Well done. You've nearly made it to the end of the course and now it's time for us to put the skills that you've learned into practice. Now your brief is to create three different surface pattern designs. The first one, all I'm going to say is I want it to be for a child who loves space and who loves rockets. The second one, I just wanted to feature some sort of watercolor based style. And the third one, I just want that to be some sort of simple and abstract illustration based style. So those are three. A design for a child who'll have space and rockets. A watercolor based style design, and a simple abstract illustration based design. So I really can't wait to see what you guys design. Once you've done these designs, upscale them and then upload them to the class project along with the prompt that you used. So we can all see what keywords and what prompts are really good. Other than that, after you've completed it, do remember to upload that work. But then I hope you enjoyed the course and I look forward to seeing you in a future course. Cheers.