Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi. My name is Josephine Skapare. I'm a Swedish Illustrator and Designer based in Stockholm. I'm a freelancer and I work in a bunch of different markets, all from editorial to home decor. I just love creating patterns. In my work, I mix both digital and analog techniques, and that really makes the iPad the perfect thing for me. It's so handy since you can bring it anywhere and it really has that analog drawing field to it. I was so excited when I finally found this way of creating patterns all on the iPad. I use the app Procreate, and I go from sketch to finished tile all in the same document. For this class, we're also going to use the app Adobe Capture. It's free to download and it's really easy to use to preview our patterns. Make sure to download that as well. This class is really for anyone who likes drawing patterns and also enjoys working on the iPad. For our class project, of course, we will be creating patterns: one basic and one half-drop repeat. I really suggest that you work with a simple icon, maybe florals or foods, or just a fun little character. Just keep it simple so you can follow along with the different techniques that I show you. Once you get a hang of the technique, it's really intuitive and then you can work on more complex patterns and really have fun with it. Make sure you upload your process and final designs in your class project. If you share any process on Instagram, please tag me and I'll have a look at it and of course, comment as well. Let's dive into Procreate. I'll show you quickly which tools we will be using in this class.
2. Tools – Procreate Overview: Let's open up the Procreate and start. The first view you get is a gallery and this is where you will find your documents when you have a bunch of them so you can work on. They are saved automatically, so you just go back to the gallery and they can go into the document again and it's saved. We're going to start by creating a new document, and we are going to hit this plus sign up here to the right. We will create a custom size. For this pattern, and for most patterns that I make, I stick around something around 3,000-3,500 pixels. I think it's a good size because you can work around with scale afterwards. Also make sure you have the DPI setting to 300. Three thousand pixels in a square will print approximately 25 centimeters in a square or 10 inches when printed at 300 DPI, so it's a really good scale to work with. We're going to rename the setting to "Pattern tile", and then we will have that saved for future projects. Now our canvas is created, and we can actually go back to the gallery by clicking up here to the left. Now you can see that there's a new document created. We can rename this document, and let's call it "Basic". Before we start sketching our pattern, I'll just quickly go through which different tools I'll use when creating this pattern. Of course, we're going to use the brush, and you can find the brushes over here. There is a bunch of brushes that comes with Procreate that I love, but you can also buy from designers at different creative communities. I have some from Maya Rhombic and her company [inaudible]. They make awesome Procreate brushes. But you can also make your own, and I know John Brameld has a great class on that here on Skillshare. Here you find eraser, and as well, you get the same brushes and that's great because you can erase with the same brush that you draw with. Next to that, you get the layers and this works pretty much as Photoshop, and you can work with Blend Modes, and Clipping Masks, and Alpha Lock, and things like that. I will show you how I work with that once we start drawing. Next to that you find, of course, the color pallet. You can save your different palettes here, and you can get different views on how to choose the colors. Here you save all the different palettes and the swatches that you want to save. I'm going to use this one that I use a lot in my work for this project. You can just go ahead and use whatever colors you want, of course. I like to keep it in this classic mode if I want to make any changes, because you get this square with the gradient and you also get these settings here. We're going to start with the black, so I just choose that. I'm also going to choose just a regular pen for drawing later. Good to know is that for the brush and the eraser, and this is a smudge tool, but I rarely use that, so yeah, we'll just skip that for now. But here you can actually change the size of the brush or eraser, and here you change the opacity. That's good to know. Here you find a selection tool. We have nothing to select now, but I'll show you these tools mainly when we start working with our pattern. But this is like the black or white arrow in Photoshop. This is a selection tool. It lets you select with these marching ants. You can choose whether to do an automatic, which fills which color you want to select, or you can make a rectangle, or an ellipse, and you can use the feathers and you can invert it, etcetera. I'm going to show you how I use this and the patterns. Here. You can make other types of adjustments to the colors. On this tool icon here, you can find a lot of interesting stuff. You can add photos, text, you can copy canvas. Sometimes if you want to add a photo, it is really good if you want to add some kind of texture or if you want to reference image. On the canvas tab here, we can crop or resize our canvas. We won't need to do that. But something we will use is the drawing guide. I usually set my guide to 500 pixels when I work with a 3,000 by 3,000 document, and can change the color of the grid here, and you can also change opacity, thickness of the lines, and the grid size. There's a lot of different settings here, but I'm not going to show you that today because it's not necessary for this specific technique. So let's just hit "Done". I will mainly use this grid thing when we do the half drop [inaudible] , but we'll just keep it on for the basic as well.
3. Basic Repeat Sketch: Let's start our basic sketch. I'll use this simple regular pen that I use a lot. I call it a grid ink liner. I made it myself from mixing with the brush that's already here in procreate. But I really like it and it's easy to draw with. Let's start. For the basic pattern as I said, we're just going to make something really simple. To just show you the technique and to learn how to work with a technique. We're just going to make something really simple and to make a repeat tile. For this basic first pattern, we're just going to try and fill out the tile but we're not going to go outside the corners here. We're just going to stick into the middle. But you can go how far into the corners you want. But we're going to adjust that so it doesn't look weird afterwards. I'm going to just create simple clouds. We'll say maybe I make some characters of them later. But we're not making our signature pattern here. I really just want to show you how I go about and create my patterns on the iPad. Because it's so much fun once you get this technique in your workflow. I'm going to add a tiny one here and you are going to be able to move these around later. You can just fill it up like that. Here comes my little technique thing. I'm going to add a new layer and we're going to fill that. We add a new layer by clicking the plus sign here. We're going to fill it by either clicking on the layer and choose fill layer. If we want to undo, we can just click with two fingers and it will undo. Another way to fill the layer is make sure you're on the right layer. Then we can actually just drag this little color icon onto the canvas and that will fill the layer. What we're going to do is we're going to lower the opacity. You can do that by clicking on the layer, and clicking on N. Which stands for normal, among these blending Options. We can drag the opacity down here. But we can also click with two fingers on the layer, and we can adjust the opacity like this. I'm going to keep it at somewhere around 20. Then we're going to choose both layers and we're going to group them. Of course, you can make duplicates and you can save the original. First, this is just a sketch. I'm not going to be very mindful of that. But also I like to work a bit destructive because that makes you a bit more intuitive and you don't really have the same choice to go back and forth all the time. It's a bit more analog way to work, and I really like that. We're going to duplicate this group. Now we have two groups. You can close and open the group by clicking this arrow here. You can see that both groups have the sketch layer and the opacity fill. I'd like to close these while I'm working. We have one of the groups chosen. We're going to press this arrow here. It's the selection 2. We're going to drag this along the canvas, like that. We don't have to be exactly in the center for this technique. In traditional when you make a pattern, it's very important that you keep in the center. But we just want to make a seamless tile so we don't have to actually keep in the exact middle. You see this blue line appearing while I'm dragging. It can be in different angles. That's because they have this magnetics icon checked here. Make sure you have the magnetics checked and that's blue. We are going to release this here. It's very important that you stay on this blue line while dragging it across. Either when you drag it horizontally or vertically which we're going to do later and we hit undo. It's very important for the seamless tile that you keep along this blue line here. That is on the blue line when you release. You can actually feel or see if you release it in a wrong way. Be mindful of that. We're going to hit release by pressing the arrow again. You can see that it's darker here and lighter here. That's because of the two opacity fields are overlapping. We're going to choose the other group by choosing the selection tool. Then we're going to drag this over. You can see that the overlap is getting less and less visible. We want to keep just the tiny bit here. Make sure that you have this blue line all the time straight across in a horizontal line, and then release. Release by pressing the arrow. We actually want this to go away completely this overlapping line. I don't think you can actually see my grid here. Perhaps he can. But I'm going to take that away right now, because it makes it easier to see so that this overlapping line actually disappears. We're going to press the arrow once more. Now it's important that we click it just outside the middle here. If you want to Zoom out or in, while you're in the selection mode. You just click and hold on the arrow, and you can Zoom in and out. Here you see that you have three blue dots here on row and also along that side. The middle one is of course, at the center. We really want to click outside this center blue little dots to make sure that it's moving exactly horizontally. Because if you click up here or down here is going to move slightly diagonally and then we will lose our seamless tile. I'm going to release that and Zoom in once more and selected again, and continue to click until it's almost gone. I can say it's almost gone. But we want to click a few times more. I select, and I click, and I deselect. Now you can see that it's completely gone. That means that it's completely seamless now. You can see that this cloud is repeating over here, and this is repeating over here. Now you can make some adjustments if you want, but we can also make the vertical adjustment already now. Now we're left with two groups and we have these half opacity fills. I'd like to just erase this while I'm working. I like to collapse these groups. You can do that either by flatten it. You can flatten this one as well. Then you can click on it and merge down. Then you have just one single layer again. But also we're going to undo that by clicking with two fingers. We can click and we have two groups again with one sketch in each. We can drag them together to one layer by pressing the lowest one and the top one. We can just pull them together like that. now we have one layer again. Now if we do want to make some changes to this view here, we can actually just choose the selection tool. I'd like to keep it at free hand so I can draw any shape. I'll just move this to show you what I mean. We're going to select that. Then hit the arrow to move it slightly. We can release it by pressing either of these. I'm going to choose the selection tool once again and select that. Cloud and move it up and perhaps move this down a bit as well. Then I'm going to make a new one here. That's good. Maybe move this just slightly up here. Now we're going to make the same movement and move this to the up and down sides, by moving the group's vertically. We're going to create a new layer and we're going to fill it. I prefer to just drag this color on top of it. Then I usually click with two fingers, and I lower the opacity like that around 20 percent. We're going to drag the other one to the right. We're going to group it at once more. We're going to close the group and duplicate it. I'm not very mindful of naming these groups and layers, because I keep flattening them and make new groups, and replicates. It would just be a lot of unnecessary work to name them all the time. We're going to move these now up and down instead. We're choosing our selection tool. Now we're going to be mindful of this vertical line here. Just drag it down somewhere to the middle. It doesn't have to be perfect and release. Then we're going to do the same with the other group, but we're moving in up, release. Then of course we are going to click outside the center blue dot here on the top side. As you can see, it's hard to see if the overlapping part is disappearing because of the marching ends and that's why you have to release and click again. I think that's it. Yeah, that's it. Now we have these two groups again. Just the standard procedure, I just like to take away these opacity fills and collapse them into a single layer like that. Now we can see that we have for Clouds here. I do want a bit more variety. I'm going to erase it one of the clouds here. Actually, I'm just going to make a slightly bigger Cloud. I think I'm going to erase this one as well and just move this by hitting the selection tool and moving it over. I think I'm going to select this one and move it down. Actually we have a basic repeat tile here. I'll like to see how this will look once it's repeated. I'm going to show you that by copying it to Adobe capture. I actually one more thing I want to change here. That's selecting the selection tool. You can see that I want to move this one. It's actually possible to do that in this view. Because you can select the one on the other side as well. Then when you hit that move arrow, just be mindful to keep that blue line visible so you're in the center. Then hit release. Now I'm going to show you how to preview this in Adobe capture.
4. Basic Repeat Sketch – Preview and Edit: We're going to the tool icon up here and we're going to press "Share". This is where you can export a PSD, or PDF, or JPEG or any format you want, even GIFs, but that's a whole other class on how to make that. But we're going to explore it as a JPEG. Then of course, you can choose where you want to save it, but we don't want to save it anywhere right now. We just want to move it to Adobe Capture. As I said, you should download this app because it's really nice to quickly overview your patterns and a bunch of other things as well. But if you don't have that, Adobe Capture here as a selection or as a choice, you can press this icon here and then you should find Adobe Capture here, and just turn it on, so it's on green. Then it appears here. We just select Adobe Capture and click "Post". Here is our tile. I'm sorry, because things are in Swedish here, but I will tell you of the necessary words that will be in English. Here you can have a lot of fun different things to work with here in Adobe Capture, but we want to find the one that says pattern or monster in Swedish. Then you get this weird view, but that's because you have this triangle shape that actually is the tile. That's fun if you want to create maybe some weird pattern from the photograph, but we don't want that, of course, we want a simple square repeat tile. We're going to select the third icon here on the left and we're going to choose this regular grid at the bottom. Here you can actually see our pattern emerging. We're going to click the checkbox here and now we can actually zoom in and see how our pattern is working. If there are any weird maybe rows, you can see a few weird rows, but I feel that that's pretty much always the problem when you make it basic repeat tile that you will get these weird squares or perhaps lines in the work. But you can work with that and make it flow anyways. But usually I like to work with a half drop because of that. I'm going to see if there's anything I do want to change here. Perhaps I want to just add a tiny bit to that cloud and move that down. But overall, I'm quite happy. There is this row going on with the two clouds here as well. I think I'm going to look at that as well. We're going to go back to procreate. We don't have to hit "Save", we can just go back to this view and next time it will just update within your picture. We're going back into procreate and I did have these two clouds here that I wanted to move because they made this a weird line here. We do have to make a bit of a move at the tile, but first, I just want to add just a little shape on that cloud to fill it up. I'm going to make the same thing again. I'm going to fill the layer that's on top, click with two fingers and drag the opacity down. I'm going to group them, close it, duplicate it, move this down, we don't need to move it all the way just so we can work with these clouds, keep this blue line in mind, let go and select the other group. You can actually move the group around like this it doesn't matter, as long as it's on that blue vertical or horizontal line once you release. Like that and zoom in. We're going to click so that the overlap line disappears, and it's gone. We can open these up and delete the opacity fills. Again, just make them one layer like that. We could move these so that we can work with that cloud as well. But I think I'm just going to delete this one and maybe move that a bit. I'm going to delete this and take the selection tool and just move it like that, and select this one, and just make it a bit smaller. It doesn't really matter if we have a bit more space in the pattern, it's clouds, so they are not usually lined up perfectly. But we're going to keep it like that. Just for the teaching purpose, I'm going to show you how I preview it once more. We're hitting this tool button here, press "JPEG", and let's find Capture, click "Post" and again, choose Pattern here to the right, or a Monster if you're in Sweden, and on the third icon on this left side, you choose the basic repeat. You click "OK" and here you can see the pattern again. It's not perfect but it's really to show you the technique, so I'm going to be happy with this. Next we're going to finalize this pattern by creating the actual icons.
5. Basic Final Pattern – Drawing the Icons: let's go back to procreate and have a look at our tile here. We're going to make the actual pattern in the same document because there's no reason to create a new document for this. I'm just going to lower the opacity on this sketch here, we're going to create a new layer, which we can draw the cloud zone, and I'm going to choose a background color. This is just the play around patterns, I'm going to have fun and choose this pink sky, let's just create white clouds on that. We're choosing white as a color, I really like to work with this dry ink pen from favorite core, I really recommend it if you'd like the look of this line work that I'm going to create. I'm going to fill in all the clouds that are not cut off at the corners because we're going to draw them later, on the red layer beneath the sketch, I'm just going to draw these clouds here. I really like that dry inky texture with this pen. As you see, I'm not really that mindful of following the sketch. The sketching segment is usually, I just use it to plot, plot out the different icons. I see the flow of the pattern and then you can play around with the different icons and motifs once you start working. But it's good to have a sketch to relate to before you start making your motifs, especially since we're working in pixels. The different icons won't be scalable afterwards, it's good to have them an idea of how big you want the icons to be so you don't have to scale them up later. we can always scale them down, that's no problem. I'd like to keep a bit of texture from the brush here and of course you can add more texture afterwards, I usually do that by adding a new image. I think I'm going to create a separate spellcheck class on that because that's a whole other world. I'm just going to finish up these clouds here, that's it, I think that's all. I was thinking maybe we should create some eyes and mouth that we've be fun to make characters out of them, I think I'm going to do that before we do the move. I'm going to make a new layer because I do liked work destructively, but you don't have to work to destructively, because if you, you can add layers and play around with that, I'm just going to make some sleep, be clouds. Here, perhaps some cheeks am going to make the pressure a bit bigger, I think I'm going to make something that stands out so you really can see how the repeat is, how the tile is repeating. Once we preview this pattern, I'm just going to make these weird ice the cloud is looking happily, at Neighbor. This is just weird, but it's fun, and this one is happy, so cute it's so funny because you can actually make characters out of everything just by putting a mouth and eyes on it, I'm giving them cheeks, all of them like that. Now we're going to make the other clouds, we're actually going to create a group out of all these three layers and group them, here of course, you can make a duplicate and keep the original, but as long as you're mindful when you're moving the different groups to the sides to keep it seamless, then you really don't have to worry about keeping the original because you can always go back and work on these clouds later. I'm going to collapse the group and I'm keeping this sketch because I really, I need to see where the sketches going once we're moving it. We're duplicating this group now, but I actually forgot to do something, as you might see, I'm going to delete this duplicate group and open up this group, I'm going to press one of the layers here and add a layer, of course we're going to have to add a opacity fill. We're filling that layer, I can lower the opacity here, again, around 20. Now we can duplicate the group, we're going to move it to the left and we're going to move it to the right. We do want this overlapping line to disappear and it's gone, we're going to do the same thing, but we're vertically. I'm going to delete the opacity fills, here you see that we have a bunch of different layers now, I do like to keep the clouds and the sketch on the same layer. What I'm going to do is I'm going to drag the cloud to the cloud and then I'm going to hit the top layer and just press merge down, am going into drag the glasses and ice on top of that. If you do want to move a layers, you're just hold on it and it gets lifted up like that, you can just move it. We're going to press the top one and merge down, and the same thing with a sketch, top and merge down, then we can just delete that group underneath. Now we have three single layers like that, we can add a new layer and do the opacity fill once more. Close the group, duplicate it and move it vertically, keeps the blue line in mind and choose the other group, put up. Here, we can actually see that there has been some weird movement, I don't know where that comes from, I'm just going to undo. Can you see this here? I have made something wrong, I don't know why, I actually don't know what that is. But I'm going to see if this repeats correctly anyways, I do think it will. But let's just check that now in Adobe capture. I'm going to press JPEG and go to Adobe capture and post. Even me who have made this technique like a 100 of times, I can mess up also. If we check the sign here, now you can see that I actually did something wrong in the move with the white clouds. That's good because then we can just go back to procreate and press with two fingers until we did that move, we're going back to where we started. Here we can see the problem, I should know hell after have left it like that, I think there was in a hurry. We're going back to move that tile here. Now we're back.
6. Basic Final Pattern – Finishing Up: We're on that layer that has the whole square, and we're pressing that arrow. I think I'm going to be a bit more mindful this time. We're releasing it with this blue line and the center visible. Like that. I think it moved. I don't know why. It usually doesn't like that. Now, we can see that there is no gap there. We're going to move it to the right until this disappears. Perhaps I didn't move it a bit on the side. I don't know. But now, the overlap is gone, and there's no strange gaps at the corners. Now. We're going to do this again. I'm going to erase the opacity fills, drag the clouds up, make them one layer, drag the glasses up, and at that and merge down to make that one layer, and choose also the sketch. Hit that, and merge down. It could keep these, and make a bunch of new groups, but I just think it's easier to keep them at separate layers like that because it's easier to work with. We're deleting that extra group. We're adding a layer, filling it. Pressing with two fingers on the layer to lower the opacity, and closing the group. Duplicating it. We're going to be very mindful now when we do our move. Now, I can actually see that we have just one here, and these three at the corner, at the bottom here, and that one that we do want to paint. We are going to be very mindful, and drag that so that those are visible, and release it. I think that's going to be good. I'm going to add that up here. Now, it's gone. We can actually see that we need to fix this also later. But I'm going to take the opacity fills away. It's hard to see maybe some of these. Well, that's because they're actually gone. Now, because the white clouds are all in this group, if we hide the layers by unclicking this checkbox here, we can see that we have nothing on those layers, so we can just delete them instead of merging them. Then we can drag this sketch layer on top, and merge that down, and remove that group. Now, we can just fill in the clouds. Like that, and this one. It might seem a bit tedious to do all this collapsing a new groups, and you will pass it a fills. But once you get that into your workflow, it's really intuitive, and it's so much fun to work with. Now, we have these white clouds, and I'm just going to add a few eyes to those as well. This one is also a bit sleepy. Now, you can see that I selected the pink color simply by pressing and holding on top of that pink color. If I move it on top of the white color, it will be white, and on top of the black, it will be black. That's a really simple way to change color while you are working in the document. Then you can just go on, and keep painting, and you don't have to go up to the color section all the time. Going to choose the black, and make another sleepy one here. Now, we just have one more to go, and that's this one. We're going to make a new layer, and fill it. You can actually fill it with any color. It doesn't have to be black, but I just usually use black because I just do that. But you can fill it with any color because they just need to overlap. Maybe not the pink color because then it won't show through but any other color would work. Collapse that. Duplicate it. Select, and we're going to move it vertically. Keep this blue line in mind. Select, and move it over. Zoom in. Here's the center blue dot. I think one more was good. Now, we can again delete the opacity fills. You can also collapse these by just dragging them together, like I said before. But when you have just two layers, it can be a bit tiny, so I usually like to merge them down instead, and the sketch. If you're ever confused of which layer is which, you can just hide it, and show it again. You see which ones disappear. But you can really see on that little preview here which ones are which. We're going to make the last cloud. We choose that inky brush again. Make sure that you really don't go exactly on the corner here. We don't want to draw here because then it would be weird cut there because everything that goes outside the canvas in Procreate will be cut off, so you can't save it or get it back like that. Just a few eyes, and we are almost done. We can make maybe just some happy eyes and some cheeks. Not black cheeks, pink ones, like that. Now, I can close the sketch, and preview our pattern in Capture. We can hit JPEG, and go to Adobe Capture. Post. Now, this looks weird. But that's because it's set to shapes as a preset. I don't know why, but that's the way it is. That will make the dark parts into vector. That's good if you want to do that from a photo or something but that's not at all the point why we are in Capture. We want to go to pattern, and the third one on the left here, and choose the basic. We can press that "Check mark" again, and we have our pattern here. It's done. You can really see the base groupie here, that's why I did these glasses on one of the clouds so we can see how it's repeating, and it's repeating in a square. If we would have made a half drop, we would have one with glasses here in the middle as well. So it would be not such a square feeling. But I'm happy with this. It might be fun on kids clothes. We'll see. But I'm going to make a similar pattern when we do the half drop. I'll see you there.
7. Half Drop Sketch: Let's go back to procreate and create our half drop. We're going to close this document. It saved automatically once we go out to the gallery, and we're simply going to create a new file here with the preset that we made before. At the bottom you find the pattern tile, 3,000 by 3,000 pixels. Just click that, and we have a new document. I like to just name the document before I start. Let's name it half drop, and go back in. We're going to start by creating our guide. We have this layer here and we can just start with that. We're going to fill it and lower the opacity to somewhere around 20. Then we're going to use the selection arrow there, and we're going to use this rotate 45 degrees. Click that. Then next to that you have fit to Canvas. That will give us a diamond shape all at the center of the square. We're going to release the selection, and now we have our guide. This is where we will create our pattern. We'll keep somewhere around and inside this diamond shape. We are going to repeat it at the sides here using the same technique that I showed before, but we're going to use a diagonal line to the sides instead. For this, I also like to put on the drawing guide to make it easier to see where things are going. Using backspace here and choosing 500 pixels, and this is good when you have a 3,000 by 3,000 pixel document because it gets right at the corners here. I think I'm going to make a darker guide for you to see. I think you can see that. That makes it easier to see where things are going on the sides. I'm going to press ''Down.'' Here we have our grid drawing guide and also the diamond shape. We're going to begin with a sketch and we're going to press the plus sign to create a new layer and choose a pen for sketching. I choose same one, and again, we're going to make some clouds just to keep it simple. Make sure you stay pretty much inside this diamond. Never go outside the border here. When you plan your pattern, it's good to have in mind that what would you draw here will come in here at this side. This part will go in here. The same down here. This will come in here. That's just good to have in mind when planning your different icons. We're going to go back and forth and move things around. But this is just a really good guide to have once you start drawing. We're going to clear this or simply erase it, but we can click the ''Layer'' and choose clear so we take it all away. Let's just begin to draw our clouds here. We're making a cloud there, and a big one there. Now we can see that this is going outside here, so that will make it inside some around here. I'd like to make just a quick sketch for as a reminder, so I know that it's coming in here. Also for this one, it's something like that. You really don't have to do that. I don't do it all the time, but you can do it just to have a somewhat idea of what you're up to. Let's create a cloud here, and the smaller one here. It's important that you always have a part of your icon inside the diamond shape, but you can always go outside it. It doesn't really matter. Here you can see from the drawing guide where this crosses and then you can find it here. That makes them really have some cloud here. We can make one here as well. That will show up here. We can make a small one there and maybe an even smaller one there. Up here, we can see that what goes in there, here is nothing, but I think we can work this part out later. We're going to try this out and make sure on how to raise all those extras that you had as a guide. As I said, I don't always do that, but it's good for some guidance. Now you see that we only have these clouds, it doesn't look as filled. But once we start repeating it to the sites, we are going to see that they come down and it's going to create a more complete pattern. Let's start repeating it to see how it works. Again, just like before, we're going to make a group of the guide, do opacity fill, and the clouds. We are going to group them and duplicate it. Here we're always going to have this original group in the center, so that will always be undistracted and always just be as it is, and we're just going to make copies to copy to the sites. We're going to all in all make four copies, one to each corner. We're going to start with this one group. Now we're moving it up diagonally. You see this blue line appearing, and that's the same one that we had horizontally and vertically. We just want to keep it diagonal this time. Make sure you have the magnetics check there if you don't see this line. Release and then I like to release with an arrow, again, release the selection and zoom in. Here you can see this opacity fill and overlap as a line that's diagonal. When we hit this selection tool again, we're going to click just outside this corner here. Since we don't have any marching ends in the way here, we can just click until the line disappears. Now you can see that disappears. It's gone. We're going to release it. I like to just keep the workspace clean and always delete that extra opacity fill and just flatten that group there. We're going to make a duplicate of the original group again, and we're going to move it up to the left corner. Release it, let go, zoom in and click just outside the corner here so it moves exactly diagonally. Now it's gone. Release and check closely. It's all gone. Again, we're going to delete the opacity fill and flatten. We can just move these to drag them together so we have one single layer. I like do that because then you can quickly have an overlook at the original group and you can turn this on and off. We're going to make a new duplicate layer and drag it down to the left corner. Let it go. Select and just click until the line is gone. It's gone. Takeaway the opacity fill and drag those together. One more time, we're going to duplicate this and drag it down to the right side. We'll let go, zoom in, make the selection again, and click until it's gone. Make them one layer, and here we have our pattern. When we hide this layer, we can see all the repeating along the corners here. Great. I actually don't see any real problems here. Maybe I do want to move one or two clouds. We can close this or simply deleted and move things around and do the whole moving process once more. But when we have just a few icons that we do want to move and they are not actually on the corners, we can select both layers and use the selection tool. I do have this one cloud here that I want to just move it slightly to the left. We can see that the repeated cloud is over here. That's also not cut off anywhere. We can actually simply select this one and that one. Choose the selection tool, and just move this over, and that will move them both so we get a nice preview of how the final tile will look. We don't have to repeat the whole process once again because it's inside the borders. I actually think this looks good and we're going to preview this in Adobe Capture. Let's close this diamond shape and again, go to the tool, choose JPEG. Let's go to Adobe Capture, hit "Post", and here we have our sketch. We're going to choose pattern here to the right. We don't want that. We had triangle tile. We want this simple, basic repeat and hit "Check". Here we have our pattern. I really like to flow this. As you can see, it doesn't have that square looking thing that you get so often with a basic repeats. I really like this and I think down going to go right back to creating the icons.
8. Half Drop Final Pattern: Let's go back to Procreate and finalize our pattern. We're not going to need the set extras on the corners here, as we're actually going to just create the original icons and we're going to duplicate them to the corners once more. Again, I'm going to choose a background color. As you can see, when it shows the background color, that's the only thing you can do with that layer here. You can't do anything else. I forgot to mention that before, but when you choose the background color, you just click the background color and you choose a color, and that will just give you a whole background color for the whole document. It's really nice to work with. We're going to not have these anymore. We can actually delete that because we don't need them, and we can also just hide that diamond shape and create a new layer. I'm going to press N to lower the opacity of the clouds, and also, we don't need the drawing guide anymore, so let's just turn that off. Let's begin drawing our clouds. Go back. If you click on one of the brushes, you will come into the settings here, and you can make a lot of changes, we're not making that now. Again, choosing the dry ink brush, and I'm going to draw the cloud. This technique with the half drop really makes it easier because you only have to draw the clouds in one layer. You don't have to do in any moving, and you can repeat them, and it's easy because it's really non-destructive in that way because you always have the original icons intact. You can make a lot of changes easily. I'm going back to the inky liner pen. It's good to know that everything you keep in this group, you can have how many layers you want, and you are always going to be able to make a repeat tile as you just replicate the group and drag them to the corners. You can have quite complicated illustrations in here. We're going to repeat this to get our final repeat tile. We're going to unhide this diamond shape in the background, but we can keep the sketch in there if we want or just deleted it. We're going to again, replicate the group. I do like to close them because it's easier to handle, and select that other group. Drag it to the corner, doesn't matter what corner, just one corner, and zoom in. Click outside the corner here, make sure the overlapping line disappears, and now we have a bunch of layers here. But again, to keep it easy to work with and just simple, I like to delete the opacity fill and flatten the whole group, and making a duplicate of the group again. Dragging it down to the other corner, keep this line visible. Release some in. Make sure the overlapping line disappears, it's gone. Open the group and delete the fill, and flatten the group, and you can just merge those two so you have one layer and we're duplicating the group again. Select, drag it up. Again, you can move it how where do you want to as long as it's on the line once you release it, release and click until it's gone. It's gone and here we go. We have our finished pattern tile. We're going to preview it again in Adobe capture. Post. Go down to pattern here on the right. Select the third one, and the basic repeat. Click shake, and then we can zoom in and see what's happening. I really like the flow of these clouds. It does really stand out these glasses but I did make them just for this class purpose, to show you how the repeat actually works. If I would make it again a regular pattern, I might just take these glasses away. But let's just keep that for this class. Now we can hit save. If we want to keep our patterns, we can save it. We can click this x at the bottom, and we will save the pattern here. I don't usually use this much for anything else but just previewing, but it's fun to see which patterns you have been making. Just as a final thing, I'm going to show you how to simply upload it, and actually order it or work with it right away. You can either export as a PSD to work on it on the computer if you want to, or you can just export it as a Jpeg, and you can save it in a folder or just on the iPad. You can save it wherever you want. I'm going to just save the image, and then I'm going to show you where I like to upload my prints.
9. BONUS – Upload to Print On Demand: I'd like to show you as one final thing, how you can use your pattern right away. I like to go to Doc Cotton, that's a print on demand site. I do have my patterns there, so I select "Designer" and you can order things with my prints on, but you can also upload your own design. Doc Cotton is a sustainable slow fashion company based in the UK, and they only use organic cotton and they only print the actual pattern that's going to be on the garment, and then it's made in the UK at the same factory where it's printed by people with fair wages and it's really good. I highly recommend that. Here you can choose a bunch of different garments. As my pattern is quite kid friendly, I would say I would like to make some pajamas here, and you can just upload your print. By hit, "Upload your print," go to the image library and just choose your last image there, and here you have a preview and you can choose the scale of the pattern. You choose size of the actual garment, and just "Buy now," and that's how you can use your pattern right away. Or you can use any printed them on site like Society6 or Redbubble. Go ahead and have fun with it and let me know what you create.
10. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for taking this class. I really hope you enjoyed it and I can't wait to see what you create with it. Make sure you try both the different techniques out and see whatever works best for you. Sometimes I mix both techniques, I start with a half drop and then I finish up with a basic repeat style and really just have fun with it. It is so easy to create patterns anywhere now, it's on the bus or in a cafe or simply from the sofa. It's really good when you have a tiny kids as well. You ca create a pattern from basically anything. You can just keep your kid's drawings that I usually let my kids draw on my iPad. Then it could be fun to create patterns out of them directly in procreate and that's it. I hope you enjoy the class and I can't wait to see what you upload in your project section. Also on Instagram, if you tag me there, I'll have a look at it. If you have any questions at all, just drop them in the discussion section and I'll make sure to answer that as quickly as possible. Until next time. Bye.
11. BONUS update 2020 - Procreate 5X: I want to create a bonus lesson for you just to show you the latest updates that came in Procreate 5X, the new version in 2020. We're going to open up a new document. I'll just simply show you the ways that these features really improves our workflow when we create a pattern like I showed you in class. We'll start as usual, and I'll just simply choose a background color. I'm creating just a simple dot pattern this time. I just want to show you the techniques. We are also going to do as before and fill the square, use the arrow there, and rotate it 45 degrees, and fit to screen. Down here is where the new magic has happened, and I'll show you that in a bit. But first, let's just lower the opacity like that. I'm using a 5,000 by 5,000 canvas. Nowadays, I use this at 835 pixels with the drawing guide because it creates these at the corners there. That's done. I'll just create a new layer and start making some dots. Let's try this out. We will mark these two as usual, and group them, and then we will duplicate the group, so we get a new one. I'll put down the pen. Here we go. What we want here is for this snapping to match and on blue and we want both the magnetics and snapping on. That will really help with our pattern-making because we won't be having to press outside like we did before in class. Now, we can simply zoom out here and we can drag the whole group until it snaps. You will get these orange lines here that shows you that it's snapping in the center, both vertically and horizontally and then you just release. You can zoom in here and see that there is no gap, just like before. Now I can see here that we got this double thing happening. I usually just lower the opacity in the duplicated group so I see what's happening. I'll just move that right away up here, but then I see that it will probably go into that one. But we'll see what happens when we move to that corner. I duplicated the original group again and we will move this again to the snapping point. Here was another snapping point. This is a blue line, you don't want that snapping and you can also see that it's overlapping here. We want those orange central lines. We'll release here. I've removed the background again and lower the opacity of this layer. This is to see, so I know which dots are the original dots. We can see that one is all right, but this is again a bit close. I'll go back to the original layer and just move that up a bit like that. Then I see that I really want to move this as well. All of these steps, they just help creating a more even pattern. That one makes me want to move this one a bit. Yeah. Just to move this one a bit as well. Something like that. We're not going for perfection here. I just want to show you the process. Let's create another duplicate. I've moved stuff around now so let's just delete all this stuff and create a new duplicate. Again, press the arrow and drag it down. I think that looks all right, so let's just delete the background there and duplicate the original again. Drag that down until it snaps. I think that looks all right, so let's delete that background. I like to, when I'm working, I like to just bring the corner designs together so I keep that on one layer like that. Just duplicate it again. Drag it up like that. Now, I don't think I was mindful of the orange snapping and this is also a new feature that once you have released it, it will still fill the central, vertical and horizontal lines. You can actually just drag it over here and you can still get it to place. Before, we had to go back from the beginning. All you want to do is make sure that you see these orange snapping guides on both horizontally and vertically. Now it's just messing with me. You should be able to simply do that really easily. Like that. Now it's not working, so I'll just go back to the center again. But it should be working. You should be able to move it like that. Like that. You have to be mindful when you move them. You really do put them in the center, but it totally works. Perhaps if you're not recording a class and it will distract you. Like that. You've got these four corners here. I put them on the same layer like that. Perhaps there's something missing here. But I can work on that another time. I just wanted to show you the process of creating a pattern with this new snapping feature that really helps the process. Good luck in creating your patterns. I hope you have fun and make sure to upload your project in class.
Josephine Skapare, Illustrator and designer
