ProCreate Artists on Spoonflower: Everything You Need to Know to Get Your Shop Up & Running!

1. Introduction: Hello, my name is Jennifer Nichols and Layland post studio. I'm an artist and teacher and a fabric designer. Spoonflower is my favorite place to post my seamless repeat patterns. And I'm here today to help you get started with your own shop. Show you some tips and tricks for uploading your design. Ordering swatches at a great value, creating your shop banner. And I'll also show you everything I know about creating and uploading t tells which when I was trying to figure it out was pretty tricky. So I thought I'd save you guys some time and show you what I found out. Be sure to hop on over to my Skillshare profile. I've got lots of classes, but I have some great classes on seamless repeat patterns. So you can learn how to make them in procreate for your shop. Let's get started. 2. Getting Started: Let's get started on starting up your account. So go to Spoonflower.com and tap Join. And of course, I don't need to enter all of these things in bed and just follow the prompts for getting your account started up. And then I'm gonna go through some of the other account information on my account. So just to help guide you through that a tiny bit. So once you go into your account, make sure you go through all of these tabs and wave in the sum of those tabs. There's more tabs, like in the spoon dollars tab. There's information on how you prefer your spoon dollars to be transferred to you. You can let them kind of accumulate or you can have them pay out through PayPal. And so make sure you go through these things. And the screen name is actually going to be sort of part of the link to your shop. So really put some effort and time into thinking about that. Um, I changed mine and I ended up having to change links on my website and things like that later. So I don't recommend changing it once you're established. And then you have email setting options and a lot of great stuff. So for the orders tab, there's a history of your own orders and there's some histories here. So I can't really show these because it has private information of mine. But make sure you go to this verify account tab and make sure you've done all of the things you need to do to really get going with spin flower. And you'll be ready to go. After that. You can access things by the little icon, the little person icon up here. So you can tap on that and you can get to all of the things you need. So studio home is your studio. So that's not what everybody else sees that slake you going into your own art studio. I'll go ahead and show you mine. So you can see a little ad here that there's a sale from Spoonflower, but the rest is stuff that you can set up and you can manage your preferences by tapping this right here. For me, I can see how many spoon dollars I currently have and all sorts of things. All right here, and that is all manageable by your preferences right there. And then there's your design library. And we will go into the details about this when we uploaded design. So this is just a way to access all of your designs. And then there's my shop. My shop is maybe the link that you would want to add to your social media or your website, send it to friends. This is the link directly to your designs. This is another important part right here is edit your shop. So tab edit your shop. And you can make some changes here. You can add a little bit of info here. This says my store in my blog. I, they're optional. I put my website and my Instagram there in that way in my shop, people will be able to see links to those things. I don't put my address in this part. Spoonflower has my address, but people don't need to see it. This shop banner. This is a little confusing in Procreate. So I have included a Procreate document that is using the shop banner size that I use is just under two megabytes. And when you choose a file, so you go and you create your document in Procreate, and we're going to talk about that a little bit. And then when you choose a file with it and you select a photo from it, any of these photos that you select will tell you how many megabytes they are right there. And you can easily tap that and have more options. Sometimes the options are only there. If it's a JPEG, if it's a PNG, I've noticed some websites like they don't have that option. So if that is happening to you, just save it as a JPEG instead. So you choose your thing and then you upload there. And the other thing I wanted to talk about really quickly in this particular video is just the website itself. So in the fabric section is where you can shop for fabric. You can get information on the different fabric types. You can order a sample pack, which is a nice box that has a little sample of all their different fabric types. And it's free shipping, I believe the boxes $7 in the US. And you can get to fill a yard here, and we will do that later in class. And then some themes and you can get to design challenges, and those are the completed ones. Here's where you can order all the different categories. But then design in cell has some more information that you should look through, including design tools. Here is some fabric that they'll send you if you order it. And that has the hex code for the different colors. And there's that sample box again, it's another way to get to that and then discover. And of course there's other things too. There's a book and all sorts of things. So make sure you go in, explore all of that. This Discover tab, I, I end up going here all the time. You can go to the blog here. And you can get to the design challenges here. And I'm gonna go through a whole lesson just on design challenges. That blog is fun because they post a lot of great new content all the time. And they also post the results of the design challenges here you can find yours truly, phenotype Procreate patterns may be seamless repeat in procreate with Jennifer Nichols, read molar. Since you're on Skillshare, since you're watching this class, you, if you watch my other classes and you don't need this information, but this is some of the very basic information for people who aren't on Skillshare. So now you're in the blog and you have some other information you can get to directly here and then get back to the website there. All right, so that's a little bit of navigating around the website and getting started up. 3. Create Your Shop Banner: So if you go to the projects and resources section of class on an iPad in a browser. In landscape mode, you can get to the downloads. So I have the shop banner download, a 150 dpi TTL template, also a Procreate document, and a 300 DPI. And I'm going to talk to you about why. And then I have some links for some great references. So to load these, you just tap them. It might be different depending on your browser. Then tap download and you can see it bounced right there and you can just get to it right from there. It'll go oh, it went right into procreate. Sometimes if it's a zip file, it will go into your files and you can get to it from there and tap on it and it'll come into procreate. So to add art, maybe existing art to your banner, you can insert a photo. And unfortunately it does insert to size, but it's still not de-selected. So you can go ahead and upscale since we know that that's bigger, I think this canvas sizes just like, you know, basically this size in real life too. I'm going to turn into keeps snapping on. Well, I'm going to turn it off until I get this placed. I'm going to get it placed where I want it. But then I'm going to turn snapping on and I'm going to snap it to one side. And then I'm going to duplicate that. Sometimes the snapping doesn't work so well in these cases. Yeah. And I do have a little gap, so I'm going to select it and just tap it over. Sometimes this snapping feature doesn't work well when you have when you've cropped the photo or dans, a couple of things I've noticed. So just go ahead and do that and then I'm going to duplicate the original one again and slide that when we over here. And let me zoom in and see, yeah, I can see a gap on that one too. So I'm just going to tap a couple of times and get rid of the gap. And it's not perfect. I wouldn't not post that as a repeat pattern because I do see a little thing. But for the banner, you can post it just like this. You can shrink those together, add a layer, add some text, whatever you want your banner to look like. I would suggest going through some other shops and getting some ideas for how you want your banner to look. So I would go ahead and export that as a JPEG into your camera roll and then you can access that from your shop. 4. Uploading Your Designs: All right, it's time to upload your art. I just take my design. If you don't know how to make seamless repeat patterns, I have some really great classes and shared I just, for Spoonflower, I share as a JPEG and save it to my camera roll. So you can see here I have quite a few. I've been uploading. So you go to Student flower and you can just go right here, upload your design or you can go, I just usually go to Design Library. Tab choose Files, Photo Library. I usually upload two at a time. The times that I've tried to do more than that, it hasn't worked, but you can play around with that and then tap, Add. And then you need to read through and make sure you're following these guidelines and tap the that you agree to those and upload. So you'll get the spinner here. And, um, for my, from my experience, at least on the iPad, it doesn't show the bar accurately, so it looks like it's just sitting at 0, but don't worry, it is working. And then all of a sudden it'll jump to a 100 and then it'll be done. So in the meantime, I usually will split screen with something else and let that sit over there and make sure I can see that part and I do some more work. And then you can see it's loading. So you don't have to sit here and twiddle your thumbs. You can do other things by doing this split screen and it works just fine. All right, Once they've uploaded their back into your design library, and from here, I usually go ahead and select which collection I want them to be in. But I'm gonna go ahead and tap first swatch. First swatch. Those are the collections. If you see the drop-down, these are the collections I have. I used some of them for my swatches. So I just sort of manage those and have a couple going at a time. You can see here I have some that are in the second swatch because I'm not quite ready to order swatches of those yet. And then you can tap on them. You can do other things right from this menu as well. But I like to go ahead and tap and go in. You can see it's auto-generated, a name. You can see the scale here. Makes sure that you look at this scale. It's currently showing a fat quarter. You can tap this and view it in different sizes like a full yard and such. And then right here, you can change the scale so you can go smaller, smaller, smaller. You can go a little bit bigger on some things. And then I'm looking at my four inches and looking at eight inches and I'm trying to get an idea of how big this is going to be. Once I'm happy with that, a tap, save this layout. You have to do that in order for this scale to be saved. If you think you're going to want more than one scale of the same pattern, you need to upload that a second time and save it separately. So this takes a bit and now it's done. And the other thing you can do instead of just going with the presets that they have here, is you can tap on change DPI. Now you can see it's at 514. So you can tap on it and put in something very specific right there. This does get viewed at a bit of a blurred view and you can tap on Preview info and go through here to see why Spin Flower does that. And here's another way you can access your collections. So you can tap on that and choose a collection at that point to this is where you would change the name. So I just double tap to select the whole thing. And I'll just call this rainbow mountains. If you want to add a description. I usually do that on tea towels and make sure people know how to order tea towels using linen, cotton, canvas. Any additional details might you might have. I normally don't use these. And down here, this isn't currently updated since we changed the scale of this. And you can see this is an updated yet either. Even though it is down here and it says updated, you do need to refresh the page. Let's go ahead and see. So the thumbnails up here. That is what you're selecting here. So when people are just scrolling Spoonflower, what do you want them to see? Sometimes your scale is going to be so small that you need to choose a different one of these so they can actually get an idea if they're interested in something. So I might just choose swatch there. If you think that you're going to want to sell this, you can go ahead and tap this now to add it to your public gallery. If you're entering this spoon flower design challenge, I think you also have to tap that. I usually come back and tap it once my swatches come in and I approve, and then I go through and and make them all for sale. The type of repeat you have, you can change right here. If you're taking my classes, even if you're doing a half drop repeat. And the way that you export how I showed you in class, it ends up needing to be just staying on this basic repeat option. As far as tags go, there gives you a lot of ideas. You can, you don't have to type a hashtag, you just type the word and they limit you here. And so that's just something that you'll have to come up with based on what your design is. And they do recommend it. And all of these things save automatically, except for your DPI changes, your scale changes. So everything else does save automatically. You do need to refresh the page if you want to see this accurately once you change the scale. And that also updates the name. When you tap view all products, I bet you probably need to refresh that page first as well. So you can see the wallpapers are all pretty big because we didn't change the scale on that. And this is fun. I love looking at the products. So let's go ahead and tap wallpaper. So for the wallpaper, you can change the DPI and it's going to be separate from the fabric. Say, I still think I'll go down a little bit and tap Save. Whoa, that's pretty much the rest down here is the same. You can view just the design or view room. So you can see that that takes a little bit of time for every design. I've just uploaded 40 something and designs. And I don't want to take the time to do some of those things yet. But I did go through and change the scale and I'm ready to order my swatches. Although I haven't changed the scale on this one yet. I'll do that one really quick. And then I'm going to show you how to order swatches. And I'm saying swatches, but what I actually order are the fill a yard. And I will show you that next. 5. Collections & Swatches: I wanted to show you really quick there every once in awhile. This view does show that the seamless repeat is not repeating perfectly. So just as long as your upload, if you know, when you're looking in Procreate, that your repeat pattern is fine. It's probably find in, it's just the speed of our website that's doing that. So here's another great way to scroll through your designs. When you're ready to order. I go back up to my menu up here and go to collections. Once you're in collections, go ahead and yours will be blank. Go ahead and just you'll have this box. You can tap that. Let's just name it test. So you can make the description whatever you like. For us. We're gonna be doing some test swatches. You can type something and decide if you want to make it visible and then tap Create. So here it is, right here, it's showing it's locked because it's not visible to the public. You can tap on it. You can edit here that just edit from the last window we were just in. Like if you want to edit the title of it, you can now edit it from here as well, or you can delete it from here. Now you can start adding designs to this collection. So you can create collections of lots of other people's work. But for this class we're talking about our own work of course. But now when you go to your design library, when you tap this, you can, your drop-down list is going to include that test. So then back to when you're loading up your designs, you now can choose that category, that collection to add any of your designs to. So I'm in one of my collections and I can see this, see this collection in your design library. So over here you can see this option to get a sampler. And if you tap the little question mark, it's telling me that you can order batch swatches, which is different from Philly yard. And it says it's a $1.20 per swatch. It does say is the most cost-effective way to order swatches. But at a $1.20 per swatch, when you do affiliate yard, you're getting up to 48. Well, let's see, for the one yard when it's 42 designs for one yard and your pain about $20, even less actually. So the Philly yard is a really great way, but the blocks are going to be smaller. So if you want larger swatches, then this is a way to get larger wins. So you can tap, get a sampler and you can see what it looks like. It's all connected and each one has its little bar code in it, but it's all connected into one, kind of like a fill yards. So I've never ordered an actual sampler. The affiliate ER does not have all of the white surrounding each of the samples though. So it's up to you and how much you want to spend. This is still a great deal obviously at a dollar or something per swatch instead of $5. All right. These are actual collections that people can view to buy from that I have some that I just use, like I said, for throwing my designs in when I'm not quite ready to order these ones, I'm ready to order. It says I have 48 in here, which is perfect. And I'm going to tap on this, tap on it again. It'll go right into Went to use this word billiard. Alright. Then I can tap C full collection. So anything that has the lock on it, it just means you haven't set it to be able to be viewed publicly yet. All right, start designing. So once you've got your collection and you're happy with the ones that you've put in there, then you need to choose which filtered. So the ones that are more beneficial, or that the one yard with 42 designs in the two yards with 48 designs. Now the other thing that you're going to need to know is you have different fabric choices depending on which one of these you choose. So if you tap on it, you can see what fabric traces you have. And do you know what I'm not seen. I'm not seen the Petal Signature Cotton which is actually wet I want normally, I would probably go ahead and get this organic cotton knit for my swatches because those you can cut, It's like t-shirt material and it doesn't fray. You don't have to him it. And you can cut it into the little squares of all of your swatches and actually use them as instead of paper towels, which is an idea that Spoonflower had on their blog. So I'm looking for Petal Signature Cotton. It's on sale for the next hour. So I'm actually ordering this villi are great. Now. I'm an a, I know Petal Signature is in this option. So there it is right there. And you only have those two traces that might be different depending on what country you live in. And I'm going to tap design your project. Alright, so you can see the grid. Hopefully you can see that in the camera is one yard. It's only for a 42 designs in I've got 48. So I am going to pick a few that I will save for my next batch. So that means I need to six of them aside, and that's fine. All you need to do, It's when you have this many, it's a little bit tricky to figure out if you've got them all. So I like to just go in order and tap over here. So tap when and then tap a box, takes a minute to think about it and then it fills the box. Now, if you want more than one box to have the same design, it will repeat. So you can do something like that. You can't clear those, but what you can do is just go ahead and put something else on top of one of those. So I'm basically just going through minute wait on that one. I'm going through and I am adding these designs. When at a time, knowing that I need just one square for each design today, a lot of times I do a few squares. So I will fast-forward this. I need to think about a way to remember which ones I'm saving for later. I know that one is. Alright, so now you've filled everything and Add to Cart. And then I go straight to purchasing. So I've had times where I've done more shopping and my fill yard ended up not being in the cart when I got back. So because it took so much work I do at last and then I go ahead with my purchase. Alright? And you can see in the US at least it's only less than $15 for 42 designs. So that makes me feel like I can really experiment with color. So finishing up, I'm hopping back over to my designs. If I receive my swatches and I find one that I don't like, say I don't like this one. I might want to just swap it out with something that I do like it needs to be something you've already proved. And all you need to do is tap Upload Revision. And then you can enter a completely different design in there. Maybe it's something that a different scale or whatever it is. If you're actually loading a revision, of course that would sweat. It's intended for maybe I don't like this light green on this colored background in the end, once I see it in print and I want to upload a slightly different color, things like that. All right, Enjoy. 6. Design Challenges: Let's talk about design challenges. Go ahead and go to the Discover tab and go to design challenges. So design challenges are a great way to just kinda get some eyes on your account. You can see here the embroidery template challenge says Vote now, the winners will be announced May 13th, but the, all these other ones have already been announced for what the challenges descriptions are and all you have to do is tap, see the challenge. Read the description, more description over here. You can see the prizes. Sometimes this is a pretty typical price list, but sometimes there's collaborations with other companies and they'll add some prizes. And then just some more information. When you decide to do a challenge, you can go straight from your design library to enter the challenge. So let me show you that really quick. So let's say you are right here having one selected. And you want to enter this in a challenge, all you have to do is tap this right here. Tap which challenge you want to enter it in. It's going to pop over to another page and it's going to show you this challenge is for a wallpaper. So it's showing you on wallpaper, and it's showing you exactly what the challenge entry will look like. And if you want it at a different scale than you need to go back, change your scale and try again. Probably need to refresh the page and things like that. And then you can hit Enter challenge. Just make sure you look at deadlines and meet those deadlines for each of the challenges. So on this design challenge page, you can go down and you can see the latest winners as the last few. So you can go to this seashells, see winners. And it will show you an image of the top. And they put quite a few, they say top 50, but look, it was 70 this time. And then if you want to see all the rest of the entries, you have to go back to the blog and then find where that is and you can tap, read more. And then it has the big long granting list. There were over a thousand entries in this challenge. So you have to I believe the only way to check where you're at is to look manually. And there's probably some sort of search function on a web site. So and then you can also shop that challenge entries as well. I'm in this one. I'm number 141, I think. Yeah. 141. Not bad out of a 1040 or something like that. Sometimes the design challenges are for tea towels. So in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to do tea towels. There's a couple little things you need to know. So it's an important watch. And the other really awesome thing about tea towels on Spoonflower is they don't have to be repeat patterns. 7. Tea Towel Tips!: So we have our 150 dpi and our 300 DPI TTL all templates. The reason I gave you both is I don't personally like to design in 150 dpi. So I will design in this one and then I'll save it to this one. And I'll export it from this one. And that will give me a 150 dpi because you do need to upload the 150 dpi version of your tea towel in order for it to fit correctly into the yard. So I'll show you that in a minute. So you can choose to go ahead and design and 150 dpi if you're pretty sure you're not going to use that art for anything else. Or if you're just importing a different piece of art and doing, moving it around and things like that. And you've already created it somewhere else. Just go ahead and design directly in 150 dpi. So I'll just show you a quick example of what I mean when I design in one, in 300 DPI. But also really quickly just say, you know, the top of the tea towel is to the left. And so T-cells are typically viewed that way. And then you have this safe zone is the white area. And then the finished te tell size is right there. Oops. So the hem line will be at route right there. And then that's just the fat quarter size and that will be part of the hand rolled in. So you can delete those layers. You can make a quick sketch of where this safe zone is, for example, so that you can just completely delete. Well, that wasn't a very good line. And then you can completely turn those other layers off and then change the background color. Make your design on a different layer. So it's not the same layer as that little sketch. Let's do some B stamps have all bad. So let's just make a couple of stamps. Md, HIV. So if that is your tea towel, which obviously wouldn't be, you need to spend more time on you need to rotate it back this way and save it before you turn that outline off first. And when step I love to do is to put a little border around the edges. And you can do this with 2D Drawing Guide here. Let me clear that first. So turn on the Drawing Guide and have it on 2D and then go to the layer and press drying assist. I'm just on a monoline brush, so now it's going to draw perfectly straight lines. And this is a nice way when you order a full yard of your design. It defines for you where to cut along and cut the four quarters up. If you just had a white background leading to the next te tell that also has a white background. You're really going to have to do some measuring to figure out where to cut. This orange line won't show this is all tucked in under the Him. So don't even worry about that, just make it super skinny. You can see it's not terribly skinny. You can see here, I'm still way away from the finished TTL size. Alright, I'm gonna turn that grid off. So since I designed in 300 DPI, I'm just going to, you can change the background of course to anything you want. I'm just going to go ahead and copy all. I don't want to save it into my camera roll because then I'll get confused. Is that 300 DPI, is that 100 dpi? And then I'm coming into my 150 dpi and I'm just going to paste it here and de-selected and then save it from here. And that saves it at a 150 dpi. Save that. And now that's in my camera roll for two tells you how to save them in this direction. If you forget, you can rotate them in your camera roll. So don't worry about that. You can just edit and rotate from there. But there it is in my camera roll. And then back in your design library, you just add it like any other design. And now your design is loaded. You can see that is a fat quarter, but it's not showing your whole design. And that's because T cells are made to fit linen cotton canvas dimensions. So you tap linen cotton canvas and you should be able to see your whole design. This is what doesn't work if you saved it at 300 dpi. So make sure you save it at 150. You can view it as a full yard and C4 full designs. And that shows you how you can figure out where you're supposed to cut. So that's nice. And the other critical piece is you need to add a tag. S. F stands for Spoonflower, all one word, tea towel. Add tag. That will tell the system that this is only for tea towels. So when you view all products, if I tap that right now, it's probably going to show all sorts of designs. But if I refresh the page and then tap view all products, sometimes it takes a little while for that tag to really implement. You can see that it's only available on tea towels. Now, as far as the finished products are concerned, people can order this on any fabric you that they want. It's only going to make these perfect tea towels on the linen cotton canvas. So in the description, it's a good idea to let people know that this is the dimensions are to be ordered either in effect quarter or by the yard on linen, cotton, Canvas. Don't forget the tea tell because this is not a repeating pattern. Oh, and look, it's gone back to Petal Signature. So because this isn't a repeating pattern, you have to have it be set to just a tea towel. I'm going to try something here. I need to save this layout. And I'm gonna see if it saves the linen cotton canvas. So now I'm going to go back to view all products. And then go back. It's still am linen cotton canvas. So that's good. I can't confirm that just having this saved right here is all you need to do to get people to make sure they order it that way. But it looks like that is probably going to save that fabric setting. So that's good. And then of course you need to finish all this other stuff. And of course add more tags as well. So if you go back to the project, is that projects and resources tab. This tea towel design info is just one of their blog posts on some design challenges that had, there were a whole bunch of TTL design challenges in a row. So it had some great information. Some of the templates though I think are mostly for Photoshop. So I included the link just to this is I just made a procreate version of this essentially. And I included the link so that you could scroll through and see more information on tea towels. I included the whole lesson on tea towels because I found it a little bit challenging when I was trying to enter some design challenges with details, I wasn't sure what I was doing. So I just wanted to make it easier for other people in case they find themselves in that same position. All right, I hope you enjoy.