Procreate to Affinity Photo: A Seamless Workflow for Surface Pattern Designers

1. Trailer: Building your patentiles in Procreate can feel, well, a bit fiddly sometimes. You think everything's lined up, but then you zoom in and whoops, a little gap or overlap sneaks in. What if you could build out your entire patentile with one click perfectly every single time? That's exactly what we're gonna do in this class. I'm Rebecca Flaherty. I'm a Surface pattern designer, YouTuber and creator of the pattern Makers Tokit. I've taught thousands of students just like you how to create seamless patterns in Procreate, and now I'm excited to show you how to take those patterns into Affinity Photo for a smoother, faster and more professional workflow. Affinity Photo is amazing because it lets us automate the parts of pattern making process that usually trip people up, like building out tiles accurately. No more second guessing, no more snapping errors, and no more wasted time. Plus, it's a one time purchase, just like Procreate, so no ongoing costs. Learning this workflow means you'll save hours of work, keep all of your Procreate layers intact, and open up tons of new options for recoloring, exporting, and applying your designs. This class is designed for Surface pattern designers who already know how to make repeating patterns in Procreate using the diamond method. If you've taken my class on Easy Half Drops in Procreate, this is the perfect next step. And don't worry. You don't need any prior experience in Affinity Photo. I'm going to guide you through every part of the process. We'll start by bringing your finished Procreate patentile into Affinity Photo. Then use automations to build out your repeat with a single click. After that, we'll explore how to easily recolor your design, save it and export it for different uses, and add it as a pattern fill so you can see your artwork in action. I'm even providing you with two sample patterns to work alongside Media in the class, so you can just focus on learning the process. Once you try this workflow, you'll never want to go back to snapping again. Ready to see how powerful One Click can be, let's get started. 2. Overview & Class Project: Before we dive into the lessons, let's talk about your class project. By the end of this class, you'll have a fully put together layered pattern that you started in Procreate, brought into Affinity Photo and built out with automations that you've recorded. Ideally, this class should be taken as a follow on from my Easy Peasy half drops in Procreate class. So if you have the project from that class, you can use that to carry on with in this class. But if not, I've got a copy of the pattern that I made in that class for you to pick up with. Because here's the thing. I really want this project to be about learning the process without overthinking the finished design. This is why I'm sharing these two half finished sample patterns for you to use. I highly recommend starting with those because it will let you focus on the techniques, steps, and workflow without having to create a pattern from scratch at the same time. Copying is actually one of the best ways to learn, trust me. You don't have to stick with the same colors that I've used in those patterns. I'll be showing you how to easily switch up the colors. So don't worry there won't be a project gallery full of patterns that all look the same. You can make it your own by adding your own color palette to it. That said, if you are already a pattern making pro and want to use your own design while following along, then go for it. This project is flexible and the goal is for you to practice the workflow from start to finish. Here's what you're going to be doing. Creating or copying a pattern in Procreate, your choice, getting the file ready to export from Procreate and organizing your layers for a smooth workflow. Importing it into Affinity Photo to set up automations to build out your seamless repeat tile. Adding your pattern as an asset so you can use it to fill layers and shapes and then uploading your final project to the project gallery so everyone can see your amazing progress. I've included low res class project templates, which are in an ideal size for sharing to the Project Gallery. And if you want to use those, I'll be showing you how to add layer fills and export as we work through the class. Remember, it's not about perfection. It's about learning the steps, building your skills, and gaining confidence using Procreate and Affinity in your new workflow. So grab your iPad and let's get started. 3. Picking Up From The Previous Class: Thanks do. Bank. So we're going to pick up almost where we left off in the previous class, Easy Peasy half drop repeats. You can download this file from the project resources section, and it's a copy of the file that I made in that class. In that class, we built out the pattern by duplicating the file and then flattening a copy. But in this class, we're going to skip that step and export straight into Affinity Photo to build it out with an automation. So in this file here, you can see that I haven't deleted the sketch layers yet. A lot has changed in the art world since I made that class. Whatever your opinions on AI art are, it is currently here, whether we like it or not. And because of this, I now never delete my sketch layers. I want to have proof that my artwork is 100% human made, and these sketch layers are my evidence of that. And this isn't just me being paranoid. I've seen real world examples of artists being challenged on the entries in things like spoonflower challenges, which don't allow AI art. They were asked to show their sketches or rough drafts to prove that they had made the pattern themselves and hadn't used AI. So this is the first evolution of my workflow since that original class. Keep your sketch layers and don't delete them. Just group them together. And then name this group sketch. I and then you can just hide it. It can just sit there at the bottom minding its own business, and it's there if you ever want or need it. We're also going to group all of our working layers into another group, so not that one. All of these remaining layers, we're going to group those, and we're going to rename this one pattern. This is going to make things easier for us later when we import into Affinity Photo. So once you have your sample file downloaded and you've organized it like I have here, sketch layers hidden in the sketch folder down here and your pattern layers all in a pattern folder up there, we are ready to learn some editable sketching and shading techniques in the next lesson. 4. Edit-Proof Shading And Texture: Thanks do. And Okay, so if you've ever seen almost any pattern I've ever made, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about here. Texture is my middle name when it comes to patterns. I love adding it wherever I can. Another of my big loves is playing around with color and making up new color ways for my patterns. So any shading or texture I add needs to be fully editable. I'm going to show you how you can easily transform your flat patterns from this to this and still be able to recolor without having to redo the shading and texture for every single color change. All of the colors for this pattern are on separate layers, and that's step one when it comes to making editing easy for yourself. New color, new layer. One of the things I love most about digital art is using blend modes. When you have artwork on different layers, you can choose how they affect the layers underneath. All of these layers here are just stacked up one on top of the other, and they aren't having any effect on what's underneath. The yellow here in these small flower dots just sits on top of these orange ones here and doesn't have any effect on it. This is called normal blending. If we click on the layer here and click on this N, that N stands for normal. And then you've got other blend modes down here. A quick scroll through all the different blend modes here will show you that there are a whole range of ways you can blend this yellow dot onto the orange flower beneath it. The two that we're going to use for adding shading, high light, and texture are color burn and color dodge. Color burn is a blend mode that makes the colors underneath look richer and darker. Think of it like turning up the contrast and saturation at the same time. So if I put a light color on top, you'll notice it hardly changes anything underneath. White actually does nothing at all, but if I use a darker color like this one, you can see it really burns into the base layer, making it more intense. And if I go all the way to black, the base layer turns completely black. This is a great blend mode to use when you want to add depth, shading or texture without painting in new colors yourself. It's like giving your pattern a little extra drama with just one layer. Color Dodge, on the other hand, is kind of like the opposite of color burn. Instead of darkening, it lightens what's underneath. The colors underneath look brighter and lighter, almost like they're glowing. If I put a light color on top, you can see it really brightens and lightens the base layer. White makes it go super bright, almost like a flash of light. But if I use a darker color on top, not much happens. You'll barely see any change. This blend mode is perfect when you want to add highlights, shiny effects or to give your pattern a little pop of light. It's like turning a spotlight in just the areas you choose. Color Burn and color dodge are like two sides of the same coin. So you can think of them as a little duo. Color Burn will give you darker, richer, more saturated tones, and color dodge is lighter, brighter and glowing. Together, they're great for adding depth and highlights to your pants without painting new colors by hand. I'll show you what I mean. I'm going to add some shading over the top of these yellow flower middles. I always use a 50% gray for my shading, and by that I mean the color you get by double tapping in this area of the color wheel. If we go to value, you'll see that that gives us 50% on the bright this there, and saturation is zero. This gray works just right as a shader or highlight over all colors when using color burn and color dodge. If I was going to use anything other than naught percent saturation, it would also affect the hue of the color underneath. So that's why I use gray. I'm going to add a layer here above these flower middles. I'm going to change the blend mode to color burn. And using the artists crayon, I'm going to put some darker touches on there. See how it's darkening the yellow on those? Obviously, we just want to have that effect on this layer of yellow, not the orange underneath. So what we need to do is tap on this layer and make it a clipping mask. This gray and the blend mode will now only be applied to the layer directly underneath it. Let's tap back onto this yellow layer now and add another layer above it. You'll see it will automatically get clipped in between, and I'm going to change the blend mode on this one to color dodge. And now if I draw on this layer, you'll see we can add some lighter tones up there. It's pretty intense, isn't it? We can fix that though by reducing the opacity on these two layers. So if I tap on here and I can bring the opacity down, I normally find something 40-50% is a good opacity to use. So I'll bring this down to 40 and then this one bring down to 40 as well. It's a thing you can experiment with in your own patterns and artwork depending on the look you want to go for and what suits your own signature style and aesthetic. So now we have the shading set up here for this one. I'm going to show you how easy it is to change the colors in your pattern. So if we add another layer above this, and maybe I want to choose a lighter yellow for this, I can tap on here and fill this layer. That's now made all of these dots on here, the same color. And you can see the shading here is still a perfect match. You can also go to hue adjustments up here. And change the colors there, and you can see that shading will match with whatever color we use underneath. Let's finish off the rest of the shading on these flower middles now. We can carry on recoloring the rest of this pattern now and add some shading as we go. I'm going to go to the next layer, add a layer above, make it a clipping mask, and then fill it with the colour I want to use on these flower petals. I'm going to use a slightly darker cream color. Then add the two color burnt colour dodge layers over the top up again and set the opacity to 40% and just scribble over all the petals again with this artist cre and to add some subtle texture. I'll whizz through adding the new colours and textures to the other layers now. As you start adding these color and texture layers in, your layers are quickly going to fill up. To keep things organized, you should group each layer and its clipping mask together, and then name the group so you can navigate things a little more easily. If you know that your iPad has a tight limit on the number of layers you can use in Procreate, you might want to skip adding the recoloring layer until we take this file onto the computer later. Also, on a personal level, you might feel that making color choices feels like a post production job that you would do after you've made the pattern, and you just might prefer to do that on the computer anyway. Quite often, I'll use placeholder colors whilst working in Procreate, add my shading over the top, and not make any color choices until I have it open on the computer. Other times, I'll find I'm more in a couch doodles mode and want to finish the whole pattern right here in Procreate. You have options here is basically what I'm saying. With all of these dots here, I don't want to have to add separate shading layers for each one of these colors. So what I'm going to do here is just group all of them together, call it dots, and then just do one color burn layer and one color dodge layer for the whole group. You can't clip this to a group in Procreate, but we can easily fix this later in affinity photo. So for now, I'm just going to leave all of this messy and unclipped for dealing with later. That's all of the shading and recoloring I want to do now for this button, and it is ready to export and open in affinity photo in the next lesson. 5. Procreate Export & Affinity Import: So before we export this, let's do a quick preflight check. You should have all of your motifs and their shading layers grouped together and labeled like this, and then all of those grouped together in something like pattern, then your sketch layers also grouped and hidden and labeled up as sketch. It's definitely easier to do this in Procreate than on the computer. I don't know why, but as soon as I take this onto the computer and this goes to whether I'm using Affinity Photo, soon as it's in there, it all feels unfamiliar, and I've got no idea what is what if I haven't labeled it up properly. So do yourself a solid and get into the habit of doing this before you export. Then you can go up to Actions, tap on Share, and we want to export as a PSD file. PSD is a layered Photoshop file format, but you can also open them in Affinity Photo. It's going to keep all of your layers here and nothing will get flattened. Then you can use your normal method for sending this over to your computer. If I'm going to open it up right away, then I'll use AirDrop. But if I'm just sending it over to open the next time I'm on my computer doing edits, then I would save it to either Dropbox or ICloud. If you're feeling fancy and you've got handoff enabled on your devices, you can even drag it from your iPad over onto your iMac. Once you've got the file on your computer, you can right click on it and choose Open In Affinity Photo. Now, I know I always say this in my classes, and that's because I have to say it to myself when opening new software, but don't let this new software interface overwhelm you if you've never seen it before. You don't need to know what everything does right away, and you can ignore everything except the tools we'll be using. This is how your screen should look when opening it for the first time. You have your document here in the middle. Tools down here on the left, panels over here on the right, and we can also use this area here for panels to give us more room to see them. And then you've got your toolbar menus up at the top. So let's set things up to be a bit more pattern designer friendly. You can click over here and get rid of histogram, and we'll put swatches up here instead. So we'll go up to Window and find the swatches menu and put that in there. We can also get rid of color because we don't need that one. I'm going to drag the layers panel over here to the left. So that we've got more room for seeing all our layers there. And then over here, I'm also going to add a panel called macro and also library. These two are what we're going to use to set up our automations. You can also get rid of these others down here. I'm going to get rid of channels. I'm going to get rid of navigator history. I'm going to leave Transform down here and I'm going to go up here and add in the Assets panel. But I will drag that over here. There we go. So we've got assets and transform there. So this is how your setup should look, although you're totally free to customize it to suit your needs, of course. If you already use Affinity Photo, then you might have another setup you use. Or if you're switching to Affinity from a different software, you might want to set it up to mimic your previous layout. If you want to switch between different setups, you can save this layout as a preset. Come up to Window, come down to studio, and select Add preset. So you could save this one as Surface pattern design. Choose Okay, and then you can click up here on Window, go to Studio, choose between your different presets here. I've already got one, which I've labeled up as pattern design, but we'll just carry on using this one for now. So in the next lesson, we will get started and build out our patentle using an automation for perfect repeats every time. 6. Automation 1: Building Out The Tile: So you remember from the first class that we put a diamond method pattern into repeat by duplicating this middle section and repeating it into each of the corners. In Procreate, we did that by flattening, adding marks to the corners here so that we could move the layer by half a canvas width in each direction. In Affinity Photo, we can do that without flattening without adding marks and we can use maths to make sure it's pixel perfect. Let me just very quickly explain the maths. This canvas is 3,600 pixels square. When we snap it in Procreate up into this corner, we have moved it halfway across and halfway up. We've moved it 1,800 pixels horizontally in this direction and 1,800 pixels vertically up here. We use plus and minus to describe whether we're moving it to the left or right or up or down. For horizontal directions, left is minus, right is plus, and for vertical directions, up is minus and down is plus. When we snap this up into that corner there, we've moved it -1,800 horizontally and -1,800 vertically. Don't worry at all if these concepts take a while to become muscle memory, especially if they don't feel intuitive to you. For example, I read left to right, so minus for left and plus for right makes sense to me. But for someone who uses a writing system that reads left to right, sorry, right to left, this will feel backwards, just like up being negative somehow feels backwards to me. And just to make you feel even better in case it wasn't clear, I am one of those people who has to put their hands out in front of them to work out whether I mean left or right every single time. It makes for some interesting car journeys when I'm on MAP duty, let me tell you. Anyway, the point is, I'm saying all of this because these coordinates and directions can feel like the first stumbling block coin switching from snapping on Procreate to maths on desktop software. And I don't want you to think that this has to sink in or even to make sense first time around or for you to feel like you failed if you feel lost right now. You will only need to type in these numbers once to set up the automation, and then you can just do it with one click after that. So let's look at how to do that now. So with the MO tool selected, and V is the shortcut for that, click on your pattern group, and we're going to press Enter. You'll then see we get this little move and duplicate box pop up there. And there's spaces in here for you to tell it how far to move the group in each direction. And you can choose to just move it or you can tick this and move it and duplicate it, which is what we're going to be doing. I'm going to be going through this process twice in all once now to show you how it works, and then again in a second, as we record it to make an automation. So select duplicate, and we're going to move it -1,800 horizontally. And minus 1800 vertically as well. Just press tab. And you'll see that's going to move up there into the corner. We've got duplicate selected, so we can press Okay. There's a copy of it up there, and that first one is nice snapped up into this corner. I will say here, don't worry about all these smudgy marks. We are going to sort those later. We're just looking at the movements of this for now. So we're still on this group. We haven't had to select another group, so we're going to press Enter again. And this time, we're going to move it 1,800 pixels this way. So that's plus. So we'll turn duplicate on, and we're going to type in plus 1,800. And then vertically, we're still going up, so it's still -1,800. Press tab, and then you can press Enter. So that's the first two in place. We've snapped, not snapped. We're just moving it. We've moved one up there and one up here. We're still on this bottom layer each time, so we can press Enter again and duplicate. So we're going to move it down into this corner now, so we're going to move it 1,800 pixels this way. So plus 1,800. Vertically, we're moving it down, so we want to go plus as well. So plus 1,800. Got duplicate selected, so we can then just press Enter. We're still on this layer here. You'll see it's just going to keep adding layers above, so we'll always be on this one, so we can press Enter again. And this time, we want to move it back this way, so that's -1,800. And vertically, we're going to move it down. So that's plus 1,800. Check, duplicate. And it, okay. So now, this has built out our pattern tile for us. There's one extra step, which isn't going to make sense for now, but it will make sense later in the class. And I think it's better just to do it this way to start with so that it doesn't come as a forgotten extra step later. We're going to transform it one more time. So hit enter. We're still on this middle one. Press Enter again, and we're going to move it -3,600 pixels horizontally. So it's going to put another copy of it kind of over here. So we'll do minus 3600. So one full canvas width, and we want to duplicate it, and then you can just press. Okay. In this particular pattern, you won't see anything on the canvas, but just know that it is still here off to the edge, which is where we need it in the next type of pattern we're going to work on later. So these are the steps that will form our automation. If I just go and delete all of the ones we've just duplicated, going to press shift and delete all of those. So we're back with this one in the middle. Open up my library, and I've got this one here called Make 3,600 diamond repeat. If we click on our pattern layer and we click on that you can see that builds that out with just one click. So that's the automation we're going to build next. All of those steps will happen automatically, perfectly every single time you bring a 3,600 pixel pattern you've made like this in Procreate into Affinity Photo. No math to remember, and it doesn't matter if you remember which direction is plus or minus, which is a huge relief. So let's record that automation now and we can go through those steps one more time. You click on to Macro here, which is what we're going to use to record it. And I want to keep this one in the middle, but everything else, I'm going to select and delete. So we're going to go to the macro panel and click on this red circle there, and we're now recording. It's so silly, but as soon as I press this, I automatically feel anxious like I'm being watched. Say, I move that down there, and I didn't mean to do that. You can just stop recording. Click on this little visa arrow, and that's going to scrub everything that you've recorded. So don't worry if you mess up. I'm going to press undo. So it's important that we're already on our pattern layer. If you're on a different layer, you need to press Stop. So we're on our pattern layer, and now we can press record. So the first thing we do is press Enter. And the first step is -1,800 horizontally and -1,800 vertically. We want to duplicate it, and then we can press Enter. Then we press Enter again because it's left us on this same bottom one. We're going to move it plus 1,800 horizontally, -1,800 vertically, duplicate it and press Enter. Then we can press Enter again. Horizontally, we're going plus 1,800. Vertically plus 1,800. We're going to duplicate and press Enter. Enter again. This one is -1,800. Vertically, it's plus 1,800. We want to duplicate it, and then we compress Enter. And then remember I said there's one extra step where we press Enter and we move this one minus 3600. So one full canvas width this way. We do want to duplicate it and we just press Enter. And that is the automation recorded, so we can press Stop now. And that's finished recording, and that has recorded all of those steps for us. So all of your steps that you've made are listed here. It should just have five lots of duplicate. If you've messed up at any point, remember you can click on this arrow and go through that again. Otherwise, you can click on this icon here that looks sort of like a graph, and if you hover over it, it'll say at a library. So we're going to click on that, and then you need to enter a name for this. I've already got several named 3,600 Pixel repeat for when I've been going through this to test it. So I'll just call this 3600. Repeat one, just in case I've already got one like that, and then you can click Okay. And then if you go to your library, which should automatically open after that, you'll be in the default library, and you might have some other bits and pieces in here. If you want to get rid of any other automations, so this one I'll delete. You can right click on it and delete Macro. This is the one I've just used. So what we can do is test this now. So I'm going to click on all of these layers that we duplicated, delete those. And then if we come down here and it was this one here, 3600 repeat one, if we click on that, that has then built the Pat night for us. And just like magic, your tile is built out. If you've been solely doing this in Procreate and at the mercy of sometimes finicky snapping to build out your finished tiles, this is an absolute game changer. You can know with complete certainty every time that your tile has been built out perfectly and will repeat perfectly all with one click. I'll show you a quick way to test the repeat now. Come up to your top layer here and we're going to press Shift Option Command E. And that's going to make a new layer at the top with everything flattened onto one. I'll pop up here in a second. It's not showing in the preview at the moment, but that's got everything flattened onto one. If I drag it around, you can see, we've got that whole layer there. What we're going to do is use the move and duplicate to move it halfway this way and halfway that way. And then we'll see the edges meet in the middle and we can check that it's repeating properly. So on this layer, we're going to press Enter, and we're going to move it -1,800 pixels, duplicate it. So let's move half over this way and then press Enter again, and this one will move plus 1,800. We don't need to duplicate this one. We can just click Okay. Just grab the view tool and then we can zoom into the middle. And obviously, there's a line here because we haven't sorted these things out with clipping mask yet. But you can see that repeat is working properly done the seam there. So I'll just delete those and we'll test the top and bottoms. Seems nice. So I'm going to press Shift Option Command E again to make another copy in there. Press Enter, and we'll move this one vertically plus 1,800. So that's going to move it down. We'll duplicate it. And then press Enter again, and this one will move vertically -1,800. We don't need to duplicate that one and then grab that one, zoom in. Then you can see if you zoom in, sometimes you might see that flicker of a line there, but as you zoom in, it disappears, and that is just a rendering thing. You can see there's no gap in there. Apart from this line here, but again, that's because we haven't got those things clipped into place. So we can delete those, and that's how you can do a quick test just to see that everything is lining up. And that is how easy it is to set up that automation and use it. And in the next lesson, we can use it to make some speedy color edits. 7. Easy Recolouring: So let's start by deleting these copies. I'm going to want to keep this one at the bottom, but everything above it, we can delete. So we're back with this. I'm going to open this up, and I'm going to hide the two shading layers for the dots for now, just to make things look a bit simpler while we're looking at the color changing first. So we can open up this pattern group here and play around with the colors and also fix our shading in a moment. If you've already set up color fill layers in Procreate, what you can do is just drill down to the color fill layer, select the gradient tool with G. Pressing G will toggle between these two over here. You'll get a paint bucket, which is the bucket fill. And then if you press it again, you'll get this icon, and that's the gradient fill. So with this layer selected, you can then choose different colors to click and fill that layer with. So you can pick from your swatches. You can fine tune it by double clicking up here. And if you haven't already added color fill layers in Procreate, what you can do I'll get rid of this layer here. So we're on this one here, the dots that are in their original format. Click on this layer and add a new layer above it by going layer new fill layer. With this, what you want to do is drag it down and over to the right so that then that kind of gets clipped over this layer. That's how clipping masks are done in Affinity Photo. I'll just undo that again. So you've got your layer that you want to add the color over. Select it. So it's this one here. Layer, New fill layer, and then you drag it down, not so that it's hovering over the thumbnail like that, you drag it down and over that way. Then with your gradient tool, you can choose colors like that. So that's how you can change the colors in your pattern. Let's go on this one. And again, I've got the Procreate fill layer on here, so I can change the colors like this. But if that wasn't there, I'll delete that one. And it's this blue one there. We go layer new fill layer. And drag it down onto the layer like that, and then you can change the color with these swatches. Let me show you quickly how to import and organize palettes. You can import palettes in either AF palette format or Adobe's ASE format. If you've got some of those you want to import, I'll show you how to do that now. You click on this Hamburger menu there and go to Import palette. You've got three options here. You can have the palette be accessible just in this document. You can have it be just this app or the whole system. I always go for system because that then lets me use it anywhere. This palette will be accessible if I open it in Affinity Designer, for example. So I'm going to import it as a system palette and it's this one here I'm going to bring in, so I'll click on that and choose open, and then that's brought all those colors in. So what I can do now is use that to change some of the colors in this pattern. Click on that one. Make that one blue. If you want to bring in a color palette and it's not in either of those formats, then you're best off either typing in the hex codes by clicking on this and you can type in the hex code there, or you can take a screenshot and bring it in and do color swatching. So you'd use the eyedrop at all. You just go to File Place. Just quickly find a JPEG that I can bring in. Bring it up to the top, so it's not like clipped in between stuff. And then you could grab the eye drop at all with I select a color here. And then if you press on that, it's going to add this current color to your palette. So that's how you would save stuff to a new palette if you don't have a palette in AF Photo or ASE format. Right click on these and delete those because I don't want these in this one. And we'll get rid of this one. To toggle between your palettes, you just click on this and any palettes you've brought in will be in that little section there. What I'm going to do now is rename all of these color fill layers, Color fill one. I would go through and do that for all of these. Then what you can do is duplicate these layers with Command J, and then you can choose new colourways for your background and it's an easy way of toggling between two different colourways. And then you can name this one color fill two and pick a new color for each one. So Command J to duplicate, and then pick new colors for your pattern that way. And it's an easy way of toggling between your two colourways. Going to hide, get rid of these cars. I don't actually want a second colorway. But when I'm making a pattern with two colourways, that's how I kind of organize the file. I just stack the different color options on and label them Color fill one or Color way one and color way two. And then when I want to toggle between them, I can just do that by turning them on and off and also as a background too. So now what we're going to do is see about these dots here and the shading on those. I'm going to close the group that has the dots in them like that, and with my move tool, I'm going to command click on the dots group. Then I'm going to select either of these two shading layers above and choose this mask layer here. And you'll see straightaway that has clipped it down over those. It's not really clipped it down. It's just use that selection to mask it. Can then select the other one, press that again, and now we press Command D, you can zoom in. All of that shading is clicked over the area in that group, and that's a lot easier than having to do separate shading layers for each of those dots when you want a different layer for each color of dots. I press Command zero. Let's put this into repeat now that we've got the shading on the dots sorted out. I'm going to clap down my pattern group. Click on that. I'm going to click on my 3,600 repeat. Now that has built that pattern out and as you can see, all of these dots are fixed now. This process of editing and then rebuilding the pattern is kind of similar to how I use smart objects in Photoshop for editing patterns like this. Affinity Photo doesn't have a smart object function yet, but I was determined to come up with a workaround, and I'm pretty happy with it. And actually, I've now switched to using Affinity for building a Mo patterns instead of Photoshop because I actually prefer doing it this way. In the next lesson, I'll go through a few options for saving and exporting your files. 8. Saving & Exporting: At the moment, this file is still in the PSD format we exported from Procreate. If we hit Save now, so Command S. It's going to ask us to save it in an AF Photo format, which is the format that Affinity Photo uses. Let's save the AF Photo version first. I'll make a new folder for this. I'll give it a proper name and an SKU number so I can easily find it on my archive. I'm just going to use my initials. The last two digits of the year I made it, and then the last number is just a running tally of how many patterns I've made this year. So in January, the first pattern I make will be RF 25 oh oh one, the next one, RF 25 oh oh two, et cetera. It really can be just as simple as that. Now, you do have the option of exporting this as a PSD as well if you want the flexibility of being able to open it in Procreate again or Photoshop. To save a PSD version, you have to export rather than save. There's a massive caveat here, though, when it comes to opening this in Procreate again. There are now six times the number of layers in this file. In reality, you might not be able to open this file in Procreate after all. Also, as soon as you open it in Procreate, you would automatically lose all of the pixels that are outside the Canvas area. Although you can't see them in Affinity Photo the way we have the canvas set up at the moment, they are still there. Photoshop and Affinity both include an off Canvas area, but in Procreate, they are immediately gone as soon as you open the file. With this in mind, I don't recommend also exporting as a PSD if it's solely because you might want to add some more illustration elements in Procreate at a later date. If you want to do that and you don't still have the original file in your Procreate gallery, your best option is to export a JPEG version of this Canvas here, showing the parts you want to edit and the elements of the pattern around them, and then open that JPEG in Procreate, add your extra motifs in layers above it, and then export that back as a PSD, open it in Affinity Photo, and then you could copy those new layers into this document again. If you wanted to export it as a PSD because you want to be able to also open it in Photoshop, the way you would do that is Shift Option Command S, and that's the Export screen. Up here, you can choose PSD and then choose Export. Then you could put that one in there as a PSD as well. Back to exporting this document now, you can export a finished patentile like we have on view here as either a JPEG or a PNG the same way as we did with the PSD file. You press Shift Option Command S for export. Choose your format up here. I always use PNG just because it's a loss list format, and then you can click on Export, and I would keep the same file name as I've got for my AF Photo file and then just click Save. With the different colourways, if you've set up two different colourways within this file, you could either just keep this one set of groups here and turn the color layers on and off each time. Use your automation and next bout your tile, or you could save a separate file for each colorway, or include them all in the same file and have two sets of groups. I personally just keep one master file, and I'm happy to have all of the color layers in here labeled up and just toggle between each one as I need it. Now that you're familiar with the process of setting up editable color and texture layers in Procreate, sending a pattern over to Affinity Photo, building it out, editing and exporting, we're going to go back into Procreate and learn an advanced technique for drawing into these spaces here in the corners of your diamond and filling in gaps that you might have in your pattern in those areas. 9. Drawing Into A Corner: You might already be familiar with how I draw off the edges on a pattern, but if not, I'm going to walk you through it now. So I got this pattern here, and all these motifs here are nicely spaced out. But when I build out a little pattern preview and Procreate, you can see there's kind of a hole there, and it's this area here, which falls right on the corners of the diamonds. I don't really want to make a chopped in half motif to go there. So there's a way we can offset our sketch layers. And I delete this, we can bring these edges into the middle and be able to draw a full not chopped in half motif in there. Then when we bring it into Affinity later, we can put it in place there on the edge, and it will be able to continue off the edges of the canvas with nothing getting chopped in half. So let's delete these for a moment. And in our sketch layer, and you can use sample file two from the resource section for this. You can duplicate this bottom layer here. I'm going to turn off the pattern layers. So I'm on this one, and we want to duplicate this one here, the pink one. Tap transform. Make sure you've got snapping and magnetics on and snap half of it over to this edge. I'll see those orange lines there. Then tap on the other one and snap the other half over to this edge. Then you can pinch those together. I'll do the same with this top one. So we're going to duplicate it, snap half over there. And snap the other half over there. Then we can pinch those together. So it's this area here, which is missing an extra motif. I'm going to add a layer above this pink one. Just grab drawing brush. And a similar sort of pink to work in here. And you can obviously draw motifs, however you want. You can draw something free hand. You can use stamp brushes. What I'm going to do because these are all essentially made up on the same one. I'm just going to go on the layer underneath. Grab the selectal, draw around this one here, tap transform, swipe down with three fingers, duplicate and I'm just going to put a copy of this one in here because all of my motifs are the same. If you were drawing different kind of flowers, then you could just draw your extra motif in here, and then once it's drawn, merge it in with the other pink items. Then we can get rid of, I don't know where that layer came from, but we can get rid of that. And this one we can get rid of now, too, because this layer is not complete, it doesn't match the one underneath. So we delete that and duplicate this. In case you can't see it, I do have that diamond on there. It's just a little thin and not so easy to see. So this one, we're going to tap transform, put snapping and magnetics back on, and carefully snap it back over to this edge there. And then the other one snap back over there, pinch those together, and then we'll use this to build out the new offset. So duplicate, tap transform, and we're going to snap it into each of these corners just like we're used to doing with our Easy Peasy half drops in Procreate. And then pinch those top four together, and we'll invert the colors on the top one so we can see which ones are which. And now we've done the offset again, you can see this extra one here is now in each of these corners. Cutting things in half in the sketch layer is fine, but we don't want to do that with final motifs. So now, I'll turn on these hidden pattern layers, and you can see I'm at the stage where I've got these middle motifs traced over, and it's literally just this last one that I need to do. So this is how we draw those come up to the top of your pattern group. Swipe down with three fingers and copy all. Then I'm going to swipe down again and paste. What that's done, that's put a flattened get rid of this a flattened copy of everything in there. I'm going to duplicate this, and I'm going to bring these edges into the middle just like we did with the sketch layer. So duplicate, tap transform, and we'll bring one edge over there, make sure that snaps into place there. And then this one underneath. Snap that one over there as well. Can zoom in and see that that's all in the right place. And then I can pinch these two together, add a layer above, and then I can just draw my extra motif in place now. And I think for this, I was just using the Procreate drawing brush. Dry ink brush I was using. So I was just using a mix of very similar colors. I think I'll just grab one of these colors from those to do this one. And you can do this on yours as well. Okay and I'll just grab that color there, add a layer underneath, and then just trace over these petals. This one's meant to be quite a messy pattern, so don't worry about keeping in the lines too much or if you've got gaps where you haven't quite colored everything in. There we go. So that's that extra motif drawn in now. Now what we're going to do is group these three layers together or any other layers that were required to draw this motif If you had several layers, you'd group all of those together, and we're going to group these and call this one extra And then you should have three folders here, extra pattern and sketch. And then I have these all grouped together in one big folder called layers. And that's going to be important later when we come to build out the pattern with some extra automations that they're grouped up like this. So you want to have sketch, pattern, extra and layers. And to get this ready for exporting over to Procreate, I'm going to turn off the sketch folder. In this extra group, you can either turn off that inserted image or you can delete it. I'm going to delete it because it would be easy enough to turn this off and copy that again if I needed to. So although this looks messy right now, this is how we're going to send it over to Procreate. I've got my extra group on show at the top with the inserted bit hidden or deleted. Then pattern in the middle and then sketch underneath hidden. I'm going to tap on my actions. I'm going to share. I'm going to show as PSD and I'm going to send it over to my computer and then we'll put this together in the next lesson. 10. Automation 2: The Extra Group: So I've got this file opened in Affinity Photo now. First of all, I'm going to sort out this extra group and put the motif where it's meant to be. Back in Procreate, when we snap the edges into the middle, we were moving it halfway across, which is 1,800 pixels. So now in affinity, we're going to do the opposite. So I'm going to open up the layers, and I'm going to select the extra group. And this has that pasted in layer either hidden or deleted. So we're just selecting the extra group. So I'm going to hit Enter, and I'm going to move it 1,800 pixels horizontally. And that's going to be plus. I don't want to duplicate this one. We don't want to be left with a copy in the middle. We just want to move it over here. So I'm going to now press Enter. Tnw you can see this has shifted over to the edge, and it's going off the edge of the canvas where it's meant to be in the pattern. But because we are in affinity photo now and not procreate, it's still there and it hasn't been cut off or deleted. If I drag this back in like that, you can see it's still there. Just going to undo that so it goes back in the right place. So let's undo that now. I'm going to press undo and let's build out an automation to move that in one step. So make sure that you have your extra group selected. Then go to your macro panel and we're going to press record. So now we're recording this. So we're just going to repeat what we did just a moment ago. We're going to press Enter, and we're going to put plus 1,800 in there. We don't want to duplicate it, so then we can just click Okay. And that's all we need for this automation. So we can press Stop. Click on this here to add it to our library, and I will call this one extra Transform. Here we go. And then you can see that down the bottom there. So let's undo moving that over. We're on the extra group already, and we'll click on Extra Transform. Just grab my move tool, so it works properly. And go, that's over in the right place now. And now what we can do is click on layers group here, and we could run the 3,600 repeat. Now, I'm not sure which one of these was the one I made in the last lesson. We'll just go for this one here. So you click that, and that then puts everything in place. And because of that last step that we put in the 3,600 repeat, where we moved 3,600 pixels this way, and that's this one here, you can now see some of that one, and it's because this part goes off the edge, so we need to repeat it over here. What I'm going to do is, let's zoom out so we can actually see how this looks. I expand the canvas. I'm going to use the Canvas tool here and I'm just going to drag this out like that. Press Enter, and then you can actually see what we've got here. This in the middle is our background, and then we've got all the different layers around the edges there. You can see this is the extra one that without the bit going over the edge, you can't see that there once the canvas is cropped, but now we've put this extra group in place there. That's the reason we needed to have this extra one over there. Although it wasn't visible on the first pattern we made, I felt like it was better to just put that in the automation and then knowing that it would make sense later on in the class. As long as you have your build pattern automation, always set up to include a copy over here, and you always move your extra group the same way I showed you, which is where you move at 1,800 pixels this way, this automation will always work and it will always build out your pattern perfectly. So there you go. Now you know how to sketch out and design a pattern in Procreate from the class on easy peasy half drops. You also now know how to draw off the corners and then bring the finish pattern into affinity photo and build it out with an automation. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you why you would want to bring your pattern into affinity photo in the first place and the advantages you have over just using Procreate. 11. Creating Pattern Fills: So why would you want to bring your patterns into a finity photo? What can you do in there that you can't do in Procreate? And the answer is lots of useful things, actually. Apart from building out patterns that work every single time and don't rely on sometimes finicky snapping, you also have the ability to load your patterns as fills and then apply them to all sorts of templates and play around with the scale your patterns are displayed at. For example, I've got this excel sheet template here, and I can click and apply my pattern fills like this. And I can play around with the scale in a way that wouldn't really be possible in Procreate. When you change the scale of something in Procreate, you lose image quality. But here we can make this scale bigger and smaller as many times as we like. I can also use it in this template here, which is for a Duve cover that I sell on Threadliss which is a print-on-demand platform. Patent tile for this pattern is only 3,600 pixel square, which is 12 " at 300 DPI. That's not big enough to use on a Duve cover unless we're talking about a barbie sized one, but this template is king sized Duve size. And although you could certainly make a canvas this big in Procreate, you would have to keep pasting and lining up copies of your tile on it, which just isn't really a feasible option. But we can send our patentile over to Affinity Photo, add it as a swatch down here, and then click and fill with our pattern and then resize it to the scale that we'd like it at. I have a Skillshare class dedicated to this very topic, and that's the next class you should take after this one to carry on your pattern making journey. However, I'm going to show you how to add a pattern as an asset and apply it as a fill in this class before we move on to the next lesson. Let's go back and open our patent tile file. You should have your Assets panel down here from where we added it in the setup at the beginning. But if you don't, you can go to Window and choose assets there and add it to whichever screen you want in. Mine's just down here. I've already got a category in here from where I use this normally. So I'll just delete this category, and we'll start from fresh like yours. Well, hopefully, look like this. So to add a pattern, first of all going to add a new category. So let's click up here on the Hamburger menu and choose Create New category. And I'll just call this one Patterns. Then we can add our pattern here to this group of assets. Then you'll see there's another Hamburger menu there. Click on this one and choose Add from selection. And by selection, it means the current active layer or group. So if we click on that, it's going to only add this group that we've got selected there. You can see down there, it's transparent. There's none of that purple background. So what we need to do is flatten all of this into one layer. Now don't panic. We're not going to flatten finish patterns. We can make a new layer from what's on show. So we're going to press Shift Option command, and E. And that's going to create a new pixel layer on top with everything that we've got on show. Then with this layer selected, you can click on this, choose Add from selection, and there we go. We've got our pattern tile in there now. So just to recap, in order to add a pattern here to the Assets panel, you need to have it all on one layer. You need to create a new layer from visible by pressing Shift, option, command, and E, and then add it from that. Once you've added a pattern in, if you want to get rid of it, you can right click and delete it that way. If you've got lots of patterns here that you want to delete like I did a moment ago, you can do what I did and just delete the whole category. Otherwise, you'll have to click on each one. So you can go up here and click on Delete and delete the whole category, and then you could just start a new category like I did a moment ago. So now that we've got our pattern in here, we can use it to fill layers or shapes. Let's fill a layer first. So we're going to click up here at the top where it says layer, and we're going to choose new fill layer. And then with your gradient fill tool selected, so G, that's going to toggle between these two icons here. You've got G, which is the flood fill tool, and then you've also got G, which is the gradient tool. The two icons look like this. The flood fill tool is like a little paint bucket, and the one we want is the gradient fill tool, and that looks like that. So I'm on this empty fill layer. I've got my gradient fill tool selected, and I'm going to click on my pattern here. Annoyingly, it always fills with the super tiny scale first, but you just click anywhere on the pattern, and I'm clicking and holding and dragging, and then you can just drag your pattern out. Hit shift, and it's going to make it snap to straight lines for you. So you can just drag it out to any sort of size to start with and then let it go. So the middle handle here is used for moving your pattern around. And then these two can be used for direction and scale. So you can play around with either of those to change the angle and the scale. And from anywhere on here, you can always press Shift and get it to snap back to right angles again. So to straighten things up, let's drag this into the middle first until it snaps like that into the middle. If you don't have snapping on, you can go up to view and click on Snapping and then make sure you have enabled snapping toggled up there. First thing we're going to do is drag this out, and it should. If we hold down shift, it will go in a straight line, and then it will also snap to the edges of the canvas there. And then what you should find is this is an exact copy of your pattern tile. It's centered on the canvas, and we've dragged out the repeat to go from the middle to the edge. So if I hide this fill layer, you won't actually see anything happen because it's a perfect copy. So what we can do to test the pattern is make sure this layer is showing, and then just drag this down slightly, and then I'm going to zoom in. And where it's just brought the edges down and in a little bit, you can just check along here that all of your motifs are lining up and you've got nothing cut off at the edge. And that's a really quick way of testing your pattern. So that's how to fill a whole layer. If you want to just fill a shape, we can do that, too. Let's change this fill layer to just a solid color fill so we can see something over the top of it now. So if I click on a color, that's going to fill it with a solid color. Let's just find the shape tool down here, and I want to use a rectangle tool. So I'm just going to click and drag a rectangle and then press G to get the gradient fill tool, and then we can fill this with our pattern as well. And then you can adjust the scale on that and the angle. While we're making shapes, let's make a diamond that we can use in our diamond repeats. Let's delete this layer, go back to our shapes, and I'm going to choose the diamond tool. So I'm going to press Shift and drag out a diamond like that. So down here in our transform box, you can set the width and height to be 3,600. And then we can center that on the canvas. I'm going to click up here. And then center that on the canvas. Up here, I'm going to change the fill to no fill. So I'll just click on this here to make it transparent. Go to click on the stroke. We'll leave that as black. Click on here, and I'm going to change the width to let's make it eight points, so it's nice and easy to see, and you want to make sure it's line stroke to center. Then when we zoom in here, if I pan to the edges, you can see we now have a rather handy 3,600 pixel square perfect diamond. What I suggest you do is hide all of your other layers. I'm going to select this one all the way down to the bottom and then click here to turn all of those off. Click back onto that one now. What you can do now is export this as a PNG. So I'm going to press Shift Option Command S. We've already got PNG selected up here, and I'm just going to export this. All this diamond layer. Save this somewhere that you can download it from your iPad, and then you can just import that layer in Procreate when you want to start a new pattern. The possibilities for using your Procreate patterns like this in Affinity Photo are endless. You can apply them to mockups, social media templates, interest marketing templates, print-on-demand templates, sale sheets, and so much more. And as I said, there is a follow on class which will show you how to do all of these things. I hope you're excited to get your patterns off your iPad and into some templates. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you one more automation for combining all that we've learnt so far into one single combined process. 12. Automation 3: One Click Process: I'm going to show you how to combine the two automations that we've learned into one. We'll be able to use one click to put the extra group in place and then also build out the tile. This automation is only a little bit more complicated, and the only tricky bit is that it will rely on you remembering to do that last bit of housekeeping with your file before you export from Procreate. So the things to remember are when you export from Procreate, you need to have one top folder here called layers or something similar to that that has all of your subgroups in it. Then you'll have the extra group as the next group down, and that needs to be on show and have that pasted in layer either hidden or deleted. Then underneath that, you'll have your pattern group, and then underneath that, you'll have your sketch group already hidden. You need to remember to always export it from Procreate like this. Once it's in Affinity Photo, we're going to open this layers group, and we're going to click on the extra group. This will be the point you will be able to run your automation from. So you'd open Affinity, select this extra layer, and then run your automation. This is where we need to be when we press record. Start your macro recording now. Go to your Macro tab and press record, what we're going to do is go to a library and we're going to run the extra transform. So we can use macros within macros. So the next thing we're going to do is click on the layers, and it's going to pop up with a little question for us. It's going to ask us, which layer do you want me to select every time you click on this? And the only option that is available to us, which luckily is the one we want. We want it to select the parent layer. And what that means is this group that has these three subgroups in it, these are child groups, and this one is the parent. So that's why I wanted you to group it up this way so that we can select the extra layer to do the first bit and then select the parent layer to do the next bit. So select. And now what we're going to do is run the 3,600 repeat automation. If we go back to the macro, you'll see the steps we've got so far. We've got the extra transform, set the current selection and run the 3,600 pix up repeat. What I would like you to do next, you don't have to do this step, but it's going to just save you doing one little extra task. Click on your very top layer. If you're using a Canvas that has textures maybe on the top, you could click on those textures, whatever the top group or top layer is, click up there and you want to select one layer from the top. This is always going to be clicking on the topmost layer. Then click Select. And what I'm going to do now is press Shift Option Command E, which is going to do that one last shortcut which flattens that into one layer, which we can then add to our Assets panel. So the steps we've got in this process are we do the extra transform. We set the current selection to choose the layer group. Then we run the 3,600 pix all repeat. Then we select the top layer, and then we choose merge visible to create a flattened layer. So we can press stop on that now, save it to our library, and we'll call it one click. Pattern build or something like that. Click on Okay. And what I'm going to do now is delete all of these apart from the one we were working on, and we'll test if this works. So we import from Oh, no, actually, I need to undo all of those because I need this back in the middle. There we go. So this is how it would look when we bring it in from Procreate. We open this. We click on our Extra group, and then we run this one click pattern build We've got this layer up here selected. We can now just go straight to our assets, click on that and choose Add from selection. And you can literally export from Procreate and then just seconds later, have it in here and have a pattern fill ready to apply to all your templates. So now you know how to bring your patterns over from Procreate and truly build them out with just one click. No finicky snapping, and the maths only has to be done once. And as long as you're using 3,600 pixel pattern squares, this is going to work every single time for you. If you're regularly using other Canvas sizes, then you can also build out custom automations for those different sizes, too. In the next lesson, we'll wrap things up and look at what your next steps after taking this class might be, and stay tuned after that for an extra bonus lesson where I'm going to show you how to make a pixel perfect diamond in Procreate. 13. Next Steps: Thanks. Congratulations. You've made it to the end of the class. Let's take a quick moment to recap what we've covered. You've learned how to take a fully editable pattern from Procreate using the diamond method, import it into Affinity Photo, build out your tile, using automations, recolor your design, export it in the right formats, and even save it as a reusable asset. That is a whole professional workflow from start to finish. And these skills are so useful because they give you a complete system for creating patterns that are flexible, editable, and totally ready to use on print-on-demand product or in your portfolio. No more fiddly snapping and no more flattening layers and no loss of quality. Just clean professional patterns that you can use again and again. So what's next? If you want to keep on building on what you've learned here today, I've created a follow on class where we take these finished patterns and turn them into print-on-demand Templates. That's where you'll see how to get your designs onto products like tote bags, notebooks, or even shoes ready to sell online. And if you'd like to see more from me, I share new patent tutorials every single week on YouTube. So come join me over there if you want even more ideas and inspiration. You can also check out the Pattern Makers' toolkit, which is full of free resources to help you on your pattern making journey. Thank you so much for joining me in this class. I can't wait to see your projects in the galleries. Don't forget to upload them, and we can all cheer each other on. And if you've got any questions, let me know in the discussions tab. Have fun. Say creative, and I will see you soon. 14. Bonus: Pixel Perfect Diamonds in Procreate!: Okay, so, before I go, we are going to make drumroll, please, a pixel perfect diamond outline in Procreate. Hey, if you've taken any of my classes on the diamond method, you already know that every pattern begins with this magical little transparent diamond in the sketch layers. It's like the unsung hero of pattern making, quietly keeping everything lined up while we draw flowers, gingerbread men, or whatever else we're doodling. Usually, you've got options. You can free hand it super quickly, or you can hop onto desktop software for that laser perfect accuracy. But of course, I couldn't leave it there. I thought, What if we could have both the nerdy accuracy and the code convenience of Procreate. So yes, this is a completely over the top way to make a diamond. You definitely don't have to do it this way. Free hand works fine. Affinity Photo works fine. But honestly, I just couldn't resist. You know me? I love a ridiculous little procreate hack. So if you're up for a slightly nerdy challenge, let's make ourselves the most nerdily perfect diamond you've ever seen all without leaving Procreate. So we're going to start with a 3,600 pixel Canvas. G to come up here. I already have a preset for it, but what we want is a 3,600 by 3,600 pixel square canvas. So we're going to click on that. This is my go to size for a patentle for a few reasons. It feels big enough to have plenty of space for all your motifs. It's not so big that the file size or layer limit gets out of hand. And most importantly, it's perfect for making high res 300 DPI artwork for print-on-demand that then also scales perfectly for spoon flour. You upload a 12 inch width 300 DPI file to spoonflower, it automatically gets reduced to 150 DPI and 24 inch width, which is the perfect size for their wallpaper. This really is a nice one size fits all option. So to create a perfect diamond, we first of all, need to create a perfect square. We've already made the canvas for that. So what I'm going to do I've got pink selected as my color for this. I recommend you don't use black and white because of the grid lines we're going to use in a moment. Any color will do, but maybe just not black and white. Click on this layer here and I'm going to tap and fill the layer. I'm saying click because I'm using a mouse to do this bit, so you can see what I'm tapping or clicking on, but in reality, it's going to be tap your iPad, but if I say click, that's why I'm saying click. Then we're going to duplicate this layer and I'm going to click on it, and I'm going to invert the color. So now we've got two layers, both 3,600 pixels by 3,600 pixels. What we're going to do is resize this top one now. So I'm going to tap transform. I'm going to tap on this node here. And you'll see at the moment, we've got a perfect square 3,600 pixels by 3,600 pixels. I'm going to change the interpolation method down here to nearest neighbor. Click on this again, and we're going to resize it to 3598 pixels square. Then I'm going to tap off it up here. So now we've got this layer on the bottom, 3,600 pixel square, and we've got this layer on top, which is one pixel smaller on each side. So if we center this on the canvas, we will have a one pixel border around the outside, and then we can use this layer to cut out of that one. Let me show you what I mean. So first of all, we need to center it, and you'll be relieved that I am not going to ask you to use the snapping to do this because that would be a nightmare trying to snap to the edge of this and the canvas. What we're going to do is turn on the drawing guide, first of all, so come up here. And go on Canvas and turn on the drawing guide. Then we're going to click Edit Drawing Guide. Down here on your grid size, click on this bit here and we're going to change the grid to just one pixel. And yes, it is going to go black because the grids are so grid lines are so close together. And that's why I told you not to choose black and white for the canvas colors. So once you've changed the grid size to one pixel, you can click Done and click Done up there. And if we then zoom in to this corner here, you can see we've got those one pixel grids marked out. And you can see this is two pixels smaller on this edge and this edge, but it has butted up like at the top here, we can pan all the way up to the top. Eventually, you'll see it's butted up against this edge here and also this one over here. So what we want to do, in order to center it, what we want to do is move it just diagonally down one pixel. So if we tap transform, and then you just tap down here, that's going to nudge it diagonally, one pixel that way. And then if I tap off the transform and then pan up here into the corner, you can see we've now got this border around there that's just one pixel wide. I'm going to turn off the drawing guide now. And then I'm going to hide this layer, the green one. So we've just got our pink one. But what I'm going to do is click this layer and select it. So I'm going to select the green layer, which we can still do even though it's hidden. Then I'm going to tap on this layer here. It's still selected, but I'm going to now move on to the pink layer. So we've got this area selected on this layer. Then I'm going to tap transform, and I'm just going to drag this off the canvas. And now, when I zoom in here, you'll see we've now got this transparent, perfect diamond that is just one pixel wide. So I'm going to tap transform on this layer and I'm going to rotate it 45 degrees, and I'm going to tap fit to canvas, then just tap off the transform. And if we zoom in, you'll see we've now got this super skinny pixel perfect diamond there. We can make it a bit thicker by duplicating this, and that's going to bring up the opacity. When you transform things, you get a lower opacity. So if you duplicate that a few times, that's going to bring the opacity back up. We can delete this one for now. And that is how to make your pixel perfect diamond in Procreate. I'm just going to jump right in and say, I know this is possibly almost invisible on screen recording, and I am going to make another one in just a second, which is a bit thicker, so you can see it better if you prefer to work with a thicker diamond. But this one can also be quite useful because it's kind of unobtrusive and it doesn't get in the way too much. But I know some of you might want to have one that is easier to see, and I'll show you how to make one that's easier to see in the screen recording as well. The really important check you need to do here is to zoom into the corners and just make sure that it goes all the way to the edges. On all four sides of the canvas like that. I wanted to show you this one first because the one pixel line stacks up perfectly when you offset it. This means you can see right away that everything is in the right place. So if we come up here and duplicate this layer, tap transform, and I'll snap it down here. Then when we zoom in here, you can see if I'll just invert the colors on this one. When I show and hide it, you can see everything stacks up perfectly, which is a really good visual clue to help you see that everything is in the right place, especially when you're working in the extra group and you're bringing your edges into the middle. You can do this with a thicker line, but you do have to do a little bit of extra work to get it to stack perfectly or just put up with it not looking as pixel perfect as this one. I'll show you what I mean. So let's start again. And we'll fill this layer with the pink again. I'll delete this one. Duplicate this one, tap on this one, and invert the colors. I'm going to tap transform and on this one, I'm going to resize it to three, five, 94, which is going to give us a three pixel wide outline. If you want to even thicker, just keep reducing this number by two pixels each time until you get a thickness you're happy with. Let's turn the drawing guide back on again. 3594 means we've taken six off of 3,600. So when we put the drawing guide on and zoom in here, you can see there's now six pixels here. So we want to nudge it along by three. So one, two, three, and then this is nice centered. We can just zoom in the top corner there and you can see three pixel edge on there. Let's turn the drawing guide off. So let's go over those cutting out steps again, bring up our layers, hide this green one, but select. Then move down to the pink layer, tap transform, and just drag this off the canvas. And then you can zoom in there and see we've now got this three pixel wide border there. Then we can tap transform on this one. I'm going to change the interpolation method to bilinear now, and I'm going to rotate it 45 degrees and fit it to the canvas. Then we can zoom in, and you can see we've got that border, and it still goes all the way to the edge. When I do the offset now, I'll just do that quickly, duplicate that transform down there and invert the colors on this one. You can see that they don't now line up perfectly. When I do the offset on this thicker line, you don't get the same instant visual clue that it's all lined up correctly. This isn't going to mean that your pattern is any less accurate, though. And also don't forget this is the sketch layer. This diamond absolutely won't be in the final pattern. So it doesn't really matter how this looks. However, I know that some of you, myself included, won't like the fact that this doesn't look quite so pixel perfect anymore. So we can do a couple more nerdy little steps to fix this, and please feel free to skip this if you're happy with your diamond as it is. What we're going to do is just continue to offset this pink one. So we're going to duplicate the pink layer again, snap it up here into this top corner, duplicate it again. And snap it into this corner, duplicate one last time, and snap it into that corner. I'll find this green one and invert the colors on that again so that it's all pink now. This is what it should look like. What we can do is now pinch all of these, the offset ones and the original one down onto one layer. I'm going to duplicate this layer a few times just to bring up the opacity. Now when we offset this one, you can see that it stacks the same as the others. So if I duplicate this, bring it down here. I'll invert the colors on this. And you can see now this thicker diamond does stack up nicely. So once you're at the stage where you've got the diamond that you want to use, whether it's that thin, one pix or one, the slightly thicker one that doesn't necessarily line up properly or this pixel perfect thicker one, whichever one of those you want to use, I suggest hiding the background and exporting this as a PNG and saving that to your camera roll or iCloud so that you can import this layer every time you want to start on a new pattern in Procreate. So there we go. Your very own mathematically perfect diamond all inside Procreate. Totally unnecessary. Yep, completely satisfying. A, yeah. Please remember you absolutely don't need to make your diamonds this way. I've just included it here for a bit of extra fun for those of you who are into this kind of thing. Free hand or Affinity will still get you there. But if you ever feel like going full pattern making nod, now you've got this trick in your toquet. And that really is all for me now. So all that's left to say is, have fun, stay creative, and I will see you soon.