Quick & Easy Checkered Christmas Patterns in Affinity Designer + Global Colors

1. Checkered Patterns in Affinity Designer: Hello, students. It's been quite a while since our last automated pattern templates, affinity designer course. Today we are diving into checkered patterns, checkered patterns with two and five variable elements. It's going to be a lot of fun. On top of that, we're putting a big focus on global colors, which makes tweaking your design super easy and keeps everything looking very polished. In case you don't know me, my name is Veronica Zala. I'm a freelance illustrator and surface pattern designer currently based in Germany. And so far, I have released seven affinity related online courses. In this class, we will be creating two checkers repeat patterns with a Christmas motive, a must in every pattern portfolio. This course is super practice oriented with very little theory. We will dive straight into it, create our automated pattern templates from scratch, and then design two checkered patterns with Vctor design tools, such as the rectangle tool, the pencil tool, and the Pen tool. We will also refresh our knowledge about vector assets and the assets library, and we will get very comfortable with utilizing global colors and document color palettes and affinity designer. Let's jump in and start creating together. 2. Getting Started: Or Hello, affinity fans. Welcome to class. This course has really a minimum of theory and a maximum of practice. To get started, all that you will need is your Affinity Designer software and your drawing pencil. I'm recording this course in December 2024, two weeks before Christmas, and my affinity designer version is 2.5 0.6. As always, I will be showing my demonstration in affinity Version two on my iPad. However, I am pretty confident that you can follow along regardless of your version. For example, you might want to work on your desktop version. Your task is to create at least one checkered Victor pattern and affinity designer. You can use any version of affinity. You can also select your own theme. It doesn't have to be a Christmas theme. And then our big objective is also to get confident with setting up and using global colors and affinity. A check riot pattern consists of a grid of alternating squares. It can be in two or more contrasting colors, and it's typically arranged in a regular repeating sequence in rows and the columns. It can resemble a chessboard or a racing flag. We will be creating a check riot pattern with many different colors, and we will also fill out the squares with Christmas motives. Now, back to the course prerequisites and your level, some prior beginner experience with affinity designer or any other digital drawing software will always be very handy. But all my courses are very beginner friendly, and I am sure that you will be able to follow along. You can create a pattern with two variable elements or with five variable elements or both. So if you're feeling a little bit less confident, then start with the easier pattern. And as you're gaining more skill and confidence, move ahead to the pattern with five variable elements. Case you get stuck or you run out of time, I will be giving away my two checkered pattern templates for Affinity Designer Version two, as well as my winter color palettes that you can save into your storage as vector assets. You can import them in your assets studio, and you can use them for any projects also in the future. Here a friendly disclaimer, you can draw my vector pattern from A to Z. You can exactly copy me for the sake of this exercise, but please use it only as an exercise reference. Since this is my intellectual property, you are not allowed to sell the exact copy of my pattern, please. If you're taking this class on Skillshare, please upload a screenshot of your pattern or patterns into the project gallery, and you can also simply screenshot your entire affinity interface, maybe show us your vector assets or the color palettes that you saved into your libraries, and feel free to share with us any of your work in progress screenshots as well, because we really always love to see those. If you're active on social media, you can, for example, share your final work on Instagram, using the hashtag magical vectors. And if you're in our Facebook affinity group, you can also post your final project and ask for critique there. This is especially a good option for those of you who are taking this course from my own website or from Gambro, and there is no community forum there. So you can also seek some feedback, for instance, on Instagram or on Facebook. I hope this will be helpful. Thank you so much for taking my course. Enjoy watching. 3. Templates, Colors, Inspiration: I wanted to introduce the two exercises that we will be doing together in Affinity Designer. We will be creating two checkered patterns with a varied number of elements. As a warmup exercise, we will create a pattern with two varied elements. And then as our final project, I would like to encourage you to make a more complicated pattern with five elements. So let's have a look at the first one. I also wanted to underline that you can create any theme you want so I'm recording this class in December 2024, and it's going to be Christmas in about two weeks. That's why I chose this Christmas theme, but feel free to also create patterns with some other theme or with multiple themes. I will be making available, those color palettes. I think they're really fitting for Christmas or for winter in general, but you are more than welcome to create something of your own and to use your own color palettes. So this will be exercise number one. There will be two varied elements that will be repeating in a standard repeat. I also have prepared color palettes for you. I like to save up my favorite color palettes in this way. It's actually an inspiration from the book that I recommended in another course of mine, elevator patterns, where I talk about how I choose colors for my patterns. And in this book, I like how the author is saving up patterns in this way, using geometric forms. Let me maybe catch the contrast better. So I also I also got part two of the palette perfect book, and this is where you see that the author is saving up her favorite color palettes using those geometric forms. And I really like this technique a lot because you can see the colors together and you can see how they fit together if the contrast is good. Just as a reminder how to check the contrast in affinity designer, you go here to the navigator studio and next to the main view mode vector, you have those three overlapping circles. And when you click on it, you can see everything in gray scale, and this can help you. This can help you to see the contrast of your patterns or your illustrations better. So there will be color palettes that you can choose. And if you go to the color studio, and swatches. You can also save up your favorite colors as watches. You just have to go to the Hamburger menu at application palette, which will appear across all documents in your device. We will be also practicing using global colors, and for that, we will do that exercise together. You need to add a document, specific color palette, and then we will be able to work with global colors, global colors. Basically, if you choose, for example, this one red, and it is set as a global color, you will be able to access to kind of enter the settings of this color and tweak it, and then everything that has that global color in your artwork will also undergo any changes. For example, if you want to switch it and make it completely blue, and it's a global color. You can do that and everything in your artwork will change to that blue color. But we will see that in action together. This will be the first exercise. We'll be practicing global colors and also setting up this simple checkot pattern standard repeat grid, and we will be again refreshing how to save them as a template. And then after this warm up exercise, we will move to something a little bit more complex. I will be also making available this color palette. It has a few more colors. But you see very beautifully here using those geometric forms actually help us again to see if everything looks nice and harmonious and if again, the contrast is good if you have some brighter colors and darker colors for good contrast. And for this pattern, this is an extension of what I was already teaching in my newest master class. We were really learning a lot about using the rectangle tool and those different shapes. I wanted on purpose to create a pattern that is a little bit more geometric and as you can probably already see here, I utilized a lot of triangles, rectangles, of course, stars and circles, and you will see that it was really a lot of fun creating this pattern. I'm also showing you that you can have different color variations, and again, you can choose also another theme if you would like to. As always, if you've taken my previous courses, I love working on the iPad. So I will be showing all the shortcuts and gestures for the iPad that will speed up your work. But feel free to experiment with creating such patterns on your desktop. The principles that I'm teaching on my courses also apply to the desktop version of Affinity Designer. And also another small difference between this second exercise and the first exercise is that over here, we will be also working with vector assets. I will be refreshing our knowledge about vector assets. You can access your assets, the pre safe documents over here. We have already seen the color palettes that I was using. I have a lot of categories where, for example, lately, I'm building this huge library with animals that I'm utilizing for my illustrations, and I also have a separate category which you're also more than welcome to create for holidays. So for example, for this pattern, I use this pre created Santa's hat and this present. So we will be also creating some assets from scratch and saving them up in our library together. Those are the two exercises that we'll be doing together. Now you can join me in our next lesson where we'll be creating this simple checkered pattern with two variable elements. 4. Pattern TEMPLATE: 2 Variables: Let's now build our first grid. So to build our template from scratch, we have to go to New Document. And I already have a few documents that are pixel based. If you're not seeing the same view, you just got to make sure that under document units, you select pixels. And then here you can change your dimensions. And I like working with 4,000 pixels square because I think it's a good size also for POD shops. So you can make sure that you change this to 4,000. 300 DPI, we are not using any artboards, so this has to stay on the left in gray, no artboards and color profile or color format RGB. We're not using any margins or bleed, and then we hit Okay, and we have our document. And we start by going to the rectangle tool, rectangle, and we create a perfect square. You also see the dimensions of your shape over here. One finger on the screen, it snaps into a perfect square. Move tool, we can position it perfectly in the corner. It's important that our magnetic snapping is on. And as you snap it into the grid, you see that those guiding lines are confirming that everything is in place. You can also go to the transform studio to make sure that the square is perfectly square, and if it's not, you can also change its dimensions. So, for example, just choose the width, 2000, and now we have a square that is perfectly one quarter of this original canvas square, so to say. And by default, when you create a new shape, so I just went to the color studio, you will have not only fill, but also stroke. So I select the stroke, and I just flip it up. To see things better, I go to swatches and I select a color on the film, that will be contrasting because I want to see the two squares that will be building my pattern. Okay, now we don't have to go to the rectangle tool anymore. We have to make sure that we're on the move tool, two fingers on the screen, and we make a copy, or you can go here to the three dots menu and you can hit Duplicate to make a copy. And right away, I go to my color studio and I select a color that is different so that I can see things better. And now everything is in place. We have our two elements. The green one and the pink one, and now we have to turn them into our symbols. Symbols will be basically a placeholder so that those two squares, there are two unique elements and we will be populating them with our decorative elements that will be building our pattern. But first, we have to turn them into a symbol. Here you can find your symbol studio, Hamburger menu, three horizontal lines. Add symbol from selection. And now you can see it's really worth keeping it at contrasting colors because you can see better that everything was added properly. We have one symbol that is in pink and one symbol that is in green. There are two separate symbols. For example, if I were to change the color of those symbols to be just this dark green and I go back to the color studio, you see there are two elements. So just because it's one color, it doesn't mean that it's the same thing. Those two squares, there's still two separate symbols. Okay, so now we have our symbols ready. You could also play it very easy and you can just create four elements. We will be creating more. Let me go back to my original pattern. We will be creating one, two, three, four squares in a row because as I'm building my pattern, I would like to see things better. So instead of just focusing our canvas on one, two, three, four elements in total, we will have a grid of four by four, 16 squares in total, but two symbols. And this is what we're going to do here as well. So I have those two symbols selected. Two fingers on the screen. I make another copy, and I position them right next to each other. Keeping the selection, I'm dragging them down so that I have the order that I want. And now I'm selecting all the layers. A handy shortcut to select all the layers very fast is to select one layer, two finger tap on the last layer, and everything is selected. And now from the move tool, I can keep adjusting my shape, but to keep the proportions perfect, again, two fingers on the screen, let me zoom in so you can see better. And I'm making sure that everything is snapped to the other corner of my canvas as well. Now, to keep everything neat and tidy, I will group the first row, and then two fingers on the screen, I'm creating a copy. And I'm positioning it below my first row. And what we got to do is we got to take, for example, this last pink or this first green and position it at the beginning. Really making sure that everything is aligned. See, sometimes you make a small mistake and things are not aligned properly. So seeing those snapping lines or guiding lines, it's really worth to take a few more moments to make sure that everything is aligned perfectly. So now we have row number two, making sure, again, suck that everything snaps beautifully. And then selecting row number one, row number two, two fingers on the screen or three dots menu hitting duplicate. To make another copy that we position over here, and now we see the guiding lines in red and blue showing that everything snapped perfectly. But if you still got to make sure, then just take your time. Zoom in if you have to and see if there aren't any extra pixels there that might ruin your pattern a little bit. Keeping the selection, I drag everything down so that at the end, we have row number one, row number two, row number three, row number four. But it is all built from those two symbols. So now I would like to drag out just the two symbols from my upper left corner because it's enough to be working on those two guys and the pattern will build itself in the rest of the squares because this green guy is basically the same as this green guy. So we just need to focus on one element and everything else will kind of build itself. So this is the essence of automated patterns in infinity. Select my elements more easily. I find that it's easier just to select the node tool because it selects what I'm trying to find on the Canvas right away. It's especially useful to select from the note tool if you have lots and lots and lots of elements on your Canvas. And now I'm just taking this symbol and I'm dragging it outside. So you have to make sure you're not dragging out just the rectangle that you created, but the entire folder. And again, as a refresher, a symbol has this orange line on the side, and it's also called symbol at first before you rename it. Okay, from the node tool, we search for pink. Making sure that you drag out the entire symbol, we drag it out. So now we have just those two exactly those two squares. Since I have them selected here on the layers panel, you see also my selection here. There's a small outline. And now I want to group it, and I will name those group basically something like my repeat. And the rest of my squares, I would also like to group them so that they stay out and I call them something like pattern. You don't even have to call it anything. And then I go to my colors. And we can choose this color palette here. And now our template is ready. The fact that I chose here green and pink and doesn't really matter. It could be also different gray scale square, so it really doesn't matter. And now, if you would like to have this saved as a template with or without this color palette, you can also kick it out before you create your template. Maybe I'll kick it out. So if you just want this, your simple checkered pattern template, saved as a template. This is what stays, and then you go to the Hamburger menu, three horizontal lines, and you have to export it as template. Here you can also rename it. So something like Checker maybe something like checker two. The two will imply this template will have two elements in the pattern, safe. And now I have a separate template folder. I save up everything on my iPad and my iPad storage and once a quarter, or sometimes every month, sometimes once a quarter, I also export everything to my desktop computer so that I have my backups. So I have this templates folder, and this is where you can save your template. And all the templates will have this extension dot AF template. So if I were now to go to the original guys and maybe change this green to red and this pink to white, I already manipulated this pattern within this document. And if I go back to my affinity interface outside of the document, I can still reuse that template, and it will stay at this original state it was saved out. So we go to templates. Then you have to find the folder or the place where it could be also dropbox if you're using Dropbox. So I have it here in this folder. You have to find this checkot two template. And see it opened this template at the state that I saved it at, if it makes sense. So as I was creating this template, I was using this green and this pink. What I'm trying to show here is once you start working on your template, for example, here I changed the color of the squares to red and to white. This will not overrt the original template. So if I wanted to export it again as template, it would export and remember the thing that I created at the beginning, if it makes sense. But when you start working on it, adding in the documents, changing colors, this will not change your original template. So now we have our template ready. We can also add in our color palette, and in the next lesson, we can start creating our first checkered pattern. 5. Checkered Pattern DEMO: 2 Variables: Our template is ready, our color palette is waiting for us. In this lesson, we will be creating this simple check root pattern with a Christmas theme. Remember that in case you're not creating this pattern in December, you don't need it, feel free to create something in your own motive. It could be summery, it could be autumyO Christmas Eve. If you need it, for example, for your POD shop, the reason why I'm also releasing this class with a Christmas theme is that Christmas is very, very sellable, and you should actually be creating Christmas patterns already in the first half of the year so that you can market them to potential clients so that they can buy them and license them. And have them ready for December for the Christmas time. So even though this class seems very seasonal and only tied to December, it's actually not true. You can create Christmas patterns at any time of the year, and you should because they're probably one of the most important themes that you should have in your surface pattern design portfolio. So having said that, we have our color palette. The first thing that I'm going to do is to change the colors of the squares, and we will be creating our Christmas assets with a combination of using the pencil tool and the rectangle tool. So let me start by going to our Layers panel, and I will drag this pattern example below and also this color palette below. And I will make sure that I am working in those two squares here in the upper lift corner. It doesn't have to be the upper lift corner. It can be anything as long as you know where it is. And then the rest of the squares, we're just leaving them out. So I would first like to change the color of the square. So I'm using the eyedropper here to this pink. And then obviously the other square to this dark green. And you see here beautifully how those symbols, excuse me, how those symbols are working, we changed just those two squares, and because everything is tied to a symbol, everything was adjusted across the entire canvas. So now you can just draw something freestyle, or you can switch to the pixel persona. And you can create a pixel layer and you can first sketch what you would like to have in your square. So I'm going to the brush studio, and my favorite is the Metacrylic 02 brush, which you can also find in the Acrylics folder over here, and you can change it to whatever color you want. If you want to see better than just select the black. Here you can change its width. So how big it's going to be test it out and everything will be in this pixel layer and you can also drag it inside of your symbol. So now, whatever you're drawing will be also here. Let's go back, draw again this pixel layer to our symbol. And now we can draw like a Christmas hat more or less as a placeholder, and this will help us to create a nice vector acid later on. So you can sketch, but you don't have to. And then I'm going to the second symbol, the green one plus pixel layer. And now I can draw here. Here, everything, as you can see is happening simultaneously as long as you're drawing on this original square which is in the upper left corner. If I do it here, it will show up somewhere else. You have to make sure that you're working in those squares that you positioned in your upper left corner. I'm going to sketch a gift box with a ribbon. And this will be my sketch. I will get rid of it later on. You can of course work without a sketch. So we will start by drawing this Christmas hat. I will switch of this example so that we don't get distracted. We go to the pencil tool, and first, I like to do like a test blob, so I start drawing a shape. Then I go to the color studio. I select the fill that I need. So for the fluffy parts of the hat, I need the white. And oftentimes when you just start in the document to use the pencil tool, it gets a stroke. It gets a stroke. So you flip it up, get rid of stroke, and you just keep fill. And you can also make sure that here in this contextual menu, you have fill on and also auto close on so that our vector shape gets closed. So now I'm getting rid of this test shape, making sure that I'm in the right square, which is the pink one. I start to draw the fluffy part of the hat. And as you start drawing, you see this red circle will indicate that at some point, the shape will close itself. So we draw the the lower part of the hat. You can also move to the move tool and you can make it smaller. You can adjust it or you can go to the node tool and you can adjust the individual nodes. If something is a little bit too wonky, you can still fix it from the node tool, for example. Now, I like to group everything in color, the fluffy white part will be just one group and then I go underneath and I make from the pencil tool. I make another test and I select the red that I need. I delete it, and then I go back and I draw the rest of my shape, switching off or kicking out completely my sketch layer. Yeah, I go to the node so you can also select the node that you don't want. You can remove it. Actually, everyone knows that the fewer the nodes, the easier it is to edit your shape. And I'm just slightly adjusting the shape of the hat from the node tool. Okay, that looks quite okay, so I'm working again in the upper left corner in the original square. Okay, that looks like a nice Santas hat. And now I select the red part and the white part, I group it. So here's the group icon, swipe to the left, rename layer Santas hat. And now, since everything is selected, I can still consider to go to the assets studio. I have two very comprehensive courses about Vctor assets and asset Studio. And if you have something like a holidays category, you can put this new hat. So this one actually had a around shape on top, but I like this heat as well, so you might as well add it as a vector asset hamburger menu, at asset from selection. And now our new hat is in our vector assets library, and we can also use it for any other future projects. So this is a little bit different from my original hat, but I want to make something slightly different. Now we can kick out the sketch layer. This symbol is done. And I'm moving to the other symbol to create my present. So I'm going to the rectangle to, create a rectangle, change the color to white. And now I'm going to create ribbons very fast. So I am drawing another rectangle. Change the color to pink. It also remembers the previous colors that I used. So you can either eye drop the colors from this vector acid here or you can change the colors from this watches panel. So I go to the MVT, and then I position everything more or less in the middle. If I want it to be perfectly in the middle, I'm selecting the two elements, and I go to the alignment tool and I select align center, but everything seems to be okay. Then I create a copy with one finger on my screen. First, I drag this handle, one finger on the screen. I will be able to rotate it by exactly 15 degrees. So I rotate it to 90 degrees. And I position everything in the middle. I see those guidelines show me this is exactly the middle, so I'm happy. Now for the ribbons, you can either just go to the pencil tool and just draw something. That looks okay. But you can also go to the pen tool, and if you want to keep things a little bit more geometric, you can keep drawing with the pencil tool, making sure that the fill tool over here is switched so that we can also see the color and maybe create a ribbon that is a little bit more geometric. Actually like that a lot more. Okay. So now those three elements are sharing one color. That's why I'm going to group them. Pad. So I also have to group the present or the gift. And now since everything is in the symbol, you see this is where it's really good that we had more than just those two because now we have we see more of the pattern, and we can tell if it looks good or not. So I want this all at an angle, like so, and now my pattern is basically complete. And if I want to, I can still choose this gift asset, go to my library, maybe positioning it back at zero degrees so that it's sitting straight. Add acid from selection to add it to my library. Okay. And now this is done. So our pattern is basically done. And in the next video, I would like to show you how I would work with this pattern using global colors for easier color changes. 6. Global Colors Explained: In this video, I would like to show you a really handy trick to be more efficient in your design work and to save some time when you're tweaking colors for your patterns. So we created this checkered Christmas themed pattern using normal colors, if I may say so. But it is time that we start also getting used to using global colors because in particular for pattern design work, this can be really, really handy. The ones like a small disadvantage of using global colors is that they will be tied to a document. So if I had this Christmas color palette saved up here and I wanted to use it for another project, and it was previously set to global colors color palette. It would be only tied to this one document. I wouldn't be able to when I'm browsing through my color palettes, I wouldn't be able to access it because this is an application color palette. And you can even see it here, there's a little category name on a slightly darker background that shows all the application color palettes. Application color palettes and affinity designer, they will be accessible from any other new document or old document that I created. A workaround for this is to save your color palettes as vector assets, just as you have seen before, then you have access to your assets studio in any document, right? But with global colors, they're super Hindi, they will be only tied to this one document. You save and you create your all color palettes or swatches in accessing the Hamburger menu, three horizontal lines. And here you have two options. You can either create or add a new application pallet. This is what we have done previously, and those application palettes will be accessible throughout the entire application. In this case, my iPad in any new document that I create, or we can add a document palette. This is what we will do. Let's name it Christmas. Global. So just for our reference so that we know. And then we hit ok. And now from the note to it will be easier for me. I would like to add in all the colors, all the fill colors that I previously set for this pattern as global colors. So now I have this dark green selected hamburger menu, and now that we created. So step number one is to add document palette. If a document palette wasn't created previously, this option add global color will be grayed out. It will not be accessible. But now we can just hit and add global color. I do not rename it because I want to be able later on maybe to tweak change this green color to something else. So if I named it Christmas green, it would make no sense if I change it later on. So I just keep the standard name Global Color one. And when working with global colors, this is the only place where in the settings you can also access to change them to overprint and to spot colors, which are relevant for client work when you're preparing your artworks for specific print specific print specifications, like requirements from the client. But we don't need that. It's just a personal project, and we just hit Add global color. We need to select it by long pressing it, edit. And from the eyedropper, we need to select that green. And now we have this green global color. We have a new category in our drop down menu. So there was just application before. Now we also have a document color palette. It's called Christmas Global so that we know. And if we go back to this original Christmas palette, you see that it's just squares of color, whereas global colors have this little triangle in the lower right corner. So now let's add this pink, add global color. Long press, we have to use this eyedropper from this menu, pink, and we have another global color. Another global color, long press edit. And what else do we need? This red. And now the white. This is a bit of an off white. You see my CMYK sliders here that it's not perfect white. Otherwise, it would be all at 0%. So now we have our three global colors. So step number one was to create a new document palette, and then we needed to create our global colors and use the eyedropper to select the colors that we want to be part of this palette. But this is not the end of the task because this is like a pre created pattern. For the next pattern, we will be probably doing this from scratch. We need to apply those global colors again to this pattern. If it's like a pre created pattern that was using application color palettes. But this one is super easy because it's just a few colors. So we just need to kind of hit it again, pink for every element. So those two will be this off white. This will be pink, and this will be red. And of course, this is something that I'm showing you afterwards. But if you know that you want to work with global colors from the very beginning, then you have to first create them from the very beginning and then start building the pattern. This is what we will be doing for our next pattern, of course. But this is super easy. We only had four colors here. Just have to make sure that we reapply those global colors now. Okay, so now what happens with the global colors? Let's say I want less of this pink. I'm also long pressing the pink. You can rename it, but we discussed that it doesn't make sense because we want to be able to change basically those colors to something else. You can also delete it or you can edit it. Over here, you also have different options. You can use CMYK sliders, you can use RGB sliders or you can again use the eyedropper to select a color from something else. Let's say we would like to change this pink into something different. But you already see what I mean that the color has been applied across our pattern and now it's much easier for me to adjust it. You can change it, for example, to something more blue or something more green. Let's maybe change the pink to something more blue, and then this dark green also into another color. So we long press it, edit, and now we can start experimenting with it. I also want to see what I can do with this red color. Maybe this can be a little bit more bluish. Maybe more of a magenta color. So now this palette, I can kick it out, or I can build a completely new color palette and also save it in my asset studio. Okay, so this was a short demonstration of how global colors work. This is still the same document color palette called Christmas Global, but the colors were edited. It's a really handy efficiency trick that is, in particular, useful for surface patting design. I don't use it that much for general illustration or for Kitlet art. But for patterns where we often work with limited color palette, I think it's really, really super, super handy and it's worth knowing about. All right, so those were the videos about creating a simple checkered pattern with two varying elements, also learning or refreshing how to use global colors. And now we will move to our second exercise where we take it to the next level, we will build a more complex pattern, and we will be using global colors from the very beginning. 7. Pattern TEMPLATE: 5 Variables: Alright, so now we move to our second exercise, which is a little bit more intermediate or even advanced. We will be creating a template this time not with two variables, but with five, one, two, three, four, five. So let's go back to our interface, and we will be also creating this grid from scratch. Uh at first, I thought maybe I could recycle the grid that we created at the beginning with two variables. But the thing with those templates is that you really got to make sure that there are no mistakes. So I would rather create it from scratch. That's why we select again a new document. So the settings here are remembered from the last time, 4,000 pixels square, 300 DPI, no artboards and RGB color format, we hit Okay. And now part of the process will be repeating the previous steps from the rectangle tool. One finger on the screen, we create our first square. We go to the color studio, and again, we have to flip up to get rid of the stroke and just to leave fill. Next we can move to our swatches and we can select any color. Right now, it doesn't matter that it's an application color palette. We will be setting up global colors later on. Right now, we just focus on creating our template. So this will be our first square. I'm going to align it with my upper left corner. Create a copy. Change its color to the next one, and I will also drag it because I want my left upper lift most square to always be on top. Now, another copy. Changing my color. It doesn't matter what colors you're selecting. It just has to be something else so that you can see things better if everything is aligned properly. So I'm putting it in the same order, like here, starting from my upper left. And our last color will be pink. So now we have the light green, middle green, red, the darkest green and pink. If I want to keep again the proportions, I have to keep one finger on the screen. And you see this green line that showed up, it means that everything is aligned properly. Now we have our five squares, which will be the five elements of our pattern. And now you guessed it, we have to turn them into individual symbols before we continue building the rest of our grid. So we go to the symbol studio. Hamburger menu at symbol from selection. Again, because we assigned different colors, it doesn't matter which colors. We can see things better that yes, indeed, everything is correct. We have five individual symbols. So now we can also group it, making sure that we're on the MVTol and we will be building the remaining rows of our pattern template. There will be five rows because we also have five elements. So two fingers on my screen, I make a copy. And I make sure that row number one is always on top, and then I'm dragging the second row to be below. Then I'm shifting everything by one square. You see here that this light green will be at a diagonal with the next row, so to say. And then the element that is at the back has to be selected and it has to be shifted to the front. And again, making sure that everything snaps. You can always zoom in, take this extra time to make sure there are no extra pixels that were created by mistake. So now we are creating our next row, making a copy and shifting everything by one square. This will be row number three, one, two, three. And this green, like, whatever is sticking out has to go to the front. So now you see we have all those colors at a diagonal. Okay, row number four. Shifting everything to the right by one square. Making sure that this is row number four, drag it at the bottom, and the very last element, which in this case, is red comes to the front. And here as well. And the last row. Okay, shifting everything by one square. And moving that green to the front. And since it's also our last row, we can also drag it to the bottom. So this is one way to build this pattern with five different variables to have all those variables at a diagonal. And then in this case, we would group those last rows, and we would kind of group them so that they stay away. I made them invisible. So we group them away, and then we would be only working with those symbols that you can see in the first row. So this is option number one, having everything at a diagonal. Let me also show you how I created my original pattern with five variables. So let's open this file here. So you can also walk the extra mile, so to say, and you can try to spread out the elements of your pattern in a more uneven way. So the templates the templates, the grid that I created a few seconds ago that I showed you had all the elements at a diagonal. But, for example, if you have a look at this tree over here, you will see that it doesn't show up in this pattern at a diagonal. It's actually spread out in a more uneven way. And yeah, this is something that I would really recommend either to do it at a diagonal or to do this variation, variation number two, to go back to your squares and to spread them out in a more unpredictable way. So I'm going to speed up this video, and I will kind of spread out all those colors in a more random way. The only thing that you got to remember about from your side is that when you're spreading them out, Make sure that again, you zoom in, zoom out, you have this magnetic snapping on, and you make sure that everything is really, really aligned. So there's always this risk that you will make small mistakes, but you will create this template only one time. And then when we are done, as you remember, you will be able to export it as a template, and you can reuse it as many times as you want, and making sure that this very first template is mistake free. Will be basically a guarantee of your success later on because you just have to make sure that everything is without mistakes this very first time. Okay, so now let me spread out all those different colors in a more random way. See you in a few seconds. Okay, that was just a short demonstration of how I would go about my template. From the move tool, that's very important. I would just select a color. For example, I would try to not look at any other color. If I would like to manipulate the pink, I focus just looking at this one pink, and I see, for example, here, that those two pinks are more at a diagonal and those two pinks are also at a diagonal. So maybe I would like to split that. And then from the MVTol I would select this one pink and move it around, and if it covers another color, I would go to the Layers panel to fix that other color that was hidden. It's good not to use white because when you start moving around your elements, the original color of your canvas is white. So if you see white, it means there is nothing in there. You have basically just uncovered your naked canvas. So you have to be mindful of that that this is also covered up. And the reason why I make sure I'm moving from the move tool and not the node tool is because we want to keep moving the entire folder. So just a small reminder, this rectangle that is nested within our symbol, that's not the symbol itself. So sometimes when you're moving from the node tool, let's, for example, use the node tool and select this green you will see that this green shape was selected, which is true. We selected this green rectangle. But what we want to move is not the rectangle, but the entire symbol from the top folder level, so to say. That's why we have to keep using the move tool as we are moving around. And then when you're more or less happy with reshuffling, you can close up your groups to see everything better, make sure that you deselect. And you see that we are still working with the first row. So this is where we will be building our pattern and the rest of the canvas. So the rest of the pattern will kind of build itself. And the remaining part is just the remaining part. It will be like the scrambled up checkered part of the pattern, so to say. So you can also swipe to the left here and rename this group that this will be the repeat that you will be building. And the rest of your squares are your pattern. So if it helps you to stay a little bit more organized and not to lose track what's what and where, then you can also swipe to the left and rename your groups. If you're happy with your scheme, again, it really doesn't matter what colors that you're using. The colors were just meant to help you to distinguish. Okay, I'm doing everything correctly. I created five separate symbols which I will build my pattern from. You can choose any colors that you want. If you're happy with what you created, you can go to the Hamburger menu, expert it as a template. Even before re name it, you can hit save, and to keep the same naming conventions, you can go to the original folder where you are creating your template. You can click on the other template to recycle the naming conventions. And here you can reuse that name, get rid of the two number and substitute it with five. This way, you can very fast, create different checkered patterns, variations, for example, with two variables, with five variables or even more, maybe 12 or maybe ten. And you can create as many variations as you like or as you need. So this is like general guidelines for creating checkered pattern teplans for automated patterns for affinity designer. Now we are ready to move on to exercise number two, where we create a checkered pattern with five variables. 8. Checkered Pattern DEMO: 5 Variables: Okay. Welcome to our final exercise. It's a little bit more intermediate or even advanced. But in the previous lessons, we learned everything that we got to know to be successful, and on top of that, we will be practicing using global colors. And in the end, we will create a Christmas themed, slightly geometric pattern that we can add to our surface pattern design portfolio. Remember what I told you about Christmas patterns. They seem to be very seasonal and tied only to the winter months, but you should actually or you could, you should be creating Christmas themed patterns throughout the year because they're very sellable and producers, they're looking for new fresh Christmas patterns all the time. Our template is ready and our color palette is also waiting for us. Now we have to set all the colors that we have as global colors. We go to the color studio swatches. Because it's a completely new document, you remember previously we created Christmas global colors color palette, and this is not visible here. This is what I meant by that global color palettes or global color palettes. They will not be accessible across all your documents. They will be document specific. We have to create a new palette here. We do that by going to the Hamburger menu and we have to add first a document palette. Now we can give it pretty much the same name Christmas Global, for example, something so that, you know, you have this mental note Ah. This is my Christmas, global colors, color palette. And now we have to add all the colors that we have in this color palette here as global colors. So back to my swatches, Hamburger menu, add global color. Long press it, edit. And from this eyedropper tool, we will add our first color, which is this pink, and it also has this small triangle that tells us this is a global color. Okay. Another global color, long press, edit. Let's take this light green. Another global color, long press it. Let's choose this red. Another one. I think this is an off white color. Right now I have RGB sliders, but I can also, for example, change to CMYK. You see it as a little bit off whitey. How many do we have? Six. We still need the greens, another global color Edit choosing the middle green and our last global color, long press edit and our darkest green. Now our global colors are set. And we can even remove that so that we're not tempted to sample colors from this swatch over here. And now what we got to do, remember this is something that we are not touching. We're working on our first row only. Okay, so now everything is all set, and I would like to replicate this pattern that you see on the left with Christmas trees. I left this darkest green color as an extra, but I think I will stick to my original idea and I will limit my color palette It's always a good idea to limit your color palette. It looks very good with those geometric designs. So in order to replicate this pattern, I will also replicate the background colors from this original pattern. So this one has a white background. This one has a pink background, the lightest green, red, and the middle green. For now, I'm going to leave out the darkest green color, but I set it up just in case as a global color in case I want to change my mind. So from the Move tool, I am selecting my upper leftmost corner, and I assign it this off white color. Next in row, we have pink. Then we have light green, red, and middle green. So this is the photo of the pattern that I imported here as my reference. We can first build our elements outside somewhere here on our workspace. And then later on, we can put those elements inside of our symbols to build our pattern. So this Christmas tree is very abstract. It's only built from triangles. So I'm selecting a triangle. And I am building one part of my Christmas tree, making sure that this middle green is assigned. And now I'm selecting a rectangle, and I'm selecting this off white and I position it in the middle of my triangle, so I create a clipping mask. And because it's perfectly centered, half of my triangle is white, and the other half is green. And then I'm selecting the entire group two fingers on the screen, and I create a copy. And I have my first Christmas tree. You will also see that the other half of my original white square has this other green color. So first, I'm going to go to this off white color, and I will place this new Christmas tree either inside of the symbol or even to be even more sure inside of this white rectangle to make sure that things are not sticking out to other rectangles. And now because everything is super geometric, I am just you see it snaps into place. I'm just positioning this abstract Christmas tree inside and I make sure that it all snaps into the square. And I need another rectangle that will be this middle green. I position everything behind my abstract Christmas tree and from the move to I place it on the other half of my square. And you see that everything snaps into the borders of my square. And, of course, we assign global colors to everything. You can also see the entire pattern without the things that you positioned outside of your canvas by choosing this preview mode here. So you can switch it off whatever you have outside of your canvas, or you can switch back on the elements that you have outside of the canvas if you want to see better. So now we build our first abstract Christmas tree, and we see that the pattern is indeed populated across. Okay, now we will be building this Christmas tree. It will also be from triangles. So I built my first triangle. I assigned it this white color. And now from the move tool, I'm creating copies to build the rest of my tree. So the triangles that are more at the bottom, they're a little bit more white. If you want to make sure that everything is aligned properly, you're selecting all the triangles and you go to the alignment tool and you can select align center. Okay. Make sure to group it to really double check or triple check. You can also assign that global color on the entire group level. And then in order to check if everything looks good, you can place this new Christmas tree within the other square. So here I can see, for example, that this needs to be adjusted so that this Christmas tree is a little bit more shapely. Okay. That looks good. Zoom in Zoom out to see if you like it. And now I will be also using from the rectangle tool, the star shape and the ellipse shape to create my Christmas ornaments. So I will just go back to this original original symbol, and I will start with the star. By default, it remembers the previous color. I have to assign it to global color. So here's my star. If you have taken my master class in Affinity Designer Adobe Fresco, we were talking a lot, a lot, a lot about the rectangle tool. So we also talked about the properties of the rectangle tool that you will be able to manipulate the shape that you selected. By going back to the rectangle tool, you will gain access again to some properties of the shape. For example, here, you can adjust the shape of the star and create completely new shape. So you can experiment to create a star that you like the most. And I will also make this a little bit thinner. So that the star looks better on top so that this white line shouldn't kind of flow together with the red line of the star. Okay, now it looks good. And now back to the rectangle tool, we create a few round ornaments, if you want the perfect square one finger on the screen, making sure that everything is in place. To. They can also vary in size if you one to one, two, three, spreading them out. And I'm also grouping everything together. So because I was creating my template in a random way, I didn't know what I will be building inside. And for example, I see here that those two symbols, they don't work well together because the white from this element is overlapping with the white that is above. So it is okay. It's something that we just got to fix by going to this one, two, three, fourth row, and we have to shift either this element or this element so that there are no color overlaps. So let's maybe shift this symbol here. So I will go kind of manually to this group to make sure that I'm not creating any mistakes here, and I will position it instead of the red one and I go to the red one, and I have to place it back here. Now I have to also shift this red color because there's an overlap. So making sure the entire symbol is selected, let's maybe shift it here or maybe there. And then the pink symbol with the Christmas tree can move here. We will also have a small conflict here, but let's see what we will build inside of this square. We can keep reshuffling. But right now, we keep building. Okay, now we can create this Christmas tree. It's also very abstract. I will create it again outside of my pattern. Somewhere in my interface. I'm creating the first triangle. They're all the same size. Oh, okay, let's make a copy, stack everything together. Let's group it, assign our red global color right away. We can also merge everything together. We have everything selected. We can stay on the group level. We go to Boolean operations. We also talked about it a lot, a lot a lot in my master class. And we select AD and everything has merged into one shape. Then we go back to the rectangle tool. We create an extra rectangle, assigned the pink color, and we create a clipping mask. We put everything inside and we make sure that our shape divides this new shape exactly in the middle. Okay. Now we can go to our pattern tile, and we can position this new Christmas tree inside of the light green symbol. Okay. All right. That looks good. And for this shape, I also used this geometric star, which is, I think it's called a square star. So we go to the rectangle tool, and here we have a square star. So we create our first star. If you want it to have a perfect shape, one finger on the screen, we assign it white. And this star has six sides, one, two, three, four, five, six. So instead of you can see that in the contextual menu instead of five, we have to change it to six, and I can also adjust its shape a little bit. Okay. So this looks like a snowflake in the end. Okay? So we're creating a few snowflakes to imitate snow, two fingers on the screen to create a copy, if you want to retain the shape, one finger on the screen. You can also rotate it a little bit for some more variety. So that they don't look the same. Okay, so that looks quite good. And then we group everything together, and we make sure that the global color of white is assigned. Now for the red symbol, we will be creating another very, very basic geometric Christmas tree, triangle, still clicking, making sure that the global color is assigned. Then we need the trunk of the Christmas tree, which will be pink, assigning my global color. This is stacked perfectly in the middle. I can see everything well because snapping is on. But in case you have any doubts, for example, this is a little bit off. You can select the two elements, alignment tool and align center. Okay. That looks good. I'm going to group it and place everything in my red square. I position everything in the middle and I can still tweak the shape of this triangle so that everything looks nice. See, this tree has also shown up in all the other grids, and then I'm going to the ellipse tool from the rectangle tool, I assign it my off white color, and I create a few circles that will also imitate snow. To retain the perfect shape of the circle, one finger on the screen can also make a few of them a little bit bigger, a few of them a little bit smaller. Okay, I think that starts to look good. And of course, we group everything. We double check that our global color is assigned. Okay, because we still have some color overlaps, in order to be 100% sure that there's no overlaps with the last tile, we will just finish our last Christmas tree. Okay? This one is also fun. Everything is very minimalist. It will look very good both on fabric as well as on packaging. So we're building our last Christmas tree. Similar shape. Okay. I will not merge everything together because I still want to retain some editability. So I'm just going to group it. And with a simple rectangle, I'm also adding in a simple trunk of the Christmas tree. And because it's the same color, I will put it into the same group. Then we create our star shape, and we change points 5-6. Okay. Actually, here we had more. So if you ever want to change, like, keep working on the shape, go back to the rectangle tool, and you always have the contextual menu. So maybe six will look good. And we position the star on top of our Christmas tree. And because it's the same color, I keep everything in one group, and before I build the rest for this tile, the Christmas ornaments and snow texture, I will place it into the right tile. So the middle green tile here in I position everything in the middle. That looks good. Now I go back to the rectangle tool and I will create a few ornaments. For example, this one will be pink. Before I move to other colors, I work with this pink. I group everything, back to the ellipse tool, another circle, and let's maybe select our red. Two fingers on my iPad screen, I keep creating copies. Okay. That looks good. And then I sort everything by color into one group. And my third ornament color will be this light green. Back to the move tool, creating few more copies, and now I basically have to spread everything more evenly. Okay. And before I forget, I'm also grouping the light green color. Now for the snow texture, I can also group it into a single Christmas tree. For the snow texture, we will be using vector brushes. Also in the previous master class that I released, we were talking a lot about vector brushes. So first, we got to move to the vector brush tool here on the left, and making sure that we stay on this vector brush, we can select on the stroke side our designated color, which is this off white and then here by clicking on this brush icon on the right, we will be able to access our brushes. I have a few brushes that I bought, but there's a lot of brushes that are for free. So I think under patterns, I have my airbrush brush. Yeah, this is it. So there's airbrush dens, airbrush medium, airbrush light. We can start with the light, for example. And here on the left, you will be able to just also the size. It's a bit of a trial and error. So I'm staying within my group. And I start drawing. So I need this brush to be bigger. You see this circle, it shows me more or less the size of the brush. So I need a little bit more spread. That looks very good. I like it. I just drag it behind my Christmas tree. You can also pause, go back to the vector brush tool, make it even bigger and run another experiment with the pigest brush so that the snow is not too not too dense. Okay. That also looks interesting. I made three strokes, so I have to group them. And now I can see which one I like more. So this one is a little bit more like with smaller snowflakes. I think I like this one more, so I'm going to kick out that one. And now because it's a vector brush tool texture, it will behave just like vector shapes. So I can, for example, move back to the move tool. And on the stroke side, I can change, for example, this dark green that I haven't used previously, I can use it. But since I wanted to imitate snow, I will stick with the white. I just wanted to mention maybe like a refresher information for you that vector brushes, they help you to create really interesting decorative effects that will look like raster art, but they will preserve their vector property. So they will be scalable. If I go back here to the MV tool, and select the strokes that I created, you will see that this is all vector property. It's a vector line that I can keep manipulating. I'm a big fan of vector brushes. I also have a blog post on this topic encouraging people to use Vctor brushes more. So see, it's all very editable. It would not be possible with pure raster texture. Let's deselect by hitting this X symbol or by tapping somewhere outside of my canvas. So now I will be going row by row, and I will be checking whether there are no color overlaps. For example, this I don't like because this green is merging with the green from this other element. I will take a few moments to fix any color overlaps now. Alright, we are nearly done. It seems that there are no color overlaps and everything looks okay. We can still test it with a bitmap fill. So we go to the three horizontal lines, hamburger menu, and we have to export our pattern tile. We keep the original 4,000 pixels square, and we need to save it, for example, into our storage. So we hit Share. And then we save image, for example, to our iPads camera roll. Safe. And then somewhere outside of our pattern, so I'm going to close all the groups that I don't need. I go to the rectangle tool for the last time and I create just a random bigger, of course, rectangle. Then we go to the gradient tool, which you can find here, we select gradient. And from the contextual menu, we have to move to the very end to select a bitmap, and this will immediately prompt us to get the option to select our pattern time, for example, from files if we saved it into our files or from photos. Okay, so here's our Christmas pattern. Let's selected. Whoa. And now let's use the handles here to see if everything looks okay. But it looks okay. There are no other color overlaps. Oh, no, there are, see? So this is something that we also got to move. We need to fix this. Okay. Let's locate it. Ah, okay, I see it. See, The Christmas trees are stacked here. Ideally, there should be no repetitions when going from left to right, and also from top to bottom. So there is one repetition here. This green Christmas tree is also repeated in this last column at the bottom. So we need to fix this. Okay, this we can make invisible for now.'s one, two, and let's fix that. From the move tool. Okay, now it looks good. We can export it. Safe image. We can go back to our test swatch, go back to gradients. Again, bitmap and place from photos the corrected pattern tile. Okay? This is the corrected one. Okay, so this is the corrected one. Now it looks like we don't have any overlaps. It looks okay. And there you have it. We created two checkered pattern templates with two variables and with five variables, we fix the one with five variables so that now you can use it indefinitely without any overlapping mistakes, and we created two Christmas themed repeat patterns in a checkered design. 9. Global Colors Demo: We've got one last exercise to solidify our knowledge of global colors. So for this more intermediate pattern, we were using global colors and a document color palette from the very beginning. So now, any color changes or colored tweaks will be very, very easy. Just as a reminder, there are two color palette types affinity designer, application color palettes and document color palettes. So when we were creating this simpler pattern, we started with an application color palette. Uh, application color palettes, they will be available across all the projects. We created a color palette for a Christmas team and save it as an application color palette. That means that every time I create a new document, this color palette will be available and you will be able to see it right away in your interface. It will be available in all the documents old or new. And application color palettes are saved within the app. So if you're also switching between the iPad version and the desktop version, for instance, you have to make sure that you export your application color palettes and you import them, for example, to your desktop version. Now, for this more intermediate pattern, we used document color palette in affinity. A document color palette will be nesting our global colors, and it will be applied to this one document only, so it will be restricted to one file it is created in. But the big advantage of using document color palettes with global colors is that they will offer you adjustable color schemes, and color changes will be very easy and very fast. By the way, don't forget also to save your patterns. You can do that by accessing the Hamburger menu, save as. And then I normally have the following naming conventions that I start with the word pattern. And then you can just name your pattern, maybe Christmas, geometric, trees, and then you hit safe. And I like to save my work to my iPad storage, which I then backup at regular intervals. I send them over to my desktop computer. So I have a dedicated folder for every year. This is 2024 for Patterns folder. I hit safe. We also have all our progress saved and we have a new name. When we enter this document, this was our testing tile. We can switch it off and the original pattern. Now when we go to swatches, this is the application color palette that we created previously when we were doing the two variables pattern. And then when you hit on the name of your swatches category, you have the whole list of all the swatches or color palettes that you saved, and right on top, we have our document, global colors Christmas color palette over here. So we can select that. There's also this tiny triangle in the lower right corner. That's how you will recognize, uh huh, everything is okay. It's a global color. As I mentioned before, I love using global colors for pattern design specifically because I tend to work with a minimal color palette anyway of maximum six or eight colors, I think is a complete max. Rather minimal color palette with fewer colors. So it's very easily manageable with color palettes and another application example of using global colors if you have your brand colors that you use, for example, for your branding, maybe business cards for your website, social media posts, you can create your branding, global color palette, which then you can also reuse for various projects within your software. And I did say that your global colors in the document color palette will be tied to one document, but there are two ways to go around it. You can also, for example, export those color palettes. So you go to Hamburger Menu and then you have to click on Export palette. And then I have a folder for exports, which I'm going to use, and you hit safe. So if we were, for example, now to go back to let's say this pattern didn't have any global colors, and we wanted to use the global color palette with our Christmas colors, we go to Swatches, Hamburger menu, and then we need to import that palette and we have to choose that it's again document palette. So it will be again tied to this one document. But it's a workaround to take a global color palette from another document into a new document or a new project. So as document palette, and it also has an extension dot AF palette. That's how you will recognize the Swatches files. And now in this document, we have, of course, the full list of our previous application color palettes and this new Christmas Global color palette. So this is one way to go about it. Remember that you can export and import your document color palettes. And then this leads me to our actual exercise for this lesson is to create the different color variations for this more intermediate elaborate pattern. Color changes on the simpler pattern would be much easier because it's basically just four colors, so it's super fast. But if you have a few more colors and the pattern is a little bit more detailed, then it's a really good idea to be using global colors. So instead of just exporting and importing my global colors, you can swipe to the left and you can create a duplicate. You can create a copy of this pattern. And then when you enter it, you will have copied everything that kind of belongs and was tied to this document previously. Which also includes our Christmas global color palette. And now you can work on it, and it's a bit of a paradox. So in a way, those colors are supposed to be tied to this one document. And we created a copy, but this copy is still a new document, so to say, that inherited by copying, this global color palette. What I'm trying to say here is that now, if we will overwrite it. So when we start tweaking, changing the colors on this pattern, this will not overwrite the original documents, so to say. So it's just inherited, but we can keep working on it. We can keep editing it, and it will not affect the original document where we created this Christmas global color palette in the first place. Okay, so let's work on some color changes so that you can see how global colors can speed up your work. I also made available a few assets with color palettes, which you can download from the class resources. And I wanted to create two extra color variations for this pattern, one with a bit more purply, colder tones, and one with a bit more brownish rusty tones. So you have under resources this whole category available. Remember that when you're working with assets, you have to first save them to your device storage, and then you can go to your asset studio, Hamburger menu, and you can import a category. So this is what you would do with the resources that I made available for this course. So those are the first two color palettes that we are using for our patterns for this course. And I will insert those two other color palettes that I would like to test out. And we will just start with this first one. I'm going to make this one invisible and we will work with this one. It's a slightly different color palette. It's still very similar. I still have my own preferences that lean towards exactly those types of purples, but it's still different enough. So let's see how I would go about it. I have my new color palette. You can also screenshot your previous pattern, previous art, or even a color palette from Pinterest, and then you can just place it here from this hamburger menu and use it as your reference. I would go to the color studio, and I would probably start with my darkest color, which is this middle green color. It's located over here. You long press it, click Edit, and you're using this eyedropper tool from the sub menu to sample this new green color. So that already looks interesting. Now, I want to kick out this red, so long press it, edit. And I would like to choose this purple instead. I think the green stays the same, but this pink is a little bit too yellowy, so I also long press it, it, and I sample this cooler purple. See everything changed very nicely. And the white that you see in the middle is also a little bit off whitey, a little bit warmer. So all the green and purple tones are cooler, but the changes that were made on this white is that it's a little bit warmer. This difference is very, very, very subtle. This is our second color variation and took me literally just a few seconds. I go back to my interface, Save As, instead of, let's do it again. Instead of copy, I will write something like cooler. The same name, but cooler, I am saving up this color variation separately. Okay, I swipe again to left. I create a copy. It inherited everything else that we've been working on. But this time, I would like to work with this more rusty, brownish color palette. It still has some cool tones and warmer tones. I think this whole color swatch idea is brilliant. You can see things very nicely if they fit together. So Color Studio swatches and this new global palette that was previously created in the second color variation. It was also copied. So what we do? What will we do? Let's take? I'm going to kick out, delete this darkest green because we're not using it. Then I will long press this darkest green and sample this rusty orange or reddish brown that already looks super nice. Now let's take this purple, edit and maybe choose this color. You can keep staying within this menu and you can keep sampling to see what schemes you like best. I like this one a lot. I think this green is the same, but just to make sure I will edit it as well and sample this green color. And I think this should stay the same. Yeah, I think I'm pretty much done with my color variation. This is a little bit more rustic, so to say. Going back, savas And I will tweak the name here. Rustic. Save. All right. So very, very fast, in a matter of literally minutes, we created different color variations of this more intermediate pattern, and the global colors have done pretty much all the work for us. So you just have to have an idea, choose a color palette. Remember that you don't have to have a predefined color palette. You can also when you're adjusting the colors, you can edit them from the sliders here. So you can choose, for example, CMYK sliders, or I also like to use the RGB sliders and you can tweak your colors over here, or even go directly to the color wheel and experiment with your colors. Okay, when you finish working on your documents, remember also to save them every now and then to make sure you're not losing your progress. Remember to download all the class resources, for example, the winter color palettes that I'm making available, test them out and get more comfortable using those global colors in your pattern design work. 10. Final Thoughts: Yeah, another automated patterns course is behind us. We had the diamond repeat. We had the half drop, and now it was time for a checkered pattern. I really hope that you enjoyed creating those fun repeats with me, and I'm really curious what you will share either on the social media or in the project gallery. It really doesn't matter if you stick to the Christmas theme or you choose something else that will suit your portfolio better. Just remember that, in particular, Christmas patterns are very marketable, and you should always have fresh and new Christmas patterns in your surface pattern design portfolio. If you're taking this class on Skillshare, you can share your work in the project gallery, or if you're taking this course on Gumroad or on my website, you can share your final project through the social media, for example, in Instagram under the hashtag Magical vectors. Also, don't forget to download your class resources, the templates, and the color palettes, and I would very much appreciate it if you could leave a class review. Most of you know that we also have a dedicated Facebook group for pattern designers who work in Affinity Designer. You can definitely publish your projects there and ask for a critique. Remember that you can learn with me both on skill share and through my gam root courses. See you in my next class. Thank you.