Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: A good pattern makes your eyes happy and it makes your
heart leap a little. And we all have had
that feeling before. And that's probably why we got into surface pattern
design to begin with. And you probably
already have quite a few of those pieces
in your portfolio. Hi, my name is Esther scenario. I am an illustrator based in the US and also a top
teacher here on Skillshare. My works are seeing
various surfaces and design blogs as
well as magazines. Today, we're going to work
together on your portfolio so that we can move those good
pieces into great pieces. In this class, we're
going to cover five advanced techniques
to improve our design. We're going to cover
techniques like narrative storytelling so that your patterns can be more
engaging to the viewers. We're also going to talk about technical aspects
of pattern-making, like honing your consistency
and texture work, as well as skillful
layering or negative space. This class is designed for students who are
beyond the basics. So you are already
familiar with how to build a pattern
on your tool of choice and are on the lookout for a new breakthrough
in your design growth. Without further ado. Let's get started.
2. Strengthening Your Narrative : Every pattern
collection has a hero. It's the pattern that draws
the whole person in itself. So the pattern that has
the strongest story. And it's probably
the pattern that you would grab first in
the fabric store. And this is independent of the artistic style of the designer or the
themes that they lend on. It can be something
really specific, like a botanical
walk in the morning. Or it can be something
really abstract, like resilience and friendship. A pattern like this turns
you into a five-year-old. It makes you stare at it and
look for the Easter eggs. And it would reward you
when you find them. You may feel really airy and
fluffy when I describe it. So in order to understand the concept of
narrative storytelling, we're going to look at
some concrete examples. The first example we're
going to look at, it's by Heather Ross. My opinion. She is one of the greatest designers
in our day and time. Her designs are really
illustrative and full of stories. Sometimes I get happily
confused because it feels like I'm reading a
children's illustration book. In fact, it's a piece
of repeating pattern. So let's take a look
at a couple of those. This pattern in front of us is from her collection called far, far away third, now let's take
a look around the pattern. Over here we have a few gnomes doing various kinds
of activities. So two of them are cutting up a tree and when it
just sitting up here and there's
one guy here taking a nap and the other one
next to him is daydreaming. Each one of them has their
own unique expressions. The ribbon next to
them says they were a merry band of Brothers without a mother
or to mind them. So this gives us a hint of Miss Chief and also
invites us to look at this group of nomes
and to fill in with our own imagination in terms
of how the story goes. If we keep looking
around the pattern, we will find this girl
lying on the forest floor. There were been under
her says she awoke in the woods with new
friends to greet her. It sounds like a
very happy message. And she also looks
really relaxed and very mesmerized by her new
friends who are very curious. Not too far away from the nums, we can see a tree house. This structure itself is
very interesting already. My favorite part of the whole pattern is
the clothing line. If we count the numbers, there are seven outfits. But we knew there were only
six gnomes that we can see. This interesting fact made me look and look for
the seventh brother. Eventually I realized
that he's not here, not on the pattern. This invites me to imagine my own story based on
what's being drawn. Is the last brother
reading behind the tree or EC cooking or you see, lost? Or did he turn into this L that is looking
at everybody else? I don't know. So this only makes this pattern
more interesting to me. You see that there is so much potential in creating a pattern
that tells stories. It just creates this more
engaging relationship between a person who is looking at the pattern
and the designer. The stories of viewer
imagined might be very different from the
designer's intention, but the interaction and
the imagination sparked by this story and the
design is very priceless. Let me just read you what the designer has written
for the collection. I'm so pleased to announce
the re-release of far, far away three, featuring Snow
White and playing horses. Themes from my
childhood memories. Playing with horses with
my sister and cousin, and my obsession with gnomes and wondering how my house
gnomes did their laundry. I bet her intention is
very different from your imagination of what this
pattern is trying to say. The point is, when your
pattern tells a strong story, it really draws you in. And that is an awesome
quality of a great pattern. Over here we have a secondary pattern from
the same collection. As you can see, there are similar
colors being used. The story of gnomes doing their laundry is being told
on this pattern as well. The first pattern
is mostly vertical, while the second pattern
is mostly horizontal. The different orientations of the patterns within the
same collection give crafters and the
soloist options to combine the two fabrics
in interesting ways. As we mentioned at the
beginning of the lesson, a great patterns sends
you to a treasure hunt. For example, right here, this little naughty bird just stole a piece of
underwear and flew away. I think it's super funny. This is what I meant
by visual rewards. When you look at the
pattern and you discover this little interesting
details and maybe giggle a little inside. I hope these little
treasures that we discovered together can encourage you to go the extra mile as a
surface pattern designer.
3. Diversifying the Motifs: As an artist who primarily
works on digital media, I am very familiar with the
convenience of the tools. You can easily
just rotate, flip, and re-scale, and a recycle your motifs
in the same pattern. However, a lot of times these
techniques are overly done. In this lesson, we're
going to talk about how to diversify your motifs. This topic really
has two points. And the first part
is sketching more than what you need and
also sketch thoughtfully. And the second part is how to manipulate just your motifs
when you don't have enough. So I'm going to cover both of these points in this lesson. Alright, let's go over some of the practical examples
during the sketching phase. Here are a bunch of new sketches that I'm
currently working on. As you can see, this
pattern is going to be very character centric, which just means that there are a lot of people
on my pattern, which is new to me. Anyways, my point is
when I was sketching, I was thinking how I can diversify my motifs to make
the pattern more interesting. Well first, the poses are very different and also they
have very different outfit. You can really tell the
color at this stage, but I can assure you
they're going to wear very vastly
different outfits. And also, I've included
this little toddler, which I think makes the
whole story more fun. The angles are also different. The person on a snowboard
in the middle is enjoying the journey more
casually than his neighbors. I've also included a tent
and a pair of skis on the side indicating someone
is resting and in a corner. This might be my favorite
part of the sketches, is a person just
showing one leg. And obviously this
person just took a fall. But I think this will
add more drama into the pattern which will make
it more engaging to look at. I mean, I don't wish anyone
to fall in real life, but it just happens, right? I suspect a lot of you like to draw flowers or floral elements. There are ways to
diversify flowers as well. For example, you can add
different varieties of flowers. Or even if you're just focusing
on one kind of flower, you can add multiple angles. Maybe some from this side, some from the top and
some from the bottom. And you can also add a different
stages for the flower. For example, some
can be just budding, others can be
blooming full-scale. Regardless of how many flowers you want to fit in
in one pattern, it's always a good idea to draw flowers in different sizes. Because when you put
pattern together, you'll most likely encounter the odd spaces that
you have to fill. So it's super handy to have smaller elements for
this kind of situation. So this is how we can diversify our motifs during
the sketching phase. But sometimes you just don't
realize that you don't have enough until you're
putting together a pattern. So in the next few minutes, I'm going to show
you how to make up for it when you don't
have enough motifs. Stay tuned. On our art board, we have two flowers
to demonstrate the techniques that we're going
to cover for this lesson. Since this is an intermediate
to advanced level class, I won't cover the super
basic techniques in detail, but I do wanna go
over it real quick. Some simple transformation
includes rotation. So let's have this little flower selected and press
R on your keyboard. And you can just
rotate it that way. But notice that your
cursor is a crosshair. This means that you can plot your rotation center
to somewhere else. By default, it's
right in the middle. So when I click and drag, you will rotate based
on the center point. However, if I just click
somewhere else and you will recognize this target
as the new rotation center. When I click around, he rotates according to
the new rotation center. So that's rotation. Let me just undo. Similarly, that's how
the reflect tool works. Press O on your keyboard
to activate it, or click on this icon that is hidden under
the rotate tool. And you can just click and drag. And you will reflect your
flower based on vertical axis. When you hold the Shift, it will restrain the angle
by 45 degree increments. Similarly, the targets
defaults to the middle, but you can also click outside. And then when that happens, this flower will reflect
based on this vertical axis. So this is after and before. If you want to scale your motif or a group of
motifs up and down, you can have them selected
and hover to one of the corners and hold your Shift key to
keep it proportional. And then just click and drag. This will change the scale. All these options
can be found by selecting your motif
and right-click. And you can see all the options. These options are helpful
if you want to transform your motifs to a very
precise standard. For example, you want to move it to 50 pixels to the right, and this is the way to do it. But in certainly
unique situations, these transformation options
can be limited in a way. For example, if you have
moved all your motifs on an art board and all of a
sudden you find yourself needing a flower that
kind of look like this. But bandy, In a
situation like this, it will be a great idea to
give puppet tool a try. Let's see how we can use it. First, I'm going to
select my motif and come over to the
free transform tool or E on your keyboard. And then just long click to find the flyout menu to click
the Puppet Warp tool. This will basically
give you some joins. If we can imagine this
flower being a person, let's just move it around
before adding any pins. So when I hover over
one of these dots, you can see it changes the
direction of my flower. Although this seems
a little unnatural. Maybe I'm going to add
one more at the top. Whenever you have a pen, it's kind of like a nail
that keep things in place. Say that you only want
the stem to move, but not the leaves. You can put your pens down on the leaves and then
just move this down. When I move it around, you can see the pins
keep things in place. But this seems to be
a little too much. So I'm going to undo and
then just hover over, depends on delete them. Actually click on
them and delete them. Depending on how your
motif is structured, you might want to experiment different numbers or
positions of the pins. This is a little bit better, but when I move it around, this neck portion seems
to be a little rigid. So I'm going to click
on the pin at the top. When I click on it, you can see there's
a dotted circle. So this, let me rotate this pen. So I'm going to just make my flower tilting to
the left a little more. You can finance it. This is a little better. And then I want to rotate the middle portion as well to make it a
little more natural. Alright? And then I will just
click on V and outside. So probably you can still
get some work done here to make the neck portion of the
stem a little more smooth. But you can see my point after a few minutes
of playing around. And you can see this
is a before and after. This tool will allow you to diversify your motifs without necessarily drawing a new one. For your next step, find a pattern piece in your current portfolio
and see how you can apply this Puppet Warp tool to make your composition
more natural.
4. Honing Your Consistency: In this lesson, we're going
to 0 in, on one topic. Consistency. I have to say this is one of the most frequent issues that I see in surface pattern design. The fix is pretty easy. So let's take a look. Over here on my art board, I have three simple
motifs to make a pattern. Since this is intermediate
to advanced level class, I will walk you through every single step of a
pattern-making process. If you are curious
about my process, you can check out my
class called surface pattern design in
Adobe Illustrator. A complete introduction. But for now, we're going
to focus on keeping our patterns consistent
within Adobe Illustrator. Here is a pattern
that I'm working on based on the motifs
that we just saw. I see that there is a
whitespace right here that I want to fill with
my green leaf. However, seems like if I just hold option and drag this up, maybe rotate it a little bit. It's a little bit too
big for this space. Even if I move it around. So I am going to zoom in. And to make this leaf
just a tiny bit smaller. I'm holding my option
key and Shift key to keep it proportional and
just make it low smaller. So when we zoom out, you can see the whitespace
is not that jarring anymore. However, when you look closely, you can see the inconsistency
of the stroke width. This is a very simple example
of a very common problem. As a surface pattern designer, you might have spent
hours and hours of sketching and coloring. And eventually you have arrived at a place
that you really like. But when you put a
pattern together, things don't quite fit. So scaling up and
down is very common. But this can be a little
distracting if one of your elements looks very
different from others. This problem can be
solved very easily. Do Command Z a few times to
go back to our original size. Over here, I'm going to select my new duplicate of my leaf. I'm just going to
press Command K to bring out my
preference window. You can also just click on
Illustrator and preference. There are tons of options. What we want is under the
tab called a general. And there are two
columns of checkmarks. In the middle of the second one, we want to uncheck the scale strokes and effects
and then click on Okay. What this one does is that when you scale things up and down, you will keep the stroke
width consistent. You can see that the area of
the leaf has gotten smaller, but the lines remain
the same stroke width. So this really helps
with the consistency. Another way to access the same option is through
the properties window. So you can go to
Window and click on Properties down the list, there is a checkbox. So this is really, really
helpful if you want to keep your pattern
consistent throughout. This is one element that
you can pay attention to regardless of what
software that we use. Whether you, if you're
drawing on iPad or on paper. This is specially
important if you resize your motif to fit in
certain defined space. If you have taken any of my
iPad Illustration classes, you know that I really recommend keeping all your
layers separate. For instance, with our
lease pattern right here, I have the leaves and the
outlines on separate layers. In this case, if I need to
re-size one of the leaves, I can do that. And then just delete my
original outline for that resized motif and redraw the line work with
a consistent stroke width. But ideally, at the
sketching phase, it will be great if you have more than what you
need for a pattern. In that way, you will
have more motifs to use for your
pattern assembly. If your motifs are too
time-consuming to draw or you just simply have no
time to start a new one. Remember, use our techniques
that we have covered in previous lesson to practice
what we have just learned. Find one pattern in your
current portfolio that could use some more love to
make it more consistent.
5. Avoiding Predictable Boundaries: In typography or type setting, there is a concept
called the rivers. It's basically the gaps between words that flows
through multiple lines. It can look really distracting. And the similar things happen
in surface pattern designs. Sometimes a designer
is very focused on one area and try to make it pretty and forget
the big picture. So when a pattern
is made and you can see the pattern boundary
is really obvious. And it might not be a big
deal for geometric patterns, but it can be really distracting
for a tossed pattern. So in this lesson, we're going to cover
a few strategies on how to mitigate this issue. Again, this is another
example from Heather Ross. This particular print comes from her collection
called Molly Bu. And if you look at the pattern, all the ocean waves are
organically interconnected. It's really hard to
tell the repeat tile. Where does it begin
and where does it end? Closely? You do see some motifs
being repeated, but the design elements
come together so naturally that you stop
thinking it's a pattern. This is a great way
to approach design. Think about what you
want to say with your illustrations and then figure out the technical
aspects later. In terms of pattern boundary, you can see these two
girls are exactly the same and they are at the same
horizontal level as well. So you know that the
width of the pattern is probably somewhere
around here. But again, because things
are drawn so organically, Your Gays is following
the waves around. That's the command
you want to have as a surface designer because
you're leading people's eyes and engaging their
hearts based on the New World that you have
created with your hard work. This may feel a little too
abstract to put into practice. So I will share
with you a couple of more tips to show you how to expand your work
into a new dimension. I want you to take a break from thinking surface pattern for a moment and just
watch this clip. This is an animation
film called The Ponyo, which in itself
is a great story. But for our purpose, I want you to pay attention to how many layers of worlds
are we looking at? There is obviously
just regular ocean and there is regular air
or Skype, if you will. But also there's this
beautiful interaction between the water world
and the land world. When I was first watching
this film with my kids, immediately reminds me of
surface pattern design and really helped me understand how I approach surface
pattern design. Oftentimes my design has a flat background
with some color. And then things are kind of just sit on top of each other. And this film really
opens up my mind, kinda like the first example I've shared with you
from Heather Ross. The girls are
surfing on the waves and there are different
layers of things. The waves are not just
even one flat color. The waves has its own textures
and has its own up and downs and kind of interconnected with the
surfing girls as well. So I think that is a great way to think
about your pattern. It's more than just
a background layer and flatly objects on top of it. From a technical aspect
in Adobe Illustrator, when you think about layers, of course there is
literal layers. We can see our Layers panel. And you can create unlimited layers just by
clicking on the plus. You probably already
know it already. And then you can rearrange
the order of the layers. Or you can lock layers and hide layers from view,
things like that. But I also want to
show you something that could be really
useful when you're just on a road drawing
and don't want to mess with another panel and working
with layers and stuff. And also, if you prefer to work everything on
the same layer, you can arrange the let me just create
something real quick. You can arrange things to the back or bring it to the front by using
arrange layers, you can just right-click
and Arrange. And this will allow you
to arrange your layers. I like to use
keyboard shortcuts. So this is, if I want to bring this yellow all
the way to the back, I want to use Command
Shift and left bracket. And this will just
bring it to the back. But also when you're drawing, it may be a great idea to just
draw directly from behind. For example, if I just
use the blob brush tool, which is shift B
on your keyboard. Let me select this color
that represents snow. If I just draw right
out of the bat, it's going to be on top
of whatever layer I have. And then I have to arrange
the layer to the back or paste it to the bottom
layer in your Layers panel. But here's the trick. You see this little
unassuming and I count right here in the corner
is called the draw behind. By default, we have seen, we always draw on top of things. But if we switch the
mode to draw behind, which is Shift D
on your keyboard, It's going to automatically
let you draw behind. So let's do the same thing
with the drop behind selected. When I draw like a
small patch of snow, it's going to
automatically stay behind. I think this is a
very helpful thing to keep in mind when you
think about layers. I hope you now have a better
understanding of layers. So my homework for you is to pull out one of your
portfolio piece, zoom out to ten to 30% of the
original scale and see how you can utilize what
you have learned from this lesson to connect
your motifs better.
6. Utilizing Space Efficiently: If you're familiar with my work, you know that I love colors. But in this lesson, I'm going to
challenge you and me to think beyond just
adding another color. There are realized benefits of learning how to limit
our color uses. Because a lot of printing processes are still
screen printing based, which means that each
additional color is going to cost more. Therefore, it's a
really good idea for surface pattern designers to think about smart ways
to use limited resources. I'm going to cover two aspects of smart use of space
in this lesson. This is an example from graphic designers Shigeo
Fukuda from Japan. The use of lines and
space is genius. It just makes you stare
at the image and wonder how in the world can an idea
like this be conceived? Here is a more modern
example from Zach post. There are also just two
colors, black and white. But from the negative space, you can see the bear is holding a fish all without
adding a third color. In this example, there
are only three colors, including the background color. Instead of adding
a fourth color for the shirt of the
first-person and the pants of the second person. This artist chose
to use stripes, which is in itself
a kind of like a pattern to convey space. This is absolutely brilliant. In a very similar way, this little illustration
by Katie Evans is awesome. It just blows my mind
how simple it is. You can even tell
where the color is based on the direction
of the stripes. And you can also tell the wrinkles of the
sweater as well. It is just strikingly simple, but also it says so much
more than just two colors. Now that you have a
basic understanding of how negative space works, I encourage you to go
ahead and find one of your existing work and
just take out one color off of your pattern and see
how you can use the rest of the colors and negative space
to convey the same message. The next aspect I'm going
to cover is texture work, which I do a lot for my
standalone illustrations, but not so much for my
surface pattern work. But when you really slow down
and think about textures, your work can look
so much richer. So let's take a look. And for now, I want to show you an example of a
beautiful pattern. So this particular pattern
is done by amino Patel. And if we zoom in super close, you can see the coloring work. You can almost hear the
marker touching the paper. And it really shows
up beautifully. When was the last time that you want to stop
everything you're doing and just really wanted
to touch a piece of fabric. I mean, it's probably like yesterday seems a lot
of us like fabric. But really look at this. It's just gorgeous to help us put our
learning into practice. Go ahead and grab a
piece of paper and draw some very simple
geometric shapes. And then use the marker
to fill the shapes. Just like a five-year-old.
7. Test Your Patterns: In this video, I want to
show you how to quickly test your pattern tiles and save the preview
right on your iPad. First, you want to take
a screenshot of this, and then go to your photos app, either Lum press the URL
or Lum press this QR code, which will take you to
the default browser. If you have the P created open, you want to put it right
next to your browser. I have all my motifs
compressed into one layer, and I'm just going to
drag and drop here, right on the browser, and you
can adjust the scale here. If you like what you're seeing, you can also download your
preview right on your iPad. Just tap on this button, and you should be able
to either download or print by hitting
this share button. Don't forget to
bookmark this page, so you can come back to it whenever you're ready
to test a new pattern.
8. Final Thoughts : Congratulations you did it. I know this class can be really
dense and there might be new concepts and ideas that are swirling around
your head right now. And the one single advice
I can give you is to write that down and then translate that knowledge
into practice. So pickups, one technique
that resonates most with you at the moment and then implemented into
your current work. You can be something
really simple, like switching out the elements to make the boundaries
less obvious. Or you can be smart and
use those negative space. Or you can improve
upon the texture work. Whatever you have decided on. I would love to see it. So go ahead and create a student project and
the posterior progress. Remember, it doesn't
have to be perfect. It's a very friendly, encouraging Skillshare
community right here. And it will be great if we can walk along
with each other in this art journey until
next time. Happy creating.
Esther Nariyoshi, Published Illustrator based in the US
