Repeating Print Basics

1. Course Overview: Hello and welcome to repeating print basics. My name is Hannah Noth and I'm a surface pattern designer. You can see just a few of my patterns behind me right now. Actually, it was just over a decade ago that I first learned the technique to create repeating patterns. And I have been hooked ever since today. In this short course, I'm going to teach you that same technique. I'm going to show you how to create a repeating print, the old fashioned way using truly just a marker pen or a pen, paper, tape, and scissors. But then I'm also going to show you how to create a repeating print digitally using Adobe Illustrator. We will also be using Adobe Photoshop to edit our print too. When I say repeating print or pattern, it means the same thing as seamlessly repeating print or endlessly repeating print. Those three terms, seamlessly ends or just repeating, all mean the same thing. I just want to clarify that right now. A repeating print is any type of design that repeats over and over and over again without a visible place as to where it repeats. Some of us that are more trained pattern designers, we can pick out even the trickiest repeat. But to most people's eyes, they shouldn't be able to tell where your pattern starts and where it stops. Now I think if you are watching this course, you're most likely new to being a pattern designer. Welcome. It's the best place to be. You probably have some beautiful artwork, sketches in. You're thinking, do I need to manually recreate this artwork, this design over and over again to get it to repeat? That sounds rather tedious, doesn't it? I'm here to tell you no. There is a much simpler, faster, easier way to create a repeating print. That's what I'm going to teach you. Patterns are all around us. If you look in the room where you are right now, I guarantee you that you will find multiple patterns truly. For me, patterns make life more vibrant and spicy. There is an endless possibility. There are endless possibilities of creating repeating prints. And there's lots of opportunities for new print and pattern designers out there, as brands are always looking for new, unique, and interesting patterns. I hope that you learn a lot from this course and that you come away loving repeating prints just as much as I do. Let's get started. 2. Course Project Overview: Okay, just one quick thing before we start our course, I want to talk about our course project. In this class, your project, as you may have already guessed it, is to create a repeating print. Now, you might have a specific design in minds that you were already planning to make into a repeat. I know you will do that, but during this specific course, I want you to draw a new design alongside me. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. My design, as you're about to see certainly is not as designers. It's always good to be constantly in the process of creating new designs. You never know what you'll come up with. Really follow along with me in the process of making that design into a repeat, both on paper and digitally. Pause the videos as you need to for sure, so you can keep up with me. Then at the end of the course, please share your project with the other students and with me I cannot wait to see what beautiful designs you come up with. 3. Supplies You Will Need: Here are the supplies you'll need to create your first repeating print. You'll need a piece of white paper cut in a square or rectangle. You will need an erasable pencil, a straight edge ruler, tape, and scissors. Here are the tools that we will use to cut up our pattern eventually and make it repeat. Then for drawing your pattern, you can use a marker or a pen. I'm going to be using a simple black marker. This is all that I will personally be using to create my repeating print. If you want to incorporate color at the drawing level, then you can also use markers or even paint. If you'd like, I'll be adding my color in digitally. I won't be using those. Speaking of digital, you will also need Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator on your computer. We'll be using both pieces of the software. You need either a camera or a scanner on your computer. That way we can take a photo or scan in your print to edit it on our computers. You'll also need your creative mind as a designer too, right? Okay, let's make some fun designs. 4. Designing Your Print: Now it's time for the most fun part of designing a repeating print. Because in this step we get to actually design our print. All you need in this part is a square or rectangle piece of paper. Make sure that whatever shape you choose, that it's even measurements. Mine is 9 " by 9 " and I measured it to make sure it was precise. And a drawing utensil, I'm using my black Tombo marker. I'm going to be using the smaller tip. I am not going to be adding color in this lesson. I will add that later on on my computer. Do it digitally. However, if you would prefer to add color, maybe you have some really great marker colors at this step. Feel free to do that after watching this portion of the lesson. It's as fun as it sounds. First, start drawing any type of motives that you feel like designing today. All right, my print is finished for now and I'm ready to turn it into a. 5. Creating A Seamlessly Repeating Print by Hand: Now we're ready to begin to turn our pattern into a repeating print. Yeah, for this step, you will also need a pencil, some tape scissors, and a straight edge ruler. Start by using your straight edge ruler to mark the halfway point, both horizontally and vertically on both sides of your pattern. Make really light marks with your pencil so that if they need to be later on, you can do that easily. I'm going to draw really light lines, so light probably hard to see. But in this step, all that you're doing is you're dividing your paper into four quadrants. Now we've got our nice design here, but we're going to turn it into a repeating print. This step you need to cut across those lines. I have one big square here. After this step, I will have four small squares. Okay? My beautiful pattern is now four pieces. Here's how we turn it into repeating prints. It's pretty magical, honestly, you are going to flip everything backwards, right here. In my view, it's left to right. I'm going to put both left sides over on the other side of the right ones. Then I'm going to take what's on top and put it on the bottom. Now if you'll look closely at the edges my across to bottom now we need to tape it back together. We cut it, now we need to fix it. I encourage you to be as precise as possible in this taping part. It will only make life easier when you go to photograph your print or scan it in. All right? I'm happy with that. That's pretty precise. Now, before you scan your print in, you need to do one more thing. We need to add in some elements. If you look at your print right now in repeating print format, most likely, unless you covered all of your paper before you cut it up, there's going to be blank spaces in a T shape here in the middle because this were the edges of your paper. If you're like me, you didn't add in designs to the edges. Go ahead and add in some fun design elements. They can even cross over the axis in the middle of your paper, because we're just treating this as just the same type of print. We're not treating it as one piece of paper as another. It's all one whole piece of paper. Again, giving mine just one more look over, I like it. Okay. Now you could stop here and be really happy with your handmade paper copy of your repeating print. But if you're like me and always want to take something a step farther and turn it into a digital, endlessly repeating print. That's when we are going to need to transfer this to our computer. You have the option to scan it in, which is my personal preference with a scanner, if you want a scanner printer combo, or you can take a picture of it your phone and send it to your computer. If you do end up taking a picture of it with your phone, I would strongly encourage you to make sure that there's no light shining behind your design, as that will create some shadows that you probably don't want on the paper at this point it's finished being designed, besides color that is ready to be photographed or scanned onto your computer. 6. Editing in Photoshop: Okay, I ended up taking a photo of my design, and now I've opened it up in Adobe Photoshop. We need to use Photoshop before Illustrator so we can make a couple edits to our design. And that'll just make it a lot more accurate, frankly, easier to vectorize when we get to that step, which will be really soon, I promise. There's a lot of extra background here that I want to delete out, at least as much of it as I can. I'm going to take my rectangular marquee tool, and being careful not to cut off any of my design, I'm going to select what I can, then I'm going to select the inverse and delete that out. You still see here that I have some extra background here, but I'm going to go ahead and leave that because I don't want to risk accidentally editing out some of my design. Next, I'm going to up the brightness and the contrast because that's also going to make it more accurate. When I go to vectorize my design, I really do this step with any design that I scan in and vectorize, it just makes the vectorizing a lot more accurate. I think I'm going to up the contrast just a little bit more. You see the black lines really pop against the white background. Then finally here in Photoshop, I'm going to go ahead and use my Eyedropper tool to make sure I have a white fill. I'm going to use my rectangle tool and I'm just going to fill in these lines that are unavoidable. When you have paper that's been taped together using this simple little hack of covering them up with rectangles, I can cover up a lot of those lines. I'm not worried about the extra background here because I'll just edit that out as soon as I vectorize it, but this is going to make it a little bit cleaner. If I zoom in, I can still see, okay, I have some here. I'm going to cover those up. Again, being really careful to work around my designs and not on top of them. It doesn't have to be perfect, but the more editing you do in Photoshop here, the more accurate it will be when you vectorize your image. Okay, now that I've done those edits, I'm going to go ahead merge my layers and save this as a J peg or PNG file. We're finished with our Photoshop editing of our design, and now we're ready to move on to Adobe Illustrator. 7. Vectorizing the Print: Now it's finally time for us to vectorize our actual design. Go ahead and open up your Jpeg or Photoshop file in Adobe Illustrator. You can open up Photoshop files in Illustrator, just can't edit them, That's where vectorizing comes in. It's super fast, super easy, and also super impactful. After you've opened up your photo, make sure you select your photo. A blue bounding box will appear around it. Go up to the top of your screen and look at image trace. This is what's going to vectorize your design. If you click on the dropdown menu, you'll see there are a lot of options when it comes to vectorizing your art. I hope that you'll take the time to play around with all of them. Because truly, for each different option, that there's some some specific type of artwork that's best for the option. As you can see, I'm working with a really simple design here. It has no color besides black and white in it. I'm actually going to just go with the three colors. This will bring in my blacks and whites and maybe some off whites or grays as well. I'm going to select that for vectorizing and let my computer do the rest of the work. I select that and automatically it goes ahead and vectorizes my image for me. Making every part of the design editable, pretty cool. Okay, it doesn't look a whole lot different yet, but if you look super closely, you'll see that the paths are smooth. Every part of this design is now editable. After I save it, go ahead and save your design as an Illustrator file that's ending in, that means it will be completely editable. And we will open it up in a new window and start editing it and turn it into a seamlessly repeating digital pattern. 8. Creating a Seamlessly Repeating Digital Print: Before I show you how to turn your hand drawn and now vectorized design into a repeating, seamless digital print, I'm going to show you the general techniques as to how to create a repeating print and illustrator. First, what you will need to do is open a new Illustrator document. Your board can be any size that you want. Truly, it does not matter. It's your own preference. It could be square. It can be rectangle, however many inches you'd like. I usually prefer to work in squares for most of my prints. My artboard size today is 10 " by 10 ". That's all you need to start with. We'll ignore these motives over here for right now. We'll be using them in a moment. Now, every seamless pattern and illustrator is going to have a minimum of three layers. Go ahead down to your layers panel and add two more layers to your document. Make sure that if you already have some motives in your document like I do, those remain on the top layer. Lock all layers but bottom layer. Then go over to your rectangle tool and put a shape on top of your artboard, making sure that they're the same size. My artboard is ten by ten. I'm going to make a ten by ten shape. This shape must have no stroke and no fill. This is absolutely essential. This is the bottom layer of every seamless pattern. It's a no stroke and no fill shape. I'm going to drag and snap that to my artboard and that's it. Okay, so that's the bottom layer. There's nothing more we need to do with this layer. I am going to copy my shape. I'm going to lock my bottom layer and unlock the next layer. This next layer, the middle layer is my background layer. I'm going to paste my no stroke, no fill shape in front. And I can fill this with any color that I want. For the background of my print, it could be white. I'm going to go with blue for today. I'm also going to lock this layer and unlock the top player only. It's important that you don't keep your bottom background and no stroke, no fill layer locked because you might mess with them or move them around as you are creating your design and that could prove disastrous for your repeat. Okay, then I'm going to take these motives that I already have here and I'm going to begin to place them along the top edge and the left side of my square. Okay, now onto the left side. Notice that I'm placing each one so that it overlaps the artboard. You'll see why that is in just a moment. Okay, now I'm going to select all of the motives on the top edge of my artboard and copy and paste them in front. Then I go up to object transform move. I want to move these down to the bottom of my R board. I'm going to select zero for horizontal and ten for vertical. That just automatically moved my motives to the bottom of my R board so that they're correctly translated in the repeat to the other side of the board, just like when we did it by hand without the scissors. This time I'm going to do that exact same thing with my motives on the left, copy and paste in front, except this time I'm going to move them horizontally 10 " and vertically 0. ". Okay, now I just need to fill in this blank space, which this is an extremely simple design. I usually would spend a lot more time doing this, but I'm just going to very briefly fill in, it doesn't look quite so bare and you can get more of an idea of what a repeating print looks like. Okay, now that my design is all across my artboard, I'm going to go ahead and unlock my bottom two layers. And select everything on all of the layers. Then I will drag this to my swatches panel. I just created a repeating pattern. Let's test it out. Take your rectangle shape again, and I like to make a really big shape in my document so I can see the repeat and fill it with your new pattern. How cool is that? Look at this design and you have no idea where that original ten inch square is. It just repeats on and on and on. Okay, I hope you're hooked just like I am. Go ahead and say this document if you've been testing this design method with me and we are going to move on to actually edit and finish out our original hand drawn print and make it a seamless digital repeat. 9. Editing the Digital Print, Part One: Now we're ready to begin turning our sketched design into a repeating print and illustrator. Since we know how to do that now, go ahead and open a new file. And just like you just learned, make sure that this file has three layers. The bottom layer having that no stroke n square in my case, because it's a ten inch square. The next layer having a no stroke. And then any type of fill that you would like. I just went with a white fill for mine. Then the top layer is where you can place your actual design. As you'll see, since I took a photo of my design, which we've already edited and we've bacectorized, but it still needs some work. I still have these undesirable parts of my table actually in the background that I need to get rid of. Right now. This is not repeating. I could make it repeat, but it would be very tiled. Because as you can see, it would have all of these extra things in it as it repeats. This needs some work. Before it's quite ready, I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in. And using my direct selection tool, I'm going to start leading out everything that is not part of the actual design. In some cases because I went with the three colors vectorizing option. You'll see this isn't part of my design, but it attached itself. It treated it L as one object. For some of my motives, this is an easy fix. I'm just going to use my scissors tool to get rid of that. Then I'm just going to finagle this white fill over it. Now you'll see, okay, that planet is still cut off. But if I go to the bottom of my design, the rest of it's there. We're going to work on that. Repeating the motives as soon as I finish cleaning it up. I'm just going to continue all around the perimeter of the design and clean it up. 10. Editing the Digital Print, Part Two: Now that all of my background has been edited out, now I just need to make sure that my motives correctly repeat. Remember, we want motives that are overlapping and correctly translated to the rest of their counterpart parts. The rest of the motive on the opposite side of the board, my artboard is 10 ", so I need to make sure that my designs are correctly transferred 10 ", either vertically or horizontally in this pattern. Right now you'll see that because I deleted out the background, there's extra space here. Right now they're cut off. Let's start first with this planet. And I'm going to go into isolation mode to select the planet individually. It won't let me group vectorized designs like this. I just need to make sure that I select all of it correctly. Now that I have selected what I need to select, I'm going to go ahead and copy paste in front object transform move. And this one is vertically vertical, so I'm going to translate it and move it vertical 10 " down. Let's go down here. You'll see here's the rest of my planet. It just needs to be moved up and over a little bit to actually translate here, to meet up with the rest of it. Sometimes you end up with these funky strokes from having hand drawn vectors. What I like to do is cheat a little bit after I connect my lines here. I really want it to look good. I don't plan on coloring this image. I'm actually just going to put a little white fill shape like what we did in Photoshop on top of it. I also don't want this. I'm going to put another one time. Now my planet is correctly translated 10 " below. But like here, I have another item, another motive that needs to be changed. We moved around a bit, so I'm going to move it up a little bit and then I'm going to, I see some extra fills that I don't want from my background. Added that out. I'm going to copy and paste in front object transform move 10 ". Okay, now I'm going to go ahead and move the rest of the circle over to meet the other half of it. Notice that I'm only editing this top part of the circle, not the one that I just moved. Because if I change anything about the bottom of it here, I'll need to remove it right. Translate the other half, the other part of it up vertically, 10 " so that it accurately reflects on the top part of the design. But since I'm not changing anything about this bottom part, I'm just going to leave it. Okay, that's the rest of the planet in the circle. Now I just need to do the same thing with the stars in this planet that are on the right and the left. I'm going to go ahead and do that now. Okay. I have gone through and made sure that my motives that overlap the edges of the art board actually are translated at the correct 10 " across on either side. It probably took you a lot less time to do this part of the editing if you didn't have part of your background on the photo like I did. But anyways, that's how you edit it. Let's go ahead and just test out our repeating print and see if there's any further corrections to be made. I'm going to unlock all three of my layers, making sure I select everything, and I'm going to drag it into a new Swatch box. Then I'm going to make giant new shape up here and fill it with the Swatch. How cool is that? That is my hand drawn pattern that started out with just a little square of paper and translated into a seamlessly repeating digital print that repeats over and over and over again. It's ready to be put on any type of products. You could turn it into a coloring page if you wanted. There's all sorts of possibilities. But this is how you turn design, sketched design into a digitally repeating print. Congratulations, you did it. 11. Course Conclusion: That concludes our repeating print basics course. You did it, you created your first ever repeating print. And now you have it in paper form and digital form. Now please go ahead and upload your class project so that the other students can see it. And me too as well. I can't wait to see what amazing designs that you've come up with and be inspired by you. But also with that same repeating print. I want you to upload it to a print on demand site, create a digital mock up of it, send it to your dream brand in an e mail, or design an entire collection based off of it. There's lots of possibilities. The only wrong place to start is to not start at all. Start somewhere and work on getting your beautiful design out into the world. Feel free to follow me on Instagram at Hannah Nath designs, and tag me in your work or find me on Spoon Flower. Some of my designs are behind me. I'm just Hannah Nath on there. And feel free to leave any feedback or questions for me as well. I hope you leave this feeling empowered, inspired, educated, and encouraged in all of those good things. Truly, the world of repeating prints is endless. Just like the prints are. Happy designing, I'll see you around.