Stripes Made Easy with Pixelmator Pro

1. Welcome: Hi, my name's Chris, and I'm a surface pattern designer. In today's short pocket-sized class, we are going to look at using Pixelmator Pro to design a simple striped pattern. We are going to take this pattern to the point where it is ready to upload into Spoonflower. And because this is a short class, let's get stuck straight into it. 2. Creata a Canvas: Here we have Pixelmator Pro, and I already have a canvas open. The canvas is 3,600 pixels by 3,600 pixels. So how did I determine that size? Or how did I create the file that size? Basically, go to file and then down to New. That will give you this window, which allows you to either pick an existing template or create one for yourself. We're going to create one and we are going to create it at 3,600 by 3,600 pixels. The first thing to do is to make sure you have pixels selected. Then in the width field, type 360, and in the height field 360. We'll leave the resolution at 300. It may be something different on your screen. It doesn't really matter at this stage. The important thing is the size of the canvas. Let's click Create, and I've got a new version of this file open. As you can see, I already had one. I only need one, so I'll just delete that first file. There we have it. We've got our Canvas 3,600 pixels by 3,600 pixels. What we're going to do is create a stripe pattern and then export that to PNG ready for importing into Spoonflower. See you in the next lesson. 3. About the Canvas: So we're back to our canvas and you're probably wondering why I chose those specific dimensions for the canvas. There is a reason. The reason is because this pattern is going to be imported into Spoonflower, and Spoonflower tends to work in inches, as in pixels per inch. If you're used to metric like me, I find it actually easier when designing patterns for Spoonflower, just to put the metric system aside and just work or think in terms of inches. So this is where it's at. All paper on spoon flour is 24 " wide. At 3,600 pixels wide and 150 pixels per inch or dots per inch, that will equal 24 ", which is the full width of the paper. Now, in all probability for this pattern, I will probably go for 300 DPI, which means the stripes when printed will be half as wide. It's really up to what you want to do. So for the purpose also of keeping this class or course nice and simple, we're just going to go with 3,600 pixels by 3,600 pixels. See you in the next lesson. 4. Creating Stripes with the Stripe Generator: It's time now to create some stripes. Now, the traditional method in terms of doing this, or the most common method in terms of doing this is probably just to create a rectangle and then copy and paste it. So that's copy and paste and then do that again and create stripes that way. Now the stripes have to be pixel perfect. All these rectangles have to be pixel perfect. The distance between them has to be exactly the same, and that's all possible and feasible, but this is quite a slow way of creating stripes. So we're not going to do it that way. Now, what am I doing? I just grabbed the background. I want to grab these and delete. Okay, so how do we create stripes easily within Pixelmator? Let's go to effects, add Effect, down to Generator, and then press Stripes. There we have our stripes. Now, these stripes can be any width at the moment they are set to 80 pixels wide. Just a reminder that our canvas is 3,600 pixels wide. If I want stripes that are one tenth that width, then I need a width of 360 pixels. Let's put that into this field here, 360 Enter (or Return), and I've got my stripes. Now, these stripes have a tendency to disappear into the background because they're black and the background is black as well. I just want to reduce this down so we can see things more clearly. And here we will just apply a color, and for today, let's go for orange, nice bright color, and there we have it. Let's have a look at these stripes. What we have at one end is a white stripe and what we have at the other end is an orange stripe. What we have got is a pattern that will repeat perfectly because it'll put that white stripe to the right of the orange stripe. That is, this white stripe will end up over here and we end up with a nice repetition of stripes. And that's pretty much all there is to it. As you can see, it's a pretty easy process. So let's move on to the next lesson. 5. Exporting Your Stripes for Spoonflower: Now it's time to export the file in a format that is ready for importing into Spoonflower. To do this, we'll go to File > Export, and we'll just give this a name, so we'll call it Orange. Stripes. Not very inspiring, but it'll do. The format we want is PNG. The color profile will remain as sRGB because that is what Spoonflower requires, and we want to keep the original size. Here we go. Export. And now I have that exported to my desktop. And that's it. Pixelmator is actually very easy to use. A little bit different to Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo and Adobe products. It can take a while to get used to, but as you've seen, each of these lessons is incredibly short. There's really not a lot to it. See you in the next lesson. 6. Bonus Lesson - Upload You Stripes to Spoonflower: Now it's time to see what it looks like on Spoonflower, let's go ahead and upload that file. I've got Spoonflower open, all I need to do is go up to here and down to upload your design. Choose files. We'll select our new file and then click Upload. Agree and Continue, and now it has uploaded, and already, we can see what it's going to look like. It's quite a bold stripe, quite a bold color. Of course, you could pick any color you like. It doesn't have to be orange and it doesn't have to be bold and bright. You could actually do this with pastels. So what you can see here is spoonflower turns your pattern or takes your pattern and creates a lot of different mock up scenarios so you can see what your pattern looks like as tablecloths or table runners or bedspreads or cushions, pillow shams, whatever, it's all there, and people can order your pattern as a product. 7. Bonus Lesson - Scaling Your Pattern in Spoonflower: In an earlier video, I talked about actually making this pattern into a finer stripe. That is, I wanted to take that 3,600 pixel canvas and instead of spreading it over the width of the wallpaper, I actually wanted to spread over half the width of the wallpaper. So what happens when you import a pattern into Spoonflower. By default, it aims to display that pattern at 150 DPI. By halfing the width of that pattern, in other words, reducing it from 150 to 300 DPI, and I know that sounds weird. What you're actually doing is reducing the size of that pattern, and you're printing two of those pattern units side by side. So I hope that makes sense. Maybe it'll make more sense as I work through it. So what we have here is our uploads and our mockups. Now, you can change things in the fabric and the wallpaper mockup, and you can rotate a tea towel, but you can't do any other changes on any of the other mockups because they're all based on these three mock ups here. So as you can see, I've got a 24 inch by 24 inch unit. So my 3,600 pixel wide pattern is spread over 24 ", and that is at 150 dpi. So I want to half that to 12, which is going to increase the resolution to 300 dpi. So this is how you do it. You just click Edit. And in here, we can just click to the side here and see what happens. It's reduced to 12, which is exactly what I wanted. And then I can click Save. And it may take a while one to 3 minutes to update the images. We can see that the wallpaper is updated already. The fabrics obviously haven't because I haven't edited that one yet. Again the fabric, we've got a 24 inch wide unit or pattern, which is your 3,600 pixels spread over 24 inches. I want to reduce that to 12 inches and go from 150 dpi down to 300 dpi. So I'm going to click Edit, and what I'm going to do here is, let's have a look what happens if we scale it. We can actually have anything we like. But I want to make sure that it scales properly. So I'm going to go 50% then press return. Actually, instead of pressing return, I'll click in here and that resets those fields to 12 inches. And what we end up with is a finer print. Now I can save that and wait for it to update, and it's updated pretty quickly. You could see that now we've got a finer print (stripe) on our cushions, and all the other mockups have updated accordingly as well, which is really good. The other thing which I haven't done, which yeah should I cover it? I might as well cover it here. Let's just go to proofing the design. What we want to see is because, I mean, this is actually the first time I've used Pixelmator to create a pattern to directly upload into Spoonflower. Normally, I take it from Pixelmator to Affinity Designer, export it from there, and then upload to Spoonflower. So let's go and click 'Not Proofed'. And it's verifying the design. And here we go. We can see our 3,600 pixel square, that's bounded by that pink line. I'm going to click Start. It's going to zoom in, and I can see that it's nice and perfect, at least it's pixel perfect and perfectly aligned. So that's what I'm looking for. I want to just zoom out, and I like to check in the middle just to make sure that everything is perfectly aligned. It needs to be pixel perfect. And I can see that is the case, and I'll just have another look in here and that's all fine. And it looks good. So I'll click 'Looks Good'. And now this pattern is ready to publish. Well, at least the design is ready to publish. I'm not going to go into editing the title in the search. That can be for another short lesson, another day. But for now, I think we've covered essentially all that I intended to cover in this class. So onto the next lesson or at least what your project is going to be for this class. 8. Your Project: Hey, I really hope you enjoyed this class, and I'm looking forward to seeing your stripes. So please upload your stripes to the project area below. So what else is there? Pixelmator. If you are new to Pixelmator, or you haven't heard of it before, you can go to the Mac App store and buy it from there. There's a bit more information there. There is also the Pixelmator website where you can check out what you can do with Pixelmator. Now I use Pixelmator in conjunction with the Affinity products. It does some things better and faster than the equivalent functionality in the Affinity Products. What about Spoonflower? Chances are if you're a surface pattern designer, you probably have Spoonflower up and running already and that you're selling your patterns. If that's the case, I would love to see your mockups featured in the projects area below as well. If you haven't used Spoonflower before, it's a straightforward process of signing up for Spoonflower. Once you've done that, you can start uploading patterns and looking at the mockups. Where are we at? I think we're pretty much done. I've covered everything I wanted to cover. Please again remember to post your projects in the projects area, and I look forward to seeing you in the next class. Bye.