Surface Design for Fabric & Paper: Creating Kaleidoscope Patterns with the Repper app

1. Intro: Hi, my name is Becca. Welcome to Surface Design for Fabric and Paper, creating Kaleidoscope patterns with the Refer App. Bab I'm a full time teaching artist, and I work primarily in fabric and paper, incorporating techniques like paper collage and hand embroidery to my designs. So I make everything from garments to covered books and boxes and a little bit of everything in between. One of the things I do most often in my practice is to create surface designs. Now, surface designs are a different kind of art that aren't meant to hang up on the wall, but they are meant to be printed or added to the surface of some other substrate like fabric or paper. I like to make my art completely from start to finish, starting with a blank page and not going out shopping to use someone else's designs in my art. Surface design can seem complicated. There are dozens, if not hundreds of classes on skill share just about surface pattern design. What I want to do in this class is give you a different way to approach it that hopefully makes it a little bit simpler. So with this technique, you don't need to know photoshop or procreate or really have any technical computer skills at all. That is the cool part of the tool I'm going to teach you about. In this class, I'm going to show you how to use a different tool. One that works kind of like a kaleidoscope. It's gonna take your art, cut it up into little pieces, and then put it all back together again to create new and interesting patterns. So the app is called rep, and I've been using it for years, and I really mean it when I say it's one of my favorites. So in this class, we're going to do exactly the process I like to use. We're gonna start with a blank piece of paper. We're going to make some art. We're gonna use this kaleidoscope tool to create some new designs for it. And then at the end, I have two different projects for you to choose from to finish something created from start to finish with your art. Whether your art practice uses fabric or paper or some kind of mixed media, I know that you will learn something in this class that you can add to your work to create custom designs to make your own art. So, if that sounds fun to you, let's jump into the next lesson and get started. Oh. 2. What is Repper: So the very first thing I want to introduce you to in this class is an app called Reper. Now, I have reper up on my computer screen here that you can see. And that's one of the cool things about reper is that it works right in your web browser. So you don't have to download anything to your computer. You don't have to worry about what kind of computer you have or how to install it. So it works right in your laptop or you can use it on a tablet style computer. So it'll work both places. Now, there's not a phone app if you love working on your phone. There's just a little too much going on to be able to fit it on a tiny phone screen. Okay, I want to talk just a little bit about what Reper does and what we're going to do with this app with our art. Now, I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, I used to go to art fairs and things, and there would always be somebody who was a woodworker who made kaleidoscopes. And you could hold them up and look through them and turn the knobs on the front of it. And it would change the pattern. And it's based on a series of mirrors. That's basically what EPA is doing for you. You're going to add some of your art into per, and it's going to take your art. It's going to cut it up into little pieces. It's going to re arrange it in about 30 different kinds of patterns, and it's going to make new designs based on the art that you create. So you can make one piece of source material and create endless numbers of designs from your own art. Sounds like fun. I've been letting it just play in the background here so you can see they call this the dream state, where it's just going through different patterns. That's one thing I want you to take away from this class is that per really is a tool. It's a tool we're going to use, just like we would use a paintbrush or a pair of scissors. It's designed to help us create patterns, and that's how we're going to use it. So in the next lesson, we're going to create some art that we then can put inside the kaleidoscope to start creating our patterns. 3. Choosing Great Source Materials: Before we get started making patterns, I want to talk for a minute about source material. Like I talked about, the way per works is it's going to take the art that you put in. It's going to rearrange it, cut it up, make all kinds of different patterns from it, and then you can take art back out that you can use for different things. So what you put in to create your art really makes a huge difference. That's why I wanted to take a minute and say, it really matters where you are sourcing your art from. The app has some libraries of images that are built in, and that's fine. But as an artist, you really want to know that the art that you're making is something that you have done from start to finish. That goes for the source material that you're putting in also. Now, I'm not going to dig deep into copyright and those kind of things because I'm not an expert in that. I'm not a lawyer. I'm an artist. But here's my rules of thumb about the materials that work best for these techniques. I've got some source material potential down here on the desk and I want to talk about the different kinds of source material. Over here on the right hand side are things that I made. This is a little sketch that I did of my dog with the squirrel. This is a piece of marbled paper that I actually did. I marbled myself, so I created this pattern on the paper. And this is a paper collage that I created just from some junk mail that came one day. All three of these things started out as a blank sheet of paper. I know that I made the art from the very beginning from that very first blank sheet. So there's no issue for me here of knowing who has the copyright, because this is for sure, all my art. This second stack is a little ffier. This is just a birthday card. The colors are cool and everything, but that's a copyrighted character right there. This is a piece of art that a friend made for me. Usually hangs up on the wall in my studio, but I pulled it over here. Of course, this is one of my favorite illustrators. This is a book. Now, I could take a picture or scan any of these things and upload them as source material as well. The problem is, I don't own the copyright on any of this source material. These are things that were not created by me. So even though the stack of pieces of paper all sort of look similar from a far away view, I want to really encourage you to create your own art when you are making patterns using this tool and using these techniques. So to make that easy for you, I'm going to show you one of my favorite ways to create source material using this tool. And the reason that I love it is that it makes very distinct designs because of the way that you're going to put the materials together. In the next lesson, we're going to create start to finish some source material that we can use to create our own surface patterns. 4. Gather Your Materials: Okay, let's talk about the materials you'll need to get started. So first, you need a pair of scissors. I love these little micro tip scissors by fiskers, for cutting small pieces. These are great. Then you need something to attach pieces together with. So double sided tape or a gluestick, work awesome. You want to have one piece of paper that you're going to use as your background to build your collage. This is just a piece of a little bit heavier weight paper, plain white. You can use any color you want to, but I recommend that you pick out a color that is a good contrast to the other papers that you're going to use for your design. So black or white are great choices to start out with. I just use a small piece. This is a quarter of a sheet that I cut. It's about four by 5 ", which is plenty of material for you to get started. That piece of paper, and then you need a collection of recycled paper. This is really where you can have fun and use almost anything. I want to just talk you through the things that are in my stack of papers here. I have a few pieces of just solid colored paper. Some of these are like lightweight origami paper, some are like scrapbooking card stock. I just have a bunch of different plain colors. Then I've got a few pieces of some painted paper. These are ones that I painted for different projects are scraps that are leftover from things. These are textures that I designed, but just little pieces of them. I've got a couple of other fun things like here's a piece of paint chips because I like the colors that are in those. There are a couple of stickers. I don't use stickers with characters or animals on them, but I particularly love alphabet stickers, letters or numbers. I have some of these that are a little squares and some little circles. They're just a great way to add some different shapes to your design. Then I've got some bigger sheets. This is a page just out of a national geographic magazine. I'm not going to use like the whole page. I'm not going to use the logos and symbols that are on this, but this has such awesome color in it, that I'm going to cut up and use little pieces of this because I want to use the texture and the color that are in this piece. That's absolutely a way to use magazine or junk mail or pieces like that. If you're only just taking little elements, not like designs out of the piece. I have a piece of graph paper. Here's another piece of painted paper that I'm going to use, and then one of my personal favorite textures to use. This is an envelope from I'm not sure what a bank statement or something. These are called security envelopes, and on the inside of the envelope, you can see if I hold it up close. There are some black and white or sometimes they're blue and white textures that are printed on the inside of the envelope. I use these all the time in my designs. I love security envelopes. So that's just a few of the kinds of papers that you can use. So take a minute. You might want to pause the video to go collect your materials, and then we'll come back and we'll start creating a collage design. 5. Make a Collage: Okay, let's start making our collage. So you want to start with your base paper, whatever it is. You can work on it vertically or horizontally. It doesn't matter. So I've got eight rules or guidelines for creating your design, and I'll put that up on screen. It'll also be available for you to download in the resources section of this class. So this is to help you create a really rich source material that you'll be able to pull a lot of different designs from. Here are my eight categories or my eight rules of things that your collage must include. The first one is geometric shapes. Those can be any kind of shapes that you want to, triangles, circles, squares, stars, anything like that. It has to have some of those. You have to have some organic shapes. Organic shapes are things like blobs or squiggles or leaves, things that are more irregular shape pieces. You need to include a letter of the alphabet or a number. So those stickers that I had might be a great way to do that, or you could cut a letter or a number out of a magazine page or a piece of junk mail. You need a shape that repeats at least three times. So it could be any of the shapes that you're adding, for example, if you put down a circle, you need to maybe have circles that repeat at least three times. All right? You need to have a shape that overlaps another one. So we're creating things that are overlapping each other and not just individual pieces like sitting next to each other. Next rule is, you need a shape that's larger than a quarter. You need one that's smaller than a dime. And for those who aren't in the US, think about your sizes of coins. I want to have big shapes and small shapes. And then my last rule, and this is the one that everyone always hates. I want you to make sure that there is something that you think is ugly, and it's totally making you crazy to leave it there and you want to peel it off the paper. I want you to make yourself leave it there. I promise it will make your design better. Okay? So I'm going to start just talking you through adding some pieces to my design. And then I'm going to speed up the video. So you can sit back and watch me assemble mine. You can work along with me however you want to, and then we'll join back together at the end to talk through our finished collages. Okay, I'm going to start with I'm going to add some geometric shapes. I'll just start at the top of the list. So I'm going to add maybe a triangle. And I'm not thinking about these things too hard. I'm not making a picture. I want to make sure that I'm creating just something abstract. So I made two triangles. Those are geometric shapes and things that repeat. So I'm already starting out there. Let's see. I like to cut like some long narrow strips like french fries. I think those are really fun to add to a design. Let's see. I'm going to add that letter in later. Let's get some pattern paper. To add some squares. And you'll notice that I'm not sticking anything down yet. I like to kind of play with my design a little bit with everything still loose. And then when I feel like I have kind of a theme going, I will start sticking pieces down in place. Let's see. I'm going to put in a little bit of this graph paper. I think this is fun, but I'm going to cut it in irregular shape. And put it this one. Yeah, I like that. I definitely want to put in a little bit of this great colorful stripe from this National Geographic. This will be larger than a quarter piece. Put that down. Put some stuff out. All right, so you kind of are getting the idea, hopefully of how I'm sticking these pieces down. So I'm going to speed up the video at this point and just keep adding to my collage. I don't need to fill the entire piece, but I want to use up as much of the space as I can. It so feel a little cluttered. It should feel a little bit busy. You should make sure that you've got lots of good contrast. Darks and lights, straight lines and curves or jagged ones, small and large, like as many ways as you can think to add contrast is going to make your source material better. Sit Okay, I think my collage is finished. I'm gonna call it finished. Some things that I hope you noticed while you were watching the video. So I wanted to make sure that my collage really didn't have, like an up and down or a direction. So you will hopefully have noticed that I was rotating it around as I was working and seeing looking at it from different sides, like, where I could add more pieces to it. So that's a trick to think about as you're creating yours. Now I want to check back in with our checklist and make sure that I've hit all eight rules that are on the checklist. So let's start with geometric shapes. I have lots of those. I made all kinds of triangles and squares and that kind of thing. So check. Organic shapes. I cut a blob. That's my only real organic shape, I guess. I could add another one of those. I'll think about that. These guys look like lily pads. Maybe that's an organic shape. We'll see. I have my letter of the alphabet. I've got a K there, a shape that repeats at least three times. Yeah I did a lot of repeats. I have this French fry shape that repeats a bunch of times. The stripes are repeating. I've got a bunch of triangles, so I think I'm good there. Shapes that overlap another one, not a problem. Shapes that are larger than a dime. I've got a couple of big things, and I have a bunch that are small, so I've got some littler pieces as well. Then something I think is ugly and it's making me crazy to leave it there. I'm not wild about this little section right here, this navy blue seems too dark for the rest of it. It might be great, it might not. I don't know. I'm leaving it there. I did not peel it back up again. That's the important part. I think I'm going to call this done. It's up to you to decide when yours is done. The more you fill the space, the more you'll have to work with when we go on to the next lesson. If yours has a lot of white space, especially around the edges, you might want to go back and just add a few more pieces to it. Okay, when you're completely done, the best way to get this into a format that we can work with to create a repeating pattern is to scan it. If you've got a scanner, awesome, throw it on your scanner, scan it. The resolution doesn't really matter, just get a clean copy of it. If you don't have a scanner, absolutely no worries. You can just take a photo of it. So you can use your camera or even your phone. Kind of take a close up photo so that you're getting basically just your collage and not much else around it. And my best advice for you is to actually just step outside to take your picture. The more kind of soft bright light that you can have, so you don't have shadows across your piece, the better your patterns are going to look. Okay, so two options there, either scan it or take a photo of it and make either the scan or the photo as clean and clear as you can. And then go ahead and save that to your computer or your tablet so that you're ready to work with it in the next step. If you want a few extra tips for scanning, I will put a few more in the resources section, the handout for this class. 6. Navigating the Repper app: Okay, so let's talk a little bit about Reper, which is the app we're going to use to create our designs in this class. So I've got my laptop here in front of me. The first, like thing you should know about per is that it's an app that works right in your web browser. So you don't have to download or install anything on your computer, and you can use it on either a laptop, desktop, a computer, or on a tablet. It doesn't work on your phone. Phone screens are just a little bit too small. So all you have to do is pull up the site rep app. And I've got that up on my screen here that you can see. So mine is going to look just a tiny bit different than yours when we jump into the very first screen because I already have an account. So I have a subscription to this app. So it'll be a little bit personalized for me when I log in. So just bear with me. We'll get to the screen that'll look familiar to you. So the way you start the app is you go to the website and there's a button up here in the top right corner that says Start App. Okay, this is the screen that's going to be a little bit different because it's personalized for my account. I'm just going to dismiss this and move it out of the way. And this is what you're going to see when you jump right into per. For this lesson, I'm going to take you on a tour of how things are arranged and sort of where you find all of the tools in reper. Starting on the far left side of the screen, you can see there's a black column, and it's got some little tiny thumbnails in it. Basically, what happens in this column is you can take what they call snapshots of what you're seeing on your screen when you're creating patterns, and it saves a temporary version of that over here on the side. This will make more sense when I go into demonstrating how per works, but that's what is happening in that farthest left column. Where you're going to do most of your interacting with per is in the narrow middle column that's on the left hand side. As we look at that, on the top of it, there are three options, three tabs, that say pattern, effects, and export. We're going to start on the pattern tab because that's where we create patterns. Right now, everything in that left column is about, like all of those tools are going to be about creating patterns. The very first thing you see is a drop down menu that's next to the word tiling. This is where you choose the pattern that you want Reper to cut your artwork up into and rearrange it. If I click on this little drop down menu here, where it says robesque. That's the pattern I have selected right now. You'll see it pops up a little menu version. And if yours looks different than this, right over here on the right hand side, you can see there are three different ways to view this menu. So I'm looking at the list view right now that has the names of the patterns, but there's also two other kind of grid views, and you can page through and look at what those look like. It's the same information, just presented in different ways. So we're starting on the patterns here. There are two options, again, two little tabs at the top, one that says seamless and one that says seamed. We'll dig in a little bit more to what those two things mean, but it divides the groups of patterns into two. You can see there are about 20 or so patterns here under seamless, and there are about that many again under seamed. So that's all the different ways that you can cut up your artwork and rearrange it to make designs. We'll explore those a little later when we get to doing a demo, but that's where you find the different kinds of patterns. I'm just going to click outside of that to dismiss that. That was under tiling. There are two options underneath tiling, the rotation and the position. I'll demonstrate those a little bit later when we get to doing some artwork. Those are functions I don't use personally very often in my art because I'm creating patterns for a specific purpose, but we'll talk about what they do. Now, kind of the most important part over here is you'll see that there is a big piece of artwork kind of in the middle here. So this is another collage that I created different than the one I did in the last lesson. But we can go ahead and load in the one that I created in the last lesson. So I mentioned before, you want to scan it or take a photograph of it, and then you'll be able to import it here to use as the source material for your patterns. So I do that by clicking on the little tab that says Change Image. And it's going to ask me if I want to upload or from my library. I would avoid using the button that says image search. That's going to find something from stock photos that it's going to pull in here. You can totally play with this as an experiment, but if you're intending to create art, you want to use your own art. So I'm going to click on Upload. And I have saved the collage that we did in class to my desktop, so I'm going to choose it off of my desktop, and there is the collage that I created. So a couple of things to know about this preview of the artwork. So it's going to show you what your whole piece of artwork looks like here. And you'll notice that there is this kind of funny looking triangle with some corners on it that I can click on and drag around the design. And I'm sure you've noticed the design on the right hand side of the screen is updating. This is how I choose what section of my design that I want it to repeat. And the shape that this is that I'm clicking and dragging around is based on whatever I have chosen from the drop down menu up here. So sometimes it's a triangle. Sometimes it's a rectangle, it could be a hexagon. There are lots of different shapes that it can slice your piece up into. So I've got this kind of double triangle shape. Now, you can do lots of things to choose the section of the artwork you're going to work with. So like I said, you can click in the center of it and hold down your track patter or your mouse, and you can drag it around. So that changes the part of the artwork that you're using. You can also click on any of the corners, and some of the designs also have, like a bar in the center here, and you can make this option larger and smaller. So I could drag this down and take just a teeny, tiny slice of my artwork here. Okay. And move that around the screen. So every time you change it, if, for example, we change the drop down up here to this one called Jester, you'll see we have a different shape now that it is previewing for us, that we can change around and update and so forth. Then underneath that, there's just a little bit of information. It's showing you the image size. That means the full size of the image that you uploaded and the tile size. How big is that slice that it's taking? Sometimes those are useful if you're trying to do a very specific engineered pattern, most of the time it's just informational. Okay, so that's kind of everything that is in that left column under the pattern tab. Now, if we move over to the Effects tab and I click on the word effects up there at the top, there are about ten different options of ways that we can adapt our pattern. So this is kind of fun. I'm not going to go in major depth into what all of these do because that's for you to explore. But I will show you a couple just to demonstrate. My favorite one in this set of effects is the one called Duotone. I just click on the little slider button, and it will change it. And you'll see what Duotone does is it gives you a selection of two different colors, and it overlays that on top of your design. So my design went from being kind of crazy, colorful to now everything is kind of a deep purple and a mint green. You can change those colors by clicking on the little drop down next to it, so you can choose a different set of colors. I love this kind of peach and red version. I think that one's kind of fun. The invert button will switch the positions, so the darks will become light, and the lights will become dark. And then you can adjust the amount that it overlays. So you can have some of your original colors bleed through or you can have it cover up entirely. I kind of love this design that it created here just from me clicking buttons. So you can turn on or off Duotone and any of these other things that you want to, and you can explore and experiment with all of those things. The last tab I want to show you is the Export tab. This is how you get your designs out of Reper so you can do other things with them. So if I click on Export at the top, there are some choices here, again, some drop down menus. Under the mode drop down, there are three different choices. Tile surface, and three D. I wanted to take a minute and explain what's the difference between all of those. If I choose the one that says tile, what it's going to do is show me the preview of one single tile. This is like the individual repeating element that creates that pattern that you're seeing. You take one of these and you repeat it over and over and over and that's going to give you the pattern that you were previewing on the screen. So tile is the version I use the most often when I am exporting something to create a new pattern because all I need is that basic kind of building block, that lego element. To be able to repeat it over and over. That's what the tile tab is. If you go under surface, what surface is going to show you is repeating tiles. It's going to take that individual tile, repeat it over and over to fill a specific space. You can set the size of this repeat to be, for instance, eight by 10 ", so it would fit on a piece of 8.5 by 11 paper. So you could print it out on your printer. Surface means that you're creating a specific sized something filled with your design. And you'll be able to adjust the size of your design to repeat more times or fewer times, depending on what look you want. We'll do more of this when I kind of demonstrate some of those things a little bit later in other lessons. The last one I want to show you is three D. Three D is kind of fun because what it does is takes the design that you created and makes a three D mockup of it. For instance, here it's showing me a pillow, that it's created this three D design. Now, you can change what it is showing you by looking at the bottom left corner of this kind of preview section of the screen. And you can see there are all kinds of different choices here of what it can show you. So we could look at this as a T shirt. That's what it would look like mocked up as a T shirt, or we could look at it as something like maybe a coffee cup. So it's giving you some mock ups. This is kind of fun as a designer to be able to imagine what your design would look like in different situations. Okay? So that's the three D mode up here under export. Now, each one of these modes under export has different settings, and we're going to take an entire lesson to talk about what specific settings you want to export for different reasons, for different purposes to use these patterns. So I'll dig more into that a little bit later. Okay. So now let's go back to the pattern tab. I want to switch this out of the three D mode, and you can see up here at the top of the preview panel on the right side. The three D mode is highlighted. I'm going to switch back to the surface mode, which is the version we were looking at originally, where it's just kind of filling the screen with your design. And I'm going to switch back over here to the pattern tab. Okay. So just a few more things to mention, kind of working my way across the screen. So we've talked about everything that's in this left column. On the right side, you've noticed, this is the preview section. So we can preview what the design looks like in all these various ways, and it live updates as we are moving our design, our cutout around our original design. So a couple of things you can adjust here. Right at the top, you can see that there's a plus minus. This will let me zoom in and out of my design. So if I click plus, it will zoom in a little bit, so we can see it a little bit closer. You can also click on the bottom right corner way down here. There's a little full screen icon. So if I click on that, that'll bring it up and take away all of those tool bars, so I can preview, like, a little bit more of it. And then you just click that button again to go back. And then the last version I want to show you is kind of a fun like, feature they built in. And that's this little moon and stars up here at the top. This is what they call dream mode. And so if I click on Dream mode, what happens is that it starts to drive, basically the design that's changing over here on the left side. It just kind of does that automatically. So you can just kind of sit back and watch it as it changes things around the pattern, which is kind of fun. Now, what if one of these designs that it jumps to, you're super excited about, and you're like, I want to save that one. I want to make sure I export that. That's when we go back over here to this far left hand tab and what I told you about thumbnails. In Reper, they call them snapshots. And so if I want to take a snapshot, I'm going to stop dream mode by just clicking on the Stop button. And let's say, I love this pattern. I want to save this one. All I do is click on the plus sign that's down on the bottom of this column here. And that's going to put a little thumbnail right here of this design that I'm looking at on the screen right now. And I can click back to any of those anytime I want to, no matter what else I'm doing. So, for instance, if I want to go back to this version, which I looked at earlier. I can click on that, and now it's going to change here and show me, Oh, there's that version that I looked at before, or here's one from a different. You'll notice that it's changing the original artwork. That's because I saved those snapshots when I had a different original here that I was working from. Okay? So I'll go back to this one that we were going to, and we're back to our original art. Okay, so there was just a quick tour of how you find everything and kind of how you navigate reper. So in the next lesson, we're going to start working with the collage design that we created in the last lesson. 7. Choosing a Design: Okay, here's the fun part. Let's jump into creating our project for this class. So we're going to make a design from our collage that we created using some of the per tools. So just a reminder, I'm going to show you one more time how to load your artwork into per. So we are going to make sure that we're under the pattern tab, and we're going to come down here to the center part of this column where it says Change Image. I'm going to click on Upload, and I'm going to find where I have that saved on my computer. So I saved it on my desktop. So now we've got the collage we created from class, and I've got that right here. Okay, next, we want to choose one of the tiling patterns. So here under the tiling menu that we click that little drop down. You can choose any of these designs that you want to. I'm going to demonstrate just a little bit with a couple of my personal favorites, the ones that I use all the time. And I like. I don't know why, but Ciro is one that I like a lot. I use this one a lot. Right now, so I've chosen Ciro up here under the tiling menu, and you can see the little preview of the part of my art that it's going to slice out is kind of tiny right now. So I'm going to make that a little bit bigger, so I'm capturing a little bit more of the art. And now it's just up to you to drive around your design and see when you see something that you love. The only thing that I have learned that you can't do, which I think would be cool is there's no way to take your original artwork and rotate it. In here, you would have to do that like in another program and then re upload it into per. That's one thing that I wish there was because I think you could get some interesting patterns being able to rotate your original sometimes. But I'm going to drive around here and see what I see until I see something that just strikes. That's interesting. I like that. If this is a pattern that I'm like, I like this one. I want to save it. I want to go over here in this far black, that left hand column, and the little plus sign right here, you can see when I mouse over it, it says save snapshot. A snapshot is how I'm going to save this tile that I'm looking at over on the right hand side of my screen. I love that one. I've saved that there. Now I can drive around a little more. How did I switch designs? So that was Ciro under the seamless pattern side. I'm going to try Bloom. Bloom tends to create kind of circular pieces. It cuts this really long skinny wedge, but it makes kind of flower patterns, which I think are kind of fun. I like that. I like how that looks really flowery, I'm gonna save that snapshot, too. Oh. That one's really fun. That little bit of a circle that's cutting out are making really kind of fun like lemon shaped pieces. So that's kind of fun. Let's try one more design. How about Let's go with high five? That's kind of, like, a really simple fun pattern right there. I'm going to resize that one ale bit. Oh. Like a really simple geometric coming out of that letter K that I put into my design. That almost looks like starfish. That's kind of fun. I don't know. I like that. I'm gonna save that one. Like, a little bit whimsical. I like it. Okay, so I've got some designs saved. I want to show you one more Maybe I'll choose the echo tartan. This one makes kind of plaid looking patterns like this makes an awesome plaid, just where it happens to be. This is just kind of a fun thing that you can see that there are a little slices across the triangle, and so it's taking kind of slices out of your slice and doing different things with them. So that's a really fun way to create kind of a plaid. Oh, I like that. I don't know. That kind of looks like, like, paper snowflakes a little bit. Oh, I like this one. I'm going to hit a snapshot on this one. Okay, so you get the idea there. I want to show you one other thing, which is, when we're choosing patterns, we've been choosing everything right now from the seamless tab. And what the seamless tab does is these designs are they're kind of created so you don't see the edges of the tile necessarily, where the seamed designs have a more distinct like a line between the repeats of the pattern. So if we choose one like playing card, for instance, this you can see like some definite lines between the patterns. One is not better than the other. It's just a different style, and so that's a way of organizing them. Playing card does a fun thing where it's actually flip flopping the two repeats of the design. So it's flipping the direction as it's repeating things. Hopefully, you can see that a little bit. Like the arrows there, the little end of the triangle, they're going one way, and then they repeat going the other direction. So some of the ones under the seamed section are more directional. We, that's kind of fun. It's creating these neat stripes with a bar across them. Okay? Let's look at one more L et's see. Like, fan. This is picking out a kind of muddy part of my design, but if I move this around, I'll make it a little bit bigger. Can see this is creating kind of 66 pointed kind of radiating. It's another kind of flower like shape. Cool. You can spend all afternoon. I swear. Experimenting. That's kind of a cool pattern. I'm going to snapshot and save that one, too. Okay, I'm not going to take the time to walk you through every single one of these patterns. That is for you to explore on your own and have a great time. Now, one other thing that I said I would come back and talk about, is underneath the tiling tab, you can see there's an option here, this pattern, you can change the rotation on it. So you do that by just dragging the little dot that you can change the way that the pattern is rotated. This one is kind of symmetrical many directions, so it doesn't make as big a difference with this one. But some of the other designs that might be a thing to experiment with. For instance, bowtie might have a interesting, if you were to change the direction. Okay. Like I said, I don't use rotation very often in my designs, just that it isn't a thing. I often create fabric and you can cut out fabric going in any direction, so I don't need to rotate the design before I print it. Okay. And then depending on what you choose from the drop down menu, the options might change. So you can see the hexagonal grid option doesn't have any other options for rotation or anything like that underneath there. So it will change based on the pattern that you choose. Okay. So once you have chosen some snapshots, Then we're going to go on to the next lesson, where I will teach you how to export it so that you can use this for another project. Okay, your assignment for your project is to play around with patterns and to save about five or six snapshots. Now, don't forget, try different kind of patterns from the tiling grid. You can also try different effects from the effects tab and pick something that you love. And be sure to save it over here to the snapshots. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about how to export pieces so that you can do different projects with them to be able to upload it and print it on fabric or stationary, all those kinds of things. We'll focus on that in the next lesson. 8. Exporting Your Designs: I hope you had fun exploring patterns. Now we're ready to export. I'm going to divide this lesson into two parts because there are two ways to export, depending on what you want to do as your final project, like what you want to create to make more with your art. We're going to start by talking about exporting tiles. So I'm going to switch over here to the export tab. We've talked about just a little bit before, and I want to switch the drop down menu here to tile. I've chosen one of my designs by clicking on it over here in the snapshots. And this is the one I'm going to export. Okay? So I've chosen first tile at the top. So why do we export tiles? A tile is one individual repeat. So if we're going to take this and upload it to a place like Spoonflower, who prints fabric, we only need to upload one repeat of our design. And Spoon flowers tool, their engine is going to take it and repeat it to fill and print fabric. We only need to export one tile to be able to take it over to Spoonflower. Now, the same thing applies if you want to upload it to a place like Zazzle. They also will let you repeat a tile over and over. So think about how you want to use your design, and that'll help you choose whether you need to export a tile or a surface. Let's imagine I'm going to print this one as fabric. I'm going to print this. I'm going to export this as a tile that I could upload and print fabric. So the next thing you want to look at is in this left hand column, and the next option here is size. The easiest choice you can make here is the radio button here that says maximum. I always export my designs at the maximum size. So what does that mean? Okay, so think back to when we uploaded our original collage. When we scanned that, we captured some number of pixels, when we scanned it. Then we took it into reper and we cut out a tiny part of that. Even though we might have captured millions of pixels, when we got to make our design, we only captured maybe thousands of pixels in the part that we cut out. When we cut down our design, we might not have enough pixels to print this the size of a billboard. Probably we have enough to print it the size of a poster. I don't know. We'll see when we export it. But what I do is I always choose maximum size so that I know when I go to print it on something that I've got the biggest that I possibly can get it. Now, you can dig in if you're kind of a math geek and figure out exactly how many pixels you have and how big the maximum size will be. You can scan it at different resolutions to make sure that you have more pixels to print a large. That's totally all possible to do, and I'm a little bit of a geek. I sometimes do that. I'm not going to dig in to how to do that in this class, but I will say it is completely possible. For you and all the information is available for you to be able to do that, and I'll show you a little bit like where you find it. For the most part, if you export it the maximum size, you're going to have enough pixels to print it on nearly e surface that you want to. So I always choose maximum. Under the size here, I don't customize it. It's going to tell you right underneath that what the pixel size is. The size of this design is 1037 by 599 pixels. If you know the resolution that you're going to print this out at, that will tell you what size this tile is. For instance, I know that spoon flower prints at 150 DPI. If I divide those numbers by 150, that'll give me an idea of the biggest size I can print this tile. So, just really quick math. If I divide that by about 150, that's probably about nine by 4 ", just very roughly, that would be the largest size I could print this individual tile. If the math is just too much, and you don't care. That's completely fine. You can adjust that once you've uploaded it to spoonflower, Zazzle, or anything like that and just size it the way that you like the way it looks. Okay? Then the last option down here is type. That's the file type that you want to choose. So there are two options in the drop down menu, either a PNG or a JPEG. For the purposes of what we're doing, either one works. There's not one that's really better than another. I usually choose JPEG because it's just slightly more universal to be able to be used anywhere. So once you got all of those things set up, you'll see at the bottom of the column, there's a big purple button that says Export. All you have to do is export. It's going to ask you to give it a file name, and it's going to save it wherever you want to save it on your hard drive. Before we do that, I also want to mention Export snapshots, which is a little button right next to that. If you choose export snapshots, what it's going to do is export everything that's over here in your little list of thumbnails using the same settings that you just set up for this one that you look at. So this will export all six all at once. So it's a quick way to gather a bunch and do one export, and they'll all be exported at the same time. I'm going to just export this one. And you can see it gives it kind of a temporary name. I'm going to call this pink flower, and I'm just going to save it to my desktop. Okay, that's all there is to exporting a tile. Now, I'll do a quick demo at the very end of this lesson to show you how you would upload it to a place like Spoonflower or Zazzle. But in the meantime, I want to go on to that second part I was talking about and talk about exporting a surface. So what the different versions of export are. Okay, so tiles, we understand, we're going to upload to repeat somewhere else. When you choose surface, and I'm going to switch to surface here, we're printing out, you can think of it like, I'm going to print out a piece of paper that has my design repeated on it. So a great example of this, and I'm going to challenge you in a lesson a little bit later to create a piece like this is, I want to print a piece of this paper. I'm going to use it as a cover for a notebook. My printer can print on an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. So I want to create a surface that is eight by ten because I can fit that on an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. So I am going to choose surface as the top dropdown menu. For this one, I do want to choose custom because I have a very specific sized surface that I want to print it on. I'm going to click on custom, and it has several options here. I want you to skip over the repeat one because first, I want to set the size of the design that we're going to create. So we are going to create a piece of paper, a surface in inches, because that's what I know my printer creates. So I'm going to change the unit here from pixels to inches. Now you can see the size up here in the menu has changed. Right now, the surface that it's showing me over here is five by 3.333. I want to change that to the size of the surface that I want to create. I'm going to make eight by ten. I'm going to make that eight, and I'm going to change this to ten. Now it's showing me. This is what it would look like as an eight by ten surface. Now we can skip back up to repeat, which is the first thing here. So this has got a kind of large design in it, like those flowers are kind of the flower shapes are kind of filling a lot of the space. Maybe I want those to be a little bit smaller. That's what I adjust with repeat right here. So I can choose right now it's saying the repeat is 1.848 ", and it's repeating it four times. So if I want to make them smaller, I'm going to increase the number of times it's repeating it. I'm just clicking the little up arrow. And this you can totally do by Ii. Keep clicking until you decide that you like the size it is. I think for a notebook cover, that looks about good. So I'm repeating mine 9.1 times because that's what looks good to me. Okay? Once you've adjusted those two things, now you can do the same thing on the bottom here and export it. And what it's going to export is an eight by ten inch image that then you can print on 8.5 by 11 paper. So you can think about this lots of ways. For instance, if maybe you wanted to print your design on stickers. So you have some sticker paper that you can put through your printer, and maybe it has like two by two inch stickers. So you could create a surface that's two by 2 " and then create the number of repeats you want in it, make it the way look the way you like to. And now you could export, you'd have one that's just the size of the sticker that you need to print. Okay, so that's how you use the surface version. So I'm going to export this one as well. Export, and I'm going to label this one book cover because that's what I want to use this for, and I'm going to save that again to my desktop. Okay. So there are the two examples of exporting a tile and exporting a surface and kind of the reason that you want to choose one or the other for your project. Now I want to tag on just a little like bonus at the end of this lesson. Let me show you how you take that tile and upload it to a place like Spoonflower. So I've got spoonflower open and another tab of my browser. If you're not familiar with spoon flower, they are a printing service, a print on demand service that prints on fabric and wallpaper. So I use their service a lot to create raw materials that I use to make my art. So I'm logged into my Spoonflower account here. I'm going to go up under the little M icon, my dashboard, and I'm going to choose upload a design here from the dropdown menu. And I am going to just upload. So I'm going to choose my file. I'm going to choose that tile that we saved, so the one called Pink flower, and confirm the copyright here and then hit load. Okay, and here is the tile that we just uploaded, that we created in per? You can see it's repeating it over and over, so we can create fabric. And then here you can choose to print this on fabric or wallpaper, just from the tile that you uploaded. So I won't dig into all of the specifics of spoonflower, but I just wanted to show you how it comes from per. You save it to your computer, and then you can upload it to another service to print. Okay, in the next lesson, we're going to talk about your projects for this class. What are you going to create with all of the skills that you've just learned? 9. Your Project: Export a Tile or Make a Book: A Okay, now comes the fun part, the project for this class. So I've got two versions of the project. You can choose whichever one you want to do. So let's start with the kind of simple version of the project is, I want you to create a design and per. So make your collage, upload it to Reper and then export a pattern. You can either export a tile or a surface if you want us to see what it looks like when it's repeated over and over and upload that to the project section for this class. I'd also love to see your source collage, if you want to include that as well. Now, the challenge version of your project is to create something from one of your designs. I think sometimes it's fun when you are working digitally to actually be able to create a physical object at the end, and I love creating simple books. So I'm going to show you a really simple one that you can make and share with us using one of your rep designed patterns. So this piece of paper right here, hopefully, you'll recognize this design. This is the surface that we exported from our last lesson. So this is an eight by ten inch piece, and I just printed it on my regular printer that sits on my desk. So I printed it onto a piece of kind of a middle weight cardstock just that I get from the scrapbooking store. So it's got a little bit of heaviness to it. It'll make a great book cover. Okay? So you want to print out one of your designs on a surface that's eight by ten, so it fits on an 8.5 by 11 paper. You need some kind of paper to make some pages for the inside of your book. So I found this fun kind of graph paper that I'm going to use for my inside pages, and I cut this down already to be seven by ten. And I'll put that in the notes up on the screen. So my book is going to have pages that are seven by ten folded in half, and I'll make my cover match that. Then you need a couple of tools. You need something for poking holes. I have a book binders all. You also could use just a thick sharp needle. You could use a push pin. Both of those will work great. You need something to poke holes with and a mat or something to poke some holes into. This is just a thick felt coaster. I use those all the time as my thing that I can punch holes into. You will need a folding tool. This is called a bone folder. If you don't have a bone folder, you can use a popsicle stick, works great. A nice smooth popsicle stick. We're going to use this to just help us make some creases. You will need a needle. This is just a small tapestry needle that I have. It has a rounded point and a big eye. Anything that you can get your thread through is going to work great. I've got this tapestry needle and then I have just a spool here of size three pearl cotton. This is really thick embroidery thread. Again, you can use anything you've got around. You could use some cotton twine, crochet cotton, fine yarn, embroidery thread, like six stranded embroidery floss. You could even use a skinnier embroidery thread. This one is a narrower one. I could just double this up and use two strands of it to make it a little bit thicker. You just need some of decorative thread to bind your book together with. All right, so I've printed out my design. The first thing I want to do is just cut this down, and I'm going to cut it down because my printer can't print quite all the way to the edges of the paper, so I just want to trim that off. So to trim it, I'm going to use just a utility knife blade and a ruler. You could use a paper cutter if you have one, you could use a pair of scissors. But I'm going to cut my cover down to be the same size as my pages. So I'm going to trim that down and I'm going to use the rulers on my cutting mat, just to get it kind of squared up. And I'm going to make it be seven by ten. Okay. So I've trimmed up one side and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Okay. And then I need it to be 10 ". A Okay. So there is my cover. Cut down so it's the same size as my pages. All right. So first thing, I want to put some ce. I'm going to fold these. So I'm going to fold in half. I want to cover side out. So I'm just going to match this up really carefully. So I've got the edges in the corners matched up. I'm going to take my fingers and kind of sweep back towards me and then push it to one side and the other. And I always do that with my fingers first, and then I grab my bone folder and just kind of go over the crease and help crease it a little bit more. Okay, so there's my cover fold it in half. I'm going to do the same thing with the pages. I have, let's see, one, two, three, four, five pages here. I could fold these each one at a time or fold them all together as a group. I like doing them one at a time. That's just kind of the way I learned. So I'm going to do that quickly, but I'm just going to do it the same way that I did with the cover. Fold and then reinforce the fold. I think this graph paper is fun. I like notebooks with graph paper in them. Okay. Once I got my pages folded, I'm going to stack them all one inside the other, so all of the folds are matched up. And these are blank on one side and graph paper on the other, so I have lots of options in the notebook, and then I'm just going to kind of square those up. Make sure I've got them all. Okay. Now I want to punch some holes so that I can stitch together the binding on these. So I'm going to make myself a little bit of a template so that I can punch the holes the same way in the cover as I do with the pages. And I'm just going to take a piece of scrap paper to do that with. So here's a little scrap of my cover paper. I'm going to just cut it so that it's the same size as my pages. And this doesn't have to be super exact. Okay. So I've got kind of a template here. And I like to fold it in half so that I can fit the fold of this template down in the fold of my pages and my cover. So I'm just going to fold it in half. So Okay. And now I can mark where I'm going to stitch this. So I'm going to do what we call a pamphlet stitch. This is the very first book I learned how to do with a stitched binding, and I love that it's kind of really simple. So what I need is three holes that I'm going to punch. I'm going to grab a marker just so that you can see it on camera really well. I normally would do this with pencil. And what I want to do is I want to mark three different spots. I want to mark the center so I can punch a hole in the center to find the center, I'm just going to fold this in half and make just a little crease. I think that's way easier than measuring. Okay, so I've made a little crease in the center. So one of my holes is going to go there. And then I want to make the other holes be some distance in from the end. So for this book, I think I'm going to go 1 " in from each end. And I have my ruler here, so that's a quick way that I can measure that. And I'm just going to make a little dot, an inch in from the end there and 1 " in from the end there. Okay. So I got my three marks. Now I'm going to punch holes. I'm going to start with a cover, and I'm just going to fit my little template down inside the cover, and I'm going to match it top and bottom. And now I'm going to punch in those three places. I like to hold it with one hand, and I'm just going to punch in and try to aim right down in the corner. So one move it over, so I'm on top of my felts, two, three, there's my cover holes. And then I'll do the same thing with the pages, to make sure I'm in the center. I've got them all stacked up and lined up. Put my template in the middle. Once again, one, Two and three. If you have more pages, you might have to do your pages in a couple of sections if you decide to put more in there just so that you can punch through all of them. Okay. Now, I can take my pages and put them inside my cover and line up everything. And now we're ready to stitch. I'm going to open up so that I'm looking kind of at the inside of the book. And I want to cut a piece of thread that is about two times the height of my book. Okay? So one, two times. And I'm going to thread my needle. Okay. This one, there's just kind of a pattern that you do the stitching. So I'm going to start by going from the inside of the pages, so I'm right in the center of the book. I'm going to go out through the center hole. And I'm going but I'm going to leave a little tail. So a couple of inches of tail here. We're going to tie this together. And you can just hold it with your thumb, if you want to, to make sure that you don't accidentally pull it all the way through. Okay? So I come out through the center. Now I'm going to go back in. I'm going to come to the right side first through the top, and you might have to wiggle this around. You want to make sure that you get through the cover and through all of the pages if that hole doesn't quite line up. Okay. So I'm coming back in there. And I'm going to pull just so that the thread lays across the spine of the book. So it's not bubbled up. Now on the inside, I'm going to go all the way across to the other hole. That's the bottom. I'll be the bottom of my book. Same thing. I want to wiggle my needle a little bit so I can get through all the pages and to the outside. That made a big stitch on the inside. Then the last one, I want to take my needle and I want to come back in through the center hole. And I'm going to pull my needle just off out of the way. Now you've got the two ends on the inside and you've got two stitches on the outside. All right. Then the last thing, what I like to do is I've got two ends here and the stitch that's going across the middle. I like to actually slide one of these ends underneath that center stitch because I'm going to tie these in a knot. And that way, I'm tying that center thread down inside the knot. Now I'm just going to tie a square knot with these two short ends. I'm going to take right over left end and pull it down and then over right. I got a square knot. Then I can trim these short. And that is a stitched binding on my book. Now, a couple of little finishing things, if you want to. I like to take the bone folder and just run it one more time across the spine. That helps kind of set everything in place. And then one other little thing, you will notice that your pages stick out just a little bit past the edges of the cover because they were all stacked up together. If you want to, you can go back and trim that bit that sticks out. I always leave it because I like the way that looks that it looks like a handmade book. There, you have a little pamphlet stitched notebook. This is the challenge project for this class is for you to print one of your reper designs on a piece of cover paper and make yourself a notebook that you can use to take notes in your next class. So I would love to see a finished physical object or your digital design uploaded to the project section for this class, and I hope you will share with everyone. 10. Inspiration & Wrap Up: To wrap up this class, I want to show you a couple more examples of things I've made using patterns that I created the same way. So these first two are books I made. I printed some of my patterns on a roll of wrapping paper and used that to create sort of the covers and the end papers for some different books. So there's that style. And then this one is called a flag book. And so all of the little flags are different patterns. I created using the same techniques that we just did in class. These two examples are some pieces of wallpaper. So these are a metallic wallpaper that I printed some designs on, and I'm going to use these to make some book covers and cover some boxes. So those are all patterns created using a paper collage and reper And then finally, this is a piece of fabric. This is a lycra fabric, like a swimsuit fabric that I printed. This design is created from this is a photograph of colored pencils, like a stack of colored pencils, and I imported that as my original artwork and then created this kind of honeycomb pattern, and I put some little silhouettes of bees in this design. So I'm going to make something out of this. And then last, here is, this is a stainless steel water bottle. And this was created with a pattern I made with leaves from my garden. I put them right on my scanner. I scanned those leaves and then used repper to create a pattern, which I got printed onto the squatter bottle, which I think is really fun. Makes a cool kind of metallic design. So, hopefully, that inspires you with some ideas of ways that you can use these to create surfaces that you can make other art from. Please remember to share your project. When you finished it in the project section for this class, we would all love to see the creative things that you try with your design. Thank you for joining me. I hope you had fun learning a new tool that you can add to your toolbox for creating your own surface patterns to use in your art.