Surface Pattern Design in Affinity Designer: Full-Drop Repeat

1. About The Course: If you're looking for an easy to follow and learn tool to take your surface pattern design to the next level and to master vectors, this course is for you. We'll be learning how to create a seamless repeat pattern, all 100% vector, and hand-drawn. Spoiler alert, no monthly subscription fees. Hi, I'm Veronica and I'll be your instructor. I'm an illustrator and surface designer based in Berlin. My most favorite tool for vector arts that I'll be teaching you today is Affinity Designer. Affinity Designer is a onetime payment software which works really great for me for a vector pattern design. It allows me to draw beautiful vector shapes with a hand-drawn feeling, without me feeling totally intimidated that it's all vector. It also enables me to create this super handy, life pattern preview tool, which allows you to see the results of your pattern adjustments in real time. No more guesswork whenever you're trying to make sure that your repeat patterns are perfectly aligned every time. In this course we will be drawing a full-drop repeat pattern with vegetables to make your portfolio really stand out. I will guide you step-by-step and show you how I'm setting up my document, how I create the life pattern preview from scratch, how I draw my vector shapes using the pencil tool and how I position them on the pattern tile so that the pattern turns into an error-free, seamless repeats. As a bonus task, I will show you how I upload my final pattern into my print-on-demand shop. I hope you'll join me and I'll see you in class. 2. Getting Started: To get started with the course, all that you will need is your Affinity Designer software and your drawing pencil. I'm recording this course in January 2023, and my Affinity Designer version is 2.0.4. I'll be showing my demonstration in affinity version 2 on my iPad. However, you can certainly follow along regardless of your version. The steps that I'm demonstrating in this course can be applied to both version 1 and version 2, as well as to both the iPad and the desktop version. This course is very much well-suited for beginners as well as for more intermediate students. If you're completely new to Affinity, consider taking my beginner's introduction course. If you'd like to proceed with this course and at the same time work with vector assets when building your pattern, then the checkout my vector assets course for Affinity Designer. I also started an Affinity Designer Facebook community for graphic design and surface design. If you're on Facebook and you would like to join us, we will be very happy to have you. It's an extra space to share your art, ask questions, get feedback, and see Affinity-related updates fast. Your task in this course is to create a standard repeat vector pattern in Affinity Designer whichever version. For a strong pattern portfolio, I suggest that you create a pattern with fruit or vegetables, preferably vegetables because most of the pattern portfolios I see are filled with simple florals and I think they sometimes lack some variety. I believe if you showcase a pattern with something unexpected, like vegetables or at least with fruit, your portfolio will stand out much more. A bonus task is to upload this pattern into your POD shop, into your print on demand shop. I will be showing you a short demonstration towards the end of this course on how I upload my designs into my Redbubble shop. But you might have another POD shop such as a Society6 or Spoonflower, or it might inspire you to start the POD shop with me. Please upload a picture of your final pattern into the project gallery on Skillshare. You can also simply screenshot your whole affinity interface, or you can upload just your pattern tile. Alternatively, once your pattern has been uploaded to your POD shop, you can attach a few screenshots of how beautifully I'm sure it looks on product mockups from your shop. If you're active on social media, you can for example share your beautiful pattern on Instagram using the hashtag magical vectors and tagging me in your caption. You can also look under the hashtag to look for some inspiration and to see what other artists created so far. If you're on our Facebook Affinity support group, you can post it there and ask for a critique. Thank you so much for taking my course. Let's start learning. 3. Full-Drop Pattern: FULL-DROP repeat patterns are a common type of repeats in surface design, and this is what you commonly start with. First, let's define what a FULL-DROP repeat pattern is and why you should be including them in your creative portfolio. Another name for a FULL-DROP repeat pattern is a block pattern or a basic repeat or a standard repeat. You might have heard of those two. In a FULL-DROP repeat pattern, you are stacking your pattern tile in a grid format. That means that the elements are repeated in one line, both horizontally and vertically. It's usually square spots, rectangles are common too. They are relatively easy to create and they make a good starting point for designers new to surface pattern design. So I truly believe that they are really great for beginners. On top of that, they're very easy for print on demand or POD shops. This type of repeat can be used to create a variety of products such as fabric, wallpaper, or wrapping paper. Let's have a look at our first example. This is a very simple pattern, very minimalistic. I created this pattern with a standard or a full drop of repeat tile. I actually used only one flower asset. Here on the next slide, you can see the grid that I was talking about that makes the FULL-DROP repeat. My elements are stacked in both directions, up and down, and left to right, horizontally and vertically. Here's another very simple example. It's also a floral pattern. Maybe it's a little bit more complex because there's more than one flower type. But here also on the next slide, you can see that indeed it's a standard or a FULL-DROP repeat pattern again. Let us briefly talk about the pros and cons of creating FULL-DROP repeats. As I've mentioned before, I think it's really great for beginners because it's much easier to avoid any mistakes in your repeat. It's also super fast and efficient for PODs, for print on demand shops, where usually a good strategy is to be able to create a lot of patterns on a regular basis and then upload them to your shops so that you can make a difference and you can rank better in their search results. FULL-DROP repeats are also perfect for creating simple blender patterns. Now, on the cons side, we have the argument that a FULL-DROP repeat may look a little bit repetitive. It can also look a little bit too basic and maybe not even professional enough. The reason for that is that the repeat is often more difficult to hide. However, if you again have a look at the simple pattern, you can see that this might actually be something deliberate. You may want for example, to create something a little bit more calm, simple and minimalistic that will really be a good addition to your new pattern collection. Moreover, you can still create a much more complex and more interesting repeat pattern with a FULL-DROP where the repeat is not that obvious, there are just a few tricks that you have to take into account. Where would I recommend using a FULL-DROP repeat? For starters, I really believed that the FULL-DROP is really great for creating small ditsy floral patterns as well as blenders or secondary patterns. I would probably not recommend it to create your hero pattern in your collection. But maybe some more secondary patterns where you can play around with some simple flower shapes or maybe stars, dots or abstract shapes. I think it's really perfect if you would like your pattern to look geometric or really organized on purpose. Then a Block repeat pattern is really ideal for a checker or a checkerboard pattern type. If you have a look at the pattern that I presented to you on the right side, it's a checker boards type of pattern that constitutes only of squares, and each of those squares has been also filled out with some interesting elements inside like flowers or fruit. I really believed that It's a fun and easy pattern type that you could add to your portfolio in a fast way. There's one more tip that I can give you. If you are concerned about your repeat showing, I do recommend that you stick with a minimal color palette so that you can hide your repeat better. As an exercise, you can try out more monochrome patterns. You can basically pick just one color and you can use variations of this color, you can increase or decrease its brightness or saturation and you can stick just to this one single color. In this way, you will create an illusion that the pattern is still merging together and perhaps the repeat will not be that obvious. Overall, FULL-DROP repeat patterns are an essential tool in any surface pattern designers toolkit due to their versatility and ease of creation. I believe that you should include them in your portfolio. 4. Draw Pattern Elements: I always recommend starting the design of your repeat pattern with sketching out the elements of your pattern, this will make vectorizing faster and easier. You can either do your sketches in a physical sketchbook like so and then you can just snap a photo of the page from your sketchbook and import it to Affinity Designer from your camera roll. Or you can also choose to sketch in another software digitally. I personally love sketching in Procreate because that's where I have all my favorite brushes, which behave just like digital pencils. Then another advantage is that my sketch is already digitized. Once you're done with your sketch, you can import it as a JPEG or a PNG file and you can export it and save it to your iPad camera roll so that you can later on import it into Affinity Designer. If you're sketching in Procreate, you can do that by going to the wrench tool here, then heading to Share, and here we have an option to export your sketch either as a JPEG or a PNG. I will go ahead and I will save my sketch into the camera roll of my iPad by selecting Save Image. For my repeat pattern, I first wanted to draw some fruit, but then I thought that I already have a few patterns with apples and with pears and with bananas, and now it's time for vegetables. You can either draw fruit or vegetables but I think that vegetables are not that common and if you have a vegetable-themed pattern in your portfolio, I think it will stand out more. I really encourage you to go for vegetables. I chose carrots. Your task is to roughly sketch either fruit or veggies that will build your repeat pattern. Sketch between 3-5 variations of the same fruit or vegetable. Make sure that they are different in scale. Some of them can be small, some of them can be a little bit bigger, some of them will be more narrow, and others will be a little bit wider. Make sure that they have different shapes. Here comes a hot tip. I do recommend that you include sketching your fruit or veggies first of all as a whole shape and then draw its intersection as if it was cuts through with a knife. I think that including this view of your vegetable or your fruit will really make your pattern stand out. Here, for example in this sketch, I drew 1, 2, 3, 4 different carrots. Some of them are a little bit longer, and I drew also one that looks a bit like a turnip [LAUGHTER] it's a little bit thicker, but they all have a different shape, even though maybe those two are a little bit similar the shape is different. They will also have a different set of leaves. Some of the leaves will be a little bit more pointy. Some of them will be a little bit shorter. I definitely took care of including some variation in my sketches. Also I had a look at my reference photos and I made sure that I also include the intersection of the carrot as if you cut a carrot in half and you saw what's in the middle of the carrot. The advice that I can give you here definitely is to simplify your shapes. You don't have to, you even shouldn't, sketch anything realistically for your pattern. Because the simpler the better actually simplicity is the best thing. Whenever you feel like over complicating things, drop it, keep it simple. What do I mean by simplifying my shapes? Do not focus on the details. Just sketch the rough outlines of your vegetable and try to think in terms of triangles or squares or circles and ovals, and that's it. Once my sketch was complete, I have also prepared a mini mood board, I can just keep it in my camera roll and treat it as my source of inspiration. 5. Affinity Pattern Preview: I would like to show you how to create a pattern preview in Affinity Designer on my iPad. You can definitely replicate this whole process on the desktop version, the steps are the same. The process that I'm showing you is applicable both to the newest Version 2 of Affinity Designer, as well as to the older Version 1. Having a templates document with your pattern preview will save you a lot of time along the way. Because next time you'd like to create a new pattern, you will simply create a copy of your template, so you won't have to repeat the steps that I'll be showing you in my demonstration. Let's do it, as you can see in my interface, I already have some templates waiting for me, but we will create a new one from scratch, so that you can repeat those steps with me on your own device. I have one template for a standard or a full drop repeat pattern, and one template for a half drop repeat pattern. In this tutorial, we will create a standard repeat pattern preview. First, we need to create a new document. You have the option to create a new document in Affinity Version 2 on the menu on the left side. We go ahead and we select "New Document", I always work in pixels and I recommend that you do the same. I tried working a few times in inches, but my pattern didn't repeat well, perhaps it was a glitch or a bug that has been fixed in Affinity Designer Version 2, and the thing is I would rather stay on the safe side and work in pixels. I always work on a 4,000 pixels square artboard. I already created such a preset. If you haven't created such pixels presets yet, you just open any document and then you adjust what you have here. You have to choose your document units and whatever you have. If you had selected for something in centimeters or inches, you got to change it to pixels. Then you change it to 4,000 and 4,000 pixels, 300 DPI. I always work with multiple art-boards, make sure that you also have it ticked that you create an artboard with your new document and then the color format is RGB. That was the general section, and under Margins and Bleed, we don't have anything selected here. We can go ahead and we can create our new 4,000 pixels square document by hitting "Okay". This is our first artboard, which by default is named Artboard 1. We can change its name by going to the Layers panel, this is the one and only artboard that we have at the moment. Then we go to the three dots menu, we click on the name Artboard 1, and now option pops out where we can change the name of this artboard. I would like to change it to my pattern, but you can change it in any way you want. You can just write pattern or main pattern tile, now it's renamed, and it also changed here to my pattern. Next, we need to add the background of our pattern with the rectangle tool. This is where we have the rectangle tool. We select the first option rectangle, and then we just draw one rectangle. We go to the color studio and we change its color to something bright so that we can see better. Next, we make sure that snapping is on which in Affinity Version 2 is in the upper right corner. Now we have snapping on. Then to the move tool, we have to make sure that this background really snaps into our 4,000 pixels square artboard. You will recognize it that it snaps by seeing those guiding lines. When you're done from one corner to the opposite corner, you will also see here that the width is 4,000 pixels and the height is also 4,000 pixels. But if you'd like to double-check that, you can also go to the Transform Studio, which you can find here. Here under Dimensions you can double-check and reconfirm that indeed our background tile has 4,000 by 4,000 pixels square. Now we have created also a new layer, which is called rectangle, which will be the background of our pattern. Now comes the most important part of the process, we will be creating a symbol. What is a symbol? A symbol as an intelligent object that can be placed repeatedly in your document. Any changes that we make to that symbol, will be reflected across all the copies of that symbol. To set up our symbol, we have to double-check that we really have this background layer selected. Next, we head to the Symbols panel. We go to the hamburger menu, three horizontal lines, and we choose "Add Symbol from Selection". Now this backgrounds tile has been added as a symbol. To make sure that our symbol gets updated, we will need to have synchronization turned on. This is where we make sure that this is checked. Then this way we make sure that the synchronization will be on. Now the most important step is actually complete. Now we have to create an artboard for our pattern preview. We can close the Symbol Studio, and we will create a preview next to our main pattern tile. We go to the menu here in the upper-left corner, the hamburger menu, and here we have an option to create a new artboard. We click on it and we start drawing our preview. I drew it roughly half as big as our main pattern tile, but I will go now to the Transform Studio to make sure that it really has the right dimensions. I want it to be a double, which means if I'm using 4,000 pixels Canvas for my pattern, the preview has to be 8,000 pixels square. Under Dimensions, I changed it to 8,000 in the width and 8,000 in the height. I can also go to my Layers, I would like this artboard to be underneath my main pattern. I would like to also rename it, I click on this default name Artboard 1, and I rename it to Pattern PREVIEW. Now this is where we have our symbol. We see that it's synchronized because it has this glowing orange line beside it on the left side, you see that? This means that the symbol is working. Now this entire symbol folder, we will make a copy of it and then we will shift it onto our Pattern PREVIEW. To make a clean copy, let's go to the menu, three dots. The first option is duplicate, so create a copy. Now we created a copy, we head to the Move tool, and then we shift it to this adjacent artboard. You see it got shifted from this folder here to the Pattern PREVIEW artboard. I just wanted to remind you that I still have snapping on, so when I was moving it, you see I saw those guiding lines, and it helped me to make sure that it's really fitting into this Canvas. Now we have to create 1, 2, 3 more copies so that we complete our pattern preview. We have this symbol selected. We go again to the menu and choose "Duplicate". Then from the Move tool, we move it to the right side, and we see that those guiding lines helped us for those tiles to snap together perfectly. Then we create another copy, we locate it in the lower right corner, and one last copy which we position in the lower-left corner. You see the guiding lines, we see them thanks to the snapping option. I can deselect by tapping somewhere outside of the artboards. Now everything is placed perfectly. How to test it out, let's go to my Asset Studio. We will select one asset and we will position it on our pattern tile to see if our Pattern PREVIEW is working. I go to my Asset Studio where I have a whole bunch of assets, start. I'm going to select this friendly leopard by holding and just dropping it on my canvas to double-check if my pattern preview is working. Right now this asset is outside of our symbol. You will recognize it because it doesn't have this orange line beside it. What we got to do is we have to take this layer, and we have to drop it into our symbol. This is how we know that everything is working. Whatever changes I will be doing now, it will be reflected because each of those squares that make this bigger square is a copy of this original. If I re-size it or move it, it will all be reflected and you will see it in the Pattern PREVIEW. Let's remove it because after all, we want to save it as our templates. Let's clean it up, what we have left is My PATTERN tile, this one, and my Pattern PREVIEW tile. Then we go back to our live dogs view, to our homepage, and we have to make sure that it's saved. You can save your documents either on your device, directly on the iPad, which I'm going to do, or you can save it to a Cloud service such as Dropbox. To save this preview right now you can see it's labeled as Untitled, I can go to the hamburger menu, and I can select "Save As." If this has previously been saved then I would just choose Save every now and then. But since we haven't saved this template before, we select "Save As." Here, we have a chance to rename it, maybe to something like full-drop pattern template, and then we hit "Save". I will save this template on my iPad because I have enough storage and I'm not using Dropbox right now. I have a dedicated folder Affinity Designer over here. We can also create a new folder, rename it to, for instance, Pattern tiles, and then we can select "Move" to save our document. Now this document this template we renamed it to full drop pattern template. Next time you would like to create a new pattern, all you got to do is on your iPad swipe to the left. The very first icon will be a Copy icon or a Duplicate icon. If I click on it, I will create a copy, and in this way my template will become intact. This is basically how I'm working. I create one template, I do not touch it ever again, and then I just create copies of it. Setting up such a template will really save you a lot of time along the way. Now we have completed all the steps to create and to backup our standard pattern preview. Thank you for watching. 6. Limited Color Palette: It is always more efficient to use a limited color palette for your pattern. Your task is to select maximum six colors for your pattern. My recommendation is to include white or some off-white as your highlights, and also to avoid pure blacks unless it's really part of your personal style. Instead of black, you can choose a dark indigo color or a really dark purple. You can also use the color palette that I am using, which I will make available for download. Alternatively, you can head to my Pinterest, where I have a dedicated board for all my color palettes. You can screenshot any of those color palettes and save it to your camera roll of your iPad, and then you can add it on a separate artboard as your reference. Now let's go to our pattern preview document and let's set up a dedicated artboard for our color palette and our moodboard. We will be working on a copy that we just created. Let's open it up. I will create an additional artboard in this left lower corner here for my color palette and for my moodboard. Hamburger menu, Artboards, and then your artboard is ready. I go to the Layers panel, I reposition it so that it's at the end, and I will rename it to say moodboard. Now I can go to the menu and I can choose Place, and I can place my color palette on my moodboard from my photos. I will also add in the moodboard that I created in Procreate. I would like to modify the shape of this artboard so that it fits my images in a better way. I can do that again from the Layers panel, making sure that I have the top layer of the artboard selected. Making sure I'm on the move tool, I can again change its shape. That looks good to me. Now we're all set to start building our assets. 7. Building Vector Assets: Now we can draw our assets out of which we will build our repeat pattern. Let's start by importing our sketch again from the camera roll. You can either use your procreate sketch, saved as a JPEG or you can simply take a photo from your sketchbook with your iPad and then you can place it also here in the Affinity from your camera roll. From the menu I head the option to place my image and I go to my photos to find my sketch. Then I position the sketch on my main pattern tile. Switching to the move tool, I would like to reposition it and resize it, so that it fits my canvas. Now I have placed this JPEG sketch into my pattern tile. Having it selected, I can also reduce its opacity a little bit. Three dots menu and right underneath the name of this file I have the opacity slider. Let's reduce the opacity just a little bit. Step 1 is to draw our building blocks for the pattern before we build our pattern. We will be focusing on drawing shapes that have a different form and that have a different scale. Like I've mentioned, when I was creating my sketch, I would like to have some items that are a little bit smaller and maybe also a little bit bigger, so that they're not the same. We will be drawing those building blocks with the Pencil tool and at first in our layers panel, they will be grouped by color. The reason why I absolutely love drawing my vector patterns with the Pencil tool is that, it's actually part of my personal style. I'm aiming at a hand-drawn organic shape and I cannot achieve this style when I'm using the Pen tool, that's why the Pencil tool is my most favorite tool for drawing. We will be drawing those carrots and those leaves by only using fill and with no stroke. I have an entire course about creating hand drawn assets in Affinity Designer with a huge focus on getting to know the Pencil tool. In this particular basic pattern course, we won't be going into too much detail about the Pencil tool. I would like to refer you back to that other course of mine about creating vector assets, if you would like to master the Pencil tool. The focus of this course is building a simple vector pattern. This is where you can locate the Pencil tool, so let's select it. The important thing before we choose our colors is to deselect everything else and you can deselect either by tapping outside of your art board or by selecting this x symbol here. Now everything is deselected and we can focus on this contextual bar over here. The first icon is referring to our stroke, which is the outline of our shapes and we will be drawing in this course without any outline, so we have to select the option to switch off our stroke. You will recognize it by this icon white with a blue line across it. Now our stroke is off. Next, we have to make sure over here that we use our fill. When you switch it off, you don't see any color icon and when you switch it on, all of a sudden you see the color icon. This is where you can select your color. Another way is to go to the color studio and to change your color here. Right now I have selected the icon for fill, our stroke is empty. We are on our fill and I'm using this eyedropper tool to select this orange color. I tap and hold and I drag it onto the color that I want to select. You can see here that the color has been selected, but we still have to apply it to our fill, so we tap and now the color has changed. The last important thing is this option here, to have the auto-close on. Auto-close will make sure that our vector shapes are closed. Let's test it out to just a random shape, but this shows you precisely how we set everything up. There is no stroke, so the stroke is empty. The fill is this orange color and you will also recognize that this shape is closed, because the auto-close function was on. I once got a question in my forum, some student of mine asked me, how do we really make sure that the shape is closed? You will recognize it by seeing this blue line that continues throughout the shape. Let me give you an example what it could look like if auto-close function is off. Let's switch it off. Now it's off. Let's create another shape. You see now this is broken, because the shape here continues. There is this really small tiny blue line and then it gets broken, the line as discontinued. The only way to fix that would be to go to the Node Tool and then to manually close it. See it now, this blue line continues. We want to make our life easier, that's why on the Pencil tool we want for our fill shapes to have the auto-close on. Let's select those two random shapes and let's remove them. Now to fun part, let's draw our carrots. You can follow your sketch very roughly if you want to. Your sketch is only a starting point. Now I would like to draw the other carrots with a different color. Again to change the color, I have to make sure I deselect. I can for example tap outside of the canvas or just choose the x symbol. Then I prefer to go to the Color Studio and from there to use the eyedropper to select the new color. Making sure again that I'm on the Pencil tool, we can now draw the other two carrots. I would like to group those shapes in colors, so those two darker orange colors I would like to put them in one group. The group symbol is over here in the middle and then you have to select the group. Then by swiping to the right, I'm selecting the other two carrots and I group them in a separate group. Now let's draw our carrots cut in half. This intersection pieces, I will just keep them in the darker orange color. I will move my sketch on top, because I lost some of the details that I wanted to draw. Then deselecting everything, I would like to change my color to the other lighter orange and I will draw now the middle details of those shapes. I'm going to switch off the sketch for a second and I will add a few more details in the middle with a white color. Just pure white and then one more detail here in the middle and here. I think it's nice to use your white or off-white color every now and then to add some highlights. Now I will group all of those elements into one group, so that I can see everything better. I can bring back the sketch below because now I can see anyway better. Let's start with this blue color. By the way to group everything much faster, I'm using a gesture where I'm selecting the top layer. To select all of them at the same time, I'm tapping with two fingers on the last one and then this way everything gets selected very fast. Deselect, change the color again to this purple one. Back to the Pencil tool and we can draw a few more leaves. All those purple leaves, I'm grouping them again. Another way to select everything is just to swipe to the right, but if you want to save time, you can again use the two fingers tap gesture. I would also like to change the color of my background, because it distracts me a little bit. In the end, this is the color of the background that I want. I go to the Color Studio and I select this color. With any background it's super important to change not only the fill, but also the stroke which is the outline of this background. If you do not change it or it has a different color, when you export your pattern tile you will have a mistake and there will be those faint lines on the edges of your pattern. Making sure that this is the same color, now everything looks better. I would also like to add a few leaves in white and a few more details in white. Deselecting everything, I switch off stroke and I choose pure white. Again I'm grouping them by color. I would also like to add some white dots on my carrots. I already have white selected, only fill no stroke and I can start drawing some random dots on my carrots. When I'm done with one carrot, I will group it because later on it will be much more helpful for me to regroup everything that belongs to this one particular carrot. Now this one, make sure to also zoom out to see if you're happy with all the details. Select everything and group it because this belongs to this one carrot. Now this one and again grouping all the elements that belong to this one carrot. One last one and grouping them again. Your task is to draw at least 3-5 different fruit or vegetable shapes in at least 2 different colors. Moreover, please draw the intersection of your fruit or your vegetable. Now we can move on to double checking and fixing the notes of our vector shapes. 8. Cleaning Up Nodes: I truly believe that it's a very good habit to go through your vector shapes one more time and to double-check if the nodes need fixing. I talk more about the anatomy of vector shapes in my introduction to Affinity Designer course, I have also made this particular lesson available on my YouTube channel for free if you would like to refresh this knowledge. As a reminder, nodes are points located on our line or curve that allow us to modify its shape. They also consist of two control handles. Let's have a look at it. We can modify the nodes of our vector shapes using the Node tool. Focusing for example, on those two carrots, I can select the shapes and from the Move tool, I can move to the Node tool. Those little points that you see along the line or the curve, all are exactly called nodes. Let's click on one of those nodes. You will see that this is the center of the node and those are the handles that I was talking about. Let's maybe change this shape like so, so that you can see those two handles. They will help you to modify your shape. We can also have a look at the context toolbar. Here we can also change the type of your node. You have an option to change between sharp, smooth, and smart. The smart one, it's a best fitting curve that will be created for you without the need for those control handles. But I actually refrain from the smart one, I either switch to sharp or to smooth. You can change the curve of your vector shape by dragging those control handles. If you want to, you can also delete some nodes, for example, if I wanted to delete this one, starting my selection from the outside of this shape, I select it. You can recognize that it's selected because instead of having this white fill, it has a blue fill. Then here, you can delete this node. Now it's deleted. You can also bring it back or you can create extra nodes by simply tapping onto the line and then an extra node was created for you. It's very easy. At this point, I will go through my layers panel one-by-one for each of those shapes, and I will go and see if anything needs fixing. For example, on this purple leaf over here I can already tell that I don't like this little detail. I can also tap to head to this leaf, so the group where this leaf is located will get open for me automatically. I can maybe remove it. Then maybe I can add an extra node and play a little bit with the shape of this leaf. Maybe I would like to remove this one and then fix my shape. You can either go one-by-one for all those layers, one layer at a time and one group at a time, or you can just deselect everything and you can zoom in and if you see something that is calling for your attention, for example here, you can double tap it and it will open itself for you automatically. Now I will go through the entire art board, and I will fix my shapes, maybe I'll make them a little bit bigger. Here, we can see a circle, and by that you can recognize that the node is a smooth type. If you would like to make it more pointy over here in the context toolbar, you can change the type to sharp. You click on the node and then you can change it to sharp. Then the icon from a circle changes to a square and you can see that it became a sharp instead of smooth. Now I will have a closer look and speed up this video and I will meet you when I'm done with cleaning up my nodes. The most common things that I do is actually deleting unnecessary nodes. For this process. I am also switching off snapping. Let's do some cleaning. [MUSIC] Now I have cleaned up my vector shapes and I'm ready to populate my Canvas with more filler elements. 9. BONUS: Pencil Tool 2.6 fixes: H Hello, everybody. Welcome to this update video for iPad users. Zarif rolled out their newest software updates across Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and affinity publisher. I'm under the impression that there's a whole bunch of videos about the desktop version, but only very few videos for the iPad users. And if you've been following with me, then, you know that I'm an illustrator. I predominantly illustrate now for children's publishing and for my illustration work, I always use affinity designer on the iPad, and I always use the Pencil tool. So I will be skipping the rest of the updates. This video will focus only on the pencil tool because this is the most important tool for my work, and the changes that were part of the most recent update, the 2.6 0.0 update will really make your work easier, and I would like to highlight what exactly changed in this video. So heading back to the Pencil tool, I'm also going to use this older sketch of mine, where I created this illustration just to demonstrate how the Pencil tool changed and what you need to take into account. There's also some icons that you will see here in the contextual menu that have changed, so do not be confused. Everything is actually quite easy. In essence, there's no more forced smoothing. There's also better control over the stroke. So there's basically better control over what you're drawing. And there are some new auto close options that can really improve your efficiency. All right, so the very first thing that changed, luckily, is that there is no more forced smoothing. Previously, the pencil tool would always apply some level of smoothing. So we really didn't have full control. And when I was illustrating projects for clients, I felt very frustrated after the previous update because what I was drawing was unnatural. And what I wanted was a feeling that is more organic and less vector like because all my artwork, even if I use some texture, this is all vector brushes or vector shapes, and vectors tend to look a little bit more rigid. So the previous update really destroyed my workflow and caused me some frustration. And I'm very, very happy that Serv got rid of this obligatory smoothing. So right now, you can draw lines that are more kind of rugged. Do I have an example, for example, if I wanted to draw the man of the pegasus in a more rough way? Previously, this whole line would be more smooth. What does it mean? I would get more rounded. And the shape that I drew would not be reflected in the line that the software would draw. And on affinity forums, I found that a lot of artists, for example, who were drawing maps, illustrated maps. They were in particular, very frustrated because when they were drawing the outlines of the countries for the maps, then they needed all those tiny little details, they didn't want smoothing. And in my work, it was exactly the same. Sometimes I really wanted this more hand drawn feeling and the smoothing would destroy everything. Right now, this is fixed, and the only way to get smoothing would be if you opt in, for example, for some form of stabilization. Right now, if I click in here, you see, nothing has changed here. There's a rope stabilizer or a window stabilizer. Which you can also set the force of the stabilizer here on the left side. So if I wanted my line to be, you see, more smooth, then you can use stabilization, and you can be more intentional, about choosing whether you want this smoothing or not. So with this regard, you have full control over here. Now, another thing that changed in the contextual menu are the icons. I didn't take any screenshot or I would have to find some old screenshots from my old work to show you what exactly changed. But those two icons are different. You can also click on the question mark to see what is over there. The one on the left is about using line, using an outline. And the circle that is more full is about using fill. So if you want a line, right now, it's selected, you will just, let's get rid of this stabilization. You will just get an outline. So for example, I could use this Let's increase the width of the stroke. I could use this when I'm drawing or creating a project for a coloring book if I only want outlines. But for me, more often than that, I draw without any outlines. So we can also start by going to the color studio and then just choosing color from your swatches. U and then you will have no outline. And if you want a line, you can select this use line symbol so that you can also draw with an outline. Right now, both of them are selected. You will recognize that something is selected by saying that this gray background of the icon changed to black, that means that it's selected. If I don't want an outline, I just deselect seline. And then another important thing that changed is the auto close. There's a whole menu of options here. The first one obviously means that there is no Autoclose then there's close near, close far, and close always, which can really make your work very efficient sometimes. So auto close basically connects the start and end points of stroke automatically. And before this auto close changed behavior and you really needed to come very near. So this will be the second option close near to close a shape. And oftentimes I failed to close a shape, and it was again another thing that frustrated me. Right now, you can, for example, choose close near. And you will have to again come quite close. You see there's a small red selection that tells you, Okay, this auto close will be recognized and the shape will be closed. So now it's closed. But I don't think I'll be using this option. I think I'll go straight to Either close far that you have more wiggle room. You don't have to go super duper close for the shape to close. Was a small mistake there. Let's do it again. You don't have to go super super close and the shape will be still closed. Or clothes always is very cool. For example, if I wanted to draw the wing of the pegasus, I would just go like this. And here, I just let it go at it closes automatically. This is exactly what we had before the previous update. So if I was drawing this cloud, I would start somewhere outside of my canvas. Sorry, that doesn't look pretty. But I would just draw what is essential without wasting my time to go all the way up here because this doesn't matter. The illustration will be cut here anyway. And now that we finally have this close always, I think I'll get back to it and I'll just get outside of the canvas, draw my cloud, release it, and everything is closed automatically. If I wanted to draw this tail, the same. Sorry, this doesn't look great. Depending how you like to work, you can choose among all those options. You also don't have to close it off. You have to switch it off if you're just drawing with the stroke, so just with the line. Personally, I would recommend that you either choose close far or close always, and I think I'll stick to close always because this will just snap. Look at this. This will just snap so fast and have me save so much time. I just have to make sure that the whole film selection is where I want it to be and everything snapped in a very pretty and fast way. So those new auto close options are much more intuitive. They will give you the ability to create more natural linework despite the fact that you're drawing with vectors. You will have better control over your style after all those pencil tool updates. And the new Auto close will give you basically better shape building capability. And the fact that smoothing is off, this is, I think the best news will mean that your vector illustrations will feel less mechanical and you will be able to embrace some more imperfection in your perfect vector art, so to say. So what do you guys think about those new changes and about the update? Let me know in the comments or in our Facebook groups, what you and if you found this video helpful, please give it a like and make sure to subscribe to stay updated about any affinity news or new affinity tutorials. Thank you for watching. 10. Filler Elements: Before I build my pattern, I am having one more look at my composition and I will include a few more filler elements. The first step is actually to zoom out to see better what we're missing. I think I'm done with drawing those leaves but I would like to make a few more of them. To do that, I'm going to tap on the leaf that I would like to copy, switch to the move tool, and then I will perform the quick duplicate function. You probably remember how to do that; two fingers on our canvas and now we can start making copies. I want to make copies that will be filler elements. Once I create my duplicate, I rotate it a little bit and I make it smaller or bigger. I would also like to copy this one. From the Move tool, I can still modify its shape, maybe make it a little bit thinner, so now it becomes a completely unique filler element. This one also looks nice, but we could make it a little bit bigger and a little bit thinner. Let's make that one but let's make it a little bit more thick and also rotate it, and one more from here. Now, I would also like to create a half-moon shape and I think I will stick to white. I go to the pencil tool, I make sure that white is selected, I deselect everything else, and I start drawing some extra filler elements that look more like a half-moon shape. I select those new elements and I bring them into the white elements folder. Now our building blocks are ready, so now it's the time to regroup them and to organize them properly into layers. 11. Re-Grouping Assets: Our building blocks are complete. We also agreed on the colors. Now it's the time to organize them efficiently so that we can build our vector pattern fast. We need to group the main carrots together along with their leaves. We need to group the carrot slices together. Then to leave the filler leaves outside of those main groups. Let's deactivate our background for a while because it will get easier for us to select everything at the same time. Now, we can start re-grouping. We will be regrouping from the Move tool. The first thing that we got to do is we have to take out some of those elements from their groups. We are keeping the dots together because they were grouped to belong to this one particular carrot. But we will also take out those filler elements out of their groups. The carrot slices, we also take them out, out of their groups. It literally takes just one minute. Our main carrots, they also go out and our blue leaves. At this point, I can also delete entirely my sketch layer because I don't need it anymore. In case I want to refer back to it, it's in my mood board. Now, everything is out of their groups. I can tap on any of them. I will change those white elements just to some random colors so that I can see them better and I will switch them back to white later on. Now we can start grouping. In order to do that from the Move tool, we have to start selecting outside of the shape and then we need to select everything. That means that in that selection, which you can see with this light blue fill, everything has to be contained and if it's properly selected, then everything will have this blue outline over here. You can also recognize it that everything has been selected that when you switch off the visibility then everything that belongs to this one piece will disappear as well. If everything is selected, it's enough for me to switch the visibility of only one layer and then everything will be included. You see, everything is gone, which means that the selection is correct. Now we can group it. I choose the group icon, group, and I will make it invisible for now. Now, let's group this one. I start my selection outside of the shape, and then I make sure that everything is contained in this blue fill group. Everything is grouped correctly and I can switch it off. Now this one group and I switch it off so that I do not include it. Now this carrot slice is next group. See all of those layers are in this group and we switch it off. Now we can try to deal with this carrot over here. I'll do my best to select everything that belongs to this carrot. I think I was successful. Let's switch it off. Everything has been selected. Now we can group it and make it invisible. Once we make it invisible, it gets easier [LAUGHTER] to select everything else. Now let's deal with this one. Group, this carrot is done as well, and now maybe this one. Now it was difficult for me to select everything that really belongs to this carrot. I think I also selected this leaf over here. To deselect it, I will hold one finger, press and hold onto the screen, and I will tap it so that it's removed from the selection. Let me zoom in so that you can see it better. I can tap on it again so that it's again included in my selection or I can tap it again so that it gets kicked out of the selection. Let's zoom out. Double check. We can group this carrot as well, make it invisible. I can also show you another way of selecting everything. It's the same method with the one finger on the screen and then tapping one by one. We have our last carrot. Now, the remaining filler leaves I would like to group them in accordance with their colors so I'm going to keep this first blue leaf and then tap and hold one finger on my screen and start tapping the remaining blue leaves and I will group the rest of the leaves by color. Now we can do the purple one. We start with one leaf and then tap and hold, tap, tap and hide it. Then the rest is quite easy because all of those leaves that are actually supposed to be white, I will bring back their color in a minute. They're stacked over here on top. We can just start with the first one and then double tap to select everything at the same time and group them. Perfect. Let's bring back our background and let's bring back the visibility of all the elements. Perfect. Let's first select by swiping to the right our main carrots and bring them to the top. Oops, they ran away [LAUGHTER]. Then we have our carrots slices. Fantastic. Then we have our different leaves. Now because all those leaves are grouped in accordance with their color, we are able also to change their colors, not by selecting each of those layers individually, but we can change their colors from the entire group level. For example here for those leaves, I change their color from white to something more standing out because it was easier for me to work on my re-grouping. But now I would like to bring back the white color. I go to the color studio. I make sure I'm on the fill. No stroke, just fill and I select white and then from the entire group level, the color has been modified for all the elements that are contained in this group. Great. If you have taken my Creating Vector Assets class, you know that now is a great opportunity to save all those elements as vector assets. Before you do that, in any case, to keep everything tidy, I would recommend that you give them a name. Right now the group is called Group. I'm on this fat little carrot over here [LAUGHTER]. You can rename it by clicking on it and just naming it to carrot. I'll copy this name so that for the remaining carrots, I can use the same name. I will just paste it in one by one. Now this one we can name as Carrot Slice, let's say. [LAUGHTER] Copy so that we can also reuse this name for the remaining carrot slices. Now I have sorted those filler leaves by color so I will simply rename this group as C1, which stands for Color Number 1. C1, because I could name it white. But what if I'm re-purposing this pattern and I want to change the color to something else than white. It would be a bit of a fuss to go and change the group name. That's why I just give it a generic code. This one will be Color 2, which will be C2. But of course you can come up with your own naming strategies, whatever makes your work easier. This lonely leaf remains as green. Let's change it to white. Now our re-grouping is complete. Here are our carrots. Now if we go to the Move tool, we can move them and we can basically work with them because they have been bundled together. Now the real work starts. Here we have also started our filler elements in accordance with their colors. This is for the white leaves, this group is for the purple leaves, and this group is for the blue leaves. Because in particular filler elements can get very abundant. You can all of a sudden, if you want to fill up your pattern, you can get a lot of elements and then you have to manage this chaos and I know that chaos is very imminent when you're working with your fillers. That's why over time from my experience, I have developed a strategy to sort, in particular my filler elements into colors because then it's much easier to manage them and to recolor them. All right, our basic setup is complete, and now we're ready to design our pattern. 12. Positioning Assets PART 1: Step number one is to roughly position the elements of our pattern on our pattern tile. We should take into account the scale of our shapes and we should also take into account their direction. Let's place our objects on our pattern tile. Let's rotate a few and let's make any other color adjustments that we would like to carry out. At this point, we can also create a few more copies of those elements that we just created and place them strategically in our composition. To do that, I would recommend that we select all those groups with those secondary elements; the carrot slices and our filler leaves, and if you have all of them selected it's enough to switch off the transparency or the visibility of only one group and the rest of them will become invisible too. I think it's best that we start with our hero elements which are the carrots and we will position them onto our pattern tile, and deliberately we will do that before seeing anything in the preview. Let's have a look at them. It's enough that you just tap on one and group for that given a carrot will be selected, so it's very easy. Here you have a handle where you can rotate your shape. What I'm going to do now, they're all quite straight right now. I want to rotate a few and position them onto my canvas in a few corners. Let's say I would like to put this one a little bit upside down and position it also outside of my canvas. Remember about scale, maybe I would also like to make it a little bit smaller so that they're not the same size and then the fat one [LAUGHTER] I think I will also rotate it and position it here. I'm trying to move from the upper left corner to the lower right corner. I tend to have it zoomed out quite a lot so that I can see better. This one, I could also position it. You see a little bit outside of my pattern tile and maybe also rotate it a little bit and this is also the place where you can make a copy of them. To make a copy of the entire group, two fingers on the screen, tap and hold and when you move it you have created a copy. Perfect. I will rotate it the other way round. You also have an opportunity here to go and to flip it to the other side. There's another Transform panel here in the upper corner menu. Having the set of carrots selected, you can for example here flip it horizontally. It's flipped the other way round and it will trick the eye a little bit, it will look as if it's like a completely different carrot. I'll make it a little bit smaller or maybe a little bit wider like so and I will also position this one outside of the canvas. I would also like to copy this one. Maybe I'll make this one a little bit smaller and this one too and now copy. You can also make a copy by keeping your selection and then go into the three dots menu and hitting "Duplicate", but I find gestures much faster. I just created a copy. I go to the Transform menu and I again flip it horizontally so that it looks a little bit different. Maybe I will position this one here. Zoom out and see if you like the proportions of your carrots. That looks good. That means that now one by one, we can bring back all the other elements and also position them on my art board. Let's bring back for example this carrot slice, maybe put it also outside of the canvas. Later on when we're building together the repeat pattern we will mirror it to the other side, but for now let's just place everything onto our art board. You can also make your objects smaller and you can rotate them. This one may be here and bring back the last one and perhaps I'm going to position that here. All of them are activated, but I would like to have more of them. I'm going to use the gesture with two fingers on the screen hold to create a few copies. For example, I would like to copy this one, so two fingers and then as I move I create a copy. I change the scale and I rotate it, maybe this one too. Let's make a copy. Rotate it. You can also flip it, change the scale, make it smaller, position that here. That starts to look good. Let's make a copy of this one. Make it a little bit bigger, rotate it, and position it here. Again, because we created a few more duplicate our list in the layers panel is becoming a little bit longer. Now that I'm happy with the main carrots I want to select all of them, and again I want to group them. Things will get easier. I believe that groups are your best friends, especially when you're building patterns later on that they're so complex that you're having so many groups and I think it's a really good habit to group everything as you go. I'm happy with my carrot slices. I'm also putting them into one group. Now what shall we do? White? Let's bring the white leaves for starters. 13. Positioning Assets PART 2: One by one, I'm going to position them nicely on my art board. Sometimes I will again change the scale, maybe rotate them a little bit. I also make sure that they are spread across my art board in an even way. I would also like to create another copy of this one and make it a little bit smaller. See, for example those two leaves, they go in a similar direction. This one, this one, and this one. For a little bit more variety, I would like to rotate one of them, so that they do not go in the same direction, if this makes sense. Those two, this white one and this white one, they also seem to be heading in one direction, so I will take maybe this one because this one also follows the direction of the carrot in the same way. I think I will modify it, so that they don't go in the same direction. Then zoom in, zoom out and see if you're happy [LAUGHTER] with your composition. I think the white colors also spread very nicely. I have some white in every corner of my pattern. Now, I can move to the purple leaves, and I only have three of those in here, so I can already anticipate that I will be creating some copies. Now, maybe it will be nice to create a cluster of leaves, so I'm making a copy. I'm going to make this one a little bit bigger, and I will put them together so that they look a little bit like a fan. You see that? It's like a fan. This one is done. This one is done. Now, this one went missing. Maybe here. Now, let's also create a few copies. Change the scale. Pretty much the same drill. Let's make a copy of that one, and always try to rotate it and try to change the shape. I'm missing some of this purple in this part of my pattern. Again, let's create a copy, maybe let's make it longer. Of course, if you're missing something and you're not happy with your copies, you can always stay within the same group. You can always go back to your pencil tool, the settings that we had previously have been preserved, and you can just draw a new one. Here, white has been selected, but we know we don't want white, we want this purple, so I'm just going to change it manually. You can again freestyle so you don't have to just work with duplicates of what you had. You can create again something completely different. We are moving in the area of our filler elements. For my illustration, I chose those leaves to be filler elements, but at this point, you can create any shapes that will be good filler elements for you, for example, dots or maybe some random shapes like arches. This would be interesting. I think I might actually add some of those dots. I'm staying in the C2 folder, which stands for color Number 2 because if I want all those filler elements to change color, all of them at the same time, then I will want to do it from the group level that's why I stay here. I draw some of those little dots as my filler elements. I can always go back to this color, but for now, let's not forget we still have the blue leaves, so I would like to position those leaves first and then I can go back and maybe draw a few more dots. Switching back to the move tool, and now let's reposition those leaves. I will also put this one outside of the Canvas. I think that will look interesting. Again, making a few copies and changing the scale. Now, I will draw a few more dots and I want to draw them in blue that's why I stay somewhere within the blue folder. If this remembers our previous color, then I just manually change it. Oops back to the pencil tool, and I keep on drawing. I zoom out frequently to check if all the colors are well balanced. I've noticed that first of all those dots, we need to bring them to the color Number 3 folder. They run away. I've also noticed that my background has moved as I was working. Let's deselect everything. Switch on snapping. Let's make sure that our background is repositioned. On one hand, I want to keep the background because I think the background with regard to choosing the rest of the colors, is the most important element. That's why I want to keep it. But sometimes when you are drawing and moving things, you might shift the background by accident, so I'm just urging you to stay mindful of that and every now and then to recheck your background if it's really in place. Let's deselect, and go back to our blue group and the pencil tool and draw a few more dots. I would also like to include some white dots, so I'm switching to the white color folder. Now, the last step is very important. We need to place all those elements onto our symbol because right now if you have a look at those groups, they don't have this orange glowing line beside it, and we need to place it in the symbol basically. You will learn that this is where it's really handy to have everything grouped because you get a better overview. Here I have my carrots groups, carrot slices, and all the fillers. I can select all of those groups at the same time, and then I can drag and drop it [NOISE] onto my symbol. Now, what I have just created is reflected on this pattern preview. The last step in the process will be to fix any repeat mistakes to make sure that we're happy with the composition, and to make this pattern truly a repeat pattern by mirroring some of its elements from the edges to the other side. 14. Building a Seamless Pattern Repeat: Let's improve the quality of our pattern by transferring some elements half outside of our pattern tile. If we leave this step out, we might create some obvious empty lines towards the edges of our pattern. So for our pattern to be truly seamless, we need to move some shapes outside of the art board and then we need to mirror them to the other side. We need to, for example, fill in those gaps over here, and the elements that we have already see here shifted outside of the canvas. Over here we need to make sure that they will be mirrored also to the other side so that this pattern looks seamless. Right now on the iPad, the only way to do that is to use the maths of the Transform Studio. As usual, it will be easier if we switch off the visibility of some of the groups. As always, we will start with the hero element of our pattern, namely our carrots. By just looking at our carrots, we can identify that we have 1, 2, 3 carrots that need to be mirrored to the opposite side so that the pattern is really seamless. I have also prepared a little cheat sheet for you. Remember we talked about the anchor point when we were building our pattern preview. We will want to shift some elements from the left side to the right side on the x-axis, and we will want to shift some elements from up to down on the y-axis. We have to remember that the dimensions of our canvas is 4,000 pixels square. Regardless of the direction, if it's left or right or right, left, up and down, down and up, we will have to always move by 4,000 pixels. For instance, if we have an element here that sticks out of our canvas here on the left side, we will have to mirror it to the right side. In order to do that, we will have to create a copy and then add to the x axis plus 4,000 pixels. If we need to bring it from right to left, we will have to minus 4,000 pixels on the x axis. If we want to bring it from above, from up, down on the y-axis, we will have to add to the y-axis 4,000 pixels, and then the opposite, if we want to bring it up on the y-axis, we have to minus 4,000 pixels. This is just a cheat sheet. Remember that our anchor point, our zero point, is in the upper left corner, and it will be super easy when we see it in practice. Let's go back to Affinity Designer. Just remember for now that you are working with 4,000 pixels if you chose the same dimensions for your canvas. This carrot over here, we first need to create a copy of it. Making sure that this carrot is selected, we go to the three dots menu and we hit Duplicate. Now we have a copy. Then having this copy selected, we go to the Transform Studio. This is where we have the x-axis option and the y-axis option. We just basically have to do the maths. We would like to move this carrot up, down, which means we will be working on our y-axis. Since we're going down, we have to add plus 4,000 pixels. Let's see this in practice. This is our y-axis. We click on it and we have to select plus 4,000 pixels. Hit Okay. Now we selected a copy. Right away in order not to do any mistakes or to prevent any mistakes, we should select both of them. They will be next to each other, this one and this one. Once you select it, you see this blue selection line around it, and right away I group it so that I do not mess it up [LAUGHTER] along the way. We're on the move tool now. Now we can see that we can move it. Let's have a look at our pattern preview. Now this shape has been connected. Let's switch off snapping because snapping makes the movement a little bit strange. [LAUGHTER] Snapping is off. Now we can double-check if this is the position that we want for our carrot. For example this looks good, but now I can see that I would like this carrot over here to rotate it a little bit, maybe this way so that they do not go in the same direction. Tap outside of the art board to de-select, and now let's have a look what else. The fat little carrot over here, it's been cut here on the right side, so we have to copy it and duplicate one, we have to mirror [NOISE] to the left side. First let's create a copy. This is selected, duplicate. Now we have a copy. Now remember we have to shift it from right to left, which means we are working on the x-axis and another from 4,000 to go back to the zero point, we have to minus 4,000. Let's see this in practice. Going to the Transform Studio x minus 4,000. [NOISE] Right away so that we do not even move it by one pixel because that will cause a mistake in our repeat pattern, right away, you've got to group it so that you prevent any mistakes. Zoom out. Now you can move it and see if you like its position. Now we have this one left, but before that, I think this one is a little bit too close with the leaves to the other carrot, so I would like to first move it here. Now I like it better in my composition. Then I create a copy. I have really zoomed out this time so that I can see everything properly. Now we're moving from the bottom up, which is again the y axis. In order to go back to the zero point, we have to minus 4,000 pixels. Y axis, minus 4,000 pixels, and then right away, select everything and group it. Now we bring back our carrot slices and because we moved some elements, we have to reposition them. This one goes a little bit to the sides, and this one I think I'll change the scale down. Of course, we can also switch off our carrots. This is again, the advantage of grouping everything. Now I can see I need to transform this element and this element. Let's start with this one, three dots menu. Make a copy. We are moving on the x axis to go to the zero point x axis. If this happens that the numbers disappear, go back to the Move tool and you will bring them back. X minus 4,000 and right away identify the twin, [LAUGHTER] [LAUGHTER] so to say, and group it. This one will be dealt with next, duplicate. Now from the zero point, we have to move it by 4,000 on the x-axis. We have to select plus 4,000. But I think it ran away. Wait. Where is it? Back to the Move tool? Then again, plus 4,000. We have to perform those actions from the Move tool. Before we forget, select both of them and group it. Bring back the carrots, de-select everything, zoom out, [NOISE] [LAUGHTER] starts to look great. Bringing back our white leaves. I open the group. I select anything in this group so that it's easier for me to select any other elements that might be in this group, and I'm just repositioning some of them. For example, this dot over here got a little bit lost. Zooming out. I'm happy with it. Color Number 1 done. Now Color Number 2 open it, click on any other layer in. Now we can see this one, it's shifting. Maybe we also re-scale it, make it smaller. This one and that one. Now this leaf over here, we need to transfer a copy of this leaf to the upper side of our pattern. We create a copy. We're moving from the bottom up, which is the y-axis. To go back to the zero point, we have to on the y-axis, minus 4,000 and we can group it. Maybe I can also move those dots a little bit as well because they're too close to my carrot slice. I would also like to make those a little bit bigger, and this one too. Color Number 2 is done. Let's also zoom out to have a look at our pattern preview. Let's bring back our last color. This looks a little bit more overwhelming, so we're switching to the main tile. Over here we have to reposition some of the elements. I would like to create a copy of this leaf, and I would like to transfer it to the other side, so let's make a copy. On the x axis we need to add plus 4,000. Then select the twin and group them together. Now I'm also feeling that this area is a little bit empty, so I would like to position another carrot slice in here. Perhaps this one, two fingers on the screen, and I create a copy, I rotate it and maybe change the scale a little bit. Let's also copy this one. Make it smaller and rotate it. Everything has been grouped in this carrot slices group, so even if I create a copy, those copies will be created in this group so that things are again, more easier to manage. Now is the time to zoom out and to have a look at your pattern preview. I can already tell that I'm missing some elements in those gaps over here. What I'm going to do now is I will populate those areas. If need be, I will mirror them properly so that the repeat pattern is repeated in a correct way. I'll see you in a minute. [MUSIC] Now our full drop repeat pattern is pretty much complete. Let's discuss now what change options you still have once your pattern is built. 15. Making Adjustments : When it comes to making changes to a repeat pattern that is already built, there are a few minor limitations. With regards to the elements that are in the middle of the pattern that are not touching the edges, you can of course make any changes. For example this carrot over here, you can make it smaller. You can rotate it as you like and the rest of the pattern will basically follow and all those changes will be more non-invasive so to say. Now it's a little bit different with the elements that are outside of the pattern, which have their copy mirrored to the other side. Let me show you that may be on this carrot slice over here. Have a look at our preview. This is the carrot slice that we will want to change. The only thing that you can do and this is where you have a pretty big limitation, is that you can move it around, but you cannot rotate it because you see what happens, it gets distorted and you cannot scale it up or down because again it will get distorted. If you wanted also to re-size it, there will be a mistake in your pattern. The only option that you have if for example you wanted to change the size of this carrot slice, you would have to go. That's why it was handy that we again create a dedicated group. You will have to go to one of the twins and you would have to remove them, then you would have only this one element over here. You could perform your changes for example you could make it smaller or super tiny. Then you would have to again do the steps so create a duplicate and mirror it to the other side in our case the x-axis plus 4,000 pixels. Then the convenient thing is it's already in the group and the only thing that you have left is to move it around but again, if you want to change the scale or if you want to rotate it you have to delete one twin and then you have to make your changes. Then again you have to make a copy and then you have to transfer it to the opposite side of the pattern. Those are the limitations. Let's also discuss how we can recolor your pattern. 16. Re-Coloring Options: Let's have a look at how you can recolor your pattern. The easiest change that you can make to your pattern is to simply change the background color. You just have to be mindful of changing both stroke and fill for the background. Let's go to our background layer, this is our rectangle, that's our background. You remember that our background is the only element in this case that has both fill and stroke. If you change this color, you have to make sure that the color is changed for both the fill and the stroke. For instance, I might use those hue saturation luminance sliders, HSL sliders, to maybe make this background a little bit darker, a little bit more saturated, and to change it to something a little bit more green. Now you will see that this color was changed for the fill, but not for the stroke. In order to fix that, we go to the eyedropper tool and we select this new color. We switch to the stroke, and then we apply the same color. Option number one super easy is simply to change the background, and we have a completely new pattern. Next, you can also change the colors of your individual elements. You have either grouped them or you need to go to the respective layer, and you can change the color from there. In our particular example, we're lucky because we have some of the filler leaves grouped by color. We have remember color Number 1, color Number 2, and color Number 3. I think for example, this blue looks good, but this purple gets a little bit lost. Good news we can perform our color changes on the entire group level, by going to the color studio, making sure that the fill is selected. We choose this original color, and we apply it across the whole group. Now we can choose a completely new color, for example, we can make something a little bit brighter, and maybe also change the color completely, maybe to something more yellow. That was the advantage of having those fillers in a separate group. Because now for all those elements, we can perform the color change on the entire group level. For those more complex items, it's a bit of a trade-off because, well, it's much more efficient to still have this one carrot in one group. But say if you wanted to change some of those leaves, then yes, you would have to go to this dedicated group, and you would have to do it layer by layer. For instance, if you wanted to change the body of this carrot, maybe make it a little bit darker, because those carrots have their own dedicated groups. You would have to do with one by one for each of them. On top of that, some of those carrots have been mirrored and remember they have those twins over here, this is this one carrot, but it was transferred from one side of the pattern to the other. If you would like to change the color for this one carrot, which has this twin carrot. You have to open both of the groups and you have to make sure that you select both of them to change their color. Those were the easiest options to recolor you're a beautiful pattern. Next, we will want to test our pattern tile. 17. Re-Coloring: Same Fill: In this lesson, I wanted to show you a very fast way to recolor your patterns. This is another method that I absolutely love using. You have to make sure that you are on the Move tool. Then in the contextual menu, you see the Select Same option. When you click on it, you have a few more variations to choose from. The ones that I am using the most are fill color and stroke color. It's a very fast way to recolor everything by selecting either your fill, which is the inside, or the stroke, which is the outside of your shape. All you got to do is, you got to go to the Layers panel, open your groups, and select one of the objects that you have already drawn. For example, I am selecting this blue leaf over here. It's enough that you select just this one element, and then you got to to select Same Fill Color and this blue color will be selected everywhere across your entire document. When I make it invisible, you will see that indeed everything has been selected properly with this very handy tool. Now, you're ready to make your color changes from the color studio in the upper right corner. You can, for example, go to your Swatches and you can choose a new color from your pre saved swatches. I have a few color palettes here. I can, for example, have a look at my signature color palette, the electric metal, and find the color that I like for this pattern variation. Then you can deselect by hitting the "X" symbol in the lower left corner, and you're good to go. You have a slightly different color variation of your vegetable pattern. Let's see again how this works. Let's select one of the orange carrots. It's enough just to select this one object and then you go to Same Fill Color and all the orange options here have been selected as you can see. Now you can conduct all the color changes again from the color studio. You can also go back and use the sliders. For example, I like to use the hue saturation luminance slider, so you can play around with how bright your color is. You can reduce or increase your saturation, or you can change the hue entirely because it can really produce very unexpected results. I love playing with those HSL sliders. Now, I selected this slightly greenish yellow. I like it a lot. I think it looks very interesting. I'm going to go ahead and open a group with this other carrot. I would like to change this orange as well. Same Fill Color. Everything has been selected as you can see. Again, from the HSL sliders, I can choose something else. In this way, you can make super-fast color changes, and it's very good to know about this tool. Now it's your turn. I would like to ask you to recolor your pattern. You can copy your current pattern document. In this Copy document you can experiment with another color variation or a color version. Next, you want to go to the Layers panel and you want to choose a few objects that you would like to change colors for. Then from the Move tool you use the option Select Same and, for example, colorful or color stroke, and then you simply change your color from the color studio. I recommend that you practice changing the colors from the Swatches panel, but also from the section with the sliders, for example, the hue saturation and luminance sliders. That's it. That's how easy it is to change colors with the same function. 18. Testing & Exporting Your Pattern: I highly recommend that you test your pattern tiles somewhere outside of Affinity. This preview tile in Affinity Designer, it can still contain some lines, especially when you zoom in, zoom out, you might not be sure if this is really correct. In my experience, it's really better to leave the software that you were working in and with a fresh eye to test it out in another environment. I will be using Procreate. In this lesson I will also show you the options to export your pattern tile, so we will be testing and exporting. We go to the hamburger menu, and over here we have an option to select Export. As you're exporting your pattern tile, you can choose among different file types. For our testing purposes, we will go either with a JPEG or a PNG. If you'd like to give this pattern tile to a client, they will most certainly ask you either for a PDF, maybe a PSD format, EPS, or an SVG, those are the most popular ones for vector art. As you export your pattern tile, you have to make sure that you are exporting the pattern tile because we have been working on multiple art boards. In this expert window here, you have an option to specify the area that you would like to export. This is where again, it's very handy that we have renamed our art boards so that everything is neat and tidy and now it's much easier to work. As you remember, I have renamed the art board with my main pattern tile to my pattern. I do not recommend exporting the pattern preview because it's only for visually checking if we're happy with the composition and the balance of the pattern. But from my experience, this pattern preview nearly all the time creates some mistakes and errors, so I highly recommend that you always export especially for clients only the main pattern tile. We would like to test our pattern. We select the area of this one art board. We stay with the JPEG, and here this is also cool thing. We can stick with the 4,000 pixels, but, for example to reduce the file size in Procreate, we can also remove 4,000 pixels and then we can change it to say 2,000, and it will be scaled down for us. Because those are vectors, the quality will not be compromised. Next, we need to export it to Procreate. The best option to do that is to go to the share section, to click on it, and over here it already recognizes that I've been using Procreate. We select it from here, and our pattern tile will travel all the way to Procreate and then we can open it from there. Now we hit on "Cancel." Now let's head to Procreate. See the briefly imported. We can find it in our gallery. This is our tile, and now we can test it. I go to the layers, I make sure that the background is switched off, and then from the move tool, I head to snapping, I make sure the distance is max, velocity is max, magnetics is on and snapping is on. Now I resize my first tile and when it snaps in the middle, I let it go. I swipe to the left, I create a copy, and I move it down till it snaps together, and then deselect, zoom in. This already looks very good. Since this is a full drop pattern and not a half-drop, it's enough for me to pinch those two layers together to merge them, and then to make a copy of this layer here, and then to do those two layers at the same time. Perfect, everything seems to be working really great, it worked out. Of course, we can test it one more time. I can make a copy, I can also save one of those tiles here, make it invisible and work on this copy. Snapping into the middle, copy, bring it down or to the right side, pinch it together, make a copy and then move it to the other side. Yeah, it's working, there are no lines , everything looks great. Our pattern is working, we have tested it as well. Our work is done, as a bonus lesson, I would like to show you how I upload my pattern into my Red Bubble Shop, which is a print on demand shop. 19. Uploading to Redbubble: Uploading your patterns into a POD shops such as Redbubble or Society6 is fast and easy. One big advantage of uploading your designs into PODs is that you can test them out and you can see how they might look on real products. I already had some of my designs printed out on fabrics as well as on mugs and on notebooks, and pillowcases. If you're lucky to get some traffic into your print-on-demand shop, you can also gain access to the information which patterns are more popular than the others. Let's upload together our pattern tile to Redbubble. In order to do that, I have a big recommendation. I create a big pattern tile for my POD shops. The reason is that such a huge pattern tile fits all the products and from my experience, it involves minimum editing on my part. What I do is usually in the same file, let me show you another file that I have, I create a twin POD tile. It's essentially an additional art board. This is my main pattern tile, this is my preview, which might contain some mistakes, and then this is my POD tile which is basically, let's have a look, is a JPEG of this main pattern tile which contains no mistakes. We will do exactly that. We will go back to our document. There you go. From our main menu, we will create a new artboard over here. Doesn't matter which size it has now, because now we can go to the transform studio. As you already know, we can change its dimensions here. I want the width to be 11,000. It's a pretty big file, I admit, but this will fit pretty much all the products that you have in your print-on-demand shops and it will save you time. Eleven thousand height. We need to export this main pattern tile, let's say as a JPEG. We already exported it to Procreate, but we haven't saved it into our iPad. First, from the area, we select our pattern and then we click on "Share" and "Save Image". This will save this main pattern tile into your camera roll. This is saved and now we can go to this main art board, which we can also rename to POD. Now we can go to the main menu and we can select "Place Image" and we can place it from our photos because we have just exported it. There it is. Now we can place it onto our canvas and we really have to make sure that snapping is on. We activate snapping over here. Now from the Move tool, we can position our pattern. With the gesture, with the two fingers on the screen, we can make copies of it, so copy number 1. The guiding lines will show us if it really snaps into place. Copy number 2. See, the guiding lines show us it's snapped properly. Now with one finger on the screen, we can select all the three. Two fingers on the screen, make a copy, shift it to the right, snap, and one more time, shift it to the right. Deselect very carefully. You don't want to move it because it might create some mistakes. It might move one pixel here, one pixel there, so you want to be very careful with this process. That looks good. Now we can again export it. Go to Export. It can be either a JPEG or a PNG. We choose our POD tile. That's why I have renamed my art board so that I can keep track what is what. POD, select it. It is generating our export and it might take a little bit longer because it's a bigger file. We can see here it has nearly 14 megabytes. Share and then we save it to our device and we click on "Cancel". Now you can see that this pattern has been saved to our device over here. This is our 11,000 by 11,000 pixels. Switch off our carrots. I actually have two POD shops, I'm also on Society6, but I do believe that uploading your work is a little bit easier over Redbubble. I think it's faster. For the purpose of this demonstration, I'm going to assume that you already have a Redbubble shop or a Society6 shop. I will not be teaching you here how to start your own shop, but if you go online and you want to start a POD shop, you will see that the process is very intuitive and you will do it in no time. On Redbubble, I will be uploading my pattern from my iPad. I have to go to the menu here on the left side, click on my shop and here you can see an option, Add New Work. This is where Redbubble actually makes your work easier. You can already copy some existing setup. You can copy all the settings that you had from a previous pattern and you just swap the files to the new pattern. But for the purpose, again, of our demonstration, I will do everything from scratch and I will select "Upload New Work". Here we have an option to select our pattern from the photo library or maybe you have saved it somewhere in your files. I have mine in my photo library. Let's find it. By the way, sometimes there is a glitch and your pattern is not uploading from your camera roll, then you have to save it somewhere into your files on your iPad and then import it from there. Now we need a title, for example, and be mindful of keywords. Maybe not happy carrots, like carrots vegetable pattern. Include important keywords in your title. Then I usually after a hyphen add the main colors that you can find in this pattern. There's definitely orange, indigo blue, and lavender purple. I include both lavender and purple because they count as two keywords for me. Then as a tag, I always include my own name. Then such keywords as vegetables, I will also include fruits, food, maybe kitchen. Again, my colors, orange, blue, indigo, aquamarine, lavender, and purple. The description, I will add it later. I usually have a copy-paste where I just mentioned that if someone wants a different color, they can contact me via my email address. Now basically it's about editing your products. I always disable clothes because first of all, I don't like it that it's polyester. I don't think this material is sustainable and I don't think that those repeat patterns look good in this constellation. I leave it on phone cases. For pillows, I think if you edit on it, you can also scale it to make it a little bit bigger and you can see in real-time what it looks like. You can also disable it if you want to. It looks really cool on a shower curtain. I also disabled prints, cards, and posters. Any pet items, I also disable them. I definitely leave them on the mugs because they look very cool on mugs. That can stay. Definitely, notebooks and journals. This clock could actually be great for the kitchen, but I will make my pattern, and sometimes you have this live preview, I'll make it a little bit bigger. I think that looks better. No prints. The bottle can stay. Again, disabling the prints, enabling masks. I think this looks weird too, so I'm going to disable that and I'm going to definitely leave the apron because it would look cool for the kitchen. Maybe disable the jigsaw puzzles, disable all the clothes. Socks can stay. I think they look cool. I think the backpack also looks cool. See even the duffle bag which demands a higher file, it got covered by our 11,000 pixels tile. Then I choose Digital Art and maybe also Drawing. If I have a collection saved, I could have also selected a collection. Mature content, no. Anybody can view my work. Of course, this is my intellectual property, so I have the rights to sell products blah blah. [LAUGHTER] Then save work. It will take a little while to process our pattern. But soon, I think within the next 1-3 minutes, this pattern will be available in our POD shops and we will be able to admire it, at least on product mockups. They say here that this might take up to 15 minutes to appear. Clicking on my logo over here, my profile picture, I can also go to Manage Portfolio. This will show all the other patterns that I have. This I have uploaded recently and now you can see that this pattern is here and it will have all the statistics such as comments, sales or likes. You can also view it directly from your shop tab. If you click on Explore Designs, this pattern very shortly should show up with the rest of the designs. Here we have our carrots pattern. You can click on it and see the products. A big congratulations, you've created a 100% vector pattern and perhaps you also uploaded it into your POD shop with me. Great work. [MUSIC] 20. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for taking my Affinity Designer course. I hope that it's really accelerated your design skills. I can't wait to see your gorgeous pattern and I'm very curious about what you will decide to draw. Don't forget to hashtag magical vectors. I also invite you to leave a review for this class and comment how you liked it and what you learned. It's very helpful for both me as a teacher as well as for other students who are considering taking this course. Check out my other Affinity Designer courses and consider signing up to my monthly newsletter to stay in the loop for new tutorials and artists resources. Perhaps I will see you on Instagram or YouTube or on our Facebook affinity support group until next time. Take care and happy creating.