Transcripts
1. Welcome: Have you ever wanted to design your own fabric but you
didn't know where to start. So many teaching options, so many expensive programs, and so many devices that
you think you might need. Well, I'm here to tell you that you don't need
all those things. Hi, my name is Rachael King for ten years of inner Graphic
Designer and fight, a licensed Surface
Pattern Designer. Here in Queensland, Australia. I've had my prints
put on home wears, on fashion and stationery. And I absolutely loved
being a teacher and mentor and an author
in this space. I've got all of my experience to the table to create
this skill share class, where I can take you through a very simple
watercolour exercise. Show you how to catch out
the motifs that you produce. Load them up onto the
program Canva Pro, and then export
them to a print on demand website such
as Spoonflower. Creating your own fabric
needed a huge headache. You can actually make beautiful unique
designs that you can call your own using my method. What you will need for
this class is a brush, some watercolors, some paper. Your smartphone, access to a laptop computer with
the canva app on their, we actually use the Pro version that you can do this class. If you've only got basic. If you only use basic, then you will have to be
able to edit your photos outside of Canva and then
bring them back into Canva. In Canva Pro, there is a really, really cool tool which is
called the Background Remover. And it's really important
for this class. Once we've done that, I'll show you how to export your file and load it
up to Spoonflower. I talk about dimension and
scale so that you know that you're actually sending out a quality exploitable file. When you do this, you'll actually get what
you think you're gonna get when it arrives in the post. The class project for this
class is simply you following the instructions so that at the end you have your
own repeat pattern. And once you've done that,
I'd love you to share it with us in the class
project section. It's gonna be a really
exciting opportunity for you to have
something that you create come to real life
on a product or on fabric. So look forward to
sharing this with you. So come along,
let's get started.
2. Painting: Welcome to the
watercolour exercise. Here I have some
basic watercolors that I got from a
local Art Supply Shop. Pretty basic range
that's in a tube, but you could also
have something that comes in a palette like this. But what we're going to
do is squeezed some of this paint into a pellet
and use this water. I have a Chiquita
kitchen towel and some 83300 GSM watercolor paper. But whatever watercolour
paper you can get your hands on will
be perfectly fine. I put all of the paints into the pellet so
I'm ready to go. I'm just going to move
these up to the side. Water and my piece
of kitchen towel. Start off with my first flower. It's gonna be nice purple one. So five big circles
with little hole in the middle and you have
yourself a lovely flower. Now we're gonna do a nice
smooth one next to it and just leaving enough
space around the white. Because when we take our photos, we need a bit of
space around each of the motifs to make it a nice simple image to take into Canva. Now, as you can see, this is a pretty simple shape. And I'm doing this
ever so quickly. I got to do a nice blue one now. Make them a little bit
shaped if you want. Three. Now we're gonna
go on to orange. Super, super simple, super, super simple flare-up
floral shapes. And we got some
orange this time. Loving. These
colors are so cute. You've got the past or next
to the bright niche Calloway. We're gonna do a
lovely light blue one. It's super quick. You ever
shaped flower you like, but this is my super, super, super simple flower,
which I like to do. And then we're going to do
some motifs in similar leaves. So we're gonna go straight up. And then when you use this
beautiful meaty purpose or Spearman color, I'm going to just make some pretty leaves and put a little one in
there like that. Then we're going to use
that same color to do some basic leaves fanning out that the round
brush like that. Around. Now we're going to use this lovely dark green. And I'm just going to
make these leaves and probably pick leaf on there. And some green leaves. You have it. You had to motifs. You can let them dry now. And then once they're dry, we're going to capture them
3. Capture: It looks like my green flower here in the bottom-right corner. It's dry. So because I'm using my
smart phone to record this, I'm just going to show you
what I'm going to do with my digital camera to record each of these different motifs. So I'm just going to
hover over the space. And once I feel
comfortable with that, then I have an image of my
motif is you can see there
4. Import to Canva: Welcome to the next step. So here's Canva. You're version may look
slightly different than mine. I have what's called
the desktop version, so that's what it looks
like on my PC monitor. But if you're using a search engine like
Google to find canva.com, then it will just
look a little bit different when it comes
up on your screen. Firstly, we're going to start
cleaning up our motifs. So we're going to
create a design down to the bottom left and
go to custom design and put 200 by 200 pixels into the
Custom Size create design. Canva is now going to give us a nice clean white
canvas to work on. We want to start uploading those images that
we've just taken. So we press the upwards
on the far left menu, go to upload files, and then go and find the files that you just downloaded
from your smart phone. I've got them in a folder called Canva motifs
on my desktop. So it's nice and
easy for me to find. I'm going Shift-click
all of these items, all the motifs, and
then press open canvas. Now going to upload each one of these files to the
upload file section
5. Cleaning up motifs: Will you do is click on one and drag it and click on it
and it'll drag it out. This is the green
stem that we did. And I want to clean it all
the white background up now and make it look a little bit prettier than what
it is at the moment? So the first step is
to go up to here, edit photo, click, Edit photo. And this new menu comes up. And this is where you'll find Canva Pro is
different from Canva basic because you will not have this type of functionality. The Background Remover,
we click on it. It is going to start
removing all of the white around our stem and make it
all nice and clean for us. So there it is, sitting in
whitespace, all cleaned up. On that menu. I'm
also going to go to the top-left and go to adjust. And I'm going to give it a
little bit of brightness, a little bit of contrast, a bit of vibrance
and saturation. Just to make that stem
look a little bit nicer. Then I'm going to just take the edges out
so that it's a bit bigger and fill the space a little bit more
freely in the middle. And then I'm going to go to fall on the top-left
on the top menu. And I'm going to download, come down to download. I'm going to click
transparent background with a PNG in the title here. The file type and
press Download. Canva is going to
ask you for a name. I'm going to call it
green stem PNG and Save. This will then be saved in your downloads folder
on your device. Once you have had
that downloaded, you need to upload that new cleaned up image
back into your folder. So go to upload. Upload files, find the one
that's just been downloaded, press open, and Canva will bring it back into
your uploads library. So you'll see the first
one that I've got my mouse on here, pointer here. And then this is the
cleaned up version. And that's what we wanna do
for each of these motifs. And by doing that, we then
have these beautiful, cleaned up, color adjusted, editable motives
that we can drag out time and time again
without having to go through this
cleanup process. Now that I've actually got
it sitting in my library, I can delete this. And I'm going to go
onto the next one, which is this flower. I click on it. I
go to edit photo, BG Remover, Canvas,
thinking about it, or moving all the
background area. And it's made a nice
tidy flower for me. I'm really happy with
the color as well. I don't think there's much I can do to that or just give it a little squeak
with my vibrance, saturation, brightness
and contrast. But I'm really happy. Again. I'm just gonna
make it a little bit bigger so that it
sits in that space. And now I'm going
to download it. Top-left file. Come down to download PNG, which supports transparency.
Click the box. Download. Canva is now downloading it to your
downloads folder. I'm going to call
that purple flower. I need to bring that
cleaned up version back into my uploads folder. I click on uploads on their
left menu upload files. And there it is, sitting there. Click Open. Canva is now bringing the
cleaned up version of the purple flower back
into my uploads library. Now, I'm going to continue
to do this for each of the motifs and fasten up the video so that you
can do this yourself. Now I'm just going to slow the video down for
a minute here, because in the edit
photos section, you can actually adjust what's happened by coming
back in here into the BG, remove it because
I've found there's a little bit of white
here that it missed. So if you click on
these little guys here in the middle
of the BG Remover. It takes you to a new page. And this is where you can
take away and add back into the area that
Canva has removed. So I'm just going to go into here and go the brush
size a little bit smaller And see where it's
got this area here. Bring the even smaller. I'm taking that white out. There we go. I'll go back into the Background Remover
and now it's been removed. So now that that's been
done and I've adjusted it, just give it a bit of
vibrance and saturation. It's ready for me
to download again. Again. This is a good example of how Background Remover
is taken most of it, but it's left some of the image here on, I don't want that. So I'm going to come into the
Background Remover, adjust. And I'm going to
just use the brush to get rid of all this
business down the bottom. And you'll also see that the Background Remover didn't get the white
in the ear and middle. So I'm just going to make
that a little bit bigger. I'm happy with that now. So I'll come back out. And now I'm going to adjust it. Make the color a little
bit better by contrast. And vibrance and saturation. Time to download. Now we have all of them
might take sitting in our library all cleaned
up from ready to go. You will have seen
a couple of times that they PNG
failed to download, so you just have to
give it another go. I've also managed to
mockups some of the sizing, but that can be remedied
in the next section. But now we have these
beautiful motifs cleaned up, adjusted, ready to go for us
to create a repeat pattern. Ready for the next stage?
6. Start repeat: Welcome to the next step. We are now going to
create a repeat pattern. In order to do that,
we're going to create a brand new document. So go to your homepage on Canva. Go to the top-right and
create a new design. If you go down to
the bottom left and put in the custom size bar, 2000 pixels by 2000 pixels, and then press the
purple button. You will now have a
brand new workspace, a brand new canvas. Given that we worked so hard
in the last exercise to clean up down motifs and upload them back
into our library. We go to the far left,
into the uploads. We will also will see them all waiting for us to use them. So I'm going to
double-click on each one, will just click on
each one and bring them out onto the canvas. And then they all are. We are now going
to start arranging the motifs around the board. And to do that, we
just pulled them out. And to scale them, we can just pick up the corner and
just ease them in and out. And that will keep them
uniform when we're doing that, especially with the
little leaf motifs, they usually come in
a bit smaller than our flowers and even the stems. So we're just going
to move them around. And also we have the option
to rotate them by using this little spinning motifs
in the bottom there. We can move that around. We can scale. We can also flip, forgot to the top menu. We can flip horizontally
and vertically. I'm going to just bring
these flowers out. I'm just going to
scale a few of them. Just a little bit. The next thing we're going
to do is start duplicating them around the board so that we can start
filling this space is up. To do that. Once we're
on our actual motif, we go to this little menu at the top and press
the duplicate. And another flower
will come out, scale it, spin it. And then you have a
different looking flower. So then you can bring that
into different position. Duplicate. Scale.
Alright, tight. You can start doing that
for all your motifs. I'm just going to speed up
the video here a little bit.
7. Arrange repeat: Welcome to the next stage. This is when we start to make our repeat towel look
a little bit more natural without these big gaping white areas
around the border. I'm going to start type
picking up a couple of motifs and I'm going to
actually duplicate them. And I'm going to take them
off the edge of the top of the pasteboard and
then I'm going to replicate it and bring
it into the bottom. And then I'm going to
take them off the edge and then I'm going to bring
them into from the right. And I'll show you why that this will make the repeat
look a little bit more natural and
break up this white area. So first of all,
I'm gonna go with the apricot big flower. And I'm just going
to move it off here. And then where it is
sitting right now, it's going to come
in from the bottom. The top half of the flower is
going to be coming in here. I click on that space and I go, I'm still in the Layers
panel which is here. See the menu at the
top, it says position. This gives you all of
the different layers. We're going to go to arrange, which is the second option
in the Layers panel. And it's come down to the
bottom which says advanced. This is showing us where that particular motif is
sitting within the canvas area. It gives us a pixel in
the width and the height. And it also gives us
an X and a Y position. So we're actually
wanting to move this duplicate and move
this flower to the bottom. So that will become Y axis. Question. Where it's
sitting at the moment, I'm going to duplicate it. Now what happens when
you duplicate is, as I said before, Canva wants to just move it slightly off center so that
you can't, so you can see it. But we need to match
that up again. So we have the two items sitting directly on
top of each other. They're in exactly
the same position. And I'm going to move this
top one to the bottom. And because our actual
canvas is 2000 pixels, wherever this first flower is, I want to add 2000 pixels to it. At the moment. In the y-axis, it's sitting at
negative 424.6 pixels. If I use my calculator and
put negative 426 point, sorry, for 24.6 pixels, -2,000 pixels into
the calculator. I then have to move that
particular item, 21,575.4. Click Enter. And what's happened
now is that has moved it exactly 2000 pixels below that position.
Which is wonderful. So I've done that,
I've made that today and I'm now going to do something with maybe
this orange flower. I'm going to move it
off to the side here. If I do, it's going to
come in to the right, come into the left here. So I'm going to grab this guy. It's sitting here on the x-axis. If I duplicate it, and make sure that they're
both sitting exactly on top of each other.
Just watch that. I'm going to now
put this x-axis in. I'm going to put 15,050.8
plus 2000 pixels. Actually, I'm gonna go 1,505.8 -2,000 pixels because
we're going to the left. And that comes in at negative
494 point to press Enter. And that brings it in. So you'll see now that if I was going from
the right to the left, we're going back 2000 pixels. If we're starting at the top and we're
going to the bottom, we're going positive
2000 pixels. If I had a flower here and I wanted to move
it off the canvas, then I'll be going negative up the canvas and vice versa
from left to right. So these are now in
the right positions. Now I have to move all
the other elements to actually make
it sit properly. But it also thinking, I might make one of the, these actual motifs come
in and out as well. So I'm going to bring
this guy as well. So I'm going to make sure
he's sitting in a good spot, so see him here. I'm gonna be bringing
him back on the y-axis. And this time this guy
is sitting at 1,368.9. So I put that into
the calculator. Calculator 12,368.9. I want to Chile take off 2000 pixels
this time because we are going up that canvas and not
down the canvas. So -2,000. And that comes in
at negative 631.1. Click click, click into
oh, and guess what? I didn't do. I didn't
duplicate it first. So that's a really
good lesson there. So duplicate it first. Then putting your new y-axis,
negative 631.1, Enter. And you'll see that
that little bit of stem is floating off the bottom where it would
meet onto this guy here. So now that we've got some
guys coming off the edge, I'm going to now move my other motifs around that
there's balance around them because I've created a few holes since I've moved a
few things around. So I'm just going
to fasten the video up for a moment while I do that. I'm pretty happy with that now. So we've got a really
beautiful mix. We've got a few motifs
coming off the edges. And I'm hoping that this repeat pattern will
now flow beautifully. So we need to get, we're
going to start to test it. And that's the next stage.
8. Test repeat: Welcome to the next step. This is when we test
our repeat pattern. A very important stage because
I'm really excited to see how it all turned out when repeating out over
a piece of fabric. But in order to do that, we've gotta do a couple
of things first, now, everything is
sitting in position. I now want to go up to the
position tab at the top. And I wanted to put
a background color in behind all these
lovely flowers. Yes, she can keep it
wide if you like. But I always find sometimes
just adding a bit of Touch of Color can just
make all the difference. So I'm just going to click
on this bottom panel here, which is the background. You'll see background
come up the word and go up to the top here where
it says Background Color, and click on that
beautiful rainbow tab. And it comes down with a
number of options for us. Canva is very intuitive in it. It's picked up on some of
these flowers and given us some lovely variations
of colors that can come from those
hues and shades. But we want something really liked to sit behind all of these because something
dark will actually dominate the repeat patterns. So I'm going to
choose my own color. I'm gonna go for a
really nice pale pink. So I've just gone into
the reds and I'm just sliding around here in
that gray pink area. And you can see that this pretty pink shell colors come in at really
brings out the color. So I'm really happy with that. So go back out to position
and you'll now see that that background
color is now pink. And I'm really happy with how
this is all, all looking. So I'm just going
to give that final, final little tweak
and let's test it. To do that, we are
going to come to the position disposition tab to see where all
of our layers are. And then we're going to
go out to the elements, which is a new part of the
menu we haven't explored yet. But we're going to
click on elements. And it comes up
with a search bar. And these are all of the, all of the bits and
pieces that you can use when you're creating
your documents in Canva. And if your Canva
Pro subscriber, then you get more
options available will get free images and
free templates. So it's really worthwhile. So what I'm going to go into this search elements
and I'm going to type in the word grid
and I go press Enter. Now the first thing
that comes up is great. And if I just go to the see all, it'll come up with all the
different variations on grids. So I'm going to click, scrolling down and eventually
I'm going to hit one that has a
foursome just there. Now, I clicked on it and it's brought it out onto my canvas. It doesn't look very good at
the moment and I'll tell you why because it's brought
it in as a background, so I just have to pick that
up and move it to the top, just make sure that that purple lines come in and then it'll sit above
everything else. We don't want to have
any spacing in the grid. So we got to the
top-left menu here. Click on Spacing and
bring that down to zero. Now what it's done is it's
brought two identical, or 32 identical squares, two identical squares all
butted up next to each other. This is where we're going
to actually put our design. So to start with, I'm going to just make that transparent so I can't see it, but it's sitting there
above everything else. And I'm going to export our
beautiful repeat pattern. So to do that, I'm going to go into File. I'm going to download. This time I'm going to choose
a JPEG because we have a solid surround and it's going to download to my desktop. And it'll come into my
downloads on just gonna call that floral design, click Save. Then I'm going to
upload it again, exactly the same
premises when we were uploading out
clean up motifs. We're going to download our repeat pattern
and then upload it back in again so that
we can use it to test. So I'm going to
upload floral design. There it is. Then I'm gonna go
back out to position. And I'm going to click on that. And up there transparency which will show those
Foursquare's again. Then I'm going to go to
upload and I'm going to just drag each one of those squares
across and they have it. You've tested your
repeat pattern. It's looking fantastic. I'm really happy with this. The only thing I'll
probably change about it is maybe get rid of this little
guy and maybe or if I did, maybe I could just
change the direction of him because he's a bit close to him and there's still a bit of
space there on the corners. So that's maybe the only thing
that I would change. Yeah. This is a really good
opportunity for you to test and make your changes. So to make your changes. So let's go back out to position
and we're going to just delete that completely,
that layer. We don't want that anymore.
We're gonna go back to our original layers and I'm
going to fix up what I saw, which meant that I needed
to either get rid of this guy or change
his positioning. I'm going to bring him
down a little bit. Actually, what I'm gonna do with this guy is I'm going
to bring them up. Now remember, when you have
anything that's hanging off the edges
normally you wouldn't touch it because
they're very sensitive. You can't go mucking
around with them because everything you do to one side, you
gotta do the other. On this occasion, I'm just
going to see if I can nudge them up using
my up arrow key, because I think that'd
be a better position for that orange in relation
to everything else. So I had clicked
on both of them. I Shift-click to click them and then I moved them up together. And so that makes me happier. The other thing is I put
that there and maybe I can just move this green
foliage that's here. And I'm just going to spin it. And I'm just going to move it up into that position there. And that will make me
happy about where that is. And I'm going to
flip it as well. Just to add a little
bit of drama. Because it might
look a little bit low to like this guy over here. So I'm really happy
with that now. I'm just going to just
make him a little bit smaller, bring him in. And I think we're nearly there. Okey-dokey, money, move
him down a little bit. So it's all about
checking relationships to all the elements to
make sure that the space, they sit well next to
each other and they're not crowding each
other and it flows. And this is something
that happens over time. It gets easier and easier for
you to pick spots that need attention and it will become
obvious to you when you're, when you're checking
your repeat. Okay, So I'm happy
with that now, I'm gonna do the same thing. I'm going to now download. I'm going to go
to File Download. I'm gonna go to JPEG again, and I'm going to
download the file. It's going to come up with a
floral design version two. I'm just going to
go number to save. And that's now going
to be on my computer. And I'm gonna go to upload, upload file and bring in that second iteration
of that repeat pattern. And we're gonna go to
position elements, bringing that force,
awesome foursome position. Bring it up to the top. Bring down the spacing to zero. Go back up to upload and
bringing this new guy. Wow, so much better. Isn't it looking fantastic? I'm really happy with that. Okay, so now that I have
my repeat pattern tile, I'm really excited because it's now ready to
go to Spoonflower. All I need to do is have
that exported file, the last exported file ready for me to export to Spoonflower. I'll show you what happens
when we do that next stage.
9. Upload to Spoonflower: Welcome to the final stage of our demonstration of creating your own repeat pattern
and uploading it to a print on demand company
such as Spoonflower. Here is the
spoonflower interface. I already have an account. And once I had that account, you can actually roam around the website and upload
your own designs. And that's what I'm about to do. I'm going to upload the beautiful repeat
pattern tile that we've just downloaded from
Canva to our desktop. So to do that, I go to upload a design. You select your
file and because we are exported our file as a JPEG, it is a required or
one of the file types. I'm going to choose the
floral design number two that was in my
download folder. And I'm going to click that. I own the rights to that print because
I've just created it. And then I'm going
to upload the file. So Spoonflower is just having a little look, think about it. And then it's going to come in. And we'll see what it looks
like when it's on fabric. It's very exciting
part of the process. It's having a little
think about it. And here is our print. It's coming beautifully and they show you what
it looks like. A cross, an inches by inches
area for fat quarter. And I'm just going to go into the drop-down here and
show it on yardage. So this is what it
would look like if it was repeated across yardage. So I'm going to just
take you to a slide now. And this slide shows you what's happened with the file
that's come from Canva. We had a two by 2000 pixel area. When Canva exported the file, it came out as 96
pixels per inch. 96 pixels per inch
is a common or a standard practice when you're dealing with digital images, you don't need to have as much information in
front of your eyes. So the pixels that are
larger within an inch, if you were doing something
on, printing onto, onto, say a document onto paper than a printer will always
ask for 300 pixels per inch because it needs
to be very clear and find that there's a
lot more information. In every inch. There's 300 pixels per inch. Canva has exported this file 96, but when I uploaded
into Spoonflower, it converted it to 100 and
fixed 50 pixels per inch. So what it's done is it's, it has still got
2000 by 2000 pixels. But because they've jammed more pixels within
an area to 150, it actually shrinks the
size of the swatch. So hopefully that makes sense. So what was a 52 centimeter by centimeter area or 20
centimeter by 2020 inch by 20 Algeria has now
been downsized to 33 cm or 13 " square. It just gives you a
demonstration of what happens in the transition from
a Canva export file to what happens when it
goes into Spoonflower. So coming out of that slide back into this Spoonflower interface, we can see our beautiful Print. And just to reiterate what I just said to
you on that slide, that is now sitting at 13.3
" at 150 pixels per inch. You then have the option to choose any fabric
base that you want, and you can choose how
many yards you want. So that gives you the
demonstration on what it is to upload to
Spoonflower and why. It will convert from
the 96 pixels per inch size to the 150
pixels per inch size. If you're using another print on demand company like
Redbubble or CD6. They also have what they
call specifications. And they will be the
file sizes that you need to provide to
them in order for your artwork to be
clear and print well on the area or
the surface there, they're printing it on for you. And so if you were doing
something really large, like a shower curtain, it stands to reason that you
would need bigger artwork, but if you don't
have bigger artwork, then your print is
going to get smaller. So this print here would print really beautifully
on it for Shell curtain, but it will come in quite small. You wouldn't have large motifs. And to remedy that, when you're starting
your Canva document back at the beginning, you might start the document
is a 3,000 by 3,000 pixel canvas area instead of the
2000 by 2000 pixels area. So that just gives you
a starting point for understanding
resolution and size between the different platforms.
10. Finish up: We come to the final step of the class and that is just
to come back to Canva. I was really happy with how
it came out and Spoonflower, so I don't need to
make any adjustments to my original file. I'm just going to come into
position and get rid of that area where we
trialed the grid. And I'm going to
just delete that. So this is our original
elements sitting in the space. So we're going to just
go to File floral design final and press Enter. And that will now sit in
your library. With Canva. You can come in and out
and you can actually come in and make changes
if you wanted to. But this is a fully
editable file. And as long as you respect
the laws of motifs coming off the top and the bottom and from the
left and the right, you will be perfectly fine when you're creating
your repeat tile. Now that that's done, you
can just save that and close it down and come
back to your homepage. And there you have it.
That is the ending of our demonstration for creating
a repeat tile in Canva Pro
11. Now it's your turn!: Thank you so much for
joining me today. It's been a pleasure
to teach you my method on how to create your
own repeat pattern. I look forward to seeing
what you produce. So why don't you upload
it at the end of the class and show everyone
what you came up with. A sincerely hope it's been a simple introduction
for you to creating your own repeat pattern
and therefore having your own unique fabric design
out in the world. Thank you
Rachael King, Passionate about Pattern!
