Design Half Drop, Full Drop, Tossed and Brick Patterns

Class Description

Hello everyone welcome to my latest class. I’m Jen Lezan and I’ll be the one guiding you through this creative course. I’m a freelance graphic designer, illustrator and educator based out of the midwest and I run Bella + Sophia Creative studio. If you want to learn more about me, check out my youtube channel: The Creative studio to get a behind the scenes view of the work I do as a freelancer and the work that goes into making classes like this one. I am a huge advocate for sharing knowledge in accessible ways and I have found that places like Skillshare and Youtube allow for that and allow me to connect to a diverse group of people looking to learn and grow.

This month, I wanted to dive a little deeper into building our creative skills in Surface Pattern Design using Affinity Designer V1 on the desktop. In my past surface pattern design intensive, I showed you the basics of surface pattern design and building repeats on the iPad. In this class we will take that process a little further and explore how to create some of the most common surface pattern repeats - the Full Drop, Half Drop, Tossed and Brick Pattern Repeats

Expanding on the types of patterns you can create helps to add visual interest to your patterns. Choosing the right pattern repeat for your design will depend on what sort of look and feel you are after. But, the wonderful thing is once you have your motif drawings, you can keep experimenting with the different repeat layouts until you get the result that you are after by applying each of these techniques.

What the class is about

In this class, I will walk you through my process on how to make 4 of the most common surface pattern designs in Affinity Designer V1 for the desktop These repeats include: the full drop, half drop, tossed and brick pattern repeats. We will work on designing these patterns and creating a seamless repeat using illustrated motifs. We will also touch on some tips to help establish creating strong repeats as well as discuss a process for creating color palettes.

This course is designed to give you all the technical skills you need to start designing full drop, half drop, tossed and brick patterns using the Affinity designer V1 desktop app. But, it doesn’t go into as much detail as the surface pattern design intensive course I have here on Skillshare. This class will get you comfortable with the tools and studios in the software as well as familiarize you with some of the layer effects, geometry functions and transform options that will aid in building a repeating pattern in Affinity Designer V1.

We won’t be going through the entire process of surface pattern design from concept drawing to final pattern, but instead we will be focusing on building and constructing each of these 4 pattern repeats. If you want to learn the very basics of surface pattern design using your iPad, Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo, I would suggest checking out my Surface Pattern Design intensive course for beginners: Learn How to Create Surface Pattern Designs on the iPad with Affinity Photo V1 + Affinity Designer V1.

Make sure to check out the class resources for a resource guide on surface pattern design, as well access to the project templates.

Tools needed

All you need to take this class is a desktop or laptop computer with Affinity Designer V1 installed.

An overview of the class project

For your class project, we will be creating 4 seamless repeats: A half drop repeat, A full drop repeat, a tossed repeat and a brick repeat. They will all be designed in Affinity Designer. You can submit these along with your color story template to the course project gallery to share with your fellow classmates and myself.

Deliverables

When you are ready, upload the following to the project gallery

1. 4 Final Patterns (full drop, half dropped, tossed and brick) showcased in the Final Project template - You can share each page as a JPEG and upload it to one project within the gallery. Feel free to share your color palette worksheet if you wish as well! - you can find the files under the class resources (must be in the web view and not app to access -- download the zip files and open them up to access the editable templates).

   
   

Who the class is geared toward

This class is geared towards anyone interested in learning how to create surface pattern designs using Affinity Designer. Whether you are a seasoned pro in surface pattern design or someone just learning how to use the software, I try to ensure you will feel comfortable in the app and the course. I know that surface pattern design can sometimes seem daunting when it comes to the tech side of things, but for this class -I wanted to show how you how to create some of the most popular styles of repeats that can help grow your surface pattern design portfolio.

I am looking forward to creating with you today!

Let’s get Started.