Hello everyone and welcome to another Affinity Designer tutorial,
creating a custom pattern. A three-part lesson drawing the pattern using simple shapes working
inside the Export Persona with the slice tool and apply a bitmap pattern fill on a garment.
Alright inside Affinity Designer with a New document open, first I will go ahead and use one
of the Diamond shape so I will tap on the Toolbar here till I get to the diamond shape, the Diamond
tool, and then I am just going to tap and drag to just create a random diamond shape. Then inside
the Transform Studio, I will set its Width to 400 and its Height also to 400 then I will tap on the
Document menu, tap on the Grid and then tap to Show the Grid because that will help me to
align things up and then I will switch to the Move tool and I am just going to place this
around the center. It doesn't really matter, what matters is that we convert this into curves so
I will tap on the Edit menu and then tap to Convert to Curves, like so. And the reason
I did this is that I would like to have those two corner points to have round corners. So for that,
I will grab the Corner tool, just make sure that you, marquee select these two nodes, and then
at the bottom of the Context toolbar, I am going to set the Point radius to something quite high.
Let's see, I am going to set it to 120, doesn't really matter, what matters is I
am looking at the end shape. Once you're done with this once, you're happy with your shape,
don't forget to Bake Corners so tap on that and now we have a shape with curves, alright, great!
So what's next, well first of all let's go inside the Layers studio,
and instead of a Stroke I am going to swipe this to the right to get to the Fill color and I am
going to set this Fill color than looking inside the Layers Studio, here is the first curve. Now
what we're going to do is, we're going to create a bunch of duplicates of that and then size them
down but for that, we're going to use actually the Contour tool. Let me show you how! First of all
let's go ahead inside the Edit menu and create the first duplicate, grab the Contour tool and
at the bottom of the Context toolbar the only thing I am going to change is the Point radius,
and I am going to do this numerically so everything is equal as I go in. So that will be,
set to (-20), immediately after I am going to bake its appearance so I will tap Bake Appearance
and then, of course, I am going to change the color here, tap to create another duplicate,
still with the Contour tool, tap on the Point radius, I am going to set this back to (-20),
I will Bake its Appearance, I will change its color, back on the Edit menu, duplicate that,
still on the Contour tool, I am going to set this to (-20), Bake its Appearance,
change the color to that perhaps, create another duplicate, still with the Contour tool, set
this one to (-20), Bake its Appearance, change the color to this, and believe we have one more
duplicate. Again we're going to set this to (-20), and then of course Bake its Appearance,
and then change its color. This is what I was going for, OK, I like the shape,
alright, so this is the shape that I was going for and this will help us to go to the next step
which is to define the pattern using the Slice tool. Now before we jump into the Export Persona,
we need to define our pattern and which shapes will make that up. So first I will marquee select
all of these curves, all of these vector shapes and inside the Layers studio I will go ahead and
tap on the Group icon to create the first group and then I am going to size this down to 200 by
200 to be able to control the pattern within the grid and that will make things easier
once I jump into the Export Persona using the Slice tool. Now I will also tap on the Transform
studio to double-check my work and I can see here, under the Dimensions, the Width is slightly off
and all I am going to do is just nudge this back and forth and now it's set to 200 by 200, great!
Now I will make three duplicates here to define the pattern,
alright and this very next step is such an important step because everything has to line up
perfectly fine because the slightly offset of one pixel will damage the pattern so everything has to
line up, and I believe everything does and that's another reason that I used the Grid here. Alright,
so now we are ready to jump into the Export Persona, so we tap on that and here we're going
to use the Slice tool, so tap on that and then I will tap and drag to create this slice here. Now
I am going to define the area that I am going to export. I know I am not going to do a great job,
I'm just going to eyeball it but now OK we need to do this accurately. So for example, this Slice
Switch window that we get is such an important window because that gives us all the information
we need. For example, we have Dimensions which as you can see is not correct, this should be 600 x
600, then we have Slice1, which's the default name that comes from Affinity Designer for the slice,
the PNG is the file format that this slice will be exported which of course we can change,
then we have the RGB and the 8-bit, great! So how do we do this accurately well, first of all,
you have to Zoom in quite a lot and then just tap and drag this and that will Snap into the Grid
and that's what we are zooming in so much here, to make sure we do a perfect job.
So I am going to go all around and I will double-check everything
and now everything seems to be OK. You see that the Slice Switch window tells us this is 600
x 600. Alright, but when we are ready not yet, what I am trying to say is, if I look inside the
Slices studio, I can see that the pattern actually has a white background but in this case, we want
the slice to be transparent, so how do we do that? We need to tap on the Document menu, inside the
Canvas, tap on the Transparent Canvas and that reflects immediately inside the Slices studio,
on the preview thumbnail, great! What else can we do? Well, I will go ahead and tap on
the Slice Options here, first of all, I will rename the Slice1 to perhaps, Retro Pattern,
tap OK. Next, we have the Export file Formats, mine is set to PNG, now Affinity Designer comes
with a plethora of these Export options and I highly recommend you experiment with different
file exports for your, own project, depending of course what you're after. Alright, great! So mine
is set to PNG and then we have the increased level of resolution. By default we have the 1x which is
the standard, then we have the Retina, and then we have the 3x. You can have all three if you wish,
I am just going to stick with the 3x and then I will tap back on the Slices studio and one more
thing we can do is, we can tap on the Preferences here and choose an Export Folder of our choice,
I already have done that so all I am going to do now is tap on the Export icon
and that gets exported to the designated folder that I had set earlier,
so now we are ready to go to the next step and actually use this pattern to fill the garment.
Alright, so we are ready to go to the next step which is to fill this pattern we exported to the
garment so I will tap back on the Designer studio and before I actually do that, couple
of things I would like to change here, so I will tap back on the Document menu, tap on the Canvas,
and then tap again on the Transparent Canvas just because I like to have a solid background color,
and then back on the Document menu, tap on the Grid and Toggle OFF the visibility of the Grid.
Great! Now I will tap inside the Layer studio and I will Toggle OFF the visibility of all
these groups, I will turn ON the visibility of the first layer, this Background layer just because
I like the color and then, of course, we're going to focus inside the mannequin group here.
So if I twirl this down we can see that we have a Belt, a Garment, and a Frame, and by the way,
I am providing this vector file inside the Exercise folder in the event that you would
like to use that for your, own project. Great! So now I will tap on the Garment,
tap on the Edit menu, tap to duplicate this, and I will focus on that specific layer. I will fill
that layer with the pattern, so for that, I will go ahead and grab the Fill tool, and at the bottom
of the Context toolbar, we're going to cycle through the different types here. So I will tap,
and I am looking for the Bitmap option which is this one, and then I am prompt
inside the destination where I saved my own pattern. So tap on that and here is the
pattern, right? So we're going to take this Center point here which we can use to place
this Bitmap all around the shape, within the boundaries of the shape of course,
and then we have those Fill handles here so I am just going to bring them inside, right?
And by the way, you can rotate this, doesn't matter, whatever you want, it's quite flexible,
something along those lines. That's the one thing, the second thing is to tap on this layer here and
we're going to set a different Fill color so I am going to tap on that and perhaps use this color
and that's why we used it for the first garment here, that's why we use,
we set the pattern to be transparent so we have all the flexibility in the world
that we can set this, and put this pattern in any surface. Alright, so everything looks great
all you have to do is perhaps take a piece of paper, sketch out your idea, use simple shapes,
bring them together, and define your, own pattern. Hope that helps, see you around!
I would like to thank each one of you for visiting my channel, watching the inspiring lectures and
project tutorials, do not forget to subscribe, and share the knowledge! Elias Sarantopoulos