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 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 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 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.

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 + Affinity Designer

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

If you want to check out some of my surface pattern and other design and illustration work - make sure you check out my shop on Etsy: Bella + Sophia Creative or you can find me over on Spoonflower!

Tools needed

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