I am always trying to figure out ways to increase my productivity. It is absolutely necessary when you are a one-person operation and you need to keep cranking out content! While producing classes for the school, I am also keeping my toes dipped into the surface pattern design and illustration I do for art licensing.

This class, Advanced Floral Pattern Design Raster to Vector, will show you some of my illustration and pattern design methodology, and an all new technique I am using to create inner lines on my motifs that show through to the background color. I want the inner lines to essentially be transparent. There is definitely more than one way to accomplish this, but I think I have figured out the fastest! In the class, I take you from start to finish in creating a full seamless repeat pattern, notably with the inner lines I have just described. I find it gives the over-all pattern consistency. With these techniques I will be able to save the pattern in another iteration. I make sure the pattern swatch we’ll be creating is completely editable and colors can be changed easily. One of my goals is to show you how we’ll be able to recolor it once the pattern is complete and add textures, which are two things I will do in follow-up classes.

Many of the Affinity Designer skills you have already learned will be reinforced. Each time I do a pattern design class for Affinity Designer, new opportunities present themselves for teaching you new skills and efficiency strategies. And I try to always do things in a way that makes it fun and attainable.

In this class I’ll walk you through:

• my step-by-step method for inking flowers with “see-through” interior lines

• tips for creating compositions for a new iteration of a pattern

  my workflow for auto-tracing and creating the initial SVG file

• adjusting colors until satisfied with a color scheme and keeping it simple enough to edit later

• methods for keeping the art fully editable for later adjustments

This is a real-world example of how a surface pattern designer works. Creating collections is imperative to being an artist whose work is saleable. With these pattern design classes, I am creating a continuum of learning that, once complete, will give you the skills necessary to pursue this as one of your possible divergent income streams.