Hello, this week we’re looking at drawing better motifs for your surface pattern designs. This week’s tip kind of follows on from last week’s video about resizing artwork. I want to give you a few more tips about creating high quality motifs for your patterns, which in turn will improve the overall quality of your designs.
When making patterns, it can be tempting to duplicate and resize some of the motifs for filling other parts of the pattern. But I want to offer a few words of caution here. I’m all about shortcuts, and if it’s your sketch you’re working in, then you can knock yourself out! But for your final motifs, this is one occasion when you should avoid shortcuts.
The problem with duplicating and resizing motifs in Procreate is that you will likely have to flatten layers to do it, so straight away you’re losing a bit of editability. This is possibly even making more work for yourself later on because if you change things like the colour, you’re going to have to re flatten and reposition that duplicated motif every time if it’s part of your main pattern.
So the second reason to avoid resizing main motifs is that as I talked about last week, you’re likely always going to see a bit of image quality loss if you’re also resizing or rotating and that motif is possibly going to stand out and not match the quality of the others, especially if you’ve used a textured finish.
Lastly; and this is the biggest reason I draw each one of my motifs from scratch, is that you want them all to look like they were drawn with the same brush in the same way that you would if you were painting or drawing a real picture. Each one of your pen marks would be the same thickness because you use the same pen for it.
If you’ve used any line work, either in the form of a stem, an outline or some detailing, as soon as you reduce the size of that, the brush with is going to become smaller and it won’t match with the other motifs anymore. This isn’t a problem in software like Adobe Illustrator because you can keep your stroke widths editable all the way through, but with pixels it’s not possible.
So to make sure my entire pattern looks like it was drawn with the same brush at the same time by the same person and is one cohesive piece of artwork. I draw each motif individually. I’ll also keep track of my brush sizes by adding them as a mark on the brush size slider. You can save up to four of these markers for each brush. Even if your pattern is made up of entirely identical motifs like this mushroom one here,
It’s still nice to draw each one individually because you get to build a tiny bit of variation into each one and give it a hand-drawn, unique feel. However, if you’re making a completely flat geometric design, then some of these tips won’t necessarily apply to you because uniformity is the name of the game for geometric. So as always, feel free to take the tips that serve you and leave the rest behind!
All these little extra attentions to detail will help your patterns look more cohesive and like a single piece of artwork, your strem widths will be the same and your outlines will be the same weight. It might seem like just a small difference, but it really does make a big difference to the overall quality of your surface pattern designs.
If you found this video about drawing better motifs for your surface pattern designs useful, please consider subscribing to see more content like this every week and I will see you soon!