Sketch to Sellable
pattern workshop
✦ Go from sketch to sellable repeat pattern in this free two-week workshop in Affinity Designer, the app that costs you nothing and cuts your pattern building time in half. ✦
Five lessons, two of them live with me. Replays included if you cannot make live it or miss a session.
lessons | drawing sessions | templates
save your seat here
This event is free, but you have to save your seat to get in the room. I’ll be revealing how I make mirrored previews, sharing templates with you, and helping you understand how Affinity is actually the easiest app you can build patterns in.
Enter your details below to join us for the Sketch to Sellable Pattern Workshop!
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you downloaded affinity. then you closed it.
I’ve heard this from so many artists: “I opened the app, saw a list of buttons, none of them look like the buttons I know, and so I closed it.”
So you keep building patterns the slow way. Draw a block, cut it up, move the pieces to the corners, nudge them until the seams line up, check, re-check, find a white line at the last second.
You are not alone. The number one fear artists share with me about Affinity Designer is that it might take too long to learn. Here is what I want to show you: the reason to learn it is that it gives you the time back. Many times over.
“I was struggling with Affinity Designer. I had taken other courses, and I just did not seem to get it. Then I found your courses and how you integrated Affinity into your workflow, and now I finally get it.”
Jen Perrotta, Surface Pattern Designer
draw in the middle. watch it show up in the corners.
This is the part that makes people gasp on live sessions.
In Affinity, you can set up a preview so that when you draw a motif in the center of your canvas, it repeats itself in the corners and edges automatically, live, as you draw. No moving blocks around. No exporting to check your seams and coming back to fix them.
“I came across a clip of Liz drawing on an iPad, creating a perfect mirror drawing. After creating my first repeat pattern in Affinity Designer I was hooked. Affinity Designer was the missing piece.”
Jacine Arias, Surface Pattern Designer
Artists Like You
These artists decided to take the leap and learn how to use Affinity Designer with me. Now they’re confidently making professional patterns faster.
it finally clicked
“Thank you for your EXCELLENT tutorials. After dipping in and out of Affinity for eons I am finally seeing the light!”
Karen Eide
Artist
faster and cleaner
“I started working mostly in vector in Affinity. Following the lessons, I developed a workflow that allows me to create faster and better.”
Tanya Pautov
Textile Artist
professional patterns
“I have learned how to use Affinity Designer on my iPad to turn my hand-drawn artwork into professional repeating patterns.”
Amanda Mikolajek
Surface Pattern Designer
faster + more professional = more time for creativity
The mirrored preview is one time-saver. There are more, and they all culminate in one result: you feel more creative because you’re spending less time on the boring parts.
You can recolor a whole pattern into nine colorways in the time it used to take you to do one. You can resize a design for a client without it going fuzzy. You can select every layer of one color in a single tap.
That is what I mean by professional. Not fancier art. Cleaner files, faster turnarounds, and work you can hand to a print-on-demand site or a licensing client without worrying if it’s the “right file”.
one sketch. five steps. a finished pattern.
We are not touring the app and listing tool names in this workshop. We are building a pattern together, start to finish, and I am only teaching you the buttons you actually need along the way.
We’ll alternate between recorded lessons and live sessions, so you aren’t watching a long, boring course. You’re building real patterns with me in real time.
✦ Part 1: Understanding Affinity
The setup, the two personas, symmetry, the vector tools, and a play page where the only goal is to stop being afraid of the toolbar.
✦ Part 2: It’s Sketching Time
Reference images, grids and guides, and sketching your whole pattern rough, then refining it in color.
✦ Part 3: Building Previews
The mirrored preview, built from scratch, in both diamond and basic layouts, so you can do this with any pattern you make from here on.
✦ Part 4: Let’s Ink
Inking your sketch, adjusting brushes, and setting your artwork up so it vectorizes cleanly.
✦ Part 5: Vectorize and Export
Vectorizing your inked pattern, building three or four colorways in minutes, and exporting files that are actually ready to sell.
finish the work, then come ask me anything
There is a small project after each part. A play page, a sketch, a preview, an inked pattern, a set of colorways.
Submit all five by September 23 and you will get an invitation to the Secret Pattern Q&A, a private live session on September 29 where you can ask me anything about patterns. Selling them, styling them, pricing them, fixing them.
If you cannot be there live, you can send your questions in and watch the replay.
No prizes, no competition. Just the artists who did the work, in a room with me.
who this is for
You are in the right place if:
✦ You have Affinity Designer sitting on your iPad and you have barely opened it.
✦ You already make patterns (in Procreate, on paper, wherever) and you are ready to make them faster and cleaner.
✦ You want to sell your patterns on fabric, wallpaper, or stationery, or license them, and you know your files need to be better than they are.
✦ You have heard that Affinity is awesome and you want to figure out why.
a note from liz
I have been making and selling patterns for about ten years. I uploaded five thousand designs to Spoonflower in two years, took a shop from $1K to $44K, and stopped touching it in 2018 (it still pays me). My work has ended up on fabric, wallpaper, calendars, a shower curtain at Target, and a sitcom backdrop.
I am telling you that because I want you to know where this workflow came from. It is not theory. It is what I actually do when I sit down to build a pattern I intend to sell, and I have refined it over a decade of doing it professionally.
I teach in Affinity Designer because it’s free, and I believe you should not need a software subscription to make professional work. Let me show you how it all works!
~Liz
come build a pattern with me
Two weeks from now you could have a finished, vector-based, sellable repeat pattern, plus a workflow that makes the next one twice as fast.
“It made me unafraid of Affinity.”
Lisa McNamara, Artist
save your seat here
This event is free, but you have to save your seat to get in the room.
Enter your details below to join us for the Sketch to Sellable Pattern Workshop!
By signing up you'll be added to Liz's email list. Unsubscribe anytime.
faq
No. Part 1 assumes you have never opened it. If you have, you will still pick up shortcuts.
Yes, it is a free download. No subscription, no trial clock. You will notice when you download the app that the language references a trial, but then once you have the app on your iPad, the trial language goes away. This is a feature of the App Store that is a little confusing when it comes to free apps! Download Affinity Designer 2 for iPad.
I teach this on the iPad, so that is the setup I would recommend for following along. Some artists have followed my tutorials using the desktop version, but it will be easier to follow along if you are on the same device as me!
Come if you can, because we draw together and it’s the fun part. You can catch the replays on the Pattern Hub after each one, and the three recorded lessons (once released) are always available to watch on your own time.
No. Some of my best-selling patterns started as very rough sketches. Simple usually sells better anyway.
Every lesson is under an hour, most closer to thirty or forty minutes. All video lessons and drawing sessions are spread over two weeks giving you time to learn, practice, and spend however much drawing time you want to put in.
Part 1 lands in your inbox on September 3. Sign up any time before then and you’ll get all the details including dates and links.