10 Photoshop Tips for Surface Designers

1. Introduction: Hi, everyone. Mel Armstrong here and welcome to my class, Ten Photoshop Tips for Surface Designers. In this class, I'm going to take you through 10 different tools and techniques that I use frequently in Photoshop to create my pattern designs. Starting with a simple sketch, I'll show you all the tools I use in Photoshop to transform it into a surface pattern design. This includes how I draw my motives in Photoshop, what brushes I use, how I create background texture, a simple repeat, and how I create mock-ups. It's jam-packed with lots of useful tricks to make Photoshop fun. By the end of the class, hopefully you'll have created a pattern design in a totally new way to add to your portfolio. Let's get started. 2. Drawing with Lasso & Using Brushes: Hi everyone, in this lesson I'm going to show you how I create my icons or motives in Photoshop. I'm going to show you my favorite tool, the lesson, along with some of the brushes that I use to color my motives. Here is a pelican that I sketched on paper and then I scanned it in. Sometimes I sketch in Photoshop using my icon some tape. But generally, I sketch on paper and scan it in so I'm going to show you how I color this cute guy. Firstly, I'm going to select to the sketch layer and I'm going to change it to multiply, and then I'm going to create another layer and drag it underneath and this is going to be the body. I'm going to select the last tool, which is this little one over here on the left. Or you can select L on your keyboard and then what I'm going to do is trace around the pelican. Just zoom in a bit so I'm just holding down the mouse and dragging and tracing. Sometimes I get to a point, I think I'm at the wrong angle I need to let go, so I just close that up, I'm not taking any notice of lines or keeping the trace exact and you can see I've only got half of it selected. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to rotate this to a better angle I've hit on the keyboard and then I'm going to click and drag to gets to an angle that I like. Then I'm going to go back to my lesser and now to add to this, I'm just going to hold down the shift and you can see that it changes the icon to a lesser with a little plus. That means I can add to it, if I wanted to remove some, I would hit the Option key and he can say there's a minus sign there. We will go back to shift for plus and we will continue adding to the pelican. I'm at a bit at angle now, we can't seem to draw straight lines on a funny angle. Because I don't want to rotate that by grand just to finish off his neck. Let's turn hit it or you can see the outline there, now to fill this, I do one of two things. If I want a transparent type background, I will just go ahead and select a brush and color it in. For this one, I want it to be solid, so I'm actually going to fill it with white. To do this, I can go up to edit field or shift f5 it'll bring up the field box and I'm going to fill it with white. Now you can't see it because the background is white so I'm going to change the background so we can see better. If I click to unselect what I just had selected is command D on the keyboard and if I go to my background layer, I'm just going to select this coming here. All I did was click on the fill and then the color picker comes up and I will click on that coloring, pop it in there for me and then I'm going to use the paint bucket tool to fill the background and that will give it just a bit of contrast so you can see that body. The next part I'm going to do is the beak, so I've created another layer and we call it beak. I'm going to hit L for lesser and let's rotate it a little bit to make it a bit easier. Now with this one, I'm going to, let's just rotate. Select my favorite brush, which at the moment is called dry media medium pastel bay. In this brush shoes panel, I've actually sorted my brushes into my favorites in one group, and then I have all the rest in here as well. Most of these a call Webster's, which are absolutely fantastic and could probably take years to actually discover all that amazing brushes that he has because there are many. But once you find ones that you love, you are going to stick to them a bit. Anyway, for this one I'm using the calls, draw it dry media medium pastel bay. I'm going to select this orange using my color picker, and then I'm going to rotate this a bit because I'm going to paint dragging down just to give it a certain texture. Let's just undo that and get rid of that sketch so I can see what I'm doing and see how it creates a lovely texture. Because that big selected, it's going to color in nicely for me. It's a little bit there. I don't like I'm just going to use my eraser tool. I'm going to go into the car Webster make a peck erases folder and select that one there, the flat 100 percent who's probably the best one to use, and zoom in. I'm just holding down the command space bar and then clicking and dragging to zoom in. To decrease the size of my eraser, I'm clicking on hitting the left square bracket on my keyboard to go down and just take them out of that off there to even it up. Next step, I am going to put the wings. Let's zoom again out for lesser image on another layer and I'll call this wing front. Just rotated a bit and the keyboard shortcut I liked to get around the borders just hitting the space bar and dragging. You can see when I hit the space bar in my hand, a hand icon comes up, and then I can just drag it to where I wanted. We are now going back to L for let's see and trace my wing. For this one, I'm going to fill it with white again. I'm going to hold down Shift and F5, fill it with white, and then I'm going to go back to my pastel brush and select this dark brown black color, I might increase the size of the brush a bit using my right square bracket. It's colored in. You'll see this lovely texture that happens. This is what I love about Photoshop. You can't really get this in Illustrator without a whole lot of effect. I do love working in Photoshop. Let's rotate it back a bit. Then we need to move that beak above that. I have just clicked and dragged that layer above. Then let's do the other wing. I think you need some legs. I'm going to create behind the body for the legs. One for the back leg anyway. I'm going to do that in the same layer I have just hit now. You can see my sketches are pretty rough. I'm going to keep this one transparent as well. I'm not going to fill it up, and I want my orange color. If I go back into my swatch, that color is already there I don't have to pick it. Let's do a layer in front from the leg. As you can see, I use my keyboard shortcuts a lot and I think I've been using Photoshop for like 10 or so years and I guess over time it becomes second nature. I don't really think about it. I highly recommend using them. It just speeds everything up a lot, rather than having to go up to the menu and find what you're looking for. In fact, half the time, I don't even know where things are up there. I refer to my shortcuts on the keyboard. Yeah, this leg is looking a bit funny to me, I'm going to just shrink in the back one bit. Size it. This one I'm actually going to fix this a bit more because it looks like it's broken. Now I need to add to this, so I have selected it first by clicking on the layer with my Command button pressed, and then that will select the layer. Then I use my lasso with the plus sign, holding down the Shift key to fix the broken foot and then I can just use my brush to fill in that gap. There he is. He needs an eye. For this, I'm actually going to use the Marquee tool to create an eye. I didn't want that one. I want the elliptical one. I'm going to rotate that. All I'm clicking on his Command T to bring up the handles which I can then drag to rotate like that. Now, one other thing I want to do is decorate these wings just to make him a little bit different. I'm going to color in each of these wings with some line up. Just going to make it up as I go. Let me just rename this layer. I'm going to click on the front wing and then create a layer on top of it and then I'm going to hold down the Option key and then you can see that little arrow pointing down if I click, double key create a clipping mask. Everything I draw on this layer will stay inside the wing. For this, I'm going to use a white color and I'm going to use my other favorite paint brush and close with pencil. Let's just do a little test here. That's okay. You know I might speed this up a bit because it's going to take me a little while to fill in all of this, but basically I'm just going to doodle and create some flowers and other elements. I'm probably going to just duplicate that a few times and drag it around, rotate it, resize it. All I'm doing is Control T. Then holding the Shift key I can drag it and make it smaller. Now, to duplicate it, all I'm doing is holding down the Option key and then clicking and dragging. You can see it creates another one nicely for me. I'll speed this up so I'll see you in a minute. That' pretty much it. We'll merge all those lines that have been clipped to the wing. I'm going to select them all by holding down the Shift and then selecting all of them. Right-click and then "Merge layers". Now then I create a copy because I want to put it on the back one as well. If I create a copy and then drag it down to the back wing and then clip it, I can then hold down Command T and then drag it into place. Now, I'm also going to change the opacity of this. Am I to change that to screen? Let me just pump it down a bit. Just so it doesn't merge into the front wing. Just slightly. That's about it. In the next lesson I'm going to talk more about blending modes and clipping masks. See you there. 3. Clipping Masks & Blending modes: Hi everyone. In the last class I showed you briefly how to create a clipping mask in Photoshop. In this class, I'm going to explain it a little bit more and also talk about blending modes. A clipping mask is when you mask a layer based on another layer. Basically you use them when you have a large image that you want to have clipped down to fit into a small image. I use this for a number of reasons. In the last class, I used it to draw these patterned flowers within the wing so that it was clipped to the wing. Another reason I use a clipping mask is to clip texture to my illustration. Sometimes I will create a texture that I want to apply to the whole illustration, or maybe I want to apply it to just one of the section. For this one I'm going to create a texture and just apply it to the body of the pelican. Over here I have a photograph of some rust that I took, and I'm going to use that to add texture to my pelican. First, I'm going to desaturate it and adjust the levels because I want it to be black and white and I don't want it so full on, I just want little speckles if you get what I mean. First I'm going to go up to Image Adjustments and then Desaturate, and then I'm going to adjust the levels. So I go back up to Image, Adjustment and then Select Levels, and then I want to increase the amount of white. To do this, I use the right slider and move it up and there you can see there's more white, and then I just want to make sure these black speckle still stand out. So I'm going to increase the black on just those ones, and now you can see I've got just subtle texture that look good on my pelican. Click "Okay". I'm going to then go back to my pelican nature on my body layer. I'm going to go back to my texture and just drag it across, and it's going to be above my body layer. Now to clip it to my body layer, I just need to make sure that layer is selected. The texture layer, hold down the "Option" or "Alt" key, and you see this little arrow appear, and then click to apply the mask, and now you can see it's just inside the body of the pelican. Now, at the moment I do it like how strong the texture is, I want to make it more subtle. This is where blending modes come in. A blending mode changes the way the layer reacts with the layer underneath it. You can get an inkling of this when you adjust the opacity of a layer. This is the opacity here. If you adjust there, you can see how it will launch in it and the layer below show through. With the blending by you can change this level so it really opens up in entirely new world of the texture or effect to make it more realistic or interesting. I recommend playing with all these and find ones that you like. I do have my favorite or favorites, probably multiply Color Burn and Linear Burn are my most used blending modes. Sometimes I use screen when I want to lighten things. Sometimes a Latin one, but mostly these three multiply Color Burn and Linear Burn. For this one, I'm just going to change it to multiply and just burn down the opacity, and that's all I want to do with that. I recommend playing different colored backgrounds will give you different effects depending on what color mode you select. There's no one right way to use it. It's just a matter of playing with it until you find the effect that looks good for you. In the next lesson I'm going to show you how to create a Photoshop brush. See you there. 4. Create a brush: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how I create brushes to add texture and interest to my motives. The first one is something I do a lot, so I'm going to create. If you know my work you'll notice that I do a lot of texture with the little lines to represent feathers on my creatures. Why I do that in Photoshop, is to create a brush. Then I don't have to spend so long creating or doing each little strand. I'll show you how I do that, I'm going to create a new layer. I am going to go to the Brush Tool and select Kyle's Wet Pencil brush. Just zoom in a bit. Just going to create a row of little dashes like this. That's probably enough, just do a couple more. Then if I can hold down the Command Key and select that layer, then over those dashes are selected. Then I go up to Edit, Define Brush Preset. We can then give it a name. I'm just going to call this, fur dashes, and now you can see, I've got the Brush Tool selected and this is the brush that is going to work. Let's unselect the lines that I created, we can delete that now we don't need it. Then if I go over to my pelican here, I'm going to select the body and create another layer that is clipped to a clipping mask and to everything that I draw on this layer will end up inside the pelican body. Then I'm going to decrease the size of my dashes using the left square bracket. I'm going to select the dark brown black color and then depth them in here. Then you can see it's a really quick way of adding interest or texture to your illustration. I don't have to do all those dashes individually and get really creative with this. Then I could fill the whole bird. I'm actually not going to use this, I'm just using it for demonstration purposes. If you wanted to adjust the angle, you can do that by going into the Brush Settings. Now, if you don't have that just go to Window, Brush Settings or select F5 on the keyboard. If you go in here, make sure brush tip shape is selected. You can change the angle using this little rotator. Just do it dramatically, so you can see now it's at a different angle. Then make your work tilt that way, you get quite creative. That obviously looks a bit silly, but at the moment but you get what I mean. I'll show you another one that I like to do. Let's create another layer. Select my Wet Pencil brush or Kyle's Wet Pencil brush. I' m going to create a feather. The best looking feather that I will do it for this purpose. Let me say I'm not doing this as well as I would normally do it. I'm just creating a rough one here to show you some cool techniques. Then we have a funny looking feather. Select that, holding down the command and selecting the layer then we go up to Edit, Define Brush Preset. Let's call this feather and to select Command D. Now let's go to the wing. Will just remove that for the moment and create new layer clipped to the wing back to her feather know how to angle this, so I'm going to go back into my Brush Settings and angle it, so it's the same direction as the wing. Then I'm going to reduce the size and select the light color. You can do something like this. Let's check in a couple of different colors just to make it look a bit different. You could do something like that, that's cool. The possibilities are endless I love this tool. It really gives you a lot of interest to your illustrations and makes them a little bit different. It means that I have to draw every individual one, you could if you wanted to but this just speeds things up a little bit. To access your brushes that you create, you just go to the Brushes panel and they will be down the bottom. You can see feather there, my fur dashes there. You can rename them in here, you can organize them, put them into folders to categorize them, try and get them organized, otherwise they'll get completely lost especially if you have all the Kyle Webster's brushes and they're many as you can see. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how I create texture that I then use my pattern, so later on I will also show you how to create a repeat from background texture. See you there. 5. Create Texture: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to create a simple textured background. If I show you my final pattern from my pelican, you can see the background has this hatch linen texture. This is really easy to create in Photoshop. I use Kyle Webster's brushes to do it, but you can also just scan in some pencil, hatches and it would create the same effect. What I'm going to show you, let's go back here, turn off the pelican. I'm going to create a new layer, I'm going to use a dark color. Now, the brush that I use for this is called downpour 1. I have it in my favorites, but you will find it in Kyle Webster's concept package. If you want to know where to get these, if you don't have them, you do need Adobe CC. Go to adobe.com, I'll put the link in the about page and you can go here and you can download all the packs that you want. My favorite is the megapack, watercolor, the gouache, the dry media one's great. But there are so many and they are really good. If you need help, if you're not sure how to import them, there's some great help tutorials here, it's very easy. So going back to my document, I have selected the downpour and then I'm just going to click and drag across the page and maybe a bit more on top and then all I do is duplicate that. So I'm going to grab that layer and drag it down to the duplicate icon. I'm going to rotate it, so command T to transform and then holding down my shift and dragging will make it snap to the right place and there you have a hatch texture. I will then normally merge them and change this to multiply and just bump the opacity down, so it's very subtle. There you have a texture that looks a little bit like linen, it's very easy. I would play around with all of Kyle's concept brushes and see what sort of cool textures you can come up with. They just add another element or another level to your designs, I feel. I will show you later how to create a repeating textured background like this. At the moment, this wouldn't repeat very well so we will do that later on. In the next class, I'm going to show you how to use the Puppet Warp tool to manipulate your measures, to make them look slightly different. I will see you then. 6. Puppet Warp Tool: In this lesson, I'm going to show you the Puppet Warp tool. I use this when I have a illustration or a motif that I want to repeat. But I want it to look slightly different. Instead of redrawing it in different ways. I find the puppet warp tool is handy for just modifying a motif just in slight way, just to give it a difference to all the others. I'm not going to do it with a pelican. I'm going to quickly draw a tree and I'll show you how I use it. Speed this up and I'm going to quickly draw a tree. I'm going to use a brush that I've created it myself to create the leaves and I've created this brush as I did with those other brushes in my previous lesson. Now, graduated to create leaves is to create a brush. This is the brush like by change the flow, it won't be so transparent. Here's the brush and as you can see, it's just all one way to address that so you can randomly apply those brushes. Go into that brush settings, let's just use this one here to space it out so I can see there and if you go into shape, dynamics and change the signs, that'll change the size every time you paint it. Can change their diameter, change your angle, actually use these flip, ones. As you can see, this is what will happen in return me paste it or painted it. Will apply a different direction. Different signs just changed the size a bit more. Space them out. Let's give that a go and choose grain. You see how it's randomly just placing them in different directions and sizes and then let's put some orange in. You can see how quickly you can create a tree using this method, alright?. What I want to do is use create another tree.But this time I want it to look like it's blowing over in the window a bit. I might merge these leaves and the trunk together and then let's create another one, a duplicate squeeze size and so you can see them both. We've got two identical trees, now this one I want to bend. If I go to- edit puppet tool, then just click on different areas of the tree to put a pin and this is where you click and drag to manipulate the tree. Now these leaves up here that aren't attached will need to be moved individually, but put a pin on each of those so I can move them. If I just pull, you can see how I can completely manipulate this tree. This make it look like it's bending slightly, you could drag these out. Look like the leaves are blowing off the tree and then if I click on the tick, that will set that as all believed it and so now you've got same tree, but it looks completely different because we've just manipulated the angles with it. I love this tool, I use it a lot, especially with the characters that I want them to be bendy may had a different way or just to make a subtle difference, I find it very handy. In the next lesson, I will show you how to clean up artwork that you've scanned in. See you there. 7. Cleaning scanned in artwork: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to clean up scanned in artwork. I've got a watercolor artwork here that I want to cut out and clean up so that I remove the background and have a clean motif that I can use in a pattern design. To start with, I'm just going to create a duplicate of the background. I'm just going to drag that down to the Duplicate icon and then I'll just turn the background layer off, this is just so that we have a backup of the original. On that new layer, first thing I'm going to do is actually just cut it out. Using my lasso tool L on the keyboard or just select it, I'm just going to draw around the icon. If you had multiple icons on your page, you would do this with each one, to cut them out and put them on a different layer. I find this is the easiest way to do it. If you try and remove the background with multiple icons, it can become a little bit cumbersome. This way it seems to be a cleaner way of doing it. I'm just going to go Command X to cut that and then Command V to paste it, and then remove that copied layer which I no longer need. I've just got the cut-out layer here. Make sure I'm on that layer. First thing I'm going to do is whiten this background. This will make it easier for when we cut it out. To do that, I go up to Image, Adjustments, Levels and using the right-hand eyedropper, you can see, it has a little white fill in it. This will set the white point and change the area that I click to a whiter color. I'm going to select that and just click on the end, see how easy that was. It's changed to auto white. Now you can move that around and click in different places to get the most desired effect. You want it to be all white, but you don't want it all washed out in certain areas. Generally I just play around until I get something which I know will work in the next step. That will do. The next step is to remove that white background. To do that, I use the magic wand tool, which is W on the keyboard, and then check the tolerance, for this one I think 32 should do fine. Make sure Contiguous is turned off and then just click on any of that wide area. Now see how it's selected all of the white. If it had missed a bit and it hasn't in this instant, you could go and click on the next part and add to this. If you didn't have that Contiguous on, you wouldn't be able to do that. In this case, I don't actually need to add any more because I don't have any gaps in between where it is missed. I'm happy with that. Now before I cut that background out, I just want to make sure that my edges are nice and smooth. There's a couple of ways to do that. First is go to Select, Modify and Feather and what this one does is it smooths out the edges for you. Generally I will use one or two pixels to do that, play around with it though, if it doesn't work, just undo and then do it again with a different setting.I'm going to leave that at two and then I'm going to go back up to Select, Modify, and Expand. What this does is it will expand the selection. In this case, it's the white area that is selected. By expanding it, it will move the matching ends further into the watercolor part of your illustration, so that it basically cuts off the jaggedy edge and makes it smoother. If I did five, that's going to be way too much. It's going to actually cut, go in. See how it's cut in too far. I'm going to undo that and see how that's put that back only the edge. I'm going to go back and Select, Modify, Expand, and I'm going to select one. Let me see what that does. See how that just moved it in slightly. Usually one or two will do the trick. That's probably a bit hard for you to see on there, but play around with it. The more you do this, the more you realize what will work and what won't work. If I go back out. At the moment, my actual watercolor is selected, so we want to select the inverse so that everything else is deleted. Go up to Select, Inverse, now you can see the matching ends all the way around the outside and instead of using Delete, I use the Layer Mask button. Down here, click on the Add layer mask. The reason I do this is I can then go in and clean up a little bit more and if I don't like it, I can undo it very easily. Before I do that, I'm going to add another background, a darker layer so that it will show up any white pieces that I may have missed. I'm just going to create a new layer, I'm going to change my fill to a dark color and use my bucket to fill the background. See how there, you can see there is a little bit about white mark around the edge there. Go back to my layer mask, make sure the layer mask is selected, not the actual image. Click on the Layer Mask, ensure that the Fill and Sroke are black and white. This means when I click on the paintbrush, this increases a little bit, see how I can erase those bits I don't want. If I decide I want to keep them, if I hit X on the keyboard, it'll switch around my fill and stroke and I can put the white back in again. I don't want that, so I'm going to take it back out. Let's speed this up and I will just remove some little specs that I don't want in there. I'm just going to clean up this little bit down here and I'll show you the benefit of having that layer mask. I've selected a brush that has an uneven edge just to try and keep the even edge of the watercolor showing through. If I make a mistake, I shouldn't have done that. I'm just going to hit X and then paint it back in and that's what I love about layer masks, you can't lose anything because it's always going to be there. Let's remove that background. Once you're happy, right-click on the Layer Mask and Apply Layer Mask. There you have an isolated watercolor, that you can then use in your pattern designs. You can even play with the hues and change the color of that if you wanted to. But it's my favorite way of removing backgrounds and cleaning up art work. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to create a color palette in Photoshop. See you then. 8. Colour palette: Hello everyone. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to create a color palette in Photoshop. I've got this photo here that I took recently, and I'm going to grab some colors out of this photo, for my new color palette. To do that, I'm going to use the Rectangle tool. I'm going to draw a rectangle. I'm going to create a few of these. I'm just going to click on it using the option key and dragging it down a few times. That's probably enough. Let's go back to the first one and fill it with a color from here. If I double-click on the "Layer thumbnail" it'll bring up my color picker, and I can go in here and just pick a color that I like. That gray looks quite good. Then I will do that for the next one and so forth, until you've got a selection of lovely colors, and there we have a selection of lovely colors. We need a library panel. We go up to window and then select "Libraries" and then here on the right [inaudible] pulls out a bit. Here I've got a lot of color palettes already set up. To create a new one with this selection that we've made. To make a new selection, you can either use the icon down here, new library from document, or go up to the right-hand corner and select,: Create new library from document." This will bring up a dialog box with the six colors that you created, and then you just click "Create new library" and there they are. Then I'm going to rename that. I'm going to click in on that right-hand corner icon and select, "Rename" and call this Mel's colors. I will say this only works in the Adobe CC. If you have earlier versions of Photoshop. What I used to do is just what I've done here and I would create this document and save it as my color palette document. Then when I'm working on my design, I will come in here, and I will use the color picker and just go through each one. If you see, over here, it's actually adding it to my swatches panel as I select each one. When I'm designing, they are always at the top there, ready to be used, and if you do lose it, you just go back to your document with your color palette and reuse it. But the benefit of having Adobe Photoshop CC is that you can save your palette and use it whenever you want. If I come in here and double-click it, it changes my color to that color and then I can use it with my paintbrush or [inaudible] that's and so forth. The other benefit of using Adobe CC color palette library is that I can now use that any Adobe CC application. I actually use Adobe Photoshop Illustrator. I also use Dreamweaver as I do web design as well, and InDesign is another one I use quite often, and so this color palette will be available in all of those applications without having to recreate them. If I pop over to Illustrator here and then go to "Libraries" and it is slowly coming up. There it is Mouse colors. Then I can use them in Illustrator. That's it for this lesson. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to create a simple repeat. See you there. 9. A Simple repeat: In this class, I'm going to create a simple repeat using the pelican icon. I'm going to create a new document. File new. I'm going to create one that's 3,000 by 3,000 pixels, 300 resolution, and RGB color. Then I'm going to drag my pelican obit into my new document. I'm also going to change the background color. If I go back to my original document and select my fill, it'll bring up the color picker. I'm going to click on the background to get that color. It will put it in that film box, so that when I go back over to my pattern document, I can see it's right there. I'm going to click on my background layer and use my bucket film to film the background. We need to re-size the icon. I'm just going to select my pelican, Command T to transform. Holding down the shift key to keep the proportions, I am going to reduce the size. We're going to turn on the guides, the snap tools, sorry. I forgot to view and then snap. What this does is, when you move it, you get these pink guides that will help you position your motions in the right spot. This is really helpful for when you're doing a simple repeat. Not a complex one. I'm going to create a copy of that pelican. I'm going to flip it horizontally. Command T and go to edit, transform, flip horizontal. We've got some going one way and some going the other. All I'm going to do is create rose to make this a very simple repeat. I'm going to start with this one. I'm going to put them in the left-hand corner. Using those guides, I can get him pretty much in the perfect spot there. I'm going to repeat him across the top of the document. Basically, when you create a repeat towel, you need everything at the top, repeating at the bottom. Everything on the left needs to be on the right. I generally start at the top and left. This one is going to be a very simple row repeat. It's not that hard to create it. I'm just going to copy this pelican. I want another one in the middle. I'm going to click on him, hold down the alt key and then drag. When you click on a motive, it's not jumping to that layer. Just go up to order and select, and make sure that layer is selected. That way, when you click on a motive, it will jump to that layer and have that layer selected. Let's just grab him and we're going to repeat him on the right-hand side. We need to make sure he is in the right spot. To do this, I'm going to select him. I'm going to create a copy. I'm going to select Command T to transform. Now, we know that the width of document is 3,000 pixels, so we need to move him exactly 3,000 pixels across. To do that, we go to the x field to set the horizontal point, and we add 3,000 to the value that's already in there. Mine has a value of minus 10.5. I need to calculate 3,000 minus 10.5. That will be 2,989.5. That will move that across, and we can just hit "Enter" on the keyboard or click on the little tick up here. Now, I want to make sure these are evenly spaced. To do that, I'm going to select all of them holding down the shift key and just clicking all of them to make sure they are all selected. Now, up here, you can use this one here called Distribute Horizontal Centers. That will evenly distribute them out without moving the left and the right one. Anything in the middle, it will move. That just moved that slightly over. That means it's evenly distributed as the same amount of space that is there, if that makes sense. I want to repeat that on the bottom as well, so they are still selected. I'm going to group them, and then create a copy. Then I'm going to move them down to the bottom. Command T. Now, we need to change the value of the y-axis. At the moment, it says 67.5. Oh, we just need to add 3,000 to that. I'm just going to put three at the beginning of that to change it to 3067.5, and that will put it down on the bottom. Now, my second group, I want them facing the other way. I'm just going to put him in the middle, and then click and drag. Now, if you click and hold down your option to copy and also your shift key, holding down the shift key will keep him on that same row without moving him off like that. The shift key locks it so you know he's in the right spot. Now, I want to copy that middle over into, sorry, the top row into the middle. If I change my order selected group, if I select each of these rows, it will select the group rather than the individual. I'm going to create a copy, and then hold down the command and T to drag that down and see. I've got my snap guides on, so that put that perfectly in the middle for me. I'm going to grab these two, I'm going to group them and then create a copy, and then move him down into that position there. Now, I want to make sure that the rows are evenly distributed as well. I'm going to hold down the shift key and click on the bottom group, and then the top group to select all of them. Then I'm going to go up to distribute vertical centers. Click that, and then that will evenly distributed them, so the gaps are all exactly the same. Now, we have a pattern tile. Great way to test this is to go to edit, define pattern. Then you go to pelicans, then create a new document. Any size, doesn't matter. Then go to edit, sorry, layer, new field layout pattern. That will select that last pattern for you. Now to check that it repeats nicely, I re-scale it down to 50 percent. You can see that that repeats nicely. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to create a nice textured background for this, that will repeat nicely. See you there. 10. Textured background Repeat: I'm going to show you how I create a textured background. I'm going to create a linen texture using a hatch made by using one of car Webster's brushes. Then I'm going to make sure it repeats nicely as well. I'm going to turn off my polygons for the moment. I'm going to create a new layer. Go to my paintbrush, select the downpour brush and then I'm just going to create a lovely texture here. I'm going to change the, I personally change it to multiply bumper down to around 10 percent. I'm going to create maybe a copy and transform that so that it creates a nice hatch. Now let's turn on our public concern so that it looks like, it's not too bad. It's probably going to end up a bit lighter than that in the end, but for the moment so that you can say it all neighbor like that. I'm going to merge those two layers together. Now at the moment, if we created a pattern, [inaudible] , you would see lines through it. We'll demonstrate that by just going to edit, define pattern and then creating a new document. Then creating a pattern layer. No bump that down to 50 and now you can see where the texture has repeated. We need to remove that. I go back to my original document. What I need to do is offset this. Go to filter other offset. Now you can see here is where the repeat will be starting and finishing. We need to remove these lines. I'm going to try and get this in the middle. I'm just going to use the sliders. Doesn't have to be right in the middle, but it makes it a bit easier. Now to remove these lines, I use the clone tools. That is the clone stamp tool with S on your keyboard. Basically we're going to clone parts of the texture on those lines. To clone a bit, you hold down the Option or Alt key and click on an area and then let go and then click on the line. You can see there it's taken a clone of that area there and placed it over that line. Basically I just do this and take different areas. Don't pick the same area and we want to make it look different to the lines that have gone. Now, I had it just quite difficult to get it fading nicely. This works really good if it's something like watercolor, background or a paper texture. Something with lines in it can be a bit tricky. We're going to actually darken these bits here as well. We'll just say that all matches. Now we can test this out by going up to the filter offset. Just moving these around to see if we can see any of those lines, is looking not too bad, a couple there that I could possibly think. Basically just play around until you happy. A little bit there. All right, I'm happy with that. If we turn her pelicans back on, it's going to look a little better and I'm going to just change that back ground opacity download a bit more because it's too dark for me. Now if we create a pattern, so edit, define pattern and then go to our test document, double-click on that layer. Pattern, fill, I can bring it up and get the next one, which is the one that repeats nicely. Then there you can't see whether it's repeating and all its lovely and seamless, here we go. It takes a bit of practice. I find the clone tool, but eventually you'll understand it and have some beautiful texture patterns. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to create a simple mock up in Photoshop. See you there. 11. Create a Mockup: Welcome back everyone. In this class, I'm going to show how to create a simple mock-up to display your pattern design. Here is a mock-up of my pelicans on a lamp shade. I'm going to show you how to create this. I'm going to undo what I've got here. I'm going to get rid of my mock-up layer. Here we've got a photo of a lamp shade that I have at home. The first thing you need to do is create a new layer above your image layer. Then using the Pen Tool, which is "P" on your keyboard, or you can select it from the Tool Menu over here. Using the Pen Tool, we're going to create a path around the area that you want to apply your design to. Let me zoom in. I'm just going to use my Pen Tool. The Pen Tool can take little bit of getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, it's quite handy. You basically just click and then drag to get it in the right position. There you can see I have drawn, or using the Pen Tool I have marked out the path of my lamp. Let me close it up a bit. If I click on the paths panel here. You can see where I have marked it out. I've got one there that I did before, but this one is the one that we're using now. I'm going to go back to my layers panel and this time I'm going to grab my Rectangle Tool. I'm actually going to just draw a rectangle by clicking and dragging and making sure that whole area is included. Then I'm going to create a smart object from that. Right-click and convert to Smart Object. Now what I will do now is double-click on that Smart Object thumbnail, and it will take me in. I'm just going to go to layer, new fill layer pattern and there it is. That's going to reduce the size of that to 50. Click "OK". Now, I'm going to click on "Command S" to save. Then it will bring me back over here. Obviously at the moment it's not looking quite right. That's our next task to apply it to the shape of the lamp shade. First of all, I'm going to change that to multiply. There you can see the lamp shade is starting to show through. Then I'm going to use the Warp Tool because the lamp shade is slightly bent, so we don't want our image to be just straight across. We want it to move with the contour of the lamp shade. If I click "Command T" to use the Transform Tool and then right-click and use Warp. I can then bend this slightly, it doesn't have to be a lot to match, the lamp shade shape. It's very subtle, plus makes it look better than having it just straight across. That will do. Now I'm going to go back to my paths panel and holding down the command key, click on my path. Now you can see it's selected the path of the lamp shade. Now I'm going to go back to my layers panel, and I'm going to click on this icon down here, which will create a Layer Mask. There you can see it's applied the path. Now you have a mock-up. You can go back in to smart object and change the pattern, or you can apply color. You can do whatever you like. So you can keep that for future projects. There is a lamp shade file, this lamp shade file in your downloads. Feel free to use this for your work. It's free for you to use. It's just a photo lamp shade I've got at home. You can play with it and practice creating mock-ups and apply new designs and I'd love to see one in the projects area. 12. Final Words: Well, that's it from me for this class. Thank you for watching. I hope you got lots of new tips and techniques that you can use in your Photoshop designs. I would love to see them, so please post anything you create from this class in the new projects area. If you have any questions, post them in the community section and I will get back to you as soon as possible. If you are posting on Instagram or Facebook, please use the #melarmstrongskillshare, so I can see all your amazing work. Until next time, happy pattern-making. See you later. Bye.