Photoshop Patterns - Start to Finish

1. Intro: Forget the math. Forget the headaches. Repeats are fun now. It's easier than ever to create good repeats and photoshop. And today, I'm going to show you how. Hi, my name is Summer. I'm a textile designer and figurative watercolorist in Los Angeles, California. I went to school at Otis College Art Design for fashion design. And then a few years into fashion designing. Here in LA, I switched to textile design because it met my needs creatively much more. When I'm not designing, you can usually find me in the flower gardens here in LA. My other pastimes include painting and hanging out with my cat. I love to play VR games. I'm a huge fan of Beat Saber right now, and I am proud to say that I am on expert mode in almost all the maps. So that's important. I'm sure. Well avoid pattern design. They say there's too much math. You have to draw everything, or it just takes too long to create what you want. But that's not true anymore. Now I'm going to show you how to drop the math. Use collage and have the most efficient workflow. And on top of that, it's fun now. I sometimes call myself a lazy designer because I prefer efficiency overdoing things a long way, so I'll spend hours trying to find something to make my work faster. In this class, we're going to be creating patterns from concept to presentation. We're gonna do mood boards, then repeats, then mockups, and I'm going to show you the most efficient workflow so that you're thinking about the patterns you're making, the art you're creating, and not about the steps you're taking. It's easier than ever to create a good repeat because of the new technology available. Adobie capture will show you kaleidoscope prints. They are fun, easy and fast. We're going to go through photoshop pattern preview. This is where you get the math out of the equation. Get into the flow without worrying about the technical details. It makes pattern creation much more intuitive. And finally, I'm going to show you seamless. This is an amazing extension for photoshop, and it creates textures for use as standalone pieces or within our main repeats. We're going to reduce the time invested in each pattern and create quality, quantity, and consistency. Once you've done all this creation, we're going to refine your selection. You'll be creating so many prints that you'll be able to select the best to create the strongest collection possible. And then I'm going to show you how to create a presentation, make it look professional. Help your clients or art directors see the final project, make it easy to say yes. I'm going to show you how to create mockups that make that just easy as that. There's so many things. I just packed this class full of, and I can't wait to show you. So let's get started. Okay. 2. Project: So what exactly are we going to be doing in this class? Let me break it down. We start with moodboards, then we're going to move to prints and then mockups. That's because we go from concept through creation and into presentation. And with this method, your creative flow is going to have a great process. We're going to be creating a moodboard. And from that moodboard, we are going to create a hero print. And we're also going to create some coordinating prints and some textures. The textures can be used on their own. Sometimes they're called nothing prints or no-print prints. And they can also be used inside your hero print to add depth. So those are a very important addition, even though they're kind of a subtle and not as recognised, print style. We're also going to be doing mockups. I have some assets that you're going to be able to use for free! And they are awesome. So you're going to be able to present your work professionally, cleanly and beautifully. You're going to be start to finish on this, concept through presentation. So one more quick note, use your skill share project. I encourage you to post as you go. Put in your works in progress as well as your final project. You'll have a much fuller project at the end. And it will be amazing to see all the different things that you've come up with and developed through this one class. And I can't wait to see everything you do. So please, post often! Come back for the next bit where we're going to talk about the lingo you need to know for pattern design. 3. Definitions and File Setup: Let's go over some quick definitions you'll need and how to do a file set up for a print. Just a quick note. You don't have to know all of this right away. And you can always come back to this lesson. These are just things you're going to run into when you start doing surface design, and it helps a lot to know exactly what everybody's talking about when they say these words. What exactly is a repeat? I'm so glad you asked. A repeat is art that is created in a way where it has no discernible beginning or end. It goes to infinity. This makes repeats perfect for video game textures, website backgrounds, surface design, and textile design. The most common types of repeats. These names refer to how the repeat is organized or created, by the way, are straight, half drop or brick by column, window or brick by row, T, a stripe or plaid, and a diamond. Repeats can also be categorized by motif, such as the floral, the Cat, the Paisley, and the leopard. Many prints go by multiple names and can be categorized by type of motif or type of repeat. The kind of repeats we'll be learning are GOs Here's some examples of that. These can fit into several different types or categories. Toss. Here's some examples of that. These can be built as a straight repeat or a half drop repeat. Texture. These are also called a non print or nothing print. Here are some other options. These are mixed or multiple types of prints in one, such as a toss with geopils or a diamond with a toss on the top. You can basically combined any of the print types you like into new ideas. Motifs are the parts and pieces used inside of a repeat. They're also called elements or objects. In this print, the letter A is the motif. In this print, flowers and butterflies are the motifs. Scale, how large or small something is or to make something larger or smaller. Scale can refer to the entire print or to the individual motifs. This print is the original scale. This print is scaled 50% larger. You can see because the elements and the spacing are larger. You could scale only the elements inside or you can scale the entire print. Those are both options when you're talking about scale. Translation, the movement of a motif or section in a repeat. Think sliding to a new spot like this. Rotation, the turning of a motif or section in a repeat. Think clockwise or counterclockwise. Like this little duck. Reflection, the flipping of a motif or section in a repeat. Think mirrors. Reflections can be horizontal, Reflections can be vertical. Offset. When a section or motif is pushed vertically or horizontally around an artboard. This is the original motif placement, the art board, and this is when it gets offset wrapping when the contents of an artboard wrap to the other side. This is offsetting with wrap selected. Okay. So you can see on the left, it wrapped from left to right, and on the right, it wrapped into the four corners because once the motif is pushed up into the corner, in order for it to all stay on the artboard, it kind of pushes itself around to the other sides. Overflow. The parts of a repeat, not fully on the artboard. They are flowing the bounds. And this is what happens if you don't have a wrapping. So the right motif is offset, but there is no wrapping. And so you get overflow. Pattern breaks. The problem areas of a pattern where there is an obvious break or line in the repeat, a break in the flow of the pattern. You can see here, there's two major holes in this pattern. Otherwise, it's a pretty full pattern of paisleys. Obvious holes in the repeat. That's okay. I can fill them. Repeats are at their most basic what's called a Swiss repeat and offset with a fill in the center. If we think about our offset to the corners, then we have an open space in the middle. We just fill that and then we have a perfect repeat. Complicated repeats are often multiple textures and objects offset and layered as needed to create a seamless flow of art. Like this. This has several different layers that are offset and put on top of each other, different transparencies to create this very full and deep looking pattern. The steps are to use tools that allow you to see the repeat in full. Then you're going to place your motifs in a balanced way to create seamless art, add texture, hand drawing or shadow layers to create more interest. Test the repeat, fix it, tweak it, export it, and you're done. Ta. That is the most simple way to explain how to make a repeat. Now, let's talk about your document set up. You're going to start like this. 24 by 24 300 PRG B white background with no artboards. 24 " by 24 " is what you want to set your document size to. 300 PPI is pixels per inch. SRGB is your color mode. You want a white background so you can see what's going on, and you don't want any artboards because you only want to work on one for your if you don't understand that, that's okay. I'm going to leave a document that is exactly this setup. In the project area. Just remember, if you're doing small repeats, you don't need them to be 24 " by 24 ". And if you're doing super huge digital repeats, you can make them less than 300 PPI because it'll get too big for even the most amazing computers if you make the file too big. Keep in mind when working commercially. For screen prints, use even numbers. 24 " is good. There is a color max. For rotary printing. 25.25 " is your repeat size or any number evenly divisible by that, and there is a color max. For digital printing, there is no minimum or maximum size repeat. There is no color max. It can be expensive, but a lot of smaller brands prefer to do this because the minimums are lower, which means you can create without having to create so much and not being able to sell it. Okay. These are general guidelines. Always check with your print house and art director for specs before creating. These are super general for your basic screen rotary and digital printing methods. There's a bunch of little stuff in between there digital could mean two different kinds. It could be sublimation, or it could be true digital printing on fabric. So you need to know that kind of information and the easiest way to get that is to talk to your print hoouse or your art director and talk to your mills directly, you have a dialogue of what exactly specs they work best with and create around that for them and you will get the best work possible out of them. The set of file is located in the projects and resources tab underneath the video player, and you can just download that and use that. Make sure you tune in for the next video where we talk about finding inspiration. Okay. 4. Finding Inspiration: But I keep saying concepts are easy. But where does someone get all these good ideas? Well, let me tell you. I love clip art books. I collect them. I have them on hand all the time and when my brain is stuck, I like to look through and find pretty things to incorporate into my mood boards and into my final prints. I love going to the flower garden, florals for me are usually based on real flowers and combined with styles that are popular. If I'm trying to emulate a specific style from a time or aesthetic. Inspiration also come on pints If you don't spend hours on pints are you even really procrastinating Okay. That's my favorite way to procrastinate, and I just, you know, use the work I do there work that I do on Pinterest. Being in fashion means I have to keep up on the latest fashion shows. And that's fine by me. I love looking at this stuff because a lot of it feels like arts. And there are some amazing prints on some of these pieces of clothing, and that's really what I need to look at most. Studying the most recent shows will not only give you ideas for prints, but it's effective trend analysis, gives you an idea of what's coming in the next year into stores near you. Being up on what types of prints are favored by different fashion lines can really enhance your communication skills, especially if you're working in the fashion industry. Somebody says, I want this print to have a Pucciesqe feel or a Missoni feel, or I want to see something that resembles Etro. You know exactly what you're looking for. You can immediately go there. I need inspiration. Well, we all do. Here's some help. Vogue.com has all of the runway shows for free. That's right. Look at every show, every season, every designer you can think of, and you have all the images at your fingertips. They're really good ones, too. If you need specific direction, Etro for men has amazing paisleys. They're just an incredible brand for prints overall, a real powerhouse, and their men's line, especially is one of my favorite go to for really good print inspiration. Pucci has bright abstracts. The king of bright abstracts, really beautiful beautiful stuff, very happy, a little bit 60s vibe. Masoni is known for their chevrons. Again, a 50s 60s kind of brand. This multicolor chevron is famous. It's even called the Masoni Chevron. Okay. Armes has scarf prints. If you ever get a chance to go into me store and just see the artistry. They even call out who the designers are. This one was designed by Elin or. I can't tell you if I'm pronouncing that right, but the amazing artwork on these scarves are worth the trip into one of the stores to see them in person, and it's incredible inspiration for everything you can think of. There's a lot of detail and hand drawing and beautiful artwork involved in a lot of these prints, so it behooves you to study them and check them out and take inspiration from them. If you need more help, interest will always be there for you. Make all the boards. You know this already. I hope you know this already. Instagram, use bookmarks. You have collections now. I mean, it's just so easy. And if you need more Internet, here's some places I like to look. Be hands. Pattern bank has actual patterns from actual pattern designers available for you to see because they're for sale, so you can see what other designers are selling. Inspiration grid has some great stuff. On splash has a lot of great sources for textures or just really beautiful photos. I check them almost every day to see new photos that they have. Pattern observer, one of the best places on the Internet for really beautiful inspiration. If you're tired of the Internet, you're not the only one. Here's a quick tip. Take yourself on an artist date. Find inspiration and relax your brain at the same time. Here's a few ideas, flower gardens, hiking, shopping, museums, or architecture. These are just a few of the ideas that you can use, and I'm sure you can come up with 20 more. Use them all. Keep your well full. Don't let it run dry. Make sure you are constantly filling your inspiration well with the things around you. Enjoy, go to museums, see art shows. Do whatever you can do to continually keep the ideas flowing. It's when we restrict ourselves to only creating and not also refilling that well, that we hit blocks, that we get bored, that we get anxiety. So let's avoid all of that and really enjoy being the artists we are. Take ourselves on those dates, go shopping, go looking, open your eyes, and fill. Fill that thirsty, thirsty well with all the inspiration you can handle. Now that you're all full up with the good stuff, come back for the next video where we make these inspirations into a moodboard. 5. Moodboards: Moodboards are one of the most fun things about being a textile designer. You get to scour the Internet and call it work. You're on Tumblr and Pinterest for hours. It's basically free time that you can build for. Since you've already spent all this time collecting images and going to all these cool places and taking pictures. I suggest now is the time to put it together. I need you to concentrate on three things, specifically, theme, motifs and color. That's it. Don't over-complicate this. Moodboards should be fun. All right. Higher decided to concentrate on nautical for my theme. And I've created an entire Pinterest board and the things I like. So I've collected all my inspiration and now's the time to put it into either something as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. These are the abs I recommend for really good mood boards. I prefer Photoshop and pure red. Pure ref is very popular for artists and it can be made into a very quick and fast moodboard. Just pull your images in, sort them out, and you can even export that as a PNG. It's a popular tool because it's easy to use and it works on a Mac or PC. I prefer to use a combination of tools. I like to use pure RREF when I'm collecting. And then I export the images individually and put them together in Photoshop. I like to take my time and do something a little nice in Photoshop if it needs to be displayed or if anyone else is going to see it, select a matching font maybe. And I always try if it's for myself to put color stories. So Color Themes, stories, pallets, whatever you want to call them. Your color selection should be five colors. This is my finished moodboard. And as you can see, I've got four different colors stories on here, which is fine because you can design into any or all of them. And then really pleased with this, I think I've got some really good ideas to make into cool motifs for my prints. When you're done with your mood board, you're going to need export it so you can load it up into your project and also so you can send it in an email if you need to. This is really easy. All you're gonna do is use Quick Export to PNG. Just go to File Export and Quick Export as PNG. You'll also see under their Export Preferences and you can change where and how your quick export function works. And now I have a PNG I can upload or email to anyone. See you see me build my mood board. This is how you do yours. Just grab your images, organize them. I mean, that's really it is not difficult. Make sure you concentrate on your theme, your motifs, and your color. You only need three to five motifs if you have more than more the merrier, but three to five is plenty. And now, just post it to your Skillshare project. Be sure to join me in the next video, I'm gonna show you how to create motifs and colors, stories from this brand new mood board you just made. 6. Color and Motifs: So we have our wonderful mood board. What do we do next? Post it to your Skillshare project. Alright, your moodboard is posted to your Skillshare project. You're very proud of yourself - or you should be! Next step is to look at that moodboard and start brainstorming concepts for our prints. Now that we've got our mood board, Let's look at these ideas that we can get from it right away. I really like these paisleys, and I liked the idea of combining them with some shells. I also included a jellyfish, but I am really thinking about maybe doing an octopus. I'm also kind of obsessed with diver helmet and the anchor with ropes. I've been wanting to do something along those lines for a while. So using all of these elements, I'm probably going to create several prints. Motifs can be created. They can be bought, or they can be found. I tend to use clip art and my own drawings mostly when I'm working for a company, sometimes I'll source motifs from their previous prints that I know are popular. In this way, I ensure that the designers are going to like it from the beginning because it's already using pieces that they're already familiar with. And I can already check before I even start the print if it's something that they want to align with, do you want this Paisley to be similar to this other paisley? Do you want this floral to use some of these roses and maybe a couple of these from another couple of prints. And I can design different kinds of prints using the same motifs. This is why it's really good to start creating a motif collection. The hunt for motifs is never done. I love to draw motifs and I also use photo bashing techniques. So I'm often scrolling through the pictures, roses and flowers or whatever other motifs that I need. And I use those almost directly. Maybe I'll put a little effect on them or whatever it is. It's useful to remember that no technique is off-limits if it gives you the result that you want. That includes using Clip Art and that also means don't be afraid of buying your elements. Most companies use stock websites including Adobe Stock and Shutterstock. They're incredibly useful when you're short on time or short on brainpower. Just remember to respect copyright and use them within the limits that they are licensed. I know not everyone has the resources I do, but now you do. Here's some places to get copyright free elements and photos. Pixabay, Unsplash, one of my very favorites and Pexels. I especially love to go into clip art books. Dover has the best election in my opinion. And I love to use them for inspiration, not just sourcing elements, for good-quality elements and mock-ups that you can purchase. Creative Market, Shutterstock and Adobe stock are your best beds. These are the highest quality and the most bang for your buck. But they do cost bucks. Just remember if you're in a corporate environment, you might already have access to Shutterstock and Adobe Stock C. You might want to ask about those resources. Textures can be found at textures.com, free stock textures.com, and texture king.com. I know they all sound very similar. The other thing about these textures that you need to know is not just where to get them, but that a lot of them aren't in repeat. So what I'm going to show you about how to put textures and stuff into repeat comes into play here. So you don't want to have a beautiful pattern and then see like some weird seam just because you put a texture on it That's not in repeat. We'll fix that. Don't worry about it. Color stories. Sometimes you want to start with color first. Check out these locations for the best color stories I have found: colorhunt.co, color.adobe.com, canva.com/colors, labs.TinEye.com. This one is especially important because it lets you take colors from photographs. So if you have a photo you really like, you can find a ton of photographs that align with the colors you're looking for. And you can also find all the colors inside a photograph from this one website. coolors.co and colrd.com So these are great places to get color. Sometimes I like to look at color first and then develop ideas from that. And no way is the right way, just whichever way you enjoy the most. Go there, do that, do the things. Adobe libraries is basically like a little folder system that follows you between Adobe programs and any point you can open it up and grab pieces to work with. They're all in the cloud. So you can also share these with other people. It's an incredible libraries that, and if you're working as part of a team. You might want to all start adding two motif Libraries. If you don't know where to find your Adobe libraries, it's really easy. Just go up to Window on the top bar of Photoshop and scroll down to libraries and click. And there you go. It looks like a little bookmark in your sidebar here. And you can see I have a ton of libraries. And you can collect a lot of things inside of it. You can collect shapes, colors, some kinds of patterns, graphics, which means you can collect all your elements, including PNGs with transparent backgrounds. Make sure all your motifs are cleaned and ready to go. That means they need to be on a transparent background and cleaned up. We're not going to go over that in detail in this Skillshare, but there are plenty of Skillshare's out there showing you how to take your drawings and get them ready for a prince. Grab the elements that you decided to use. Whatever motifs, whether you found them are from your own pictures and clean them up, then put them into an Adobe library. You can use one that you already have. I'm creating a new one here for flower assets. Now let's use Adobe Capture and get these colors from the Moodboard into our libraries. This is going to be your first introduction to Adobe Capture. It's inside of Adobe Libraries at the very bottom there, just click on the plus and then hit Create from image. Make sure your moodboard is flattened and the layer is selected. Once the dialog box opens up, go to the third selection for color themes. Now it's just a matter of pulling all the dots over to the color bubbles that you've already put onto your moodboard. And you can create several of these. Just click Save to CC Libraries each time. This is a very sped up version, but you can see that I'm putting all three of my, while. I forgot I before I put all four of my color palettes directly into my CC library. And then I can access those colors at anytime. No matter what I'm working on, Adobe already puts a few mood options up at the top. You can see me clicking through and seeing what it decides was pretty inside the moodboard. And you can also use those as color palettes if you'd like. Once we're done, we just close that box and we can open up our libraries and see all of our color palettes right there. There'll be under, not grouped and you can group those later. You can also see as I scroll over each color, I can click on each color and it goes right into my swatches ready to use. So here's what to do next. Using your moodboard. Brainstorm several print concepts. Gathering, prep your motifs to develop those concepts. Save your motifs into your Adobe libraries, and save your color palettes using Adobe Capture. As an extra bonus, organize your Adobe libraries by motif type. And remember, you can do this with textures too. You can have text or libraries. This is a really great organizational tool. These libraries are a lifesaver. They have completely changed my design game. Anyway. Make sure you come back for the next video where I'm going to talk about my favorite thing in the entire course. Kaleidoscope prints. 7. Adobe Capture: This section is all about Little GOs, otherwise known as kaleidoscope prints. There's so much fun to create, and they're the basis for a lot of really beautiful pieces. So I wanted to show you the cool motifs that I was able to get for my project. This is one. It's based on a piece of clip art. And I did some drawing over the top. Here's another clip art piece from one of my books. These are all very nautical. This one is weird. I don't know if I'll end up using him, but I like him. He's neat. Here's a really beautiful piece. I really like this one. And I'm just dragging and dropping for you to see all the items that I got. I'm just dragging it right from my libraries on in here. You can see with the x that it's linked. This isn't a rasterize layer. It's linked back into the cloud. You see a little cloud on the square? It's linked back into the libraries. So it's a funny little upside down octopus. I sped this part up right here because I'm just showing you all the cool stuff that I'm using as motifs or I have as options for motifs. Lots of nautical things, mostly clip art. I did draw a couple things, but you're going to see them in just a second. And I drew an anchor and edit it and made it look really nice. I also drew this from some of the reference that I pulled. I thought it looks really cool. I don't think I want to use this motif in this lesson, but I wanted to show you all the different motifs I collected, and I'm definitely not going to use them all, but having them all at the ready makes it a lot easier to move forward. I want to show you how to create a bunch of patterns from all these motifs you collected really fast because it's important to get the feeling of just knocking stuff out quickly. Those little winds will help you a lot as you go forward. And if you're in a rut or if you're having trouble with the pattern, you can always work on something else and come back to it. And I really like to play with these and just create a bunch of stuff I may never use, but they're fun to create and fun in the creation is the goal for me. I know that I create prints to sell and I know that I create prints for other people, especially for clients. But the only way that I can enjoy my work is to do these parts that are really fun. The process is fun, not just the ending, not just a pretty final piece, but the doing is fun. So let me show you how this can be really fun. Now, we have all our motifs laid out, and you can get to your libraries without having a document open in photoshop. You can just go up to window and click on libraries, and it'll pop up and you can open up like an element or whatever. But for this, it's easier to just find a document and lay your elements onto it. And I know that I want to use a color from the color palette for the background. So I'm actually going to make an object, a big rectangle in the back. Let's open up our libraries, and I'm going to make it that color, I think. Or maybe maybe that color. That is really pretty with all the elements on top of it and stuff. These are both really pretty. This is kind of really nice. Okay, let's just go with this. That's fine. So we have a background color. We have a bunch of elements thrown in here. We're not going to use all of them. But we can just play however we want. And I just like to throw them all on here to see kind of what happens and what I get. And for the purpose of this, we're just going to flatten the file. The only purpose of this entire document is to create these little images, so we don't have to worry about flattening it. It's not a big deal. Okay, so we have our image flattened. We've double clicked it to make sure it's the working layer. Make sure it's selected, hit plus. You see you have several options. Hit create from image. And boom, a box opens up. You're going to expand this to the full size that you can, and you can see it looks very complicated. So we're just going to scale up so you can see what's going on. Some weird stuff. Whatever is in the box here is where it's going to pull the pattern from, and you can see up at the top, you have five options for patterns. And remember, we went to color themes before, but we're going to stay on the first one patterns here, and you can always create things from other documents you have, or once you've created other prints, you can create stuff from that. This is so weird looking. But to change what you have here, just drag in this box here on the right. You can drag it and see that looks really interesting. So really interesting patterns to start popping up. Anytime you see something you like, click on Save to CC Libraries. And I'm going to do that probably a lot. This is on the Morale which I may or may not use in my final piece. So I'm going to scale back a little bit and move into some other elements that I like a little better that I may use more readily. You can see how the elements start to combine in here. You can also rotate this. I mean, it's like a kaleidoscope. And I call these kaleidoscope prints for that very reason. They are just incredibly fun to work with. Now we're in that shell and the morale combined, which is interesting. If we scale back, we can see that in our little box over here. And this is the time to play. Once you're through with one or if you just want to move around and explore a little bit, just click on the different buttons on the top. This one is a fantastic one for creating cool stripes. You can always take these patterns later and cut them up and use them differently. Now, I just want you to click through and play. I am going to play as well. I'm going to do this into a time lapse for you. And just anytime you see things you like, remember to click on Save to CC Libraries, and you're going to end up with so many cool things. It's just going to blow your mind, I bet. If you do quilting collections, what you'll usually need is a hero print and several supporting prints. And that hero prints, that's right. It can serve as your base print for a bunch of these, which can be your supporting prints. And just, you know, move it around, rotate it, play with it, scale it up, scale it down, see if you find anything you like in there. And you're going to get all kinds of weird things. So, you know, You don't have to save all of it, and sometimes you may not get anything you really like out of it, or maybe you'll get some really cool stuff that doesn't actually go with your collection, and that's fine. You can save these for other things. A quick thing to note, if you're not liking the colors you're getting, you can always go over down here to gray scale. And then you can literally just work by value as opposed to working with color. And this can give you a better idea of what the piece might look like in any color because it's literally just black and white. And that way, if you're like, this is ugly, You can be neutral about it on the color and create some really interesting things from areas that otherwise might not hold your interest at all. When you're done, just hit close. And I've decided I am not really keen on some of this, so I'm going to rework the elements, maybe put them down in a different order or shape. Now it's time to flatten everything and get back to work. So I made a ton of prints. They're called capture patterns. And once you've closed out the box where you're creating them, they'll be right here in whatever library you had open. I had nautical skill share open, so they're right here at the bottom of the capture patterns. And to see what they look like, I just have my pattern, my layer selected, and I just click on it once, and it gives me a pattern fill over the top, using that pattern, and I can scale it up to see what it looks like. And I can do this over and over with all the patterns that I created to see which ones I really want to keep. Because the key to this is obviously to create a ton. Quantity will give you quality. You can just check them out, see which ones look good. Some of them will not look great. That one I don't like. Okay. That's totally normal. It's totally par for the course, so don't expect everything to die for. This one looks really strange. I mean, you're not everyone is going to be a winner. And sometimes you'll have some elements that just give you killer after killer I really like that. That's super cute. So I didn't like this one though. So I'm just going to delete it. And I didn't like That one, it looks really weird, so I'm just going to delete it and we can look at some of these other ones. You can go through all of yours and see which ones you like. Which ones have a cool feel to them, even if it's not something you'll use right away in this project, might be something that's perfect for another project if you just reclored it. Remember to keep your simple ones too, because they can be very, very beneficial. It doesn't have to be over complicated to be a beautiful print. I'm just going to show you real quick the ones that I liked that we got out of this. There's a ton of great work here that I didn't have to work hard to get. I mean, these are really pretty, and a lot of them would work all by themselves, and keep that in mind. The work that you do does not have to be difficult to be good, which is a revelation to my younger self who thought that the only great work came with lots and lots and lots of struggle. It's just not true. These are all fantastic, and they were really fun to create. The hard was not in the work. So I made a ton of prints with all of the main prints that I created, and I ended up with so many kaleidoscope prints that I was able to pick and choose which ones are really the prettiest. And that's a real key to creativity is having a multitude of creations to select only the best from. It can be difficult prints takes so long to create, but not with this kaleidoscope thing. It's like a shortcut. One thing I forgot to mention about these kaleidoscope prints is their uses also extend into filling other shapes in bigger prints. So here's an example of where I did that. And you can see that the fish, the background, and the shell are all different prints. Now it's your turn to play with this. Grab your motifs, combine into a flat document and create a ton of prints. And then, I think you know what comes next. Post your phase into your skill share project. Try playing with these different things. Try making stripes. Try some color variations and try to get as many as you can, and try some different comboses of motifs. This can make all the difference. Once everything's posted, make sure you join me for the next class because I'm going to show you exactly how to use Photoshops pattern preview. Okay. 8. Pattern Preview: Let's talk about pattern preview in photoshop. This is going to make your patterns come together really quickly. It's the secret behind fast pattern making and photoshop, and it helps you avoid pattern breaks and hot spots. Let's talk really quickly about what those are so you can learn to avoid them as you put your patterns together. All right. So really quickly, I'm going to show you in this image that I have up. The left image of the sweatshirt has a very nice poco dot pattern. It's pleasing to the eye. It just kind of rolls through it. It feels complete. You're not finding a lot of holes where your eye just sits and doesn't know where to go next. As opposed to the T shirt on the right, It has a scattered poka dot pattern, but these holes in it are so big, and some of the items are so much closer to each other than others, and there's no intentional movement. These are what I'm calling hot spots and pattern breaks. So like, you see the two poka dots on the bottom left that I'm circling. Those two are too close together. That would be kind of a hot spot, or where you have, like a lot of these large dots together. It's kind of a hot spot where you'd want them more spread out. So it feels like they're everywhere and not just in one spot drawing all your attention. That's what it means by a hot spot. It's drawing all your attention to that one spot, and these are pattern breaks. So you can see the obvious break in the pattern right here, right here. Along the top, right through the armpits and through the mid section down here. And you can see exactly where the pattern hits. Like, I could draw you a square of exactly what this pattern is in here. And actually, you can do the same on the left one, but it's a lot harder to pick out unless you're a print designer, where that repeat sits. So the goal is to get rid of things like pattern brakes and hot spots so that it feels more comfortable and beautiful to the eye. Now I'm going to give you a quick walk through of Pattern Preview and how to use it with smart objects. I'm going to walk you through pattern preview, and I'm going to talk to you about smart objects, what they are, how they work, and why they're so important to use in pattern preview. I have the anchor from our elements that I created, so I'm just going to take that and drop it into the file, and let me show you how these work. If you take something from your libraries and you drop it into a file and it has the x and you hit Enter to embed it, it's still immediately linked over almost like a symbol. So if you were to say, have a bunch of these, right, and they all have the cloud. If you change the definition of this anchor, You put an inversion on it, okay? And you save that? Anywhere that that is linked, it now changes it much like a symbol in illustrator. So let's go ahead and take that inversion off. Okay. And resave. So now we're back to normal. And that's a really important point to make because this is the same way that smart objects work. Only they're not linked into your Adobe library, they're linked into the file where they exist. Let's take away all but the original of this anchor. And you see how it still has the cloud. We can unlink this really quickly to make it more malleable for us. I prefer to unlink these from my Adobe library when I'm creating patterns. So just link it and convert to layers. And the other way to do this would be to see it in your Adobe library, right click and hit place layers. And then you can see it's not linked anymore. So either place it as a layer or convert it to a layer once you've placed it in your document. Let's just delete that one. Now we have this anchor. It's a flat layer in our document. And I'm going to duplicate it, and I'm going to make this copy into a smart object. And I'm going to show you how they work. Now, let's say we're doing a really simple pattern here. We have our two pretty things, and let's put this ocean texture behind it. It's already in repeat and everything. See how that's linked. All you got to do is right click and hit convert to layers. And then just hit yes on whatever the next menu is that pops up. And I'm just going to expand this to exactly the size of my tile and put it at the bottom of the stack. Now we have these two on top of it. They look a little funny in color. We'll take this opacity down to like. There. So we have these anchors. We just want them to be fun. The way that we used to check patterns was you can define something as a pattern right in here, just hit plus. And then you could create a new file like maybe you just create an 11 by 17 file to test according to a scale that you're familiar with. Okay, sure. Then you would create a pattern fill on it. So you could see what your pattern look like, and you could see that there's a funky little pattern and you can take the scale down or whatever. And that's how you would test your pattern and you go, Okay, that's a funky little pattern. That's not very pretty. So then you would go back and create tile after tile after tile to check and recheck your pattern. But now, all you have to do is go to view pattern preview, and you can see the exact same thing from the beginning. You can see what your pattern tile looks like, which is great because you can say this is funky, I don't like it. You can say, I want this to be a different color. Maybe it's like gray. That'd be kind of interesting. It's just a gray anchor. Okay. And then we have our other one. So now we know the difference. This one is our regular anchor and this one is our smart object anchor, and you can see that's highlighted. It's got a little corner, this is smart object. This one is regular. And you can turn any layer into a smart object by right clicking and going to convert to smart object. But we already have this one is a smart object. So let me show you what happens in pattern preview between regular layers and smart object layers. Adobe recommends using smart object layers because they behave correctly in pattern preview, and this is what I mean by that. When used with Adobe's print preview tool, smart objects automatically wrap around the artboard, making repeats really easy. We can then define a repeat and use it as a fill anywhere. If we bring it to the corner, we see that as it goes over the edge of the artboard, which is defined by the blue line, it wraps correctly. And that means that it goes across the edge, and it looks just the way it's supposed to. It matches. Everything looks good. Well, that's great. We want that behavior. Let's look at the normal anchor that is just a pixel layer. When using raster layer and not a smart object in print preview, any elements that overflow across the artboard do wrap, but are essentially cut in half at the edge. Scaling or rotating the element after this becomes a nightmare. This is not a smart object. It's a very dumb object. We have our poor little anchor, so sad, and we take it over. Wait, it's working, right? Oh, it's behaving correctly. Well, what's the real problem? Well, when we take our smart anchor to the side, we can also scale it. Let's just scale it larger and rotate it. Now we've rotated and we've even put it on the corner. Yeah, cool. Well, let's pull that back just so we can see what happens with our poor little dumb anchor, our poor little dumb anchor, we're going to take it to the side, and we're going to scale it. Well, that doesn't work properly. Well, what if we don't want it to be any bigger? We'll just not scale it. That's fine. But we do want to tilt it because it just looks so boring there. So if you tilt it here on the inside, It does something weird because we've already taken it over this side, and it breaks apart the edges of the anchor and makes it into multiple anchors. And you can see how this works. Just hit Enter. When you look at the object bounding box, it just got huge. It's like, it doesn't stay consistent. It's very strange. So let me just grab this anchor and show you what happens if I try and rotate it. All kinds of weird things. I mean, it kind of looks okay if you can get it at exactly 90 degrees. But otherwise, you're in for just a crazy time. And let's just pretend you're like, I don't know what I just did, and you hit Enter. You anchor is a little broken now. Let's just command Z or control Z to undo and go back to our normal anchor in our normal little timeline. Hello, little anchor, and it seems to be fine, and it rotates fine as long as you keep it inside the bounds and never take it outside of the bounds. But that's not what we want to do. We want to be able to manipulate these endlessly. So right click and convert to smart object, and now you can treat it like you did your other anchor. But, bah bah, you can trage it endlessly and it looks really cool. Now we can also see how to balance this pattern and see, that looks cool there. I think that this is still a funny color. Let's go ahead and change it. Maybe we'll put a gradient map on there. Yeah, I'm just going to set it to only apply to this layer. So now we have a light gray anchor and a dark gray inchor and that looks pretty cool. I like it over the ocean. It looks neat. So I've added a couple of ropes to this just to make it look cool. And I'm going to show you something kind of interesting here. We have these as smart objects. But our ropes are not smart objects. So we're going to make those smart objects really quick. Remember, all you have to do is click on the layer and right click convert to smart object. So I'm going to these and group. We'll move this group up a bit in this group. Maybe this group is just over some and this one is up a little here. Yeah, I just want to them over the side so you can see what we'll run into. So we think that we're all good because we've got smart objects, and we've got a semi balanced, very simple repeat here. This isn't anything to write home about, but it works as a repeat. The problem lies in see how this is crossing over here and this is crossing over left to right, like it should. When we take off pattern preview, The things don't cross anymore like they're supposed to. Things just disappear. When removing the print preview, the object wrap on smart objects disappears. This makes having a finished layered TIF file usable in older versions of Photoshop or in other programs impossible. This is where fixing the overflow is really important. This is also really important when working with other people that might need to touch the file because they won't necessarily use the same procedures that you do, and it still needs to work for them. So if you're in pattern preview, all you have to do is define this as a pattern by opening up your pattern swatches. I have so many opening up your pattern swatches and just hitting plus. And yes, there's your repeat. But you don't want this as just a flat file because you may want to go in and work on it again later, or you may be passing it off to somebody who is not going to be working with pattern preview the way you do and they need everything to look right and tied even when it's not in pattern preview mode, especially if you're working with people that are in older versions of Photoshop, this can become a real problem because you need a layered view for them. Don't worry. There's a solution for this, and I'm going to show you how to use seamless to make it happen. Here's what you do next. Using elements you've already created, make a new document and open pattern preview. Get a feel for how things work in it. Experiment with raster and smart objects to understand how they behave, and make a simple repeat with or without a background, using pattern preview. Make it balanced and even. And then, of course, you know, I want you to post that in your Skillshare project. This is a great time to play and enjoy yourself and just kind of fuss around with it. There's nothing at stake here. You know, you don't have to post it in your Skillshare project, and you can make really silly stuff. I mean, nobody's checking in on us, right? We can do whatever we want. That is the joy of creating work on your own. So once you've created all this work and had a lot of fun, make sure you join me for the next vid because I'm going to show you how to use the Seamless extension, and you're going to fall in love with it just like I did. I know you will. 9. Seamless Extension: Let's talk about seamless. Seamless is an extension that you can put into photoshop. It works wonderfully by basically running scripts as you push buttons to get you effects that already exist in photoshop, but much faster and without having to do the math in your head. This is great because I don't like doing math in my head. Okay. Your workflow speeds up for obvious reasons, and I love to use seamless to create textures. Textures are an essential part of surface design. As I'm sure anybody who has been doing any amount of surface design probably knows. It's very easy to create a very flat repeat without a lot of depth, and it can be difficult to create something that feels like it has some personality without texture. Using texture is a fast and easy way to give it some depth, some feeling, and some flow. So before we had Pattern Preview, I was always on the search for something to do, basically what it did and help me create patterns more quickly and more flawlessly. And I found this amazing extension. It does a lot of things that Pattern Preview doesn't do. As pattern preview is kind of a one trick pony. It does one thing for you and that thing is excellent. But there's a lot that it doesn't do, and this is where this extension can really pick up the slack. So this extension is called Seamless, and it is really, really, really good on its own. You can buy it with a bunch of other extensions if you find those useful for you as well. But if you look in here, you can see it has two use cases. You can use it to toss patterns or you can make texture patterns, and you can see it has the ability to toss patterns pretty well. But we're not going to go over that one so much today. The function that we're really interested in most is texture. So the really cool thing about this is the way it works to create a really good repeat and texture. And I'm going to show you exactly how that works. So you can see some use cases that they've done here of texture and tossing elements and that kind of thing. But we are most interested in the texture part because we can create really great elements for underneath our major repeats. So you can see it has the option to merge all the layers, flat in the light, so you don't have vignetting flat in the colors. So you don't see a lot of that variation. It feels more like a true texture underneath. Invert the edges, which is an offset. It does a perfect centered offset with one button, and it does an auto patch of the x that that offset would create. And you can also make that auto patch larger or smaller. You can also split the thing into four if you need to, which I don't know what the use for that would be, but you can do that as well. So let me show you how I have used it, and you can decide if this is something you want. As you can see, there's an installation guide. It's straightforward and easy. If you have any problems, just reach out to the person who made the extension. This is how I use this tool. I'll open up a texture picture that I have. This is of leaves on the ground from the last time I went out taking pictures. And if you look at this in pattern preview, you can see that the repeat isn't great. So pattern preview doesn't really offer a way to fix this. So we're going to open up our seamless panel. And it's a little circle with the waves through it on the right hand side. We just click on that and it opens up, and we're going to need to offset it. And they call this inverting the edges. So that's what we're going to do, and we can see that the repeat isn't bad, but it's not perfect. So all we need to do is click the button that says auto patch and automatically, a cross shaped auto patch of 50 pixels wide in both directions automatically fills. It does a beautiful job at cleaning it up, and if you need a bigger size, you can change the size of the auto patch. I usually change it to 100 if it doesn't work at the 50. Then what we do is we just go in and patch it up by hand, anything that's not quite working right or that we don't like. You can always use pattern preview while you're using this other tool. So it doesn't have to be an either or thing. It can be a both until it's the best type thing. So as you can see here, I'm using the stamp tool to kind of go over things and you want to make sure you merge the layers before you do this because otherwise, you're going to get some funny effects. But you can see I'm using the stamp tool, and it's working really well to kind of bring everything in. The only problem is we have some discoloration that kind of makes the whole thing You'll be able to see the repeat really well, which is not what you want with a texture. A texture should have a very, very clean, invisible repeat to it because you don't want it to distract from anything that you put on top. And because it's such a homogenous type of repeat, you can see any problems almost instantaneously, unlike a very busy repeat that might hide it more. So our next step here is going to be to flatten the light. You have a lot of colors going on here, and it can really make it difficult to make a full seamless repeat if these values of high and low become too prominent and your eye is drawn to those areas. All we have to do is click on this button that says, flatten light. And right away, you'll see layers forming in the layers panel. You'll also have a little pop up to let you know how flat you want the colors. And the repeat starts to look much cleaner, much more homogeneous, much more like a texture. It doesn't distract your eye. Now, pay attention because this is a really important part. I'm going to check the pattern by clicking preview. And all of a sudden, it gives me a pattern fill of exactly what's on my screen at 30%. So I can see if the pattern looks as good, as I think it does. From a little further back than pattern preview would give me. So I'm just looking at this. Do I like it? Do I not like it? I can change the scale to see how it looks in different sizes. And this is what I would use before pattern preview was a thing. And I still use this occasionally instead because it makes it smaller than real size. So I'm looking here to see if flattening the light really did the work that I wanted it to do, and you can see it did. You can see the problematic nature of the print beforehand, the lines, the problems with certain values drawing your eye too much before we flattened the light. So now we can go back here and fix any problems that we see. And I have the flattened color layer off right here so I can really kind of do some true touch ups. So I decided I like the repeat. I've also played here. As you can see, there's a little folder that says flattened light. So I tried out the flattened light and the flattened color and decided that I liked the flattened light version better. So now all I got to do is make this into a repeat, and I can put this underneath any pattern I want to create, and I already have a good base for my pattern. Here's another quick example where I took something that would traditionally just be a normal picture. Took the texture out of it and made that into a repeat unto itself. This is a standalone repeat. I made it into a camo. Let's look how that's done. Basically, I'm going to take the picture and I'm going to crop it into the usable area. Make sure that when you crop your image, you have the delete cropped pixels box checked. Then you're going to just invert your edges like we did last time. Just click on the button that says invert edges and you'll have a perfect offset image. Because this one has a very different, very obvious cross in the middle, I'm going to change my auto patch to 100 pixels. The auto patch here isn't fantastic. It does some of the work, but there's still a lot to be done. And I try flattening the colors and try putting a flattened light filter on top of it, but they're just not doing what I want them to do. So I take them off. Or just take the eyeball off of them, and then I start working on making the texture look good by using the stamp tool. That's my secret weapon. And the cool thing is you can take the stamp tool and make it either a hard edge or a soft edge. For the other one, I use a hard edge because the leaves are all sharp, and if you had a lot of soft edges, that would have stood out. But this has a lot of softness to the image in the background, and if I use soft edges, it will look better to merge. So I'm using a soft edge brush with my stamp tool to create a clean repeat. So I sped this part up extensively. So you don't have to sit through all the edits that I made because I did this for a while. A lot of using the stamp and clone tools and just going through and adjusting things. And I used the preview hide preview tool a lot, and I even used the pattern preview to th here. So you'll see some of that pop up throughout. And it's really important to know that I don't confine myself to one tool or the other. I use the entire range of adobe photoshop as I create my prints. You'll see some dodge and burn tool in here. You'll see. I just pulled out the entire kit of tools that I have at my disposal and made things really work. I even changed the size and resolution of this to make it really match a textile design because you don't need them to be gigantic and 300 DPI, but they don't need to be you know, 50 by 50702 DPI. That doesn't work either. So I made it an appropriate size for a textile design. And then I went in here and did something really, really awesome that you can do to make your colors work better, and this is a hot tip. My colors were too many, and my flattened colors and flatten light weren't working, so I put a gradient map on top. That's right. Gradient maps can help you reduce color when you're doing textile design. Just pick two or three colors, and you can even index into just those colors. I ended up loving the color combination at the end, and I actually made two other color ways of this textured print that will be cameo prints for winter and for fall. Because I'm well aware, you're not going to be just using pictures you took from outside. Here's a quick walk through of a texture that I pulled from a free website, and I made into a really wonderful texture that gives a lot of depth underneath a print I made. So you can see I'm using all the tools we already went over, and I've sped this up a lot, but it's very fast to do. And it just works. It just creates a gorgeous texture underneath. So I know in the previous lesson, I told you I was going to show you how to fix pattern overflow when you have things in pattern preview, but You know that once you take pattern preview off, those overflows are going to be evident because you won't be able to see them anymore. So if we go to view here, we take pattern preview off, you see that the smart objects, you can see right here that there are smart objects that are crossing over the bounding box are not wrapping because the wrapping only seems to work when pattern preview is on, which is fine except when we need to pass our stuff off to somebody else. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to take off pattern preview. And we see right here, I have group one and group two. Group one is the top anchor, and group two is a side anchor. And I have seamless open right here. And before we were in the texture pattern panel right here, and we just click this other tab that says element pattern. And we can see it says, apply to the following layers selected, top level, or all. And you can fix overflow or remove. So fixing the overflow will create overflow copies and removing the overflow will obviously remove those copies. This is pretty simple. We're not going to deal with the shuffling stuff down here or the spreads because that is more about creating a pattern when you don't already have one. We already have one. We've already created one. We just need to fix the overflow in the pieces that are here. So I want you to select both of these. So you can see I have group one and group two selected, and you just click fix overflow and you let it do its thing and it does copies to either side and up and down. It also links them. Look at this. Group one is now linked, and the name for this is shifted bottom and this one is shifted right, so you can see that the shifted right one is this one over here, and this one, the shifted bottom one is that one right there. Now, it looks right here, and to test this, you can just hit preview in seamless and it'll show you the little pattern preview, like I was showing you before. So if we, for instance, took off the copies, and then try preview again, you'd see it's all broken. But once we turn our copies on and we hit preview, it's perfect again. We hide preview. Let's look at it again in pattern preview. It still looks perfect. It's actually a little darker in some areas because they think it's duplicating the layer, but that's not a problem. Because you can just flatten it right here and this is your tile as well. This is the better way to use it if you are working commercially or with other people. If you're not doing that, then you don't even have to know this part, because if you're just giving people flat artwork, then they don't need to know how to adjust it and they don't need access to your elements. But most people that work in the industry prefer to give layered files when they're selling their artwork, especially for color correction, having separate layers is very helpful. So that's how to fix the overflow problem. That's it right there. And if we hit remove, we see it takes away all the overflow copies, which is what I was telling you. So if we fix overflow again, if we just do top level, it does actually everything, including the ocean texture, which it didn't need to do. But see, this is the same as we had before. It just fixed everything left to right and top to bottom. Bingo, we're done is really that easy. This is such a one click wonder over here. All right, let's get you using this solution. First of all, you're going to need to download the extension. The link is in the project resources tab below the video player. Next, check out the texture sources provided in the Motifs lesson or find your own textures, whatever you are more comfortable with. Then create texture repeats using the Seamless extension, playing with light and color flattening. That can be a real game changer. And see if you can make one repeat for a background and one that's good enough to be its own pattern. And of course, you know what I'm going to tell you now. Post it in your skill share project. I can't wait to see everything you're doing. I am so excited to discuss with you how you're liking these new tools in your toolbox and if they're helping you. So please post your stuff. And then come and join me for the next lesson where we're going to be creating our print our hero print. 10. Hero Repeat: Okay. Ready to take on the big repeat. Let's go. Just a quick warning. The next time lapse videos do feature some flashing lights. Please do not watch if you're epileptic or have problems with visual flashing lights. Instead, I suggest you listen in audio only mode. But you will get all the information you need to continue your pattern journey. All right. Welcome back. Here's where we're going to get into the hero print. You already know the skills that you're going to need to do this. It's just a matter of putting them all together and making something you really enjoy in love. To start, you're going to pull out the elements that you like best and put them on your Canvas and then turn them into smart objects. As you can see, I've done that here. I've pulled in a ton of elements, and this is going to be in super fast forward because it took me several hours to do this. But I put them all in here. I put a texture of an ocean that I liked underneath it. And then I just started building it out, moving things around, playing with color, just whatever I wanted to do. And this is the fun part. And you'll see a lot of, like, flashing in the video, and that's me just kind of doing and doing things to see if I liked the decisions I made. And that's something I do a lot. Do I like what I just did? I don't know. With without With without. It's like an eye doctor appointment, A, B, whatever. And I'm just going through and coming up with ideas on what I want to do with it. I don't really know yet. I know I wanted to do some pretty shells and some fish. I like the idea of a school of fish, which was interesting to me, but I felt like they stood out too much. So I changed up the color. And I'm just working with making sure the repeat looks good from far away and close. I put another texture over the top. I like things to be very textual, and I was like, You know what? That octopus idea. I can't let it go. So I got the big octopus out and decided to change the color up, so it would fit better with what I was trying to do. I didn't want to stand out too much. It all needs to look cohesive and beautiful but not too disparate, you know. And then I got to this point, I'd saved it, by the way, Save your work And I decided, I'm going to change this into a whole different print. It's just too much it's too busy. I have a habit of making things very busy. I like that. But I know it's easier on the eye to have a more simplistic pattern. So I went back in and I was like shells and pretty things in the ocean. And that's kind of where I started to develop the second print. And you don't have to do anything all in one shot. You can do one print, go into the second one like I did here, go back to the first one. Change things, fix things. It's much easier, usually, to have several prints working at once, so you can move back and forth between them. In this way, you give your mind time to rest and do thinking that's not conscious. You want your unconscious to have time to work on the problems that you're doing also. Give your whole brain a chance at it. And the way best to do this is to work on multiple projects. So while you're working on this other project, In your conscious brain, you're unconscious is still working on whether or not you liked the other project or how you can change that. And this is where ideas like going to do the dishes or taking a shower or just chilling for a while is really important as an artist because it lets your brain do the work for you. If you just sit here and plug away at it for hours and hours, you might come up with something great. But it may also burn you out. So the chance to work on other things and really kind of cross pollinate with other ideas is important for my work. So I usually here, I was like, I want the octopus again, but I didn't want the octopus like in its full glory. I just wanted little pieces of it. This is supposed to be a much more feminine print for me. Very pretty and kind of flowery almost with the paisleys and stuff. And so these would almost look like little curly cues stuck in. And that's really where I wanted to go with this. And you'll see I'm messing with color a lot. I could have gone in a lot of directions with this, and I decided to kind of go into blues with it. I really liked these kind of reddish blues that I was getting. Okay. You've seen me take on two major repeats now and complete them. They're saved in my patterns palettes, we're ready for next steps. But what happens when things don't go that quickly and smoothly? What happens when you can't get it to come together or you keep having hot spots or color problems or it just looks too busy or too sparse. This happens to all of us, and I'm going to show you a quick video of me failing miserably because I don't want you to feel alone if this happens to you and it will. It happens to all of us because if we did succeed at every single thing we did, it makes for a very boring career. I want to show you that I did fail at this the first time I tried, and then I'm going to show you what I came up with after I was done with trying to record it. After I was done with doing it in front of an audience on a live stream, and after I was done trying to fit it into a time frame that was suitable for camera. When I just did it on my own, noodling around and finally figured it out. The first thing I did here was I fixed a bunch of elements. I had drawn and painted some cool stuff. I scanned it in and I'm cleaning it up. So you can see me cleaning it up. I'm trying to get everything to look right. So I doctored up everything, using a lot of warp tools, puppet tools, anything I could do to make it look right. This is typical process for me. I'll clean up the elements and I'll spend a lot of time on it, and then I used a texture that I already had, and I made it into a perfect repeat using the texture fixing tools that I've already shown you. And then I decided that I needed this to be a brush. So I'm using a bunch of tools here to create brushes from these ropes because I want them to kind of loop around and do all this cool stuff. But I don't know quite what I want to do yet. So I didn't want to draw it by hand. I figured doing it in illustrator would be fine. And this took forever. So I am playing an illustrator right now. You can see, I'm making the brush. I'm fixing the brush. I'm tidying the brush, and then I'm making the brush work. And illustrator is jogging along like it usually does, telling me that I'm asking way too much from it. It's just a little program. Please don't expect so much. But I'm able to get some really beautiful twirly ropes and chains, which is what I wanted. So I go through here and I make all these cool ropes and chains, and then I've got to figure out how to get it back into photoshop without being too big. So I do that. I get it back into photoshop. I do some playing. And then I decided I wanted the whole thing. To have vapor wave elements. I'm like, Okay, vapor wave, I love vapor wave. Let's do the blues and the yellows and pop it all up. It'll be really cool. You can see I changed some of these to neon brights and everything. I didn't look great. It doesn't have a nice flow, and I'm feeling like I can force it to work. You know how sometimes if you just barrel through somehow it manages to get right, I never did with this. It just continually looked bad. The I was at the end of several hours with a very unattractive print. But that's not the end of the story. Once I had time to settle down, think about it a little more, I came up with this. That's right. That majorly frustrating few hours time got translated into some really beautiful prints. I thought about what shapes would work for a better repeat because I wasn't able to get a good flow. I thought about how to simplify the effects of the ropes and making them more into long lines instead of twirling around each other was much easier. And I thought about making the color palette much more calm, relaxing and sellable, and something that fit more in with my mood board. Sometimes when you go off on tangents like I did, you get a cool result and sometimes you just don't. In fact, a lot of times you just don't. There's a reason that we put all that time into planning and you can see how well it worked out here. Do you need a hero? Here's what to do. Drop your elements on a newly made document. Turn all your elements into smart objects and play around with them. Just keep playing and keep playing and keep playing. That's really the basis for all print making, and that's why I enjoy it so much. Remember to do these, balance your print. Check as you go. Zoom out if needed, or use a seamless preview tool, and then check again. And save your work, please save your work. Of course, you know what I'm going to tell you to do now. Share it with us. Post it in your skill share project. Check out other people's projects, too. It's amazing to see how different similar work can look in the hands of different people. I want to see it, please then come back and join me because I'm going to show you how to do mock ups where you can check your work and get it ready for a perfect presentation. 11. Mock-ups: Mock ups can make all the difference in your being viewed as a professional. We're professionals, June, are you done yet? Mock ups are really important part of my professional flow, and they could be a part of yours too. It can make all the difference when presenting to a client or an art director, and they can also help you in your creative process. I love to use them when I'm not quite done with things as I'm getting through the polishing part of the print because I can put something into a mock up and immediately see holes in the pattern I didn't see before. Scale issues. I can see color problems. Because a lot of times I do mock ups in twos or threes, I can see how things sit together and maybe rework from that point before I even show it to somebody else and make sure they sit together and more cohesively, more complementing each other as opposed to fighting each other or being too mundane and looking all the same. There's a lot of problems that can be fixed us seeing it in a garment. Adobe has a free mock up, and we're totally going to use it. It's pretty high quality, too. Nice. So the first thing you need for a mock up is the mockup file. And you're in luck, Adobe stock actually has a free one that you can download and it goes right into your libraries. So if you can see here, I've pulled it up and I will have that link for you on the what to do at the end of this video. But I want you to see here, all you have to do is click license for free. And I've already done this. So I'm going to show you where it resides in my Adobe libraries and how to use it now. So now we open Photoshop. And even though we don't have a document open, we can just go up to Window and to libraries and click on that and we'll open our libraries. Just give it a second to load. Now, I have this loaded up in Artwork things one. Because that's the library. I asked it to load into. It's my default library. If I look here, I see sweirt and T shirt mock ups, which is how it appears, and because it's a photoshop template, I can right click on it and go open new document. Boom, here's our thing. Here's our starter image. It's pretty easy to use has smart objects within it, and you can play around and change things as you need to. As you can see down here, the background element can be changed, and then it has a T shirt folder and a sweatshirt folder. It has a sweatshirt image you can change, is highlighted with red so you can see what to change here, and that has a smart object icon on the bottom right here of that layer. I can double click on it and open up the smart object and then create my artwork in here. This is especially good for placement prints. But if I'm going to put in a different kind pattern, I can just fill it right on top there. The problem with that is you can't change the scale. Let's try that again. Fill the layer with white. Then open up your pattern swatches, pick out whichever pattern you want to fill that with and do that. Then you can change the scale of the pattern. Right here, it's at 100. Let's bring it down to that might be a little small. 34. Because it's a smart object, you have to save it. And then it will update in your original document. As you can see, this smart object layer is on multiply, which is why you get this color the way it looks. If you changed it to normal, it would be on a white background. I would look really weird. So the multiply helps it blend in and look like it's a real sweatshirt. But I'm not a huge fan of the smart object layer. It doesn't let you play with it in real time, as well as I'd like. So I can double click on that and where I'd put a layer over the top in white, I'm going to leave that. But I'm going to disable this pattern fill. In fact, I'm going to delete it entirely and just hit save. Then we're going to go back here and as we see it has no pattern, we open up our pattern menu and click on whichever one we want. Let's try this one this time. That's way too big. Let's bring it down. See, I can play with it right in here and see exactly what's going on. I like it there. I'm just going to change the sweatshirt color real quick with levels. I wanted to be more of a white sweatshirt, keep the shadows in there. Maybe more of a light heather gray is nice, but not that medium. This is okay. I'm not quite sure that this is the pattern I want on top. Let's look at a couple of other ones. You can always just double click on that and change the pattern fill and it will keep the same scaling too. That's pretty cool. A lot of these patterns that I've done actually look pretty great on here. I played with a lot of different kinds of patterns, and you can see that not all of these are viable patterns. I really like this one on here. Let's leave that one. 20% looks okay, but let's talk about scaling. Knowing the scale of your mock up allows you to make your print look accurate. It lets you show how it will actually look when printed. The important thing about scaling is that you know the size of your mock up or how big it should be and the size of your actual repeat. And that way you can judge how many repeats should be within that scale. And since I know I can just measure it on myself that the top of the neck line to the bottom of the hem of a sweatshirt that I would want to see is around 21 ", and we're just going to say that's about the same for the T shirt. As you can see here, this shirt with this print, the print should be a little bit bigger than the sweatshirt at full scale. So we know that the repeat is bigger than 21 ". I think I have this one at 24, which makes sense that is bigger than the sweatshirt. So that's how we would judge it by eye inside our repeat. Now, let me show you what that looks like in practice. To make sure it's the correct scale. I know that this print is 24 " high. That means that when I pick and you can double click on this and then move it around inside your layer. When I pick this print, the top of let's say the inside of this swirl and the inside of this swirl should be 24 ". And since we know that this is 21 ", this scale is too small. So for accurate scale, mine needs to be at a little bigger even than that, at 35% is accurate scale. I know that with this resolution, any print that I do at this resolution should be at 35% scale inside of these mock ups to be accurate. Now, look, I know I tried to tell you that there wouldn't be any math, but if you make all your prints the same resolution, you only have to do the math here once, and that's almost as good as having no math at all. Now, I'm not really looking for it to be this big. I actually want it to be smaller. I liked it at 25, but I liked it better at around 30%. I think this is good. I think any bigger than this, and you lose some of the joy of this cool repeat. So I really like it at 30%, and it's pretty easy to gauge what your new scale size is here because you can just pull the top of this area to the top here. I would say it's probably 22 ". And that should do it. I mean, you can always print these out and hold them up to you to see what the scale should be for final scale. But this is a good idea to get an accurate assessment on a general idea of what you want the scale to be. I know that I want my actual scale to be a little smaller. And I'm pretty happy with how this looks inside of the piece. I don't want it on the rib because I'm not going to do printed rib. You could do matching color rib. That's something you can definitely do. But I like this how it is. It's a little weird and it's a little fun and I like that a lot. So let's come over here and do one for the T shirt. So you know how I told you we have to put that white layer in. Let me show you what happens when you don't put the white layer in. If you were to just put in a random artwork, it's going to fill in the words, which is cool, but it's not quite what we want here. It would actually be very cool, but we're going to not do that right now. We're just going to make a new layer and fill it with white and hit save, and this is the smart object layer for the T shirt. You can see right here. This is a T shirt, we'll close the shirt. Smart object layer, the one that's red on it, and we just put a white layer in there. And now we can Make sure that's actually on multiply and add whatever print we want. If I wanted to add this one, that might be pretty rad. It's very large right now. I know this is at the same resolution, so if I put this at 35% should be closer to accurate scale, which it is. This is a very good example of seeing some holes in a print. This isn't a print that I did for this project, but it's exactly what we need to see. When you see this, all I'm seeing here are lines of butterflies. See that line of butterflies right there and a hole in the middle. I either need to up the scale, so we don't see those problems with the repeat or I need to fix the repeat. This is a really important aspect of doing mock ups is finding problems like this. It's just either too small with a repeat like this. I should do a half drop with it, or I need to put more butterflies in the middle here or I need to enlarge it. Let's see what it looks like when I make it bigger, and by doing that, you would just up the scale to let's try 60. Then it actually looks fine. I don't feel like I need to go in and adjust anything at 60 or even 70 is pretty nice. It gives almost a place artwork feel. One of the things about that is if you're cutting random cut, you can pull this around inside and make several mockups to show how it could look in different random cuts, which could be important to your design director, if they don't want it to look bad, any way it's cut. If they say, actually, I don't really like it if it were to get cut here, it wouldn't look right. This is especially important for bikinis and that kind of thing because prints can land in unfortunate ways and create really bad looks for what you're trying to do. Okay. So for this, I'm going to change the T shirt color, and we are just going to actually pick a color off of here. But we're going to mask it so that it only affects what we haven't printed on. Let's change the color. That's really nice. That looks really good. So I'm really liking what this is doing right now. These are definitely not the pair that I would put together for a presentation, but you can see how each one works in its own way to make a really beautiful garment. I have an Adobe free mockup available for you. The link is in the project and resources panel below the video player. You should be able to find it without an issue. And now, I just need you to download either that mockup or another file of your choice. There's also skill share classes available that will show you how to make your own mock up. Whatever you want to do. Just take that mock up and insert your prints, making sure they're the right scale. And then you can test it, test the print by moving it around inside the mock up. Then you can make your final adjustments to scale, pattern, and color. Now, just go ahead and post it in your scale share project. That's right. Then come on back. Join me for the next class because we're going to go over how to make variations on your prints. 12. Variations: Creating multiple options and colorways is now fast and easy. There are essential for any print designer to be able to do quickly. They're going to ask for them. They wanted to see other colors. They want to see what it looks like, bigger or smaller or whatever. So let me show you how to get through that and get to a final approved file as fast as possible. There's a lot of options to create variation. So let's go over three main ones that I like to use. Scale, color, and echo. Scale is the first one we're gonna go over, is easily shown in printout and in mockup forms. You can really choose Either way to display it. Here it is, like you would see it in a printout. And here's how it would look in a mock-up. Mockup can sometimes work better if you're not working with your designer in-person. Color is the next one. You can create dozens of options is best to print it out because I can literally have 20 different color ways and there's a million ways to change color. We're not going to go over every single way to do all of these variations. I just want to tell you all the ways you can create variation and echo. This is similar to color in that I preferred to print these before doing mock-ups. It goes can create a very large or very subtle change that as interest. So like in this one, you have anchors that are playing on the bottom and on the top example, you have these white anchors that are echoed in the print. So you're literally taking some of your motifs, duplicating them in changing the transparency or the way that the layer sits on top of the other ones. In, in that way you create almost like an echo, a double shadow, whatever you wanna call it. And this can be a variation. And then you have your more simplified version underneath. And you have choices here. Motifs is a bonus way. I'm going to show you this one. Similar to color. I prefer to print these before doing mock-ups. That's because it's usually a very easy choice for the designer. Just removing a detail can change the look drastically. Look at this. The bottom one, in the top one are the same. There's just some elements removed. So if you're removing motifs are adding motifs. This is a very simple change and all you really have to do is print it out to show your designer. Now you have some ideas. So in your designer or client says, I like this, but I want to see some options. You know what to do. You can change any of these three asked them which they would like. And you look like a pro because guess what? You are. Now come to the next vid. Let's put this altogether into our final presentation. 13. Presentation: We're getting ready to present our prints. And these are the things we're going to need. In a physical presentation. I print everything out on 11 x 17 pages, on fine paper with a very good printer. So that's for a physical presentation, is pieces printed on 11 x 17. I can print out my mockups. I can print out the actual prints. I can show scale variations. And it makes it all very easy. But especially in these modern times, we're not always presenting in-person. That's when it's essential to be able to present digitally in a clean and professional manner. I usually put everything that I'm presenting into a single PDF and present it that way. That's going to include the actual artwork, the mockup, and anything else that I think might be relevant, including a mood board if my final prints match that, or if they've provided me with a mood board to start with. So this is probably the easiest part of anything we've done so far. All we need to do is first of all decide on our orientation for our presentation. And this is where our PDF remember. And you just need to decide if you're going portrait, landscape, which one of those two. And this should be letter size 8.5 by 11. If you're stateside, A4, if you're not. If you don't know, portrait, landscape, portrait is like you're drawing a portrait up and down. And landscape is like you're drawing landscapes side to side. So there you go. It's pretty easy from there. You can use almost any type of program that works for you as far as putting things in order and rearranging them to look of her presentation. For my presentation, I am doing this the easiest way I can in Photoshop. I created an 8.5 x 11 document in landscape because that's what I decided I wanted my PDF to be. And I created it with art boards. So I've already put my mood board in right here. And let's get in a little closer so you can see that. And it's actually, I created it in portrait size, so I just put another copy of it behind their enlarged it and blurred it. For the next one, I'm just going to drag my prinnts in here and make sure that they are the correct size. Have a bunch of my patterns here. I know that one. And that one are both in. I'm going to go ahead and put my mockups on at the same time so it can compare and contrast and arranging things. This is a pretty straight forward process. Now that I have this all set up and ready to go, all I have to do is go up to the top and go to File Export, Artboards to PDF. This is what pops up. We can change the destination. I do want it to be a multi-page document, a JPEG, so that's a decent quality right there. Include the ICC profile. I didn't change our board names, so no, I don't want to change that. And let me put this in here. Nautical print group. And then you just hit run and wait. And it's all done. Make sure you save this file too. So I opened my PDF in Adobe Acrobat. My pages are all messed up, so I'm just going to reorder them. All you gotta do is click the "organize pages" on the right-hand side and it lets you come into here and figure everything out. Now, I wanted this one to be group one and then just do the thing, you know, all done. And then just save it and close it. And this is how it looks. I labeled it set 1 -A, B, and then 2 - A, B. This makes it easy if the pages get separated or when somebody printed out, for them to figure out what's what. All right. Great job. This is another kind of presentation I just wanted to show you that I did with this project. I focused in on the bottom corner of my mood board and I just called it the Pink Sea. See, these are really beautiful pink looking prints that kind of all go together and have kind of a frilly yet nautical feel. It just goes to show that you can go almost anywhere with your creativity. You can pull disparate things together with a color story or with a theme. The ideas are limitless. There's just so much you can do. All right, your turn, go ahead and do your presentation loaded up to your project and come on back so I can say Thank you Before You Go! 14. Thank You!: We're at the end. And you should have an awesome project to show off. I can't wait to look through it and tell you how wonderful you've done. Because I know you're going to come up with some awesome things if you just follow the process is from the previous videos. So thank you so much for making it this far. I look forward to seeing you in the comments and project section, and in my next class. Have a great day.