Build Bold Patterns with Easy Layering Techniques in Photoshop - A Graphic Design For Lunch™ Class

1. Build Bold Patterns with Easy Layering Techniques in Photoshop - A Graphic Design For Lunch™ Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Skillshare class on making a layered pattern in Adobe Photoshop. I've chosen this doughnut design because it's simple enough for anybody to be able to make, and it lets me show you practical uses for some Photoshop tools such as warp and Puppet Warp, as well as how to make custom brushes and patterns and so much more. These are all valuable skills for you to add to your Photoshop tool kit. Now I'm going to teach this design step by step so that you can follow along and make your own pattern. And when you're done, simply upload it as your class project. I really hope that you'll enjoy this class as much as I have enjoyed putting it together for you. 2. Pt 1 - Draw the Donut: To start our pattern, we're going to start with a new document, and we're going to make a square document. I'm going to click here on New File. And I'm going to make a document 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels in size. Now, critically, you need to make sure that this artboards checkbox is not enabled. I've got mine enabled. That will not work. You have to make sure that this does not have a check mark here, or the process later on is not going to function. You're going to have to sort of unscramble the mess. So deselect the artboards and just click Create. I've already got a brown color selected here. Let me just cancel out of there. You will find a nice brown color in the Swatches panel in the darks area. So there's some browns there. There's also some browns here. So you can select whatever you like. Now, I'm going to the Ellipse tool here, the one that's in the shape area, and up here on the tool bar, I'm going to select pixels. And that means that this color is going to be the fill color we'll use. Before we draw our actual shape, we need to view our layers palette. I'm just pressing F seven, but you can go and choose Window and then layers. If we draw our circle now, it's going to go on the background. It's going to be very hard to get it away from there later on. We don't want to do that. I'm going to click the plus sign here to make a new layer for it. Now I'm just going to hold this chef key as I drag out a fairly good size sort of shape for my doughnut. A doughnut is going to look better if it's not a perfect circle, so I have my doughnut layer selected over here. I'm going to edit and then transform, and I'm coming down here to warp. Now, with the warp tool selected, you can see we've got a grid here, and we can drag on bits of this shape. We can drag on the shape itself, but we can also drag on these handles here. We can drag on these points. And all we're going to do is try and just tip this away from being a perfect circle. So we don't have something that is reading a little bit too accurately in terms of being a circle. It's going to look a bit more like a doughnut. I'll click up here because I'm done. We need to take a circle out of the middle of the doughnut for its hole. For this, I'm going to target this layer. I'm going up here to the elliptical marquee tool. It shares a tool by position with the rectangular marquee tool. I'm going to hold the shift key down as I start drawing my circle, but I'm going to make sure I don't let go of anything at this point. I'm going to add the space by by just pressing on it with my thumb, and that will allow me to position this shape, which is the hole in the doughnut wherever I want it to be. So I'm happy with it about there. Now I've let go of all the keys, and I'm just going to press the delete key to remove the middle of it. And now I just need to remove the selection here, so I'm going to select and then deselect. If you want to, you could go again and warp this or you could have saved your warping until now so that you could actually tip the middle of the shape a little bit and make it a little bit more interesting. So it's up to you to decide what you want to do, but that's a kind of fun tool, that warp tool. I kind of like it. 3. Pt 2 - Add the Icing: Make the icing for our doughnut, we're going to make a duplicate of the doughnut louse. I'm just going to drag it onto the plus sign here. I'm going to fill it with some pink color, so I'm going to select a pink color to use. I'm just going to swatches. It's just a little bit easier for me. I'm going to the paint bucket tool, and because I've got my top version of the doughnut selected, I can just drop the pink color in here. Now, it's gone over the top of the doughnut, so we want to sort of distort the pink color so that we can see parts of the doughnut. Now, we could use the warp tool. So with the layer selected, we could go back and choose, edit, and then transform and then warp. It's a tool that we're now familiar with, so we could just use it to try and make our icing look a little bit like it's placed on top of the doughnut. There's another tool that you can use, and that's called the Puppet Warp tool. Again, with this layer selected, we'll go to Edit and we'll go to Puppet Warp. Now, there's a couple of things about the puppet warp. The easiest way to use it is to think that the first pin you put down is like your sticking down pin. So just click to put a pin down. Don't try and move that because if you do, you're going to move everything. But now go and put another pin in and you can start moving things. So you can move things in and out. You're going to get into trouble if you try and put pins down too close to existing pins, so just be aware of that. You can put a pin down and then just drag it. Really, there's not a lot to the Puppet Warp tool at this level, so just have a bit of fun with it, and all we're trying to do is see bits of the doughnut underneath here so that we get the impression that this is icing and we haven't lost the doughnut entirely in the process. When you're done, just click the checkmark. If you don't like what you've done, just click this icon here and just go and start all over again. But there is my doughnut looking shape. 4. Pt 3 - Add the Sprinkles: To create the sprinkles, we're going to create a custom brush. So I'm going to choose file and then new. I'm going to make a document that's just 250 pixels by 250 pixels. I'll click Create. I'll press Control and zero to enlarge the document. Now, brushes need to be black, white or shades of gray. I'm going to make mine solid black, so it's going to paint full saturation. I'm going to the rectangle tool here. I'm going to select it. I'm going to make sure that up here of these three options, we're actually using shape. While I'm here, I'll confirm that the fill color is correct. It may not be. You can just change it at this point by clicking on it, but this is the fill that's going to be applied. I'm going to drag out my shapes. I'm just going to click and drag a sort of long sprinkle shape because I chose this shape tool, I get this little corner widgets, so I can drag on that to make the edges round. So that's a nice shape for my brush. I'll select this and I'll go to Edit and then define brush preset. Going to call the sprinkle. Click Okay, and now I can discard this document as I don't need it any longer. Now when I go to the brushes tool, you'll see here that the brush is already selected, but you could select it if it wasn't go to the brush settings option because I need to make some settings for this brush. Also, I want to see my *** panel at this stage. That's pretty important. I do want to paint onto a new empty las. I'm going to click here to add a new empty layer for my brush. Right now, this is what my brush is painting like. We'll go to brush tip shape. I'm going to decrease the size of the brush quite a bit. I think that's going to be a better size for it, and I'm going to increase the spacing so that the brush strokes paint spaced apart. Then we'll go to shape dynamics. And here, all we want to do is change the angle jitter so that the brush strokes will now change orientation as we paint. And then we're going to color dynamics. I'm going to check this check mark here and then select on the option. We want to click Apply per tip and we want foreground background jitter to be 100% everything else here. These three settings, hue, saturation, and brightness can all be 0% and just leave purity at its middle value, which is 0%. I'm just going to close that down. Let's get some colors to use. I'm going to the Swatches panel. I'm going to choose some fairly bright colors for my sprinkles. So I'm going to choose pink here and let's go and get a sort of blue color. Now, my brush is going to toggle between these two colors. So I'm just painting here. We should be painting on our new layer, which we are. Now, as I paint, these sprinkles are being placed. They're rotating and the colors are also changing. A sprinkle goes into place and you don't like it, just press Control Z, and that will undo it. And you can continue on. You can also change the colors if you want to. Just choose another color for your sprinkles and then you'll toggle between the orange now and the pink. So when I'm done, I can just save this file, and it's all ready for us to make our pattern. 5. Pt 4 - Make the Pattern: To create our pattern, we're going to the Las palette, and I'm going to put these three layers, the three layers that contain the doughnut itself into a smart object. So I'm selecting on all three. Right, click and choose Convert to Smart Object. Now, I need a duplicate of this smart object, and how I do that is going to impact its behavior. Could drag this smart object layer onto this icon here, and that would give you a second smart object that's going to be linked to the original one. So if you made changes to the first one, the second one would change also. I don't want that to be the case. I want my smart objects to be separate from each other. So I'm going to right click and I'm going to choose New Smart Object via copy. It looks like these are identical, and they are at this stage, but they can be separately edited. Smart Objects are really good choice for making patterns with the new pattern tool in Photoshop. It just works better that way. So we're going to choose view and then Pattern Preview. I'll click Okay. The pattern is pretty big right now. I'm just going to shrink down my screen a little bit so that we can see the edges of the pattern here. I'm going to select the topmost object, and I'm just going to move it into position here. Now, word of warning this pattern preview option will not work if you've got multiple artboards, so make sure that you have your design on a document that only has a single artboard. So here is the first of our patterns. If I'm happy with that, I can go to the patterns option here and just add my pattern. Now, before I do that, I'm actually going to remove the background from the pattern. I'm going to hide the background so that my pattern is transparent background. That means I can put my own choice of background in later on. From coming down here to the bottom of the panel, I'm going to click the plus sign, and this is going to be my first Donte pattern. We already decided that we could make changes to our smart objects. I'm going to double click on this one. I'm going to change the color of the icing, so I'm going to choose a different icing color. Let's just go to the swatches. Let's pick up a blue color for our icing. I'm just going to dump the blue color into this layer. I'm going to save my changes, and now I've got a second pattern. So this time I'm going to my patterns panel. I seem to have closed it. So let's just go and add a second doughnut pattern. If we wanted a doughnut without the sprinkles, that's easily done as well. In this case, we will double click on the Smart Object. Turn off the sprinkles. I suggest you don't delete them, but you just turn them off so that they're there if you want to make changes later in the future. I'm just going to save this. You can see this one now has no sprinkles. If we want to do the same here, we will need to separately edit this one because they're not linked any longer. Make sure you save them. And now we have a pattern that has no sprinkles at all. Let's go and save this as a pattern. So we have three patterns that we can use. 6. Pt 5 - Use Your New Pattern: Now before we finish up here, we need to get out of this dialogue. So I'm just going to choose few and then turn pattern preview off. We've got two doughnuts here. One of them is up in the top corner of the document. You can see it's just sitting up here over the edge, and this is the middle one. That's exactly what it should look like. Just leave them the way they are. You can save this file, and then you can come back in at any stage and edit this design to make another pattern should you wish to do so. To use the pattern, we're going to make a brand new document. I'll choose file and then new. For this one, I'm going to make a really large document. Mine is going to be 3,600 by 3,600 pixels in size. I'm going to add a new lab because that makes it easier to add patterns to our documents. I'm just going to do that. Let me close down. This panel here. Let me actually just go and get my patterns again. The bottom of my patterns panel are my new patterns. I'm just going to click to add the first of them into the document. The white background is coming from the background of this document, not the pattern itself. If we want to scale the pattern, we can do so. I'm just going to double click on the thumbnail here and scale it down to a smaller size. If I click on one of these other patterns, it's going to come in at this smaller size, if I just click on it. You can see this is our second pattern, and this is the third one that has no sprinkles at all. Now if we want to put our own custom background in the file, we can do so. Turn the background off that came with the file, and we're going to choose layer, new fill layer, solid color. I like using solid color layers because when you use them, well, let's just put it in the right place first. When you use them, they're fully editable. So I can just double click on this thumbnail, and I can come in here and change the color to any color that I like. And if I look at it now and say, well, that's not the color I want, well, I can just double click on it and make further changes to it. It gives you a chance to sort of experiment with colors as you're working on these designs. And of course, we can just change the pattern by targeting the pattern layer and just change to a different pattern.