Building Awesome Pattern Tiles in Adobe Photoshop

1. Class Introduction: Hey, I'm Dylan Mierzwinski and I get to make my living by creating patterns well and other art work too. Making patterns is like putting together really pretty puzzles, and high-quality surface patterned designs are in demand in lots of industries. I'll be using Photoshop to show you the mechanics of building three patterned tiles of varying difficulty levels, as well as the methods that help make sure those designs are accurate and look awesome. This class is not for Photoshop or pattern newbies. You should have sum familiarity with either moving around the program or repeats in general to have success in this course. Once you see things in repeat and seen how a few painted flowers can turn into an endless flower blooms, I think you'll be hooked on the process. The methods taught in this course are applicable to myriad repeat styles. So if you can build this, you can build anything. Let's get tiling. 2. Class Project & Materials: In this lesson, we're going to cover what the class project is, the materials needed to complete the project, how to access the provided class resources and practice our work, and how to share your project when you're done. For your class project, you're going to use either the provided artwork motifs or use your own artwork motifs to create a pattern tile in Photoshop. You're encouraged to use one of the three demonstrated patterns styles as your guide. A simple spot pattern, a pattern with groups of motifs and whitespace, or an intricate all over design. But if your creativity takes over and you do something different or a combination of some kind, that's totally cool. The materials you'll need to complete this course include a computer with Adobe Photoshop, I'm using CC 2019. You'll also need some artwork to use for the motifs in the pattern. We'll talk about motifs in the next video. But if you want some ideas for creating artwork, you can check out my other classes like illustrating florals or getting to know your paint, digitizing your hand-drawn sketches, etcetera. If you need help digitizing the artwork to get it ready for this class, checkout my digitizing your paint course, which honestly as sorted of an underrated class, I packed a ton of information about all the tools I use in Photoshop to manipulate my artwork in that class. If you don't have your own artwork yet, not to worry, I've provided the motifs I use in all three demos for you to follow along with. To access them, you'll need to be on a computer, not a mobile device and go to the project and resources tab. On the right sidebar, you'll find all the goodies. Please keep in mind any artwork made from my motifs is only for educational purposes and may not be further used or sold and that includes professional portfolios. Sharing hear on skill share in a project or on social media with clear and obvious credit is acceptable. Back to the materials list, you may need a calculator. If you have a smart phone, you might want to have that handy or even an old-school calculator, of course, its fine. A few optional items are Adobe Illustrator. As I'll mention later, I like to use the recolor artwork tool to explore color options. Even if the artwork isn't going to end up in AI. It isn't necessary to complete the project, but you may want a wake-up or drawing tablet of sum kind to aid and adding texture or details to your artwork. You may want to printer to test patterns scale. But I won't be doing this because I don't own a home printer because I appreciate my sanity and general happiness as a human being. When it comes time to share your project and I known you will because your the best from a computer or laptop, you can head back to the project and Resources tab where you found the class resources to found the big green create project button. You can add text and images to the project body as well as a cover photo to top the whole thing off. Don't forget to look at other projects for inspiration. If you have a moment, leave a friendly line in the comments and make a fellow artists day. The next lesson we'll cover motifs. 3. Working with Motifs: In this video, we're going to discuss what motifs are, some tips for creating or gathering them with patterns in mind, what a working palette is and why I prefer to use one. We'll review how to download the provided motifs if you want to use my artwork and lastly, we'll cover some file management tips. Motifs are the elements that make up the artwork in a repeating pattern. Maybe I'll paint a few separate flower pieces that get put together to create a single flower motif. Or maybe I'll take five flower motifs and group them together to create one bigger motif. Either way, the motifs get arranged into a tile with edge elements repeating on all sides and then the tile gets repeated infinitely to create our repeating pattern. Motif seem to fall into two general categories, spots and arrows. Spots are usually a single motif or a group of motifs that the eyes lands and lingers on. Whereas arrows keep the eye moving in a direction. The head of a flour would be a spot, but the leaves or fillers sticking out from it would be an arrow. You'll see how this balance can change the look of a repeat as we move between all three demonstrations. But I say it now in case you're going to be gathering your own artwork for the project, it could be helpful to gather a variety of spots and arrows to have in your inventory. Not only will you on a variety of spots and arrows, but you'll want a few variations of each motif type. So if I'm making a pattern of roses and eucalyptus, I want to paint a few versions of each so I have lots of options to choose from when building the tile. If I paint a sideview rose, I'll probably want to paint 3-5 of them so that not every sideview rose is a copy of the same one. It can also be helpful to have sum pieces together, like a stem with leaves coming off of it, as well as a few separate elements like if you isolated leaves. With pattern-making options and flexibility really help. When I'm building my tile, I like to have my motifs in a working pallet, so a color palette that works enough in contrast and distribution of colors while I'm building, but may not be the actual final colors for the artwork. In this example, you can seen I built the initial test project for this class in light colors, but then explored other color options in the final. Even though the colors themselves, the hues are totally different, the color relationship between the elements, the distribution stays the same. See how this group of roses has two smaller roses that matching color next to a large rows of a different color and the yellow version, that relationship is still true, two smaller roses matching color but differ from the bigger rose. I'm more likely to focus on that relationship and distribution of colors in the working palate than worrying about getting the exact hues and values right from the beginning. If you work in a way that considers the final color palette and texture earlier on, that's totally fine. This is just the way I like working as sometimes the composition will inform the color palette better than the other way around. I'll cover how I explore and apply final color palettes and texture in the finishing lesson. If you're going to use the provided practices motifs from a computer, not a mobile device, you'll want to go to the project in resources tab and download the resources list in the right sidebar. As I mentioned in the class project video, any designs made from my artwork are for educational purposes only, and may not be further used or sold and that includes professional portfolios. Sharing hear on Skillshare or on social media with clear and obvious credit is acceptable. Whether you're using my artwork or your own, I suggest creating a new folder to house all the pertinent files for the project and to move the motif artwork to that folder now. File organization is important because sometimes the design will be needed months or years after it's been created and there's not a great chance you'll be able to remember where and what you saved if it isn't safely stored together. You're welcome to create subfolders for scans, tiles, exports, and markups. But even just having one master folder that everything gets dumped in is better than having everything scattered all around. The files for surface patterned designs can get really large. So I use and recommend using an external hard drive to keep those monster files off your computer's hard drive. Let's get into making our first pattern. 4. P1: Document Setup: For our first pattern, we're going to cover the basic mechanics of how to make a technical repeat in Photoshop, by creating a classic set repeat from spot motifs. This is the most basic of the three patterns we'll be making and the following demonstrations will build on the information being shown here. The very first thing I want to do is create a new document, and you can experiment with different tile shapes, different rectangles and such. But we're going to stick to mostly squares in this class. Squares just seem to be a great go-to, but definitely experiment to see how different shaped rectangles can change the look of the pattern. If you see for this wallpaper client, I had to make the repeat in the tall rectangle like a strip of wallpaper. That created a challenge because since the repeat on the horizontal axis was so narrow, I needed to be really careful to create flow with my motifs. Feel free to play around, but we're just going to keep it square. For this first one, since it's more of a simple pattern, I'm going to start with 12 by 12 inches. That's a nice size that I can easily conceptualize in my mind of how big it's going to be in real life, and also, don't stress too much about this, you can change it as you go. But I would say if you're going to heir on one side, air on making it bigger than you might need because you can always scale things down more easily, but it's not easy to scale things up. Also if you create a pattern at the wrong size, the "Wrong size," like let's say you make it and then a specific client picks it up and has the size they need. Once you do the heavy lifting of figuring the tile out, it's not that hard to rebuild it at a new size, so don't worry to much. We're going to start with 12 by 12 and 300 dpi. I'm going to keep mine an RGB mode, but you're welcome to work in CMYK if you're more comfortable with that. Background white, and I'm going to hit "Create". write off the bat, I'm going to save my documents. I'm going to go to, won't let me because I haven't maid any changes. I literally just need to do one thing on it, and now I can go to File, Save, and I'm going to call this Pattern 1 Tile. You can see that I'm saving it. If I go to my desktop, I have a Pattern 1 folder that already has the motifs in it. I'm saving everything altogether. I'm going to hit Command Z though to get that mark off of there. Anytime you need to undo, you can go to Edit and undo or step forward. You can see the hotkeys for those are Command or Ctrl Z and Shift Command Z. I'll be using those a lot. You'll found in this class that I really rely on keyboard shortcuts. I'll try to show you where it is in the menus as much as possible. But once I show you once, I'm going to keep using the keyboard shortcut. I'm going to go ahead and navigate to my pattern folder to open up my motifs, and I'm just going to start bringing them over to my work area over here. Now, I could use my lasso tool and select these and copy and paste and bring it all over. But I want, like if you look at the layers over here, if I open this one, I have everything separated on the layers and everything is already really nicely grouped, and so I really don't want to lose this organization. A really nice way to carry layers over from one document to another is just to click and drag. Since these are the colors I'll be using for my working palette, I'm actually going to go ahead and grab this background color fill too. I'm going to hold down shift On my keyboard, and click, and that will let me grab a range of them. I'm just going to click and drag, hold it over on the name of the document up here, and then just drop them in. Now you can seen I have my motifs in here. We have five daisies, and we're going to use these five daisies to create our pattern. As you saw before, each folder here has its daisy with the petals in the center, and normally, when I'm going to be making a lot of copies of something for a pattern, I would want to turn these from folders into smart objects. Now, we're not actually going to go into smart objects in this pattern, we're going to go into them on pattern 2. But I want to plant the seed to get you to start thinking about them. In this case, when I'm going to make repeats of lots of the same motif and there's a chance that I might want to recolor them later, I would probably right-click on the folder and go to Convert to Smart Object. Again, don't worry if that just totally confuse you and you have no idea what I'm talking about. That's fine, it's a seed that I'm planting for later. But since this is our first pattern, we are just going to keep everything in groups and duplicate these. The first thing I want to draw your attention to is with my selection tool, you can see I have this auto select to group right now. I change this a lot. Not only do I turn it on and off, but I change it between group and layer. Here's how it works. Right now, with my move tool, which is V on the keyboard, it's this mane guy right here, I have auto select to group on. You can see if I click on one of these flowers, keep your eyes down here, actually. As I click around from flower to flower, it's going to jump around and pick the different group and so with a simple click, I can click and drag my motif around, which is really helpful when you are making a composition. However, sometimes I'll need to get in and just select this dot or just select these petals. In that case, I'll go ahead and change it from group two layer, and now you can see I can go in and just grab those petals as I need. Or I can turn it off, and when you turn it off, it means it doesn't matter where you click, Photoshop is going to base what it's moving based on what you last clicked over here in the layers panel. That's helpful and I'm not sure if there's a way to set up keyboard shortcuts for this, I should though because I use them all the time. So if you see my mouse flying up here, it's probably because I needed to grab something in a different way and it's quicker two just change this and get it done. 5. P1: Building the Pattern Tile: Let's start building. I'm basically going to take these and start building a column of flowers. Since we only have five motifs, but we're building a whole garden of them, we'll want to vary them and flip them around so that it doesn't look like the same five over and over and over again. As I'm lining these up, I'm just eyeballing them. But if you want to be more accurate, and you'll need to get used to using them anyway for later parts of the process, you can certainly use guides. To use guides, you want go to View and make sure that your Rulers are on. That's what these guys are right here. You can also hit Command or Control R. Then from the Ruler is you can actually just drag out these guides. I have this one, and you can see that if I put it right on the center, then I'm able to just quickly grab these and align them all up. Now, I like it to be a little bit more casual, by the way, to hide and show your guides is Command or Control colon or semicolon key. I can go up to View, Show, Guides. But again, that's three clicks when you could really just do one hotkeys. So that's why keyboard shortcuts are so helpful. Anyway, so I'm going to turn that back off. Now I want my column to be taller than this, so I'm going to have to start repeating flowers. All I'm going to do is I'm going to hold down Option, and you can see that my cursor changes from the Move tool to that mirror double arrow, so that lets me known I'm about to copy. This just makes it really quick for composing. But if you don't want to copy groups that way, you're also welcome to select the group you want, and hit Command or Control J, or you can right-click and go to Duplicate Group. But like I said, it's a lot quicker to do this. I'm going to hold down Option or Alt on a PC, and I'm just going to bring that down. Now, this guy is an exact copy of that one, so let's hide it a little bit by hitting Command T or Control T. That's going to open up my Transform. I can also go to Edit, Free Transform, which you can see that's the keyboard shortcut we just used, or if you want to do one of these specific transforms, you can, but here's a trick. If I hit Command T, I'm able to rotate, I'm able to scale. If I right-click, I can access all of those other transformation tools. If I want two flip it horizontally or vertically, I can do that there. Then when I'm done, I hit Enter, so that's a really helpful one to use. Even though we copy these two motifs, the eyes isn't going to be able to detect write away that they are a copy, which is part of the pattern game. I'm going to keep going until I get to the bottom of this. I'm zooming in and out by hitting Command or Control plus or minus. You can also use the Zoom tool by hitting Z on your computer or using this guy over here. But again, there's just these basic maneuvers that you do a lot in Photoshop that it's going to do you really well to just get the keyboard shortcuts down. I don't even have to think about them anymore, my fingers just do it. I think I have enough here for the first column, and I'm going to turn my guide back on and just see how we're doing lining up-wise. Looks like everything looks pretty good. I think I might stagger it a little, so maybe I'll grab this guy. Using my arrow keys, I'm just moving it left and right. Move it to the right a little, hear is one to the left a little, just to give it a little bit more movement. 6. P1: Defining the Pattern: We're going to make more columns to fill out the rest of this pattern, but let's talk really quickly about how we're going to be telling Photoshop where the pattern is. When we make a pattern, you go up to Edit and Define Pattern. Now, if I don't have anything selected, if I just click this right now, Photoshop is going to use the bounds of my Canvas area to determine where the repeat happens. If I go to Edit and Define Pattern now, I can name it if I want, I'll hit "Okay" and now, I'm actually just going to go ahead and open up what I call a dummy document and this is what I do to test my patterns when I'm making them. I just make a big area where I can see everything. Hit "Create". Now, if I go down to this black and white cookie button-down hear and fill it with a pattern, you can see that pattern I made is available. If I click and drag, you can see it repeats forever, going up, up, up. Since we didn't put anything else between it, it's basically just like a pattern of very wide stripes. You can see that Photoshop used the tile bounds or the Canvas bounds to make that repeat, but the other way I can do it is to use my marquee tool to pick out a selection area. You can seen I've only selected part of these flowers. Now, if I go up to Edit and Define Pattern, go back to my dummy document, I can just double-click on this pattern fill to change it to the new one and now, you can see that all of those flowers are cut in half because it defined the pattern based on where the selection was, and of course, our selection cut those in half. Either way is fine. When I'm making the tile, I prefer to use guides and my marquee tool because then I have extra room on the Canvas to work. That being said, I'm going to start setting up my guides to create my tile area and since I know that eventually, this guy's going to repeat, I'll just put the guide right on here just so that I known it's coming and for now, that'll be good. I'm just going to go ahead and keep building out these columns. 7. P1: Filling the Pattern Tile: You're welcome to set up a grid of guides. I'm not going to do that right now because like I said, I'd like to just eyeball it and see how it looks naturally and then I can always go in a star shape. Do you see how I put these two pretty distinct flower shapes like this guy has less petals than all the other ones, and so it kind of stands out the most from the pack. I put one right next to each other but a little bit rotated because it helps force the eye to see like okay, you're going to see this shape a lot, but it's still different and it's not. I guess all I'm trying to say is that, sometimes a trick in order to help you hide that you're repeating things is to actually put two copies of something right next to each other. Because then the eye is ready to know that we are using repeated elements, but it won't necessarily be able to find it. I don't think I'm really explaining what I mean, but it's okay. Basically just all you need to know is a trick that I do is I sometimes I will purposefully put two like items next to each other. Don't forget you can flip things. So flipping horizontal and vertical. That will mirror. If I flip it vertical, it's going to mirror up and down, and if I flip it horizontal, it's going to mirror left and right. All of these little tricks just help us make a magical pattern out of just a few pieces. I'm going to keep going with this process and now I will start setting up just a grid of guides. For one thing, I want to be able to make sure that I'm not spacing things too a radically. Paying attention to the space between the guides up in the top area, I can start placing these at even intervals and they might not be perfect, and that's okay because like I said, I definitely want this to feel a little bit natural. I don't want it to feel too rigid. I'm already going to make my tile bigger. I want to be able to go a little bit wider than this. So you can either go up to image and canvas size and you can change it right there. Or you can just grab your crop tool by hitting C on your computer, or it's right here, and I'm just going to drag this out and hit Enter. Now I've changed my canvas size. It's really no biggie if you make a size and then realize you need to change it. I think I just want one more. I'm going to make this a little bit bigger. I'm actually going to make it bigger on top too just because I like to have a lot of area to work with even if I'm going to trim it later. So those aren't perfect, but they're good. You can actually set up a grid. If you don't like setting up your own, can go to show grid and I think you can change your grid settings in user preferences. Yes. Guides, Grids and Slices. So I don't use the grid a lot. I don't know why it's so confusing to me. It's just basic math, but it does confuse me. I like to just set up my own guides, but you're welcome to set up a grid there. Okay, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. I think nine columns is going to be good, especially since this column, since it's on the edge and we're making a repeat, we know that that's going to need to be repeated over here. I really only have a few more columns to create. I'm going to hop back to it. I know how to better say what I was trying to say earlier. This motif of the five is the one that stands out the most. If we use it more regularly and put it next to itself, then it becomes less distinct and is able to fade into the background with the rest of them. If I use this one more sporadically since it's so different, I bet it would stand out to the eye more and the eye might be able to catch on to where the repeat is more quickly. We don't want that to happen so. Now that I've gotten three done, I don't have to keep building these out one by one. I could actually go ahead. I'm going to click on this top group and then I'm going to go down and shift click on the bottom to grab all of them. I can actually hit Command or Control J or right-click and hit duplicate groups. To duplicate all of those. I'm going to hit Command T so that I can move all of them. I'm going to move them and I'm going to flip them horizontally, and I'm going to flip them vertically so that they do not look like the same groups that I just grabbed. Now if I wanted, I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to lock my background so that it doesn't move and I'm able to grab the things on top of it. Now you can see when I click and drag, I get a little murky. I'm actually able to grab and select all those groups just by dragging it over. Now I'm going to just copy this column and hold down Option or Alt on my keyboard. I'm going to click and drag it over. Now to make things drag perfectly straight, like if I hit Command T, you can see what I have selected. If I just drag it, you can see that it just moves around freely, and let me make a copy of that again. Command J, Command T, you can see that it just moves around freely. If I want to constrain it and keep it in line with this one, I'm going to hold on shift and drag it and that will move it. I can only move it left or right or up or down. I copied too many because this one needs to repeat on this side. So I know we've just been moving flowers around, but honestly that's a lot of what pattern-making is. I'm just grabbing all of these and holding Shift and nudging them. If I nudge without holding Shift, it moves the group one increment. But if I hold on Shift it moves it 10 increments. I'm pretty sure. 8. P1: Creating & Testing Pattern Bounds: We're ready to repeat and create our tile bounds. The first thing is this is going to be the one that repeats on the other side, so I'll go ahead and click and drag to grab all of those groups. I could also just, I'm going to just turn my guides off for a second. I could also just click on one, do you see how that selected that over my layers. If I hold down Shift and click all the other ones, that will grab them all that way too. If you're worried about using the marquee and grabbing something you don't mean to, then that's okay. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hit Command J or Control J to duplicate it. Again, you can also right-click on the layers and go to duplicate layers. Command J, and I'm going to move this guy by holding Shift so that it all stays lined up, I'm going to move it over here. Now these guides that we were using to help us make the layout, they're not going to help us for the technical part that's coming up. I'm going to go ahead to View and Clear Guides and so that's going to get them all out of there. Now, in order for us to tell Photoshop where to make this pattern, we need to make sure that we are going to have this on the edge in the exact same place that it's on the edge over here. We can do that with Photoshop doing the heavy lifting. I'm just going to select this one motif right here. You can see that's the one I have selected. I'm going to hit Command T. The nice thing about when an item is in this Command T zone is it's really easy to snap guides to exactly its bounds or its center. When you Command T an object, this little guy ends up being right in the center and that's my anchor point. Since it's in the center, I'm able to snap a guide to it. I'm going to hold down Command or Control on my keyboard to pull a guide out while I'm in Transform and you can see that it's just snapping. When I get close to the center or the edge, it's snapping there, so I'm going to let it snap to the center. If yours is not snapping, you may need to go to View and Snap and make sure that there is a little checkbox there and to make sure that it's snapping to all of these things. Basically what I did is I just set a guide at the exact perfect center of this flower. Since this flower is lined up perfectly with this row as it is on this side, we can use the center of this flower to create the other bounds. If I hit Command T, hold down Command or Control on my keyboard and drag this out into the center and hit Enter. Now, I have this guide exactly in the right spot on either side. You can see if I use my marquee even though we don't have it repeating correctly on the top and bottom, if I go ahead and go to Edit, Define Pattern. By the way, the marquee will automatically snap to these guides too, so I don't have to worry about accuracy there. I can go ahead and fill my dummy area with my new pattern. You can see that sure enough, here's the gap from what we haven't fixed on the top and bottom. But you can see that I'm repeating perfectly left and right, which means that we got that to be really accurate. Now, all we need to do is figure out where the top and bottom is. I'm going to grab all of these and I'm going to Shift drag them up so that they stay in place, see how they're just moving perfectly up and down because I just took the time to find where that repeat is. Even though it didn't take long, it's just nice to keep that in place. Since everything that was on this side had to repeat on this side, that means everything going along the top needs to repeat along the bottom. I'm going to go ahead and grab all of those. Or again, if I wanted with my Auto-Select group, I could just click, Shift, to grab all of them. It's really your preference. I have all of them, I'm going to hit Command or Control J to duplicate, hit Command T so I can see all of them, and I'm going to hold Shift and drag them down to keep them in place. We can use the exact same trick to find the top and bottom guide. We're going to use the same daisy, I'm going to hit Command T, and this time I'm going to Command drag a guide down from the top, Hit Enter. I'm going to go down to the copy down here and do the same thing, and now I have my perfect tile bounds. If I'm not sure and I want to test it, here's a trick that I do to test for accuracy. We can go ahead and Define this pattern. The marquee tool, by the way I'm not sure I said it is the keyboard shortcut of m and it's just your most basic selection tool. If you have not used any of these selection tools, this class is probably going to be too much for you, and so I would recommend checking out my class, digitizing your paint or watching a different Photoshop beginner's course that goes over these basic tools. Anyway, I'm gonna go to Edit and Define Pattern and hit okay. If I go to my dummy document and change my pattern fill, I can see that that indeed repeats everywhere. However, there's so much going on that it's hard for me to know where the tile bounds are as I defined them. If I needed to fix something, like let's say, I see too much space right here, I need to fix that. Well, how do I go over here and know where that is if I can't eyeball it. A trick to test for accuracy of your pattern is to make a new layer on top of your background color, but behind all of your motifs. I'm going to use my marquee tool again, keyboard shortcut m, to drag out a rectangle that is inside of my tile bounds. You can see my tile bounds is here, but I'm on all sides, my rectangle is within that. I'm going to go ahead, I'll grab my paint bucket tool or whatever you want to do, and I'm just going to fill this with a totally different color and hit Command or Control D to Deselect. Now, I'm going to go ahead and define my pattern where I'm supposed to. Go to Edit, Define Pattern. What this is going to do is it's going to help me immediately see where the tile bounds are. When I'm testing for accuracy, all I need to do is go in here and check where the boundary is, the edge boundary, to make sure that I didn't mess up. It looks like everything is good. Let me mess up one on purpose to show you what it would look like. I'm going to grab this flower here, I'm going to hold down Shift and I'm going to nudge it five times to the right one, two, three, four, five. Drag this back out, Define the pattern, fill it with the new one. Now, as I go around, you'll see where I made the mistake. That's a really nice way and it'll show up on this side too because that's the repeating edge. That's a really nice quick way before you're even ready to test for flow and to see if it's working just to make sure that the actual pattern is working. I'm going to go back here. I'm going to fix this guy, one, two, three, four, five. Go back in and Define my pattern. Let me zoom into where that problem area was right here, and now I can fill it with my new pattern to make sure that I fixed that. I can see it's fixed, and so now I know we're all set. But now that we've tested for accuracy, we want to test for flow, we want to see if the pattern actually looks good. I turned to that rectangle off. I'm going to go ahead and go to Define Pattern, make a new Pattern fill and now I can zoom out to see how it looks. It looks pretty good. There's some spacing issues, so it gets a little bit tighter in here, and it's a little bit looser right here. I could fix that if I wanted by going in and seeing like I can see that there's a bigger space here, a vertical space. I want to grab this whole row and move it up. The quick way to do that is to drag this marquee and I'm going to hold down Shift and just tap the Up arrow and find a better middle ground. If I drag a guide out, you can see this row is really not straight. Let me see how that is if that's a problem in the pattern. You can also scale this down, so I'm going to double-click on the pattern fill, you know how we've been doing to change the patterns. You can also change the scale here. If I change this to 50 percent, I'm able to really step back and see how this looks. Actually the wobbliness of it isn't a problem for me. I think that it's okay, I like how it looks natural, get guide out of there. Anytime you need to get rid of a guide, you can just click and drag it up past the interface and it will get rid of it. That's great. Our pattern's working. We could call it done. But I want to make it a little bit more interesting. Hang on, these look like it could move over a little bit more. I can't tell you enough that pattern-making is a lot of just staring at your screen and nudging things around and testing and trying and then fixing it when it doesn't work. 9. P1: Adjusting the Tile Design: The pattern tile works. Since I have nudged things, let me go ahead and take a look and see if I created any issues that weren't there before. I'm going to hit Command Z a few times to toggle that back and fourth so you can see the change that I just did. This was a pretty obvious stream and then I fix that and those got closer together. Now, if I bring this back up to 100 percent, I'm pretty happy with that. We've maid a pattern, but the solid grid is just a tiny bit boring. So what I would like to do instead is stagger with these rows. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go through and I'm going to go through and group them by their columns. So I'm going to turn guides off right now by hitting command or control column. I'm going to select all of these motifs and hit command or Control G on my keyboard. You can go to layer and group layers, but again, you'll be spending all your time in the menus if you do that. I'm just going to hit Command G and that made a group of all of those. You can see them over here. I'm just going to turn it off temporarily so that it's easier to grab all of these. I'm just going to keep selecting, grouping and then turning off the groups so that I can see where I'm at. Now, I have nine column groups. Turn my guides back on by hitting command or control column. Now, what I want to do, I have auto select by groups so I know it's just going to select each column as I grab it. I want to grab every other column and shift it down. I'm going to leave these ones that are on the edges and I'm going to grab this one, hold down Shift and click this one, hold down Shift and click this one, hold down Shift and click this one. If you want to hit Command T to see the bounds of that you can, or you can just go ahead and move it. I'll hit Command T so you can see and I'm just going to drag this down to where where I like it. Now, we actually don't even need to update the tile because the way we just shifted those things there's nothing on the border edge right here. The only things that need to repeat on the other side are things that cross this tile boundary. There's nothing crossing this tile boundary at the top or the bottom. Even though this flower is hanging out down here, it won't be included in the pattern, but it's okay because it was just copied one of this top motif anyway. Now, I can go ahead and go to define pattern, hit "Okay." Now, I have my beautiful staggered flower pattern. It's nice and casual, it's not too perfect. Again, if you hate that mine is casual and you really want it to be perfect, I recommend being more accurate with setting up your grid guide or just using one of the Photoshop grids. But also, it's fun to loosen up and just let things be a little bit natural. 10. P1: Fixing Tile Mistakes: There are two things I want to clarify really quickly. The first is, I talked about using two marquee tools. So the one that we use to define our pattern is actually the marquee tool. That's what it's called, it's the most basic of the selection tools. It's actually the rectangular marquee tool, and it lives up here. Anytime you make a selection in Photoshop with this tool or the Lasso tool. These types of marquees that create marching ants are literally just telling Photoshop to pay attention to this part of the document for whatever tool I'm going to use next. In our case, we use the Marquee Tool to say pay attention to this area and then we define a pattern. But I could also select this area and only use brushes inside of this area or whatever the case may be. The other Marquee tool is only when I'm talking about using the Move tool, and when I use it to click and drag to create a marquee to select specific items. This marquee is just temporary. You can see when I let go, it goes away and literally all it's doing is selecting items. If I actually had my background layer unlocked, I wouldn't even be able to do my marquee, because it thinks I'm moving around with that background still. So if I locked that again, then you can see I get my marquee back, if I click and drag. You can see in this case, this marquee selected those two columns. So those are the different marquees. The other thing I wanted to explain is, we were able to create our tile bounds just by knowing the exact placement of the corner items, and that's great. That's an awesome way to craft the tile bounds. But what happens if one of these other motifs that we didn't use the center for, what if we nudge it out of place? What if I grab, I'm going to go ahead and go in and find one of these guys to grab, so we'll do this one. What if I nudge it and I didn't count how many nudges I did, and so I don't know how to fix it or what if I accidentally deleted it? I'm like, how do I get this to repeat over here? You'll see it a lot in the next two patterns we make because we're going to do it a lot. But the way to do it is this. The first thing is, I am going to grab my Marquee tool and drag out where the tile bounds are. I'm going to open up my info panel over here. If you don't have yours, you can go up to window and info. I'm also going to just for right now, right-click on my rulers and change it from inches to pixels. Now in my info panel over here, this width and height that's giving me, is actually the width and height of the selection. Since the selection is our tile bounds, that's the exact width and height of our tile. So I would actually write those numbers down on a piece of paper. So that's 3837 wide and it's 3536 tall. The reason I switched from pixels to inches, if I go back to inches, you can see it gives me the very exact inch dimensions, you know, 12 inches, 12.79 inches, 11.787 and that's great. But for whatever reason I just feel, and this is just my feeling, it's not a fact. I just feel like it's more accurate to dial in a specific whole pixel number than a fraction of an inch, because sometimes Photoshop and Illustrator does its own rounding and I'd just like to be in pixels for this part. I now have the width and height that my tile. Since we know that things that repeat on one edge need to repeat in the other, I can actually grab that flower, it's going to be over here. Grab this guy, I'm going to duplicate him by hitting "Command J" and I'm going to hit "Command T". I have my copy in transform mode. Up here I get the specific X and Y coordinates. So x going left and right and y going up and down, and we know how much we need to move it to the left, because we wrote it down, we need to move it 3,837 pixels over here. What I can do and thank you to the student that helped me learn this in my last class, which you didn't know. You can actually go ahead and click this relative positioning triangle, and that's going to set the coordinates to 0. So it's going to say, okay, this is where that item lives in relationship to the Canvas, but you can set it to a relative position of 0. Now all I have to do is in the x category or in the x area, I just have to type in that 3837 that represents the width of my tile area and hit "Enter". Now I know that that is exactly placed where it needs to be. If I need to move it from right to left, then you just have to enter in a negative value. This time I'm going to go ahead and delete this daisy, and I'll make a copy. I'm going to select this one, hit "Command J", hit "Command T". I still have my relative positioning checked, and this time I'm going to hit negative 3837 and that will move it to the left. That is how you can accurately move your tile elements, if you notice something is broken and it's not working, that's how you can get the exact tile dimensions and move things around accurately. Next we'll work on pattern design, No.2. 11. P2: Document Setup: For our second pattern, we're going to move into grouping motifs to create a pattern that has movement and intentional use of white space or the negative empty space surrounding the motifs. In this pattern, larger motifs will be made from groups of smaller motifs and we'll start introducing some arrows to add direction to our flower spots. Just like last time, I'm going to start off by creating a new document. Not only are the motifs in this pattern larger than the daisies from pattern one but there's going to be more variety throughout, so I'm just going to need a bigger area than 12 by 12 to work in. I'll start with 20 by 20 and see how that goes and as you know, we can adjust as needed. If I go into my pattern 2 file, you can see I already have my rows motifs in here. I'm going to bring those over to my new document. I'm going to click and drag just like last time, shift clicked to select all of them. Click and drag and drop. There they are. Going to go ahead and delete this blank white layer. Then I'm going to lock my background and color film. Now I have all of these pretty pieces to play with. Now the title that I'm going to work within is going to be 20 by 20 but I also want just some extra area for this, for these motifs to be so that I have a difference between my working tile area and just my play area for the motifs. I'm actually going to make my Canvas bigger than the 20 by 20 but before I do, I'm going to go ahead and use the 20 by 20 Canvas to help me set up some guides. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hit command or control A on my keyboard. All that does is it throws a selection around everything on my document. You also hit command D to deselect. You could also just grab the marquee tool and drag over everything as well. Same difference, but basically I'm going to make a new layer. I'm going to fill that layer with whatever color it doesn't matter. You can hit option or Alt Delete to fill with your foreground color or you can just use your paint bucket tool over here. I'm going to hit deselect. Basically I just created this square just so that I have something to Create guides from. If I hit command T and I hold down command to drag my guides out, that's going to help them snap exactly to the 20 by 20 edge, hit enter when I'm done transforming and I can just delete that square because I don't need it. Now I can grab my crop tool by hitting see on my keyboard or again, it's over here. I'm just going to go ahead and scale this up. Now I have all of this room on the edge of my tile. What I'm going to do is see how all my roses are in one group right now. I'm going to ungroup them so that I can select them one at a time. You can do that by hitting Shift command or control G. Shift command Z or shift control G, or you can go up to layer and ungroup layers. Now since all of these roses are grouped together, I can just click and grab those. I'm going to move them over to the side where they're not in the way. You can already see the difference from the last pattern is last time we set up our artwork and then created the guides based on where that artwork is. This time we are going to just start out by setting up some guides and then create and arrange the artwork within it. We can adjust it if needed. These leaves, are still grouped together, so Shift command G to get them to be separate. Smooth them up here. I have these tiny pods, Those are all grouped together. I will shift command G, move them up here. There we go. 12. P2: Grouping Motifs: This patterns really fun because unlike the last one where we just made a basic layout of the same type of motif. This time we're going to be building groups of motifs. I'm just going to pick a place to start, and we're going to start building. One thing I like to do, so these three patterns were making, they can work in a collection if you want them to. Sometimes if I'm making a pattern that needs to coordinate with another one, I'll create a pattern fill of that pattern so that I can just see how the scales relate to each other. This is that repeat that we just maid at 100 percent. These flowers are quite a bit bigger than that, and so I actually, just from seeing that, I'm going to select all of my roses and I'm going to scale them down. I don't always know that ahead of time. Like I can just tell from looking at those that I wanted them to have a closer relationship. But sometimes you can't tell until you get going, you can always scale things later. But this at least helps me see that like these scales between the patterns aren't going to be two different. I'm going to go ahead and turn that off. I don't need that now. I'm just going to grab elements from the side by making copies so that I always have the masters over here and just start building little bouquets, start with this, pick one, and to copy these motifs as a reminder, I'm holding down option or alt, and clicking and dragging. But you're welcome to select the group and then right-click and do duplicate or you can do select it and then do command J, like we've been doing, it's whatever you want. I'm basically just going to try and found an organic way to group these so that they look like little clusters, but they keep the eye moving. When we talk about spots and arrows, these motifs are spots, but as we group them, we can create whatever we want. Then these leaves come in and act as arrows because they have a nice flow and shape to them. If you want to rotate something other than around its center, you can just move this back like this. You can just click and move the anchor point and now it's going to rotate around that corner. That's a nice trick. I've already made, what I would say is an error and don't freak out, it's nothing big. But it's good to start looking out the way that we are creating patterns, we want them to have movement. We don't want them to be jarring or to stand out, and won of the things we need to avoid is working to horizontally or to vertically. write now even though this leaf has a curve to it, it's actually pretty flat going horizontally like this. It has the potential to create a stripe or create a line in the pattern, and so I'm actually just going to rotate that and fix it right now. Even just putting it up that way helps get that out of there. I don't want each cluster to get too crazy, but I just want enough so that there's movement. Your eyes flux from [inaudible] to another, and this is a skill, this ability to just create movement out of these pieces, it just comes in time. We'll see if this, do you seen how that ends up. It's not straight up or down, but that's like a straight line. We'll see if that ends up being maybe too straight. We will try one of these curved ones instead. That's nice. That's going to be one of our clusters. I'm actually going to go ahead and mark [inaudible] around all of those and group them, and I'm going to change the color of the layer. I'm going to right-click and you see I have these colors down here. That just lets me color coordinate them so that I have a lot of groups, I have a lot of things going down here, but I'll know that the yellow one means that's a completed cluster. We'll keep going. I want two start getting into smart objects, but I'll wait until we find the flow. When we're building patterns like this, it's helpful to build it from one spot outward. For instance, there's a very good chance I'm going to reuse this cluster somewhere. Make a copy of it and flip it around, and so maybe at this point I might think like this looks like a good spot to put it. But I actually don't know if that's a good spot yet because I don't known all of the things that are going to take up this space. Try and resist that urge and build just from right around the area you just worked on. Grab another flower, and I wanted to have some nice white space between these, so I don't want them to be too close, but I also don't want them to be too far and look weird. I also want to vary the amount of flowers, so I don't want all of them to be clusters of three. I want there to be some clusters of three and some clusters of two and sum just single flowers, and so I'm going to start playing around with how I can maybe do a cluster of two. Again, notice how I'm staggering these. I'm not setting this rows directly to the right of it or directly below or above it, because that would create a straight line, and we're trying to create a more natural flow. The ability to transform, rotate, and flip all of these motifs. It really turns five leaves into 25 leaves. This is why it's so helpful to create things with paint multiple versions or multiple motifs. Maybe there's a formula for how to make these look great, but for me it's just trial and error and playing around. That's like some of my lease fare, like I just really hate when someone's like just play around, but it really, there's just some skills that you just have to get in and practiced, figure it out. That's nice. Now you can see the difference between spots and arrows. When my islands on these, it just stays in here, it swirls around, but then as soon as it hits this thing, this leads my idea here, and that leaves my idea hear. That's why these motifs are more arrows than spots, and just by placing those artfully, we're able to create an island that has that nice smooth s-curve without creating any obvious up and down lines. I'll grab all those and group them, color them yellow, and keep going. Again, don't be afraid to use the same motif next to each other. 13. P2: Utilizing Smart Objects: I'm crossing my first tile bounds here. I'm pretty sure this was 20 inches by 20 inches, 6,000 by 6,000 pixels, just want to double-check. Now before I make a copy of this motif group to move over to the other side. Now is the time to talk about Smart Objects. As we talked about earlier, I'm working in a working pallet. These colors look nice. It's cute, it's pretty. But it's probably not going to stay like this. These colors work well enough together, but they may not be the final. That means if I'm going to make copies of these clusters, it would be really helpful if I'm going to change color later to only have to change the color once. That's where Smart Objects come in. If I take this group and I right-click and go to "Convert to Smart Object", I basically just made a Photoshop document within a Photoshop document. You can see, if I look here, even though it's called Group 3, it's really just a single layer. I can't expand it. Everything looks like it's frozen onto that one layer. As it pertains to this document, Photoshop sees this as a single layer, which makes it really easy to move things around. It also actually saves you some file space because Photoshop is offloading that information to the Smart Object document. But don't worry, even though it looks like everything is in one layer, it's not. All of that information is still there. If I double-click, you can see that it opened up. It took me to this Group 3. psb. That's a document related directly to this one. You can see my group is still here. Everything is intact, even the coloring that I set the layer to. Everything is still here, still editable. Now, actually let me close this. Sorry, let me not, let me show you what I was going to show you. Let's say that I wanted to change the colors of these details. Now, if I hit "Save" in my new document and close it and go back to my original, you can see that it updated that color there. If I open it back up, I can say "You know what, I changed my mind, I want it to be the pink." I can hit "Save" again, close it and it's updated. That's fine. But where this really comes in handy is when you have multiple copies of Smart Objects. Let's go ahead and move this guy. I'm going to hit command J and command T. The only issue with using Smart Objects, and I'm sorry to have to give you a lesson within a lesson, just try to stay with me. But we cannot use this relative positioner anymore because there's too many relative position. There's the position of this layer, the Smart Object in this document. But then the Smart Object itself has its own relative position to where it is in this canvas. It just doesn't work. You can see that if I hit this triangle, it doesn't set it to zero, it sets it to these other relative positionings. That's fine. All we have to do is we have to do the math manually. Let me double-check. I'm pretty sure this is 6,000 by 6,000, it is. I'll write that down. Always helpful. De-select. I'm ready to move this guy. I've got the copy. Am going to hit Command T. Now basically since I can't just have it do the work for me, I basically just need to do some math. Since we're moving something to the left, that means we need a negative x value, which means we need to take this x value and subtract the width of the tile. So the width is 6,000 pixels. We need to move it left 6,000 pixels. I will take this number, 7761.5. I am using a calculator and I'm going to subtract 6,000 and that gives me a value of 1761.5. I'm going to type that exact value in here, 1761.5. Sure enough, you can see that that dropped it right in the right spot. This is why Smart Objects are awesome. Even though if I look here, I've got two separate layers. If I open up the Smart Object and change one of these things and then hit "Save" and go back, you can see it updated both of those because both of these copies of the Smart Object are pulling from the same Smart Object. You can see how this would be very helpful, especially if you have an intricate design and you're going to be recoloring, this can be a lot quicker than having to go into each separate copy, an instance of a bouquet in order to color it. When I planted that seed earlier talking about the daisy design. If we knew we were going to recover all of those which we are or which I would because I used a working palette, I could have at the beginning turned all five of those daisies into Smart Objects and then used copies of those. Then when it came time to recolor or add texture, I would only need to add color to those five and then it would update in the rest of the pattern. We will go into coloring and texturizing in the finishing video. Don't worry about that too much, but it's good to know for this. So I'm going to go hit Command Z back in this I'm going to hit "Save", and I'll Close it and we're good to go. Now the only thing I want to show you really quick with Smart Objects is, let's say I made a copy of this. But let's do different ones. I'm going to turn this bouquet into a Smart Object and I'm going to duplicate it and I'm going to move it. Let's say I wanted to use it really close to this motif. I decide, you know what? When I was doing my working palate, all of these roses were the same color, but actually I want this rose to be a different color from this rose, but they're both coming from the same Smart Object. So if I go in there and I find the rose I want to change, I'm like, "Let's make this one in pink" and I hit "Save". You can see it updated both of them. If you've made something a Smart Object and you change your mind and you decide that you want one of them to be different, what you can do is you can go in and click and drag. Let me go ahead and "Undo" that color change edit first and "Save" that. You can go ahead and click and Drag all of these layers back into your document. Then basically you just have the fresh group of layers, again, not as a Smart Object. So I could create a Smart Object from this new one. I'm going to call this new so that I know. You can see so that even though I created Smart Objects from these same bouquets, I made a brand new one here, which means if I update the colors in this one and hit "Save", it's only going to update that single instance. So there you've got some flexibility there. If that was a mind meld, I totally get it. It took me a while to catch on to Smart Objects. While they can make things faster, you certainly don't have to ever use them. If that was just you're not into it, you don't like it. You'd rather manually update your colors, that's totally fine. But that is where Smart Objects can be really helpful. So I'm not sure what I want to do yet. I guess I'll keep these ones as Smart Objects that already are Smart Objects, but then I'll keep moving and decide later. 14. P2: Grouping Motifs Continued: One thing I can see is, this is going to be a very apparent repeat or element that's being repeated because it just is. There's no science there. It's just whatever is going to be on the edge, you're going to be able to see it right away. If I make a copy of that motif and keep it similar but put it up here, that actually might help break the eye from seeing this too quickly. It might not, but it might. It's really not going to get, let me move this guy because he's covering that. It's really not going to get more complex than that. I'm just going to keep building more of these grouped motifs and filling out the area. Now, looking at how these are filling the space, I might end up making my tile area larger because I'm worried that just with the relative size that I'm not giving myself enough room to create flow, but I don't know that yet, so let's keep going. Now, these ones are see there a little bit up and down. I get a straight line with their edge right there, so I'm going to break that up. Actually for now, I'm going to turn my guides off and I'm just going to work on, I'm not going to worry about composition just yet. I'm going to delete this copy and I'm just going to make some clusters. I think once I actually have the clusters made then I'll be able to see how much area I'll need to make a layout from it. Now one thing I want to avoid is pulling the eye in too many directions. This is a good example here of how these elements are on the opposite side of the flowers, but they create the same like this nice U line here, and then these come out nicely. Right now with this, my eye is confused about where to go. It's pulled down nicely here, but then this one is pulling it in this other direction, and so that just doesn't feel very organic. Again, that sense that I have is something that just has built up over practice. That's not a thing that I tried to master. You just get the hang of it. Right now I have four clusters. I think I'm going to go for an odd number. I see I have three with three, one with two. Let's see, I have four. Let's say I want seven. I probably want two more to have two and one to just have one. There's no magic to those thoughts like I literally that's just what sounds like a good solution right now to my brain. I could be wrong and have to create more or end up not utilizing them, but that's okay. Since I keep pulling from the same buffet of flowers, I want to make sure that I am getting a variety and that I'm using a lot of them because it just helps. My tendency is to want to work in clusters of three. We're trying to do two for this one. That's the same copy of the same leaf, but just by rotating it and scaling a little bit, it doesn't read as direct copy. One thing I'm also thinking about, so this motif has a lot of arrow direction to it. This one has a little bit. I'm going to want a few that work together as a spot, because there's going to be areas that I'll need to fill in. Maybe, I don't know if that helped. Maybe this will actually just be what this little cluster is. Because, I've got some, I have direction here, but it flows back into itself. Let's do another two, or grab another big flower. I'm actually going to, so since this big flower is distinct in might stand out, I might actually try to trick the eye and make it think that it seeing this cluster again of three, but then if you look closer, it's actually only a cluster of two. Again, that just helps hide the distinct things while still letting them be distinct. I've used this double cluster a lot. I've used it in three, and so just a little, it's not a perfect copy. This is why it's helpful to paint some things in pieces. I'm going to go ahead and just cut that out. I'm just using my lasso tool to make a selection, and then hit command or Control X or edit, cut. I'm going to grab this guy and place him on top as if he was the one that was there all along. Now I'm still using the same skeleton, but at least they're not exactly the same. I can change the other one too, let's cut that one out. Again, if you'd like any information on using these selection tools, my class digitizing your pain. Super underrated class that has super underrated and that I think if more people knew what is being taught in their, they'd want to take it. The people who have taken it, value it. I just sound like I'm tooting my horn and all sorts of ways. Anyway, I don't even remember what I was saying. Now I'm embarrassed. I do. If you need help with those selections and stuff, then that class will really help you out. The only thing that's happening is right now I've got like this edge. I think I actually want to manipulate it so that this bud can stick out a little more. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, one more and we will make it our single guys. I just want to see if there are any of these big roses that I haven't used. They use this one there. Similar to this bouquet, which even though this one is two flowers, it still works as a spot, and so that's what I want this one to be able to do too. Because sometimes, like oftentimes when you're making a pattern, you just need to fill in one area. You've got a spot that you need to fill, but it needs to have its own flow. Again, that's nice that these looks similar at first because they both have the two leaves, but then if you look closer, they're not the same. 15. P2: Building the Pattern Tile: I'm going to start with those motifs. I'm going to group all of my extra stuff that's hanging off the side and turn the visibility off just so that I can see what I'm working with. I suppose I will turn each of these now that I have them made, I'll turn them each into smart objects. I'll turn my guides back on. Like I was saying earlier, I can just tell that with the size of all of this stuff, I'm going to need more area to create the flow that I want. I could certainly use these five elements in this space to create a tile. Not impossible at all, but just for what I'm picturing for the amount of whitespace, I'm going to need more space than this. I can also scale these elements down. But remember I was using this pattern fill to judge how big I'd want them to be. I really don't want to scale the motifs. I'd rather scale my area. I'm not worried about this being a perfect square anymore as long as it is squarish, then we'll be good. Now we get to build our pattern. Just for this moment, I'm going to ignore the tile bounds just to create a flow that feels nice. This can be deceptively tricky, utilizing whitespace in a natural way. But I know you'll get it. There are all seven being used and now I'm getting to the point where I'll need to start repeating them. I already have something falling off this tile edge. Let's use our Marquee tool to find out what the size of our tile is. It went from being a perfect 6,000 square to now the width is 8,993 and the height is 8,926. Again, since these are smart objects, I'm going to have to use my calculator in order to get the values correct. Obviously, my computer has a calculator. It'd be very easy to just pull that up. I don't know why if it's my current version of Photoshop, if I need to update or what it is, but sometimes when I do this process, so if I get the value of this guy and then open up my calculator on my computer and then come back for whatever reason, sometimes this will be grayed out and I can't enter any values. It's a bug. I don't know why it does that, but because of that, I always use the calculator on my phone. You won't seen the calculator on screen, but just know that's what I'm using. The width of this is 8,993 pixels. So I need to get this guy 8,993 pixels to the left. I'm going to be dealing with my x value. The current position is 12,988.5. I'm going to go ahead and subtract 8,993, and that gives me 3,995.5. Hit Enter and you should bee able to tell pretty easily just buy looking at it that you got that number right. I can see just a little dip of that roses hanging off and a little dip of that roses is hanging off there so that is correct. Even though I want to work from the inside out. Now that we have elements repeating, we're going to be able to easily see where we need to fill the spaces. The other thing is I have these two guys also covering the edge, and I can move them at the same time. I'm going to select both of them. Hit Command J to make copies. You can see I have group 1 copy and group 4 copy selected. I'll hit Command T and now as a group, these have a position of 11,557, so I will take 11,557 in my calculator, I will subtract my value of 8,993, and now the new coordinate of this is 2,564. You can see just from looking at these that it looks like the edge of this leaf lines up almost perfectly with the edge of that leaf and I don't want to create a column. I already know that these are the correct amount of space away from each other and so I'm just going to select both of them and move them. When I click into my area to make sure that I've got nothing selected and now I'll shift click and grab these two. Now I can move them around wherever I want because I know that they are the correct size for the tile. I guess that spot I had those and is pretty good. Maybe I'll try moving that over a little bit and then try moving this over a little bit. Which means now we don't need this one because it's not covering the edge so I can delete it. One of the best tips I can give you too is to not solve problems before they're problems, which is what I just did. I saw that those were lining up and so I tried to fix them. But maybe with the flow we had, maybe it wasn't even going to be an issue. Now it's just the fun of making copies and flipping them around. The nice thing about this pattern is it's an all over multi-directional designs. You don't have to worry about keeping the leaves facing up. I'm getting a stripe hear. I don't want that. Again, accidentally, if I moved this one independently of that one and messed up the relationship between them, it's as easy as making a new copy and moving it where it needs to be. The sky looks small, I need to increase it. Now, this is just an annoying Photoshop thing. If I just have a normal layer, not a smart object. If I transform it, if I just click and drag the corner, it holds onto the aspect ratio. If I want to not do that, I hold down shift and now I can drag it out independently however I want. For smart objects, it's the exact opposite. If I want to scale this up and down, if I just click and drag, you can see it's easy for me to throw off that aspect ratio, but if I hold down shift and drag, it constrains it. I have no idea why they're opposite. It's very annoying. This is nice because this flower is going to repeat again somewhere up there. By having this copy of it lined up, but not quite, it'll help break that and maybe I'll rotate it just a little bit more. I don't think we saved this document, we want to save often. I'm going to go ahead and go to my pattern 2 folder. I'm going to call this Pattern 2 Tile. I think every artist and designer has had that moment when a program crashes on them and it is sad. 16. P2: Testing & Adjusting the Pattern Tile: I'm going to go ahead and test this because I'm interested to see how this space that's left over we'll look. I'll go ahead and edit, define pattern. I left this Smart Object group open earlier. I'm just going to close that and we don't need our rows motifs anymore, so I'm going to close those and I'll go ahead and make my dummy document. I'm going to do 20 by 20 and even though that's smaller than my tile, I can always scale the pattern down to be able to see all of it. It's looking pretty good across the width. We have a little channel here, but we could fix that. Where is that? See how sometimes I can't tell where the thing is that I'm looking at. I'm going to go ahead and make my ugly square so that I'm able to figure out exactly where that spaces that I was looking at in a file. I'm going to duplicate this pattern filled by hitting "Command J" so now when I do this second one, it will be perfectly lined up on top of that one. The space that I was seeing was right here, we'll go ahead and put a guy. I want to put an item like right where those intersect. That's almost at the top of my tile near the left-hand corner, so that's right here, so that's how that can be really helpful to orient yourself. Might go down here to see, so I don't want to cross that border. I need to move this one down, so we're going to be using the y value and since we're moving it down, we need to add to this value. I will type in 913 and I'm going to add my y-value of 35. You know what? I have too many values written down and I can't remember which ones are for this tile. This one, it's the bigger one, I almost use the smaller one from last time, so you have a copy. Sorry about that. I want to take my 913 value and I want to add 8926 to it because that's how tall my tile is and that new value is 9839. I hit "Enter", I'll do a quick visual check to make sure that that looks like it's right and it does. Now it can do a quick test to see how that addition did. Once I get to this point where I'm closing in on the space, I test a lot, testing all the time. If I move that down, that should be nice and since there's two of them, I need to make sure I grab both of them. Will try right there. That's really nice. Now it looks like I only have this big space to fill and from the shape of it, it looks like if I can get something to go like the Nike swoosh and there, that would be good. That is my corner areas, so sometimes those can be tricky. If I were just looking at this, I would think, cool I'm almost done but when I open it up in the dummy, I'm able to see there's this big glaring hole and I'm actually able to see what shape I might need to fill that hole. I'm going to try this one, rotate it a bit, and when an item shows up on a corner, that means you need to not only repeat it against this access, you also need to repeat it against this one. I'm going to first rotate it this way, so I will take my x value of 4229 and I'm going to add my tile width to it, which is 8993, and I get 13222. Great. That looks right. Now I will grab both of these now. I don't technically need to repeat this one down here because what's shown, there's nothing here, I really only need to repeat it down here, so I guess I'll just do one. But if I do have corner elements, then you can grab both of those and move them at the same time, but like I said, I don't technically need a repeat of that one, so I'll just do this. We need to move it down, so that's the y-value. I need to add, so I'm going to do 943 plus 8926, that's 9869. Let's go ahead and test that and see how it's looking. Now, I guess we'll just do just to be sure, let's do an accuracy test. Just double-check that we're not missing any glaring issues, we'll do a flow test. This one I am going to move and all I need to do is check one of the upper edges and one of the side edges, so there's no problems with the technical repeat, turn that off. But I only need to see if it works, if it looks good and honestly, this is where a lot of students and beginners fall off. It takes a lot of work to do this and to get the flow down. Once it just technically works, they're like, "I'm done, " because it works. That's fine, but does it look good and so I'm going to zoom out even more. I'm going to take this to 30 percent and I'm going to do the squint test, so I just put my screen into full view mode and I'm going to squint and the thing that I'm looking for are stripes and debuggers. So I'm not seeing any stripes; they appear really quickly. You'll just notice that there's a gap between the motifs or something. It really is like magic that your squinted eyes can see them better. Here is what I am seeing though. I see that there's a trail of these that looks really close together and this guy is standing out like a debugger. A debugger is someone that draws all the attention to them and while debuggers are wonderful in real life, we don't want them in our pattern, we want to make sure things are flowing. It looks like if I could change this motif to have something more than maybe that would fill the area better or maybe if I nudged it over. I'm weary to get to replace this single bouquet with one that has more because then I think that this single one will stand out more, but I at least know where I need to be looking to fix things. The first thing is this looks like it could just move this way a little bit and that might be enough and maybe if this moved up a little, and then these groups moved up a little. Let's see what that little adjustment did. When I'm doing tests like that, when I'm seeing should it be this or should it be that, I really like to utilize my "Undo feature" to see it before and after. That's before, this is after and now when I squint my eyes that totally took care of this debugger issue. If it was a debugger not because of it, but because the space we're putting around it was more than around the other one, so this is how it is now. It just looks like everything has a much nicer flow to it and also that help fix like I still see these ones in a train together, but it isn't disruptive because I see these ones in a train together too, and it just looks like the flow. I think that looks pretty good actually, so once you've tested for accuracy, you've tested for flow and everything checks out, then that's it for the tile. Again, we'll come back to this pattern in the finishing video so I can show you how I would apply any final colors and textures but for now, the repeating tile is built. Next, we'll work on pattern design number 3. 17. P3: Document Setup: For our third pattern, we're going to create an intricate all-over design, so a pattern that has virtually no whitespace and can be used in any direction. This pattern will utilize lots of arrows to keep the eye winding around with big and small spots for relief. Before we get going I want to talk about a correlation that's been happening already that will really become evident in this third demo. One of the main problems we're trying to solve when creating a surface design is masking where the repeat is. The longer it takes for the eye to find the repeat the better. Now, with some designs like stripes or the first spot repeat we made, it can be much more evident where the repeat is just by the nature of the design, but for the most part we want the pattern to feel like it magically goes on forever. It's like editing film, the better you are at editing together a story, the less you're going to be noticed as the editor because the viewer is too enthralled by the story to remember it was even edited together. We want our viewers to be so enchanted by the pattern that they forget to look for the edges. There are two things that affect the ease with which we can hide the edges, the complexity of the composition and the tile size. The first repeat we made was fairly easy to compose and only took a few minutes really but because there's so little going on it means every little error or weird spot is going to be visible. Meaning it can actually be harder to ultimately mask the pattern tile edges on a simpler composition. Ease of building the composition of motifs and ease of hiding the tile edge have an inverse relationship, when one gets easier the other gets harder. Looking at our first two patterns again, the first one was only made up of a few motifs and it was very simple to compose, which meant we had to really look out for flow disruptors that might quickly reveal the edge or standout in a bad way. The second pattern took a bit longer to compose with more variation in the motifs and use of negative space and therefore, it was a bit easier to hide the edges than the first design. When we look at tile size and ease of hiding the tile edge they have a positive correlation, so as the tile area gets larger it's easier to hide where the repeat is. When we look at the first design we made you can see we put this into practice. We only had five motifs to build that tile so I could have done a similar design more quickly in a much smaller area but that would mean it would be that much easier to spot the repeat. By making the area a little bit larger and arranging more copies of the motifs it becomes harder for the viewer to find where elements are being repeated. When we look at the second design we made I think we fell in about the middle. Smaller would have made it a bit harder to create flow but larger would have given us more opportunities for better flow. Now, looking at this third design, it's a very complex composition, the most complex of the three, not only in how much is going on but just variation in motifs and colors, and it requires time, practice, patience and fresh eyes to complete but that also means it's going to be a piece of cake hiding the repeat. There are so many colors and shapes and thanks to the arrow motifs lots of movement and this makes it really difficult for the eye to find the repeat. Due to the heavy use of arrow motifs though, I'm going to be using a bit bigger of a tile area too to make sure I've got enough room to create the full breadth of flow that I'll need. Both of these factors mean hiding the repeat isn't going to be a concern like at all, but the trade-off is it's going to take some time to build and fill out. As we venture into this heavier pattern if you find yourself becoming weary from all the arranging and layers and technical bits, take a break and remember it's challenging because it's a challenging task, not because you're dumb or some other terrible judgy thought, it's hard we are putting together puzzles that have to look like they go on forever. I'll also add that practice lends itself to your efficiency and ability to work out these puzzles in a big way, so if this is your first time or one of your first times be patient with yourself and know that it gets easier every time you do it. By now you know the drill that we're going to start off by creating a new document and even though this layout is going to be more dense and not require as much white space there are a lot of arrows that are really long so I need a lot of room for flow as we talked about in that relationship. Basically what I'm getting at is I'm going to go with an even bigger workspace of 30 by 30. You certainly don't have to, you can go smaller and still have a lot of success. In fact, maybe I'll regret it and shrink it down but I'm going to start with 30 by 30. I'm going to open up all of my motifs, so Pattern 3, there's lots of motifs for this. In the first two patterns we copied everything over to the tile and built it with everything all in one. There's just too many elements for me to want to do that this time, I'll get really stressed out if I see all of these options hanging out on the side of the board and so I would rather just switch back and forth and grab things as I need them and then copy them as they're on my art board already. One thing I do want to bring over though is the background color so I'll grab that fill and put that back there. I'll go ahead and save it and we're going to get into it. 18. P3: Building the Pattern Tile: By now, there's really nothing new that I'll be teaching you. This pattern just needs to be built, and it's going to take some time. I'm going to be looking out for lines and stripes and devos, and I'm going to be testing often. One thing I'll do is I'm going to take a look at the other patterns I made. Then the second pattern we made, I actually maid it big. I'm going to scale that down to 65 percent, and I'm just going to use my mask to see all of them at once. This is where the coordinate, where the scale for those have landed and I really like that, and so I'm just looking, I'm going to feed those just so that I can really see this. I just want to make sure this isn't going to be too much larger. I think it'll be fine. I think I'd rather build it a little bigger and scale it down like last time. I think the scale it came in and that will probably be just fine. I'm going to delete these pattern fills. I'm just going to start building. The reason I really wanted to show this process of building this, even though I'm not doing anything, did not want all of those. Ungroup these just like I did in the other ones, so that even when it's set layered by the group, I can still grab these single things I need. The reason that I wanted to show building this pattern, even though it's no different skills wise than the other one, is because it does still take more skill, because you're just balancing weigh more objects and more arrows, and spots, and it's really dense. In the past when I've watched pattern classes, when teachers are okay, well I'm just going to keep going and then they cut you off, and then you go back and see the next video and they have this beautiful thing and you don't know how they did it. I'm always, let me see that. Just I don't care if it's boring, let me see it. I'm letting you see it. There's nothing incredibly interesting or thought-provoking that I'm doing. I'm just making sure I'm not creating stripes. If I put this up here, then I'm creating a pink wine right there that I don't want. I'm going to create a little curve, create a little arrow. We're going to try and vary the colors and keep it full of movement. Ungroup all these, then you grab a couple of flowers. You'll notice I'm not using Smart Objects, and maybe that would surprise you because it's going to be a beast to recolor all of this if I'm not using Smart Objects, but the reason I'm not is because a I don't mind recoloring without Smart Objects. In fact, I do that more often than I use Smart Objects. For instance, I'm using this leaf stem as it is, and I'm going to be using this leaf stem a lot. In order to prevent it looking to copied, I want to be able at some times to go in hear and cut that piece off and move it somewhere else. If things are smart objects, then it just builds in that layer that I can't get to things. It ends up slowing me down a little bit, and I don't want that. For instance, this tall flower, if this were a Smart Object and I wanted to alter it, I need two click into that Smart Object, find the thing and go back. But since it's not and I known this leaf is separate, I can actually just grab this leaf and move it around as I need. It's just you trade your efficiencies. What's efficient for one task is going to make things harder in another, but it's okay because we can handle all of it. Whereas with the second pattern when we had white space around and so we didn't want to draw the eye in too many competing directions. This is going to be so dense that we really need to keep the eye moving at all costs. Sometimes we might end up creating a spidery looking thing in structure, but then as it gets filled out, it doesn't look like a spider. Some rules are meant to be broken for some instances. Again, I'm building outward. I don't want to start placing a leave down here because I don't know how the flow of that is going to look yet. I just know that I want to keep the shapes a rolling in this. This is a little bit stem coming off, I just use my eraser to trim that. If these are coming out this way, what shape can I have commit that from a different direction? Since I want this to be an all over print, I really want to make sure that I have motifs going in all directions. I think I might be able to naturally meet that, right there without them pointing at each other. If I put these right here, that creates a weird mirror thing, but if I put them right here, then it looks like they just are fitting together and that gives me an opportunity to start my next cluster appear. One of the things that I do try to think about when I'm building these more complex compositions is creating triangles. Triangles are triangles. Triangles are really pleasing for the eyes, I know this is a strange triangle, but by creating those three right there, and then I have a triangle right here. I'm just able to keep these from being spots that stand out. If I just have two then my eyes bing bong back and fourth between them, but if I have three than I have almost like a complete circuit that feels right. It feels right to me. At least if it feels wrong to you, then don't do any of the things that feel wrong. Just try what feels write. You never know what will work. I haven't set up any guides yet. I'm probably going to need more room than this, which means my going to really get big on the file here, but that's okay. That's why I store things on hard drives, because I would rather have full-scale large patterns, than we'll teeny tiny ones that I have to remake every time a client wants it at a new size. Now, look at this fancy one. She wants to stand out. It goes getting too far away from this cluster and I want to try and keep building outward. A shortcut? Basically I want to make sure that I hide this stem behind this one, and I need to rearrange my layers. To do that with keyboard shortcuts, you can hit ''Command'' or ''Control'' and left and right bracket. I'm going to hit left bracket to move it down and you can see that tall flower moving down. It just got behind that one, that's what I needed. If I have a nice dip going here and then I have this alternate curve coming out here. I like how these three leaves look together, I'm actually going to copy them. Looks like we're really just trying to create swirls and triangles. If I want to move something all the way to the back, I can hit ''Shift'' command left bracket, and then just hit command right bracket a few times to bring it up above the background layer. You're going to hear my computer fan start going. I can hear it roaring up because let's see. This document is already 323 megs, 532 megs altogether. These ones are all hundreds of megs each, I have a lot going on and I'm just duplicating layers. My computers then heat up and my processor is going to kick it span on. One thing is I don't want this orange flour to become a diva. I need to create a triangle somewhere to keep that from happening. It's up to you just how dense things are, whether you have things overlap all the way like that. These little daisies are these little spot motifs are going to be easy to fill in any awkward spaces with. They're really going to save us when we get to awkward areas or these bigger arrows that don't fit together. Once again, that's why having a variety is nice. Here's my favorite double pod. Same with the double pods there in the grand scheme of looking at everything else, they aren't that noticeable, but they'll be able to help add pops or direction to these spots if anything starts to get stale. 19. P3: Building the Pattern Tile Continued: By putting this orange one here, I just lined it up with that orange one. We don't always have to pay that close attention to elements that are that far away from each other. But since that orange stands out so much, it creates a triangle that has a perfectly straight edge here, which I don't like, and so I think it would fit better. Maybe even over here where I have these buds appear at now. I don't want to put it here because then I create that triangle. This would be the worst spot because then I create two straight lines. That's nice. We have a nice triangle pointing that way. We have this bigger one pointing that way. This one pointing that way. If you did not follow my mouse movements at all, that makes a lot of sense because that was not easy to follow. Once I have a pretty big chunk of it like this, which I don't know if it's quite ready, but I'll show you what I'm going to do. I'm going to lock my background layer so that I can go back to being able to grab all this stuff, delete that one. All of these. I'm going to group them together for right now. I'm going to see what it looks like to duplicate it and start figuring out how far apart I think these need to be. So the main thing I'm seeing is this big orange flower, and so we might want to create a triangle down here with some more of them. You can also create a trail of more orange ones. But I'm really just trying to see, is this enough space, what flow am I going to get into? How are these going to meet in the middle organically? I'm not ready to do this yet. I just ungrouped those by hitting Shift command G, I think it's still need to work out more what's happening here. I think a cluster of roses would be glittery here. So when I'm bringing these layers over, I'm sometimes accidentally dropping the groups within other groups, and so I just need to move those out so I can keep grabbing and moving these independently. You could see it as two triangles, but now we're just getting into a nice organic shapes that keeps the eyes line moving. I might bring this guy down a tiny bit in size just because it is the most bold of the coloring and so I think that'll help. Let's group all of those. Let's see if that helps us out with this issue. Sometimes I'll just test it. So let's just act like that's going to stay there. I'm going to challenge myself to break this obvious line that you see, and so we'll need another big orange flower. That's not bad. Trying to see though how does this change direction? So if this arc is going this way, how is it going to naturally turn into this? So maybe ask how that happens there. 20. P3: Creating the Pattern Tile Bounds: For now, I'm going to say, before I ungroup all of these, let's just go for it and try and make our tile bounds. I'm pretty sure that this is going to be enough room to create the flow I need. So just like with the first one, we're going to use the so like these are mirrors of each other, right. They're perfectly lined up so we can use the centers of these groups in order to find where the tile edge is. So hit "Command T", hold down command or control, drag the guide out. My guides are turned off, so I'll turn them on by hitting "Command Colon". I'll do it with the other one. Now at least I known where the left and right of this tile is as of right now. I can make sure that it works. I'm going to go ahead and create my dummy document. Just so I don't have two massive files open, I'll do 20 by 20 and then I'll just shrink the pattern down to make sure I see it. So far this is what we're working with. I broke one of my earlier rules when I said build from the inside out. But for this I'm more so just wanted to do it as a test to see is this single row is going to be a diva, or could I start to build it out there. I think I can, so I don't know if I going to leave, I'll leave those for now, but they could get in the way. Like for instance, I'm going to need something right here to start. Actually, you know what, if I put these flowers right here, see how the end of this leaf is ending up with the end of that leaf, that almost creates a line. I'm going to want these leaves to be able to go further, so I will have them like right there. I'm going to ungroup these mega groups now because I want to be able to grab their motifs and right now I can't. See this will give us a nice, we'll have a nice, and that helps bridge here. So that really helped us continue the high line right there. There's an art to ranging tiny daisies so that they look like they're in a natural cluster. It's like a natural cluster but also filling in awkward space and continuing the high line. So that's why these patterns are more challenging because you're solving a lot of problems at once. If I'm growing from inside out, you know, I'm going to be looking at this high line, which means I'll be dipping down here. I might grab a copy of this to see where does that work. Then I'm going to use the center of this leaf to test out the repeat here. Now I at least have a test tile size, full tile size. I know before we had the widths, but now I at least have this first initial idea of where I can be going. If you want to see the life of your patterns, so instead of replacing this one, so I'm going to hit "Command J" to make a duplicate of it. But I'll go in and select the latest one and then as you grow, you can just look at each layer to see how the pattern changed, which is cool. I can't seen too much right now, I just need to keep building. I think that could work, it's certainly works hear to continue that high line. I think since these are curving, I think that a curve right there will be good. Now I'm going to go ahead and make note of my tile size and I want it in pixels it is. I'm going to write that down because I made the tile from finding the center of those areas, but now we have a specific size that everything will need to conform to. So 8056 wide, 8399 tall. 21. P3: Filling the Pattern Tile: I tried these rows down here, since we're not using smart objects, I don't have to use math, I can do negative 8399 to move that up. I think that's going to work because I want to start creating some triangle with this yellow guy here. It's really nice with background elements like leaves. I'm using the same copy, but since it has so much movement and it's just in the background is this filler element with all these other things it isn't as obvious or it isn't as bigger the deal because the leaves are just sort of this, they work together as a single background element. With these separate branches, I'm really able to create the movement I want. Cool, here's where we started, and here is where we are now. We're already making it across one. We've already made it above here and we're touching in the center here. Making our way, I can hear my computer fan as promised. I'm going to cut some leaves off of this one, do some trimming, I need to get closer, I just tried to erase part of the stem, and instead of erasing it made it orange. That's because I have the transparent pixels locked on this layer. Instead of erasing, it's going to show the background color. I'm just going to hit this little lock and go in there and turn it back, and then I'll hit this little grid icon to lock the transparent pixels again. That just makes it easier to color things, with these transparent pixels locked, right now I can fill everything that's on that layer with my foreground color of pink. Just by hitting option or alt, delete in one click. If I didn't have it turned on, I'll turn that off, you can see it just fills the whole layer. By locking the transparent pixels, you're literally saying any pixel that does not have artwork on it, please ignore, only apply it to the artwork, that's what that is. But that also means when you go to erase if it still turned on, then it doesn't actually erase things. If you'd like to know more about that, I would check out my digitizing hand-drawn sketches class or the digitizing your paint class. This is turning a little bit too far upright, it's almost creating a straight line. But if I do that it connects with those motifs better, I can just slip that back in there. Now, we have a nice long S curve here then we have some nice stuff happening here. Let's go ahead and test it, it's looking nice, I'm going to shrink it down even more. It's always nice when the shapes you have leftover are really organic. That's great, the only thing I'm seeing here is I'm seeing a gap between these roses and those leaves. I need to figure out these [inaudible] I need to figure the rest of it out. I'm going to go ahead I don't need all of these to show where it was and where it is. I mean, you've seen it, I'm going to delete those just to keep things light and I'll bring this back up to 50 percent. I'll keep this right on the main hole we're closing in on. Which is funny because when you look at it this way, it's hard to see that it would be a hole, it just looks like a big open area but really, this top right here is, of course, what caps off that gap. This right here is what we're seeing right there, but you know that's basic pattern stuff. I want to make sure I have a nice variety of flower clusters. I don't want all of them to be groups of three, I want it to be good, but I also don't want these if these get to close then I'm going to have one long connecting thing of roses. I want to stay away from that. But, I think creating this arch of orange is really going to help with this would be diver right there. I have just spare leaves to, my daisies aren't the only thing that can fill empty spaces, if I have something weird I can just put in one leaf and it looks very natural like right there. I think this that is curving right here, which is this guy right here, say, how can we make that so that it makes sense with this movement. I grab one of these and start playing around with what direction looks the most natural. I don't want to use this exact one because his brother is right there. I think that placement is going to work, I have these spots right here, and if I don't intervene with some orange up here, then I think those are going to stand out as diverse. We're really getting there. You can see how the swirls are all starting to converge on each other, that is good. I almost have a number nine shape here, and that fits with all the swirls that are around it. Following that nine shape I saw, I'm going to fill in the greens that way. I mean greenery, I know these aren't, I know what I'm looking at is blue. This group of flowers is creating a rectangle right here that I don't like. If I put this here, I create a straight line of roses, we were really getting there. I what to remember to zoom in, we turn this group off and look to, because I don't want to look too far out. I want to make sure that what I'm creating close up looks nice like there's some competition here. Looks better, this looks like it needs to be rotated. It's good to look from far away, but it's good to look from close up to. To enter into full-screen mode I'm just tapping F on my keyboard, sometimes that's what I'll do, especially if I on my dummy, if I shrink this down to 30, I'll zoom in and then go to full screen and I'll just stare at it when it's more full, then I see how it looks full screen, but we still have too many gaps to fill. See how those just so nicely fill that space, it's very satisfying. Make sure I save I haven't saved in a while, I think I'm actually going to test one more time and then I'm going to take a break, so I can come back with fresh eyes. I'm Just [inaudible] and going back to see if I like those changes I just made, this is the before, and this is the after. The new way is much better. Cool, you know what? Look, let's just do a quick accuracy tests because I don't want to be making decisions based off of inaccuracies. We'll go in here and make any colored square, we already know one of them is wrong. See if anything else is, we know that flower needs to be repeated. Everything looks good going across the top. It's just that one. But I missed this one, negative 8056, it's coming together really nicely. I know it can be hard to see with the glaring hole in the way. But I like how fun it is, even though these are really bold, they don't stand out too much because there's so much boldness happening. It's a little hard to test for diverse right now, but as I squint, there's at least these oranges are nicely dispersed and grouped, that's encouraging. I'll come back to it with fresh eyes, one more save I'll see it soon. 22. P3: Filling the Pattern Tile Continued: While that break me have been about two seconds for you because of the power of editing. That break for me was about 15 hours. Yesterday I finished this up about 04:00 P.M and had dinner and logged off for the night and didn't look at Photoshop. I'm happy I did because I remember yesterday when I left off, I remember I was building out the rest of the structure for how the swirls would come together. But I didn't really know where to go next and today when I opened it up, the first thing I saw was this gap right here. I can already see how I might be able to add some of these tall flowers so I might be able to do one right here to help form this curve and then I could do more coming up this way to create a swirl. That's why taking a break is nice and just having those fresh eyes. I'm just going to hop right back into it. One thing I'm going to do though, let's do another test on a dummy so I can remember. What I was thinking was maybe we'd have put a flower to one of the tall flowers going this way but now that I see it laid out like this, yeah, I think that will still work. Sometimes too with these tests, even though this is just a pattern feel, sometimes I'll bring some of the motifs over onto here to see how I could fill that gap. This fills that gap nicely, but I'm worried so since this stem comes in hear and then it looks like it just picks up right there, I just want to make sure that that line isn't too strong. I think it's going to be, I can already see right now that that's making that orange flower stand out even more, so I might need to find a different solution. It's not that bad actually. I wonder if it would look better if instead of an orange rose, if this were a big yellow one or something. Again, the reason I'm worried about this is not only the boldness of it, but it creates this just really strong line and I don't want the eye to follow any single line for that long, I don't think. I noticed that I had a big area in here where there weren't any of these tall flowers, so I fit one in there, I think that really helps break up the movement if I turn that off. Yeah, I think it just helps. Do you see how there's some areas that I've built-in. Right here, we have a little bit of relief from the density right here, we have a little bit of relief right here and so I'm really trying to balance out. I don't need to fill every little white space with these clusters. I'm more so looking at where they are needed and where it feels more like a bold spot versus where it feels like a breathing spot. If I don't want see how this stem is sticking out, I don't want to erase that stem though. If I wanted to work non-destructively, I can just add a mask to this layer and using a brush or scissor basic. Basic brush and black in color then I can mask that out. Masks are another thing that I cover in depth in my digitizing your paint course. They're very helpful. As I'm moving this around, what I'm looking at is the shape of this as compared to the ark of all the light flowers near it. I'm trying to found a way that will be seamless for all of them, which feels like right there because these ones are nice and it isn't competing with these. The only issue is it's too similar to this one that's right there. I think I'll have some leaves swoop up to meet these ones in the middle and then we'll have a little swirl to fill in right here, and then some space right here. Right now, this leaf back here, I just want to move this one stem. But it's hard for me to see with everything layered and so if you ever want to solo a layer and have that be the only thing you see if you hold down Option or ALT on your keyboard and hit the visibility eye on the layer, it will make it so that's the only layer that's turned down. But you need to be careful because if you do that and forget that you solo that one and you start to turn these on individually, then you'll have to manually turn on the rest of them. For instance, before I even make this cut, I'm going to go ahead and hit Option or ALT and click that eye again so that it turns everything back on. Now I can cut and paste. I did that by hitting Command X and Shift-Command V can also do Edit, Copy and Edit Paste in place, which is what I was doing. I think that maid a nice swirl in there, which means right in the middle of this swirl we're going to have a cluster of flowers. We will do some tiny orange ones. Somebody could create a triangle right there. This one will also help break up what's happening there. Now that I'm filling in this swirl, it's really helpful to have these separate curved leaves for me to just fill in what I need. It's a little bit too straight up and down. Do you see how this is creating a straight line? It's like, "Yeah, I want to fill the space, but I don't want to create a bunch of straight lines when I do it." This one here, see that line that I created, don't want that. I do not know what keyboard shortcut I hit. I must have hit Command four or five and I did something in the channels here. See sometimes that happens. Sometimes you're moving along and you hit a keyboard shortcut and you don't know what happened, but just be calm, google if you need to. I didn't need to google for that one. 23. P3: Filling the Pattern Tile Continued (again): Here's a good example of where, let's see, this area isn't as dense as the others with just the leaf showing through, but it doesn't feel bald. Whereas up here, this spot right here and this spot right here, that does feel more or like an awkward space that I need to fill. Look for some daisies to copy. We're getting really close. One thing that I noticed in this preview that I didn't in the others, is how obvious the repeat is because of these two right here. These two are easy to pick out and maybe they'll be less so when these are filled. But what I know I need to do now, is I need to find one of these long flowers and I need to found a way to fill it in here so that it breaks up that eyeline. Let's see that is happening over here. Again, it's these corners that can be tricky if you're not testing to be able to see how the space can best be filled. Just adding this tall flower onto this one to extend it, but I need to do some layering work so that it's not just on top of that one. I want it to be behind that other tall flower, so I'm just using Command or Control left bracket to move that layer down until I see it disappear behind the flower. We have a lot of layers. It might be faster for me to go all the way to the bottom. Yeah. That was faster. Of course, I need to duplicate and move that up. Let's see if that helped. I'm still going to have the gaps that I need to fill in, but I want to see if that at least helped that eyeline issue I was seeing. Yeah. That's all I needed to break that up. If I Command+Z and go back, I don't know. It feels like this is really obvious and then when this is in here, it just helps that line become more obvious. Yeah, that's much better. By adding this one, I was able to at least offer an alternate eyeline to this strong ark right there. Then by adding this one in I was able to take away the power of that one and add more wildness. Homestretch of the pattern. Now it's just the nitpicky filling the tiny areas and testing. This pattern is nice because everything is a diva, and so if something is standing out, it's really a diva. But it means that there probably won't be as many of those to fix. Since we worked so hard to build flow from the shape of the leaves, I think that it's not going to take long. Once this is fully filled in and we're really testing for flow, I don't think it's going to take very long, we've been testing as we go. I'm doing a quick squint to take an inventory of rows colors to see if there's an imbalance that I notice. There's not a lot of orange in this area from the flowers, but there's orange from these leaves so that's nice too, the flowers aren't the only thing carrying something orange. Now, I accidentally see this one down here, I accidentally grab the exact same orange one, and so this would be repeating gray here. Those exact copies would be near each other, which isn't a problem, but I don't want them to be the exact same rotation and everything. I might just go in, and I've got lots of orange flowers to choose from. Take this one. I'm actually going to line it up down here because I want to make sure I create a triangle between these three, and that I'll move it up into place and see where it lands. This is looking awesome. I have this spot here, which you can see in the repeat, shows up there but, everything else looks pretty great so far on the initial look. Now, I've been testing this pattern at this smaller scale just so that I can see everything. That's good. But you can see that there are some things like those two roses I just put in, it's pretty easy to see those as the grid. I'm going to try and break that up. But also I'm pointing it out to say that, sometimes if you zoom out enough on any pattern, it's going to be very easy to see the grid, and so you have to balance it with, I want to zoom out to make sure that it looks good but at some point you need to know, well, it's not going to be used at that size. That's where zooming in at a reasonable rate and just looking and seeing it in full screen really helps because you can look at each section and see there's something that's not working. You can also go in and make it a little bit smaller. Let's go 40 or we can do 30. Some of these single yellow roses stand out. I just altered an edge element, which means I need to delete this one and pop it back into place. Even though I made a copy and I eyeballed where I think that would land down here, I don't need to do that for the technical repeat but I'm trying to figure out what flower is going to fit best here. It helps to see what's going to be coming below. Look at that before and after. Here's the before. Super easy for me to spot these. Here's the after. See how that just all blended and fell right back into the background? It's very satisfying. I'm really close with this one. Now I'm doing a squint to see if there's any divas, any bawled spots? I see a bald spot right here, where we were working. Right in there. I really need to fill this part of the Illustration out with daisies. I could use some more up here too. It's nice once you get to this part, there's so many motifs and little clusters that you can really reuse a lot of pieces and since I'm working all the way on the other side of the pattern, the eye won't have enough time to catch on to the fact that it's a copy pretty much. We're using the scale, size, and density to our advantage. See just how those relate out, I was able to create a little bit of movement here and fill that gap. Now I can't totally tell, looks like it's just kissing the edge, but I'm going to make a copy and move it to the other side too just to be safe. This guy actually, he does not touch the edge at all, so I just need to move it into place up top in here within the tile. I don't need to make a copy, I'll just move him negative 8399. Again, this right here, that looks less like breathing room and more or like, just an awkward open spot. It won't take much. It just may take that one daisy just to show that we didn't overlook that space. Same with up here. This scrubby zoom I'm doing, I'm doing Command and then Space and holding them down and then clicking and dragging with my mouse and going left and right. If I go to the right, I zoom in while holding those down and if I go to the left, I zoom out. But it also Space Command is the thing that brings up spotlight search on my computer, so that comes up when I do too. It's just annoying but, whatever. Look at the difference between without all those daisies and with, just really helped fill things in. Think I'm going to need a few rate here. That's right under that arch. I can find that. It's over here. 24. P3: Filling and Adjusting the Pattern Tile: I'm going to save and I'm getting pretty close now that I want to just take some time and do a sanity check or an accuracy test. I want to make sure I've got a lot of elements, I've been moving around and it's super, it'd be very easy for me to skip one. I just want to go in and make sure that I don't see any weird lines at the border. There's one. There's a stem in the bottom line that needs to be fixed. It's this guy right here. You see, it doesn't need much, it only needs that little bit, but that little bit is going to make all the difference, so minus 8056. Moving on, we looked out. I think I went all the way across the top. What a relief? That doesn't always happen. I usually forget way more things. Just to make sure it's fixed, I'll go to edit, define pattern. I'm going to zoom in to the place where the trouble issue was, so is right here. Put in the new pattern, and you can see that's fixed, that stem now goes all the way. Let's go ahead and do our flow test. I think we're pretty close to being done here. That's a bald spot. There's patterns so big, it's really hard to create a diva except for, I mean, we did with some of those yellow flowers, but we saw we were able to break those up. The main thing I'm seeing is this blank spot between these two orange roses, that's right here, and I think I'm going to put a leaf and some daisies. I really want to be careful to not overdo it with filling the space, sometimes I can get a little too happy with that thing, and then before I know it, I have just too many daisies. I want it to look organic and cute, but still have some space. Am noticing there's no red line flower in here, but I don't think it's a problem because there's enough going on around it creating flow. I don't see anything in my squint test that stands out too much to me. I see a few spots that maybe could be filled with daises , but I don't want to do that right now because I don't trust my eyes because I was filling them in too much. For right now, if I bring this back to a larger size, so this is more the scale I pictured this existing at, and so I want to take a look at that and see. Actually in this size, I do feel like there's two very obvious wells on either side here where there's not any flowers. So let's see. That's this area right here, I was playing with that a lot earlier. I do you remember trying to figure out how to make these work because it's the swirl where everything comes together. Maybe I'll try one of this. This is the smallest of them, and I'll take it out all over and then I'm going to cut off that little bud. That feels better to me. I'm going to call this one done for now. We have fully filled the tile area. It feels really beautiful and full. There's a few sections that I might want to revisit, but right now they don't stand out as errors or anything for sore eyes, or a source for the eyes. This would make a great desktop. Sometimes a test I'll do is to try and move around and see if cropping it in different ways throws it off, and if I can handle it, then we're good. I'm going to scale this down to 20, and then zoom in. It's a little bit blurry, but I can at least move around. I don't see anything awkward or any framings that I wouldn't want to have. It looks like the movement works well no matter where you're at. With that folks, let's do a Save. We are done with our intricate all over pattern. Now that we've created all three patterns, I'll show you how I finish my designs. 25. Finishing: Layer Organization: The meat of this class is really about building awesome and strong pattern tiles and less about the motif creation itself or final rendering styles. But in the spirit of thoroughness, I'd like to show you how I finish my designs before storing them. In this lesson, will cover organizing layers, using clipping masks, recoloring artwork, utilizing smart objects for quick editing, adding texture and preventing Photoshop from taking a million years to open. The first thing that I do when I'm ready to start cleaning up and finishing my files, is I make a copy of the file. So when I'm about to clean it up, I'm about to throw out anything we don't need. So this square that I was using to do accuracy tests and these extra backgrounds and sometimes I have sketches that are in there or extra motifs that weren't used and I like to just hold onto those, because this document right now is built for positioning. It's built for building a tile. We have all of our motifs, are easy to grab and move around. What we're about to do, is we're about to convert it to be built for finishing, for coloring and adding texture. So we're actually going to change how the document is set up and so, I like to have the one as it is. Then I'm going to just go and hit "Shift Command S" or "Shift Control S" on a PC or "File Save As" and we're going to save a new copy. So I'm still in my Pattern 2 file. This time I'm going to call this one Pattern 2 Tile Cleaned Up. The first thing I'm going to do is crop down, so that I don't seen so much excess. I'm still going to go on the outside of my guides. That's how I prefer to do it. I'll show you in the delivery video how I crop down to the specific tile bounds when needed. But for now, just getting that extra is enough for me and I cropped by hitting C on keyboard. But you can also just grab the tool over here and crop. One thing about the crop is, I have this delete cropped pixels turned off so that if I were to crop this back out, you can see that artwork still exists. It's just our canvas got smaller. Now the big thing I need to do is, organize my layers. As I said, right now everything is built to be moved around, but if I need to recolor everything, everything's in separate groups, it's all spread apart. The first thing I'm going to do is, take everything out of its group and regroup it buy color. I have somethings in smart objects and somethings not, because I wanted to show you how I handle both of them. For right now, I'm just going to rename all of the smart groups. I'm going to call them flower cluster 4. I'll just copy that name and paste that all the way down for all the smart objects I have. Then I'm going to move those to the top of the pile by hitting "Shift Command" or Control right bracket. You can also just click and drag it to the top like this. But if I grab all of these by holding down "Command" or "Control" and clicking them, I can select just those ones I want and then shoot them all to the top at the same time. I'll worry about organizing the layers within the smart object after. By the way, these 1,2,3,4,5, these six smart objects are all pulling from the same smart objects. I only need to update one of those. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to go in and start ungrouping these groups I have. You can go up to, is it layer? Yes, you can go up to layer and ungroup layers or I will be using the Shift Command G keyboard shortcut. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to create a folder per each color item. For instance, the pink details, those are all going to be in one group. Since they're always on top of everything else, it's going to be the top group. I'm going to hit "Command G " while I have this pink layer selected and I'm going to call the layer, flower details and I'm going to move everything that is pink into that folder, by clicking and dragging. Now you can see in this bouquet over here, that we're working on everything that's pink, is in folder. Now I'm going going to make a folder for these flower fills. The pods are the same color as the flower fills. I could just put them in that same folder, but just in case for the future if I want to color them separately, I'll keep them separate for now. Then we'll need a group for the leaves. Now I'm just going to keep go through and I'm going to keep doing that. Each new group, I'm going to ungroup it and I'm going to grab all of the same colored layers, and I'm going to move them into flower details, three flower fills, some pods and two leaves. I'm going to do that all the way down until every one of my grouped motifs is put into one of these four folders. This is one of those times where keyboard shortcuts like knowing two command clicks, so you can grab all of these at once and being able to move layers around with keyboard shortcuts, it makes this part go a lot faster. We're only going to be doing this process on the second pattern, but the process would be the same on the first pattern and the third pattern too. It's just, the third pattern would take longer because there's more and the first pattern would take no time because there's a lot less. But it's the exact same process. Even when it's a big pattern like our Pattern 3, once you get into the groove, it really doesn't take long to get everything where it's going. So everything is in those folders, I'm going to turn off these smart objects and you can see that everything else that's been grouped, is correctly in its own folder. So all the leaves are in one folder, all the pods are in one folder, all the flower fills are in a group, all the flower details are in a group. Like I said, now it would be really annoying if I needed to move this bouquet, I would need to go find all of the layers. I would probably actually do this. I'd go auto select my layer, and I'd have to shift click and make sure that I grabbed all of the different layers and then try to move them. That's why, the setting up your document this way, that's why I make a copy. Because if I found out that the layout needed to change, I would just go back to my original document and change it there. Then I would make a new copy and redo this process. Because all tool that took me less than five minutes to go through and do all that. In the big intricate pattern, let's say it takes three times longer, that's still 15 minutes. It's not that much time considering how powerful it will be, to have these ungrouped differently. The other thing is, I'm ready to delete any layers I don't need, because they're safe in that other documents. So I don't need this accuracy test box anymore. Looks like this folder has all the extra motifs in it. I can get rid of that, save some documents space, this pattern fill, I set up to help me get the scale, I don't need that. I have two copies in the background fill, I don't need that. Now we're down to that. Now I'm ready to go in and do the same thing inside my smart object. Even though it's within a smart object and it doesn't have as many items, I'm still going to group all the pink items together. So that would be the flower details. I'm going to group all the fills together. 26. Finishing: Clipping Masks: Now what we're going to do, the reason that this is so helpful is because we are going to use clipping masks to change the color of this. For now, I'm just going to set clipping masks that are the same color as the items that I have. I'm going to go down here to ''Solid color.'' For now, I'll just pick a wild color that we're not using. Let's use like very bright green that we know is not right. What I'm going to do, is with this folder closed, this group is closed and the color fill right on top, I'm going to clip this color fill to the contents of this layer by using a clipping mask. I'm going to hold down ''Option'' or ''Alt'' on my keyboard and hover right between where that color fill and the group is. Do you see how my cursor is changing to that box with an arrow? That means I'm going to make a clipping mask. You could also go up to layer ''Create Clipping Mask'', or use the keyboard shortcut of option ''Command'' or ''Control G.'' Now, I'm not going to go too in-depth about what's happening with clipping mask, if you want to learn more about them, you can check out my, let's see, you learn about them in digitizing your paint, you learn about them in digitizing hand-drawn sketches. But basically, it's a wall of paint that we're saying I only want this color to be applied to anything that's in this group. Now, you can see in one click, I'm able to change all of those leaf colors and I don't have to go into every single group. That's why we regrouped these things this way. I'm actually going to go ahead and sample the color they're supposed to be. I'm going to make a clipping mask for each group here. Now a little caveat, so right now my group is closed and if I go to ''Add a solid color,'' you'll see that it added it right on top of that group, which is what we want. But if instead, the group is open and I go to ''Do a solid color,'' it's going to put the color fill as the top item inside of the group, and that's not what we want, because if I create a clipping mask, it's only going to clip to that one item that it's below directly beneath. I'm going to hit ''Command right bracket'' to move that out of the group, but right on top of it. Then do my clipping mask. It's actually a little bit easier to have the group closed before you add your solid color just so that it doesn't accidentally add it to the wrong spot. Last one, just needed to grab my pink solid color, and hold down ''Option'' and click that to be a clipping mask. Now, I'm going to do the same thing inside of the Smart Object. I'm just going to grab the yellow we need. Again, if I just knew at this point that the pods are going to stay the same color as the flower fill, I could just combine those groups and not have to have two separate clipping masks. But I like to keep things as non-destructive as possible, meaning you can go back. I'm just going to hit ''Command S'', close that group. Now, all of these smart objects are organized. 27. Finishing: Exploring & Applying Color: Now we get to do the fun part of the process, which for me is exploring color. The first thing as a great tool is color.adobe.com. Not only can you explore pallets, I could type in retro up here, I can see, I like this. I can actually hit this little add to library button and like magic, if I open up my library and Photoshop, you can see that those colors are right there. That's a great, easy way to explore a lot of color palettes and quickly get them into Photoshop. The only caveat is you have to deal with five colors. You can't have more or less. That can be a little limiting but as far as a jumping off point, I've had a lot of luck with finding pallets in here. Not only can you use them, but you can alter them if you want. Actually, I don't want to alter this one. I'm just going to go over to create up here. You can see that you can actually create your own color palettes and you can actually apply different color harmony rules to it. If you want a monochromatic, you can go ahead and pick a color and see how those change. You can build one in a custom way like that, but I also really love this extract theme feature. I'm going to upload a picture that I downloaded from Unsplash, the photographer's name on there is girl with red hat. I downloaded this image, I like all the gem tones and the bright colors in there. I'm going to open that and Adobe color is going to automatically pick colors from that. Now I have some moods over here, so that's colorful. I could choose bright, muted, deep, dark, and sometimes those don't always work. But the cool thing is, you can also alter it yourself. Like let's say, I really want one of these light pink colors like that, and maybe I don't want that orange, maybe I want a darker color. You're really able to quickly build color palettes, and then I could save this and add it to my library if I wanted to. Color.adobe.com is great. I also encourage you to look at past work. If you post your work on Instagram or somewhere, sometimes I'll take a screenshot of my feed and then just sample colors from there to play with. I'm about to show you a quick overview of a process I do using Adobe Illustrator to explore color, and whenever I do that, I actually take a lot of screenshots of the different color palettes I find, and then I save them even if I don't end up using that one for that artwork. This is my main hard drive that I keep everything, all my active work in. I have this ideas folder and if I go over to colors, you can see that it's just full of screenshots. These are all from past pieces I was working on and colors that really caught my eye. Now at anytime I can go back in here and be like, I'm looking for a five color print, and those I can go through and look at some of my past work to see if there are any color palettes that inspire me. Definitely use your past work as well. But my favorite way, and this is not required because this is a Photoshop class and so I don't want to have you rely on illustrator. But this is truly my favorite way to explore color. What I'm going to do is just take a quick screenshot of just part of this pattern. You can also export a jpeg of this, it doesn't matter. I'm going to go into Illustrator, and I'm going to place that image. Again, this is not an illustrator tutorial. I show how to do this process actually in full in my pattern play class using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. If you want to know more about the recolor artwork tool, or why I use this, even though the artwork's in Photoshop, you can check out that class. But I didn't want to make this class and skip over that all the way. I have my screenshot in here and I'm going to open up my image trace. I'm going to go to color, and I basically just want a rough vector version of this that at least closely represents what's here. If it is messy, it doesn't matter, as long as it has the right amount of colors, then I'm going to be good. I have four colors in this print. Sometimes illustrator needs more than is in there to get it all the way. I'm going to type in six colors, and I'm going to hit preview, and it's going to do its thing. That looks good. We're going to hit expand, and this is my recolor artwork tool here. Basically, the colors that are showing up on the left are the original ones in the artwork. All of these colors are what we want them to display as. Right now I can see I have two really close yellows and two really close pinks, and I want those to be one. I'm just going to pick one of them and I'm going to drag this here so that those pinks are the same. I'm going to drag this here, so those yellows are the same. I'll hit okay, and then open this backup and then I have just the four colors in the print. Now I get to have a lot of fun and all of these swatch groups that I've built up over the years, either from my work or just colors I've collected. I not only have some that are grouped, but I also have one master, that's BDM, by Dylan m, that has all of my colors in it. Sometimes I want to start with a palette, like I'll start with this one. I can just cycle through and look at different colors and see if there's like a starting point. I'll start with one of these more lower count palette, minimal palette. I'll start with one of these minimal palette ones and be like, "Oh, I really like that." If I like one, I'll take a screenshot, and then I'll keep going. Then eventually I'm like, well let me just see all the wild combinations. I'll go into my main one and it's like I'll get some really crazy combinations that I would never think of. A lot of the time they don't work, but every once in a while I'll find a genius ones that I would never put together. I'll just go through, take screenshots of ones that I like, ones that stand out. Then what I can do is, I would go and review those screenshots. The ones that I like best, I would change the file name and put a B at the beginning for best. Then I would take all the ones with Bs and put those in a folder and then I would just keep doing the process until I narrow it down. You can see in my hard drive, I actually have a bunch of these, have a B on them. That means they made it through a first round. Then this best folder, some of these were even better, and then there's a best folder in there. I literally will just start with 100 different color options, but then I'll just keep narrowing them down and putting them in the best folder. Then eventually I got down to the point where these were my final contenders for this pattern. I actually didn't need to put any in there because I ended up just choosing this one. That's a nice way to get to explore a ton of different colors while also finding a way to manage it and narrow it down so that you're not just sitting on top of 1,000 crazy colors. Let's say this is the one that I wanted, I would just sample the colors and apply them in Photoshop. Then I wouldn't even save this file because I don't need it. I'm going to quit. I've already done that offscreen. Already went through and found some colors that I want. I was trying to look at the patterns as a collection to see if I could find some colors that work for all of them, and these are the three I came up with. I think I like this one best, this bottom one, and so I'm going to apply those colors to this title. We're now moving from our working color palette to our final color palette. I always start with the background and then I go lightest to darkest. All of those sampled colors are now up here, and I can just go through and change them. Flower details are now going to be red. Flower fills are going to be this light peach. Pods will also be that light peach color. Leaves are going to be green. It's locked, hit that little lock to unlock it, and pink as the background. Then all you need to do is go into one of these smart objects and update it there too. Hit save. Go back. Now in a few seconds, thanks to our organization down here, I was able to totally recolor that pallet. I would save it. Again, I don't usually have a document that would have both smart objects and regular ones but regardless, the process is the same. You just get in and you organize them into color folders. If you apply clipping mask, then you can change the color right away, and it's very exciting. 28. Finishing: Adding Texture: Next I just want to show you for process sake, that this is the point at which if I wanted to add more texture to these items, this is where I would do it. I have my very small, very basic, very old Wacom tablet plugged in and I'm basically just going to show you how I would add texture to these. Now, I made these motifs so that they could stand alone without it but just for demonstration sake, I will show you how I do it. In this case, I would go in and let's say I wanted to add some texture to this guy. Now anything I add to this folder is just going to be red because we have a color fill clipped to the top of it. What I want to do is I want to command or control click the area where I want to be adding the texture. That's this layer. I command click right on that layer preview and what that does is it selects everything that's on that layer. Now I can create a layer on top of that color fill so it's not going to be affected and be one color like this. Thanks to my selection, I'm still going to be constrained within this area. I'm going to go into my Kyle's brushes and I'm going to pick spatter. I'll sample these colors and then what I'll do is just go in and paint some of the texture. Again, some people do this, maybe you'll have the texture on your motifs ahead of time that's totally cool. For me, sometimes the color and the final composition will inform how that all is going to look and so I don't like to do it too early. Even that little touch of spatter adds nice grit for my eyes to grab onto and so I wanted to do the same to this. I would select this layer to find it, hold down command and click on the layer preview and that gives me my marching ants, my selection around all of this. I'm going to go back up, create a new layer for this one and do the same thing. Then just for an argument's sake, let's say that you end up changing the color of your flowers so a client buys it and they decide they want it to be blue. Well, by doing all of that texture on separate layers, I'm actually able to then apply a clipping mask just to the texture that I added. Clip that down and that gives me full control over everything on that layer and a few clicks. It's really powerful to use clipping masks and to make sure you're smart about your layers. I'm going to hit Command Z a few times to undo that. I would hit Command S because I'm in a smart object and we can go back. If I zoom in to where those motifs are, you can see that that spatter texture was added there to all those instances of the smart object. These Kyle's brushes I bought years ago and now Kyle's brushes come as part of Photoshop. If you'd like to learn more about those, you can just Google Kyle Webster Brushes Photoshop, and I'm sure you'll find lots of resources there. 29. Finishing: Fixing Photoshop Load Time: This pattern is ready to go. It's finished. It's ready for storage. I would say it's done. It's not ready to be delivered, but it is done. The tile is accurately made, the colors are there, the textures are there. The last thing I want do, and I'm just going to define this pattern a few times just to make a point. When you're doing this, every time you define a pattern, it's getting stored in Photoshop, and those are heavy files. Sometimes, actually I'll just quit and I'll show you. I'm going to quit Photoshop. There we go. I'll quit all this other stuff I have open too. Now, when I open Photoshop, I want to show you what it gets stuck on. See how it says Halide Bottlenecks, and then I get the little spinning wheel of death and it takes a few minutes to open? While Photoshop will always take a little bit to open because it's a big program, it does not need to take this long, and so I'm going to show you how two solve this problem. I don't known if yours will say Halide Bottlenecks. I don't know if that's the actual thing it's getting stuck on for you. But if it takes a while to open, I would recommend going up to edit, presets, preset manager, click on this drop-down and go to patterns, and you seen all of those pattern tests that we did are in there and weighing down our program. I'm going to grab one and shift click to the beginning, and I'm going to delete all of them and hit done because I don't need Photoshop to hold onto all of that. I have the tile as it is. If I needed to recreate and define that pattern for sum reason, I could just open up that tile and define it. Now, if I quit Photoshop and open it back up, it should stay there for not as long. It still says Halide Bottlenecks, but that took two seconds to open instead of 15 seconds. Don't forget when you're building a tile and you're defining, defining, defining, don't forget to go in afterwards and delete those out so that your Photoshop doesn't take one million years to open. Let's go talk about how to deliver these files if somebody or you wants to use them. 30. File Delivery: While in the last video I showed you how I'll finish off a pattern for storage, I'd like to give you some ideas on how I prepare the file for client delivery, or for my own use. In this lesson, we'll cover file management, cropping and cleaning up the file, sanity, checking the tile and overall design, converting and reducing colors, layer organization, and how I actually deliver the files. Here I have my cleaned up tile, and we're ready to pretend like a client is requesting it, and now needs me to deliver the working files to them. The first thing is you can see that as we've bean staying organized, everything is living inside of this Pattern two folder, and I'm calling it Pattern two for the sake of the class, but for just the life of your portfolio, you'll want to give every piece a unique title, even if it's flour toss 45, or flower toss September 2020, or anything, if I go into my work hard drive here, everything has its, butterflies, buttons, Cactus Farm, Carnation Crop, carrots, cat bag. Everything has a title that makes everything a lot easier. In this case, we'll say that Pattern 2 is our title. In that folder I've got my motifs, I have my original built tile, and then I have the cleaned up tile that's grouped by color instead of being grouped by motif as the original, and then I have my colorideas.png in here as well. The first thing I want to do is I want to make a folder for the client delivery, so I always call it client name and then delivery. Let's make up a client. Let's say Sunshine Pottery wanted this pattern. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to save a copy of the cleaned up tile write into that folder. That way you don't have to worry about destroying that copy you have, it's just for sanity purposes, and knowing that I have this safe folder and this is the tile that's specifically being delivered to the client. Now that we've got that set up, we're going to go ahead and crop down to the actual tile size, so I never totally know, I deliver files to all different clients, and I never know what there situation is on the other side, I don't know if they have an in-house designer that is as trained in Photoshop as I am, or if it's people that are just trying to make it work, and so I don't want to assume that they're going to have their Guides on, and I don't want to assume that they know to use the Guides to found the tile bounds, so instead I'm going to crop down to it. I'm going to hit "C" on my keyboard, and the nice thing is when you're cropping, the Crop tool will snap to your Guides, but I don't always just trust it. I like to zoom in because again, this is for client delivery, so it's really important that we're being accurate, and so I'm going to zoom way, weigh in, and I'm going to line this up perfectly with the guide. I'm going to do that on all four sides. Looks like that won already got spot on. Sometimes I go in and do this and then I zoom back in and it looks like it's off just by one pixel again. Don't worry about it, as long as you get in and you're being as close as you can, sometimes it's just how Photoshop is manipulating things, so sometimes it looks like it's a pixel, often it's not, so that looks pretty good to me, I'm going to hit "Enter". Again, I do not have Delete Cropped Pixels checked because I want that artwork to still be there, and now we're going to go ahead and do a test to make sure that I cropped that correctly, and since the accuracy is so important, I'm definitely going to set up an accuracy box. Now when we define the pattern, since we just cropped to the tile bounds, I don't have to use the Marquee tool, I can just go to Define Pattern. Go to New, make a dummy document, scale it down, and let's make sure that that crop was successful. Cool, it looks great. I don't know if I went all the way down on the other side. That looks great. Our crop was successful, that's good. I can get rid of this. Now what I want to do is what I call a sanity check. In the case of this pattern, the sanity check isn't as important, it's super important for intricate patterns or things that have lots going on. But I still like to do it for clients and I like to drag out a grid, and do a systematic sanity checked. I start at the top left, and I'm just really looking to make sure there's nothing weird, there's no mistakes, they don't have a layering issue or a stem sticking out where I don't want it to or a weird jagged edge, and especially when there's a lot of textures, or I do more texture and brushwork that I did on these, I really like to get in close to make sure I didn't get out of hand, or there's not something that's unnatural looking. This is looking pretty good though. We were pretty careful in creating the motifs and everything, so pass the sanity check. I'm going to go ahead and clear all my Guides now because they don't need them, and I hit "Save". Sometimes, since I already know that everything's organized over here and I already named all my layers because that's definitely part of it, you don't want everything to bee called layer 1, layer 2, layer 19, so you can see everything as details or center or flower fill, and so everything is labeled there. This could just be done. This is an RGB file. A lot of my clients accept things in RGB, so this could be done. But if you need to reduce or convert colors, this is where I would do that. I'm going to save it. Again, if you don't know or if the client wants two versions of both RGB and CMYK, not sure why they would, but anytime I reduce or convert colors, I always make a second copy. Again, in this case, I can't imagine why a client would want something, oh, here's an example, like for when I delivered my fabric collection, I wanted to deliver an index file as well as a non-indexed file because when you index it, it flattens all of your stuff. In this case, I have this cleaned up tile, but I would maybe save another copy, and I'm going to call this one indexed, or CMYK. If you need to adjust this CMYK, you can just go to Image mode and CMYK. I do not want to merge all my layers together. It's going to ask if we should rasterize smart objects, I'm going to say no, don't rasterize those, and it's going to convert to CMYK. I honestly don't work in CMYK that much, a lot of the products I make don't end up in traditional offset printing. I haven't done any children's books or anything like that, and so for me, it's not to big of a deal to work in RGB and then convert to CMYK and deal with any color limitations there may be. But for sum people that work, like if you're always illustrating kids books, it's going to do you a disservice to work in RGB and get used to seeing all those bright colors, only to have two always dramatically convert them when they're in CMYK. If you'd like to known more about RGB and CMYK and all of that, checkout my sending your work to the printer course. I can see now up hear in the File title that I'm in CMYK, I didn't seen any huge color shifts, but also, sometimes colors will still show on here as if they're bright and then you print them out and they're not. I'm going to hit "Undo" because I don't want that to be in CMYK, but that's how you do it. But I do want to show you quickly how I index colors. This is the process, I tend to not like to show processes that I can't fully explain, but this is such a helpful thing to know, especially for file delivery, so I'm going to share it. I'm in my copy that I saved as indexed, and indexing color is a way of cataloging color. What it's going to do is it's going to flatten everything into one image and essentially divvy it up into separate colors, which is great, but it means we're going to lose all editing ability of these motifs over here, and so that's why it's really important with indexing to for sure save another copy. Next I'm going to go to Image mode and Indexed color. It's going to ask if I want to merge the layers, and I'm going to say "Okay". You may not have seen a big shift, but already this actually indexed everything to 10 colors. You might be surprised by that and think, "I thought this was just a four color palette". When we zoom in you can see, and if I hit cancel so I undid that we're no longer in index this is how it was, you can see that even in this red area we have a ton of different shades. Here the red is more transparent, and so it's letting more of that peach show through. Here it's more opaque so that red is really dark. We certainly have much more than just four colors here. That's why indexing is important because it really draws those hard lines between, now, how many colors are you going to show in this with no variation? I'm going to go back, image, mode, index, color, flatten. It's taking everything and it's boiling it down to 10 colors. Now, I keep mine on local adaptive. This is one of those areas I don't totally know what all of these mean. It's just the way that Photoshop is interpreting the pixels, but I've always had my on local adaptive. I really like to pick how many colors. You can see if I type in five colors, or even if I do two, that's not enough let's do three, you can see that it's going to totally edit the artwork based on how many colors you're adding in. This is actually a great way to reduce colors, and see how the pattern could work in less. Instead of the four colors I was seeing before, now it's a true four color palette and maybe I'll like that reduced. I'll just keep typing in numbers until I get to the closest of what I like. Five colors is as solid. You can see it looks like really flat and really solid. If I bring it up to six, I just get a little bit of that variation in the color, which is nice. The transition between these colors is called dithering. You can change that between these three diffusion, pattern noise, and none. I don't like to use these very often, I don't like how it really interprets them, and I don't always notice the difference. You might not be able to as I go through them. The only one I noticed is noise, and I never like how it interprets that, so I always turn my dether down to none. Again, I don't fully understand everything that's happening here, so I can't answer more in depth questions in that, but this is how I use index color to reduce colors. Then the cool thing is, once you have it reduced, I'm going to take it back down to five to that most flat level and hit Ok. Now I can go up to Image mode and Color Table. It's going to show me exactly the five colors they have in there. For this, it's showing a transparency as the fifth color. I don't know what that means. I hate teaching a class and telling you, "Well, I don't know." But I just really don't. I also can tell you I've never known and it hasn't been a problem. Anyway, you can now get in and click on these colors, and you can actually alter things. If a client needs you to reduce and alter your colors, you can do it all at once, which is really nice. Cancel, that is index color. Like I said, now, everything is one layer I can't go back. You definitely want to make sure you have a copy of that file, so that if you do need to go back you didn't lose it. I'm going to hit undo to go back to my original look. We have cropped it, we've tested it, we've done a sanity check, we've checked our colors, in this case we're good. The last thing I do is I just make sure that all the names, the layers are named and makes sense. All of these highlighted in yellow, I'd probably strip that yellow color out just because I don't want them to think it means something when it doesn't. Just making sure that things are clean, and organized, and make sense. Leave a file how you would like to find it, golden rule thing. When I'm ready to send it, I'm just going to save this. Actually, this was still called index, so I'm going to call this pattern2TileDelivery. Then I also like to deliver just a pattern fill. I'll just make usually like an eight by 11, and I'll just fill it with the pattern. I need to define a new one before I do that, Edit, Define Pattern. I'll fill it in that space how I like to, and then I would save this as pattern2LayerFill, or something like that. I just like to deliver both of those because again, I don't necessarily know how they're going to use it, even if I do know what the end use is. It's just nice to say, if you need to make any changes in that, here's the tile, but if you like the pattern as it is then here's the fill and you can just apply it where you need it to. Then I would take this folder. Sorry about that. Just had a little glitch. Anyway, I would then grab this delivery folder, I would add it to Dropbox. Then if I right-click on the folder in Dropbox, I can copy this Dropbox link. Then in the e-mail to my client, I would just say, "Please find the working files at this Dropbox link" and then I would link it. That also keeps it so that it's easy to deliver very large files because none of these would fit in an email. That is how I manage doing that, and that is how I deliver my files. Sorry, one more thing. Just for thoroughness sake and maybe you already understand this, but if it's not a client that I'm delivering the pattern to and I just want to share it on Instagram, then what I'll do is I'll just create a new document. I like to share portrait orientation photos in Instagram, and those are showing up in an eight by 10 ratio. I'll make an 8 by 10 document. Sometimes if my pattern is really big, I'll start with an 8 by 10 and then crop it holding shifts so that it's still 8 by 10 in dimension, but actually larger than 8 by 10 inches. Either is fine. Then I'll fill it with the pattern and get it to look just how I want it to look for that post. Maybe for this one I do. If I was ready to share this on Instagram, I did Save As, I just did it really quick keyboard shortcuts, but I would go to Save As. I would save it as a JPEG. I would actually save it right within that folder, and I would say p2IG or something like that, and save it. Then I would AirDrop that JPEG to my phone and post it on Instagram. That is how I deliver my files. 31. Thank You!: Thank you for spending time creating awesome pattern tiles in Photoshop with me. I just dumped a lot of information on you, information and processes that I've been learning and honing for years. Please be patient with yourself while you learn. But be on yourself about practicing as that's the only way to get better. No course or amount of talent can replace the hours sweating it out in Photoshop. If you practice, it will click and it feels so good when it does. Don't forget to share your project and then get inspired by your peers projects. All the good things happen when we share and get curious. If you'd like to be the first to heard about my new classes, give me a follow here on Skillshare. If you'd like more regular and casual updates, a follow on Instagram @bydylanm is the way to go. If you don't want to miss the important stuff, I put out a quarterly newsletter that you can subscribe to at bydylanm.com. Thanks again, and until next time. Okay, let just do another round. Hey.