Transcripts
1. Create Polkadot and Circle patterns in Photoshop - An Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class, Create Polka Dot and Polka Dot Star Patterns in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. In this class, we'll be looking at making a range of polka dot patterns in Photoshop. It wouldn't be a graphic design for lunch class if it didn't also look at a whole range of ancillary techniques, including making grids and color schemes, making a dot pattern using a halftone filter and one using a brush that paints in multiple colors. By the time you've completed this course, you'll have a range of patterns that you can use and you'll have increased your Photoshop skills with new knowledge and techniques. A hearty thank you to Patricia who asked for this course. Enough from me. Let's get into making some polka dot patterns in Photoshop.
2. Pt 1 Create a Simple Polkadot pattern: The first pattern that we're going to create is just a very simple Polka Dot Pattern. So we're going to start by choosing File and then New and I'll make a document that is 200 pixels by 200 pixels in size. It's really important that your document is square, and it's also really important that the dimensions of the document are divisible by two. We can easily have 200 and we don't get any fractional numbers left over. That's really important. I'm going to set this to a white background so that we have a background that we can see. I'll click "Create." I'm going to press "Control" or "Command 0" just to zoom into the document. But even though the document looks big on the screen, it is only 200 pixels by 200 pixels, so it is quite small. For our polka dot, the next decision we make is, how big is the dot going to be? Well, i'm going to make a polka dot pattern with a small dot to start off with. I'm going to do this using the Ellipse tool. Over here in the shape tools is the ellipse tool. There is some shape, path and pixel choice to be made up here in the top of the screen and we're going to choose shape. That'll give us a bit of flexibility in designing this shape. Next up, i'm just going to click in the middle of the document and i'm going to type the values that I want for this polka dot now. Because the polka dots going to be really small and because the dimensions of this document are 200 by 200, i'm going to set my polka dot to just 40 pixels by 40 pixels. That is a circle because the width and height are the exact same value. I'll click, "Okay" and that's a nice small polka dot shape. Now in the Layers palette, because we created a shape, we've got something on a separate layer, so it's not stuck to the background. That's one of the advantages of using shapes. I'm going to pick up this shape and i'm going to position it in the middle of the document. I'm using the smart guides to align my circle. Now if you don't have smart guides or find them difficult to use, what you're going to do is you're going to select your shape and then you go up here to the align options. Now i'm going to choose align to Canvas, and i'm going to center this on the Canvas and so I've now in the middle of the Canvas. It's a small polka dot. But as promised, we're going to make a pattern that has a small polka dot in it. Now if we save this as a design, we'd end up with a squared design. Let's just go and do that. Well, choose, "select" and then "All," and then we'll choose "edit, and define", pattern and this is just going to be blue dot. I'll create a brand new document because we're going to test out our patents as we make them. Now this new document needs to be big enough so that we can see what's going on. I'm going to make mine 2000 by 2000 pixels in size. It doesn't matter about the background at this stage. This is a much larger document. It's ready for our pattern to apply. Our pattern will choose Layer, New fill layer, and then pattern. When I click "Okay," the most recent pattern that I have created is applied to this document and now I can scale it if I want to. It's best not to scale up in size, very much at least, but you can scale it down. We could make it, for example, 50 percent of its size that would be a much smaller pattern. You can say that our dots are in a regular grid. Well its a step further to make them look a little bit more sophisticated. Let's look and see how we do that. I'm going to take a duplicate of this ellipse, plus, I'll drag it onto the new icon here, and then i'm going to rasterize this lab by right-clicking and choose "Rasterize Layer". Now if you don't Rasterize the layer at this point, you're going to get the option to do it in just a second anyway. We're going to apply an offset filter to this second copy of the dot will choose "Filter Other" and then "Offset." Here you need to either convert your object to a smart object or rasterize it. It's going to be easier to rasterize that because it's going to end up being a raster shape anyway. Now, some people find this offset filter a little bit confusing, but in actual fact, it's really very simple. The values that you're going to put in for horizontal and vertical are 1.5 of the dimensions of your document. We made this document to be 200 by 200,1.5 of 200 is 100. We'll just type 100 in here and one half of the vertical height, well the vertical height was 200.1.5 of that is just 100. That's why we picked values like 200 for the document dimensions. Nice, easy values to divide by two. Now we're ready to go ahead and to create a patent from this. We'll choose, "Select" and then "All", and choose "Edit" and then "Define pattern" and this is going to be called offset blue dot. I'll click, "Okay." We'll go to the document that we're working in here. I'm going to double-click on this layer that I added previously. I'll click this drop-down and i'm going to the very last pattern in the pattern dialogue because that's going to be the pattern that we just made. You can see now that the pattern is more sophisticated. It's running in a series of diagonal lines. This is the pattern pace that then when you fill a document with it becomes this pattern pace.
3. Pt 2 Big Polka Dot Pattern: The next pattern that we're going to make is going to have a really large circle in the middle of it. Let's get started with that. I'm going to create a brand new document. Again, it's going to be 200 pixels by 200 pixels. It has a white background. I'll click "Create". Now the question becomes, "How big a circle do we create?" so that we can not only have one in the middle here, but we can break up the circle into the corners. Now, if you're familiar with mathematics, you'll know that there's a theorem called Pythagoras's theorem and it helps you calculate, in our case, the length of the diagonal of this square. Now, I've done that for you and I've got a rough rule of thumb here. It's approximately 1.4 times the height. If we take the height of our rectangle, it's actually a square and multiply by 1.4, we're going to get 280. Now for any value of height and width of a square, 1.4 times that is going to give you the approximate length of the diagonal. That's going to help us when we go to make a really large circle in the middle of our rectangle. Now that we know that the length of this diagonal is 280 and we have to fit two circles in there, then the circles can't be any bigger than 140. They're going to be really close to each other at 140. Let's prove that to ourselves. Let's go and create an ellipse. That is an actual factor circle and it's going to be 140 in width and height. I'm going to move so it's in the very middle of this document and then I'm going to make a duplicate of that layer and I'm going to do the exact same filter as we did previously, "Filter" "Other" and then "Offset." I'm going to rasterize the shape before I do it and I'm going to type in the same 100 for the horizontal and vertical offset because that's half of the width and height of this document and I'll click "Okay." You can see that these are really close to each other. When we take the approximate diagonal of our rectangle and divide it by two, that's pretty much the maximum size that we can have for a circle. Let's go and see what this pattern looks like. I'll choose "Select All" and then "Edit" "Define pattern" and this is going to be big blue dot. We'll go back to the document that we were working in. I'll double-click in it and I'll go and select the very last pattern in the patterns group. You can say that our pattern is really big. The circles are really big. But we've been able to prove to ourselves that the calculations we're making are working and so if 140 is really a bit big, let's go and adjust this to make a better size shape. I'm going back to the shape tools. I've got my shape selected. Now, for some reason I've also got the entire document select this. I'm going to choose "Select" and "Deselect" because otherwise that's going to bite me in just a minute. You want to make sure that when you're about to re-size this circle, that you don't have matching ends. Now, up here we've got the width and height of the shape at, obviously, 140 and 140. I'm thinking 120 and 120 is going to give us a pretty good size shape here. Now, the shape is no longer centered in the middle of the documents. I'm going to the path selection tool. I'm just going to drag it into the middle and I'm using, again, the smart guides to tell me when I've got the middle selected. Now we're going to do the exact same thing as we did previously. We're going to duplicate this layer. We'll choose "Filter" "Other" and then "Offset." Again, we're going to be prompted to either convert it to a smart object or rasterize it. Let's just rasterize it. Now because we used 100 and 100 as the offsets last time, Photoshop is remembering that. Since the document we're working on is the exact same size, it is a 200 by 200 document, then the values in here are just half of those, so 100, 100 just fine. I'll click "Okay." Now we'll select everything and will create a pattern from this. It's a better size blue dot pattern. Let's go back to our working document. Double-click on this layer, click the drop down and go and select the very last pattern, which is the one we just created and this is a more comfortable looking pattern. The dots are nicely spaced out. There's a bit of breathing room, but it is a big dot pattern and it certainly has a lot going for it. This is the small dot pattern that we made and this is the big dot pattern that we made and in-between those two values are a whole range of patterns. Obviously, you could have different sized dots in your pattern and the larger the dot, the less background you're going to see.
4. Pt 3 Multi Color Dot Pattern: The next thing that we're going to look at is alternating the colors instead of just having blue dots, we have say, a blue and a pink dot.. Let's see how we do that. Let's go back to the small dot, although we could just as easily do it with the large one. I'm going to turn off this layer that has the circle that's split into the corners. I'm going to make a duplicate of this ellipse. I'm going to re-color it before I do anything with it. For this I'll need to re-select one of the shape tools. Either I can select the black or white arrow cases, Path Selection or Direct Selection Tool. Or I can re-select the shape tool whatever shape tool it is, I can just select it. That brings these options up here on the top panel. I'm going to change the color here. I'm going to set this to a pink. Now we're going to get an alternating pattern of pink and blue dots. We're going to take this layer and we're going to apply that Offset filter to it. With filter Other and an Offset. Of course, we're going to click here to Rasterize it, the values are just exactly the same as we've been using. We don't need to make any changes here. We just click. Now we select everything and make a pattern out of this. Let's test that pattern. It's going to be the last pattern in the pattern palette here. Let's just take that back up to a 100 percent so we can see it more clearly. Here we have alternating blue and pink dots. We could do the exact same thing with this dot here. What we would do is turn off the one that's broken up into the corners, make a duplicate of this middle one, and then change its color before we apply the Offset filter to it.. Then we would just get a larger version of this pattern again with these multi-colored dots.
5. Pt 4 More Colors in a Pattern: The next question is, can we have more than just two colors? Well, yes, of course we can. Let's go back to this large pattern and let's make that into a pattern which has four colors and not just two. I'm going to drop this ellipse onto the new icon, I'm going back to one of my shape tools, I'm going to select a different color for this particular ellipse. I'm going to use a pale blue. I am looking for something that will be a parallel version of the blue that we're working with here. Now I'll apply the offset filter to this layer with Filter, Other and then Offset. Again, we'll rasterize it. Now we've got a two-color pattern, we're going to select everything, and we're going to make a large multicolored blue dot pattern. We'll test it out. Here is our true color, large blue dot pattern. To take it to make a four color patterns, this is what we're going to do. This four regional pattern paste was designed on a document that's 200 by 200. What we're going to do is to create a document that's double the size of this. So I'll choose File and then New. We're going to make one, 400 by 400, and we'll click Create. At 400 by 400, this particular document will take four copies of that pattern. There'll be one in this corner, one over here, one down here, and one down here. The simplest way to fill this document with the pattern is not to do what we've been doing, but instead to choose Edit and then Fill. We'll choose our pattern and that's going to be at the last one in the pattern palette here, so I'll click on that and click OK. That just fills this entire document with that pattern pace, and we know that it's the exact right size and that's really important at this stage. I've got a document that has blue dots in it. What I want to do is to re-color some of them, and so what we need to do is to select and color the ones that we want to re-color. I'm using the Magic Wand tool and I've got a tolerance of about 35, that's a pretty good value, that's selected that entire dot. I'm going to select this one because it's a matching pair. We're going to have this one is a pale blue, this is a pale blue, and this is a pale blue, and the other two in this diagonal are going to be a different color. I'll go and select the color to use. I'm going to the Swatches palette here, and I'll use a couple of pinks for this. I'll grab this pink. Because I've got these two shapes selected, I can press Alt Backspace, that would be Option Delete on the Mac to fill the shapes with that color. Then I'll choose, Select and Deselect. That fixes up this middle line of dots. The next thing that we need to do is to change the color of the remaining dots. The remaining dots that we need to work on are this one, this one, this one, and this one. Just the four that are over the very edge here, and we need to make them a different color. I'm going to grab a different color for them and just fill them with a different color. This is now our pattern pace and you can check it. The pieces on the top and the bottom should be the same color, and these two pieces should be the same color here. Whatever is in the corner should be the exact same color. If you have a different color corner, it's going to fail spectacularly. Of course, layers in the middle don't really matter because they're not overlapping in the edge of the pattern. They're not crucial to the pattern, obviously you want them to look good, but having them different colors is not going to affect the pattern. Having these two different colors is really going to affect the pattern. We'll choose Select, and then All Edit, Define Pattern, we'll go back to our master document, double-click on the pattern lad, go and select the very last pattern in the pattern dialogue and click OK. Now we have a pattern of dots and there are four different color dots in this pattern.
6. Pt 5 Whimsical Polka Dot Patterns: So far all the patterns that we've created are really regular patterns. It's time to have a look at something that is extremely irregular. I'm going to create a brand new document. I'm going to start with 400 by 400 pixels. It's going to create a larger pattern pace. I think that will work well for this. I've got a white background. I'll click "Create". I'm going to create a pattern of dots because that's what this class is all about, so I'm going to the brush tool, and I'm going to select a circular brush. I want a nice circular brush. I want its hardness to be 100 percent that's really important. Let me just choose a different color to use. When we paint with this brush, we're going to get nice, hard-edged shapes. They're looking pretty good to me. We're at 226 percent of normal size, which is why they've got slightly fluffy edges, but if you took this down to 100 percent, then you would say that they are quite hard edge shapes. This is at 100 percent, so you want to look at things at 100 percent when you're designing them. Let me just wind this back, and let's start with a brand new layer because we want to keep the dots that we're working on separate to the background. If they stuck to the background, it's going to be a nightmare to clean up the mess. Let's have a look at the brush tool. I think the brush is too big, so I'm just using the open square bracket to change its size. I think about that size is going to be good for my brush. I need to change some of the brush settings so I'll go to the Brush Settings dialogue. Right now, the brush is going to paint as a solid line, and we don't want that. I want it to be spaced out, so I'm going to increase the spacing so that the brush is now going to paint more like dots. But I don't want them to paint even dots. I don't want them to follow my brushstroke, I'd like to apply some scattering to them. I'll go to Scattering, and I'll adjust the scatter. Adjust a little bit, and I'm going to set it to both axis. Now, we'll see how it's working well. It's not scattering enough for me maybe a bit more, and then if you think it's, for example, a little bit too close still, you can go back to the Brush Tip Shape options, and just increase the spacing. I think we're pretty much where we need to be right now. Having done that, let's go, and confirm that we're painting on a brand new layer which we are, and I'm going to paint dots into my document. I don't want them to overlap. If I think I've done something that overlapped, and I don't like it, I can take it back out. When you are pretty happy with the design that you've got, and remember this is supposed to look irregular, so you don't want it to be nice and even, but you do want your background to be pretty much filled with your dots. We're ready to go ahead to the next step, and the next step is to break this out into the corner. So we're just going to apply at offset filter. We have the layer with the dot selected, I'll choose Filter, Other, and then Offset. Now, this time our document is 400 by 400, so we have to put different values in here. We have to put 200 and 200, and then we'll click "Okay", and while this might look like it's a spectacular disaster, in fact, it's a really good start. The problems that we're saying that we need to fix up are along this line here, and this line here. Let's see what we're going to do, we're going to the eraser tool, and we're going to erase anything that is half a shape over this line. Everything in the horizontals fine here, let's just clean up the rest of this. Now, even though things around the edges might look bad, they're not. They're perfect. It's the things in the middle that we need to fix. Now, I'm going back to my brush tool, and I've got my brush settings exactly as they were, and I don't want them to be as they were. What I want to do is to turn this Scattering off. I want this brush to paint where I put it down, so if I click here, I want a brushstroke there. I don't want it to appear somewhere else. What I'm going to do now is just fill in these gaps, but I don't go over the edge, that's really crucial that you don't go over the edge. If I put something close to the edge like I have here, I don't want to put something close to the edge over here, or these two shapes are going to be too close to each other later on. In fact, let me just undo that one. Let me put something in here, and then I can put something closer to the edge over here. Again, I'm going to go really close to the edge here, but not over it, and I'm going to make sure I don't go really close to the edge here. Now, I'm pretty happy with this arrangement, I think it's going to look just fine. I'll select everything. I'll choose Edit, and then Define Pattern, and this is going to be whimsical dots. We'll go to the master document that we've been working in. Double-click on our "Layer", and apply this new pattern to the document. Here, we have a design that's made up of unevenly spaced dots. Now, if you see something that's concerning to you, and I'm thinking that they're three together, becoming a little bit obvious to me, you can come back into your document, and try and locate where they are. I think this is where they are. You can edit them so we could come back in, and change this. I'm going to the eraser tool. I'm just going to erase both of these dots. I'll come back to my brush tool, I'll just put one dot in its place. Go back to Select, All. Go back to Edit, Define Pattern, This has got to be whimsical dots too. This is a better result. I like it better because I'm not saying those three dots very obviously together. It's also possible to create this pattern as our multicolored pattern. Let's go into that now, we'll go back to our document. I'm just going to turn this light off, and I'm going to add a brand new layer, and we're going to paint on this layer. We're going to pick some colors to use. I'm going to stick with the blue color that I've got, but let's add a second color in. I'm thinking this pink might be nice. I'm going to toggle between these two colors. Let's go back to our brush, and we're going to turn our Scattering back on, and this time we're also going to turn on Color Dynamics. The settings that I've got currently are giving us this multicolored effect. You need to set on Apply Per Tip, and then you need to adjust your Foreground and Background Jitter. I want to jitter between these two colors, so I've got that at 100 percent. Now, I have a Hue Jitter here, so there's going to be some jittering in hue, and you can turn that on or off as you wish. If the larger the hue jitter, the more colors you're going to have that really aren't between these two colors, such as the screen here. I don't like that so much, so I'm going to adjust for practically no hue jitter at all. I also don't want to adjust the saturation, and I don't want to adjust the brightness. So saturation would vary the saturation brightness would vary the brightness as we're painting, and I don't want that for this pattern. You could choose that if you did, and purity of minus 100, we're getting a gray-scale look. At a 100 percent, we're getting a whole lot of vibrancy. Again, I think that probably setting that at zero is going to be a good value. Now, we can go ahead and paint our shapes. I'm just going to wind that back, and let's go, and do as we did before, and paint the shapes onto this document. I've got a selection. I'm just going to deselect that before I begin. I'm thinking that my spacing isn't quite right because I'm getting some shapes that are overlapping each other, so I'm going to try for a little bit of an adjustment of spacing here. Once you got most of your dots down, you can turn off the Scattering, and then just go, and add a few extra dots if you like, and they're going to be in the same multi-color. I'm really just filling in spots where I think that there aren't enough dots. When I'm done, I'm going to apply our offset filter with Filter, Other and then Offset. It's defaulting to 200 and 200 because that's the values that we used last time. That's perfect. I'll just click "Okay". Now, we're going in with the eraser, and again I've got a hard edge circular eraser. I'm just going to erase over the shapes that are causing problems down the middle here. Anything that's not a perfect circle is going to be deleted. Anything over the side here is just fine. I'm going to take out all of that one. This is just going to be a bit easier. All our half circles, vertically and horizontally have been removed. We already go back to the brush tool, and just add in the dots that we want to put back in. Again, just be really careful about how close to the edge you go. When you're done, you can test it by selecting everything, and choose Edit, Define Pattern, and we'll apply it to our sample documents so that we can see how it's looking. If you see something that needs to be changed, you can go back to your original document, locate where the problems are, make changes to it, and remake your pattern.
7. Pt 6 Clean Up Your Pattern Collection: Before we go any further in this course, I just want to cover the issue of keeping your pattern collection clean. Because we'd be making some patterns and we already know that some of them weren't very good that's why I went and fix them up. But the problem is that they're still in our patterns collection. So if you want to tidy things up and you're using Photoshop CC 2019 or earlier, you'll go to the Edit menu and you're going to click here on Presets and go to the preset manager. Then you'll go to the patterns collection. In the patterns of course are all the patterns that you've made and so are the ones that I've made are all down the bottom here. Now this one was too close together, so I don't want it any longer. I'll select it and I'll just press delete to delete it. So you can go through and delete any of these patterns that weren't the way you want them to look. So you're only leaving in your pattern collection the actual patterns that you may want to use in future. When you're done, just click done. Now in Photoshop, 2020 things changed. so when you go to Edit and go to preset, you'll find that in their preset manager you no longer have the pattern, so it's being removed from there. Which begs the question, where is it? Well, it's now a panel, so I'll go to Window and then patterns. Then we have a Pattern's panel and it's going to work pretty much the same way as the presets did. So you can locate a pattern, for example, that you don't want and you can click on the trash can here to remove it from the pattern collection. So that's how you would clean up your patterns in Photoshop 2020. But of course, if you're working with an earlier version of Photoshop, you would have the preset manager.
8. Pt 7 Create a 10 x 10 Multi Colored Pattern: This next pattern we're going to create is a little bit tricky and it's a little bit technical, but it is well worth the effort of creating. We're going to start with a fixed size document, and I highly recommend that you use the exact same values as I'm using. Otherwise it's going to be very difficult for you to reproduce this, at least the first time until you see what's going on. We're going to create a document 2,000 by 2,000 pixels in size as RGB color mode, mine happens to have a white background. That's just fine. I'll click "Create". Now, we're going to divide this document up and we're going to do it with the new layout guide, so I'll choose View, and then New Guide Layout. Now, the default is going to be something different to what you see on the screen here, but what you want is 10 columns and 10 rows. You're going to divide this document up into 100 little boxes, because the document is two thousand by two thousand pixels, and because we've got 10 boxes, each one of these is 200 pixels by 200 pixels, just to give you an idea as to the size. We're going to create a circle, so we'll go through the ellipse shape to make sure it's set to shape. I'll click once in the document. I'm going to create a shape that has 100 pixels by 100 pixels. I'll click "Okay". I'm going to turn off its strokes. I'm going to make sure that has no stroke at all, and I'm going to add a film now. I'm going to show you a little bit later how I got the pixel that I'm using, but I'm just going to use this set of pink colors that I have here. Then we're going to move this shape, and I want to move it immediately over the very edge of the document here to do it and to do it accurately, I'll choose Edit and then Free Transform. I'll make sure that the middle of these nine boxes is selected and you need to do that before you do any movement. The exposition is zero and the y position is 200. I'll will just set that to zero and 200. That's now in position. Now, we want a duplicate of this shape and we can do that by choosing Layer, New, Shape Layer via Copy, and there's going to be worth a while to learn this shortcut at least temporarily, it's Control or Command J. Now, we've made that duplicate. You can check it over here in the last pallet, and we're going to move this shape that we currently have selected with edit and then Free Transform. Again, we still have the middle selected, which is what we want all the way through the x-value is not going to be changed, but the y value, we want to move it down here to 400. I'm just going to type in here 400, and click the check mark. Now that we've done that and with this shape still selected, we can do this again and again with just two keys. I'm going to press Control or Command J to make that duplicate, and then Control or Shift T, that will be Command Option Shift T on the Mac. I'm going to do that repeatedly Control or Command J, Control Alt Shift T, Command, Option Shift T. You'll do that until you complete an entire column of the circles. Just be aware that we don't have one at the top, and that's for a really good reason, which we'll discuss in a minute. Let's go and select the second one, and we're going to recolor this. Having done this, we're going to grab this bottom shape, and because it's a shape, the whole shape is here, even though part of it is cut off. We're going to make a copy of this particular shape layer with Control or Command J, and then I want to move that copy all the way up to the top. For this, I'll choose Edit and then Free Transform. Make sure that the center option is selected, and it's going to be positioned at 00. The reason why these two shapes have to be the exact same color, in other words, duplicates of each other is because they are going to be attached to each other later on to make a whole circle. So they have to be the same color. We'll go now to the last pallet. What I'll do is go and grab hold of every single one of these shapes, except the top most one. I'm going to click on the Shape layer for the second to last one that I created, and then I can hold the Shift key as I select each subsequent shape. You could also just come and select ellipse one, holding the Shift key down, making sure that you've selected this entire set of shapes, but making sure too, that you don't have the duplicate one selected again, that's critical. You're going to click here on the group icon, and that puts all of these shapes in a group, so we can turn them on and off by just clicking on or off the visibility of the group. Then we've got this stray one at the top. We're now going to make a duplicate of this group. I'm going to grab the group and I'm going to drop it onto the new icon. Now, the new icon changed its look in Photoshop CC 20-20, but not its position. So it's always going to be immediately to the left of the trash can. This gives us a copy of group 1. It's still selected, so we're going to choose Edit and then Free Transform. For this set, we're going to move it relative to the top middle of the shape. So the top middle of the selected group which has this position here. We want to move that down to here. It needs to come off close to an x value of 200, and the y-value, tempting as it might be, we don't want the Y value to be 400 because that would put this little marker right here on the line. We actually want it to be just short of 400 so that the middle of this shape is in position. In actual fact that would be at 350. Visually check that it's in the right position, and then click the check mark. Now, we're going to make a duplicate of that group, again, the one that we have selected. So I'll drag and drop it onto the new icon, and then we can apply that same transformation by holding Control Alt and Shift and press the letter T, It's Command Option Shift T on the Mac. Again, we'll make a duplicate of this group and do the same thing. You should end up with these dots going down in a sloping line and you should be running out before you reach the last line because the dots or the circles that are on this side here are the ones that need to end up over here. Now, we need to fill in this area up here. Let's go back to this group and its group 1. We can just check to make sure that we have group 1 selected here. For group 1, we're going to drag and drop it onto the new icon. We're going to have group 1 copy something. For this particular group, we're going to move it. I'll choose Edit and then Free Transform. We want to move the very bottom middle marker of that one. So I'm just going to click here on the bottom middle marker. The bottom middle marker, I want it to appear just up here. It's going to be at the same x value, that's 200, but the y value is going to be 200 plus 50, so it's 250. I'll click the check mark. We're going to do the same with the next group. I'm going to drag and drop it onto the new icon, and with it it's still selected our press Control or Shift T. That's Command Option Shift T on the Mac. You'll notice that everything is just going into a perfect position. Go back and grab copy 3, drag it onto the new icon, Control Alt Shift T, grab group 4, and do the same thing. Now, we've got our document all filled in except for this line down here, and this line down here has to be exactly the same as this one across here. We just need to locate it, and it's going to be in group 1 here. This is it, but it also has this little dot up here. I'm going to grab a group 1 and this is the dot here, this ellipse. I'll Control or Command. Click on this, so I have both those shapes selected. I'll drag and drop them onto the new icon. Now, I'm just going to move this entire selection all the way across here. Again, Edit, Free Transform. The easiest thing is going to be to move it looking at its midpoint. So I'm going to leave that as its midpoint. Its x value is going to be 2,000 and its y value is going to be unchanged because we don't want to move this vertically all we want to do is to make a duplicate at across here on the other side. That is the basic patterns watch and we can prove that it's going to work by selecting it. We'll choose Select, and then All. I'll choose Edit and then Define Pattern. We'll create a much larger document to place this pattern in. I'm going to make one that's six thousand by six thousand, but you just need a much larger document. We'll choose Layer, New Fill Layer, and then pattern, click "Okay." The design is filled with the pattern that we just created. You can zoom in to make sure that everything's working as it should, and the thing that would alert you to there being problems is, that one of these shapes or more of these shapes actually was two different colors, but ours is just one color. Every single one of these is one color telling us that the pattern has worked perfectly.
9. Pt 8 Randomize the 10 x 10 pattern: In looking at the pattern that we've just created, you'll see that there are some distinct angled lines through it. The reason for this is that we took each of these groups of dots and just move them down one row position, and so we're getting these lines through our pattern. We can make this look a little bit more random, various lay, so we're going to look and see how we would do that. Before you start, I strongly suggest that you save this document so that you have a copy of it in case things go awry. Also, you're going to be breaking it up, so you probably want a version of the original document as well as this new broken up version. The first thing we need to do is to clean up this document a little bit, and what I'm going to do is remove this row because it's a duplicate of this one over here. We just need to work out where it is in the document, and it's going to be probably the two topmost shapes in the Layers palette. When I turn those off, that entire row of dots is removed. I'm going to grab these two that have their visibility turned off, having proven that that's the ones that I want and just drag them onto the trash can. I'm now going to look at this row and it seem two places because we created it into pixels. This is one of the pixels and there's another pace down here, this is the other one. I'm going to grab base two and I'm going to make a group out of them. I'm just going to click on the group icon, and what you're doing now is just go through the next pair of items here in this order, in the last pallet and group them because every time you grab a pair, they're going to pay a column of dots. You can prove to yourself that that's the case by just turning them off and just checking. But because of the way we created this, if you didn't move things around, they should just pay in order in the Layers palette. Now at the very end, I've got this group over here, but I've also got this shape up here, so I need to put this shape in this group. The easiest way to do that is to make your last pallet big enough that you can see both the ellipse and the group that's headed towards and just drag and drop it in there, so it's going into group 1. You can test it once it gets there by turning visibility of the group on and off, and just make sure that it actually turns off correctly. Now we have 10 groups, I'm actually going to put this in a numerical order. I'm going to have group 1 at the top all the way down to group 10. What I want t do next is to randomly order these groups of dots. One way that I've found to do it is to go to this site called random.org. What I'm going to do is just go back to what I already did. At random.org forward slash lists, you're going to type in the numbers 1 to 10 and just put each one on a separate line. You're pressing enter between each number and then click randomize. What you end up with is a random list. What we're going to say is that this is the position number in the document and this is the group that's going in that position. A group 10 is going to be at position 1. I'll come in here and select group 10, I'll choose edit and then free transform. Now it's really important that you don't have this little indicators selected because that will move it relative to where it is right now. What we want is to move it to the absolute position. It's going to be at x position 0. Make sure it goes in the right position, click the check mark and turn the visibility of that group off. Position 2 is group 5. We'll go and like group 5 and position two has an x value of 200 edit Free Transform. Set this to 200, do a quick visual check to make sure it's gone in the right position, turn its visibility off. Position 3 is group 3. Its x position is at 400. Quick visual check, click the check mark, turn the visibility off. Position 4 is group 7. Its x position needs to be 600. Quick visual check and turn its visibility off. Position 5 is group 4. Its x position is at 800. Quick visual check. Turn its visibility off. Position 6 is group 8. Its x position needs to be 1000. Position 7 is group 1. Its x position is 1200. Position 8 is group 2. It's x position is 1400. Position 9 is group 9. Its x position is going to be 1600. The last one is this group here group 6, and it needs to be at position 10. The x value for that is going to be 1800. Now we can go back and turn the visibility here on of all this, and we should have something in every single one of these positions, except this line over here. The reason for that is because this line has to be duplicated over here. We just need to locate which is at position 1. If we have a look at what's group 10, so we can easily go and locate group 10, double-check it to make sure that it's the one that we need a duplicate of. I'll make a duplicate by just dragging it onto the new icon. We need to move it over to this position here, which has an x value of 2,000 edit, Free Transform. Now we have a more random arrangement of these dots. I'll choose, Select All and then edit, define pattern, and we'll test that in our document. Now we have a lot more different colored dots and everything is randomly arranged. In fact, it's going to be really difficult to see where the pattern repeats are. Here is the dark purple and here is the next instance of the dark purple. But you've really got to look at this pattern to work out that it is actually a repeat.
10. Pt 9 Add more dots to the 10 x 10: Now I'm always a big proponent of making patterns work, and if you're going to spend a lot of time creating a pattern like this, really make that pattern work. What we're going to do is we're going to add something into the middle of these areas, so it's going to be very easy to do. I'm going to double up on my guide, so I'll choose View and then New Guide Layout. I'm going to increase this to 20 and 20 because it's going to show up very clearly the area that I'm looking forward to align my next set of dots with. I'll click on the Ellipse tool, I'm going to click once in the document, and I'm going to make a shape that this time is just 50 by 50. It's a much smaller, circular shape. I'm going to give it no stroke at all and for this one, for the fill, I'm going to choose a dark, blue gray. I'm thinking something like this would be nice. I need to position it in this exact position. Because each of these boxes is 200 by 200, you can see that it's x and y value need to be at 100 and 100. Let me just choose Select, Deselect, so it got marching ends there. We'll choose Edit and then Free Transform. Its center needs to be at 100, 100. I'll click the check mark. Make sure that you like what it is that you've got before you progress to the next step. What we'll do is select over this dot and I'm going to make a duplicate of it with Control or Command J. Then I'll choose Edit and then Free Transform. For this one, I want to move it down to this position, which is a move of 200 pixels. I'm going to click this relative box, and I'm going to type in 200 on the Y and click the check mark. Now I'll press Control or Command J, Control Option Shift T, Control Alt Shift T, of course, on the PC. I'm going to do that all the way down the document. Having made all of these shapes, I'm going to the Layers palette and I want to locate the shapes and they're here, they're just single layers. These are the groups that contain all the multicolored circles, these are the shapes that are these gray shapes. I'm going to select all of them, right-click and choose Merge Shapes. What that does is it merges them into a single shape layer, so everything is on the same layer. Now we're going to make a duplicate of that layer. I'll just drag and drop it onto the new icon. I need to move it with Edit and then Free Transform. We're going to move it across 200 pixels on the x axis. I've got this Delta symbol selected so that I can move it 200 relative to where it is right now. I'll click the check mark or press Control or Command J and then Control Option Shift T, Control Alt Shift T on the PC. I'll continue to do that all the way across the document. Once we get there, I'm going to grab all of the Shape layers, I think that my computer is just responding a little bit fast and I'm duplicating things a few times, it's fine. I end up with a few more than I need, but that's just fine, I'm just going to right-click and choose Merge Shapes. We end up with a single layer with all of these dots on it, and they're all shapes. We can open up the Properties panel, for example, and we can change the color of these shapes because all of them are set to the exact same color. If you didn't like the color that you created, it would be possible at this stage to alter it. I'm going to go for a slightly lighter color. This is now another pattern. We can choose Select, All. I'll just make the pattern, say 200 percent size so that we can see the result. We've got alternating pattern of dots. You could of course, do that exact same thing with the very first one of these patterns that we made with everything nice and neatly arranged. But I think that that's a good way of upping the ante on this pattern if you like. Now if you're ready to get rid of the grid, you can always go to View and then just clear the guides.
11. Pt 10 Create Color Swatches: Now when we were creating the large 10 by 10 series of dot patterns, I suggested to you that I will show you how to create a set of color swatches to use. Now we're going to do that first for Photoshop 2020, and then we'll go back and do it for earlier versions of Photoshop because things changed a bit. Now, this is the set of colors that I use. I have a series of pinks and I created that set of color swatches. What we're going to do is we'll select and create a set of blues just for argument's sake. So you can see the process, I'll click here on ''Create new color group'' and I'm going to call this blues. Now, if you're being pedantic, you may want to put your initials in front of it so that you know that this is your color swatch rather than a swatch of colors that, for example, you downloaded from the web. Now we're going to a rectangle tool. I'm going to click once in the document. Now I want this rectangle to be exactly the width of this document and my documents 1920 pixels wide. The height doesn't really matter, I'll just make it 100. That's fine. I'll click ''Okay''. I'm going to move this over so it's centered in the middle of the document. I'm going to fill it with a gradient. I don't want it to have any stroke, I will turn the stroke off. I'll go and target the fill here, and I'm going to select a gradient. Now at this point you can choose a gradient to use. Now you could choose a built-in gradient or you could make your own. Now I'm going to choose a built-in gradient. I'm thinking that this one will be pretty good. Only I want it to be a linear gradient not a radial gradient. Let me select linear. I also want it to be rotated around so that they're yellowy colors are on one side and the blues are on the other. Let's set the angle to zero, and this is pretty much what we've got here now if you want to change the colors, now is a good time to do it. I'm going to come in and find a slightly more grainy blue for this end of the gradient and I might find a slightly different color for this one too. I've now got a gradient that runs from greeny blue through to a more real blue. I'm going to divide this document up and we divided a document up in the previous set of videos when we make that dot pattern. Let's do it again, we'll choose ''View'' and this one is ''New guide layout''. No I'm not fast about the number of rows, so I can just set that to one. But I do want columns and I'm going to make the number of columns equal to the number of colors I want to get out of this gradient. For me, let's just make it 12 and I'll click ''Okay''. Now we'll go to the swatches panel and just open it up, make sure that we're pointing to the blues. I'm going to the ''Eyedropper'' tool. I'm going to sample something in the middle here. Then I'll click the ''Plus'' symbol and click ''Okay'', and that adds our first blue. Now, dividing the document up just makes it easier for you to determine where you are and how you're creating these colors. We're just going to go across and click in the middle of each of these boxes as we go to sample a color that's in the middle of those boxes. Probably about as confusing as it's going to be is which box are you clicking in next? You could find some way of marking them if you wanted to. That's how I created my set of pinks. In that case, I just used a gradient that went from a pink color through to a purple. Divided the document up into the number of colors that I wanted, and then just sampled colors from the middle of that gradient. Now we've got a set of blues that we could use anytime that we want to create a document that contains a whole range of blues. Now if you're using Photoshop CC 2019 or earlier, you'll find swatches are quite a bit different in these versions. This has been the Swatches palette for years and years and whatever changes we make to it are going to be sticky. Next time we open another brand new documents it's going to have this exact same set of swatches. Now, if I want to build up an individual set of swatches that is just pinks, this is what I'm going to do, I'll go to ''Edit'' and then I'll go to ''Presets''. What I want is the ''Preset manager''. I'll click in here on ''Swatches''. These are my current colors. Now, I want to back those up, so I'm going to select the first one and shift click on the last one so that every single one of these colors is selected. I'll choose ''Save set''. I'm going to call this Helen November 2019. I know that it's my sort of swatches. I know the date that I created them on. I'll just click ''Save''. Now I'm going to delete them all because I want a clean set of squashes. I want an empty swatches palette so that I can make a pink set that I can then save and reuse. I'm going click ''Done''. I've got no swatches left here. Now we're going to do pretty much the same thing as what we did in Photoshop CC 2020. We'll click here with the ''Rectangle Tool'' selected or I'll make a rectangle that is the width of the document and a height of just a notional value. A 100 is just fine. I'll click ''Okay''. I'm going move this so that it's placed in the middle of the document. It stretches from one side to the other. Now I am going to fill it with a gradient. Again, I'm going to select a gradient to use. Let's go and select this one here. Now I want it to be linear, so I wanted to yellow on one side, purple on the other side. I'll turn its rotation to 0 percent. At this stage, I could change any of these color stops if I wanted, I don't want to, that's just fine. Now, in most modern versions of Photoshop, Photoshop CC, you're going to have that new guide layout. I'm going to come in here and I'm going to set my rows to one. And the number of columns to the number of colors that I want. Again, I'm going to get 15 out of this, so I'll click ''Okay''. In the Swatches palette, I'm ready to create my new swatches, so I'll go to the eyedropper tool and sample the first color. I'll click here on ''New color swatch'' and click ''Okay''. I'm going to do this for all the colors that I want. I now have a lovely range of colors that's been sampled from this gradient. I'm going to go and save those so I am going back to the ''Presets." Edit ''Presets'', ''Preset manager'' got back to ''Swatches''. I'm going to select all of the swatches and I'm going to click ''Save set''. I'm calling it Helen pinks and purples. I'm going to delete this set because I don't need them anymore and I'll just click ''Done''. Now I'm going to recover the original set of swatch colors that I had so that I don't lose those. I'll go to load swatches and I'm going to locate and open the set of Swatches that I was using originally that I saved, just so that I would have them accessible. Now I'm going to add in my Pink's. I'll go to the fly out menu and I'm going to ''Load swatches''. I'll go back now to my pinks and purples click ''Load." They are loaded in at the bottom of this swatches panel. We don't have a neat way of organizing swatches into groups in these older versions of Photoshop. So your swatches panel does look a little bit untidy, but that's how you can not only save your swatches cause you don't want to lose them in the process, but also how you can create groups of swatches yourself and they are of course, shareable files. If we go into load swatches and see what we've got here, this is a set of swatches that could be shared with somebody else. That's a way of sharing and also saving your swatches so that if for example, you lose your contents of your swatches palette, you can always get back the colors that you have created and like.
12. Pt 11 Create the Halftone Dots: This pattern that we're going to create next is a little bit complex, but provided you follow all the steps as I'm showing you, it's going to work out just fine, and it is quite a lot of fun to make too. I'll choose "File" and "New". We're going to make a document 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels in size. I'll click "Create". We're going to add a circular shape. You'll go to the Ellipse tool, make sure that you select it. Make sure of these three options up here that you have shaped selected. Click once in the document and then type 750 for the width and for the height. That's going to make a circle that is 750 pixels tall. I'll go to the Move tool. I'm just going to pick this up and move it into the center of the document. I'm using a smart guides to line this up. If you don't see your smart guides, choose "View", make sure Snap tool a set to Guide, make sure Show has Smart Guides enabled. Now, we're going to set up this circle, and we don't want to have any stroke at all. I'm going to stroke and I'm going to turn that off. If you don't see the Properties panel here, you can always get to these settings by clicking on one of these two Shape tools. Either the one that is the arrows, the path selection and direct selection tools, or you can select any of they shaped towards and when you do these options appear on the toolbar, they don't appear when you have things like the Move tool selected. It's a bit confusing, but that's the way it is. Let's go back and make sure that we've got as shapes selected here I'm going to the fill and going to select a gradient for the fill. I want a black to white gradient. So I'm selecting black to white. You'll also find it in these panels here. We want it to be radial. So I have radial selected and I want it to be black or dark in the middle and light at the outside. If you don't see that as an option, if yours looks like this, just click this button to reverse your gradient. We need the black to not be so black. So I'm going to double-click on this color stop here and set it it to a mid gray. Then click "Okay" So this is what you should see if you click away from the shape in your document, you should just see a smudge of gray in the middle of the document. Come over here to the layers palette, right-click on this layer and convert it to a smart object. You are choosing convert to smart object. The reason for this is we want this next effect to be editable and it won't be if we're not working on a smart object. We'll choose filter and then pix-elate color half tone. The Settings you're going to use here are not setting concrete. You can choose any values that you like. I'm going to tell you what values are going to work best. For the screen angles, you want every single one of these values to be the same. So I'm using 45, you could use 60, but just make sure that every one of these channels is identical. The maximum radius is going to be the size of the circle in the middle, I have it set to 60. That's a pretty good value. Let's just click "Okay" and see what it looks like. That's what it looks like here, we're getting a nice set of dots. If you had a smaller value, your dots would be much smaller. I think those are a pretty good size. The thing that's worrying me that I think I might be able to improve on is that these dots at the very edge are a little bit cut off. So I'm going to double-click on my color half-time to open the filter dialog back up again and see if 59 is going to be better. It's not and it sort of is. So let's say a 58 will be better. Okay, 58 is pretty good. I've got whole dots all the way around here. That's a half a dot there, that's a dot there but all the others a whole. I think that's pretty good. I'm now going to right-click this layer and choose rasterized lab because that's going to set this in concrete. You'll see from the thumbnail preview here that you can actually see the white. We're going to get rid of that. So I will go to the magic wand tool. We want to make sure that we have it's selecting. We're going to click on some of the white in this document here you are on the ellipse layer, you're clicking on the white and you've selected all your desk press delete, that will get rid of the white and now you can choose select, deselect all learn the shortcut, which is Control or Command D. The next thing we're going to do is get rid of these fractional circle. So if you've got any little circles that are not whole circles, you go to the eraser tool, select a round brush and make sure that you have the hardness set to a 100 percent that's critical. You do not want a fluffy brush here at all. You're going to just click over the top of any of these that are not full circle. So to that we're not full circles. Now we're going to color things. So we'll go back to the magic wand tool. I have contiguous set enabled right now. That means that if I click on one of these shapes, only that shape is going to be selected. Not all the other black shapes. If I disable contiguous. Then when I click on a black shape, all the black shapes are selected. We're going to flip between using contiguous and not at the moment, I don't have it selected because I do want to select all these black shapes and I want to choose a start a color. So I'm going to choose a pink. It's now my foreground color. I'll hold down the Alt key, press the backspace key. On a PC that would be option and backspace or option and delete on a Mac. Then I'll choose, select and deselect. But we're going to learn the keyboard shortcut Control or Command D, will go back to the magic wand tool this time will enable contiguous and you'll select a few of these dots. I'm thinking probably 10 at a time. hold the Shift key and select another one, and continue around selecting a series of these dots. Some big, some small. Choose another color to work with. I'm going to work in pastel colors here. As soon as we've got it set as your foreground color, press Alt, backspace option, delete on the Mac. If you think you haven't got enough of the circles colored in that new color, add a few more by clicking on one shift, click on the other fill them with the color and then you're ready to progress. Going to choose another color this time. This time I'll choose an orange and then I'll continue doing this. If you make a mistake and click outside a shape so that you're selecting absolutely everything, then press Control or Commands Z just to undo that last step and you'll find that all the previously selected items are still selected. You've just gone back one step from the mistake that you made. It's really easy on these small shapes to make that mistake and select the background instead of the shapes. So just done that there. Let's undo it with Control or command Z and try again. When you're finished selecting your shapes will go ahead and save the document as it is right now, so that you can go ahead in the next video to create the actual pattern.
13. Pt 12 Half Tone Dots Pattern: We're now ready to turn this design into a repeating pattern. I'll start by renaming this layer, and I'm going to call it Master. That will make it easier to identify as we go along. I'll drag and drop the master onto the new icon, so I make a duplicate. We're selecting the copy which is at the top. Now we'll apply the offset filter by choosing Filter other, and then offset. This might look a little bit confusing but all you have to do is to type in as your horizontal and vertical values. Values that are half the width and half the height of your document. Well, the document is 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels because that's the way we made it. Half of 1,000 is 500, so type 500 and 500, but before we click okay, I'm just going to look and see what I've got. I'm a little bit concerned that everything has a little bit close here, so I'm going to cancel out. I'm going to trash the duplicate that I just made. I'm going back to my original, or hold the Shift and Alt keys that shift option on a Mac, and just scale this in a little bit. Now we'll go and repeat the process and see if we can get a better result. Filter, Other, Offset. I'm looking at the spacing now and it's much more even. So just a little bit of an adjustment gave me a better result. The offsets are still 500 and 500 because the image size, the airport hasn't changed size. The shape that we had on it changed size but not the original documents. Still 1,000 by 1,000, so we're still using 500 and 500. I'll click okay. Now, this is not the finished pattern but it would make a pattern. So let's choose Select, and then All, and then Edit, Define pattern. I'm going to call this Halftone one. Let's see what it looks like. We'll create a brand new document with File and then New. This one will be 2,000 by 2,000 pixels in size. I'll click Create. I'll choose layer, new fill layer, and then pattern. click okay and the document is filled with the most recent pattern that I made. I'll drop this down to about 75 percent on the scale so we can see it a bit more clearly and click, okay. We're well on the way with our pattern, but I would like to fill in these areas with the next iteration of the pattern. Let's return to the work area. Back in the master document, we're going to work on filling in these empty areas. We'll go to the master layer and drag it onto the new icon, and then drag it above absolutely everything else. It's on a layer all by itself. The next thing we need to do is to move it. Now you need to make sure that it's not selected so you don't see the matching ends. At this point, if you see the matching ends, everything's going to fail later on. We'll just drag it over across the edge of the document. Now, if you add the Shift key as you drag it, you'll drag it in a perfectly horizontal direction. What I'm looking for is to position it so that it's filling in the areas where we didn't have any dots. It's overlapping existing dots, that's just fine. We've got dots on top of dots. That's just fine too. I'm just going to click away from this and then click back on this layer. What you need to see is this selection area all the way around the shape and over the edge. If you don't see that, you need to go back and start this process again because it means that you've locked the pieces off. We need those pieces in just a minute most particularly because of these shapes that are over the edge of the design. Now, we do have dots on top of dots, so the way to get rid of those is to target this top-most layer and set its Blend Mode to something like subtract. We can see that they've got problems and we can see the problems really clearly. We'll go back to our eraser tool. We're still working with a circular eraser and it's hard. It's 100 percent hardness. You need to have these as hard erasers. You can't have them with fluffy edges. What we'll do is every time we see two shapes on top of each other with this top-most layer selected, we're just going to press the eraser on top of it and that gets rid of the shape that we just brought in. Now, this one we can't erase. It's there as a filler, so I'm just going to undo what I just did. I'm going to erase this one, this one here, this one here. There's going to be one here too, but this one I want to keep because there's nothing in that same place. There's something here, there's something here. We're just going to get rid of anything that is stacked on top of each other whenever we remove something we shouldn't, we'll just press Control or Command Z to undo that. Now, when you think you've got it right, what you're going to do is turn this layer on and off, and just see if there's anything underneath the area that you've got these dots on. Because if there's something underneath you need to get rid of the dot that's on top, but it looks like I've done a pretty good job here. We've got the shapes that go over here. Let's drag and drop this duplicate that we made and that we've worked with onto the new icon because we need to move it. We've got this layer that contains all these objects. So that's a really big layer here. What we need to do is to move it all the way across here so that these objects here are duplicated on this side and so they're going to make a seamless pattern in a minute. Now, if it's distracting, you can set this to the normal blend mode. But to move this across the document with it selected, we're going to choose Edit and then Free Transform. Then we're going to look up here and I'm going to move this edge site. I'm going to target the middle of these nine boxes on the right hand side. What I need to do is I need to move its X-position 1,000 pixels, because we need to move the entire box 1,000 pixels. Well, 1,000 is a really nice, easy value to work with because what I'm going to do is go to the X-value here. I'm just going to type the number one in front of it. That moves that box into the exact right position for it to be in either this side of the document. We don't want to move it now. If you move it now you're going to mess up the pattern. It's in a perfect position, but let's go and turn the Subtrct Blend Mode back on because we need to do the same thing with the eraser here. We need to erase anywhere where we've got shapes over the top of shapes, but leave in the ones that are filling in the gaps. Now we've got a lot more to remove on this side, so just be patient with yourself and getting rid of them. But make sure that you don't take too many like I need this one, so I'm just going to undo what I just did and put it back in again. Don't take any of the shapes over the edge because you're going to need all of those. Let's test this. I'm just looking at this side of the document right now. I've gone too far with that shape there. Let me just do that again. I'm going to turn this on and off and just make sure that there's nothing underneath these dots when I turn this layer off and it's looking nice and claim. I'm going to set it back to normal blend mode. This one over here is still on subtract, so let's turn it back to normal blend mode as well. The pattern is now repeating across these two edges. You can check that by choosing Select and then All and make this a pattern too. I'm going to make this half tone too. We'll go back to the working document here. Double-click on this icon here, open the drop-down panel and go and select the very last of the patterns because the very last of the patterns is the one that we just made, and we'll click "Okay." We can see that it's now joining up in the middle. We just need to make it join up over here and that's the final step and for that we're going to do exactly as we've been doing. It will come back into this document, will go back and grab the master, will go and make a duplicate of it, and we'll pull this up to the very top. Just so we know it's here, then we'll go and select it and we're going to start moving it, but this time we're moving up. But before I do that, I'm just going to shrink this document a little bit because it is a little bit big. It'll be easier for me to work with If it's a little bit smaller. I'm just going to place it in position and check to make sure that the selection is really big at the top. When I come back to this area of the document, it's not correct so I'm just going to undo that. The trick or the thing that's telling me that it's not right, is when I see those little marching ants around the shape. That's telling me that there's something wrong here. I'm just going to deselect, before I start, make sure I target this layer here and pull it up again, position it where I want it to be and then just click away. I didn't have the marching ants this time so you can say that I'm not missing an area of the document. This is really important because this area up here contains dots that belong down here very shortly. It's a little bit tricky, I'm not sure why Photoshop is knocking things off, but it does tend to do that, you just need to be aware of what's happening on the screen and undo it if your risk of messing it up. I'm just taking out the dots that are on top of dots here. That's one's not one of them so let's put that back in. I'm going to zoom back in a little bit to make this a bit easier to do here, it's a bit easier to see where my duplicates are. I don't think this is a duplicate, it's not so I'll just under this surface. Then we can turn it on and off and just double-check to make sure that everything's looking good. There's a problem over here. Okay, that's looking really good to me, I'm going to set it back to normal blend mode. Let's zoom back out and let's shrink down the document just a little bit. Now we've got this top-most layer, and it's really big, there's a whole lot of content up here. What we're going to do is we're going to make a duplicate of it, we'll just drag and drop it onto the new icon. That's going to be, if you're following along Master Copy 5. Now this one needs to drop down exactly 1000 pixels, so we have to move it by hand, Edit, Free Transform We're going to target the bottom middle area of that, that's this little anchor point here. This time we need to move it down at 1000 pixels vertically, so we'll go to the Y value and we'll just add 1000 to it, just type the number one in front of it and click the check mark. This is now in a perfect position, but of course there are overlaps in this one too, I'm setting it to subtract blend mode. I'm going to zoom into this area because I've got more cleaning up down the bottom end of this document, we're getting more dots than we have to. But of course we need to watch and make sure that we don't get rid of dots that we need to keep. That's all looking really good to me, I'm going to set it back to normal blend mode. I'll press "Control" or "Command zero" to zoom back out, this now should be a sameness repeating pattern. Before I finish, I'm going to the crop tool, I'm going to click once in the document. You can see that there's a lot of content outside here so I'm just going to click the check mark to crop it. Now we'll choose, Select, and then All Edit, Define Pattern, I'll call this Half Tone 3. Let's go back to our working document double-click on the icon here, and we'll go and pick up the last pattern, which is the pattern that we just made and click "Okay." We've created a really interesting design this time. Now I'm seeing a problem here. Underneath this purple one, there's a little bit of green here, and I thought I saw something else here. Under this green is a little bit of orange, there's a problem in the original design. I just need to go and find where the issue is and this is where it is. It's up on the top edge here, let me just show you how I found it. What I was looking for was some green that had something underneath it, there's some green here. We can see that there's some orange bit up the top here that doesn't match it and there's a purple thing here and as a bit of green up the top, I'm just going to go in erase those places. But I need to work out which layer it's on, it's on this layer here, I think that's probably fixed it up. Let's go again and choose, Select All, Edit, Define Pattern, I'll call it Half Tone 4 knowing that I'll need to delete Half Tone 3 later on because it's got problems and this is the new pattern. This time, I'm not going to see any issues in it, this time it looks perfect. If you do have some minor problems, just go back and edit your master so that you can then remake your pattern. Now of course, like any pattern, this can be easily recolored with an adjustment layer. Just do a new hue saturation adjustment layer, place it on top of the design, and then you can adjust the colors to suit. You can also of course, targets specific colors if you want to edit just those colors.
14. Pt 13 Change Pattern Backgrounds: One other thing that I wanted to cover in this course before we finish is what happens if you don't want a white background for your pattern? Well, for most of the patterns that we've created, we have built them on a background. The background can be turned off because the pattern elements aren't actually in that background layer. That's why we've been pretty careful to make sure that we don't bake things into the background layer. This is one of the patterns that we build. I've turned off the background so it's not visible. I'll choose, Select All and then Edit, Define Pattern. I'll create a brand new document so that we can test this out. Now the file that I've created does have a background, but that's fine. We can change that. Let's just get our pattern in place. Now the way that I like to use background is not to re-color this background layer, but instead to add a fill layer. We'll choose Layer, New Fill Layer, and I'll choose Solid Color. I'll click, Okay. Now I can select a color for my background. The reason why I like to use this fill layer, and choose Solid Color is that I can then experiment with a whole range of colors. I can see what the color is going to look like before I actually commit to it. Now, I'm really liking these really dark color, so let's go and do that. I'll click, Okay. You can make for example, scrapbook paper that's 12 by 12 inches in size and add whatever background you want. But of course you want to make sure that the pattern itself does not bring a background into it. Of course, it's possible to change the color of your pattern. Choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, and choose Hue/Saturation and click, Okay. Now you can adjust the Hue/ Saturation slider to create a different range of patterns. Now if you want to keep the background, but you just want to change the pattern, click here on this icon. Because what that does is it applies the color change only to the pattern layer and not to the background layer.
15. Project and wrapup: We've now finished the video learning part of this course, so it's over to you. Your project for this class will be to make one or more of the polka dot patterns that we've explored in this class and post an image of your completed pattern as your class project. Now, as you were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you did enjoy the class, would you complete the online review? Your answers to the questions help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now, if you see the follow link on the screen, click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. If you would like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and I respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
