Create a Repeat Pattern on the iPad Using Only Procreate

1. Introduction: Hey guys, my name's Peggy Dean. I'm an author and illustrator. I'm very excited to bring a class to you all about how to create a repeat pattern on your iPad using only one app, Procreate. Repeat patterns are such a fun way to explore different types of design, things you may probably have never even thought of creating. I'll tell you the most exciting part is that you do not have to be an artist to create some really adorable repeat patterns. We will be starting at the very beginning on how to begin drawing your elements that you want placed in your patterns. We're going to go over utilizing multiple brushes, adding texture to your illustrations, working in scale, creating custom color palettes with limited selection so that you can really explore color harmonies, then we will move into actually building the composition to create your pattern, filling in the gaps, and then making sure that it's seamless. As a bonus, we are going to be putting our patterns on 3D mock-up so that you can see them in action. This class is for you if you have an iPad and you want to create a pattern. It can be for those who have never ever created a pattern on Adobe software or any other type of software. This class is also for those of you who have been creating patterns for years, have your own fabric lines, what have you, and you just got an iPad and you want to explore the amazing tools that are right at your fingertips so you can really take your workflow to the next level. I am going to walk you through my entire workflow from beginning to end. At the end of this class, your project will be to use these tools to create your very own pattern using just the iPad. I am very excited to dive into this with you guys. Let's get designing. 2. Drawing Your Pattern Elements: The first thing that we're going to do is create our pattern. I'm just going to walk you through my workflow on how I create a very simple illustration. You don't have to be an artist to do this and create adorable little patterns. The first thing I'm going to do, I've opened Photoshop and I'm going to create a new canvas, and I'm going to do this by pressing this plus sign here. They actually have a square canvas that's already created in Procreate, it's 2048 by 2048 pixels. I'm going to select that because I'm on my square canvas. Now, I want to select the colors that I'm going to use on my pattern, and patterns look great when it's isolated to 2-3-4 colors, of course you can do more colorful, it's always super fun. But for this one, I want to keep it down to just a few colors and it'll also make it easier for our workflow as we walk through it. To do that, I'm going to select this color wheel here, go to Palettes, create a new palette. You don't have to do this, but that way you're keeping it totally separate, and when you have your desk, you're only going to have those colors you're working with. For me, I want to choose, you can choose whatever colors you want, but I'm going to choose about three. I can sample them. I'm going to go to a plain brush. I can sample them, see what that color looks like. I want this yellowish, brownish ocher color, maybe a navy, a little bit lighter than that. That one looks good. Then I want to do an ivory color, so maybe little less yellow. That one looks good. Then lastly, I'm going to have a background color. I'll probably do that last just to see what it looks like complimentary wise because I might not love what I'm going to select right now. But just for funsies, I'm just going to select one to see how that's going to look to as a base when we first do that. I want to show you a couple of tricks. When you're drawing, I'm just going to select black so that I can see it really well, and then I'm going to change it to white so that whatever I overlay really pops and we'll get into that. But I'm going to draw just using my MonoPigeon brush. This is free on my website, the link is below. This is going to give me a clear image of the shape. Then after that, I'm going to apply a textured brush and create a clipping mask so that, that texture shows up in my pattern. The first thing I'm going to do is I just create these blobs. You don't have to be an artist to do this and this is what I wanted to show you. I'm just creating some imperfect blobs and I'm going to fill it by dragging my color over here and letting go. Then I might want to clean up some of these lines around the sides, of course, you don't have to, but this is literally all they're going to look like. It's nothing special. You don't have to have any special abilities to create them. Now, I'm creating a cluster because I'm going to have the stem coming off and connecting to all three of these. Each cluster I'm going to want on a separate layer. In the event that you don't do a separate layer and you've already started your next batch and you love the shape, which is funny because the shape is horrible. But let's pretend that you really, really love it, and you can always create a new layer from that by going to your selection tool, which looks like that little ribbon and the shape of an S. Select that part that you want on a new layer, use three fingers, drag down and say Cut and Paste, that's going to cut it, remove it from the current layer and put it onto a separate layer. When you go into your Layers panel, you'll now see two layers. I'm going to finish that layer with another imperfect shape here, and then I'm going to do one more of these clusters. I'm going to my Layers panel, I'm going to select a new layer and then just quickly draw a couple more little blobs. The reason that I work in layers is because I can move these independently. They don't need to be on different layers for the artwork, but it is a lot easier than having to select the same art over and over and over again. That way it's all nice and clear, and you can rename layers, that's easy for your workflow. I never do because I can just toggle them, and often see which ones they are but if you want to rename them like this is this cluster down here, I can just select it and say Rename, and then I can say Bottom. Then like this one would be Side. But I also don't like to do this because I'll probably change its location. But anyway, if that helps with your workflow, more power to you, I totally got the organization. Now, what I want do, these aren't going to stay black. These are actually going to be lighter underneath. But before I do that, I'm going to show you how to apply a texture to this, so that they don't look so flat. Flat patterns are very fine and you could absolutely just change this to a layer around. You can just change it to one color, which is great, but I'm going to show you the texture just because it's fun. Real quick too, if you do decide to keep it flat, you can drag your color over and drop it, and then do you see the color threshold ColorDrop, Color Drop threshold on the top. If you drag it all the way to the right, then you're going to get everything on that layer. Whereas, if you drag it all the way to the left, if there's more artwork going on, then you're going to select less and less. That's the Color Drop Threshold, which might be helpful. I'm going to put that back to black. I'm actually going to merge these together, because I'm going to create a clipping mask over them and then I can separate them later if I want to, but I just wanted to show you that for your reference. What I'm going to do is create a new layer on top of that. I'm going to go to my ocher color and then I'm going to select my Gouache brush. I have a pack of Gouache brushes that I've created with unique texture each of them. I've linked to that below if it's the texture that you love. I'm making this pretty large so that you can see it. The idea here is the more that you build it up, the more coverage you're going to get. If I go quickly. Over this area, you can see there's a lot of streakiness in there. The thing that I like about this particular brush is that if I go in sideways, you're also going to see streak sideways. It looks a lot more organic as if you're applying actual paint strokes to it. Then this is also a brush that you can use on its own. It has this nice textured edging. I'm going to do that to all of these, and then as you can see it's buildable, so you can have a lot more coverage or less depending on what you want to do. I'm going to do that to all of these. I like to go in with Sporadic Brush Strokes so that it doesn't look so uniformed. I like it to look a little bit messier. Then once that's done, I can apply a clipping mask. I'm going to go to my layers. I most going to select the layer that I was just on. Then say clipping mask. Then you can see that it grabs to only what was on the previous layer. The nice part of our clipping mask too is that you can work on that layer to change the way that it is going to perform after the clipping mask is applied, if there is an area that you don't love, you can always change that, but I love the texture that it creates and I'm not keeping black underneath this. I showed you blacks that you can see it, it's really great to use to initially illustrate, but I'm going to go to my Layers panel and select my initial layer. Then I'm going to go to my colors. I'm going to select the ivory that I have in my palette. You could choose white. Then I'm going to take that color here, drag it on on over, and then use that color threshold to apply it to everything on that layer. Then you can see that I've got this really nice texture with brushstrokes within it, without it being too loud or too obnoxious, it's just enough texture to where it looks really cool. Now, if you guys have used alpha lock, you can absolutely do the same effect with alpha lock. The only difference is it's not editable when it's alpha lock. For those of you who don't know what alpha lock is. Actually, I'll just use this color that I'm on. If I were to quickly draw one of these shapes and then I want to apply that texture on top. I would take two fingers and drag it over. Then you may or may not see this, but it's got little gray checkers which shows that it's an alpha lock. I'm going to go to the color that I want and then see how you can apply the same effect. But the problem is, it stays on that layer. There is no separating it, there's no turning it off or changing the scale or anything like that. Whereas the clipping mask, I can select that and change the scale. I can move it around and see what that looks like. That's the difference between a clipping mask and alpha lock and why clipping masks work great for this. Once that's done, I'm going to create a new layer on top of this. Now I'm going to create my stems and I'm going to do it using a navy color. To create my stems, I'm going to go into my ink pack because I love this ink scratch brush. This is another Procreate brush pack that I've created and it comes with a bunch of different inking brushes, but you can see it has that nice texture on the side. I want that in my stems and I'm just going to loosely create a base that my flower can sit inside of and then a stem coming down. Then I'm going to draw two small stems coming off of that one that connect these two and cover that. That looks good to me. You might want your lines a little bit thicker, thinner. A lot of creative choices here. Create a little base for that to come down a little too thick. There we go. Connect it. I don't love this end here, I'm actually just going to round it out. With your eraser tool, you can round it out or your selection tool to get rid of it. But if you want to maintain that texture, if you hold down your eraser, it will grab the exact tool that you're using so that you can keep that organic texture. I'm going to finish this. Then you can always drag and drop this. If that ever happens to you when you are filling an area, where it accidentally grabs everything, you just drag your threshold down until it's just the area that you want. I could be done or I could add a little more detail into my flowers. I'm going to take that ivory color and I'm actually going to insert a layer in-between my navy and my ocher color. I'm going to add a new layer here, take that layer, drag it just underneath the navy layer. If it happens where this little arrow comes up, that's putting a clipping mask on it. It doesn't really matter if I'm going inside of that area, but I'm going to uncheck that and then go to my ivory. Then I'm just going to draw a really basic shape inside of my ocher shape just for a little more dimension. If you do color fill, make sure that when you drag down here, they connect. If I were to turn off that navy color, if I did this, it would color fill and it would hit everything. You want to make sure that that's closed. I just like this because it adds a little more interest. Then I'm going to add a little bit of line work. I'm going to go back to my navy. You could do this with your background color too, or you could do it with your ocher to pull out some of that. I'll show you what that would look like. Actually, I think I will do it with my ocher because that's cool. You can add some details, some line work in here, like so. I recommend doing this on a different layer. Just in case you want to move something and you just never know, layers are your friend. That looks good. I'm doing this with that same ink brush that I used for my stems. Again, this is super sloppy. I'm not putting a lot of time into it because I want this to look just really fun and playful. That looks good to me and now I am ready to start building my pattern. I can either build my pattern off of this right here, or I can create a new canvas. The reason I want to create a new canvas is because I like where this is at. If I start moving things around then I don't have something to come back to. I could duplicate a bunch of layers, but that to me is a messy workflow. My workflow, I like to create a separate layer. I want to see these in a PNG so I don't have a background. I'm going to go to my Layers panel, turn off my background, go to my Tool icon, it's under Share, and then PNG, Save Image. Now, I'm going to create a new canvas. I'm going to turn this background back on so it's easier to see in my library. Create a new canvas also square. Now, I'm going to import that photo by going to Tools, Add, Insert a photo. There it is on a separate canvas. Another way to do this that might be a lot easier would be to duplicate the canvas by swiping left and saying duplicate. I didn't do this because I just wanted those on one layer without having all the clipping masks and everything. You could merge it together when you duplicate. It really just depends on what you feel like doing or what comes to mind in that moment. Then once that's on there, we will start positioning them and I will take you there in the next lesson. 3. Placing Elements to Build Your Pattern: Now that I have my image imported, it's on its own layer, I'm going to start creating and building my pattern. Something to think about here is scale and how large you're going to want this. There's two ways that we can play with this pattern and I'm going to show you that when we get to it, but first I want to start positioning where I want to put my artwork. I'm going to start by separating these in their own layers. I'm going to select my "Selection Tool". It's the little ribbon that looks like an S. Select it, three fingers down cut and paste that's taking it off that layer and putting it onto a new one. Go back to the original layer selection due to one more, cut and paste, and now they're on their own. Now I can move them all individually and I am going to start by just getting this as close to the edges as possible without having it fall off. You don't want it to fall off, you want these to be their full art form. Then I go to my next one and then I think I'm going to just stagger these. I'm going to start staggering here. You'll notice that this is overlapping if I drag that layer over it, then it will overlap the stem instead of having that stem show, and we do the same thing to the bottom layer since I'm going to put that below it and then move this on over. I can't see the bottom here, so rather than deselecting it, I can just hold down my "Arrow Key", reposition, and then place where I want this. I can flip this so that it covers what I want. If I don't like that, then you can always change the scale or even just erase. If I had it this way, I could erase any excess that I wouldn't want showing, but I think I like it this direction. I'm going to put this towards the very bottom without actually going off of the page. Now I can duplicate these layers that I want to play with. I'll duplicate this one on the bottom, bring it up here, and then I can start to position this where I want them. I like to have them in Windows not directly across from each other but more staggered. I'll place that there for now, create another duplicate of another one and then maybe flip it, see what that looks like. I'll put this one right here. I'm going to drag this up above it so that it overlaps the stem. If I were to put one right here, it would fall off the page, so I'm going to leave that as is for now and just continue and then I can fill in all these empty spaces in a little bit. I'm going to duplicate another one, bring it over here, see how that looks. You can keep these pretty separated if you want. I like the look of having it overlap. You can keep them all separate, which also looks lovely to have more of that stamped look on the pattern. Right now I want to do this one and maybe flip that, see how it looks right here. Then I'll do that to this one again, where is it? Here we go. Bring it over here. Obviously I am going to have to bring that on the top of those layers, but I like that here, so I'll bring that above and then just continue. What will look good here? I'll bring this one over. It doesn't really matter which ones you're duplicating. As long as you know where your overlap is and if it happens to be that it overlaps in the wrong place, just drag it to the top and you're good to go. I'm going to do this one again and then flip it. Maybe not. This looks good. I'm going to bring that to the top and see how that looks. This might bug me. If it does, I can always get rid of this one element here from this one. I think it'll be fine though. Let me just see. Yeah, that separates it a little more. Then I'll add one more to the bottom. Let's do this one. That's the same. I don't know if I'm going to want that to be so close together, but if I flip it horizontally, it goes in a different direction, so that might break it up and if I lift it a little, that would too. I don't want that one though. Which is the other one? Let's do the other one. That will look fun and I'll just have that overlapping right here, drag that up to the top and then this stem, if you don't want that there, this is where it gets tricky though, because now you don't know which one that is. If you're an organized worker, you can always play with your layers. It's like the last one I chose, of course. I should have known that because the newest layers that you use are toward the top. I'm just going to go to my "Eraser" and get rid of that excess and then it overlaps beautifully. Now I'm just going to see if I can get away with putting another one here, oh I can, without it falling off the page. I might want to put it. I like the way that the stem looks when it's overlaying like this. It's not the edge of it, it's just the the body of it. What I think, because this does look a little cluttery, I might actually remove one of the florets, the flowers from this one. I can just take my "Selection Tool" or eraser and get rid of this part. Three fingers down to say ''Cut''. Yeah, that looks better and now I can move this to where it's not so cluttery. Lastly, I might fill this one and see if I can get away with doing so. Let me use this one and bring that over here and maybe flip it. That looks good, and then I'll get rid of this one that's falling off because I can fill that empty space in just a minute. That looks good to me, very fun. Now that I have positioned my pattern, I'm going to start building the repeat and filling in the empty spaces that we will encounter when that happens. We'll do that in the next lesson. 4. Filling in the Gaps to Complete Your Pattern: Once your pattern is placed, you are going to want to make sure that when it is selected, it selects the entire canvas. If I group all of these together or if I flatten it, either way and I press my selection tool, if I were to zoom in here, you'll see that the entire canvas is not selected. You are going to want to make sure that it is. To do this, you are going to add a layer and make sure it's on the bottom and yet this is where you're going to want to choose your background color. To choose your background color, I'm going to select what I thought was going to be my background color. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep it that way and then drag it and drop it. I think I might choose a little bit different color, but this is where you can experiment and see what looks the best in contrast or compliments your artwork. An easy way to do this rather than to continue to go in here and pick a new color and drag and drop, what you can do is go into your Adjustments, which is this magic wand icon, go to Recolor and then make sure that this little cross here is on the color that you're going to want to recolor. Then you can go to your colors and select whatever you want, drag it around and see it live. It comes in really, really handy, so that you're not continuing to drag and drop. I think, I like blue. I think, I just might want a little more of a green tone and dirty it up a little bit, more gray in there or you go the opposite end of the spectrum if you're using these colors and warm it up and do something like a peach, which it would look really pretty too. You have options. I'm going to go here. Now that that's done, when I collapse my group, I make sure that it's in there and I can select that layer and see when I zoom in, the entire thing is selected and that's what you want. Now you're going to export that as a JPEG and save the image. Now, you're going to create a new canvas. I'm going to go back to my gallery, create a New canvas, just square again. Then I'm going to import the JPEG that I just saved. I'm going to go to tools, Add, Insert a photo, insert the photo that I just saved. This is now in its own layer and you're going to want to create four of these layers, so duplicate it. Go to the Layers panel, swipe to the left, duplicate, do this until you have four. Now, I want to turn on my Drawing Guide. What you're going to do is create perfect quadrants. I'm going to go to my tool icon, go to Canvas, Drawing Guide, turn that on. You can see that there are these tiny blue lines that create a grid. I'm going to edit Drawing Guide. At the bottom here, you'll see grid size. You're going to put that all the way up. Then you will see that you have a perfect line quadrant. You have these four areas. Now, you're going to take your first layer and what you want to do is drag it so that the bottom-right corner down here is in the top left, so basically, opposite. I'm going to select this and I want to also point out that when I select it and then I start to move it, it's pretty free form. It's called free form. If I keep it on free form, it's going to be hard to get it exactly where I want it whereas if I put on Magnetics, it snaps and place a little bit, so you can see how it snapping. That's going to help you guide it to where you want it to go. I have my first layer selected that I've got it on Magnetics and I'm going to drag it towards this corner, this opposite and hits the middle here. To make sure this is the middle and I'll have to stop here, I can actually hold down my selection tool, zoom way in and you can see it's not perfect. Now, I can just drag it to where I know it is perfectly, right now, it's perfectly in line. That is done. Now, I'm going to go to my next layer, and then I'm going do the same thing. I'm going to create it. This corner goes opposite and to the other corner. Then to make sure that's perfect, I'm going to open this up. Perfect. Now, I'm going to do the next one. Grab that layer, selection tool and I'm going to move it from this corner down to the bottom. Then zoom way in and that looks good. Lastly, I'm going to take the final one, select it and bring it down here. What you're going to find is anything that might have been cut off right here is now perfectly on the other side. This stem comes up and then it cuts off then, you can see it poking over here. The top and bottom, you see this stopping, but then, it comes up right here. If this square was placed on top of itself, then you would see the repeat pattern. Now what you're going to want to do is we have this empty space, so this is when we want to fill this empty space. I'm going to take that PNG that we had initially created, Add, Insert a photo and then you're going to take that. I have it, it looks like it's underneath some layers, so I'm going to move it where it's on the top. I can see it. These three right here and I can move that to fill in that empty space. I'm going to create different layers so I can move them independently. This is personal preference. I just say this isn't easier flow for me and then turn two those off, so I can drag this around and see where I want to go. Turn off Magnetics. This looks like a good place here. Notice how this is cutting off. You don't want that to happen because you don't see it mirroring on this side. If you do want to play something here, just make sure that it's not cut off. I'm going to flip this and see what I can do. That looks good. Then I'm going to go in and remove this overlap. Now, I want to fill in this area, so I can turn this on and see where I can place that. That looks good there. But because my stem is falling off, I don't want it to have that harsh edge, so I'm just going to stop it there. Turn this one on somewhere where it makes sense. Looks good there. I want to get rid of this axis. Then this area could use a fill here also. I'll probably just duplicate one of these, drag it on over, that looks good. Then I'll just get rid of the part that's coming off of it. Also, this hidden stem, the stem that's overlapping. Actually, they could just do the part that is there and then I have my stem still here. Cool. Then I think that this area could use one, so instead of duplicating it, which one is this? I'm going to select just one part of this, three fingers down, copy paste. It keeps it on its initial layer, but paste and duplicate on a new layer and then I can put it in here as a new element. That looks good. I think, I might move this one over just to [inaudible]. That looks pretty good to me. I can turn off my Drawing Guide if it's distracting. Then I see, I have a complete pattern here. This is a perfect swatch. Now, I want to test the pattern to make sure that it looks good and that it's working the way that I want it to. This is my final pattern swatch. This is what everything is going to be built off of. What I want to do is save it as a JPEG and now I have that. 5. Testing Your Pattern: To test our pattern, I'm just going to open a new canvas so that I still have all of this for whatever reason I might want to adjust. Then I'm going to turn on my drawing guide. I'm going to turn that down or up so that it's only four quadrants. Import my pattern that I just created. Instead of dragging it teach corner, I'm actually just going to shrink it. This is also going to give you a repeating pattern in a smaller scale, but I want to shrink it so that I can make sure that everything lines up perfectly. I'm going to duplicate this four times again. Then I'm going to take the first layer, make sure it's magnetic. You really want to make sure it's magnetic on this one because you're going to be scaling and you don't want to lose anything width wise or height wise. I'm going to bring this down to where the bottom corner is perfectly in the center. If you want to make sure you can zoom. That looks good. Do it to the next layer. Bring that over. You can see that it's matching up here. My pattern is matching and then I'm going to do it to the next layer, bring this corner down to the bottom left. You can see how this is matching up, but I do want to make sure my corners line up well and one more over here, drag that down. There I have my perfect repeating pattern. I don't have any areas. If I turn off my drawing guide, you would want to turn it off for this so that you can really see how it lines up. It looks good. I don't have any areas that aren't matching up. I am finished with my patterns so I can keep it at this smaller scale because you can see that this runs off but then it mirrors on this side or you can keep it in the larger scale. I can export this as a JPEG, save it and then if I go to my images, I've got my large pattern and my small pattern. 6. Put Your Pattern on a Thing: I want to to show you guys an area that you can test your patterns and put them on products to see what they look like. You can also order samples and even dropship from this site. Really, it's a great resource to see your patterns come to life in a 3D mockup. What you want to do is go to artofwhere.com and create an account. Once you are in your account, you can go to Design Lab. Design Lab is going to show you all of the products that you can put your patterns on so that we're in the clothing category. You can go to pillow cases, scarves, device cases, accessories, bags, wall art, books, stationery, and embroidery. That doesn't really count for us, but these are the items that they have. Of course you can do this on other platforms, but they have such a vast collection and their mockups look awesome when you put your patterns on it. We'll go with something simple for now and we can choose a pillowcase. You're going to select pillowcase and then say Create New. Now when the design lab opens, you're going to want to upload an image and then you're going to want to select Upload. At this point you'll have one and two AirDrop or send yourself the file of your patterns. I'm going to select my pattern, say choose, and it is going to upload that and then I can place it on the pillow. I selected it and now you can see this mockup here of this pillow and it looks awesome. You can also look at it from the side, which looks really fine. That's an easy one. I can exit out of here and now let's look at another one. I go back to Design Lab and let's say I want to put this on a dress, I know that there are dresses in here, here they are. I'm going to click Flare Dress, open this up and you can see that I have this big canvas area to upload my image to. I'm choosing my smaller pattern because I like the way that the smaller one looks when it's on something larger like address. Depending, you could do either or. That covers my canvas there. I'm going to do another one, select the same one and then drag that over. Now you have this mockup of this dress and then you see the front. You can look at the side, the back, and then you have this adorable dress. We'll look at one more thing. I'm going to go to Device Cases, you can choose your device. I'm just going to pick the iPhone and use my pattern or let's try the larger one and see how that looks on here. I'm going to select it and there we go. You can see right here, you can zoom in and out. Let's say I wanted to save this and say Save Product and then you see it here and here. You've got this awesome mockup of it and then you can name it repeating pattern iPhone. Now I have it saved in my library and Design Lab, also something that's neatly. You can do on this is you can move it and see where you want that or you can also drag it so it's larger or smaller. That is it, easy place to see some inspiration and test where you want your products to go. 7. Project Time!: All right guys, we have reached the end of the class, which means that it is time for you to start your own patterns, play with color, play with the tools that we went over, play with your composition, play with separating things a bit more, play with making things more condensed, play with more layers, play with less letters. I could go back and forth with these all day, but I'm thrilled to see what you guys create. Please upload them into the Your Project tab so that we can all see your creativity. I guarantee you that there is something that you will create that somebody else will be able to source inspiration from, and that is what this is all about in this creative community. If there's any particular feedback that you guys would like, please, please be sure to note that in your project and I'll be happy to give you any additional guidance or feedback. Thank you guys so much and I will see you next time.