Create Organic Patterns in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Organic Patterns in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, create organic 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. Today, we're looking at creating organic style patterns in Photoshop. These are a little bit more complex patterns and we're going to see how we can create those very easily. As you're watching these videos, you'll see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others, please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and your questions and I look at and I respond to all of your class projects. Now, if you're ready let's get started creating organic style patterns in Photoshop. 2. Make a Pattern of Wiggly Lines: The first pattern we're going to make is going to be a wiggly line pattern. I'll choose File and then New. I'm going to create a document to a fixed size and that's critical because you're going to need to know exactly how big it is, so I'm giving it a width of 200 and a height of 300 and background contents are going to be white. I'm going to zoom in just a little bit, but I still want to see the top and bottom of the document. I'm going to the Pen Tool and I'm going to start creating a wiggly line and I'm going to start well above the document, so I'm just going to click and drag down in a series of curves, so I'm clicking and dragging to left, click and drag to the right, click and drag to the left a little bit, click and drag to the right. I'm going to finish up pretty much so that I would be running in to the start of the line if the start of the line were where I'm right now, so I'm going to be heading in this direction. I'm going to press Escape to finish the line off. I'm going to the Path Selection Tool, I'm going to select my line. I'll choose Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste, and then Edit, Free Transform Path. There are nine little boxes here and you're going to click on the middle one in the bottom row and you're going to read off the y-value, which for me is 227 but yours is going to be different. The critical point here is that you need to add the height of the document to your y-value, that's why I made my document and easy number to remember and an easy number to add as well. My document is 300 pixels high, so I need to add 300 to 227, so that's just 527, so I'll type that in and click the check mark. Now, what I have to do is join these two lines together, so I'm going through the Zone Tool, it's going to zoom in here so I can see where I am. I'm going to a Pen Tool, I'm going to click on the top most point in the bottom line and I'm going to just drag up and I'm going to click on the end of this other line just to join it altogether and I can just swing my Pen Tool around. Now, if your line is a bit wonky at this point, you can go back to the Direct Selection Tool and you can select these points and just finance them. The thing that you can't do is you can't adjust this point here or anything that crosses the bottom of the document, so you want to be working with the points that are well in the document, but not this one or also just going to throw your entire pattern out later on. Now we've got our wiggly line. I'm going to the Brush Tool, so I'm going to click on the Brush Tool, and I chose a round brush here nine pixels in diameter, given that the document itself is only 200 pixels wide, that seemed like a good value and I'm going to select a color two use, so I'm going to use the dusky dark blue. I'm going to the Layers palette, I'm going to add a new layer so that my line can go on a new layer. I'm going to Paths palette and I'm just going to click here on Stroke path with brush and that just strokes the path with that brush. I can now go and delete my work path. I'm going to zoom back out. We are ready to create our second path, so I'm going to the Pen Tool, I'm going to start well off the top of this document and just start drawing my lines down, making sure that I have plenty of anchor points here as I work. When I get to the end, I'll just press Escape. I'll select the Path Selection Tool and select over the entire path. It's really important that you have plenty of this paths sitting above the document. Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste, Edit, Free Transform Path, click the bottom middle of these nine boxes at the height of the document to your y-value and click the check mark here. Now we need to join these two lines together, but I've got a little bit of overlap. Here I'm going to the Delete Anchor Point Tool and I'm going to delete from the topmost path, so I can just wind this back a little bit and then go and get the Pen Tool and I can start joining these two together. I'm just going to click and drag and then click and drag on the topmost point on this path. At this point, I can go back to the Direct Selection Tool and just smooth things out if I want to, if I'm having a little bit of wonky stuff going in my path. Again, I want to avoid making any changes to this top area or this bottom area, so this anchor point needs to stay exactly where it is or the path and the pattern aren't going to work later on. We'll go back to the Path Selection Tool and make sure that we have the whole of the path selected. Go back to our Brush, go to our Work Path and if you want to, you can add this to a new layer or you can just put the line on the previous layer and just click here on Stroke path with brush and then we're going to make one more path. I'm going to get rid of my work path and let's go and make one final path, Path Selection Tool, Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste, Edit, Free Transform Path, click the bottom most of these options, add the height of the document to the y-value, and click the check mark. Zoom into the overlap area and if necessary you can just go and use the Delete Anchor Point Tool to delete some anchor points. It's best to delete them from this long path here rather than this one here. Now, go to your Pen Tool and pick up the end of the path here and click on the beginning of this other path. If you click and drag, we're going to get this nice line. If you need to adjust your line at any point, you can go to the Direct Selection Tool and then just adjust your individual anchor points, making sure this one does not move and neither does this one. Go to your brush, select the brush, select your paint, go to your Work Path, well, actually I'm going to add a new layer for this one first, go to my Work Path. With it, select it, just click here on stroke path with brush and now I'm going to get rid of this Work Path. I've now got three layers each with one of these wiggly lines on them. If I needed to, I could just move my lines across, but I'm going to need to make sure that I hold the Shift key so I constrain the movement to a perfectly horizontal direction because you can't afford for this to move up or down or else your path is just not going to work. Try to make sure that I've got an uneven spacing given this as one space, this is two space and this plus this is going to be the third space. If I'm pretty happy with that, I'm going to select these three layers, but turn off my Background layer. I'm going to choose Edit, Define Pattern, I'm going to call this stripes and click "OK." To test it, File, New, I'm going to create quite a big document, this is going to be 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels in size, white background, click "OK." I'll choose Layer, New Fill Layer, Pattern, click "OK" and my pattern going to be the one that's added to the document because that's the one that I just created. That's how this tool works. I'm going to enlarge it so I can see it nice and clearly, that's a scale of 200 percent. You can say that the wiggly lines have joined up just perfectly. Now, one of the reasons I like to make patterns like this so that the background is transparent is that if I like the size of my pattern, I can rasterize at this point. Then I can go and add a stoke, so I'm going to click the fx icon, click Stroke and I've got a stroke already in place here but basically what you're going to do is adjust the size and then just go and choose a color for your stroke. Let's go and make this a little bit lighter color. What I've got here is a multicolor line effect. In early versions of Photoshop, you can only put one stroke onto a line this way. In later versions, you can put multiple strokes, so I've got a second Stroke here, let's just turn it on. It's a little bit wider than the first, so I'm just going to adjust the stroke width to whatever width I want because this is no longer a pattern pace, that's just a pattern, we can make it any size that we like and the fact that goes over the edge of the document is not going to matter. In later versions of Photoshop, you can continue to add strokes, you can add lots and lots of them if you wish. Of course, you've also got this Background layer, which is white and which is contributing the in-between bits to this pattern. If you were to go and create a color here, let's go for a very pale green color and I'm going to press Alt backspace option Delete on the Mac to fill this Background layer with that color, that's adding yet another color behind this line. But that's how you can create wiggly lines that are going to repeat perfectly in Photoshop. 3. Make a Cloud Pattern: The second organic pattern that we're going to make is this cloud pattern. I'm going to choose File, and then New, and I'm going to create a small document this time it's going to be 300 pixels wide by 200 pixels tall. Again, you'll want to remember what those values are because they are going to be important. I'll click "Okay". I'm going to zoom in here because this is really quite a small document. Now we're going to create some clouds across this document and we're going to do that in some shades of blue. I'm just going to find a starting shade of blue here to use. I'm going to select my brush tool and I'm going to use a circular brush that has a really nice hard edge on it. I'm just going to measure this up to the size of the document because I only want a few clouds across my document, but I want to put these on a brand new layer. So I've just selected a new layer. I'm going to increase my brush size just using my open and close square bracket case. I'm going to start by placing some cloud-like shapes across this document, and I can vary my brush size just to fill in the gaps. Now the other thing that I'm going to do with this blue cloud is I'm going to draw all the way down to the very bottom of the document and across. So I'm just of filling in these gaps at this point. But the one thing I don't want to do is I don't want to go over the edge of the document along the sides. Now I'm going to add another new layer, and I'm going to choose a different blue this time. Let's go for a slightly darker blue. I'm going to do exactly the same thing. Again, varying my brush size so I get some interesting clouds, I'm going to move across the document. Again, I'm just using the open and close square bracket case to vary the size of the brush. I don't want to go over the edge here or here. Again, I'm just going to paint down to fill in the document because that's going to avoid some of the problems later on. So there's my second cloud shape. Now if I want to see how they're stacking up, I can reverse their order. So this is going to be the bottom most cloud. This is going to be the ones behind them. If you want to, when you're painting, you can actually paint behind so click on the background layer, add the layer immediately above that and you're going to be painting between the two cloud layers. Let's go and get another color for our clouds. Again, working with a nice big brush, again, avoiding the side of this document, I'm just going to paint some clouds across here. I'm going to turn off these two topmost layers so that I can just finish off drawing in the bottom of these clouds because that's just going to make life a little bit easier later on. We're going to add one more panel of clouds. Now with this one, we need to be careful that we don't hit the top of the document or disaster is going to strike our pattern. Let's go and get a final color to work with. This time I'm going to go for a lighter blue so it doesn't look like I've got anything I can use so just going to sample one of the colors I've previously used and get a slightly lighter color. Making sure that I'm on this layer here and making sure that I avoid hitting the top of this document at all costs. I'm just going to work across here adding the last clouds. If I add a big cloud, just making sure that it's low enough in the document that it's not going to hit that top area. Again, turning off all of these layers and just finishing off there. I don't have to go all the way down, but I do want to make a fairly generous shape at this point. This is what my cloud bank is looking like. My document is 300 pixels wide, so I'm now going to start breaking up my clouds. I'm going to select the topmost layer and choose filter other offset. I'm going to set the horizontal value to half the width of the document, document's 300 pixels wide, the horizontal value is going to be a 150 and the vertical is zero. I'll just click "Okay". As soon as you've got those values in, you can just select filter, other offset and it's going to be set up exactly the same as it was last time. Making sure of course too that wrap around is selected and you're going to do that for all these layers. Filter, other offset settings are already there click "Okay". So what that's done is that, it's made sure that these clouds are going to repeat down the edge of the document. But of course there's this big gap in the middle so what we have to do is go fill in the big gap in the middle. I'm going to start at the bottom because that was my last cloud bank. This blue color is already selected, my brush is selected. I'm just going to fill in the gap. We'll go to the next layer. I'm going to make sure that the layer itself is selected, go to the Eyedropper by pressing the letter I, sample a color, B for the brush. Go and put in the missing cloud and fill in the gap, just confirming that I'm working on that layer. Go to the next layer, select the layer, I for the Eyedropper to sample a color, B for the brush. Just adjust down the brush size perhaps to vary the cloud in this location. Draw it in and then go to the last of these layers. I for the Eyedropper to select the color, B for the brush. Select the layer, just picture that I'm painting on the right layer and then just paint in the last of the clouds. Now we've got our basic cloud pattern, but we don't have the repeating element, and that's what we need to do next. The repeating element is going to be this bottom most layer. What we're going to do is we're actually going to make a duplicate of it. So just drag down a duplicate copy. On one of these lags we're going to push it up. We're going to push it up until all those transparent areas just disappear. So the clouds are pushed off the top of the document. We don't want to push it too far, so more is not better. You just want to get them off the top of the document. You want to make sure also that they're centered on the documents, so you haven't moved them sideways. All you've done is moved them up the top of the document. Having done that, we need to read off what this bottom value is. We're going to choose, Edit, Free Transform, we're going to click on the middle bottom of these nine boxes here and we're going to read the y-value, which is 138. We just need that value. I'm just going to close that down because I don't need anything done with it. I'm going to select the second layer which is these clouds. I'm going to choose, Edit, Free Transform. I'm going to click on the bottom middle selector here. I'm going to ignore its y-value, and I'm going to take the y-value of the one I just found, which was 138. My document is 200. I'm going to add 200 to 138, which is going to be 338. So I'm going to type 338 in here and just click the check mark. What that's done is it moves the tip of the clouds to the very bottom of the document. We just can't see them because they're at the bottom of the last stack. So let's drag this bottom layer up to the very top of the document and there is a bank of clouds. Now what we need to do is arrange the ones in the middle. These three blue layers can be now arranged so we can spread things out a little bit. So let's go to this one and push it down the document a bit, again, making sure that we are not moving it horizontally at all. Then this one, we can adjust it down a little bit and this last one probably adjust it up a bit. Now, at this stage you may want to grab hold of all of these layers and just use the align tools here to make sure that they're aligned correctly. If you align them to the left edges, then everything else is going to be perfect. Now let's go and crop our document because we've got bits of clouds hanging all over the place here. We'll go to the crop tool. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you're going to drag over the current document. In later versions of Photoshop when you get the crop handles you're just going to double-click on them, and that will crop any excess pixels provided, of course, that you had delete crop pixels selected. So just do that. Now we're ready to create our patterns. So we're going to select all of these layers and we're going to choose edit, define pattern. I'm going to call this blue clouds and click "Okay". To test it File and then New, I'm going to make a document 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels in size, click "Okay". I'll choose Layer, New fill layer pattern. I'll click "Okay". It's now filled with my pattern. Now I'm going to scale this up so we can see it at a larger size. I'm doing this at 300 percent. You can say that this is a seamless pattern. There are no breaks in this pattern, either vertically or horizontally. 4. Project and wrapup: Your project for this class will be to make one or both of these organic style patterns in Photoshop. Once you've made your pattern, create a document and fill that document with your pattern just to test to make sure that that's working really well. Post a picture of your pattern in use as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about creating organic patterns in Photoshop. Now as you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed this class. These recommendations help other students at Skillshare to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and I respond to all of your comments and your questions, and I look at and 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.