Transcripts
1. INTRO: Hello, I'm Sandra Bowers. In this class I will show you how to create seamless patterns in Procreate without doing any math and how to use patterns to create amazing pattern brushes that will speed up your illustration process and allow you to get more consistent, professional results. You will learn how to create your own brushes and you can also download my source files for tree branches so you can start creating your brushes immediately. Then, I will show you how to use pattern brushes to add interest to a children's illustration, but you can use them for so many other things still. At the end, I'll show you a little trick to create a stamp brush out of your logo so you can use it to watermark your designs so come join me.
2. Class Project: For this class you will need an iPad with procreate. If you're using an iPad Pro it's great to have an Apple pencil, because it gives you a lot of control. I'm using a 9.7 iPad Pro first-generation and an Apple pencil. You will also need to install the procreate software, for the class project you will make one illustration using your brushes, I hope to see your projects in the project gallery and you can also share them on Instagram with me and tag me Sandra Bowers Art.
3. Creating the Pattern - Part 1: In this lesson, I will show you how to make seamless patterns in Procreate. I'm going to create a new file that is 12 by 12 inches. Here select the inches. I usually create all my patterns at this size. Make sure it's 300 DPI so you can print it out later. Create, and here's our new Canvas. The first thing that you need to know when you're creating these pattern is that if you make a shape in Procreate, and you drag it out of the Canvas, and release it, that shape gets cut. I do not use this technique for when I'm making patterns for clients because usually clients like the whole icon, because in case they want move it around, they don't want the icon to be cut in half. I will only use this if I'm creating things that I'm going to print myself or for things like print on demand sites, where you just upload your pattern or spring flower, or if you're going to create a pattern brush, as I'm going to show you later. But let's erase this and start building our pattern. Just going to grab a basic brush and let's make a strawberries' pattern. What do you have to do first is fill the middle without touching any of the edges. That's what I'm going to do right now. If I drive this color in, it will color the whole shape. If you have seen that your brush is creating lines that are not very smooth; you can go into your brush and select "Streamline" here on "Stroke." Now it'll create way smoother shapes. See. I'm creating different shapes of strawberries here. I don't want them all to be super smooth. They have some personality. I'm going to show you the time laps of me drawing them because it's basically the same thing over and over again. When I slided to the side with two fingers, you see there's a checkerboard in the back.That means it's an alpha lock. You can paint over it and you can only paint the inside of your shapes. This is very useful for shading and adding details. But if I'm going to add leaves outside this shape, then I need to slide it back again so I can color outside the shapes I already have. I'm going to add some leaves. I'm going to change the background color. We're going to add some suns. It's always a good idea to have varying elements. Some are bigger than the other ones. That way the pattern is balanced. Also you can use this smaller elements to fill in the little gaps so the pattern flows better. I like patterns that are very full of things, I don't really like blank spaces like these, but it's just preference. Make sure you're not touching the borders. I'm not going to feel these full of dots because we're going to have some icons there later. Now we have a base of our pattern.
4. Creating the Pattern - Part 2: Now that we have the middle of our pattern, we're going to create the repeat. First, we're going to do the horizontal and then the vertical repeat. I'm going to go to the layers, and I'm going to create a new layer on top. I'm going to set it to multiply. I'm going to take a color that is not in my pattern like these green for example, and I am going to color in the corners. Now I'm going to slide this one to the right and create a group and, I'm going to slide this to the left and duplicate it. Now I have two groups. I'm going to hide the bottom one and I am going to select the selection tool. Here you have the options. You need to keep it in uniform and make sure that magnetics is selected, it's selected when it's blue. I am going to slide this to the left. Make sure that that line is appearing. That means it's centered. See if I bring it here, it's not there. Try to match that circle with that little circle. That means it's the center of the board, and release. Untap the selection again. Now we have the left side of our pattern. I'm going to make this bigger so you can see what we're doing now. I'm going to go back to the layers and make this group visible. Select it and go to the selection tool. Again, I'm going to drag this time to the right. Make sure that line is showing up. I'm going to go to the right, and I'm going to be guided by the corners that I painted. Remember the green corners, sensor set to multiply. They create a transparency. When they're overlapping, you can see a darker spot. So just release it when they're overlapping a bit. Before I zoom it in, I'm going to have something in mind. This is the middle of my pattern and this is the middle of my pattern. I'm going to zoom it in. This is the middle of it, I can still see these middle of my pattern and I can see this better. I'm going to select that again. If I tap to the right here, besides these little node, that marks the middle of my pattern, it will move to the right, one pixel at a time. You don't want to tap up here, because see, it starts taking it upwards. I'm going to undo that, and we're going to tap besides this until you cannot see that overlapping green. They have to be sitting next to each other perfectly. If you think you're done, just hit this. See, we're still not done. Select again and move it. Still a tiny bit there. Select again, maybe twice. Nope, still one pixel, I think. Select again and tap it once, and it's perfect. If you don't have these overlapping line in here, you know that your repeat is perfect. We are going to delete these layer here. This is a layer with the little squares, we are going to slide to the left and delete. Same here, slide to the left and delete, and we're going to merge these two. I'm going to rename it. Now, we have to fill in these areas here in the middle. Again without touching the top or the bottom. You need to make sure that it's looking good as a composition, if not, you can always move things around. For example, I can erase some dots here and I think these sun would look better if it was moved here. I'm going to select there. Go to Freehand, select just the little sun and move it. Then I can make more white dots. I think that looks better for the composition. What we're going to do now is create the top and bottom repeat. We're going to do the same thing we already did. Create another layer on top. Set it to multiply, select a color, color the corners. Drag to the right, group. Drag to the left, duplicate, and hide the bottom group. Now with the group selected, go to this tool. Make sure your new format, Magnetics, is selected and drag it up. Make sure you're following and seeing this line here. So it's snapping to the middle and try to put the blue circle somewhere around with these other little blue circle that marks the middle. I release it here, and I'm going to make my outer group visible. Select it, grab the selection tool and move this one to the bottom. Again, making sure I see the line. There's the little blue dot. Try not to go under it. See, here you see a gap between our corners. You should not release it there, because then everything here will be cut off, and you won't be able to fix it unless you undo. So just make sure they overlap a bit and release. See, it moved to the right. Just release it here, undo and try it again. Perfect. Release it. I'm concentrating on one of these two corners. We're going to select it again and under the middle, start tapping down. Release. We still have a bit of overlapping. Make sure you leave space here to tap it. Select it again. Once more. One more time. Perfect. Now we go to our layers. Slide to the left and delete that layer. Slide to the left, delete that layer and merge these ones. Now we have to fill in our middle of our pattern again. Make sure you do not touch these borders. Maybe I want to move this one. Do not move the ones that are touching the border because then you'll ruin the repeat see they are already cut off, so you won't have a whole image there. Perfect. You can always erase things also. I don't want that dot touching my strawberries, so there it goes. Now I can go close to the borders but don't patch them. Just make sure the pattern seems balanced. I think I'm happy with that. Now we have our seamless pattern. I'm going to show you how to test that in the next lesson.
5. Testing the Pattern: In this lesson, we're going to test our repeat pattern and I'm going to show you how to save it. Here we have our patterns, so now we're going to save it. We're going to go to a little wrench there, and go to Share. You can select TIFF, PNG, JPEG, PDF, P is you're procreative, you're going to send it to Photoshop, choose PSD, I'm not going to send it to Photoshop now, and then select the type of file you want. If you're going to print that you could use PNG or TIFF, it depends on what you're going to use it for. Right now, I'm going to save it as a PNG. I'm going to save it to my iPad and I am going to show you how to test it. Now you go to the gallery, create a new file, whatever size, and go to the actions, Add, Insert a photo, and choose your photo. Ensure that uniform and magnetics are selected, and make it smaller. Now, swipe to the left and duplicate that. Select it and place it exactly there. You can use this to login, up until they match perfectly. Then you can do the same thing. You could merge these two, swipe to the left, duplicate, and set it exactly to match. One more pixel. Still one more pixel to go. Select it again, I tapped too much, so I'm going to undo it, and tap once. Perfect. Now you have a seamless powder in procreate. If you see something you want to fix for example, these base here maybe it's too lumpy, you can go back into your patterns, so make note of it. This is our regular big strawberry in between that and the little hearts strawberry, there was a gap I don't like. I go back to the gallery, open my pattern art work, and fill that in. Here's the big strawberry and here's a little hearts strawberry, so this is the space that I didn't like. So I'm just going to go erase it. I'm going to add a little sun there. Now I can save it again. Go to the actions, Share, PNG, save it to my iPad, go back to the gallery, go back to these, and erase everything, delete, Clear, and I'm going to import it again. Duplicate that, perfect. Go through the layers and merge those two, swipe left, duplicate them. So there it is. Now you know how to create seamless repeat patterns in Procreate. Now we're going to use this same technique for the next lesson where I'm going to show you how to use this seamless repeat patterns to create Procreate brushes that you can use to make your illustration process way faster and very consistent.
6. Creating the Brush: In this lesson, we're going to use the same process we just use to create 3p patterns. But now we're going to make them into pattern brushes. First, I'm going to show you what a pattern brush does, so you have that in mind before you start creating your own brushes. For example, you have these illustration. If you only have one illustration to make, you can make a pattern for the little character's shirt once and its okay. Let's say you have to draw these guy 20 times, then you're going to have to be drawing the pattern 20 times and that's going to be very time consuming. If you have a pattern brush, this is going to be great because it's going to look super consistent, and you'll save lots of time and it looks great. For example, I have already created a pattern brush here that has this little spots. I'm going to select the color that goes well with the shirt, and when I create an illustration, I made every color on its own layer. Now I can add the patterns easily. Here's the shirt, I'm going to tap on it, slide to their right, that makes it Alpha lock. You can see the little squares. See Alpha lock. Now I can go in with my brush and add spots to it in two seconds. You can change the size of it and add smaller spots, or you can make it bigger. This is so great. Now I'm going to go back, show you how to make the pattern brush, and then we're going to come back to this illustration and I'm going to finish it off using different brushes that I created so you can see how they all work together. I create a new file. That's square, again, 300 pixels per inch, and I'm going to select a dark color. You can use solid brushes or you can also use brushes that are not poorly solid. Again, I'm not touching their borders, and I'm going to repeat the whole process of creating the pattern again. There we have a very basic flower pattern. We're going to go to the actions, share, save as PNG, save it through your Ipad, and now we go to the brushes panel. Here I have my own folder, brushes made by me. You can drop down here and a plus here to add your own folder. Mine. I will show you two ways of creating the brushes. The first one is when you don't have a pattern brush and you're going to create it for the first time. So I'm going to go to the plus sign and create my brush. I'll give it a name and it's going to be Flower Print. Here I will go to shape source. You can swap from pro library and choose different settings. But the one that works best for these type of patterns is the black one. So choose that one. Here in grain source, we're going to insert a photo and you're going to insert that last image you made. Here in invert grain you can invert it as its name says. What it does is whatever is white here is what is going to show up when you paint with it, and if you do it like this, it's going to be the other way around. I am going to show you. Let's delete these and select our new brush and paint with it. You can't see the flowers. So you need to invert grain and now you can see the flowers. Now, they're small. When I change the size of the brush, they don't actually change the size of the flowers and I wanted to change. I am going to go to grain and modify some things. Here is the scale. If you move it, you see that you can make your flowers very small or very large. So say we leave it there. Now we paint with it and we have larger flowers. But if we change the size of the brush, it does not change the size of the flowers, it just changes the size of the brush. We're going to go into the brushes again and in zoom, bring it to the edge until it says Follow size. That way, if I have a big brush, it paints big flowers, if I have a small brush, it paints small flowers. See what happen there? The pattern doesn't look right. It's because I lifted my pen. If you fill a shape like this without lifting your pen, the pattern will show up perfectly. But if I lift my pen and start over, it's going to start over in a different place. So it's not going to look bright. You can even make the flowers larger. If you zoom these scale to the maximum, you can have huge flowers. I don't find it useful that way because you can barely see the patterns. So I like to keep it around 60 percent. Great. You can use it with different colors. Also, if you go to General, you can change these to stamp preview. I like to turn it off and you can modify it if preview, so you know which brush it is without having to memorize all the names. The other super cool thing here is the blend mode. So here it's set to normal, so it just paints normally. But if you go and you set it to different things like multiply screen. Let's add a background here, overlay. Then if you change the color, it overlays differently. You can get all different effects just by changing the blend mode. I'm going to keep it normal, and I'm going to erase all these. So after you've created your first brush, you don't need to create them all from scratch. Just go to your brushes, drag to the left and duplicate, and go into that brush. You can change the name. We're going make some polka dots, and just go to insert photo here in the green source. Select your other brush and I'm going to paint. See, that way you don't have to change anything anymore and you can create a set of brushes really fast. You can share your whole set by pressing share, and then for example, copying to your Dropbox or sending it to your computer or to the Cloud. Or you can share each brush just by dragging to the left and share it. Now you know how to create these brushes, and in the next lesson I am going to show you how to use that in an actual illustration, and you're going to love these and you're going to be a big creating pattern brushes and you're going to add them to all your illustrations.
7. Using the Brush: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to use the pattern brushes for every allele illustration. In this case, I'm going to be using it in our kids illustration. I already showed you, but I'm going to go over it again when I created it. I created each color separately and each element, the grass, the balloon, the shirt, the pants, I created the leg separately. The little decoration on the shirt, the header, the little ball and the eyes. You can use these not only for illustration but also for branding or pattern design, website designs, anything you can think of that you can apply patterns to. I'm going to create a new layer and drag it behind everything. I want to create a background with some rain. If you think it's too big, just change the size of your brush, then you can also change the color. Remember not to lift to your brush so it doesn't start over again. These brush are just created making lines, as you can see. The field shapes dragging to the right to create an alpha mask. An alpha mask is great because then you will only apply the pattern to that shape. I'm going to select my pencil scribbles brush. In two second you have a textured as if you had colored that with color pencils. You can also change the blend mode here and add it again and see what a cool effect that creates. Now I'm going to use some spots for the bunny's head. Go to the bunny's head, drag it to the right to make it alpha. Maybe a bit smaller and just color it in. For the balloon, drag it to the right. Let's use these little clouds. See, I like that one. Experiment with the blend modes. They're very fun to use. Finally, we're going to use the flowers we created for the shirt. There's our flower print. Go to the shirt, make sure it's other look. Let's choose a color. Oh, to big. All right, I think that looks cute. Then let's paint the pant with polka dots. Give one more polka dots. You can just lift it up and go over it again and these one should have the same polka dots. Lets add little rain to the grass also, but let's make it smaller. See if I had to do all the texture by hand every time I drew a character, it would be very slow and it would probably not look so consistent. If you don't like something you already did, you can just go over it with a round brush, paint over it, then you can go back and fix it. So I'm going to select the flower print brush and choose a different color, I didn't like that red. I'm going to make it more shadow. Yeah, I like that much better. You can also add two different patterns to one same object. So let's say we want to add some polka dots to this, I'm going to add some freckles and some little details here and we are done. This is it, these is how I use pattern brushes. These is how I create patterns in procreate. In the next lesson, it's a bonus tip. I am going to show you how to create a brush with your logos so you can watermark your images really fast and in a very easy way.
8. Bonus tip: This is a bonus tip. It's creating watermarks in a very easy way. You can always have these at hand in procreate and you can just add your logo to every illustration you make easily. What you need to do is very easy. You need to save your logo as a PNG image and save it to your iPad. Now we're going to create a new brush. Go to the brushes, create a new brush. Now, in shape source, we're going to go to insert photo. Find your logo, in grain source, swap from pro library. You can give it a texture if you want or you can make it flat. Now you're going to invert shape, so your logo is white. Go to general, turn on Use Stamp Preview. You see your logo there. You can change the size of your preview here. Let's name the brush logo. If you scroll down, you can see the size limits here. You want to make that big. That preview is so big now, so I'm going to make it smaller. Now you want to watermark something like the illustration we just made. You go to your brushes, you choose your logo brush, select the color and tap once. There you have it. You can make it smaller. You can change the blend mode to multiply. It's a super easy way to brand your illustrations. Now you know how to create seamless patterns in procreate and you know how to use them to create pattern brushes and you know how to apply them to your illustrations to save time and to make them look cohesive and professional. Now you even know how to make a brush out of your own logo so you have it all the time you procreate and it's very easy to brand your stuff. I hope you enjoyed this class a lot. I can't wait to see your projects. Remember to follow me on Instagram at SandraBowersArt. You can check out my Skillshare profile here, I have a lot of classes where I show everything I wish I had known when I was studying. Everything I learn in the process of being a professional illustrator, I create classes on it so you can learn that too. I hope you had fun. Bye. If you like the class remember to leave a review and share it so other people can learn about it too. Thank you. Bye.
Sandra Mejia, Illustrator + Pattern Designer
