Create Stunning Repeating Patterns In Procreate

1. Intro: [MUSIC] Hi there, creative friend. Welcome to class. I'm Sarah. I'm an artist and designer, and in this class, I'll show you my process for creating beautiful repeating patterns using the Procreate app. We'll start by creating a custom canvas. Then I'll show you how to set up a pattern template. We'll move on to sketching and designing elements for our pattern. Then comes the fun part. We will ink and color all the motifs. Next, we will use our pattern template to create the repeat, and guess what? We get to test our brand new pattern. As a bonus, I'll show you how to recolor the motifs before we finally export and save our final repeating pattern type. [MUSIC] All you'll need for the class is an iPad, a stylus, I'll be using my Apple Pencil, and the Procreate app. Are you ready? Let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Downloads : [MUSIC] I'm going to quickly show you how to download the class resources and something important to note is that you will need to be on a web browser and not the Skillshare app. I'm using Safari. Right below this video, you will see some tabs. Go to the Projects and Resources and you will see the files available for download. Click on the brush set and tap on download and you will do the same thing to the color swatches file. Now, we'll go to the download folder located at the top of your screen, click on the first, and that will take you to the file's app, click on the Brush file, and it will automatically import it into Procreate. Most of the time it places the new brush set at the very top of your brush library. Now, we will do the same thing for the color swatches file, so we'll go back to our files app, click on the Swatches file, and again, it will automatically import it into Procreate and for the color palettes, it usually places it at the very bottom of your palettes panel. So we can just move that up to the top. If you don't have the file's app, go to the App Store, type in files and it should be the first app that pops up and you can download it for free. I've included a bright color palette and fine brush set if you'd like to follow along with me in class, but please feel free to use any color palette or brushes you'd like. 3. Class Project: [MUSIC] For your class project, you will create a seamless repeating pattern tile. As a bonus, you will make an alternative color variation of that very same design. All right. Let's get started. 4. Canvas Set-Up: [MUSIC] The very first thing we're going to do when we open our Procreate app is create a canvas. Right here at the very top, you're going to see a little plus sign. You're going to click on that. You'll see another little plus sign right here, and you'll just click on that. This is where we create a canvas. Here are units of measure. We have millimeters, centimeters, inches, and pixels. I'll be working with pixels, so I'll make sure that's selected. I always like to use a squared canvas when I create repeating patterns. My favorite size is 3,000 by 3,000 pixels, so I'll just type that right here, 3,000 by 3,000. We'll make sure our DPI is at 300, and that's going to give me 55 layers. Now, I can click on "Create". Here, we have our canvas. Now we're ready for our next step where we will create our pattern template. 5. Template Set-Up: [MUSIC] Now that we have our Canvas setup, we can create our pattern template. The first thing we're going to do is divide our Canvas into four equal squares. Right here at the very top, you'll see this little wrench icon. We're going to click on that and we're going to make sure our drawing guides are turned on. Right here where it says Edit Drawing Guide we're going to click on that. We're going to make sure our grid size is all the way up to max. Now we can click on "Done." How we're going to create this template is we're going to make sure each one of these individual squares will be filled with a color. How we will start that is going to our Layers panel. We're going to want to make sure we're on a new layer. We will not be using this background color layer. We will make sure we're on a brand new layer. We're just going to fill that layer full with color. I'm going to grab this dark pink color and just drag and drop, drop it into the Canvas. Now I need my full color to be only on this individual square. We'll click on this little arrow icon. Right here where it says snapping, we're going to make sure our magnetics and snapping are both turned on. Now, we'll grab the corner of our large square and match it up to the center of the Canvas to fit into the first smaller square. As you see when it snaps to the middle, these yellow crosshairs will come on. We will double-check our work by zooming all the way in and making sure these dash lines or little marching ants are right on our guidelines. As you can see the color bleeds out from these dashed lines. We'll ignore that. We're going to make sure it's the dashed lines that are matching up to our guidelines, not our color like this or this will not work. Make sure it is our little marching ants that are matching up right on our guidelines. You'll see it turns this yellow color when it's right at the corner. Now that we have that and we know that our square is perfectly placed, we can deselect it. Now we'll go to our Layers panel again, we'll click on our layer and then click "Select". We'll make sure we're on free head. Right here where it says Save & load, you're going to click there and click on this little plus sign. There's our first selection. Now we'll do that to each one of the individual squares. We'll grab our pink square, move it over to our next square. We'll zoom in to double-check and make sure we're directly in our space. We're going to click on the layer, select "Save & load" plus and we have our second selection. This might seem a little bit strange and not really make a lot of sense right now. But in the upcoming lesson where we start creating our repeating pattern, you'll see why we're doing this and I think you'll absolutely love this technique. Now we'll do our very last square. Just zoom in and make sure it's in place. Click and select our "Layer", "Save & load" and we have our four selections done. Now that I completed filling in each one of my squares, we don't need this color layer anymore. I will just go to my Layers panel and clear that color. Now that we have our Canvas set up and our template ready to go, we can begin the fun part and in the next lesson we'll start sketching our pattern. 6. Sketching: [MUSIC] Now is the fun part. We get to start sketching our elements for our repeating pattern. I'm going to be drawing some oranges with some leaves. But feel free to sketch anything you'd like. You can create geometrics or maybe just some dots for your pattern. Maybe you want to make some florals. It's totally up to you, but you can also just follow along with me if you'd like. The first thing we're going to do is I'm going to give myself a filled background color layer. Right here on our layer panel, we're going to make sure we're on a brand new layer. We're not going to be using the background layer and I'm going to just pick a color to fill in my Canvas. I'm going to go with this blue color. Now I can just drag and drop it into the Canvas and that will be our background layer. Now I need to create a layer on top of that, and that will be our sketching layer. We'll get our sketching pencil, [NOISE] and I can just make sure I have a color that will show through the background, so I'm going to grab this dark green color. I know I want to have different oranges overlapping each other with stems and leaves, so I can just begin sketching some circles to represent my oranges, and I'm going to keep this very loose and just it's the brainstorming part, so I don't need to worry about making this sketch perfect or anything like that. I'm just planning out where I want my motifs to be. I will just start filling in the Canvas. Something important to keep in mind is that I don't want to draw any of my elements going off of the Canvas like this. I want to make sure everything stays within my Canvas. I will just continue drawing [NOISE] and I know I want my space to be pretty filled in. I want more of a dense pattern. I'm going to add lots of oranges. We can move things around and don't worry if at this point we scale up or down, we don't need to worry about it being pixelated right now because this is just our sketch layer, so we won't worry about that. We're just going to move things around and just plan everything out. Now I think I'll start adding my stems and leaves. I can just add that in. I know I want some of my oranges to have two leaves and some to have one. I have my stem going this way, so I'll make my stem goal this way on this orange and I'll just continue adding more details to my sketch. Just remember to have fun with this sketching process. Keep it loose and just let yourself draw anything you'd like. I really like the way this is looking, so I think I'm going to center my sketch to the Canvas just so I can get an idea if I need to add anything and I really like the way that looks, so I think I'm ready to move on to my inking and adding color. But feel free to make as many sketches as you'd like. If you'd like to start on a sketchbook first, before you go digital, please feel free to do that, whatever you feel most comfortable with. Now that I have my sketch layer pretty much how I want it. I can move on to inking all my illustrations and adding color, so in the next lesson, we will begin fine-tuning our sketch. 7. Inking & Coloring: [MUSIC] Now is the part where our illustration will really come to life. In this lesson, we'll be adding color to each of our elements. The first thing we're going to do is create a brand new layer and every layer will be assigned to its color. For example, all the pinks will be on one layer, all the greens on one layer, all the creams will be on one layer, and this is so we will have an editable pattern if later on we want to change the colors of our repeating pattern. I'm going to create a brand new layer and I'm going to make sure it's sandwiched in between my background layer and my sketch layer. I will put my sketch layer on multiply. Right here, where you see this little N, you will click there, and scroll all the way up till you see Multiply, and now we can lower the opacity. It's just very light, just a guideline for us to follow. Now I'll go to my new layer and I will begin coloring in certain ones of my oranges in the same color. I'll start with this orange color and I will grab my jagged marker. I can just choose the oranges that I want to be orange and I want to space them out, so it's a nice, even distribution and I want some to be orange and some to be a pink color. I always go for bold bright colors in my work. I just really like the feel of it being cheery and bright. Now I can drag and drop the color into my shapes and as you can see, we are coloring in our sketch, but you can still see our sketch on top of our colored layer. That's why we put our sketch layer on multiply. We can still see where our guidelines are. Next, I'm going to fill in the pink oranges, so we will create a new layer with all our pinks. I'll grab this darker pink color. Let me see if I want lighter or the darker. I think I'll go with the lighter pink color. We can always change the color later. That's why we're creating each color to its own layer. Now I will go in and draw in all of my pink oranges, and I can just drag and drop the color in to fill in the shapes. We can turn off our sketch layer just to see how everything is looking, and that's looking really good so now I'll turn my sketch layer back on and now I'll draw in all the leaves in steps. I will create a new layer above both of the orange layers, which is the orange and the pink color, because this one will be a dark green color, and I'll do the exact same thing. I will just go in and start drawing in my leaves. I'm just following my sketch layer and just basically tracing over it and adding in the color. Now that we have our stems and leaves sketched in, I can drag and drop color into those pieces and we can just turn off our sketch layer to get an idea and see how everything looks, and that looks super cute and I really like that. If you want to add any more details, we can do that. Maybe if we add this white color to give some highlight to the oranges. Again, I'm using a new color. I'll create a brand new layer and I will adjust the size of my brush and just go in and add in some details. Maybe I'll add a dark pink for the pinks. Again, we'll create a new layer since we are introducing a new color. That is super cute and I absolutely love it. I already am loving the way everything is looking. Now, I am ready to start actually creating my repeating pattern. In the next lesson, we will start creating our pattern using the template we created earlier. I can't wait to show you. 8. Pattern Construction 1: [MUSIC] Before we begin using our pattern template we created in Procreate earlier, I want to explain to you how it works. I made this visual to show you. Let's pretend this is our canvas in Procreate. If we were going to create this pattern manually in the app, we would have to get this side of the canvas and move it over to this side, and we would have to get this bottom portion and move it up to the top, and we would make sure everything lined up right here in the middle. That would allow us to finish filling in all the empty spaces to create our repeating pattern. Since we created a template, we won't need to be shifting anything around. All we will have to do is click on our selection and the computer will automatically know where to place each one of our individual squares so we can achieve the same effect and finish filling in our repeating pattern. This makes for a much smoother workflow and it saves a lot of time. You don't need to regroup layers, find the right colored layers, everything stays intact, and you can keep moving your styles around to finish creating your repeating pattern. Now let me show you on the app. In the last lesson, we finished inking and coloring in all of our motifs. This is now our original Illustrator file. I always like to keep an original file in case I need to change something or reference it later. I'm going to go to my gallery and I'm going to duplicate this original file, but I will first name it original template file. Now I'm going to swipe left and click on "Duplicate", and here's my duplicated file. I will name that copy template file. This is the file we will be working with, so I will just click on that. Now I'm going to group all my layers together and you will just swipe right on each one of your layers, and we will include our background layer. Now we can click on "Group". Now that we have our group, I'm going to click on the New Group tab right here, and I'm going to make sure I am on that tab, not any of the individual layers. I will make sure my selection is on New Group. This is where we will now use our templates. We know that our whole group is selected, so we will click up here on the selection tool, right here where it says Save & Load, we will click on that, and we will click on our very first selection. With it still all selected, I'm going to click on my little arrow icon, and we will click on flip horizontally and flip vertically. Now we can deselect it. We're going to do that to each one of the squares. Again, we will click on our selection, Save & Load, Selection 2, we'll click on our little arrow icon, Flip Horizontal, flip vertically, de-select. Our selection, Save & Load, Selection 3, flip horizontally, flip vertically, de-select. Now we'll do that one more time for our last square. Again, we'll click on our Selection 2, Save & Load, we're going to click on Selection 4, click on our little arrow icon, flip horizontally and flip vertically, and de-select it. Now the pattern is backwards so we're just going to make sure we flip it the right side up. We will click again on our little arrow icon and we will just rotate it 45 degrees till it is perfectly straight, facing forward. Now that we have all of our little squares positioned in the right places, we can begin filling in these empty spaces to finish creating our pattern tile. If we come to our layers panel, you can see everything has remained the same. It has just moved and repositioned our pattern in the correct spaces so we can finish creating our repeating pattern. I'm going to turn on my sketch layer again, and as you can see, our same original sketch is still here. I'm going to do the same thing as I did earlier and I'm going to start sketching in some new oranges on my sketch layer. I will grab my sketching pencil, make sure I have my dark color selected, and make sure I'm on my sketch layer, and I can just now start planning out and filling in the empty gaps on my pattern. Everything is the same like we did last time, and now we're just going to fill in all the empty spaces. I will just start drawing some oranges and filling in the empty spaces. Remember everything on this side will be repeated on this side and everything that is cut up here will be repeated on this side. This orange will be around right here, so this space right here, this orange will be somewhere up here. We can just start getting an idea of how things will fall. Now I can add my stems and leaves. That looks good. We'll add in our color and see if we like it. We can still move things around and change them. I'm going to start with the orange oranges and I will make sure I go to my orange layer. I'll grab my color and my jagged marker and I can come and start filling in my orange oranges. I can just drag and drop the color. Now I can do my pink oranges. We'll make sure we go to our pink layer, select our pink color, and just start tracing over our sketch. Now I can drag and drop in the color to fill the spaces. I want to make this one this orange color. So I will go back to my orange layer, grab my orange color, and just trace over that. Drag and drop the color. Now I can add my stems and leaves. I will go to my dark green color where my stems and leaves are, I'm going to grab my dark green color, and just start filling in all four leaves and stems. Now I can just go drag and drop the color in. If you want to fill in the color faster, you can drag and drop the color in, and right here, it says recolor. So let me show you. You can drag, drop it in right here, continue filling with recolor, you will click on that. Drag and drop, click on that and you'll see this little cross hair. You make sure you put it on the area you want to get filled in and then you can just tap on all the spaces you want filled in with that color. That looks good. Now we need to add our highlights in. I'm going to rearrange some of these layers. I want to make sure that my white cream color highlights that belong to the orange oranges are together and that my dark pink highlights that belong to the pink oranges are together. I am going to find my layer, and that's the dark pink. I'm going to bring my dark pink highlights just above my pink oranges and now I will bring my cream color highlights above my orange oranges. That way it stays together. These two are together. Here are the orange oranges and its highlights and here are the pink oranges and its highlights. That just makes it easier when I go in to add in the highlights, I know exactly where they are. Now I can just finish adding in all the highlights and I'll start with my cream-colored ones. I will go to that layer, grab my cream color, and finish filling in my highlights. Now I can go to the pink highlights and I know they're right above my pink oranges. I'll grab my dark pink color and just go in and finish adding in the highlights. I think we got everything. Now I can turn off my sketch layer to see how everything is looking. That looks pretty good and full. It's nice and dense. In the next lesson, we will fine-tune our pattern and test it out. 9. Pattern Construction 2: Now that we finished filling in all the spaces for our pattern tile, we can test it. I'm going to make sure my drawing guides are on. I will go to my layers panel. I make sure my group is selected. Now with three fingers I will swipe down on the canvas and click on Copy All and then I will swipe again with three fingers and click on Paste. This will give us a flattened pattern tile to test. It places it at the very top of our layers panel. Now I will get the corner of this large square and place it in the middle to test out my pattern. I will make sure my snapping and magnetics are turned on and I can just drag the corner to the center. It should snap right into place and you will see the yellow crosshairs will go on when it's right in the middle. Now I can deselect it. I'm going to duplicate this tile and place it on each one of my squares. I will go to my layer panel. I will swipe left and click on Duplicate. Now I can drag it over to the next square. Now I'll turn off my guides so I can get a better look. That looks really good. I like that it's dense and full. I do see a few adjustments I want to make. I see this orange right here. I want to move it over a bit to fill in this empty space and this orange right here, I want to move it up a bit to fill in that empty space. I will turn off some of my tiles so I can identify where those oranges are on my big pattern tile. I will just turn off these squares and here is a miniature version of my larger pattern tile, so I can see where my oranges are. I know this orange is this one right here, and this orange is this one right here. Now I know I will move this one over a bit and this one up a bit. Now that I identified where the elements are that I need to move, I can delete my test swatches. I'm going to start with this orange right here and I will go to my layers panel and I know I want to move the entire orange to the side. I will just grab those layers, which is my stem and leaf, my highlight, and my orange, orange. You will just swipe right on the layers you want to select at the same time. She will just grab the layer you want and then you will just wipe right on the other ones you want to select as well. Now I'll grab my selection tool and I can just closely trace around that element. I'm going to make sure my snapping and magnetics are off so I can easily move it around. I am going to bring it close to the edge. I'm not going to make it go over the edge of the canvas. I'm just going to bring it right to the edge. That's very important to keep in mind. Anything you move around, make sure it stays inside the canvas. Nothing can be hanging off the edge or it will not repeat seamlessly. I will bring that pretty close to the edge right here. Now I can deselect it. I'm going to do the same thing with this orange right here. But since we have this pink one in front, it's hard to see the edges of this orange. I am just going to lower the opacity of this layer for now. I will go to my pink layer and just lower the opacity. That way we can see exactly where the edges of our orange are. Now I'll grab my stem layer, my highlights layer, and my orange layer and we'll do the same thing we did as we did to this one. We will grab my selection tool and I will carefully trace around my elements. Now I can move it into place and I want to make sure nothing is getting cut off. I will just scoot it up a bit to the very edge and over a bit. Now I can deselect it. I will bring my pink, orange layers opacity all the way up to a 100 again. Now we could retest our pattern tile to see how our changes look. I will make sure my group is selected. Again, I will swipe down with three fingers, copy all. Swipe down again with three fingers and paste. I'm going to turn my guides back on and make sure my snapping and magnetics are turned on. Now I can do the same thing as we did before. Now I will turn off my guides to see how it looks. That looks so much better. I'm very happy with the way that looks. I think I am ready now to re-color and save it and export it to a final pattern tile. But before we do that, I want to show you what you would do if you wanted to edit anything that is falling off the canvas. Let's say you want to edit this orange right here. You would follow the exact same steps we did in the previous lesson where we used our template. All we would do would be to go to our group. We will go through the same steps as we did where we click on the selection tool, save and load selection 1, flip horizontally, flip vertically, and we would do that to each one of our squares. You would repeat that same pattern every time you want to change anything that is falling off the edge of the canvas. In the next lesson, we will work on recoloring our pattern tile. 10. Recolor: [MUSIC] Now that we've finished testing and adjusting our repeating pattern tile, I am going to show you how to recolor your elements. I am going to go to my layers panel and I'm going to delete the test swatches we used earlier. We won't be needing those anymore. Now I have my original group layer and I am going to just duplicate the entire group. On the new, I will be recoloring on the new group layer. I will open that panel and I will start with my stems and leaves. I will pick a new color. I'm going to pick this light color. We can drag and drop the color in to each of our leaves like this, or we can use Alpha lock. You just go to your layers panel again. Click on the layer you want recolor. With two fingers, you will swipe right and you will see this little checkerboard pattern come on behind your illustration and that means Alpha lock is turned on. Now you will just click on your layer and click fill layer. As you can see, it fills the entire layer with that color. Now let's try these orange oranges. Let's get a new color. Let's pick this yellow color. I will go to my orange oranges layer and with two fingers, I will swipe right, and it will change it to Alpha lock. Now I can click on my layer and click fill layer. That's how you can recolor your elements. You would do the same thing to any of the layers you want to recolor. If you want to get rid of Alpha Lock, you would do the same thing. Two fingers swipe right and Alpha Lock will be turned off. That's how you can easily recolor your elements in your repeating pattern. In the next lesson, I will show you how to save and export your final pattern tile. 11. Save & Export : Congratulations, you made it to the very end. Now it's time to save and export our final repeating pattern tile. So I'm going to click on my wrench icon, and I'm going to click on Share. Here are all my file types that I can save to. I can save it as a Procreate file, a PSD file for Photoshop, a PDF, a JPEG, PNG, and TIFF. I'm going to be using a JPEG, so I will click on that. Here are your options for saving. You can save to your Google Drive or your Dropbox, or you can save it to your image library. I'm going to save it to my image library for now. Now we can go and find it in our images and here is our final repeating pattern swatch, ready to use or to share. 12. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Thank you so much for taking the time and joining the class. I hope you enjoyed watching my process for creating seamless repeating patterns in Procreate. I would absolutely love seeing your beautiful designs so don't forget to share your pattern in the project gallery. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask. You can post your question in the discussion tab, and you can find that right below this video. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time.