Transcripts
1. Make Handy Patterns in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, create diagonal, chevron, plaid, and polka dot 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 making handy patterns in Photoshop, the kind of patterns which will be useful for scrapbook paper, online digital sales, and backgrounds for your designs. We're going to make stripes and diagonal stripes. We're going to make chevrons and some sophisticated dot patterns. All of this is building from my basic Photoshop pattern class. You'll also learn how to use a color scheme to coordinate your patterns. As you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. Recommendations like this help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started making handy patterns in Photoshop.
2. More Patterns - Diagonal Stripes, Chevrons, Plaid, Colorful Polkadots - Part 1: Before we get started with this class, it is two things that I wanted to mention. Firstly, if you've never made patents before in Photoshop, you may want to go and look at my Pattern-Making class. It's a starting introduction. I'll put a link to that in the class project section just in case you want to look at that first and if you want a refresher, that's a good class to take too. The second thing is if you've taken my Make A Color Scheme class, this is a really good time to make use of the color schemes that you created. If you want to, you can open up your color scheme here in Photoshop, click on the Foreground Color Swatch here, and open up the color picker. You'll select your color and then you're going to click "Add to Swatches." I'm not going to add this to my library, but I'm just going to name this color one. I'm going to do this for the other three colors here. Now I can close down this document because I don't need it any longer. If I open the Swatches Palette here, you'll see that these four colors, are the four colors that I created in my pattern swatch and I can use this in my project. Of course, there's no need to do this if you haven't done the color scheme class, it's just that if you had, you may want to use these colors. We're going to start with a simple stripe pattern File and then New, going to start with a pattern pace that's 200 by 200. If you're using these patterns for say, scrapbook paper, then creating them at a large size and scaling them down is better than going the other way. Going to put a guide halfway across this document View, New Guide. It's going to be vertical, it's going to be 50 percent and I'll click "Okay." I'm going to drag out a rectangle, the size of half of this document looks like I've got fixed style leftover from another project. I'm going to make sure the style is set to normal, so I can actually select up to the guide that I created and I'm going to do this in one of my color, so I have my green color here. I'm going to press "Alt backspace" option, Delete on the Mac to fill it with green. I need to select everything so I choose Select All. I'm going to make a pattern from this edit define pattern, this is going to be green stripe, click "Okay." Let's use this as a new document with File New, all of my documents are going to be scrapbook paper size, but you can make yours any size you like. I'm using 3600 by 3600, 300 pixels per inch, Transparent background, color mode is RGB, and the color profile is SRGB because that's really what you want for digital scrapbook papers, click "Okay." I'm going to choose Layer, New Fill Layer and then Pattern. If I click Okay, the last pattern that I created, which is this green stripe, is going to be applied to this document. Think the stripe is a bit big, so I'm just going to reduce it to 50 percent and click "Okay." I'm opening up the last pallet here because I have my Fill Layer, I'm going to Control or Command click on the new layer icon to add a new empty layer, I'll press "D" to get the default colors, white is my background color. I'll press Control Backspace command Delete on the Mac to fill this layer with white. This is our stripe pattern and if you wanted this as a scrapbook paper, you would now go ahead and save it as a JPEG file. Again, I have a class here on making scrapbook papers to sell so you can follow that class if you haven't already done so, or if you're unfamiliar with the process. What I want to do right now is to turn this stripe paper into diagonal stripe paper. It's not something that actually appears at first instance to be easy to do, but there's a filter in Photoshop that can do the work for you. Filter, Distort, Shear. Now I have a pattern filled layer here so Photoshop is saying it can't actually apply that filter to this layer unless I do one or two things. I need to convert it to a smart object or rasterize it. For me, converting to a smart object makes good sense because it means that I could come back and make changes to this pattern fill layer if I want to. I'm just going to choose that as an option. Now in the Shear dialogue, we can shear this pattern, what I want to do is to make it into a series of diagonal lines. I'm going to drag this set of controls in the dialogue out so that they are in the angle that I want the paper to be sheared or the stripes to be sheared and I'll click "Okay" and here we have diagonal stripes. Something that traditionally, if you've ever tried to do it before, can be a little bit perilous in Photoshop. Now if I'm looking at this and thinking that my stripes are not wide enough, let's go and fix that. I'm going to double-click on the pattern fill layer, that is a smart object. This is opening up the smart object, and here it is. I'm going to double-click on the layer thumbnail to open up the pattern fill dialogue. At this point, just so you can see a really big difference when we go back to the original document, we'll scale this up to a 100 percent and click "Okay." Whenever you're working with a smart object, you open it up, you'll get a PSP file. What you need to do is just close that and save it. This is an embedded smart object inside your Photoshop file and there is a wider stripe. Of course if you want to go the other direction on your stripe, you can do so. I'm going back to my Shear filter and this time, I'm just going to take the angle in the opposite direction and there's the opposite angled stripe. That's a quick and easy way of creating striped papers here in Photoshop.
3. More Patterns - Diagonal Stripes, Chevrons, Plaid, Colorful Polkadots - Part 2: Chevron patterns are another type of pattern that are really good for background effects. Again, they can be complex or easy to make depending on how you approach them. I'm going to create a new document with File and then New. I'm going to make my document 200 pixels by 200 pixels. Again, transparent RGB color and click "Okay". I'm going to zoom in so we can see this a little bit more clearly. Now there is a custom shape that we can use to short cut the process of creating a chevron. I'm going to go to the customs shape tool here, going to drop down the list. The one I'm looking for is this shape here. It is a sort of arrow or chevron shape. It's on its side, but we're going to write it in a minute, and it's in the arrow collection. If you don't see yours here, open a little Flyout Menu here, go and select "Arrows". Then when you are asked if you want to replace the shapes with the shapes from arrows, don't say okay, just click "Append" and they'll be added to the very end. I don't need to do that because I've already got the shape here. I'm going to select that shape. Now up here, I wanted to make this a shape glass. I'm going to select shape from the drop-down list. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you might have three icons here, you want to select the shape icon. We're just going to drag out a shape here. At this point, you want to make some sort of decision as to how bendy you want your chevron to be. I'm just making mine quite bent. I'm selecting here not Stroke, but I Fill color, doesn't matter right now what the fill is. Going to the move tool, I'm going to hold the "Shift" key as I rotate this around and I want to rotate it a full 90 degrees and then click the "Check" mark. Now I am going to place it in position here. I want it to butt up against each side of this document. If it's not quite butting up here to this mark guys, I'm going to drag it out so that it does. I'm going to select the "Custom Shapes" tool again, and this time I want to select a color. Because we're going to be using the colors mark, color scheme, I'm going to make this the pink color from my color scheme. Now, if you just want really pointy chevrons and you want a lot of space between them, you could go ahead and make a chevron pattern from this. I'm going to go and get the Rectangular Marquee tool. I'm going to start at the bottom here. What I want to do is I want to align the marquee tool up to the very top of this shapes. I'm looking to where that smart guide appears. If it doesn't appear, if you can't see it, just put your rectangle down, zoom in here, go and get "Select", "Transform Selection" so you get handles on your shape and then you can just drag it into position. What you want to see is that your rectangle shape is right on the very top edge of this chevron. I'm going to click the "Check" mark, I'm going to zoom back out. With this selected, I'm going to choose "Edit" and then "Define Pattern". This is going to be a pointy chevron. Let's go to our pattern document. I just like to put all these patterns in a single file, just makes life a little bit easier. I'm going to add a new "Layer", "New Fill Layer", "Pattern", click "Okay" and the last pattern in the Pattern Fill dialogue here is the one that we just created and it's the one that is selected, so I'm just going to click "Okay". You can say that this is a nice, even very attractive chevron pattern. But you might be thinking that you would prefer to see more pink and less white in this pattern, so you can adjust the pattern. Let's go back to our original pattern document. I'm going to display the last palette. I'm going to make a additional copy of this shape. I'm going to use the move tool and I'm going to move it up here. What I'm looking for is to define the distance I see between these two chevrons, then I'm going to do the same to a second version of the shape and I'm going to drag it downwards. I just want to make sure that I've got plenty of content here to use. I want to see all my shapes, so I'm going to choose "Image" and then, "Reveal All". That just makes the image large enough for me to see everything. I'm also going to press "Control" or "Command Zero" just to scale it so I can see it clearly. I'm going to select either all three of these layers and use this option here, which is the Distribute Vertical Centers. That's just going to align these so that their vertical centers are evenly spaced so that this gap is the same width as this gap. I also want to make sure that my chevrons are in perfect alignment. I'm going to just click here to align them to the left edge of the document and then again to the right edge. Really need to make sure that that's going to work for me. Now I'm taking my Rectangular Marquee Tool. I'm going to drag here to select this shape. I want the Rectangular Marquee Tool to go from the very top of this shape to the very top of this shape. I haven't done a very good selection there, so I'm going to start again. I am going to drag out my shape if I need to move it at this point before I let go the left mouse button, I'm going to use the space bar to just move it up or down so I can get it into the exact position I want and the exact size. Then I'll let go the left mouse button. You don't get that perfectly right, go to "Select" and then "Transform Selection". At this point, you can adjust your selection if you need to, then click the check mark. We've now got the area selected that we need to make our pattern. I'll choose "Edit", and then "Define Pattern". This is going to be small space chevron, I'll click "Okay". Let's go to our Pattern Master Fill. Double-click on the layer thumbnail here, select the last pattern, which is the one that we just created and click "Okay". Here we have a very different chevron pattern, lots more pink, very little white. But there's some really handy and quick way to make chevron patterns here in Photoshop.
4. More Patterns - Diagonal Stripes, Chevrons, Plaid, Colorful Polkadots - Part 3: Next up, we'll have a look at creating a plaid pattern. I'm going to create a new document for this 200 by 200 pixels in size, click OK. Again, I want guides at 50 percent vertical and 50 percent horizontal, just to make it really easy to line everything up. Let's just zoom in. Now, this time I'm going to use the brown color from my pattern swatch, so just go in here and select this brown color as my foreground color. I'm going to Rectangular Marquee tool, I'm going to select over half of this document, just one side, Alt Backspace option Delete to fill that selection with my color. In the last palette, I'm going to add a new layer, I'm going to deselect the current selection with Control or Command D. Then I'm going again, to my Rectangular Marquee tool and this time I'm going to select the top half of the document and again, fill that with my brand color. I'll deselect the selection by choosing deselect or Control or Command D. Next, we need to blend these together to make a plaid looking document. I'm going to do that by setting the opacity of both these layers to 75 percent. We can test how this looks by adding a new layer at the bottom here by Control or Command clicking on the new layer icon. White is my background color, so I'll press Control Backspace, Command Delete to fill it with white. For now I'm just going to clear my guides. Now this would make a really nice plaid pattern, so let's just select it and make a plaid pattern out of this. I'm deselecting my white, just in case I want to make the fourth color something a little bit different. I'm going to deselect All, and then Edit, Define Pattern, this will be plaid one. But before I leave this pattern document, I want to show you another way that you could approach this. What you could do is you could change the opacity of one of these down a little bit further again, so I'm going to make this 45 percent. What I get is light next to light and then darker. That's another alternative plaid pattern. Again, I'm going to choose select All, I'm going to make this plaid two. Let's test it in our pattern master file, double-click on the pattern layer, and we'll go and check it out with the second to last pattern at say, 50 percent scale. We've got something that is very reminiscent of a gingham check. Let's have a look at the very last pattern, which is this one. This is a little bit different because it's got three different values of our brown color, not just two. Before we leave this plaid pattern, let's have a look and see how we might be able to rotate it similarly to how we rotated these striped lines. The shear tools does not going to work here, I'm going to show you why. First of all, with this last selected, I'll choose Filter, Distort, Shear. I'm going to convert this to a smart object, and here is the shear that I applied last time, so I'm just going to reapply it to this and click OK. This is what happens to the shape, it's lost the qualities of being a rotated gingham check, so what I'm going to do is press Control Alt Z just to undo that entirely. This time I'm going to right-click and rasterize this layer. I'm effectively going to be turning it into a bitmap image. Now I'm going to zoom out so I can see the space around the document. I'm going to the Move tool, what I'm going to do now is hold Shift and Alt as I drag on the corners of the document. I want to increase at about this dimension all the way around. Then I'll rotate it holding Shift as I do, so that it's rotated and constrained 245 degrees. Now, I've brought it out a little bit further than it actually needs to be brought out and you can see the width and height dimensions here. At the moment they're 150, 250 percent. Well, I think I could probably bring them down to about 145 percent, I'm going to do that now. That looks pretty good, it's pretty much the size document that I'm going to need. I'll click the check mark. Now we can zoom in and have a look at our pattern that has now been rotated. It looked a bit bent when we were looking at it, but that's only because of the optical illusion of these different value browns. Now if you wanted to crop the edges of the document because there's a lot of excess content around here you go to the Crop tool. In the newest versions of Photoshop, you would need to press the Enter key once you do that and then click the check mark. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you can just drag over the visible document and then crop it, so I'm just going to crop the excess away. This would be my plaid pattern rotated.
5. More Patterns - Diagonal Stripes, Chevrons, Plaid, Colorful Polkadots - Part 4: To complete this class on making patterns, I want to look at a couple of ways of creating slightly more sophisticated dark patterns in Photoshop. This approach could be extended to things other than just dots. Now, I've gone ahead and created a new pattern piece. This is 200 by 200 pixels in size, and I've just put in my guides at 50 percent vertical and 50 percent horizontal. I'm going to start by putting a dot in the middle of this document. I'm going to the Ellipse Tool. This time let's just make it pixels just for ease. I'm going to drag out a pretty good size dot. I'm going to select the Move Tool. I'm just going to adjust this so that it's positioned perfectly over the middle of the document. Now, if it refuses to go into place like mine is right now, I'm going to select this shape and I'm going to press "Control" or "Command A". Now, these icons appear where you can just force it into the exact center of your document, which is where it is right now. I'll choose Select, Deselect. Now, I'm going to make a duplicate of this, drag it onto the New Layer icon. I'm going to force the duplicate into the corners, the way we make our patterns, Filter, Other, Offset. Because this document is 200 by 200, we're going to type 100 and 100 into this dialogue to break this one up into the corners, I'll click "Okay". Now, I'll choose "Select All". I'm going to make my pattern piece out of this. I'm going to call this dots 1. Now, I'm going to create a pattern piece that is twice this size. File, New, this is going to be 400 by 400, and I'll click "Okay". Into this, I'm going to put my pattern at 100 percent. For this, because it's going in at 100 percent, I can use this option Edit, Fill. I'm going to select Pattern from the Contents list and from the Custom Patterns list, I'm going to click on the very last pattern because that's one we just created, and I'll click "Okay". This is a repeating pattern in itself because it's double the size of the original one. What I want to do is zoom in a bit. I want to change a few of these dots. I'm going to get the Lasso tool, just lasso around the middle dot here. I'm going to zoom in here. Now, what I'm going to do is select this layer and lock the transparent pixels. I'm going to the Lasso tool, I'm going to make a selection around this piece here. I'm going to get a different color. I'm going to get a second color from my pattern swatch, which is my green, and then I'm going to press "Alt Backspace" option "Delete" on the Mac to fill just this dot with green. The reason why this entire selection isn't filling is because I lock those transparent pixels. This lock stops it from filling anything that's transparent. Next up, well, make sure I want to deselect this selection first. Next up I'm going to select this dot, and I'm going to shift drag on this one, so these two are in a diagonal line. We're going to go and get the third of my colors and "Alt Backspace" option "Delete." Now, I have some brown dots, some green dots, and some pink dots. I'm going to deselect my selection. Going to my last palette, I'm going to unlock that lock. I'm going to select everything, select all, Edit. I'm going to make this a pattern and click "Okay". Now, let's take this to our pattern master file and see what it looks like. Double-click on this layer, open the pattern list. Our last pattern in the list is going to be the one we just created. Going to take this up to 100 percent so we can see it more clearly. Well, actually maybe even 150, and click "Okay". What we've got here is a multi-colored pattern. There are three colored dots in here. There's our brown, our green, and our pink. We've just created it using a basic pattern swatch, but what we did was we made our 200 by 200 pattern swatch as usual, and then we filled a document that was twice that size, 400 by 400, with that pattern, and then just recolored some elements. If you're going to recolor any of these side elements, these two go together. This one and this one would have to be colored the same thing. Likewise, this one and this one would have to be colored the same thing. If you wanted to recolor this corner one, any one of these, you'll have to recolor all four, or else you're going to end up with circles that have a quarter of it, a different color to the others. Just be aware of that if you choose to recolor more than just the things that I've recolored here. Your project for this class is going to be to make the patterns that I've shown you here, the diagonal stripe pattern, the chevron pattern, the plaid pattern, and some sort dot pattern. Use your own custom color scheme if you have one or you can find color schemes online. I'll give you a site where you can find already created color schemes that you can borrow and use for this project. Post a image of the patterns that you've made in the class project area. Now as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt to recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying it, give it a thumbs up. This helps others to identify this as a class that they might want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, 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. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
