Digital Canvas Effects for Surface Pattern Design

1. Introduction: I'm Kind of obsessed with texture. I love working digitally and I make most of my art in procreate. And although there are a million gorgeous texture brushes out there, I also like to use these canvas texture overlays and my patterns and illustrations. By creating your own from scratch, you're able to add unique textures and paint effects to your digital work that help you design stand out from the crowd. I'm Bekki Flaherty, a UK Illustrator on my speciality as Surface Pattern Design. I've been working as a full-time artist, running my own online business since 2015. And in that time I've been constantly refining my process is to come up with my own methods and shortcuts for creating patterns and illustrations. I sell my artwork through print on-demand platforms such as society six, Threadless and spoonflower, as well as doing freelance work and licensing my designs to arrange a small or large companies. I get asked a lot how I create watercolor textures in my digital designs. So I'm back from my fifth Skillshare class to teach you how to create your own canvas and paint textures from scratch. And then turn them into seamless layers to use in your patterns and illustrations. Creating your own textures to use is much better than buying ready-made assets for lots of reasons. First up, it'll save you money because you don't have to buy them in the first place. Because you own. There's no limit to the amount of designs or n products for sale that you can use them in, which sometimes the place for digital. Secondly, by creating your own textures and paint effects, there will be totally unique to you. So your work will have its own personality and signature look. The class is broken down into two parts. So if you don't have access to paints or a scanner, you can skip the option or watercolor texture steps and just create the canvas texture on there. You'll learn how to apply the effects to a standalone print for illustration, as well as how to use the textures seamlessly with any size of pattern tile, will look at how to turn parts of the effects on and off. So you can still export your designs as transparent files for things like T-shirts and tote bags. And I'll even be showing you how I set my file up ready for sending out to clients. So they can easily toggle the effect since this is an intermediate level class for people who are already familiar with the basics of Photoshop. And they're ready to learn some new skills and techniques. By the end of this class, you'll be able to get started photographing and painting your own watercolor textures to use in your surface patterns and illustrations. I can't wait to see what you come up with, and I will see you in class. 2. Class Project: We're going to be learning how to create a canvas texture overlays to use in our illustrations and surface pattern designs. So she showed these off for your class project. I want you to create your own textures overlays, and use them to update an existing design from your portfolio. It's always really cool to see it before and after image for the ys. So you can either share, share separate before and after images like this. Or you can use a clipping mask to show off half the design width and half the design without. I will be showing you how to do this later in class. Don't forget to post your images in the project gallery as I really love seeing what you will come up with. 3. Concept Overview: Welcome to class. I think that it would be really useful before we begin any of the other lessons to have a very brief look at what these texts layers actually are and what they do. This way, you'll have the end result in mind whilst you were working through the lessons, which I think is always a really helpful thing to do. In my document here, you can see I have this folder at the very top layer called Texture. And they toggle this on and off. You can see how it adds this beautiful campus finished and painterly textures to the artwork underneath. If we open the folder up, you can see that my texture here is made up of three separate layers of patterns, textures that have various different opacities, blend modes. If we close this folder and hide it, and open this one underneath, which is a copy of everything that's in here. But with the blend modes all set to normal and the opacities or set to 100. You can see what is actually on each layer. We have two different layers of paper textures. Then at the bottom, we have this paint texture layer. All of these work together to create the lovely paper texture that you can see when it is applied to the artwork. To this one. I'm calling the paint layer an optional step. Because as you can see, with just these two Canvas layers, you can still get the canvas board look on your work. The painted layer add some variation and texture, which I really like. But if you're not so keen on it, or if you're a 100% digital artist and you don't have paints or a scanner lying around, then I don't want you to feel that you can't complete this project. In fact, I don't always use this paint layer and my work depending on what I'm working on. So with that said, let's dive right into the list of supplies you'll need for each part of the process. 4. Supplies: Let's talk supplies. If you're only creating the canvas textures and don't want to do any painting. You will need canvas or paper textures to photograph. I'll be using this canvas art board, but other things I've used before, our watercolor paper, embossed finished envelopes, and chalk pastel paper. You'll also need a good smart phone or DSLR camera. Either of those is fine. You'll also need a desktop computer with the latest version of GIMP and Photoshop installed. I'll put links for those in the project resources. Assuming you going all in and creating both Canvas and painted textures, you will also need watercolor paper for painting on at least 250 grams per square meter. We're going to be using a lot of water, so you need a good thick absorbent paper to be able to handle that and soak it up. You're going to need some watercolor paints to create these paint textures. Whatever you have on hand is fine. Don't go out to buy a new paints for this. To be honest, the cheaper grainy or paints may be better for this because the chunkier particles will create nice textures on the paper. In terms of paint brushes, I use a really big chunky DIY store brush like this one for laying water down onto the page. Then a smaller, softer, round brush like this for dropping the paint onto the wet paper. You're also going to use something to mop up the paint. Paper towels are often suggested, and I did use to use these until I went a little more eco-friendly and stop buying them. I now use scraps of old worn-out towels which I cut up to use as cleaning cloth. They can be easily washed and reused, which is much more eco-friendly. You also don't get that uniform emboss texture of paper towels that sometimes gets imprinted onto your work. Lastly, you're going to need a scanner capable of scanning at at least 300 DPI for transferring your work to the computer. 5. Photgraphing Your Canvas Texture: We are ready to get started with the practical now and begin to capture our Canvas textures. I'm using my iPhone camera to photograph these today. You can use a DSLR if you want to. But there are two reasons that I'm not doing that today. Firstly, I'm using my DSLR for filming, but also not everyone has one. And I want to show you that it's totally possible to do this without one. Most smartphones have great cameras these days. And to be totally honest that actually a lot easier to use and transfer photos from the DSLR to it's totally up to you, which you use. Just go with whichever camera you normally use for jobs like this. You want to shoot somewhere flat and with lots of natural light. Normally when we're photographing things, we're often trying to even out shadows. And I'll often use a white reflector board opposite the window to help, even though, however, shadows are our friends here today, though what is going to help pick out the texture we want to capture? So don't be tempted to try. And even the map. Obviously, if you have big shadows casting over your paper like this, then you'll want to avoid those and you'll need to choose another spot to shoot. And that's pretty much all you need to know to get shooting. Just make sure you have the phone or camera parallel to the paper. If you've got an iPhone, you can work with this little cross hair to get it flat when they're lined up, you're good to go. I also like to give the screen a tab just to make sure it's in-focus than just hold the camera still and you can snap away. If you're worried about camera shake, then you can use a tripod or a clump if you like. But because we're in good light, the automatic shutter speed is going to be fast enough that shake shouldn't be a problem. Also find that my tripod grip cast a shadow down over the paper. So that's another reason I'm not using it for this. But if you have one, I want to experiment. Certainly have a go. Take as many different photos of different textures as you can. As it's nice to have a few different examples to play around with, to see which works best and to build out your texture library with once you're done shooting, central the photos over to computer ready for when we come to edit them later. 6. Painting Your Watercolour Texture: Before we get started, I just want to remind you that this step is an optional one. You can still create the Canvas effect without this painted layer, which just adds an extra layer of paint, the texture to your design. If you're a 100% digital artist and you don't have a scanner or the other supplies hanging around to do this with. Then you can skip this part and go straight onto the next lesson. So with that said, let's get started. This first texture. I started off by using a big DIY style paintbrush to cover the page with a layer of water on a mission here is to create lots of watery bleeds and blooms. So we want a nice web page to drop all the paint down into. It, doesn't matter what colors you use here, will be converting the image to black and white as soon as we scanned it. What matters here is contrast and texture. With a good amount of water loaded onto brush pallet. And a large soft brush begins to drop splashes of color in a really haphazard way onto the wet paper. Keep it nice and loose and random. And just let the organic flow of the paint and water do its thing. Pull the paint around with some extra water. And you can go back in with a DIY brush to soak up any extra water. Keep dropping in more concentrated areas of paint and creating areas of light and dark contrasts with lots of nice texture. If you have different colors that you know, create extra nice blooms, for example, I find that yellow ocher has a very grainy texture, which makes for some interesting paint flows. Then don't be afraid to use these different colors. As I said, will be converting the whole thing to black and white. I also find that Alizarin crimson produces a lot of blooms when it has water dropped into it. So I'll be using some of that color later to. A good way to get the balloons into your work is to drop clean water back into the painted areas. This will pick up the pigments and carry them a little way before depositing them down and leaving a little mark on a balloon. I also like to use a scrap of old towel for lifting excess paint off the page and increasing the contrast between the light and the dark areas. These are upcycled and washable and much more eco-friendly than disposable paper towels. I encourage you to really relax and just have fun with this painting stage. If you're used to painting in a much more precise style, which is certainly the case for me. They can take a few tries to relax and create something loose and messy. But it's a very meditative practice and very relaxing. I'd suggest making a few of these painter textures as you'll be able to experiment with them and see which ones work best. I'm making a second texture here where instead of starting with a webpage, I went straight in with some watery paint and left it, some unpainted areas on the page. These areas make a little maze for the paint to flow around and can create some nice effects like you can see here. Once you've finished your painting, leave you work to dry and then scan it into your computer at at least 300 DPI. If you're not sure how to do that, have a look at my class on painting watercolor stripes. As this contains a full lesson on how to scan your artwork. I'll leave a link for that in the project resources section. After that's done, join me in the next lesson and we will start to process our scans and images in Photoshop. 7. Canvas Texture Processing Pt 1: So here we are in Photoshop. The first thing you'll notice up here on the left is that my file is called Canvas dot HEIC. HEIC is Apple's version of a high-efficiency image format photo. So don't worry if yours says dot JPEG or PNG, That's totally okay. Just import whatever format your photos are. So let's get started on processing this image. First thing I'm gonna do is to unlock that layer. And I am going to take all the color out of this photo. We just want to work in black and white. I'm going to go up to my adjustments panel. If you don't have adjustments showing up there, you can go up to Window and makes you, you have adjustments checked. Then I'm going to add a hue saturation adjustment level here and bring the saturation all the way down to minus 100. Then I'm going to right-click on this adjustment layer and I am going to merge it down. I know that this is a destructive editing method and normally we don't use those. But I only want to use this photo for this purpose and in black and white. So I'm not worried about making that change that I can't go back to and I'm not going to save any changes to the actual photo. So now that we have all the colors taken out, the next thing we're going to do is apply a filter, which is really going to accentuate the difference between the light and the dark on this photo is going to make this canvas texture much more pronounced. And it will also, even at the tone on this photo, it's a lot darker down here than it is up at the top. So we're going to click on Filter and go down to Stylize. And we're going to click on emboss. And you'll see depending on what your last settings where over here, it might look a bit while to start with. So let's zoom in so we can have a better look at this. The first thing you want to do if you don't see this change is to make sure you've got preview checked. If that's not ticked, then you won't see these changes on the main screen. So these two sliders here, the height and the other two we're going to play with. If I just drag all these all the way down, you can see what it looks like without anything done to it. Take these both down to 0 and you can see it's completely flat. If I change the height to ten and then just drag this, I might slowly over and wait for it to update. You'll see we can slowly increase the difference between the light and the dark. How pronounced the shadows are. I would say we want it around about here. And then we're going to adjust the height until we get a nice even canvas finish without too much distortion. So we want it to look pronounce but not completely distorted. If I drag it all the way up here, you'll see we get these areas where it just distorts too much. Another thing you'll notice, the more you slide the height across. If I bring this all the way up to the top, at the edges of the image, you'll get this distortion and they look smeared in. If I go to the top, you can see it better. Up here there's some blurring and distortion, which the more you slide this height up, the greater that is not a problem because we can just crop the edges of the design when we come to export the photograph. But just to point that out, that's the thing that's happening, but it's okay because we can deal with that later. Slide your height around until you get a good quality image with not too much distortion in it. Let's take this to 50 and see where that, well, that gives us doesn't look too bad. I'm just going to bring it down a bit lower. There really is no exact science to this. It really is just a case of moving this slider around until you get a nice define texture that doesn't look too distorted. Spend a bit of time moving this around until you get something that looks kind of like that. I think that's pretty good actually. As a rule of thumb, I would go for the lowest possible number, but while still having a noticeable difference, I'm not going to bring the amount up to increase the difference between the light and the dark and make these shadows a bit more pronounced. Once you've changed the way you made them want to go and fine-tune the height. You can use the up and down arrow keys and the box to just move it up and down by one or two pixels at a time. I think actually 15 is probably going to be just the right height for that amount. So I'm happy with how that's looking. Have a play around with these sliders on your own design until you have something around the same values as what I have here. Then once you click Okay, those changes will then be applied to your photograph. The first texture that we're going to work on is the one for the paper which will be created using the Multiply blend mode. I'm going to apply an adjustment level to this to brighten up because this is way too great and doesn't look anything like paper at this stage. So I'm gonna go to the hue and saturation adjustment and add one of those. I'm going to go to the likeness and bring that way up. What you're looking for is something that looks onscreen nice and bright and white. Not completely white and flat, but something that looks nice and bright like you would want to see paper looking on the screen. I think that's okay for now. I may want to go back and change that later. But the next thing I'm going to do is to add another adjustment layer and decrease the contrast. So I'm going to go up to my adjustments panel and add a brightness contrast adjustment layer. And I'm going to use the contrast slider and I'm going to bring that all the way down to minus 50. That or just even the tone out. I'm going to brighten the paper up a bit more now. Just bring this brightness up a little bit further. That is looking nice and bright and papery, but would still just enough contrast in there. We won't be using this layer up full opacity and the finished design. So don't worry about it looking too much at this stage. Once you have your paper texture looking just as you'd like it, you can group these three layers together. So select them all and press command G to group. And I'm going to rename this layer, multiply. And then I'm going to duplicate that group by pressing Command J. And then this layer or hide the one underneath. These layers are going to be the ones we will use to make our Color Burn layer, which will add the texture to the painted parts of the illustration. On this layer, we want to be a bit darker, not quite this dark, not as light as the paper, but somewhere in-between with more of a difference between the dark and the light areas are Color Burn blend mode looks at the information in each of these layers, and it will darken our illustration colors to reflect this texture layer by increasing the contrast between the two. So we want to have a good amount of contrast between our darks and lights in this texture. So I'm going to decrease the lightness on this layer. Maybe take it down to about 50. You don't want to take it all the way down and have it too dark, gray like this. Roundabout, this level is quite good. Change this to, Let's just go with 50. Then on our brightness and contrast, we're going to take the contrast all the way up on this one to 100. And then we can bring this lightness down a bit more. I think let's kinda look in, okay. If we zoom in here, so you can get a better look. We've got a nice lot of contrast here between the darks and the lights. You've got some really white areas and so much darker areas. So that's going to apply nicely to our painted layer. So I'm going to rename this group Color Burn. And then I'm going to show both of the groups. I'm going to select both of them by holding Shift and clicking on them. I'm going to press Command J to duplicate those. And then I'm going to right-click on the group. Make sure you've only right-clicked on one group. And I'm going to merge that group and then do the same with that one. So now we have our layers still intact underneath, but we also have these flattened copies up at the top. We can go back to those and edit them later if we wanted to. At this point, I'm also going to save, I'm going to Save As and do Command Shift S. And I'm just going to save it as Canvas dot PSD and click on Save there. You should have saved sooner. It's always good to save soon and often when you're working in Photoshop. Now if we zoom in, you remember these small areas here at the edges that were a bit blurred? When I going to go ahead and crop those lights. So I'm going to use the rectangular marquee tool here and just click near the corner enough into avoid those parts. Doesn't matter on the exact dimensions. And then let go. And then I'm going to press C on my keyboard, which will bring up the crop tool. And then I'm going to press Enter twice to set that crop. Then that has taken that away from the edge. And we've got nice clean edges. Now, we need to export these two layers. And we can then make them seamless so that we can use this to fill any design of any size that we want to. So I'm gonna make sure I got these two layers selected. And I'm going to right-click and go down to Quick Export as PNG. And then select the folder that you want to put them in. I'm going to call this folder seamless textures. Although they're not seamless At the moment, they will be when we receive them and put them back into here, just click on Okay, and then those will save out as layers. And so that folder, you can click on Finder to go and find them and that they are. Now, I'm going to open these files in GIMP, which is a program that I use for making my imagess seamless. If you don't have that on your computer already, you'll need to go and search up Gimp, download and go to GIMP.org. And you can download that for free. It's completely free software. You can download that off their site using the direct download. From there, you just install it to your computer using your normal installing instructions that you would follow. Once you have installed on your computer, you can select these two files. I'm going to right-click and choose Open with Gimp. I already have open at this point, so it doesn't take too long to load. But there is a loading screen that normally comes up and it takes a while to load. Once you've got it open, you can then open these two files in it. So don't worry about this interface here if you've never used before, we're not going to use any of these things to the left and right. The only thing we're going to use is a filter from up here to make this seamless. So we're going to click on Filters, come down to map, and then click on tile seamless. Then I don't know if you caught that. If I just click Cancel and then zoom in. So you can see a bit better if you look in these areas here. When I apply that filter, what it's doing is bringing the inside to the out, wrapping it around. And then it blends these areas and makes the tile seamless. It's like magic. Once that done, if you don't spot anything, don't worry, it is quite a subtle difference. You can just click on, Okay, and that tile is nice, seamless will do on this one, and you should be able to see it a bit better this time. If we go to filters up the top, you can just click repeat tile seamless. And if you notice there, you can see it jumped on that one is also nice, seamless, and you can click Okay. Then we will go to file export as. And then I'm just going to add seamless to the file name so we can tell the difference. And then click on Export, leave these settings as they are, and click Export on that window as well. And then go to your other file. And just repeat that. Go to File Export as just add seamless into the file name. And then click on Export on there and let it do its thing. And that is now done. If we go back into Photoshop, we can open those files back in here. I'm going to go to File Open, go back to a seamless textures folder. And they seem this copies a nice safe there. So I'm going to select them both and open them in here. And then all that's left to do is add these as patterns. If you don't have the pattern's panel, you can get to it via the window tab. I am going to create a new folder for these. Let's keep them all in one folder. So click on the folder icon, and I'm going to call this seamless canvas textures. Then hit this little plus icon here, which will create a new pattern using what we have on-screen. Going to leave this file name as it is because it will help you identify what pattern you're using later and just click Okay. And that is now in our pattern's panel. So I'm gonna go to the other file and repeat the same thing. Click on the plus icon and just add it to the pattern's panel. You can quickly just go ahead and test these if I add a new layer here and then click on this pattern. Whilst on that layer, it will add this pattern to the layer. And then I can double-click on the little thumbnail and change the scale to 50%. And then if we zoom in, you can see that this is now tiled seamlessly and we will be able to use that pattern on any size of illustration that we wanted. If it was a large illustration, we could just fill it with the pattern, fill the next video, I'm going to repeat these steps again, but quicker with a different texture to give you a bit more insight into how to adjust the brightness and contrast each time for other different textures you might want to use. 8. Canvas Texture Processing Pt 2: So we're going to go ahead and repeat all those steps again now for this texture here, so that I can talk you through the different choices you might want to make for different types of textures. You might be photographic. So as before, the first job was to desaturate that image and take the saturation down to minus 100. Unlock that layer, right-click on the saturation layer and merge that down. And then we go up to our filters to Stylize and choose emboss. Let's zoom in a little bit here so we can take a better look at it. When you've got a flatter texture like this one. This one isn't as rich as the canvas texture. You will want to bring the height up a little bit higher. So I'm going to try 50 to start off with here. And because this texture is a bit more flat, we're going to want to crack the amount up a little bit higher. If I just close this off, when you've got an image like this with less contrast in it. If I just open the Canvas document for reference, if we zoom in here, There's quite bright whites and then much darker grays on this one. Whereas on our watercolor paper, the tone is a lot more even when you have an image with less contrast. When you are applying the emboss filter, you want to take this and make up much higher. So let's put the height back to where we had to start with. I think it was 50 we had before. Let's put that back there. And then I think 50 is probably the best to go with that. And then let's take the amount up to let's try it around 180. And there we go. We've got much more contrast there between the dark and the light. We've still got some of this blurring at the edges which we will have to crop away later. If I let's try taking up a bit higher to 200. Yeah, I think that's good. We've got these areas of nice light and then some dark coming in as well. So I think that's looking pretty good there. When you're trying different textures. Remember if your photo has less contrast in it and you'll want to bring the amount up. But if the canvas texture, there was quite pronounced differences, you'll want the amount to be a bit lower. So let's go ahead and click Okay on that, on to set those changes. First layer we're going to work on is our Multiply layer, which will be creating the paper texture. So let's go up to our adjustments panel. We can add a hue saturation layer, and let's bring the brightness up. Nice and bright and papery. Let's try it around there. Then. Remember the next job was a brightness and contrast layer. And we take the contrast dye on this one too, even the tone. Then you may want to go in and increase the brightness again after you've done that. Then once you're happy with those settings, you can group those three layers together by selecting them all and pressing Command G. And then I'm going to double-click on the layer name, and I'm going to rename this one paper multiply. And then I'm going to press Command J to duplicate that. And then we'll call this one Color Burn. Then let's open this layer up. And if you remember, this Color Burn layer, we want to be a bit darker and have more of a contrast between the dark and light. So I'm going to bring the lightness down a touch and then go in and take the contrast all the way up to 100. A good way of describing what you're looking for as I think it looks like how you imagine the surface of the moon to look or how it's portrayed on TV. Lots of shadows, no color and just this nice gray speckled texture. So yeah, Think surface of the moon when you're making this layer. So now we have our nice white multiply paper layer, which actually I might go and lighten the bit in a sec. Yeah, I think I'm going to bring this brightness up it just looking at it in contrast with the other one, it does look a bit too gray. So I'm going to take this lightness up a bit higher. Yeah, I think that's perfect. We've got our two layers now are great. Moon surface paper color burn, and our lighter, brighter paper multiply. Highlight these two layers, and then press Command J to duplicate them. And then we've just one layer at a time selected. Right-click and scroll down to merge group and then repeat that for your other layer. You can select the two layers. You can right-click on those and Quick Export as PNG into your seamless textures folder. The next steps would be exactly the same as we used in the previous video. Opening these into GIMP and then making them seamless. So I'm not going to repeat those again here. We'll just skip forward to the part where we bring them in and add them as patterns. So once you have the seamless task back in Photoshop opened up, we can go to the pattern's panel and use the plus icon to add those in as patterns as well. Do that for both of them. That we have all our textures pet for the paper and Canvas, Safe typed, going to drag those up there into the folder and they're ready for using as layers of texture in our illustrations. This point, if you're not doing the painted layer for adding the painted texture to the illustration. You can skip this next video and go straight ahead to find out how to apply these paper textures to your illustration. Otherwise, I will see you in the next video where we will create our paint texture layer. 9. Paint Texture Processing: When you open your scan up in Photoshop, hopefully it should look something a bit like this. First thing I'm gonna do is rotate this image so it fits the ratio of the screen a bit better. So I'm gonna go up to image, image rotation and just rotate it 90 degrees clockwise. And then we can zoom in and see fill the whole screen a bit easier. So looking at this image overall, I can see I've got up at the top here, this blank area with not much going on in it. And then done in this bottom right corner, I quite like that bit there. So I'll try and keep that in. I'm going to go up to the Marquee Tool. And starting down in this corner, I'm just going to click and drag and set a bounding box around the good parts basically and just crop out the plane bits. Think that's probably okay. The exact dimensions don't matter here or the ratio. Just go for cropping it down to the good parts of your drawing. Then I'm going to press C to get my crop tool. And then I'm going to press Enter twice to set that crop. Then we just have the parts of the image that we want. Their next job is to desaturate this image as well, because we don't need any of the colors in it. So we go to our adjustments panel, Hue and Saturation adjustment layer and bring the saturation all the way down to minus 100. And we've knocked out the color. So now we can right-click on our adjustment layer and choose Merge Down and now is flatten the image. As before. I'm not worried about destructive methods here because I'm not going to save it as this PNG. I'm going to hit Command Shift S. I'm going to save this as a Photoshop file. So it will still have my pet scan to go back to if I wanted it. So now that that's done, our next job is to look at the image as a whole and assess it for any areas that are really jumping out and competing for attention. Whilst we do want these areas of light and dark, if there's any bits that are a lot darker than the rest, they're going to jump out and grab our attention. So for example, this patch here is quite a lot darker than any other parts of the illustration. So I'm going to go tone that down a bit because I think you'd notice if that bit was repeated over and over again throughout the texture. So I'm gonna go and use the Dodge tool. And how this works, it was kind of like increasing the exposure on a photograph. So as I click and drag and brush this over this dark area, it's going to gradually lighten it more just if tonight that tone and know that blends in much better with the rest of the image. So I don't think there's any other areas that are too dark in comparison. The next job is to look for any other little flex or blips that would stand out. So I'm thinking perhaps this area down here, there's a little blip on there and maybe even light patch up there. The best way to get rid of these is to use the clone stamp tool and you can use the keyboard shortcut S for this. So I'm going to make this brush a bit smaller. Make sure that you have a soft brush checked for this tool. And I'm going to option click on the area I want to clone and then click and drag on the area I want to paint over. And that will enable you to blend out those little blips. Night, the things that we do want in this texture layer are these dark burnt edges and con, areas of contrast, which are going to in turn burn into our illustration layer and create these textures mirrored on the illustration layer. I've got this quite empty area here to the right and the left at the bottom. So I'm thinking I'm going to clone these areas down here onto the bottom. I don't just want to make a direct clone of it. I want to be able to flip the parts around so that there's a little bit more variation. So I'm gonna get my marquee tool and select this top part of the image. And then I'm going to press Command J to duplicate that. And now I have copied onto a separate layer. Now I'm going to get the clone stamp tool by pressing S on the keyboard. And I'm going to use the close bracket key to make this brush a lot bigger than I had it before. Make sure you have a nice soft brush for this job because then you'll get a nice blended edges. I'm just using this brush here, which is one of the default ones. And make sure that your brush is nice and soft like this one. And then on this layer here, as I said, I don't want to just have a direct copy of this part directly down to that, because it will look really obvious and we want to mix things up. On this layer. I'm going to hit Command T, and then right-click and choose flip vertically. And then that hasn't. I flipped it around. I'm making sure I'm on that top layer. I'm going to option click up here and then go down to the bottom layer and have this as my active layer. I can then copy that down onto this layer. I think I'm gonna go just over here. You have just click and drag and use the paintbrush. You can use the crosshair on the top part to see which bits you are following along the edge itself. And then just copy that down onto the layer below. So another area I'd like to fill is down here. And over here, I'm gonna get back up to this copied layer and hit Command T again and flip it vertically to put it back where it was. And this time I'm going to right-click and flip it horizontally. Then I'll be able to copy these onto the layer below. So press Enter to set that and making sure you have your copied layer selected Option. Click on the part you want to clone and select the underneath layer is your active layer. And then you can use the mice to just click on Clone those parts down onto the bottom layer. Then I think I'm going to option click up here. I need to be on the top layer. Then select that one. And then I can clone that onto this layer below. So have a look at your painted texture. See which bits where you've got gaps that you need to fill, which parts you can use to fill them and use the clone stamp tool to copy those parts, fill the gaps. At this point, I'm going to press Command S to save, and then I'm going to press Command Option S to save a copy into our seamless Scans folder. I'm going to save it as a PNG. Just press Save. And then that will save out a copy which we can then go ahead and open in GIMP the same way as we did before, the Canvas textures. So once you're in GIMP as before, go up to filters. If you have repeats up here as an option and you can click on that. If not, you can go to map, tile seamless. And this time you'll definitely see the changes it makes the tile seamless and you can click okay, File Export as seamless to the end of your file name. And then just click on Export. Again. To save that phyllite. You can get back into Photoshop. You can open that seamless copy. Then as we did with the paper textures, go to your pattern's panel and make sure you've got that folder selected. And then just click the plus icon and add that as a pattern texture as well. So now we have these two canvas texture options. We've got the canvas on the watercolor paper, and we have our paint texture layer done as well. In the next video, we'll have a look at how to put all of these together with the different blend modes and use these over our illustrations. 10. Applying the Textures to an Illustration: So now we're going to put everything together and use it to create a texture overlay layer for this illustration I have here, it's made up of this white background color fill layer. I've got my illustration or grouped together here. And then on top you can't see it. I've got a white map. If I change the background color here to something a bit darker, you can see I've got this white matte layer on top so that we can see the contrast between the white and the texture of the paper. So let's just undo that and change that back to white. I'm going to put the texture layers on top of this group, but underneath the white map, unless you are actually building a white mat into your illustration, you wouldn't have that layer. So just go ahead and put these layers on top of your document. So I'm going to create three new layers here on top of my illustration. So putting these above the grouped illustration layers, then we're going to go up to patterns and find the folder that has our seamless canvas textures in it, but we created earlier. So the first layer that I'm going to do will be the Color Burn layer, which is going to apply the canvas texture onto the parts of our illustration. I'm going to find the darker version up here and click on that. And it will apply it to our layer. And then we can see the white matter around the edge. And then up here where it says normal, these are our blend modes. We're going to select Color Burn. And then if we zoom in, you can see it's added really cool canvas effect to just the motifs in our illustration. Now if you remember, high Color Burn works. It takes the light and dark information from this layer and uses it to increase or decrease the contrast on our illustration layer so we get the same variance in tone. Now remember, using color burn on white gives no change, which is why we've still got the white background. Now as you can see it, this is looking pretty wild and it was a bit too noticeable. So I'm gonna go up here to the opacity. I don't ever leave this at a 100%. Let's try changing it down to 50 and see how that looks. There we go. That's looking much better. I might even change it down a bit lower. I'm going to hold down the Shift key and the down arrow so I can adjust this in increments of ten. My think think I'm going to leave that up 40. Because when we come to put the multiply layer again, that's going to add a further depth to this. So it's probably better to leave it slightly underdone than to have it overdone. At this stage. I'm going to select the layer underneath now. And this is where we're going to add our paper texture in. This is only added the texture to the illustration. At this point, we're going to add a multiply layer in to add it to the paper. Because remember, color burn on white doesn't have any effect. We're going to click on our lighter thumbnail up here in our seamless canvas Textures folder. And then we're gonna go to our blend mode and change this one to multiply. Then I'm going to zoom out a bit. So you can see this compared to the white ran the outside as obviously far too gray and not really papery looking. So as before, we're going to go up to our opacity. And let's start by changing this to 50% and see how that's looking. I think that's probably still a bit too dark and too gray. So I'm going to take this all the way down to ten and you can see that's not quite strong enough. It's nice to have a bit more contrast between the canvas on the windy white map that you would have. Let's try taking up to 20. And I think I think twenties probably good for this one. The exact numbers that you will use will depend on how light or how dark your canvas textures are for both the Color Burn layer on this multiply layer. So 20 per cent works okay for mine with the levels and the settings that I have. But it may not be the right, I might feel. So do have a play, try and get some kind of contrast that's looking like this. But most importantly, how you would like it to look. I'm going to leave this one at 20. Then let's go to our layer. Underneath this one. This one is going to be a painted texture layer. So let's go to our Canvas Textures folder. Click on this pattern, the thumbnail here. The blend mode for this one will also be color burn. If I turn this layer on and off, Let's focus on this part here. If we zoom in, you can see some of these paint bleeds are being transferred onto this layer, but they're not that noticeable. And the problem is, if I just put this blend mode back to normal, the scale of this is just too big for the illustration. I'm going to double-click on this thumbnail here. And we can change the scale of this pattern layer to 50 per cent to start with, and then press Enter. Then we'll change our blend mode back to Color Burn. And then if we zoom in and toggle this on and off again, you can see the small parts of the paint bleeds are now much more visible and prominent within the illustration itself. We just turn these on and off. You can see another thing it does is increases saturation and vibrance of the colors. And that's the thing I keep in mind while I'm illustrating. I create template documents that are blank, but with these layers on them so that I can work underneath these layers in Procreate and choose my color palettes with these layers already applied to them. To do that, you would just need to create a blank document with these pattern layers on them. Save it as a PSD, and then send it over to your iPad. You can open it in Procreate and do your illustrations on the layers below the pattern fill layers. So to go back to our illustration here, I don't use this paint texture layer at the 400% opacity either. So I'm going to take it down to 70%. It is what I normally have, higher rather than lower. So have a play around with the opacity of this layer and see what depth of effects you like. You can also change the scale of the canvas effect on these two layers. But one really important rule is that if you change the scale on one, you must change the scale on the other to the same. If you remember, these are made from identical texture files. So the light and the dark parts stuck up perfectly on top of each other and they work together to give this canvas effect. So these two layers must have the same scale and you mustn't move or drag them around. They need to be perfectly lined up on top of each other. If we double-click on this layer, we change the scale to 50 per cent. And let me zoom in. You can see they don't match up and they don't work together properly anymore. So we need to double-click on this one and change the scale to 50 per cent. And now you can see the two scales match up properly. Forget to zoom out every now and then when you're changing these levels and opacities and blend modes, just to make sure that you're happy with the overall look of everything. I've just grouped these texture layers to keep them tidy and to be able to toggle them on and off more easily. If we turn this on and off, you can see the before and after effect there. This is the thing that never gets old for me. I love telling the effects on an often seeing what a difference it makes. Especially in this part here I can see the nice paint textures coming through there. So that is how to apply these layers and set them up over a print. But what if you wanted to export this design as a transparent PNG for a t-shirt. Let's just turn these top two layers off and pretend that they're not on there for a second. The way that you would make this a transparent file for a T-shirt is to turn off this background color fill layer. And then you could export it as a PNG with no background. If we turn this colorful layer on and put our texture layer on, you can see now if we turn this color fill layer off because they are not blending onto white anymore, we get this really messy background showing through instead of a nice clear background. So I'm going to put this white background back in for a second. The way we get around this is I've grouped all my illustration together in one layer here. I'm going to press Command J to duplicate that layer. And then I'm going to right-click on it and scroll down to merge group. And I have this flattened copy of the illustration. I'm going to come on to click on the thumbnail here, and that will select all of the pixels in the illustration layer. I'm done with that copy now, I can turn that off. And I can use this selection to make a layer mask for the group that has a lot of texture layers in it. Now if we zoom out, you can see that this is only applied to the illustration and not to the background as it was before. And we can now turn off this color fill layer. And as you can see, we've got a nice transparent background there. So this can be exported as a PNG file for putting on a t-shirt or tote bag. If you want to turn this effect on and off and get the effect back again over the whole document. You can right-click on this layer mask here, and then click on Disable layer mask. And that will turn the effect off. So you can toggle on and off by right-clicking and choosing, enable and disable. I always leave this mask setup, but leave it disabled. If I'm sending a file to a client, if they've requested a layered PSD, then I will leave this layer mask in the setup so that if they want to change the background or exports something as a PNG, I don't have to explain to them all the steps about setting up that layer mask. I can just say to them, Oh, that thing that you just right-click on it and choose enable or disable. See it definitely set this up and then leave it on there because it will save you time further down the line, I promise. For your class project, your assignment is to export a before and after picture of these two illustrations, one with and one without the mask. One way to do that is to turn the mask off, export that, turn it back on, export that. Or you can set up another layer mask to show it half on, half off. So to do that, I'm going to duplicate this layer by pressing Command J and hide the layer below. I'm just going to delete that layer mask. And then we go up here to our rectangular marquee tool. And I'm just going to mark off roughly half of the illustration. It doesn't have to be perfect. And then you can click on your duplicated texture layer and apply that layer mask. And then we can see half width and half with EIP. Then you would go up to File, Export and Save for Web. This will bring up this box and you can choose the image size that you want to export. I would suggest changing the width to something, certainly no more than a thousand pixels, because you don't need to be uploading full resolution pictures to the project gallery. So then you can click on Save. And then that'll save a really small JPEG copy of that file, perfect for uploading. So now that we know how to set these up on an illustration or print. In the next video, we'll look at how to use these textures we've created in a seamless pattern tile. 11. Using the Textures in a Pattern Tile: The last thing that we have to learn is how to use these textures when we need them to be seamless in a pattern tile. To show you how not to do it. Let's go over to our previous document and just copy this group that has the patterns in it. I'm just going to hit Command C with the layer mask deleted. That's got all the patterns in there. Then I'm going to go over to this pattern tile which I have set up here. I'm just going to paste it over the top. I'm going to change the scale on these to something huge, like Let's go for 200 per cent so we can really see the edges of the pattern in a second. Let's change these all 200 per cent will just leave this one as it is. So I'm going to close the group and to test how this pattern's working. Because I already know this is a seamless tile and the motifs are all tiling seamlessly. We just need to test this texture layer. So I've got my texture overlay, they're added over the top. So I'm going to add this whole image as a pattern up in the pattern's panel now. And then I can add a layer here and apply this pattern to that layer. Then I can zoom in in the corner with my move tool. I can just drag the pattern down and to the right slightly so I can see how the edges are lining up. So if we zoom right in here, you can see that although the motifs are lining up correctly, does this glitch in the texture overlay because our seamless textures are not seamless at the same scale as our pattern is, which is 12 inches in this case. Let's just zoom out. We can delete this pattern layer and I'm going to delete this layer of textures because that's not what we're going to be using to make the textures on this pattern. To make seamless texture layers for this tile, we need to go back to the seamless tiles that we created in GIMP and bring them into this document and constrain them to the proportions here, which is 12 inches in this case. So to help us bring our textures in and have them the right place, I'm going to set up some rulers and some guidelines. So make sure you have rulers turned on. If you don't have all done the side of your document, you can go up to View and make sure that you have rulers checked like that. And then from the ruler, you can just drag a guide line, height. We want this to be lined up with the center of the document. You will should snap if you don't have snapping turned on, you can get that by pressing Command, Shift and colon. And then you'll be able to snap it halfway across the document and drag one from the top and snap it to halfway down. The textures that I took with the iPhone, I had the image mode in 16:9. These are actually going to fit quite well into either side of here. I'm gonna go ahead and import those night by pressing Command Option P, which is the shortcut for Place Embedded. And then I'm going to double-click on this to bring it in. Now obviously this is way too big, so I am going to click up here on the percentages, making sure I've got the proportions locked. And just bring that down until I can see all of it on the screen. Now I know I have snapping turned on from earlier. So I'm going to click on this corner here whilst holding down Shift. And that will allow me to free transform this and snap it into the corner. And then this bottom corner, I'm going to do the same and snap it to halfway across. Now I know my document is 3,600 pixels square. So I can see in that little box there that I have gotten halfway across on the full width up and down. So now I know that snapped into the correct place. I can release that and press Enter to set that transformation. Now because we know this is seamless, I can just drag another copy of that over to there. So I'm going to hit Command J to duplicate that layer. And then I'm going to press Command T to transform it. And then up here, we want to move it along the x axis, which is the horizontal left to right access. So I'm going to click up here into the Xbox. I know we want to move it over 1800 pixels. I'm just going to type plus 1800s into this box. And that will move it over 1800 pixels, which is half of our 3,600 pixel document. You would use half of whatever your documents sizes. I'm just going to undo that. You don't actually need to know the mass. You can click into this box as long as you know your documents size. You can type in the width of your document in pixels, so 3,600. And then you can use the forward slash key, which means divide, and then put two. And that will do the math for you. So if you can't work out off the top of your head, what half of your document is. If it's a weird number, you can use Photoshop to do the math for you, which is always nice. Night. This next part, I've mentioned it in all my classes, but I'm not going to apologize for it because it is so important. Anytime you resize something that's seamless in Photoshop, is going to be recompiling that image. Changing the pixel slightly and the edges will not match up anymore and they become semi-transparent. And that is how you end up with white gaps done the edges of your tiles, which is so annoying. But it's really easy to fix. I'm going to add this color fill layer in underneath to show up the contrast because you can't really see very well here. Let's make this a darker color. Let's try this blue. And then if you zoom in, is quite hard to see. But there is a very faint blue line there where we've got transparent pixels. If I just move this over slightly so you can see where the join is and then move it back. You can see that blue showing through underneath. Maybe if we scroll down a bit further, some of these lighter areas, you can see that transparent. Maybe if I'd make this a different color, let's make it red. I'm not showing up a bit more of a contrast. You can see that semitransparent line. And that is what gives us these gaps in our work. But the good news is there is an easy way to fix that. Just zoom back in so we can see when it works. So these two layers here, I'm going to select them. I'm going to merge them with Command M, which is a keyboard shortcut that I have set up. If you don't have that one set up on yours, you can right-click on the layers and then scroll down to merge layers. Then we need to do is duplicate this layer three or four times. As you can see that the transparency or the transparencies of those layers stack up one on top of each other. Now back to full opacity again. So then you can select those and merge those layers again. Then that gap in the work is no fixed plus any gaps that would have been around the edges as well. So now we have this double-sided seamless tile that is seamless on all the edges at the same scale as our pattern. So now we can set this layer up here to Color Burn. I can change this opacity to 40 per cent. It's not the Color Burn layer is done. We need to bring in the other texture, which is for a multiply layer. So Command Option P to place embedded. And then we'll double-click on this one. Then bring the size down again. Let's bring up our guides with Command colon. I think I hit them before, yeah, Command colon. And then we can shift click and drag these into the corners to snap them to the halfway point, checking that those numbers in that box I look correct, which they do. So I can release that. And then returned to set the transformation. I'm going to press Command J to duplicate this layer Command T. And then in the x-axis box, I'm going to type in plus 1800 pixels. And that will bring it over to the other side. And I can press return to set that transformation. I'm going to hide the guide so I can check for these seams Again. If we add a colored layer underneath again and let me zoom in, you should be able to say easier this time because these multiply layers are a lot lighter. So if we zoom in there, you can see that transparent gap. So I'm going to press Command J four times. So duplicate these layers. Select them all right-click and merge those layers. And I, all the transparency is around the edges and in the middle are gone. And that is also nice and seamless. So we can go ahead and set the blend mode to multiply the opacity. I think we use 20% in the other document. If we zoom in, the reason why this isn't showing up so much is because in the other document, I have these two layers around the other way round. My Color Burn layer was on the top and the multiply layer was underneath. So I'm just going to drag those. Then you'll see the paper texture shows up properly. Now, if you wanted to change the scale of these textures in the previous document, we could just double-click on the pattern layer and change the scale, but our options are a bit more limited in this document. One thing you can do if you decide the scale is too large, you can select both of these two pattern layers here. Just click on one and then Shift-click on the other. What you can do is press Command T and then hold down shift and snap this to a quarter of the size. Just make sure it's in the right place before you let it go. Then you could repeat this in the other three quadrants of the pattern. I'm happy with the scale as it is, but I'm going to show you how to do it with this top layer so that you know how to do it if you wanted to change the scale and your pattern. I'm going to hide this one and we'll just work on this Color Burn layer. I'm going to bring the blend mode back to normal and the opacity back up to 100. Before I do any transforming. Then we can hit Command T to transform. And holding down shift, we can drag this corner and snap it to the guides and then press return to set that transformation. London got press Option and Shift, and click and drag a copy across here by 1800s pixels. And then select these two layers. And holding down Option and Shift, click. And drag out a copy down by 1800 pixels. And then we're going to select all of these layers by clicking and then shift clicking at the bottom. Then I'm going to right-click and merge these layers into one. I'm going to add a color fill layer underneath to show up any gaps. Choose this red color. I'm going to hide my guides so that we can see underneath them. And let's zoom in. And as expected, there is that faint light. Now if I toggle this on and off, you can see it a bit better. So as expected, we have resized, so we need to do that duplicate and merge trick. So it's going to hit Command J four times, select them all, and then merge those layers together. And I know that all the transparencies are canceled. And we've got this quarter size scale version of our texture here. We can see how that's looking. If we set the blend mode to color burn, Let's get rid of this colored layer underneath. And let's set the opacity up 50 per cent for now just to see how it's looking. And then you can zoom in and see that smaller scale texture. If you wanted to go ahead with this texture, then you would repeat those steps that we've just gone through for the multiplier layer copy, making it fully opaque, changing the blend mode to normal, repeating it into each corner and then duplicating and merging them. I'm just going to undo all of those steps now. To get back to where we were, we can have a look at putting the paint texture layer. And next, for this part, I think I'm going to change the background color from white to a different color. So you can see how the Blend Modes interact with things other than a white background. So I'm going to hide this white layer that we have here that will take it back to this original beige layer which I have for these poppies. So now we're going to bring in our paint texture layer. I'm going to press Command Option P, which is the shortcut for Place Embedded file. And I want it to go above this group layer. So let's do that now. And let's bring in this PET scan to copy seamless. Double-click on that. Now as you can see, this is already snapped it to the left and the right for us, we're just going to have to bring up our guides so we can snap it to the top and the bottom. Now we are going to have to quite drastically reduce the ratio of this image. And it's going to get quite squished vertically. But because this is a texture layer That's going onto the document rather than the illustration itself. It's okay that it's going to get distorted. I wouldn't recommend doing this with anything other than a kind of an "invisible" texture. As such; don't do this with main illustrations, but for this purpose it's fine. Snap it to the top half of your document and then duplicate that layer. Now, I can click and drag this one down. If I do, it's just going to move me onto the top layer as an active layer because that's above it. So I'm gonna get back onto this layer, press Command T. And on my y-axis, which is the up and down one, I'm going to go into this box here and I'm going to press plus 1800. And then that will bring that down to the bottom half of our tile. From there, I'm going to hide those so they're not getting in our way. Going to hide the guides. And as always, we need to check for these transparent lines and fix them. So I'm going to merge these two layers. I can already see them showing through with the red of the poppy design underneath. I don't need to put a colored layer underneath. So I'm going to merge these two layers. Select them both, right-click and choose Merge Layers. Then duplicate them several times, select them all, and merge those down again. Then if we zoom out, we can put these two top layers back in, make them visible. And then we just need to change the blend mode on this paint layer to Color Burn. And let's try an opacity of 70%. For now you can see we've got that nice painted texture coming in on the motifs there. And also in places on the background because it's beige and not white. So now we can add this as a pattern swatch. And if I zoom in to this corner, I'm going to add a layer and apply this new pattern to that layer. And then with the move tool, I can just drag this across. And you can see that this texture is now nice and seamless. We go back to the original one which I made. You can see where that glitch was and that's where the edge of the tile is. With this new one, where we've put the seamless tiles over the top. And that works perfectly. In terms of keeping my document tidy. I always group these layers together and name it texture, so that if somebody else is using these files, they can easily find the texture layers. And that is now ready for saving and exporting. If you wanted to use the clipping mask so that the texture is only applied to the motifs and not the background of the illustration, like we did in the previous document. The way you would do that is to select all of your layers that have motifs on them. So in my case, this uses smart objects. So I've got this Smart Object layer here. And then the other smart objects are inside this group here, just to keep them separate and out of the way. So I would need to select both of those layers. Press Command J to duplicate them, then right-click. Then merge these layers. So now in this one layer, I've got a copy of all the illustration pixels that are in this document from the motifs. I can Command, click on that thumbnail and use that to apply a clipping mask to those texture layers. That's exactly the same process as we went through in the other document which we use for print to export for a t-shirt, for example. Again, I always disable this layer. And I would send this out to clients who'd requested a layered file with that clipping mask already on there. So that as I said, if they needed to change it, I don't have to tell them how to do. I can just save, turn it off or on. For now though, I'm going to delete this layer mask. I'm going to show you how to do a before and after image for this type of pattern file so that you could share this in the project gallery. With the rectangular marquee tool selected. You just need to click and drag to vaguely halfway across the tile. And then make sure you've got your texture layer selected. And then just click on this Layer Mask icon down there. And you will get a nice before and after shot, which you can save it to the project gallery. The steps for this would be the same as in the previous video. So if you needed to review those, go back to the previous video and check out the steps for using Save for Web function. So those are all the steps that you need in order to be able to take your seamless textures that you've created and use them in a pattern tile for your Surface Pattern projects. I will see you in the next video where we will go over everything we've learned and look at other areas that you could use these textures in. 12. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for taking this class. I really hope that you've enjoyed it and learned some useful skills and ideas for adding to your work. Always keep an eye out for new textures that you could photograph and using your work. You don't have to stick to canvas or paper. Why not explore things like textured wallpaper or fabrics? As I mentioned previously, it's really useful to have these Canvas lists set up in a template document so you can use them on the go in apps like Procreate. If you want to do this, then all you need to do is set up a blank template document in Photoshop with the Canvas layers added in, and then save it as a PSD, then transfer it to your iPad. That way you can adjust the colors as you go and see you in real time how your finished work will look. Don't forget to upload your finished patterns and illustrations to the project gallery or any work in progress shots if you would like feedback or help. I'm always available here via the discussion tab to answer any questions you might have. If you'd like for me to share your photos on my Instagram account than even know of your username so that I can tag you. If you'd like to know more about me and my work, then you can find me over on Instagram, @bekkiflaherty, and on my website, RebeccaFlaherty.com. If you found this class useful, I would really appreciate it. If you could leave a quick review. It really helps me to be more visible on the platform and help more students for my classes. And of course, be sure to follow me here on Skillshare to get notified when I publish new classes. Thank you again for watching. Stay creative and I will see you next time.