From Painting to Pattern: How to Create Repeat Patterns using Photoshop | Juliet Meeks | Skillshare
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From Painting to Pattern: How to Create Repeat Patterns using Photoshop

teacher avatar Juliet Meeks, Designer and Artist

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro

      1:18

    • 2.

      Watercolor Supplies

      1:49

    • 3.

      Painting Your Elements

      4:10

    • 4.

      Scanning Your Artwork

      0:53

    • 5.

      Editing Your Artwork

      6:57

    • 6.

      Setting Up Your Tile

      4:40

    • 7.

      Pattern Time!

      13:22

    • 8.

      Testing Repeat and Color

      3:43

    • 9.

      Mockups and Exporting

      3:16

    • 10.

      Bonus Video! Alternate Pattern Method

      6:48

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About This Class

Are you ready to turn your watercolor paintings into a seamlessly repeating pattern, for use on products, fabric, and more? In this class, I will cover the steps involved from painting your watercolor elements, to scanning them in and cleaning them up in Photoshop, and finally creating your repeat pattern.

• Discover my tips for designing elements for patterns using watercolor
• Learn how to clean up your watercolor paintings in Photoshop and remove the paper background
• Have fun designing your pattern in Photoshop and learn how to create a perfectly repeating tile
• Mockup your new pattern on products, and share your work with the class! 

There are lots of methods out there for creating repeat patterns - this method is perfect for you if you want to keep the handmade texture of your watercolor paintings or drawings and prefer using Photoshop over Illustrator. This is also a great class for any new or aspiring surface designer. 

• Basic Photoshop and watercolor painting skills are helpful for taking this class (check out my Watercolor Basics class here if you are brand new to watercolor!)
• Supplies needed include a scanner, basic watercolor painting materials, and Adobe Photoshop
• Visit the Class Project for more guidelines on your project, and links to supplies mentioned in the video

Share your pattern on Instagram! Tag your pattern #frompaintingtopattern so we can all check out and like each other's work!

Music credit: "Carefree"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Juliet Meeks

Designer and Artist

Teacher

 

Hi! I'm Juliet, an artist and designer based in New Orleans. 

You can usually find me painting with watercolor in my studio, designing products for my online shop, and collaborating with other brands. Or creating classes here on Skillshare!

I'm inspired by vintage books and textiles, and the organic shapes of nature. I gravitate towards painting flowers because of how much color exploration they offer, the ability to be loose and playful with them. 

I love teaching you how to paint with watercolor in a way that's approachable and suited to YOUR particular painting style. I want you to feel like you can be playful, expressive, and experiemental when you paint. 

For behind the scenes, find me over on Inst... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Intro: Hey everyone, my name is Juliet and I'm really excited to be back on Skillshare for my second class, and I'm glad you're here taking you with me. I'm a graphic designer, and watercolor artist/surface pattern designer based in New Orleans. Today, I'm going to be going through my exact method of turning my watercolor elements into repeat patterns using Photoshop. First, what we're going to do is paint our watercolor elements. This class works best if you have some basic experience with watercolor. If you don't please check out my other class where I go over the basics of watercolor in more depth. Then also if you have a basic understanding of Photoshop this class will be a lot easier for you. First we'll be going through and painting our individual watercolor elements, and then will be scanning those in and bringing them into Photoshop. I'll show you how to clean them up and turn them into a seamless pattern that you can use for all types of things like on products or in fabric, anything that you can dream up. You can even start using them for clients if that's something you aspire to. Thanks so much for joining me in this class and I hope you learn something new. 2. Watercolor Supplies: First, I'm going to go over the basic watercolor supplies you'll need to get started. You'll need brushes. I use these synthetic round brushes. The biggest size here is a size six going down from there from four, two et cetera. You'll also need a paper towel and two jars of water, one for warm and one for cool tones so your water doesn't get too muddy. Then watercolor paper. This is on a watercolor block, which is glued around the edges so that it doesn't lift up too much when you're using lots of water. I love using fluid, it's a great intermediate brand and I also use cold press for the texture. For watercolor paints, you can use any brand that you like. You can use tube or pan pallets, these are Wins or Newton and mix of watercolor and wash. I find colors that I like and go from there. You'll need a palette this is just a cheap plastic palette or you can also use a paper plate and reference photos. I use a lot of vintage books with vintage botanical, flowers and cacti whatever just draws your eye. I'll go and walk my dog and take photos of plants that I like or I'll even buy a bouquet if I feel like splurging and bring it into my office and paint from that. Whatever gets you inspired and gets you painting just drawing elements from there and finding unique things to work with. Today I'll be using this cactus to paint from for my pattern I will be using the cover mostly as inspiration painting a prickly pear cactus but there's lots of great photos in there. I find these books online or at book fairs and I just love having like a tactile thing to paint from. Next we'll go over painting our elements. 3. Painting Your Elements: Now we get to you get started on a really fun part of the process which is painting your watercolor elements that we will be scanning into our pattern. If you're not as familiar with watercolor painting, I think it's a great painting technique for beginners, but I also offer another Skillshare class that's watercolor basics so I'm going to go really in depth into the watercolor painting process, and it's actually pretty quick class so I recommend taking that one first before you get started on this class, if you are brand new to watercolor painting. I am using this cactus book as inspiration for my painting today. I'm going to focus on a main element for the pattern which is a prickly pear cactus, and then what you can do is find your main element that inspires you, and then have a secondary element like maybe you abstract some leaves from a flower, or maybe you add some geometric elements like circles or triangles, or another third element in addition to just your main flower or cactus or animal or something like that. That way you can add some variety to your pattern and make it more dynamic. I'm just going to get started painting my cactus here using different shades of green just to add some variety to the painting. Then the secondary element I'll be adding to my pattern is flowers, so like you see from the cover of this cactus book, I will have these different types of flowers to play with for re-pattern. I like adding this third type of element which is the more geometric style, and these are just little dashes that are great for filling in small spots in your pattern that really need a space to fill. You can do dots, you can do triangles, you can do anything geometric that you can think of, it brings it to a more modern feel. I'm just going to add a little bit of texture to these cacti just to give it a little more interest. I'm going to grab some of this hot pink watercolor and paint a couple of pink flowers too, you'll see when I scan it in that the color changes a bit so that'll be a good way for me to show you how the scanner can sometimes change the color of your painting, this mostly happens with the neon colors like hot pink. Now that we've painted each of our elements, we're going to let these dry before we scan them in and start editing them for our pattern. 4. Scanning Your Artwork: If you have a scanner, you're probably familiar with this process, but I'm just going to show really quick that I will pull up my scanner software. Then I'm going to scan it in at 600 DPI. Usually, the standard for artwork, it's 300 or 350 DPI, but I'm going to scan at higher because it'll give us some more flexibility with scale and our pattern. I'll go ahead and click "Scan", and I'll name file cacti and click "Okay". That's pretty much of it. I had cut my paper down to fit into the scanner bed, so you may have to do that, but otherwise this is pretty simple. Then I save it to my desktop, then I'll click "Okay", then I will open it in Photoshop. Then we'll get started on the next step. 5. Editing Your Artwork: So now you have your elements scanned in and you fold it into Photoshop. The first thing I'm going to do is remove the white background. There are actually quite a few ways to do this. I'm going to show you the way that I use the most often and there are other ways out there that you can find online, but for me this is what works best for me. So first I'm going to flip it around because it bothers me when it's facing the wrong way. So you go to Image and then rotate it. If you want to zoom in really quickly, if you're on a Mac, click Command and the plus sign. So always the first thing that I like to do is quickly remove the paper edges. You can use the Marquee tool. You can use the Eraser, just whatever you want to use to just get them out the way. They just bother me a little and sometimes when you're removing the background they can get in the way. My paper's always not perfectly straight edge on the bottom because I cut the paper to fit into my scanner bed. The first thing I like to do after that is take the Healing Brush tool and move in any obvious spots, like that was from my scanner bed. There are some other little marks. You can make it smaller. I love the Healing Brush tool. It is your friend. Especially if there's little hairs or dust on the paintings, and I'll usually do a final sweep before I start repeating the pattern block, which we will get to. But just to get a few of them out of the way first because they bother me. So then you'll go over to Levels. This is just again, one of many ways that you can do this and I click the Highlight Eyedropper tool. So this will sample a white part of your image and then help you easily remove it. So I'm going to click the white background on the paper. This paper is textured so you can click around until you get it really white. So that looks pretty good. What you're going to watch out for when you click the background with the Magic Wand, is that lighter areas that you paint in will tend to get kind of jaggened. That's why when I'm painting, I try to be conscious of this and keep my edges darker. I mean, you want to keep the pretty effects of the varying shades of watercolor, but then again, it's like you don't want be just spending all of your time erasing these edges because it'll drive you crazy. Just to kind of clean those up before I erase that background, I will manually go in with the Eraser tool and just make sure you're on the artwork layer and then just get these nice and smooth. Now my method of doing the watercolor, removing the background is, it's not going to give you a perfect smooth edge, but I personally just feel like that's the point of painted-texture watercolor. You don't want it to look messy or unprofessional if you're using this for clients, but, you know, it's not that big of a deal if you have a little painted edge because some people will go in and they will use the Pen tool and they will trace every single element and I just don't have time for that. It would drive me crazy. So this is what I do and I just figure if there's anything that needs to be erased later, I can fix it at the end. I usually like to get to repeating and making my pattern as quickly as possible because that's the fun part. This is not the fun part, but it'll help you get a better pattern in the end, the more detail you put into this section. So I'm just getting on this little light parts that I don't want to look. When I see little spots like that I just have to get the Healing Brush tool out and fix them. No, that guy will be a problem. Then I also want to note at this point before I go any further is, I don't know if you remember me painting these pink flowers, but my scanner, it tends to change the colors a little bit of reds and pinks. I don't want mind this pink that much. It looks slightly weird, but it's not too bad, but again, just something to watch out for when you are scanning in your colors so that they may end up looking slightly different than what you painted or what you imagined. It's just this computer screen it just changes, and it's just the scanner. Some scanners are better than others. I used to have a Canon scanner. The top-row cost, so I got a new Epson scanner, which is great. Epson's awesome, but it definitely does this to the pinks more than my Canon scanner did. So I think that looks pretty good for now. So I'm going to zoom back out, go back to the Magic Wand tool. Just select that white and click Delete on my keyboard. I'm going to just undo that for a second because something else that you can do, is you can select this white and then you go up to Select, and then you'll click Similar; that will select all of the white, but it's tricky because sometimes it will select things that you don't want it to select. It gets getting pretty close to these edges, but that's okay. I may want to try this pattern on a dark background. So I'm just going to delete, click Delete and see what happens. Sometimes a good way to test if you want to see how your pattern is looking in like how you've deleted things if you've done it well is put it on a dark background, doesn't matter the color, doesn't matter if you'll use that. I actually think that looked pretty decent. So again, you can just select the white background on its own and do select similar. That's an easy method. Depends how light your elements are or you can individually go in with the Magic Wand tool. Then what you do, select those sections that were once white, like the middle of these flowers are white and do everything individually. I was pretty happy with how this came out. So that's it for removing the white background. Next step we're going to start rearranging the elements on a pattern block. 6. Setting Up Your Tile: Now you are going to make your art board bigger. You're going to go back up to image again and do Canvas size. I'm going to just do inches. I'm going to actually do 18 by 18 to give it a lot of room. Then if you go up to image size, you'll see that your artwork is 600 DPI. That's what we scanned it in as. The reason I do it at 600 DPI instead of the standard 300 or 350 DPI, is that this way you have major pattern and a larger size so that you can you can scale it down if you want to. But whereas if you were to design your whole pattern at 300 DPI, then you wouldn't be able to scale it up at all without losing some quality. You may not end up using it at 600 DPI, but at least you would have the option of going up or going down from here instead of not having the option going up at all. First I'm going to make a square, and this is going to be your pattern block. I'll just use this random color. It doesn't even have to actually be a square. You can end up later if you want, you can make it more of a rectangle. You can make it squatter. You can pretty much do whatever you want with that. But I'm just going to keep it at a true square for now. Instead of having the background transparent like that, it's just easier for me to see with a white background. I'm going to put just the whole, my background in black and it takes a little while because it's so big. Don't forget to continually save while you are working because there's nothing more frustrating than losing your work. I'm going to rename the layers as I go just to keep it nice and organized. This levels layer, that was just to remove the white background. I actually end up a liking how it looks whenever the levels is on. But for now, we're just going to delete it and we can play with the colors and the levels later if we want to. This is another boring part, but I take the lasso tool and then I separate each element from each other. It's just easier to move around. What I'll do is click "Command X", and then I'll click "Command V", and it will show up on its own layer. I will label each of these layers. You have a lot of elements. It gets me a lot of layers, but for me it just saves time in the long run. I'll even make a little folder for each type of element. There's Cacti 1 because it's Cactus 1, and then the whole group is Cacti. All right. "Command X", " Command V" again. Keep everything the same name. I'm going to go through and do this for each little part. This guy down here, I'm not really sure if I'm going to use it and I don't know if it really fits with the feel of this pattern, but I'm just going to label it extra and put it down there, and going to hide this for now just so I can really see these other elements. It just makes everything so much better when you can play with moving around each little individual element instead of dealing with trying to separate them as you go. Just do this for all of your separate elements, create folders for each of them, and then that way everything will be nice and organized and you'll have your block set up and ready to start patterning. 7. Pattern Time!: Besides the painting, this is where your creativity really gets to kick in. So what you're going to do is just start placing elements on the main block and the more variety of elements that you have, the more variety in your pattern will have, of course. So I don't really have a ton of elements right now, but I'm just going to keep playing with this and see how it's looking. So I'm just going to start with the biggest elements first just arbitrarily place them right now, just thinking loosely about the composition. So what you're going to want to do when you're placing your elements on your block, is avoid putting anything extending on the right or bottom edge. So nothing should be extending on the right or bottom edge. Also, I have found that nothing should be extending on the corner here because you'll lose a little part of it. So you can have it going over the top, you can have a going over the left, but you can't have it on the corner and you can't have it going on the right or the bottom and you'll see why in a little bit. So I'm just thinking about how you can use "Command T" to quickly transform them and rotate them. So I'll just leave those there and then I'll move on to the second biggest element, the flowers. You can make your pattern as dense or with as much negative space as you'd like and you can repeat elements that you've painted by just duplicating them. You can just click "Duplicate Layer" and then you'll have two, and if you want to transform them a little bit, just to make them look different than the original, that works too. So I'm going to continue moving these guys around and what you're going to be thinking about as you work is that, anything that is extending over the top edge is going to be brought down to the bottom edge. So for example, this flower I have here for the top, it's probably just shy of touching this cactus, which is really fine. If you want to have your elements touching each other, that works. I usually tend to have them not touching each other as much but if you have a watercolor painting that is hard to separate from the edges, you can definitely make these edges touch. It's just a matter of really your preference and it's a matter of the field of the pattern, every pattern is different. I'm also thinking about as I'm placing these flowers is, not having too many in the same line. So if I were to put this one here, it would be in the same line as this red one over here. So I might move it down a little bit and think about that. Then I'm just going to try and get everything on the page here and start playing with these dots. These dots, I'm really going to repeat and duplicate the layers with. But for now I'm just putting them on the board. So you can see it's a lot easier to move things around individually once you have these different layers set up. So I'm just going to keep playing with this here until I feel I'm at a place where I can start testing the tile. This is really a fun part. There's just so many ways that you can take a pattern depending on the layout that you go with. I'm probably going to leave a little bit of negative space in this pattern just so I can have a nice colored background or maybe I'll leave a white background. I'm not sure yet, but that's what's great about this is, it's so flexible. I'm just going to do a quick test to see how everything is looking. So I'm going to go over here and duplicate my folders and click "Merge." I'm going to hide my other folders. So the way that you start testing your pattern and start seeing how the elements are lining up with each other, is you should go to the top and you select everything that is extending over that box. So you want to zoom in really good and then get that selection right on the line. Sometimes the guides will automatically do it for you but I'm just pretty particular, so I like to make sure that it's right on the line because otherwise when you're repeating it, you will have a little white strip or colored strip if you don't get it right on that line. So once that's there, I will hold down on my selection and I will hold "Shift" and then the reason you hold shift is because it keeps it in place. Then I will go pretty far down and then I'll use the up and down arrows on my keyboard to get it, again, right on that line. Then you hit "Command D" to deselect. So those are actually looking pretty good. I don't really mind that this one's touching too much. I may go back and move this flower and make that flower a little bit smaller but otherwise that looks good. Then I just make a mental note of what needs to be changed but you could maybe do some more visual note-taking in Photoshop to just by maybe circling with the paintbrush or something, the area that you want to pay attention to. Then you'll do the same exact thing on the left side and again, you'll hold "Shift" and then just move it to the right. That looks pretty good too and what I'll go back in and do is, fill in all these areas. But I'm not done with this yet, but I'm going to show you what the idea is here just so you could really get a feel. So I'm going to duplicate that layer, hit "Shift" again, just to get it lined up and I'll just keep duplicating them. This is, again, just to give you an idea of how your pattern is looking. I'm just going to undo this after. Just to show you, so this is how it's perfectly repeating. So as long as you get those lines set up just right, you'll make sure that you have a seamless repeat and that block is just the source of the repeat and you can just infinitely repeat it. It's really cool. So I'm going to delete all this and go back to my little problem areas and get my block back again and I'm just going to play with this some more. So once I feel the layout is looking good, I'm going to take all these extra layers that I added and I'm going to group them into a folder and duplicate them just so that I have a copy of what I did of each of them on their own layers, just in case I ever need them because what I'm going to do is merge this group so that I have my block. Again, I'll just test the block again. As we do this more often, it will becomes quicker. I'm going to bring this one down here and just duplicate that one because I think I'm fairly done just so that I have a whole bunch of copies to test, which is nice to see it and see all the hard work you put into it. From here, you can just start testing background colors. Again, if you're not satisfied with the way your repeat is looking, just keep going through it. Like I said, the process is going to get quicker but if you want to just play quickly with background colors, I've always had in my head I wanted to do a light pink background for this. So I like that peachy pink. Playing with backgrounds can be very tricky. That was my foreground. They can be very tricky. So for example, this is not working at all because the pink is too close to those pink flowers, it's competing with that yellow. So I may want to make this even lighter, maybe even lighter than that. That has a nice subtle pink to it, which I like and, again, we can just play with a dark background too. So I could do maybe a really dark green. You can see how that might look. Maybe even a little darker. So whatever just doesn't really pulsate on your eye, if it's a certain color is if you're looking at it too long with another color and it's starting to make your eyes hurt, then that's probably not a good combination. So something like just really blends well with the colors in your pattern and it can be hard when you have a whole bunch of colors in your pattern, it's hard to find a neutral color that will work with all of them but you'll start to be able to move quickly, see which works. Also sometimes it's really nice to have a dark contrasting background. Then also have a light background that you can choose from and play with. That's just an idea of backgrounds. I'm going to merge these for now just so I have a reference point but before I really truly finish up the block, I want to go back and check for anything that needs cleaning up. So there are some edges that could use some cleaning up and you can do this. If you do this even more in depth beforehand, that's really even better but any digital dust, it's my design professor used to say, you want to clean up. Just give it a final sweep so you feel like you really have a pattern that you're confident with. Next step, we'll do a final test of the repeat and then I'll also talk a little bit about color. 8. Testing Repeat and Color: One way that you can really test to see how your pattern is looking as if you squint and then also if you zoom out at a smaller scale. You can see when you're squinting, what you're looking for is that obvious square pattern block that you don't want to see. But otherwise you want it to move dynamically. You don't really want any very obvious striping. When I squint on this pattern, I can see a strike going up and down here and that might be because this guy is so vertically position. Maybe if I tilted him a little to the left or to the right it would help a little bit with that striping, but otherwise this one really isn't too bad. I'm just going to keep it as is for now, but that's just a thought and that's a common trick that people use as squinting, viewing it at a smaller scale, not just the block, but many blocks so that you can really get a feel for how it's repeating. Then another thing I want to talk about right now is color because you want to think about your end product for your patterns. Since you're working in Photoshop, these elements are not vector like they would be in illustrator, so it makes it harder to change the color and vector. You can use paint and colors, you can use easily just switch between whatever kind of color you need. Of course, in Photoshop, you can do CMYK, which is from print, or you can do RGB, which is usually for web but some sites like I think Spoonflower, I believe when I upload patterns, some of them are RGB. Just to keep in mind your output for your pattern and make sure you're working in the color mode that you would expect to be needing. Then you can also play with the actual colors of your pattern and you can do this in different ways. You can do this with individual elements before you start patterning them. Or you can just for a quick, just fun look at how it would look in different colors. You go up to hue saturation and you can go under master here and just move the bar. It's pretty fun to see how it changes. I like these, this pinker feel than the red and the orange dots. That's fun and very rich in color. Of course, you want to keep in mind that the background color will affect how it looks to you. Sometimes when you do this hue saturation, it really gets to be too much like there are some elements you can see, those were the pink flowers that it's just not working out. But just as an example of how you can play with it quickly, you can also select specific colors. If I wanted to just do, let's see the yellows, if that will pick up those dots. That's a quick way to change those dots to a new color, maybe something a little darker. It's also picking up those greens, so that may not be the best one we can play with red. It's a really fun way because color just really affects the feel of your pattern. It can be more serious or more fun and it's just so important. Colors, just so important. Enjoy playing around with it and for our next video, we are going to play with putting our patterns on product mark ups. I'm going to use a few free ones that I found online and I will include them in the class notes. 9. Mockups and Exporting: We'll just play with this and start getting our pattern on to products, which is always really fun to see and play with.I'm going to select all. Then I'm going to go to your mock-up and the way most mock-ups work is you double-click this file that layer there. It's nice because my pattern is so large, I can really play with scale on this pillow. That looks right to me. I'm going to add a very light pink background to this, let's do even lighter. Then you'll hit save and there's your mock-up. This is always just a really fun thing to see and please feel free to share your mock-ups in your class projects. I'd love to see how your patterns came along from beginning to end and I'm sure everyone else would love to see your mock-ups too. Just a quick word on exporting your pattern block. What you'll want to do, for example, if you were to upload your pattern to a site like Spoonflower, what you'll need is just the block, not the white background, only the pattern and the color background that you would like. Let's just pretend that this block is our colored backgrounds. What I would do is go to that colored layer, select outside of it. Then go up to select and select inverse and then go to image and select crop. You'll probably want to save this as a new file, you probably want to keep the art board version of this file in case you ever want to go back and edit your pattern. I would just save as new file name. That way you have your block, you can export your JPEG from here. You can change the DPI if you need to make it bigger. Right now the scale of this pattern is at about 7.8 inches. That is the scale of repeat. If you wanted to make it bigger, you can change the DPI and you click re-sample. That would make it almost 12 inches, I would just make sure you save that as something else so you always have your original 600 DPI block in case you ever need it. That's it for now. Please let me know if you have any questions because I will be answering them as soon as I see them in the class discussion and please share your class projects with the class because I know we'd all love to see what everyone else is working on. All right, thanks guys, enjoy. 10. Bonus Video! Alternate Pattern Method: Now that we've made a repeat pattern with the first method, i'm going to show you an alternate method. I encourage you to try both and see which one you like. It's just up to your preference. They're both a different means to the same end. For this method, what you're going to do is you're already going to have all of your elements organized on their own separate layers and then in the different folders for the groupings of the type of elements just to make it easier for you. Then the difference with this method is we're going to set the Canvas size to a square. You'll go up to image and then canvas size and make it either 5000 or 6000 pixels. Mine is 6000 pixels. Since it's at 600 DPI, it's a little bit larger. I went with 6000 by 6000 pixels. Then I've already done the next step here, which is arranging all of my elements in the center of the square with no elements touching the edges. Just do it in a way that works for you a statically. Then once you have all of your elements organized in the center, well actually first you're going to take those elements and you're going to group them so you can actually just do select all the folders and "Command G" to group. Then you'll want to duplicate that group so you can do "Command J" if you're on a Mac, and then you'll merge that group so that's "Command E". The reason you do this is to keep your original separated elements. You don't have to go back and redo that whole process. Now that you've got your grouped layer, you're going to select that and then you'll go to Filter, Other, and then offset. I have it already in here but what you're going to do is your going to put exactly half of your Canvas size in each of these sections, so half of 6000 is 3000 so I will put 3000 in each of these boxes and then you just click "Okay". Then what you'll see is this cross shape. The basic idea here is that you're just going to add your elements again inside this cross shape, but you don't want any elements touching the sides here. That's why I do the first method better is because if we don't have any elements touching the bottom and top here, there may be some white areas that we can't quite fill because it's not fully cropping those elements off. Also that's why the first method is just a little bit more creative control but then this method is so quick that you may like this one better. Now what I'm going to do is go through and start placing my elements in this empty space and paying attention to not putting elements that are just like each other right next to each other. I will duplicate this group it or you can do "Command J" and if it's easier for you to see what was already placed what the layers that were already placed were you can just lower the opacity. Then you'll go through here and just start, moving them around, I like to hide all the different ones first and then fight with the largest elements first. Now I have my space nicely filled in. What I'm going to go ahead and do now is duplicate that group, and then again that was "Command J", and then I'm going to merge that group as well with Command E and that way we have the original saved. Then I'll go ahead and up the opacity back to a 100 percent and then merge those two as well. Now that you have your pattern tile, what you can do is go up to "Edit' and then make sure you have your patterns selected over on the Layers panel and then click "Define Pattern" and then you can just name this whatever you want and click "Okay". Then what we'll do is start testing the repeat. We'll create a new document and I'll just make it 2000 pixels and it's got a white background so what you can do is double-click on this layer, go to "Pattern Overlay" and then when you click this box, you will see that you have your pattern saved. Once you click your pattern, you can reduce or increase the scale really easily. This is also a great way to see how your repeat is looking. Then you can just hit "Okay" and again, squint and look at your tile and if anything's looking off, you can go back and correct it. This one, for example, it has some striping here along where there was that blank space and so again, that's why this method you just want to make sure that you are having a really dynamic and harmonious pattern without too many obvious striping or square shaped tiles because you just don't want to see that tile really glaringly obviously. But otherwise, that's it for this method. Try out both and see which one works for you.