Hand-Painted Seamless Textures for Surface Pattern Design

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Ever wanted to be able to use your gorgeous hand-painted textures in your surface patterns but thought there was no easy way to make them seamless? Or maybe you've tried doing it in Photoshop and were never quite happy with the results. What if I told you, you could transform them into seamless backgrounds with just one click of a mouse? [NOISE] Okay, maybe not that mouse. [MUSIC] I'm Bekki Flaherty, a UK Illustrator, and my specialty is pattern design. This is my third Skillshare class and I'm so excited to be teaching here because this is where I learned the basics that got me started in my career as a surface designer. I've been selling and licensing my artwork for nearly seven years now, and in that time, I've constantly been tweaking and refining my workflow, coming up with new ideas and techniques to create my own methods for creating patterns and illustrations. My friends tell me that productivity and workflow are my secret superpowers. I initially got started selling my designs through print-on-demand sites such as Redbubble, Society6 and Spoonflower, flower I now license my work through a wide range of companies such as Etsy and Mixtiles as well as working with small and large businesses or freelance commissions. In this Skillshare class, you'll learn how to make gorgeous, seamless textures to use as backgrounds in your surface pattern designs. Prints and patterns with a hand-drawn textured feel are very much on-trend at the moment. Just looking through the bestsellers on a site like Spoonflower, you can see that a lot of these patterns have these beautiful textures used in them. Adding a textured background can really make a finishing touch that makes your design look polished and professional and they really add depth and dimension to a design. I'll be using a painted texture as an example in this class. But this technique is great for making seamless textures. I have all sorts of different media such as crayons, collage, pastel, and even photographs. Basically, as long as you can scan or photograph your texture, then you can make it seamless. This is an intermediate class for students who are familiar with the very basics of pattern design and are already using Photoshop, but it's also a great class for more advanced designers as the skills you'll learn apply to a much wider range of techniques than just creating seamless background textures. For example, making seamless textures to apply to your motifs using different blend modes or applying textures over shapes to create paper-cut style designs. As well as teaching you how to make seamless tiles, I'm also going to show you all my tips and tricks and shortcuts as we go along, for example, how to check the seams on a pattern tile, as well as how to resize and export tiles without getting that dreaded gap down the seams and how to use backgrounds in pattern tiles with different dimensions. There are lots of tips and tricks and shortcuts you'll pick up on the way to speed up your workflow. After taking this class, you'll be able to create beautiful seamless texture backgrounds that fit perfectly with the rest of the motifs in your pattern and you won't have to use boring flat backgrounds ever again. I can't wait to see you in class. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] As you probably guessed, your class project will be to create your own seamless texture using any medium you like. You can use any paints you have such as watercolor, acrylic, or gouache, or if you work with crayons or pastels, they will be perfect too. It just needs to be a texture you can make a scan off but high-res photograph may also work well. You can present the pattern either as it is, with a background or a more complicated pattern you've made. You can share an image of the pattern tile or even present it on a mock-up. I can't wait to see what you come up with. Let's get started In the next lesson. 3. Creating Your Texture: [MUSIC] Let's get started with some painting. This method will work for almost any medium as long as you're able to scan it after you've made it. I've used this technique for watercolor, gouache, and acrylic, which is what I'm going to be using in this time-lapse. The actual paints or brushes you use, all are important. So you should use whichever tools and supplies you are already working with for your artwork and pan designing. The basic idea is to fill a page with a painted or drawn background that you would like to use with your pattern motifs. Here I'm using acrylic paint and creating a subtle painted background with a few chunky brushstrokes. The most important thing to remember when you're painting is that it is a background layer, and therefore, it shouldn't be too busy or detailed. There's two reasons for this. Firstly, I would say that a background layer shouldn't be competing for attention with the main motifs of your pattern. It's just meant to be a simple texture layer, just one or two steps above being a plain color background. Any extra detail should be worked in these motifs and your main pattern. The second reason we don't want to go too detailed here and why you wouldn't end up using this method on the shortcut I'll teach to make a whole pattern, is that it will result in the merging and patching together of some areas of the pattern. If we use a really detailed texture, then that would be really obvious and look blurred in places. But by keeping this whole painted texture quite subtle, it will look seamless and natural. Another thing to keep in mind, which goes hand-in-hand with it not being too busy is to keep the colors that you use fairly close to each other. I'm using three similar shades of green for this texture and two peachy pink tones with very small amounts of a darker brown for the other one. Again, this is because if we use three wildly different colors, is going to be a too busy for A background layer, and B won't blend together very well when we come to patch it together to make it seamless. I'm making two textures here hair samples. The first one was a square and this second one is a rectangle. As I'll be teaching you in a later lesson, there are ways to use a square texture tile in a rectangular pattern and vice versa. It's not a massive deal to paint in the same ratio as your pattern is going to be. But that's it. If you know in advance which pattern you're painting the background for, then it makes sense to paint a square if its for square pattern, etc. But if you just creating textures to add to your pattern library to use in future patterns, then just know for now that there's a way to work around the different ratios. If you want a deeper dive into creating textures to use in your work, and I highly recommend taking a look at SU Gibbons class on texturing motifs where she teaches some really fun ways of making different textures which will be perfect for them making seamless with this method I'm going to show you next. I'll put a link for that class in the resources section. Once you have your textures painted, the next step is to scan them, and I'll show you how to do that in the next video. 4. Scanning: [MUSIC] Let's go through a few best practice tips when scanning your artwork. Once you open up the software, it will immediately start up an overview scan. You want to make sure you are scanning in color and you have your resolution as high as it will go. Mine will go up to 1200 dpi, which means that I can use this artwork at a much larger scale than I've created it at. If you plan on printing your artwork, the minimum you want to scan out is 300 dpi. I'm going to leave these other parts as they are, and I'm going to set the selection area myself by dragging to create a binding box. You'll notice here there's a few extra pieces of paper behind the one which I'm scanning. When I'm scanning painted artwork and the paper has got a bit buckled and crinkled, I add a few extra sheets behind it to increase the thickness of what's on the scanner bed, and that makes the lid press down a bit tighter and irons everything a lot flatter as I'm scanning. I'm going to set the file location at this point because I like to keep my work organized as I go. I'm going to save this in my Skillshare folder here. Then I'm going to change the file name to something that I will recognize afterwards. I'm going to leave it as PNG and I am going to do a bit of image correction here. Let's just drag this so that we can see a bit better what's going on. I think I'm going to move the brightness, maybe down a bit. Let's take the temp back this way, so we bring out the greens. I think temperature, probably leave it where it is. Set this saturation to know. You can see it's quite great, and also we'll take that up a bit as well. Then I am going to hit "Scan" while pressing down on the top of the scanner bed to help iron out any crinkles in there. If you don't press down on it, you might find, or at least I find that on my scanner I get some slightly out of focus parts of the scan where, as I said, it can be a bit buckled and bent if you've painted something, and even with those extra sheets behind it, you still can get little bits that are slightly out of focus, so press down and it should iron it all nice and smooth for you. But do try and keep your hand distilled as you can while you're doing that to avoid any shaking of the scanner. Once you have all your textures scanned in, join me in the next video and we'll look at how to make them seamless. 5. Opening in Gimp: The first thing we need to do to start processing our tile is to download GIMP if you don't already have it. If you do a search for GIMP download, and then you go to gimp.org. You'll see here a page where it will have all the downloads. I'm going to download GIMP for macOS, but they also do windows and Linux versions. Choose a direct download rather than using BitTorrent and then just follow the regular instructions for installing an app on your device. Once you have GIMP installed, you need to open your file in it. I would right-click on the file and then go to ''Open With'' and then choose GIMP and that will open in the program. There you'll see your tile on the screen. Now, don't worry too much about all these tools down here on the side, we are only going to be using this rectangle select tool here. Before we get started, you need to make sure that you have a fixed ratio turned on if you want to do a square and you can select aspect ratio there if that's not come up for you and we want 1:1 total square. Also, check that you have feather edges unchecked as we don't want any feather [inaudible] when creating a pattern tile, so I just click to drag a square. You want to make sure that all the edges of the square have paint inside them. You don't want any unpainted edges. For example, if I just drag this over here, you can see down the left there is an area there that is unpainted. We want all of the square to be painted. Once you've done that and set the area, we are going to go up here to Image. We are going to go crop to selection. That's trimmed off all the excess. Next job is to go up to filters, map, and then tile seamless. That will then perform some magic transformation where it's flipping things around and merging them and your tile is now seamless. If you scan to a lower resolution like 300dpi, you might notice that change happens so quickly, you don't see it, so don't worry if you don't see the lines going across the screen as it changes like with mine. Once that's done, you need to click ''Okay''. We're now going to export this pattern tile. We go to file. I'm going to go to Export As I'm in the right folder here. But you can choose any other location you want to save it in and I'm just going to add something extra to this filename so it saves it as a new version. Just click ''Export'' again on the screen. You don't need to change any of these details. Then this part here can take quite a while so I've sped this part for you. Now we have a square version of the tile saved. I want to save a rectangular version. I'm going to hit ''Command Z'' to undo the last two things which I did, which was the tile seamless crop to selection. I'm going to go back up here to the rectangle select tool and as you can see, it's still in fixed aspect ratio. We need to turn that off and uncheck that box. Then I'm just going to drag out a rectangle shape this time. As before, making sure that the paint goes all the way off the edges of the rectangle. Then as before, we're going to go up to Image, Crop to selection. Then up to filters, map and tile, seamless. Then once that's done, we can click ''Okay''. Then just the same as before, we're going to go to Export As and then save this as a separate file. I'm just going to add rectangle to the name there and then click on ''Export''. We can leave all this as it is and just click ''Export'' again. That's our two tile saved out. We have our square version and a rectangular version. When you quit GIMP, it will ask you if you want to save the changes, always click ''discard changes''. We have our two tiles saved and we don't want to save the crop and the seamless pattern to the original file because we might want to use that at a later date for other things. Here's all our files in our folder. In the next video, we will open them in Photoshop. Make any small edits or correction to the files that we need to check that their tiling seamlessly and look at how to apply them to our patterns. Just going to end this video with a quick step-by-step of all the things you need to do in GIMP. If you want to take a screenshot of that for referring back to later. 6. Testing the Tile: [MUSIC] Now in our folder we can see we've got four different versions of those seamless textures saved. I'm going to right-click on this one and choose open with Photoshop. Now, the first thing that I always do is to test that the tile is definitely tiding properly and has no seams in it. There's several ways to do this, but I find the quickest way is to use the offset filter. What this does is shift every pixel across and down or left, right, up, down by amount that you tell it to. Where pixels go off the edge of your tile, they'll be brought back on this side. You can get to that by going to filter, other, and offset. I always have mine set to shift 100 right and 100 times, so the seam that was up here, the edge is now here and here. I'll click Okay. If I zoom in and then undo that, you can see if I undo it's bought what was the edge here, and what that is there? When I redo that, you can see the edge is here. If we zoom in, we can just pan along the top here and check there's no mistakes on that tile. That's looking good on that side. Then the other edge is the verticals that we need to check so we can pan up and down here. See that that's all looking correct. I'm going to press Command 0 to get back to full screen view, zoom back and edit. Undo that again and I'm just going to show you what it would look like if something had gone wrong. I'm on this layer here. Let's just get my brush tool by pressing B. Let's do draw a black blob on there. I'm not sure if this is a shortcut that I've set up myself or if it's a standard macron, I think it might be one I've set up myself. I use the shortcut Command Shift O for offset. You can see that if there is a problem on the edge, you'll see that it doesn't tile properly. Those are the things to look out for when you're planning along these things not looking quite right. Using this offset filter is how I test all my patterns before exporting to make sure there aren't any mistakes I haven't spotted. It's not just useful for these seamless textures. This is a thing I use for every single pattern I make, I will always do that offset check to scan along the horizontal edge, on the vertical edge. Now this is a seamless texture tile. We've painted it, we've made it seamless using GIMP, and we brought it into Photoshop to check that it's tiling properly. I'm going to now add it as a pattern. You can see why I've got these here, why I was doing some tests before, just delete those. This is the pattern's panel. If you don't have that on your screen, you can go to Window and make sure you've got patterns checked and that will bring it up. On your pattern layer, you can press the little Plus icon here in the pattern's panel. Just click Okay, and that will then save this as a pattern's watch. You can now add a layer and just click to add this pattern to it. To start with it wouldn't look any different because it's just added the pattern over the pattern and it's the same. You can see I use the move tool. You can do the same offset test by clicking and dragging this pattern around. That's is another option for checking that your pattern tiles are working seamlessly. Just going to undo that to keep it in the right place. I'm going to set the scale of this a bit different, so double-click on that little icon there. I'm going to change the scale to 50 percent. You can see it's now made the scale smaller. This is how it's looking in repeat. Now, the quick glance at this one, I don't know if you can notice it, but my eyes, I'm finding them really drawn to this white spot here that's being repeated. I'm going to go and clean that up, I think. Let's hide this layer. Go back to this one. There's a couple of ways we could do this. It's this little lodge here and here. You can fix small areas like this with the Spot heal tool. I think we'll lose our nice texture if we do that. You can see that's not really done a great job of that, that does work in some instances. For example, this little speck here, I just make this brush a bit smaller. I think probably if I click on that it will nicely get rid of that. If you want a really smooth texture, you don't want those hand painted imperfections in the other little specks, which I'm fine with because I think they make it feel real. I'm not going to go ahead and get rid of any more of those, but if you wanted to, that spot heal brush is great for that. What I'm actually going to use is the, what is it actually called? Hopefully this here, the Clone Stamp Tool shortcut is S for that. I'm going to press Option or hold Option and click on an area similar to this, so the green, I'm going to click here, and then that will copy this area over to here. I think that's going to do a much better job of cleaning up that little white hold there. There was another one here, so let's do the same thing there. Press Command 0 to see the full screen again. We're going to do the same thing again in our pattern's panel. Press the little Plus icon. Just click Okay. You'll see this a second copy added there, so then when we go back to this layer here and then we click this new one, you should see those now disappear and looking at the difference between the two, that's a lot less obvious now. I think that's done a good job of fixing that and I'm happy with this background design. Once you've made your pattern tile and you have in Photoshop, and you've put it into repeat, make the scale 50 percent. Just look at it zoomed down and you'll be able to see if there's any glaringly obvious mistakes which use either the spot heal brush or the clone stamp brush to just smooth and iron those out. What we need to do now is I'm going to delete this layer because we've made a change to this and we've corrected these two areas, I'm going to hit Command S to save. Here we go. Let's now open the rectangle version of this one. As before we're going to do filter, other offset, and just do the 100 pixels to the right and 100 pixels down. I'm going to zoom in here just to check. Now that's looking okay. I'm noticing this here again, so I'm predicting that we will probably have to fix that little thing when we put this into a smaller scale. Let's do that now. I'm going to undo the offset and this as a pattern file up there. Then we will add a new layer and add this pattern to it. Again, you can't see anything straightaway because it's just added an exact copy over the top. I'm going to go back into my move tool, but you can see this is pattern, undo that. Again, change the scale to 50 percent and you can see these are really standing out to me, those white patches. We'll go in here with our clone stamp tool S. Hold down Z to zoom in and set that area there with Option and click. Just go over that. There we go. Again, option click. That should be okay, so we do Command 0 to give it to full screen. I think that little blob there I might actually use the spot heal brush to fix that because it looks a bit more noticeable in this smaller version. I'm going to hold down Z and drag to zoom in and just fix that a bit. Command Z, sorry Command 0 to zoom out. I just have a quick look for my fix that one up there. That might actually be the same bit repeated up there, I'm not sure. Let's fix that anyway. Now we're going to add this as a pattern. Show this layer again and add this new onto it. I love that feeling of updating it with the new pattern and you see the difference of the before and after coming backwards and forwards. That's one of my favorite things about painting design [LAUGHTER]. Anyway, let's delete this layer. We going to come on tests, save to update a file with the corrections. Then in the next video, we'll look at how to add the background into one of our patterns. 7. Using the Tile in a Pattern: [MUSIC] Now that we've got our seamless texture tiles, let's have a look at how to use them as a background. I have this pattern tile file here. We have a background layer of this flat color here, I've got leaves as one layer. I've got flowers as another layer. You can use your texture tile in a pattern as long as the texture tile is the same size or larger than the pattern you want to put it into. This tile here, I go to Command Option, I can look at the image size. You can see this is 4,100 pixels square at a resolution of 300 pixels per inch. If we go to this square texture seamless here, you can see this is 12,000 Pixels per inch. This file is pretty massive. It's going to fit into this one, no problem. Let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to hide these two layers just while we work above this one. I'm going to do File, Place Embedded. Again, I'm not sure if this is a Photoshop shortcut on [inaudible], myself. This command Shift P, but that's what you want to use. I am going to put in, which one was it? Square texture seamless. I'm going to make sure I have snapping turned on. I'm going to hold down Shift while I drag because I want to be able to drag this properly into the corners and snap it into the corners because if I do this a moment it's not snapping. If I hold Shift and drag, you can see it will then snap into the corners. To resize it, then you can check-in that little box there to the right of the cursor. The width is 4167 like it was supposed to be. Just needs some pattern. know that's done and then hit Enter to set that transformation. Now, because we've resized this image, we need to use the offset tool again to check the seams again. I'm going to add a darker layer underneath. I'm going to hit Command J to duplicate this color layer. Just double-click on that and make it black. You'll see why I'm doing that in just a moment. Because we've reduced the number of pixels in this image, Photoshop has made a new version of this tile name. We need to check, but it's still seamless. We're going to do the Command Shift. I'm going to do this way because I'm not sure that Command Shift O is a shortcut I've made up or not. Let's go-to filter other Offset and we've got 100 pixels. Let's zoom in up here. I don't know if you can see. I see right in. There's the 100 pixels in dye mark, we've got this faint line here. This is because where we've made the image smaller, we've reduced the number of pixels. Photoshop has to use its smart machine learning to build a new version of that image. If we were just resizing something is not a repeating tile, that wouldn't be a problem with that, but because when you're repeating a tile, every pixel needs to match up exactly with every pixel on the other edge. You can't leave it to guesswork for Photoshop to make that pixel perfect. You will get this same here. But there is a super-easy way to fix it. The reason I put this black behind, if I were to take that out, you wouldn't notice it and it's because these pixels here they're semi-transparent. You can see the black through it whereas with this green one is the same color, so you don't see it. That's why I always put a really contrasting color behind any pattern tile I'm making when I do this to check. Let's turn that back on a second. There was a super-easy way to fix this. Just going to make sure I've got my seamless layer selected. I'm going to hit Command J a few times, which will duplicate that layer. You can see it gets rid of a line. Because those layers of semi-transparency stuck up and become non-transparent and then the problem goes away. Let's track this up a bit because I've got a bit more room. There we go. I'm going to hold down Shift and click on this bottom layer. Then I'm going to press Command M, which will merge them. You can get to that by right-clicking and it's an option down here. We need to have two layers selected. Let's undo that. Right-click and Merge Layers. If you don't have Command M's up, I keep loose track of keyboard shortcuts that I've set up for things that I use often and ones that are actually official shortcuts. I will give you both options as we go through. Now we have this tiling seamlessly. Let's zoom out a bit. We can just pan across to make sure that that's all fine and go down. If you want to put it back in its original position, you can bring up [NOISE] Offset again, Filter Other Offset. If you change this to minus 100, that will put it back where it was before we use the offset filter. With background tiles, I'd be happy to leave that where it was. I wouldn't need to put it back where it was. But if you wanted to do your test and then you've done too much to undo it, you can just go back and change it to minus numbers and it will put it back where it was before. Just as a side note here that's related to what we were just doing. A quick tip for anyone who uploads to Spoonflower. If you're ever resizing a pattern tile to upload to Spoonflower or anywhere for that matter, always do this test. The offset with a darker hold that much lighter layer behind to test that the edges are still seamless after you've resized it. Because when you are reducing the size of an image and Photoshop is compiling and rebuilding the edges of that pattern at the smaller size. Nine times out of ten, you will get that seam of transparency. Always check. Now we have a nice painted motif as the seamless background. Let's zoom out, Command 0. Zoom out a bit more. Now let's put this leaf layer back in. As you can see, having this nice painted background looks a lot nicer beside these two layers than just the flat color. It looks more authentic. It has a nicer feel to it. You can change the color of this if you wanted to. Have your layer selected, go to Adjustments and we can choose Hue, Saturation. You can play around with color if you wanted it more green. If you've got lots of different colors in your image, you will find that as you drag along. These areas here, in particular, are transforming at a slightly different rate. If I bring the saturation up, you can see there's a little bit of weirdness going on. Be careful when you're playing around with the color that you're not pushing it too far. If you want to change it to a completely different color then I would suggest using the colorize option here and use that. Because then you'll get a flat color. Let's go for something quite like this.This Blue color. It has a nice bit of contrast there. There you go. That's how to use a single tile in the background of a pattern file that you've already made. 8. Changing the Scale: [MUSIC] Now we're going to cover how you can use your tile in a pattern that is larger than your seamless texture tile. Well, because it's seamless, you can place any number of these texture tiles into a design and line them up to fit the width and the height of the pattern you want to use them in. Let's hide these again and let's place the file in again. I'm just going to hit "Enter" for now. Let's pretend this is a much smaller file, say this is around 2,000 pixels wide. We're going to need to put two of these across to make it stretch to 4,000 pixels. Because these are background tiles, they're not the detailed sharp images of your main pattern, the motifs, you do have a little bit of wiggle room, so it is okay to enlarge the tile a tiny bit. For example, this is 4,100 pixels wide, this image. If I had, say this pattern tile was 2,000 pixels wide, it will be okay to make it 2,050-ish pixels wide to stretch to halfway. Because it's a background, it's okay if you see a little bit of softening of the image, but I wouldn't push it too much. To make sure we're putting these in the right places, I'm going to drag out some guidelines here. If you don't have your rulers on your screen, you can go to View [LAUGHTER] and make sure you've got Rulers checked there. Then just click anywhere up here. If you pull it down about halfway, you'll see that it will just snap into place and we're going to drag across as well. There we go. Now we have these four sections marked. I'm going to drag this up here until it snaps into the corner, those pink lines. I'm going to hit Command T to transform and holding down Shift, so that lets me free transform it and snap it. I am going to bring it and snap into place there, and press "Enter". Now, we've got this tile here. We're going to repeat that in these sections. I'm going to hold down Command. You can do it by hitting Command J, duplicate that and drag it across. But I prefer to do it by holding down with the Move Tool selected, Command, Option, and Shift all at the same time. Then just drag this across. It snaps into place. Then do the same again with this and the same again that way, keeping Command, Option, and Shift held down. Because we resized the tile by dragging it to fit these guidelines, it's likely not guaranteed because we only resize that a little bit, but it is likely that we're going to see that semi-transparent line show up where we've resized the tile. I'm going to hide the guidelines by holding Command and colon. I'm going to zoom in making sure we've got this black layer here behind the guidelines. Actually, I think this is probably okay, because we didn't resize it too much, but mostly when I'm doing this, I do see the semi-transparent line showing up here. I'm going to merge these layers, these four things. I'm going to right-click and go to Merge Layers. Then we're going to do that offset again just to check, so filter other offset, and it changes back to 100 positive pixels rather than negative 100. As expected we've got this line there, so we're just going to duplicate this layer by hitting Command J three or four times. We're going to select them and we're going to merge layers. Now when you do your tile, if you find that you did have a seam showing top to bottom and left to right, tap Command J, duplicate, and then merge. That would have got rid of that. We may see that happen in the next thing with my tiles. But if you've got rid of it up there, you can rest assured that you will have got rid of it there if you had one. That's now our repeated pattern. That's how to use a smaller tile multiple times within the same pattern. If you needed to, say you only had a pattern tile that was 1,000 pixels wide, you could set up guidelines for repeating it four times across the pattern. Now you can see we've got these two options for different scale repeats within our pattern. Drag this color adjustment layer, so we've got the smaller scale that we've just created by repeating the tile four times. Then we've got the larger tile. Have a play around and see which looks best whether you prefer the larger scale or the smaller scale, it's always worth doing. Now that we've looked at how to duplicate a square tile multiple times within the same pattern, in the next video, we're going to look at resizing a tile to fit in a square pattern tile. 9. Using a Tile with a Different Ratio: [MUSIC] So let's have a look now at how you can use for rectangular title as a background on a square pattern. Let's go to Place Embedded. I'm going to put my rectangle texture in the seamless version. I'm going to rotate this by 90 degrees. Let's just hit enter there. Let's bring up our guides again. I'm going to get rid of, not this one. I'm going to get rid of this one. Then I'm going to go to my rectangle texture. I'm going to hit Command T. Actually, let's hide these layers, make it easier. Let's hit Command T. Let us try get up to the corner here. Holding down Shift, let's resize it here. We have just adjusted the ratio. Give it an eyeball if it still looks within the realms of what is realistic for it to look like, as in if we were resizing it like that. That's obviously it doesn't really look like good anymore. Or if we were resizing it like that. But yeah, you can change the ratio as long as you're mindful that you are changing it around and you stick to what looks okay. If you noticed any loss of image quality where you stretched it too much, then you would have to go back and look at the size you cut out for that pattern and try something different. That looks okay. I'm going to bring this black layer to underneath, let's use Command J this time. Let's duplicate this layer here. We've duplicated this layer. Let's drag it down and snap it into place there. Let's hide our guidelines. I think on this occasion we are going to see that line there, maybe not. I think that might be a rendering issue. Because when you zoom in further, it disappears. But let's merge these two layers together. Yeah, see that's got a line on merging it, but if you were to see a definite line there, again, this duplicating, emerging or fix it. If we go to Filter, Other, Offset, and we zoom in. You'll see we've only got a line there, I guess, because we resized it more on that axis. Let's duplicate this layer four times, select them all, Merge Layers. There we go. Now we have this merged layer with new seams in it. That's how you would use a rectangular tile to fill a square space. Obviously, this color doesn't work that great, so we would want to change the color of this one slightly purple. Now we've covered a few different options for using the seamless textures as backgrounds in your existing patterns. We've looked at using the square template to fill a pattern just on its own as long as the texture is larger than what you're putting into. We've looked at how to duplicate that tile within a pattern if you want to make more copies of it or have a smaller scale and we've looked at how to make a rectangle tile, fill a square pattern tile. Hopefully, now you've got lots of ideas of your own and I can't wait to see what creations you come up with. 10. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Thank you so much for taking this class. I really hope that you've enjoyed it and found it useful. Now that you know how easy it is to create seamless backgrounds from your own hand-drawn creations and apply them to your patterns, you will never need to use a boring flop background again. Any time I have leftover paint to use up, I like to paint a quick page of it and scan it for my seamless texture library ready to use on my next pattern. Don't forget to upload your finished patterns to the project gallery or any work in progress shots. If you'd like feedback will help from both myself and your fellow students. I'm available here by the Discussions tab to answer any questions you might have. If you're happy for me to share your photos on my Instagram, it's okay, then leave a note 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 @beckyflaherty and on my website, rebeccaflaherty.com. If you found this class useful, I'd really appreciate it if you could leave a like and a quick review, as it really helps me to be more visible on the platform and helps other students find this class too. Of course, be sure to follow me here on Skillshare to get notified when I publish new classes. Thank you so much for watching. Stay creative. I will see you next time.