Transcripts
1. Inky Patterns: Hi there, my name is Shayna Sell and welcome to Inky Patterns. As an artist, I like to double in all sorts of mediums, but drawing is probably my favorite. I also really enjoy making patterns, but trying to find the right way to combine your hand drawings into a pattern digitally can be tricky, especially if you're new to Photoshop and want to preserve all those things that make your hand drawings unique. So if you've ever wanted to dip your toe into pattern design or just haven't figured out the right way to bring your illustrations and hand drawings from paper to the screen, we're going to cover all that in this class today. I'll show you how I start with the theme, sketch some ideas around that theme, and then bring those ideas altogether in a two-color pattern in Photoshop. Through this process, you'll design a pattern using your very own ink lines and marks to create a pattern that's uniquely yours. Let's get started.
2. Class Project: For the class project, you're going to start with a theme that you can make some simple ink drawings around. For my theme, I'm going to create a pattern using different kinds of pastries. The reason I chose that was one, pastries are delicious; two, they have a lot of variety and shapes and sizes, so I thought that would make an interesting pattern; and three, I really like different textures and adding that in with ink, so I thought that would be something interesting to make a pattern out of. Keep in mind that this is going to be a two-color pattern, so the only colors will be the background color and then the color of your actual line drawings. There won't be a lot of shading or variations in color unless you create that with your ink marks. Then, after some brainstorming and sketching, we'll create final drawings for you to scan, and then we'll bring those into Photoshop where we'll actually construct your pattern.
3. Finding a Theme: Let's talk about picking out a theme for your pattern. I have a couple of tips for you that might help narrow it down if you're not really sure what direction that you want to go in. My first tip would be to make sure to pick something that you can represent with simple ink drawings. For example, if you go very literal and stick with the floral theme and draw different types of flowers like peonies and daisies and roses. Or you could pick something a little bit more abstract. Let's say you pick a mood like Spooky. If you're going to make a spooky themed pattern, you could draw some goose, some bats, maybe some black cats, whatever stands out as spooky to you. Either way, just make sure that it's something that you're actually going to be able to represent with drawings. If you go a little too abstract, it might be a little difficult to keep on track and stick with your theme. My second tip would be to choose something that has maybe a variety of shapes and sizes. Basically, the types of drawings you have will determine what your final pattern looks like. Depending on the shapes, you can piece them together like puzzle pieces, if you have a lot of variety. If you pick something where everything is circular or square, then your final pattern might end up looking a little bit more grid-like, which is totally fine, but it just depends on what you want that final pattern to look like. My third and final tip, is to pick something that you actually enjoy drawing. That should be pretty self-explanatory, but we want this to be fun. So pick something that you like. You can get as wild and crazy as you want, as long as it's something that you enjoy drawing and that you want to see in a pattern.
4. Ideas: Once you have your theme picked out, it's time to figure out what you're actually going to draw. I'm just going to start by doing a quick Google image search for pastries. While I already know what some common pastries are, it's just going to help me to come up with some new ideas and maybe find some new shapes that I hadn't really thought of before. Maybe some things that aren't really front of mind for me when I think of a pastry. Whatever your topic might be, you may not need to do any research. But it can be helpful to generate some new ideas that you didn't think of it first. Let's say you're going to do carnival foods, you might think of hot dogs and maybe funnel cakes, things like that. There's probably some other things that you just wouldn't think of right away. It's important to note that I'm not going to copy any of these directly, I'm just looking for some ideas and to try to figure out what characteristics I want to capture in my drawing. I'm going to go ahead and just start making a list of the different pastry items that I'm seeing that I like. Then I'm also going to make a list of the characteristics that I want to capture in my drawings. I see cinnamon rolls, croissants, different tarts, puff pastry. I've been watching a lot of great British bake off lately, so that's where my head's at. Some hand pies, and really this list can go on and on. I'm not necessarily going to draw every single one of these. But I do want to have a good amount of variety in my patterns, so we'll see what happens. I think I have a good list at this point. I might add to it on my own, but now I'm going to move on to some characteristics. These are things that I'm going to incorporate into my drawings to make them a little bit more interesting and fun for my pattern. I'm specifically thinking of things that would be interesting to recreate with ink. I really like a lot of these have very flaky layers, so there could be something that I could replicate. Some of them have a glaze. Some things almost have like burnt edges, so I wonder if that's something I could work into my drawing. There is also some tarts with fruit on them, so I like that the fruit have a texture of their own, like for example, these raspberries so there could be interesting. There's also a lot that have different, I guess it's like layers but twists. I really like that. This is pretty, there's some herbs. Part of this list making, like I said before, is because I'm not really trying to replicate these exactly. These are things that I can maybe combine to make little pastries of my own. Some of these will probably just look like traditional pastries, but this will just give me some ideas to add some interests to my drawings. Something else said I want to keep in mind are the variety of shapes that I'm seeing. I definitely want to incorporate that into my drawings because I'm going to make a pattern that fits together, so I don't want them to all be squares are circles. I think this is a good start for now and I'm going to get going with sketching.
5. Sketching: Now I'm just going to go ahead and start sketching out some of the ideas that we came up with when we were making our lists. Let's just start with a basic cinnamon roll. Maybe I'm going to add some glaze detail, not sure if I like that, but we'll see we're just sketching here. It's really just us trying to figure out what we want to include in our final pattern. Let's make a croissant. I like the crescent shape. Maybe I'll add some crosshatching. I'm also thinking about what kinds of details I'd like to add when I get to ink. Maybe we'll have a nice tort or tart, not sure which this is and layers of fruit. I'm just trying to keep in mind all the different things that I like about the pastries that I think make them interesting for ink drawings and to make a pattern. I'm also trying to think about how I can add some more variety to shapes. Maybe we could have slice of pie. I can fill in the gaps where the fruit would be. Just trying to play around and see what I like and see what would be interesting once we start adding the ink. I really like some of these danishes will have an egg right on top, like that. I mentioned herbs before, so maybe it's got a little herb garnish, and don't forget that this is going to be a two-color pattern. Everything that's going to have a color to it will be your ink marks and lines. If you try to shade something that probably won't translate once you get into photoshop, we really have to use our lines very carefully and our fills. Filling in gaps like this. I'm trying to also just keep adding more shapes. Maybe I have a little hand pie, some crimping, little air holes. Could have some loaf of bread. You could add some stippling to create some texture there to look like grains. We'll see. Also really like twisted breads, pastries. That might be interesting. They have different layers. I could add that here. Maybe some scone glaze. Really, this is your time to play around, so these don't have to be perfect drawings. It's just to help you make some decisions and get your ideas out onto the paper. You can have some muffin with little seeds on it. Can even add a little steam or something. Maybe not. Also, think about the different angles of your shapes too. I'm trying to avoid having all circles or all squares. Something like this muffin, even though it has a rounded shape. There's a little bit more interest here because of the bottom. But if I were to draw it from above, it would just be some other circle and won't really look like any muffin, so get creative. I think it was a scone actually, that's what that's supposed to be maybe you could have it sliced open. You have some filling and then the glaze. I don't think that really translates but think about those different angles. Maybe a good example would be a piece of cake. I could add layers here. Instead of it being a flat triangle from the top or a rectangle, it has a little bit more interest and maybe a little garnish. Don't forget to play around with your textures here because once you get to the ink, that's going to be pretty final. Maybe play around with some crosshatching. Maybe just some more lines to maybe add definition or shapes. Because you're not really going to be able to add any shading. Now's a good time to play with your textures and what can you really do with your lines? You can do some very quick crosshatching. You can have very deliberate lines that maybe go around a contour. But think about that as you go along. It might even be a good idea to do some quick sketches in your ink as well just to see what it will actually look like. I'm going to do exactly that. Let's try to draw a quick croissant. It's weird looking right now, but that's okay. I'm just playing with how fast and how slow I make my marks. This definitely has a sketchier quality which I like. That might look cool in a pattern. But that's why it's good to play around before we get to our final drawings. Here's just some stippling. That's what I was attempting to do here with this loaf of bread. I have some glaze on some items. I don't know if this really translates. Maybe I can draw some of those little seeds on the muffin. I'm just testing out a bunch of different things to see what I want to include in my final pattern. Maybe something else would be a frosting textures. Something like a wave to it or a dollop of cream. Also talked about layers before. Some pastries they have very flaky layers. I could draw very thin lines to represent that. The lines are what I'm drawn to. I'm definitely going to incorporate that in my final work. Right now I'm just using some pen and ink to make these little drawings. But you can use archival ink pens like this. You don't necessarily have to go out and buy anything special. Something else you could use would be a brush and a pen. You could use a dry brush to add some nice texture. The main point is just to add some interest with your texture in your ink marks. You can do that however you want. But a little experimentation now will help you wants to get into our final.
6. Adding Ink: Now that I have the initial sketches out of the way, I'm going to go ahead and start creating our final sketches that I'm going to trace over with ink. I'm still doing that in my sketchbook. That might make it a little bit harder to scan later. I'm just going to try to make sure I'm staying closer to this side of the page. The closer you get to this center seam here, you could get some weirdness when you go to scan. So that's something to keep in mind. You can also do this on some loose leaf paper, but I don't really have any good quality loose leaf paper right now. I like how this paper holds ink, so I'm just going to stick with the sketchbook. Something to keep in mind right now is the scale of your final pattern. I'm going to make these drawings as close to the final size as possible. If you're going to have a pattern where you know that you want each little item to be pretty small, I would draw them small. But if you do that, then you won't really be able to make them bigger without them getting very pixelated. Likewise, if you know that you want your pattern to have a pretty large scale, I would try to draw closer to that scale because things are going to change if you try to resize your images a lot in Photoshop. Now if you were going to make your final pattern and Illustrator, that wouldn't be as big of a concern. But that's a whole another class. Right now we're just focusing on Photoshop. So I'm just going to try to draw these as close to the final size as possible. There I'm just kind of eyeballing here. Just lightly sketching. I'm using a light 4H pencil to do this. I'm never going to add too much detail because a lot of the detail is going to be added an ink, I'm just going to try to focus on the basic shapes. Now, another option for adding your ink is tracing over on a separate sheet of paper. Then you don't have to worry about getting rid of these pencil marks later, so don't rule that out. I don't mind erasing. I think it will be fine. I'm just going to stick with this. Here I just made a mistake. I don't need to fill that in with pencil right now because I'm going to be using the ink later. I'm just going to redo this. That's all I'm going to draw for now. I'll do the rest in ink. I'm just going to go through and sketch out the rest of these. Even though these are my final sketches, there are actually a lot less detailed. That's because I'm adding so much of that detail with the ink. Now I have some of my basic shapes laid out and I'm going to go ahead and start adding ink. Like I said before, you could use pen and ink like I'm, or feel free to use an ink pen, brush and ink, something like that. But I think the most important thing is to stick with black, and that's because everything that's black, we can change to another color once we get into Photoshop. It's just a lot easier if we can use black and white to isolate those colors and fill them in with new colors once we bring it into Photoshop. That will make more sense once we get there. But I would just stick with black ink at this point. Just go ahead and start working on these drawings. This is where your own drawing style might come into play. For me, I really like that ink has a lot of little imperfections and hiccups that can happen. Sometimes that can be frustrating. But for something like this, I want it to be very fun and playful. I'm okay with that. Even though these are final sketches, they might not be perfect on your first run. This is going to be one of our scones, so I'm going to add kind of a drizzle detail to it. Got another one here. If you have any big mistakes, you can always get rid of them in Photoshop too, so keep that in mind. I'm just adding a little texture here to my egg. I like a sketchier look, so that's what I'm going with. Just have fun and play with it. I know before in my sketches I had this filled in with the layers, but maybe I could do something fun like a little squiggle here. My shapes are simple enough that if I don't like it, I can just free hand, redo it. But I'm not going for perfection here, so I'm not too worried about it. But if you want to have very precise final ink drawings, then I would definitely recommend either using tracing paper or putting paper over your final sketches with a light box, and then you'll be able to trace your sketches exactly. But for me the sketches are more like guidelines. I'm not happy with that one. Might redo it again. Maybe a little bit more. Yeah, I like that one better. This one, I'm just starting with the seeds. Maybe I'll add some little lines. I just love how much can change when you add three little lines like that. There are ways to replicate this in a digital space. But if you're more comfortable with hand drawing, then by all means you can definitely do that too. I'm just going to continue inking up these sketches, adding those fun little details that will make it a little bit more unique and have a little bit more personal characteristics. That's really part of the point of this class because there are ways you can replicate ink in Photoshop, or procreate, or different programs. But I really enjoy playing around with the ink itself. So I'm just going to complete the rest of this. In your own work, feel free to go as crazy with the ink as want, you can add way more texture than I'm adding here. I'm only going to be adding some crosshatching, some little stippling here and there. But you can definitely make a very textured pattern. It's up to you. You can stick to very simple lines or you can go to the extreme and have everything crosshatched to add some more dimension and interests to your pattern.
7. Scanning: Once you're done inking over all of your sketches, make sure to go ahead and erase all of your pencil marks. That'll just make sure that you have a nice clean scan and will only be working with the ink lines once we bring it into Photoshop. Here I have my sketchbook ready to go on my scanner, and I just have a few pointers before we go ahead and hit scan. The first is to make sure that you put some weight on your scanner. That will just help avoid any weird shadows or lines from any wrinkles on your paper. I put a jewelry box on mine. You can use a dictionary, some [inaudible] book, or you can just put some weight on it with your hands. But either way, just make sure that there's some weight on the scanner before you go ahead and scan that in. I always scan directly from my computer. Right now I have my scanner window up here. As far as color, I usually just leave it as color. You can also change it to black and white so that looks like a black and white, but we're going to change it to black and white in Photoshop. I'm just going to leave it as color, and then for the resolution, I'm just going to choose the highest option that I have, so 600 dpi. This 600 refers to dots per inch, and that means that there are 600 dots of information per inch of the scan. That means that these are going to scan in larger than I drew them, and I just want that because I want to have the most information for working with this in Photoshop. The whole reason that I'm hand drawing these, and scanning them is to keep their quality, and those unique characteristics of the ink marks. I just want to make sure that we have the best quality possible, and depending on your scanner, you may be able to scan it in at an even higher resolution. Right now, I have it set to detect enclosing box. I can turn that auto selection off and just select the specific area where my drawings are. I'm going to do that. Then I'm just going to go ahead, and I'm just going to scan it to my desktop. Change our name, and I'm just going to leave it as a JPEG. You could also use a TIFF, but I think I'm just going to stick with a JPEG. Then there are all these other options down here. I'm just going to ignore all of those. I usually don't use them, and we're going to be editing this in Photoshop. I'm not too worried about these other settings. I'm just going to go ahead, and hit scan, and it's probably going to take a little while because 600 dots per inch is pretty large. I'm just going to go ahead and speed up the video. The scanning is all done, so let's take a look. Here it is all scanned in. Looks like I might have to adjust my paper a little bit though you can see I got some blurry edges over here, so I'll probably have to scan this more than once. But it'll happen if you are working in a sketch book ends close to that seam in the center. I'm going to go ahead and just scan it again. I'm also going to scan some additional sketches.
8. Editing Scans: All right, so now that I have everything scanned onto my computer, I can go ahead and start editing in Photoshop. The first thing we want to do before we can start making a pattern is to reduce this to black and white and get rid of anything extra. Any remaining pencil marks or mistakes, anything like that. I've just opened the JPEG of my scans into Photoshop. We're going to start out by making a copy of our background layer. They are all the work we're doing, doesn't affect the original background. If we make a mistake, we still have this locked original background layer. I'm just going to hide that by clicking on the eyeball. You'll see if I hide both of them, then there's nothing on my Photoshop document. Then the first thing I'm going to do is just go ahead and reduce this to black and white. I'm going to go down here. Click on that, and I'm going to go ahead and open up the hue, saturation panel. Then I'm going to move this slider right here and move the saturation all the way down. Even though I drew on some white sketchbook paper, it really wasn't pure white. This reduces it to the purest forms of black and white. Okay? Then next I'm going to add a levels layer. I'm just going to zoom in so we can see what we're doing here. To do that, I'm going to hit command plus sign, on a PC that would be control plus. I'm just doing that to zoom in. Then I'm going to use this eyedropper tool here. It's going to be the top of the eyedropper, the darkest one. I'm going to select a dark point on one of my drawings. Let's say I select there, you'll see that it darkened all of those lines. I'm actually going to pick a little lighter point because there's still some places that see it looks a little bit light. It's not as dark as it should be. Let's go ahead and sample here. I'm just zooming in once again with command plus and zooming out with command minus. I'm going to zoom in. I don't think that's too dark either. I think I'm happy with that. Okay, and then now we need to make the background bright, pure white, again. To do that, we can either use the eyedropper tool to sample the white background. I'm just going to do that real quick. But you'll see that it hasn't gotten rid of all of this extra texture. The point here is that we want to have nothing in the background at all. Because we are going to be taking each of these shapes and moving it into a new Photoshop document. We don't want to include any of this background. Let me zoom back out real quick and then I'm just going to undo what I did. I'm going to hit Command Z, which should be Control Z on a PC. All right, so let's go ahead and I'm going to sample again with the black. I'm just going to find a light point. Let's see. Okay, that looks good. Then instead of using the white eyedropper tool, I'm going to go ahead and use the slider on the far right. You can see that as I slide it this way that the background slowly disappears. But I can also hold down on Alt or Option as I move the slider. Now I can see all of those little textures. I'm just going to hold down on Alt or Option and move my slider until all of the texture and noise in the background disappears. Now I'm going to zoom in. I didn't want to go too far because I don't want to lose some of my marks either. But this looks like it might be perfect. Okay, so I'm pretty happy with that. Now I'm just going to go ahead and combine all of these layers. My levels adjustment layer, my hue saturation layer, and the background copy. To do that, I'm going to click on Levels first, hold down Shift, and then click on the background copy. That's how you can select all of these layers at once. Then I'm just going to right-click and merge layers. Now we have this somewhat cleaned up layer. Let's just compare that to our background. Not super different, but this will be workable for us. I'm just going to go ahead and look for any marks that I actually don't want. Maybe I had some ink on my hand and it smeared or got on other part of the drawing. Here's an example. Here's this little spot here. Although this is blurry, I scanned this paper in twice, so I'm going to use a different scan for that. I'm going to keep going around. Let's say I wanted to get rid of maybe this edge here. I was drawing a little too quickly and I'm not happy with the look of that. I can go ahead and use the brush tool to get rid of that. I'm going to go ahead and select the brush tool. Looks just like a paintbrush and makes sure that you have the default colors selected. If you don't, there's a little black square and white square behind it. I'm going to click on that. This will ensure that black is the foreground color and white as the background. In order to get rid of this little spot here, I can actually use a white brush. I'm just going to go ahead and select my whites. Then if you want to change the size of the brush or the shape, I can go up to this left-hand corner and select this little drop-down and I'll get this brush window. For this, I'm actually just going to select a hard round brush. I can change the size up here or you can also use a keyboard shortcut. You would use the right bracket key to make it larger or left bracket to make it smaller. Go ahead and erase it. I'm just holding down on my trackpad to get rid of those little lines. Then you would just go throughout your scanned document to do that. If there are any other little mistakes that you made or something you're not happy with, you can just go ahead and get rid of them here. At this point, I'm going to go ahead and do the same process into more scans that I did because I did make some more drawings to use in the pattern.
9. Separate Drawings: After you're done cleaning up your scans, we're so close to making our pattern, I promise it's coming soon. But now we have to separate each and every one of these little drawings, or at least the ones that we're going to use in our pattern. I'm going to go ahead and make a new Photoshop document. We'll go to File, New, and then I'm going to create my pattern as a square, and I'm going to make it 10 inches by 10 inches. You can work in a rectangle or a square, but I'm going to keep it simple, and just use a square. I don't want my pattern to be really large, or really small. But it's easier to scale down if you start larger, so that's what I'm going to go with. I'm going to adjust my Resolution to 300 pixels per inch, and that's just a standard high-quality image size. Even though I scanned everything in at 600 dots per inch, 300 will be just fine for this. I'm just going to rename it. As far as Color Mode and the Color Profile, I'm just leaving those alone. This is where we're going to work on our actual pattern. In order to do that, we're going to have to bring in all of those drawings. I'm going to go back to one of my scans, and we're going to use the Lasso Tool, to basically take the drawing from here, and put it onto our new pattern. I'm just going to move this up, so it's a little bit easier to access. The Lasso Tool is over on this side panel here, looks like a Lasso. There are different options, if I right-click, you'll see that there's the Regular Lasso Tool, the Polygonal or the Magnetic Lasso Tool. I'm just going to go ahead and select the Regular Lasso Tool, and what I'm going to do is, click and drag around one of my drawings. That means that I've selected just what's in this area here. It's important to note that, that's just selecting what is on the layer that you have selected. If you have adjustment layers on here still, that you didn't merge, then it's not going to pick up everything that you want it to. I'm just going to go ahead and copy it, I'm going to hit Command C, to copy or Control C, and then move back into our pattern document. Then I'm going to go to this Channels tab, on the right-hand side. You have your Layers, and then Channels. Then I'm going to go ahead and click this little plus sign at the bottom, to create a new channel. What we're going to do is, basically paste our selection onto here. But if I do that, you'll see that I have part of that background still, I still have all of that white. I'm going to undo what I've just said by pasting. I'm going to hit Command Z to undo, or you can go to Edit, Undo New Channel. Then instead of just pasting it as it is, I'm going to go ahead and flip this, so that this is actually going to be the white background, instead of black. I'm basically just using the opposite. I'm going to go ahead and hit Command I, to make it the inverse. Then now I can go ahead and paste, Command D, or you can go up here and Edit, Paste. We have our first drawing moved over here, and I'm going to go ahead and deselect it. To do that, and I'm going to hit Command D, or you can go up here and select, Select. Then you would click on Deselect up here, Command D is the shortcut for that. After we have deselected and click on the little matching ants down here, those little dotted lines that will appear around the selection. I'm going to click on that, and now you can see that basically, it's selecting all of the white-space. Even though the dotted lines are all around the drawing, it's also around the outside. That's how you can tell that it's not actually selecting those black ink marks, it's selecting the white. We actually need the the opposite to happen. Basically, we want to select the exact opposite, to do that, I'm going to click, Shift Command I. Then now you'll see that those dotted lines disappeared, that were around the outside. We're just left with the black ink marks for our selection, that's exactly what we want. Then I'm going to go back to the layers panel, and then down here to the half-filled circle, and we're going to select Solid Color. What we're doing, is creating a new solid color layer, with a mask basically. I'm just going to select black, and it's going to fill in our selection with black, or whatever color you pick. We can technically do anything, We could do green, blue, whatever color. But I'm just going to stick with this basic black for now. We have our first drawing placed on our pattern. It's not going to stay here, we'll adjust that and we can play with that later. Real quick, I'm just going to give this layer a name, and that's just to help keep myself organized, because we're going to be adding in a lot more of these drawings. We want to be able to easily locate them in the layers panel. We have to go through this process with every one of our drawings, which, as you can imagine, might take awhile. In order to do that, we're going to create an action.
10. Create an Action: Let's go back over to our scan. Let me find something else that I'm going to use here will do this pastry down here. Like before we're going to start out with our lasso tool. But as I have mentioned, we're actually going to create an action to repeat the steps that we did for that muffin and if you aren't familiar with actions, you should see this, Play button over here, that's the actions panel. If you don't have this on your panel over here, you can go to Window and you'll find actions and you'll see that there are some pre-built actions in here already. Actions are really helpful tools that are in Photoshop and it's basically a bunch of pre-programmed steps to achieve something in Photoshop. For example, there's one here that's called vignette and you can see every step of this action in order to make a vignette on your document. I haven't used this particular actions, so I'm not exactly sure how it works but if I really wanted to dive in, I could actually see every single step in that process. You can see that there are a bunch of different actions here, let's see if we can try one out. This added a gradient map to our selections so let's see. You can see now there's some red here, didn't do a whole lot, I think that's just because we've already reduced this to black and white and it's a pretty simple image right now. It's not a photograph but that's just to give you an idea of what happens, so their action, they created this gradient map and it also has a little mask because I had this selected. I'm just going to Command Z to undo and as I hit Command Z, you can actually see what the different steps were in creating that gradient map, so not a ton of steps there but interesting. Now that we know what actions are, we're going to go ahead and repeat our process from before, exactly as we did it before. That's very important because the action is going to record every single step that you take. I'm just going to de-select this with Command D. I have my lasso tool selected and I'm going to find the next area that I'm going to copy first before we go ahead and start recording our reaction. I'm going to do this guy down here. In order to record, I'm going to click on this plus sign here to create a new action. Now I don't want to create it in this default actions folder because those are the defaults that come with Photoshop, so it's going to hide that and I'm actually going to create a new set first, so I'm just going to say inky patterns. Then now I'm going to go and click on this plus sign down here to create an action and I'm going to call this drawing layers and then once I hit Record, it's going to record everything that I do, so we're recording now. It's not recording my screen, it's recording all of my mouse clicks and everything I do in Photoshop. I actually was one step ahead, so like I said, it's going to record everything I do. We're actually going to make our selection before we start recording, so that's important. The reason that we have to do that is that we are selecting everything individually, so every time I select something, it's completely unique and we can't have something completely unique in an action, it's just not going to work. Real quick, I'll show you an example of that, so let's go ahead. I'm going to hit record again and I'm going to make a selection and then I'm just going to stop. I'm going to Command D to Deselect or Control D on a PC and then let's go ahead and hit play on our drawing layers action and see what happens. You'll see that it did make a selection but it literally just selected the exact same area, so if I included that in my action steps, then it's going to keep selecting this one very specific area out of the entire scan and we don't want that. I'm going to go ahead and delete that. You'll see that there are any steps in our action and don't forget that we can stop the recording, so if you make a mistake, you can always stop it. I'm going to backup a few steps and start this again. I'm going to hit command C or control C to copy and then I'm actually going to move into our new document and we still can't record at this point because Photoshop is going to get confused, so since it records, everything you do, it's going to be confused on which document you're working in. That's why we haven't been able to record just yet but now we can go ahead and do that. I'm going to go ahead and click the Record button and then go to our Channels Panel. Like before, I'm going to go ahead and create a new channel and then we need to make this the inverse. I'm going to go ahead and click command i to flip that to white and then I'm going to paste Command B or control V and then I'm going to de-select that. I'm going to click Command D and now I can go ahead and create a new selection. Like before, it's selected, all of the white, we want it to select the black, so I'm going to hit Shift command I or shift control I, select the black. Go back over to my Layers panel and then I'm going to stop my recording here and the reason for that is that it gives me trouble if I try to do the next step as part of the recording. I'm going to go ahead and click this to create a new layer of solid color layer and it's just going to default to black. I'm going to hit Okay and that's it. Let me hide our muffin from before and then I'm going to go ahead and click on the Move Tool or click V and let's take look. It looks like our action worked fine but the real test is going to be the next time we try to use it. Let's just do that one more time, except this time we're going to use our new action. I'm just going to select this little herbs spring here, command C and then I'm going to go ahead and hit play on the action. But before you do that, you have to make sure that you have the correct steps selected. I want to make sure that the name of the action is what is selected and not one of these steps in between. I'm going to click on the name of my action and hit play. It's in all of those steps and now all I have to do is create that solid color layer hit, Okay or enter and that's it. Real quickly I'm just going to hide that and you can see that it paste it over just like the others. This should save you a lot of time as you're going through and bringing all of your little elements of your pattern into the final pattern document. I'm just going to go ahead and keep doing that until I have everything transferred over here.
11. Pattern Basics: Now that we have all of our individual drawings transferred over, it's time to get to the actual pattern designs. This is where the fun starts for me. But before we dive into our actual pattern, I'm going to just go over some basics of making a seamless repeating pattern. Real quickly I'm just going to go to my move tool and rotate the sky here. I have all of my other images hidden for now. There we can just focus on this. Then you can just hit "Enter" after he moves something to lack in that transformation. Or you can click this check mark up in the top right corner. Then I'm just going to draw a rectangle really quickly and I'm going to give it a fill. See that red, I'm going to get rid of our stroke. I'm just going to make a perfect square. I'm going to hold down shift as I click and drag. Then I'm going to switch back to my move tool. The shortcut for that is V and Move this over here. Then right now you can see I have this auto select on checked. That means if I tried to click on something else, it's not going to select it. It's going to keep the layer that I already have selected. By checking that, I can go ahead and click on the muffin and go ahead and move it. I'm just going to change the order of these layers that the muffin is on top. Let's select them often. I'm just going to drag that over top. For this example, I'm going to use this as a repeating tile. This is what's going to happen when we make our actual pattern. Real quickly I'm just going to click on the muffin layer over here, Shift and click on the rectangle layer. I'm gonna put that in a group. This is all just to demonstrate how your patterns when a work. I'm going to go ahead and make a copy of this sample group here. Then instead of auto select layer, I'm going to change this to group so that if I click on this, I can drag the whole group instead of just one of the layers within that group. I'm going to click and drag. You can see that if this was our entire design, this is how I would repeat in a pattern, scientists and the other copy and do that again. Another way to make a copy is to hold down obs, and then drag, and I've made a copy of that tile. These aren't perfectly lined up, but you can see that this would create a very grid-like pattern. This is our mean tile at the design. Then this is just going to repeat forever. You do one more time. Now, I've completed the whole square. This will just be a very straightforward and basic pattern. It would be very obvious how you made it, but it does technically work. It would be completely seamless. It's now, right now just because I was free hand moving those tiles around. But it's just a very basic overview of how the pattern will function. I'm just going to delete three of those copies. Let's go back to our original or change the spec to auto select layer. Let's say we're going to have a more complex pattern, which we will. I'm going to have a ton of these little muffins. Right now actually I'm going to turn auto select off because I just want to work with the little muffin layer. I'm going to make it smaller simply by dragging down to scale it down and hit "Enter" to confirm the transformation. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit. Let's say I don't want to have my muffin right in the center and net, it's just going to repeat in perfect rows and columns. Maybe I want it to be off center. I'm going to place this right on the edge of our square. But since this is going to be repeating and we want it to be seamless, that means that we're going to have this muffin here and then the exact same muffin just moved over onto this edge. I need to figure out what the dimensions of the square are so that I can make a copy of the muffin and move it to the exact same spot. Looking over here, I can see that the square is 780 pixels by 780. I'm going to click on my muffin layer again. I'm going to make a copy of it. I'm going to hit command C or Control C to make a copy. Then I'm going to paste it in the exact same place. In order to do that, instead of just hitting Command V, I'm going to do Shift Command V or Shift Control V. Fill will go over in the layers panel. You can see the copy right here. We have our copy exactly over the original. Now, we want to move it over exactly 780 pixels to the right. To do that, I'm going to type Command T. That's going to allow us to transform. We're going to be able to move that copy of the muffin. This is where some very basic math will come into play. This line up here, this is our x-axis where this ruler is. Then we have our y-axis running vertically. Horizontal will always be x, and y will always be vertical. Since we need to move this over to the right, we are moving it along the x-axis. I'm going to go up here. This is the position of the muffin. On the x-axis it's about 394 pixels. On the y-axis, it's about 1400 pixels. To move it over, I'm simply going to type in. Then the number of pixels that I want it to move. Our square we already figured out was 780 by 780. I'm just going to type in 780. You see it's already moved. But I still have to commit this transformation by either clicking the checkbox or hitting Enter. Now we've completed our transformation. Now I'm going to make another copy of our muffin. Let's put it at the top. Just like working on the side edges, Working on the top and bottom, they're going to have to be exactly the same so that we can create our seamless pattern. Once again, I'm going to make a copy of this muffins. Command C or Control C shift command V to paste some place command or control T so that we can transform it. Now we're moving it along the y-axis. I'm going to type plus 1780, and that's going to move it down along the y-axis. You can also do the reverse. Let's say we created this bottom muffin first. If that were the case, we would type in minus 70 up here. If you don't remember that our action, you can look at the rulers. At the top, it's moving this way. We have 1, 2, 3, 4. On the y-axis is moving down, so 3, 4, 5, 6. You would be adding to the number of pixels. Just to clarify, I have inches on my ruler right now. That's why it doesn't match up with the pixels. Just commit that transformation. Let's test out our new little tiles. I'm just going to zoom out by pressing Command Minus or Control minus. I've selected our entire group. Then I'm going to hold down all or option and just drag it over. As I'm dragging, I'm just going to hold down the Shift key so that it will stay perfectly in line. If this has worked and I have matched everything perfectly, there should be no scenes. Some sort of zoom in. There it is. Nothing is funny or mismatched and you can't really tell where the pattern begins and ends aside from the edges of our square. That's an easy way to create a very simple pattern. The one that I'm going to make is going to be more complex, but you're welcome to do something as simple like this for your class project as well. It just depends on the look that you're going for. I'm just going to go ahead and delete our group copy real quick and just show you what happens if any of these are myths aligned. Let's select one of the muffins. I'm just going to use my arrow keys on my keyboard, use shifted over pixels. I'm not really counting here. I just wanted to get it a little bit off. I'm going to copy this group again. Then let's drag over the copy and let's move it down. Someone hold down, shift and move this down. Now, you can see what happens if the placement isn't correct. We have this weird mismatch scene and this is overlapping. The top of the muffin is completely off from the bottom. That's why it's important to use the exact dimensions and the correct map. I'm just going to click Command Z couple times to undo. Let's take a look at if we forget to move something to the opposite end of our square. I'm going to take this top muffin, and I'm just going to delete that with a simple pattern like this, you're not going to forget. But with the pattern that I'm going to make, I'm going to be working with a lot of different objects. It can be easy to forget to free your copy and move it to the opposite side of the square. That's why I'm going over this. I'm going to select our entire group again. I'm going to hold down all. Let's drag it down to show. I'm holding down Shift. So it's perfectly aligned. This is what happens if you forgot to make a copy of your object and move it to the exact opposite of the side. You'll end up with something that looks completely caught off, and it's a very obvious mistake. Now with a more complex pattern, it might be harder to spot. So that's why it's important to test out your pattern before you use it in any real application. I'm just going to go ahead take our original muffin, pull it out of this group, and delete this group because this is just for practice. I'm going to delete these. Now, we can actually start designing our pattern.
12. Making a Pattern: Let's dive into our pattern. I'm just going to start with one of my favorites. This croissant and my goal here is to make a very fun loose patterns. I don't want it to be on a formal grid, I want every piece to fit together. It's going to take some maneuvering and playing around. I'll be zooming in and out as I go, so just don't forget to hit control plus or command plus to zoom in and command minus or control minus to zoom out and there's just the easiest way for me. I am going to play with the scale a little bit but a permanent I'm going to mess with it too much, but we'll see as I go. Since this is going to be within the square, I don't have to worry about making a copy of it and adding it to the opposite side because it's contained within the borders of the square. This square is just the size that I chose when I created the document. 10 inches by 10 inches or pi, let's see. I'm going to turn on auto select for layer again, let's tweak it a little easier on myself so maybe that'll go somewhere over here. I'm not making a copy of this right now because I'm still starting now in the early stages of arranging this. I can't forget to make the copy and transferred over here because it is going off the edge of the title, but I want to get a better picture of how these are going to fit together before I do that. One thing that I'm looking out for while I'm adding these shapes because I don't really want anything that's going to be straight up and down like this. That's because it's going to force this vertical view once it's in an actual pattern. I want things to be a little bit topsy-turvy and it will just help it look a little bit more loose and organic, so none of these are necessarily in their final places. I'm just playing around with these, I really just wanted to get them all visible on my pattern, and then I'll probably be moving them around and scaling them a little bit more. Something else to consider is if it matters, if your pattern will make sense in one direction. For example, I put off this cape right side up but if you have everything right side up, then you're only going to be able to use it in one direction. But if I have some things upside down, it can work in almost any direction. We give that some contacts, let's say I'm going to get this printed on fabric. Well if you are using that fabric, then you would be able to turn in almost any direction and it would still make sense. You wouldn't be forced to have to use it so that everything is right side up. I'm going keep this, say upside down like that. Then you can see I'm having a little bit of trouble selecting this and that's because I'm clicking in this white space or blank space here, I'm going to have click right on the line to drag it, and you might come across that when you're working with this auto select with your layers. If I didn't have auto select turned on and already had the layer selected, I can click anywhere and move it around. I'm also going to try to avoid having two similar shapes right next to each other to. Say I want there to be some variety, I don't want everything to be very matching. I'm also avoiding putting anything right in the center of this and that's because I don't want it to be very obvious, where our tile begins and ends. If you have something right smack in the middle, it might draw more attention to that space especially something like this cinnamon roll, it almost looks like a target. I'm just avoiding putting anything right in the center of my board and I have a lot of different drawings in here, so I might end up playing with the scale more or have things really close together. We'll see what happens with my final pattern but for right now, I'm just trying to get everything into view. Another thing I'll think about as I go is how much black space I have or filled in spaces? If I have a lot of areas where things are filled in, it's going to be darker and draw more attention to that area. That's just something to keep in mind, I want things to be evenly space. Right now I still have auto select on, so sometimes it can be tricky to select the right thing when they're overlapping. You can always turn that off if it's not working for you. Then I also just have some elements that I forgot to mention while we were going over our drawing and sketching, but I've created some little small elements like small swirls and these little herbs spreads here. As I'm making my pattern, I may end up with some awkward whitespaces and these are just a nice way to tie things together. We'll see how much I had of using them, I may not at all depending on how the design comes together, but that's something you can keep in mind when you're drawing and sketching out trying to plan ahead. You can create small little elements that connect to your pattern together a little bit more. A lot of this is just going to be very visual. I'm just going off of what will have some harmony or unity to it. Must you're going to make a very grid-like pattern, you will have to use some creative sense to create something that's a little bit more organic like this. For now, I'm just going to talk all of these little extra elements in the same area and then when I'm ready to use them, I'll just look over there. I need quite a few drawings for this. I can always decide to edit myself. Don't feel completely committed to every single drawing if you've made a lot. I really want to have a lot of options. That's why I have so many here or if I do want to use them all, I'm probably going to have to scale them down. I just want to take stock of everything that I have available. I have quite a bit here. I'm just going to go ahead and hide most of them. If I click and drag, as I'm hiding I can hide a bunch at once. I'm just going to do that. I'm just going to start pair with my croissant again. Now, I'm just going to play around and try to see how can we make these shapes interact. Trying to space this out because it's pretty dark. It's going to draw a lot of attention in the pattern. This is a very circular shape again. I don't want it to be right by our croissant. Maybe I'll scale it down a little bit. I don't really want everything to be the exact same shape. We'll put that on the edge. Something else to consider is how you place things on their angles. If I have a lot of angles that are going in this direction, meaning towards the left, then that might become redundant in the pattern. Hopefully, I'll be able to show you why later but I want to keep things at a bunch of different random angles. I may have to adjust these later once I test out my pattern. I have so many different elements here, but let's say you didn't make his many. You can always make a copy and repeat it throughout your pattern. I could take this croissant here, Command C or Control C, Shift Command V to paste same place. I could rotate it or I could reflect it. Let's say we're going to flip it. I could resize it. Then now it just looks like I have a different croissant. It doesn't look exactly the same as this first one here. That's another way you can make use of the elements that you do have without having to go back and draw even more. You could use maybe, let's say, five different things and make a pattern just out of those. I wanted to have a lot of options here so I drew a lot, but I may eliminate some and repeat them. That's always an option for you too. Don't feel like you have to have 20 different elements for your pattern. I'm not sure if I'm going to use this second one, but we'll see. I'll keep it. I'm just going to hide it for now. Now hopefully, you can see why I wanted to have a variety of shapes. I can play with how they fit together. They don't all look exactly the same. Maybe I'll make something over here a little bit smaller. They're all the same size. I want to have a little bit more variation in the scale here. Depending on the version of Photoshop that you have, I'm just dragging to resize this and it's keeping my proportions intact. In older versions of Photoshop, that doesn't happen automatically. You have to hold down Shift as you're changing the size. That's just something to keep in mind. As I get more confident in my design, I'm going to go ahead and make sure I'm making a copy of the elements that touch the edge and transform it so that it's on the opposite edge to make this seamless pattern. So Command C or Control C, Shift Command V, Command T to transform. Our example earlier, we were using a 780 pixels square. Now, we're using our actual document dimensions. This is 10 inches by 10 inches. I don't need to figure out what that is in pixels. I can actually type 10 inches in here. We'll be moving this along the Y-axis vertically. Up here, I'm going to type in plus 10. Then I can type in "in" for inches. Then that way I don't have to figure out how many pixels the artboard is. I'm going to hit "Enter." There we go. Real quick, let's say I was going to leave this twist over here. There would be overlapping. It's two different edges. I would have to make a copy, move it over to the right. Then I would have to make another copy and move it up to this corner here. I would try to avoid having anything that overlaps like that because that means it's going to be showing up in the exact same position and angle multiple times in your repeat. It may make it look obvious where your repeat begins and ends. We want this to look pretty seamless. But something you can do is have it very close to the edge. In this instance, then I would only have to copy it and move it up here instead of moving it to the right also. At this point, I'm just going to keep playing around, trying to fit these together to make my pattern. Then I can show you how to test it out and make adjustments.
13. Testing & Adjusting: As you go ahead and work on your own pattern, don't forget to save as you're working. You never know if Photoshop is going to quit on you or something could happen, especially if you're working with larger file sizes or depending on the space on your computer. Make sure to save throughout the process. You can just easily do that by hitting Control or Command S to save. So Command S and you'll save it. At this point I have everything laid out in a way that I'm happy with. They're just a couple other things I wanted to point out. One thing that I've been trying to avoid is having any up and down vertical lines or horizontal lines, which I am getting some horizontal lines here. What I mean by that is that I don't want any straight across lines that will be very obvious in the pattern. Since I'm trying to achieve something that looks more loose and doesn't look like a grid. I'm running into that right here. You can see that the tops of each of these are lining up. Not exactly, but they might be too perfect. I'm going to do some adjusting to try to change that a little bit. Maybe I move this a little lower. I can try to drag this over a little bit. I could move it down here maybe. But I'm also trying to avoid getting things too close to each other. I want there to be some space around my objects. That's why it really is a lot like a puzzle. You're just trying to fit everything together in a way that makes sense but also doesn't look too purposeful either. I want it to have a sense of randomness, even though none of this is random. Maybe I can shift this up. Sometimes it might mean swapping out elements for different shapes. Maybe by rotating that I'll make it a little bit different. We'll see. I think this is a good point to go ahead and test out our patterns, and see what it looks like. In order to do that, I'm going to go ahead and go to Edit, Define pattern. That's actually going to make a pattern for us. Pastry pattern, that's fine. I'm just going to say test 1 because we're going to have to test it out a few different times. Hit OK. Then we can go ahead and test it out. I am going to make a new layer. I'm going to go over to our Rectangle tool and I'm just going to click the shape it over. Then I'm going to go into the Fill in the properties panel here. Click on it, and then you'll see there's different options to fill it with. We have our swatches here, gradient and then pattern. This is where any patterns you create will show up. Here's our pattern. Right now it says 100 percent for the scale down here. But what I can do is move this slider and keep moving it. Then now we can see our pattern and actions so we can look for any mistakes are amazing that might stick out to us as funny looking. Some examples of that would be any very obvious lines. Let me just hide than and I'm going to zoom in a little bit. We can see this twisted bread is standing now quite a bit. I don't really want anything to stand out so obvious like that. I may either have to scale it down or it maybe a matter of changing the angle because you can see that there's a very clear diagonal line that starts at the edge of this pie, then to these roles, then the twisted bread. Another pie, this pie slice. But you can see a very obvious diagonal here. I want it to look a little bit more random. That's something I'm going to make note of and I'll have to adjust. I'm not seeing anything else right now, but I'm also going to look for any edges that maybe missing. We are looking for any spots where I may have forgotten to transfer over a copy of my drawing. Like our example with the muffins, don't see any weird edges like that. That's a good sign. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this looks. Something else I might want to shift around would be this little fruit tart or whatever you want to call it here. I'll see that stands out to me. Is this one slice of pie because it's so dark, it's really standing out from the rest of my drawing. I may want to replace that or I'm going to make it smaller, but it's sticking out a little bit more than I would like. The same goes for this slice of cake. It's sticking out a little bit too much to me. That might be something else I could play with. I also don't like how these two little hand pies looks. They have a very similar look to them and they're right next to each other. It looks a little redundant. That's something else I might want to swap out as well. I'm just going to hide this rectangle and make those adjustments. I've made some adjustments and I'm going to go ahead and look at those. My pattern already looks much better to me. There are still some lines. You can still see this vertical here. But I think by rotating that twisted bread and sizing it a little bit smaller, it's helping to break it up a little bit more. I could still maybe shift some things around. I can move this muffin maybe over to the right and up a little bit. Something else though that is really standing out still is that one piece of pie. I might just remove it from the design altogether and put something else there because I really don't like how much attention that's getting. Its interrupting the flow of the whole pattern. I'm just going to go ahead and make a couple more adjustments. I may even play around with adding in some of those other elements, like the herbs and I have some cinnamon sticks and star, a nice, that would be a little fun and playful in my pattern although I already have a lot going on, so we'll see what happens when I start to add those.
14. Playing with Color: At this point I'm pretty happy with my pattern. I did end up using those smaller elements because they help tie it all together and avoid those obvious seems so it's very obvious where the repeat begins and ends. But you don't have to do that with yours, that's totally up to you. It just depends on how you want your final pattern to look. I haven't talked about color at all at this point. We've just been working with black and white. I actually really like how this looks in black and white. But I'm going to show you how to quickly and easily change your colors. There's a couple of ways. The first is that we can group all of our drawings together. I'm going to click on, let me just delete this unused layer, the top layer here and then scroll all the way down to the very last drawing. Then I'm going to group those by clicking, Create a new group. I'm just going to rename it, Original Drawings. Then we can actually just apply a color to all of these drawings. Then I'm going to hide that rectangle where we were testing our pattern. Then to change all these colors at once, I'm going to go ahead and create a new solid color layer. Then I'm just going to pick a random color. Then hold down on the Alt or Option key, move your cursor until this little black arrow appears. Then I'm going to click and then it's going to apply that color. That's a really easy way to change the color of all your drawings. Then if you want to change the background, you can just create a solid color layer below that group. I actually really like this black here. Now you can see what it looks like with these different colors. Another option would be to change the colors, one drawing at a time. I'm going to hide this layer. You would just double-click on this fill here. When we created all of these different layers for our drawings using the channels, we were actually creating a solid layer with a mask. We can just go ahead and double-click on the solid color layer and we can pick out a new color from there. But I'm going to go ahead and hit Cancel. There'd be a way where you could make this a pattern with more than two colors. One thing to look out for is that you'll have to make sure your drawings on the opposite sides of the pattern match up. If I were going to recolor, let's say this piece of cake down here, I would have to make sure it's the same color as the one on the right. But for this, I'm going to keep it a two-color pattern, and let's see. You can also go to your swatches panels pick out your color. Let's see what are my recent colors. I really like this blue actually. I'm going to select that and then maybe I'll change my background to, I could do this yellow, that's cute. I think I might just leave it white. I'm just going to play around with the colors a little bit more and see what I like. I think I'm happy with this color combination here. You can also create multiple color ways. Real quick, I'm just going to make a copy of our original drawings because we want to work non-destructively. I'm just going to move this to the very bottom and hide it. Then I'm going to group these altogether so the fill that we're going to use as a clipping mask down to the background color. I'm holding down Shift and then click and then group. Then I'm going to name this, Yellow, and it's a charcoal color. Then I am going to have to apply the clipping mask again. Holding down Alt or Option until the arrow appears and then click. Then there's one color way. I'm going to go ahead and make a copy of that. Then you can play around and make multiple color ways. I also really like this blue and maybe one of these pinks or even the blue and the blue. I'm not sure, but you could spend hours doing this, which I have, because this is one of my favorite parts. I love seeing the different colors and it can just change the pattern so much. Maybe I'll actually just do the charcoal again. I do like that. I like that it does look like ink when I have this darker colors. That can be another option. Then I'm just going to rename that layer.
15. Exporting: At this point, we have a few different options and I'm actually going to save a new copy of my pattern file. We're going to do this so that we can make one with flattened images. I'm going to go ahead and go to File, Save As, I'm going to my desktop. Then I'm going to call this pastry pattern flattened. Now, I'll no longer be editing my original. If I want to make any changes, I can go back to my original document and change as much as I want here. I'm going to go ahead and select one of my groups, and then I'm going to right-click and click on merge group. Instead of having any layers, it's just one layer and it's the basic pattern, it's the tile of the patterns, it's one flattened image. Then I'm going to do the same thing with the yellow and charcoal, right-click merge group. The reason I'm doing this is that it's just going to cut down on the file size significantly. That'll be important when we go to export. Then I am actually also going to do this with my original. It's just going to be, you'll see that there is no background in my original. These are all just the black images. I really love how those look too so I do want to save that. Just keep in mind that even though it looks like it has a white background, it's this background layer outside of the group. It's not part of my original drawings group. I'll explain the significance of that a little bit later. I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing, merge group. Now you can see, it's a little hard to see from the thumbnail, but I'm going to hide my background. Now this is just over a transparent background. We will be able to export this with a transparent background, which could be useful depending on how you're going to use your pattern. I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this rectangle. Then if I wanted to go ahead and export this for a website like Spoonflower, I would want to export the tile as it is here. Because certain websites are actually going to use your pattern tile and make the repeat. We don't have to export a rectangle with the pattern in it, like when we were testing out. I'm just going to go ahead and go to File Export. Then I'm going to export it as a JPEG. I'm going to save it to my desktop for now. I'm mostly just going to add in my dimensions so I don't forget. Then you can just do the same thing with the other versions. If you do want to export aversion with a transparent background, you just have to make sure you export it as a PNG. I'm going to change it to PNG, and then you would have to make sure that transparency is checked here. If it's unchecked, it's going to have a white background by default. If it's checked, it'll be transparent. Then for other needs, let's say you're going to upload this to a print on demand site like Society6, and you want it to be on a pillow, you'll actually have to go ahead and define your pattern. We didn't define a pattern for this pink version. Then like before, when we were testing out the pattern, I'm just going to go ahead and make a square and then change the fill to a pattern. At the very bottom, we have our final version. Then I'm just going to scale it down, and depending on where you're going to send this file, it may have to be bigger than 10 by 10 inches. That's just the dimensions that I design the pattern in. I would just go ahead and double-check the website that you are uploading it to. You want to make sure that your JPEG is large enough and will look good on whatever products you want it printed on.
16. Using Your Patterns: Now that you have your inky pattern created, it's time to talk about how we can use that pattern. The first and most obvious one would be in Photoshop. You can easily fill in objects with your pattern, but I'm just going to go over another way that I like to use my patterns in design work. I'm going to show you how to apply your pattern to some type. I've got Photoshop open and ready to go. I already have created our type layer with the word hello. I'm going to go ahead and create a pattern layer that's very similar to how the solid color layer works and fill it with our pattern. You can adjust the scale. Now we're just going to apply that pattern layer as a clipping mask by holding down "Alt". We going to use until that black arrow appears and then click in between the layers. Here you can see we have our pattern applied. We can go ahead and change that pattern out too. Once you've created that pattern layer, just double-click on it and you'll be able to change the pattern. You can also play with your pattern and drag it around. If you want a different part to be visible, you can just go ahead and drag it with your mouse. That's just one other way that you can use your pattern in Photoshop, but there are endless possibilities. Like I said before, filling in objects, you can create clipping masks like this. Really, it's just a great opportunity to explore and see what else you can come up with. Another great way to use your pattern is to help build up your design portfolio. You can do that by using swatches of your pattern like I have here, and also lifestyle mockups. Any opportunity where you can show your pattern in the real world will be really helpful to showcase your pattern. There's a whole world around surface pattern design. Definitely explore at Skillshare and look into those classes if there's something you're interested in. But a lot of artists will create collections of patterns with different color ways and themes. That's just something to think about and something that you can definitely explore further. In case mockups are new to you. I did create a free Photoshop document where you can create a mockup of your own with your pattern on a pillow. I'm just going to show you how to use that mockup, and a lot of them function the same. You can buy other pre-made mockup templates on websites like Creative Market, or if you just do a Google search, you'll be able to find mockups to use. Here's the opened mockup document. Start out by double-clicking on the smart object. Where the little pages appear in the bottom right corner of the thumbnail. That will bring you to the smart object where we can replace the sample pattern from the class with your pattern. To do that, you're going to double-click in the bottom right-hand corner of the thumbnail, where that little square is. Then just go ahead and replace your pattern. Then you can always adjust the scale. You can even change the angle of the pattern, whatever you want to do, and that's how it will appear in the mockup. Once you have your pattern all set, go ahead and hit "Command" or "Control-S" to save, or you can just hit go to File Save. We're just saving the changes we made to our smart object, so that it will replace the pattern in the mockup document. After you've done that, you can close out of this little rectangle file. Then now you should have your pattern updated in the mockup. Then go ahead and export your mock-up as a JPEG to use it on your website or in your portfolio. You can also use this mockup going forward as you create new patterns. Then the final use for your patterns I wanted to cover is sending your pattern to print-on-demand websites. These are websites where you can upload your pattern and then they'll apply it to different products. For example, here we have a phone case, a pillow, and a tote bag. You can send your patterns to these websites for your own personal use. You just want to have your own pattern on your own phone case, or you can also use them to sell your designs. Here's a list of some common print-on-demand sites. We have Society6, Redbubble, Etsy. You can actually use Etsy with companies like Printful and they link up to your Etsy shop. That's a little bit more detailed, but that's something to consider. Then I also have Spoonflower on here, which is really great because you can get your pattern printed on fabric. In that case, you can get it printed on fabric and create your own things like a tote bag or a quilt or something along those lines. Those are just something else to think about. If you are going to upload your designs, make sure that you look up the requirements. These websites all have different specs for uploading your design. As I mentioned before, something like Spoonflower, you're going to upload your single tile of your pattern. For the class example, it would just be the 10 by 10 original document before you even created a pattern with it. But something like a Society6 will have really large document requirements, so that your work will be high-quality on their products. I'll include links to each of these websites in the class resources, so you can learn more about them.
17. Your Turn: Now it's your turn. Start out by picking your theme, sketching some ideas around your theme in pencil, tracing over your sketches in ink and adding other ink marks in details. Scanning into photoshop, create your pattern and don't forget to test it. Be sure to share your work in the class projects and don't worry about waiting until you have a finished product. I'm happy to share any feedback along the way. If you get lost anywhere along the way, don't forget about the class resources. I've included some tips from the class as well as step-by-step instructions for creating your action and you'll also find the PSD mockup file in the class resources. In addition to posting your class project here on skill share, feel free to tag me on Instagram if you share any pictures of your pattern. Use the hashtag inky patterns project and tag me at shaynasellart. That we all see it and I can post it to my followers too. I can't wait to see what you come up with.
18. Wrap Up: That's it for Inky Patterns. Thank you so much for taking this class with me today. I really hope you enjoyed it and got a lot of good information out of it. I can't wait to see what fun ideas and themes you come up with, so make sure to post in the class projects. If you enjoyed this class today, make sure to leave a review and follow me on Skillshare for more classes. You can also follow me on Instagram at @shaneatexcelart. I post updates on there as well. Thanks for watching.
Shayna Sell, Illustrator and Creator
