Transcripts
1. Intro to Making Patterns from Sketches & Digital Art in Photoshop: Hello and welcome to this course on making patterns from sketches and digital art in Photoshop. My name is Helen Bradley and I'm a Skillshare top teacher. I have over 200 courses here on Skillshare, and over 86,000 student enrollments. In this course, I'll show you how to turn sketches and digital art into patterns in Photoshop. You'll learn how to take art that you've made in Photoshop or an application like Procreate, for example, and turn that into simple, and more complex repeats in Photoshop. Along the way, you'll learn to re-color artwork, so that you can turn one shape into multiple colored versions of that shape. You'll also learn to take images from your sketchbook or an online application into Photoshop, how to color those images, and then make larger repeating pattern swatches from them. You can use the finished patterns for digital backgrounds and scrapbook papers, and even for printing online, such as making fabric and gift wrap at Spoonflower. Enough from me, if you're ready, let's get started turning your ink sketches and digital art into usable patterns in Photoshop.
2. Digital Drawing to Photoshop Pattern: If you draw, for example, on an iPad or an Android device, you can use some of your drawings as pattern sources in Photoshop. Now, in this case, I drew and colored these roses in procreate on my iPad. I saved them from procreate as JPEG images and then I e-mail them to myself. I saved them to my camera roll and just e-mail them out of the camera roll. That's quite a simple to understand and process workflow. I've got the images here. Now, they came in with a white background. The first thing I'm going to do is get rid of the white background. I'll disable the lock icon on the background layer. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you might need to double-click that layer to unlock it or go to the magic one towards the simplest tool to use here, because this is a solid white background because it came from procreate. I'll just click once in the background and press Delete. Then, I'll deselect the selection, I'm pressing Control D. It would be Command D on a Mac, you could also choose, select and deselect. You can see here's the shortcut. Now the document I have, I had already cropped it before I started the video, is 972 by 993 pixels, and that's nowhere where you want to start with a pattern. What I want to do is to either make this Canvas a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller. Since this one is nearly 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels, I might be tempted to use that as a starting point, but in actual fact, I think I want things a little bit tighter, I'm going to go smaller. I think I can risk making it 800 by 800 without cropping away my roses, let's give it a shot. I'll choose image and then canvas size. I'll type the width and the height as 800 by 800, and I'll click Okay. I'm given a warning that the canvas sizes smaller than the current canvas size and some clipping will occur or click proceed. While the clipping occurred, it didn't get anywhere near my pixels, so I was quite safe there. If you do find that clips off your pieces, you'll just undo it, perhaps move one of the pixels in a little bit closer to the center and try again. Now, my canvas size is 800 by 800. That's a really good size for making a pattern because it's evenly divisible by two. Shapes are all on the same layer. I'm going to start by breaking them out. I'm going to the last so tall and I'll make a general selection around the rows. You don't need to go too close and don't want to go too close, cause you don't need to be accurate, because it's got a transparent background. With its selected layer, new layer via cut and that just puts that row's on its own layer independent of the other two. We're going to do the same with one of the others. Again, with the last so tall, just dragging around one of these roses. Makes sure that you've got the right layer targeted, otherwise it won't work. Layer new, layer via cuts. All three roses are now on their own separate layers. One of this I'm not going to use right now, I'm going to turn the purple one off. I'm going to target the pink one and I'll move it pretty much centrally in the document and then I'll turn it off for now because I don't need it there. Next, I'll go to the yellow one and again centrally, it pretty much in the middle of the document. Now, to make a pattern out of this, I have to break it into four pieces and put one in each of the corners. Well, there's a tool that helps you do it. I'm going to target the layer and I'll choose filter other offset. Now the only thing you need to know about this dialogue is that you're going to put in half the width and half the height of the document in here, which is 400 and 400, and you're going to click Okay, and you're going to hope that it works and you're going to see immediately that it has has not worked. Now, Photoshop in later versions has had this really bad behavior with this offset filter. I'm going to show you how to solve it. What you're going to do is you're going through the crop tool and go and make sure that you have the artboard selected and you've got delete cropped pixels selected, and you'll press Enter. Now, something happens here that there is something that Photoshop is thinking it's seeing around the edge and it's just not behaving correctly. Now, let's go back and do that offset filter again. Filter, other, offset. This time when we type 400 and 400, the pieces are going to be burst into those corners exactly as they should be. Now, as I said, this is an issue with later versions. Photoshops says particularly a problem in this, but if you're using version of Photoshop, you might be wondering what all the [inaudible] about, because your version probably works just fine, and if it works just fine, that's fine too. Now, I've just turned on my middle rose and we're reading, we've got out pattern paste. I'm going to select everything. I'll choose select all, of course, I could press Control or Command I, then I'll choose Edit and define pattern, this is going to be rose1, because this is going to give me a simple rose pattern with a yellow and a pink rose. In a minute we're going to come back and put the purple rose, but let's test out pattern first. I'll choose File, add new, and I'm going to create a document the size of my screen, 1920 by 1080. I'll fill it with a pattern with layer, new fill layer, and then pattern, I'll click Okay. Now, the last pattern that you create is going to be the one that is going to be used here, could have dropped the scale down a little bit so that we can say that it's repeating really nicely and I'll just click Okay. That's a pink and yellow rose pattern, but of course we had another rose that we can use. In fact, we need two, so we're going to use one of these as two roses, and we're going to make a more sophisticated version of this pattern in the next video.
3. Digital Drawing to Photoshop Pattern - a larger repeat: Now that we've made a simple two-color rose pattern, we still have a rose typed away that we can use. We can use this actual pattern piece to create something where we have four different color roses. To do that, we need a document double the size of this wall, twice as wide and twice as tall. This one was 800 by 800. That means we need something 1600 by 1600, File and then New and we're going to make it 1600 by 1600, you can type the values in here, I just happen to have that document size already in my selection here, I'll click Create. I'm going to add a new layer because I want to put my pattern on a layer that has transparency on it. Edit and then Fill. You'll choose Pattern as your option and then go to the Custom Pattern drop-down and you want to make sure that you select the last pattern in the list because that's the pattern that we just created. You'll have to do that manually in this dialogue whereas in the land new fill layer dialogue, it's automatically selected for you. We're using this one because we want to insert our pattern at a 100 percent, we don't want to change it. It's really important that we keep the values consistent, so I'll just click Okay. Here now is our two-color rose pattern. What we want to do is make this a four-color rose pattern and we're going to start by replacing these two pink roses and we'll do that by going and grabbing the purple rose that were left behind over here. I'm just making it visible, targeting its layer and choosing Edit and then Copy. Going back to the document we're working on, choose Edit and then Paste and I'm just going to place that over that pink rose there, Alt option, drag it down, replace it over this one here and all we have to do now is to get rid of the pink roses. Let's just turn off our purples for now. Let's go to the layer that actually has the pink roses on it. Go the Lasso Tool, and drag nice general selections around each of these roses and press Delete. Now we can turn back on our purple roses, and we're halfway to a pattern that has four rose colors. We've got pink, yellow, and purple. The problem is we've got twice as many yellows as we do pink and purple. Now the way that this pattern works is that ones in the corner, and this one in the middle belong together, and the ones on the side belong together, so we need to work out what's going to be the easiest to work on. I'm going to take the four corners and the middle and you can do a couple of things here, you could just recolor everything, or you could recolor and rotate it, so we're going to do both. Let's start on this layer that's got everything on it, and let's make general selections with the Lasso Tool around the corner objects. Hold the Shift key so that you're adding to it. You want all four corners and you want the middle rows because all of these have to be the same color if we're going to do a full color pattern, we'll choose Layer, New, Layer Via Cart, and that just pops on the corner and the middle onto their own layer. We're going to recolor them. I'll select this layer that has these yellow flowers on it that we just popped onto a separate layer and we'll choose Image, Adjustments and choose Hue/Saturation. In this case, we're working direct on this layer, so no other layer is going to be effective. I'm just going to drag around the Hue slider to find a different color for my rose and I'm thinking of a teal blue will be a nice foil for these other colors. Once you find a color that you like, you'll just click Okay and this is now your pattern paste, but if you want to go a slight step further, we could rotate this so that this flat doesn't look exactly like the ones next to it. Again, with this layer selected will choose Edit and then Free Transform. In the angle selector here we're going to rotate it a 180 degrees, so we'll just type 180, and then click the Check Mark and so this rose here is pointing in a different direction to those roses there. Of course, if we'd had another rose that we could have used, then we could have done this manually. We would put a rose in the center on a new layer, and then we would have duplicated that layer and then use the offset filter, but this time using 800 as the offset because that's half of 1600. Basically, the same process as we did to build up this one by putting something in the center and shooting it out to the corners. If we'd had sufficient roses to do it with, but you can also sort of fudge it by using a rose that you already have and just rotating it. This is all looking good, we're just going to merge these altogether. I'm selecting the Four Layers, Right-Click and choose Merge Layers. The backgrounds turned off, so we'll choose Edit and then Define Pattern and this is going to be large rose. Now let's go and test it out. We've got the document we're using, I'm going to double-click on this fill layer, go and select the very last pattern, which is the pattern that we just created, still got to 40 percent, that's just fine, I'll click Okay and now we have four different color roses, we've got the purple, the pink, the blue, and the yellow. As I said, if we'd had four different color roses, we could have just made that into the pattern as we had three, we're just making double use of one of the roses.
4. Hand Drawn Images to Pattern Repeat Pt 1: One possible source for hand-drawn illustrations that you can use in patterns is to draw them yourself on paper. I have a page here in my sketchbook that I have photographed on my iPhone and emailed it to myself and opened it up here in Photoshop. It's quite a large documents, 3,000 by 4,000 pixels in size. These leaves are a reasonably good size to use for pattern-making. The first thing I'll do is go and select the leaves that I want to use. So just got the background layer of this photo selected, I'm going to the Lasso tool, and I'm just going to lasso around the layers I want to use. I'm going to grab this two and I'm going to take those with me right now. Control or command C to copy, I'll choose "File" and "New". I'm going to create a document about 2,000 by 2,000 pixels in size just to work on these, and then Control or Command V to paste them in. With the Move tool, I'm just going to move them up here. Let's go back to the leaves. I'll deselect the selection, you can do that by choosing select deselect, or of course you can press Control or Command D. Go back to the Lasso tool and look for some other layers. I want this one here, so I'm going to grab it. Again, copy and paste it. They each go on separate layers, which is going to be handy because the color at the background of this is very different and it might be easier to remove the background separately. This is the other one I'm going to take. I'm just going to take four. Let's go to this layer first, which is these two lays up here. Let's just have a look at them for now. You can see that they're fairly light and that might cause a few problems in actually making a selection. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a duplicate of this layer, just drag it onto the "New Layer" icon, the topmost layer, I'm going to set its blend mode to multiply, and that's going to darken these edges. That might help me a little bit, I'll merge it down, right-click and choose "Merge Down". Now we've just got one layer and things are a little bit darker, but that might help. I'll go to the magic wand tool, and set my tolerance to 15. That's generally a sort of good figure. I'm going to make sure that contiguous is not selected and I'm just going to click here. That has made a pretty good selection, but it's a bit of a problem through here. Let's just undo that with Control or Command D and see if we can do a little bit better before we make that selection. Let's try a curves adjustment, image adjustments and curves. The benefit of curves is it allows us to darken things so I'm going to darken the darker areas of the images dragging in on this left-hand side of the curve. Then if I drag in a bit on the right-hand side, I'm going to lighten the lighter areas and I can pull up or down depending on what that's going to give me in terms of a successful selection area. The thing that's concerning me most of all is in here, I want to be able to get that area so I can actually color it. I'm thinking that this might be the better solution for me. I'll just click, "Okay". Now the benefit of putting an adjustment in using image adjustments is it goes straight in on the layer, it's not an adjustment layer, and I think it's just a change to that layer. Let's try the magic wand tool this time. I'll undo that, I'm going to up my tolerance a little bit. Tolerance is how many pixels close to the color that you have selected will be selected. Small tolerance means that only pixels that are exactly the same or really, really close to that color will be selected. If you increase the tolerance a whole lot, then there's going to be a wider interpretation of selected colors and it's based on the color that you are clicking on and how close things are to that. I think 25 is probably going to be better for me here, I'll just press "Delete". Now I'm looking in here and seeing that I do have a problem, in particular, just in here, but that's going to be really easy to solve. I'm going to the eraser tool, I've got a really small eraser, it's five pixels, that's pretty hard. I'm going to make it about halfway hard, about 50 percent and I'm just going to click once here. I'll just come down here, hold down the Shift key and click again, and that's pretty much cleaned up that area. If I see other little bits that I can clean up, I will. I'm not going to be too fussy about this, but I will go to the brush tool again, I've got a fairly small, fairly soft brush here, I can just adjust its size if I need to, black paint, I'm just going to make sure that I get these areas so that I can track my color later on. It's going to be easy to make a selection if we've actually got hard edges on it. That's pretty good, let me just check this other leaf. I'm going to call those good for now, you can see that there's some lighter areas. We're going to deal with that in a minute. Let's have a look at this one, it's on this layer here. Let's try our selection on that. Oh, that's really tight, that's really good. Let me just delete that and I'm calling that good. I don't think there are many problems with that. Let's have a look at this one here, we'll just grab the layer it's on and click on that with the magic wand tool. I think a 25 setting for tolerance is actually working better for me than 15. I might even up it to 30 on this one and just say, let me just stop that selection with Control or Command D. Let's click again and see if we can get even more, I want quite a bit of areas to color in this leaf and I think that's going to be a pretty good selection. At this point since we've got black leaves and transparency behind them, we can put all of these on the same layer. I'm going to select all the leaves themselves, but not the background, right-click and choose "Merge Layers". Now we're treating them as a single layer, it just makes life a little bit easier. I've got a dot there, I'm just going to get rid of. Now, if there are stray pixels wandering around, it would be really nice to find those. But before we go searching for stray pixels, let's see if we can darken things up a little bit. I'm going to zoom in because I'm particularly concerned about this leaf here. Again, I'm going back to the adjustments, image adjustments, and this time I'm going to do black and white. The reason why I'm going to do black and white is that we had some yellow here, can you see if that sort of yellowish brown? The black and white adjustment allows me to target a color, ie yellow-brown, and make it black or make it white. Well in this case, I want it to be black. Here's yellow, here's black and you can say that that's actually solved the problem. Here's yellow as white, you can see it's eating into the edge of the leaf. But when we make it black, we're actually really solidifying that. We're taking faded in color, if you like, and actually making it black, that's a really good solution when you see that you've got a color in something that you want to take the black or white, just go and use the black and white adjustment. Let's check for some stray pixels. This is a totally fun application of the stroke tool. What we're going to do is select the layer. We're going down to FX and we're going to click on "Stroke". What you're going to do is you're going to set it to outside, that's critical and you've got to set a color bright, something you can actually see, pinks or red is really good, and you're going to set a size value. You want it to be where you can see it and you'll just click "Okay". When we zoom in, what we'll see is anywhere where there is a pixel of color, it's going to be surrounded by this red. Let me just putting a pixel color so you can see how it's working. I'm on this layer, I've got a brush and I'm just going to put it in a black dot. Every time I put in a black dot, it gets this stroke around it. Because what this stroke is, is it's adding a six pixel stroke around anything it sees on the page. A dot is a something and it's going to get a stroke around it. Now we use that to go and get the eraser tool, make sure the eraser is hard. Absolutely wants to be a hard eraser, 100 percent hardness when you're doing this. What you'll do is you'll just size the eraser to about the size of the dot and click over the middle of it. If you click to "Delete the Dot", then the stroke goes as well because this is suddenly nothing for the stroke to be around. What you'll look for here is any bumps, really big bumps to tell you that there's some things that are still around the edge of a shape here there. Here's is two bumps. What they are are stray pixels in here that are going to fight us when we come to color this. Place the eraser over the dot and click and it's gone, and it's possibly something in here as well. Now, this cleanup job was really good, there's not very much for me to clean up, but you might have more or less depending on how you actually did your selection and what you've got left behind. What you do want to be really careful of is that you don't do this and chew into the edge of your leaf or the edge of your shape. You want to just be hovering over the little bump and then click once with the mouse to delete it. Now you could spend a lot of time searching for these bumps and removing them, but I really don't suggest that you do. I just suggest that you look for really obvious, really large stray pixels and get rid of those and for the rest, just ignore it. This is a technique that you can use any time you have to clean up a hand drawn pathos art. I just think it's a wonderful approach to take, it's very, very easy to do. Once you're finished with it, just drag the stroke onto the trash can, it's gone. We're pretty right and right now we've got our line out, it's time to have a look at filling it with color. That's what we're going to do in the next video.
5. Hand Drawn Images to Pattern Repeat Pt 2: Now, briefly before we go to color these leaves, I want to show you a technique. If you feel that your lines are not quite thick enough, well, you don't have to go and start drawing again in your notebook. This is what you're going to do. You're going to target your layer with the lines on. You'll choose filter other and you'll choose minimum. What this allows you to do is to set a minimum with fewer lines. Now 3.7 pixels is obviously way too big. But if we wind it back down to about 0.9, then we're getting a thickening of these lines. Let's see what it used to look like. This is what it used to look like. When we apply that filter to it, the lines thicken up just a little bit. That might be enough for you to think that you're actually getting a better presentation of what it was that you were intending to do in the first place. I'm going to do that. I think that my lines could use a little bit of thickening up, so I'm going to apply that filter. Again, it's filter, other, minimum. Having done that we're now going to look at filling our shapes. I'm going to add a brand new layer and I'm going to put it underneath the lines. We need to target the lines because we need to make a selection using the lines. We're going back to the magic one tool, we're going to dial this down to about 15 for our tone, because it doesn't have to be very big and we're going to enable contiguous. This is different. This time we need contiguous tone on, and we're going to select an area to color. Let's actually go and get the side of the leaf. I've selected this area of the leaf. The problem is if there are any fuzzy edges, then when I fill this with color, we're going to see fuzz around the edge. What we're gonna do is we're going to enlarge this selection or little bit, select, modify, expand, make it a little bit bigger. We're going to make it bigger by just two pixels and click okay. If we zoom in, you'll see that the selection is now inside the black line art. Well, that's just fine because we're going to put the color on a layer underneath. If the color goes into the black area, it's going to be under the black area. It's just going to fill this area and not actually eat away into the black. That's the way that we're going to approach this coloring. It looks like it's going to be tedious, but I've got a trick for you to make sure that it's a whole lot easier than it looks like it's going to be. We need some color. Let's just go. I've got the swatches palette here. I've got a lot of colors in here. Let's go and choose a color to use. Now I'm on the lab that the color's going to go on. Let me just call that color. This makes life easier. It's really obvious that this is the color layer. Target that, and we need to fill this area with this color, that's Alt backspace on a PC, it's option delete on the Mac. As you can see, we're still seeing the black, the green is tucked in behind it. De-select the selection control or command D. I'm going to zoom out a little bit. This time I'm going to make some selections down the side of the leaf and I'm going to select every second one of these areas. So it back to the magic wand tool, you'll need to be on the line art layer. Let's call this line art. Now I'm going to select every other of these little areas here holding the Shift key as I work down. Now if you make a mistake, press control Z immediately and then kept going forward. I've got the selection there. I'll choose, select, modify, expand. It's going to be expanded by two pixels so it tucks underneath. Go to the color layer. Let's choose a color to fill it with this pink color. Alt backspace option delayed and then de-select it. Let's see how we're going to speed this up, so we're not here all day. Let's go to our line art layer and let's select the area we want to paint. Let's assume we're prepared to do that much, but we'd like some help. Well, let's also get our color as well. Because if we have our color in place, then we can create an action that will fill this selected area with that color, but it's going to do all the expanding work for us. I'll choose windows and then actions. I've got a set of actions here called Helen's actions. I'm just going to tag those as where I'm going to put my actions, but you can put your action anywhere and if you want to create a new collection, just click here. But I've got my collection, I'm going to click here on new action. I'm going to call it expand and color and I'll click record. Now I'm recording. What I did and what I want this to do is to expand this. Let's go to select, modify, expand two pixels, click okay. It's done the expansion for us. Now we want to make sure that our color goes in the color layer, so let's target the color layer. Let's fill it with the color that we've already selected, Alt backspace, that would be option delete on a Mac. Now we're done with that. Let's de-select our selection with select de-select, and let's go back to the lineup because the very next thing we have to do is make some more selections. This is all recorded in our action. What we do now is just click here to stop recording. Our action is now going to do all of those steps for us, provided we actually have the color selected and the selection selected, then the action is going to do all the work. Let's go and do that. I've got all these areas selected that I want to color. Let's go and get a color to use. Use this orange color here. Let's go to our actions palette, target, expand and color, and click run. It's done all the work for us and we're back on the line art layer. Now we can just go and click to select the next area and then go and get color to use. I'm going to use a blue this time. Go and get our actions palette. I'm actually going to put it somewhere where it won't keep closing on me. The action is still selected from last time. Just click run, it just does it all for us. Now if I want to borrow a color that I've already used previously, I'm going to target the eye dropper tool and just click on that color and that selects it. I've got everything ready. Let's just click the play button. Go back to the magic wand tool. I'm going to increase the tolerance on this because I'm having a little bit of difficulty selecting a big enough area. I'm going to keep experimenting with tolerances to see if I can get a better result. Now if I continue to have difficulty, I'm going to come in here with the horizon and just say if I can solve what the problem seems to be in that light can't get into this area. This wasn't the easiest leaf to select, but I do have it all selected. I'm going to zoom out so I can sample a color from the work that I've already done. I'm going to choose the pink and we'll go ahead now and just run our action. This time I'm going to select a different color one I haven't used before the yellow, and let's just run that. Although it took a couple of minutes to write that action, I think you'll find that the process of writing the action is really valuable and will speed up your workflow. Now, in case I want to make changes to my colors later on, I'm going to grab the line art and the color layer, and I'm going to duplicate them. I'm going to turn off the bottom tool so that I have a spare copy left, and I'm just going to merge these. So now I have some leaves that I can use in my pattern, so they're isolated and they're colored. But if a ever wanted to come back later on, I could still work on the line art and the coloring separately. That just gives me a bit of flexibility since I took all the time to come in here and do the cut out and the coloring, I think it's worth doing that. Save that, and it's time to make a pattern.
6. Hand Drawn Images to Pattern Repeat Pt 3: So now it's time to make a pattern from these lays and I'm going to make a slightly irregular pattern. So start off with, I'm going to target the layer that has lays on them, and I'm going to copy that. So I'll choose Edit, Copy. I'm going to create a brand new document. The pattern size that I'm going to be working on is going to be 1,000 by 1,000, as this is going to make the mathematics a lot easier. So 1,000 by 1,000 click Create, and then Edit, and Paste. Now the lays are much bigger than the actual documents, so I'm just going to scale them down. In the latest versions of Photoshop, you do that by just dragging on a corner. In the earlier versions of Photoshop, you're going to have to Shift drag. They changed the behavior of scaling in proportion with the most recent version of Photoshop. So just don't get bitten by that because it's a nightmare, at least until we get used to it. So let's go to the lasso tool. I'm going to lasso one of this lays, so I'm going to jump each one of them to their own separate layer. Make sure that I have the last selected layer, new layer via cut. I know that in future I can press Shift, Control, and J, to do that automatically and on the Mac you'll see the shortcut for doing that on the Mac. Again, a rough selection around the leaf, hit the shortcut, go back to the line art layer. Another rough selection around the leaf, shortcut, and it's on its own layer. So now we have all four lays on their own separate layers. I'm going to click on the top one, shift, click on the bottom one, and drag them all onto the new layer so I've doubled up. I now have two of each leaf. For now, I'm just going to put the background back on because it's a little bit easier for me to work with a white background. So I've got the Move Tool here and I've got auto select layer selected. So what that means, is that I can click on a shape and it automatically selects that shape layer and when we're working with things that we want to move around like this, that's going to make life a whole lot easier. So next up, I'm just going to rearrange my leaves so that the order is broken up a little bit, and I'm going to rotate them. So let's start moving them into position and what I'm going to be really careful to do is to put at least one leaf over the top here and at least one leaf down the side. So it's actually positioned over the edge, and I'm going to avoid putting anything over the edge on the right or the bottom. It's going to make the math a whole lot easier if you work that way. So I'm going to place these leaves in position here, and just get some interesting things happening and I'm going to do this up here. Now be aware that this leaf in a minute is going to be copied down here, which means it's going to have a potential accident with this leaf and it's also the exact same leaf. So I don't want that to happen, I'm going to move it out of the way. It would be much better to have this leaf in that position because it's a different leaf. So you don't want to spend too much time working on this right now because you really have no clue as to how it's going to look. So let's go and grab these two on the side here. So I am selecting both of them at once, which means that their layers are now selected in the layers palette because I've got order select layer selected there. I'm going to drag them onto the new layer icon and what I have up here now is that these are the duplicate so I just made and they're the only thing selected. So I need to move them 1,000 pixels over here. So I'll choose edit, and then free transform, and what I want to do is read off their current X value because this is the X direction we're headed in. Whatever that is happens to be 57. I'm going to add a 1,000 to it, which is why I made the document or 1,000 by 1,000 because adding 1,000 to 57 is pretty easy. I'm just going to type 1-0 in front of the number, so it now reads 1-0-5-7. Click the check mark. These are now perfectly lined up so they're going to work perfectly in the pattern. Let's go and get this one. I'm going to duplicate it. The thing that is selected now is the second copy of that, edit free transform. This time we're headed in a Y direction. So let's read its Y-value. It happens to read 0.5. It doesn't matter what it reads, you're just going to add 1,000 to it. So I'm going to type in 100, and now it reads 1,000.5. I'll click the check mark. Now, this piece has had an accident with this one. If we're going to move anything, it's going to be this one because it's just a whole lot easier to move it. Let's just look at some spacing here for these others, and let's go and test our patterns. So I'm going to turn off my background. I'm going to select everything we select all, and then choose Edit, Define Patter, click, okay. We're going to create a document to test this in by choosing File and then New, we're going to make it pretty big. So I've got one here, 5,000 by 5,000. That's a good size. We'll choose Layer, New Fill Layer, Pattern, click okay, and the last pattern that we made is the one that is actually the one that is selected. So I'll click okay. What I'm saying here is I've got a lot of layers in a line here and a lot of layers in a line here. So we need to break this up a little bit. This is part of it. Once you've got a second look that you want to look at, select everything with Control or Command A, Edit, Define Pattern, just click okay, and there's no point in naming these patterns at this stage because you really wanted to have an idea as to how they're going to look first and get it sorted before you start naming it. The thing I'm saying problematic here now is that these are all pointing in the middle. So let's go and say what the problem is. It's this one here. Let's deselect the current selection and let's rotate this one around. Control, or Command A, Edit, Define Pattern, click okay, go back to the other document, double-click on this, and select the last pattern and say if that's an improvement and so you would continue to work on this pattern until you see something that you like in this dialogue. Now when it comes to adjusting the pattern, there are some options for adjusting the elements on the side. I'm just going deselect my selection, and if you want to move these up or down, this is what you can do. Select this one and Shift click on this one, and now move both of them at the same time. So you can move them up and you can move them left and right. What you cant do is rotate them. So if you need to rotate them, you're going to have to pull one of these apart. So what you would do is say, delete this one, go and rotate this one, and again copy and move it. But you could just move these, you just can't rotate them. So I now have a pattern that I liked. The last one in the pattern palette, the one that I've just created as the one I want to use. So I'm going to make this into a permanent pattern. I'm going to get rid of the ones that I didn't like. To do this, I'll choose Edit, and then I will, choose presets and preset manager. I'll go to the patterns presets. In here, from here all the way to the end, other patterns that I've just been making and the only one I like is the last one. So I'm going to protect the last one. I'm going to click on this one. I'm going to Shift click on this one and so that selects all of these patterns and I'll just press Delete. Now this pattern, I'd like to name it since it's something that I actually like. So I'm going to click it and click Rename, and I'm going to call it leaves. Click okay, and click done. Now in future, it's going to be available in the pattern dialog and it's going to be correctly named. Let me add a new line, it's going to turn the visibility off on this one. Let's fill this, this time with the edit fill command, edit, fill, pattern. I'll go down here and hover over this one and here it is, leaves a 1,000 by 1,000 pixels RGB color mode. I'll click it and click okay, and it's used to fill the document. So that's a way of creating patterns using elements that you've hand-drawn and this is a little bit more of a sophisticated pattern, a little bit more difficult to make too.
7. Tips for Drawing Images for Patterns: It's time now to have a look at some of the techniques that you'll need to be aware of when you're drawing line art drawings to use with this pattern-making effect. One of the things to be concerned about if you want to color your art as we did in the leaf drawings, then you'll need to make sure that you have solid lines around your objects, and that there are no open edges here. The reason for this, as you want to be able to go to, for example, the Magic Wand Tool and click on a area that you want to select, from here I'm going to target this part of the avocado. When I click in here, you can see that only this area has been selected. If I want to apply avocado green color to it, it is very easy to do because the green color is my foreground color. I can add a new layer and then just add that color to that selection by pressing "Alt Backspace", that would be option "Delete" on the Mac. Now, if you don't have solid lines, you're going to need to do some a work around. Let's see how that might work. Now I have an image here that I sketched and deliberately made it really sketchy. I can't rely on being able to select any of these areas because they are openings in the design,and so the question becomes, if you have a design like this, how are you going to easily recolor it? Well, in my sketch book, what I did was I placed a piece of tracing paper over this image and I traced the solid lines. Here are the solid lines. Now it's a bit wonky, but it doesn't really matter because we're only using this for the color, and because the entire element that we're drawing here has a sketchy look. The fact that the solid lines are a little bit wonky is just going to be fine. Let's see how we would go ahead and put those images together. What I did was after drawing this, I scanned the tracing paper with a piece of white paper underneath it, and I also scanned the original sketchy art, and so I've got both drawings here. I've assembled them into one document, and what I'll do with the topmost layer is just reduce the opacity down to about 50%. Then I'll use the selection tool to move it around, and you can use the visuals of the original image behind to just make sure that everything lines up. And if you need to, you can also just drag on the corners here to just rotate everything into position. What you want to do is end up with your solid lines pretty much placed over the top of the sketchy image, and then you can return the opacity of this top layer back to 100%. At this point, I went to the Magic Wand Tool and selected an area that I want to color and made sure that contiguous was enabled. Then I'll go and get the color to you. Let's just go and get a pink color. I created a new layer, and I deliberately placed this on top of the image. Now, I do need to extend this a little bit because I'm going to need to cover up the areas where the actual lines are. I chose, "Select" and then ''Modify and expand" and experimented with a value that would take me with a selection, pretty much halfway through this line, and five pixels did that, which tells me that my lines are probably around about 10 pixels in width. Having made that selection, I've selected my color. I'll press "Alt Backspace" option "Delete" on the Mac to fill that with color, and you'll say that not only do we have the color down, but we've lost half of this line, and that's going to be important because we want to lose those lines completely. I just built up the image that way. Let's go back to here and let's have a look at what happened. This is the element with the lines and the coloring, and we can see that we've pretty much lost the lines totally. We've covered them up with all the colors. I have put all my colors on separate layers. I just think that that is a smarter way to operate. Having done that, let's have a look at the color with no lines at all. This is our color and there are no lines, we've got a few little white areas. I'm not going to worry about those, but we could come in with a paint brush and just fix them up should we wish to do so. The final sketch involved getting rid of the solid line art layer and turning back on the really sketchy layer. Here is what it looks like. Now you can experiment with blend modes on the sketchy layer. The sketchy layer will go on top of the colors obviously because you want to see the colors through the holes on the sketchy layer, and if you use a blend mode like darken, then you'll be blending the colors together. Linear burn will work as well. That gives you a darkish look. If you leave the blend mode on normal, you're going to have problems because this sketch actually has a white background. You need to use a blend mode of one another, or remove the white background so that you can see through to the color labs below. But this gives you the ability to color your art very easily, but still have a sketchy outline. Another thing to be concerned about is the size of the objects you're going to draw. Now, I have some elements here, and I've drawn them pretty much at the size relative to each other that I want in the design, and I've done that for a very good reason. Let's assume that this lemon was actually quite large and we want to reduce its size relative to the avocado. I have selected the lemon and I'm just going to reduce its size, and then I'm going to say, well, the onion up here is too small. In actual fact, the onion should be much bigger relative to the avocado. I'm going to make the onion a bit bigger, and you can probably already see the problem that I've got. The problem is that the lines on the onion are much thicker now and the lines on the Lemon are much thinner, and they're both different to the lines on the tomato and the avocado. What you want to do when you're doing these drawings is to have an idea as to how big you want each of these elements to be in the design and to draw them with the same relative proportions to each other. If you want the onion and the tomato to be about the same size, then draw them the same size, and if you want the lemon to be like half of a tomato, then draw it at the same size as half of your tomato. That means that you won't have to re-size your elements and you won't come up with this problem where you've got differing line weights. It's going to look a lot more cohesive if you use the same line weight on each of the objects and it's just not going to be possible to easily determined in your sketchbook how thick the lines of your onion need to be if you have to size it up again later on. Do yourself a favor and draw all your objects at the same relative size. When it comes to transferring your line out from your sketchbook to your computer. If you have a scanner, then I would choose that in preference to a camera. I find that scanning pages of my sketchbook using a flatbed scanner will generally give me whiter pages or more even page color and better contrast in my art. But if you don't have a flatbed scanner, then photography will be just fine. You can shoot a copy of a page of your sketchbook with a regular camera or even your cell phone camera. Just be prepared to spend a little bit of extra time cleaning up your scan so that you get really good line out from them. Another tip, if you happen to be using a scanner to scan your drawn images is to use a high resolution on your scanner. It's much easier to size images down and you'll get better results than if you try to size them up, and most scanners will scan at anything from 300 to 600 DPI. Always plan to get as large a scan as you can, and I always stock my original scans in a separate folder and then work on copies of those images. Sometimes I will resize them down, but I always have my original scans safely stored in case I need to work on the originals at some stage. Now, if you are drawing digitally, then there are a few things to consider. If it's at all possible to save your images as Ping images with transparent backgrounds, then you can save yourself a little bit of time in removing the backgrounds. However, if you do need to include a white background, that shouldn't pose an overwhelming problem because the white background is going to be very even because the image has been produced on a computer. Compare that to the situation where you are, for example, photographing a page from a sketchbook. If the light is a little bit uneven, you can end up with darker areas and lighter areas, which are going to be a little bit more cumbersome to clean up. When it comes to doing your drawing, if you're drawing digitally or when you're cleaning up and coloring your art, you'll get better mileage out of your files if you keep separate, the line art itself and the coloring, worth like to put them on separate layers. Even if I create a composite layer at the end, which contains all the data from both those layers. I get a little bit more flexibility in cleaning things up and re-coloring. If I kept the lines in the art and the color in the art on separate layers.
8. Uses for Your Finished Patterns: Once you've created some patterned designs from your art, you might be curious about what you could do with them. We're going to look at two scenarios and the first one is using a site such as Spoonflower. Now Spoonflower like a number of different print on demand sites, will let you print fabric and wallpaper, gift wrap, and also home decore items. Now what Spoonflower wants from you is just the pattern swatch. It doesn't want a document filled with the pattern because it needs the element that's going to repeat. So for Spoonflower, this is the kind of document we would send and Spoonflower will take at this repeat to allow you to make fabric from it. Spoonflower needs the pattern swatch because it needs to be able to adapt to a really, really big piece of fabric and also a small cushion. So you won't know ahead of time exactly how much fabric you want. So you can't pre-prepare, for example, a document that's one yard by one yard. Because what happens if you want two yards, you don't want a seam and so this is how Spoonflower deals with it, you send it your patterns swatch. So the question then becomes, how are we going to prepare this document for Spoonflower? Will Spoonflower want a flattened version of the document. So JPEG, or really high-quality JPEG is going to be just fine. But we do need to pre-prepare the document, so let's see how we do that. I'm going to image and then image size. This is going to tell me two things, how big this swatch is and it's also going to let me prepare it to the kind of specification that Spoonflower wants. So I'm going to disable re-sampling cause that's pretty important. We don't want the image to be enlarged or shrunk in this process, we just want to make the most of what it is that we have, and you'll see that the measurements are in inches and that's good for Spoonflower, Spoonflower will use inches. At the moment it's just over 13 inches square at a resolution of 72 pixels per inch. Spoonflower, ideally wants the resolution to be 150 or more. So let's type in 150 and see what that gives us. Well, that's giving us a swatch of around six-and-half by six-and-half inches. So I'll click "Okay", and this is now at a resolution in a size that would be acceptable to Spoonflower, so I can choose "File" and then "Save As". I don't have to put a white background on it because if I'm saving the images of JPEG, that white background is automatically going to be added to it. So I'll click "Save As", and I'm going to call this leaves. From the Save As Type drop-down list, I need to select JPEG. Just watch out if you're unsure this JPEG 2,000 is not what you want. You just want the regular JPEG so I'll click that. I'm making sure that my profile is sRGB. That's consistent with Spoonflower's requirements, and I'll click "Save". Well, it looks like I've already got that in use as a fall line, so let's just call this Spoonflower leaves. When the JPEG options dialog opens up, we're going to select the highest qualities. So this will be a large file with minimal compression applied to it. I'll click "Okay". So this image is now ready to take to Spoonflower. Once you've logged into Spoonflower or signed up, you'll go to the design area and click "Upload". You can then choose the file to upload. So I'll click "Choose Files" and then go and find the document that I just saved and click "Open". I'll need to agree that I own the rights or have permission to use these designs which I do, so I'll click "Upload". You can then preview what your design is going to look like, and you want to check to make sure that it looks good before you progress. Now there are other things that you can do with your designs. For example, you could create scrapbook paper, and for this you'll need a new file. So I'll choose "File" and then "New". Now the typical size of scrapbook paper is 12 inches by 12 inches at 300 pixels per inch. So you'll want to create a document that is that size and click "Create". We'll fill our document with our pattern and we're going to use that same leaves pattern. I'll choose "Layer", "New fill layer" and then "Pattern' and click "Okay". Now the reason why I'm using pattern fill is that we could scale down this pattern. So if we felt that this was a little bit large for example, scrapbook paper, we could scale it back. So I'm going to scale this down to 50 percent. I think this is a better size for scrapbook paper. So I'll click, "Okay". So if this is our sheet of scrapbook paper, we would save this as a high-quality JPEG exactly the same way as we did previously, because we've already set this up as a 12 inch by 12 inch documented 300 DPI. That's how it's going to appear in the image size dialogue. So you can see it's 12 inches by 12 inches, 300 PPI. So it's perfectly sized for scrapbook paper. So we'll go ahead and choose "File" "Save As" again, we'll choose the JPEG format and I'll call it scrapbook paper leaves. But I'm going to give it a number, an Arabic number 1 because it's my first sheet of scrapbook paper. I'll choose the sRGB color profile as that's the best for online viewing, and click "Save". Again for me, I want a high-quality file that's typically how scrapbook paper is solved. But if you're selling on a site that has different requirements and obviously you'll match your file sizes and the quality to that site's requirements. I'll click "Okay". Now we can get some extra mileage out of this shade of scrapbook paper. I'm going to zoom in so I can see it a little bit more clearly. It would be really nice for me to be able to create a package of these layers. So I'm thinking I'm going to re-color these. For this, I'll choose "Layer", 'New Adjustment layer", and then I'll choose "Hue saturation". I'll click "Okay", and I can move the hue slider around to re-color this art, and I'm looking for some interesting color ways. A color on the hue slider that makes the leaves look attractive to me. I kind of like this look so I'm going to close the dialog down and I'm going to save this one to "File". "Save As". Again, it's going to be a JPEG image. I'm going to save it using the same name as previously, but I'm going to give it a number 2. Again, choosing the sRGB color profile and click "Save", and again, high-quality. So I'll just click "Okay". If I open up the last panel, I'll say that I have my hue saturation adjustment on top, so I can just double-click that and continue to move this slider around looking for color combinations that I like. Now, I kind of like this, but I think it's a bit bright side could drop down the saturation a little bit. Again, I would go ahead and save that, and then again, continue to look for other color ways, because the indicator here on the hue slider started in the middle, which means we've only done half of the possible number of hues. So we could go to the other end and start backing it off, and we'll find some color ways in here that would be interesting to us. Again, every time I find a color way that I like, I will go ahead and save it. For a set of scrapbook purpose, you could package six of them up together and that will give a nice presentation. But you may also want to include some of the leaves as sort of standalone elements. So let's go back to our recolored leaves. I have them here on a layer with transparency. So let's just turn the background off. We've got four leaves here, every one of which could be packaged as a separate PNG image. So what I'll do is go and select the first one. So I'll get the lasso tool, just lasso this leaf and choose "Edit" and then "Copy". It's now on the Windows Clipboard if you also own a Mac it would be on the Mac clipboard. I'll choose "File" and then "New", and the first option for photoshop is going to be a document that is the clipboard size. So I'll just select that and click "Create". I'll paste my leaf in with "Control or Command V". I'll turn off the background because if I'm shipping this out as an illustration that somebody could use on a scrapbook, they may want to put this on a colored background. I don't want to leave a white surrounding around the leaf image. I just want to give them the leaf as it is. I'm also thinking this leaf might look better presentation wise if it was upside down. So I'll choose "Image" and then "Image rotation", just going to rotate mine 180 degrees. I like that better as a presentation. So now we need to save this and we need to save it in a format that is going to protect this transparent background. So that means we can't use JPEG, we'll use PING instead "File" "Save As" from the Save As Type drop-down list. I'll select "PING", and I'll call this leaf 1, and I'll click "Save". Now I can choose any of these options it doesn't really matter and just click "Okay". So this leaf could then be added to a scrapbook page with a colored background, and you're going to be able to see the color background around the leaf. I would go ahead and repeat that for the other three leaves in this package so that if I'm selling somebody some scrapbook paper, they'll also have the isolated leaves that they could use, either with a scrapbook paper or with just a plain background. Now so far as marketing your scrapbook papers, you'll want a document that shows off your scrapbook papers. I have a class that goes into creating that in some depth. If you're not familiar with the process, you may want to look at that class to see how it might be done.
9. Project and wrap up: You've now completed the video content for this course so it's over to you. It's time to put some of these effects into practice and turn either your own digital drawings into patterns or take some illustrations that you've perhaps inked in your notebook, bring them into Photoshop, clean them up, color them, and then make patterns out of those. If you don't have the assets that you can use, then you'll find mine in the class project area. I'm giving you access to the roses, to the four leaf drawings as well so that you can use mine to practice with. Post an image of your completed pattern or patterns as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and enjoyed learning things about Photoshop of which you were previously unaware. If you did enjoy the class, when you are prompted to leave a review, would you do that for me? These reviews really help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now, if you see a follow link on the screen, click it to keep up-to-date with my new classes as they're released. As always, if you'd like to leave a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Until next time, my name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this class, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming class soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
