Mandala-inspired Repeating Patterns in Adobe Fresco

1. Hello!: Hi, everyone. Welcome to this class on creating repeating patterns in Adobe Fresco. We'll be using the symmetry tool and pick and brushes to create beautiful intricate mandalas, and then turn them into seamless repeating patterns. Mandalas or mandalas, as we say in my native language, have always had deep cultural and spiritual meaning. Growing up, they were a natural part of my world, worn into rituals in daily life. Whether you're just discovering mandala art or you've been drawing them for years, you'll be amazed at how effortlessly you can create complex mesmerizing design using just a few simple strokes. By end of this class, you'll know how to use Adobe Fresco symmetry tool for mandala creation, work with pick and brushes for rich textured effects, turn your mandalas into repeating patterns. And build a collection by recoloring your designs efficiently. If you join me for my previous class where we learned all about fresco and creating repeating patterns using Victor Brushes, this will be a perfect next step. So grab your stylus or Apple pencil, open up Adobe Fresco, and let's dive into the world of Mandala patterns and pixel magic. 2. New UI Update: So as of May 2026, Fresco has changed its UI. That means it might look a little different than what you see in the next few lessons. I thought I'll make a update video for my Fresco classes. So here you go. As soon as you come in, if I click on Home, this is how it looks like. Used to see your custom sizes and stuff over here, but now it looks something like this, but that's okay. You can click on Create New and create a new document as usual, click on your files, and this is how the homepage looks like. Create new. You have an extra bit here called the social. You have some social media templates there, so you can use that. I'll just go to digital and current screen size. The first thing you notice as soon as we move here is that the toolbar has completely moved from left hand side to top. I know I'm not too happy about this, but yeah, we'll just work with it, I guess. On the left side now you have the brush settings. So this is the smoothing which used to, this is the smoothing, you go up and down. This is basically the flow or the opacity of the brush, like if you have some charcoal pencil and then yeah let's make it black, and then you do this. This is like you keep it all high, and then if you keep it all low, you see it's not flowing so well. This is the flow of the brush, and this is basically the size of the brush that you have. Again, click and hole and everything else works exactly the same. The settings are almost the same as well. I don't think we need to worry about that. And on the top bar, you have all the other tools that you used to have. This one is pose. It is a new thing which is not covered in any of my tutorials, so I'm not going to go into that. But basically, you have everything in here, the last tool, everything's up here. The shapes are still here. Text is again here, and then this is to add your images or photos and things like that. The eyedropper tool is here and the color palette is over here. You might see that the undo buttons have moved here instead of here, but that's fine because your two fingertaps still work. Also one thing is when you click on something else other than the brush, this panel disappears. They used to be your animation or motion panel here, which has moved up and they used to be shapes like a ruler and stuff and that has moved into this bit here or drawing aids. That's what it is, and you have all the drawing aids over here. Then you have your symmetry here and the perspective grid and the grids. When you turn it on, you can have grids and snapping is here, so you snap everything, I guess. Apart from that, everything else is exactly the same. And when you go up, you get a full screen mode. The only disadvantage I've seen is that when you're on the brush mode, before even if you were in the full screen mode and drawing, your brush, this was a floating thing which you can move everywhere anywhere you wanted, but they have disabled that. That means when you go to full screen mode, your brush settings disappear. So if you want to go back and adjust your brush size or something, you have to go back in, which I think is not a good thing. The motion settings are still here, so that hasn't changed as well. And the most important thing that I want to include is the brushes. Instead of having three separate brushes, they merge them into one single brush. This was done a while ago when you click on brush, you need to go to all brushes, and then you can choose what brushes that you want, pixel brushes, and then you can see all the subheadings or whatever. All the brushes are here, but only thing is it's all bundled up together and that's the most annoying bit for me at least. I guess that's it. That's the main change to the UI, and since this was a significant change, I thought I will add a updated video. I hope you go ahead and enjoy the next lesson. 3. Setting up & Colors: Okay, so first, let's set up our boe and talk about all the colors that we're going to use. Open up Fresco, and then this is your home screen. So you see two things here. One is home and another one is your files. So instead of going to home, I'm going to click on your files because this shows all my files that I've ever created. Now I'm going to go ahead and click on a new folder here. And let's name this something maybe Mandala. And safe. That's your new folder. You're going to click on it and get inside the folder. The reason we are creating the folder is to keep all our files in one place. That is if you decide to create multiple versions of the same file or multiple colors, you can keep them all here and you'll be really well organized. Now let's click on Create New. I'm going to go into digital, and I'll be selecting this square here. So this is 2,100 pixels into 2,100 pixels. So you can start with a square of this size. But if you feel like you're going to design this pattern for a much bigger surface, maybe you can start off with a bigger surface as well. Like, you can start off with a four k square, but it has to be square, and that's the most important thing. But I'm going to start off with a smaller square because I think it's much easier for these tutorian purposes. And also, I usually start off with a small square anyway. Click. Your art board is ready, and there's only one thing to do. Go into your grade right here. We're going to go into symmetry, click this arrow, and turn symmetry on. And we're going to choose this one here. Meanwhile, I'll go into snapping and then turn on the rotation snapping and alignment snapping. You can keep the rotation snapping at anything that you want, maybe 45 or 90, it should be right. Click Back. Now it's time to bring in colors. So to bring in the colors, can you use the color palette image that I've provided? You can just bring it in and use that, and we'll do that first. You can find it in the resources section, so download it onto the device that you're using Fresco. Once you ham it, click on images, photos, and bring it in. And click on Done. So when you bring in a color palette or any image for that matter, Adobe Fresco automatically creates a palette for you like this one. And if you don't see this, you can go into your settings, app settings. Go General and in here or to create color palette. Make sure it's turned on, and then bring in the color palette again. But most of the times the colors don't exactly match. Like for example, this red, if I click on this HSB slider, you see that it is 580 and 95, whereas this is 11 89 and 95, so it doesn't match. So that sometimes it happens. So if you don't want that, just click and hold and it creates a color. Make sure you're in your pencil, go to your color and check the numbers. And if they match, go ahead and make a mark on your artboard. It doesn't matter what brush you're using, as long as you make even a dot, that's fine. The only reason you do that is because it shows up in the resend stab. We're going to do the next one, next one, and just make sure I check the color 19198 and 95. Okay. And then yellow. 405-90-4905. So if you go into Resins now, you see all the colors that you need, so that's perfect. And then you can hide this. You can also hide this. The next method to get colors is by using Adobe color. I have the Adobe color theme shared with you guys. When you click on that link, it's going to take you to Adobe Color website where you can just click as Add to Library, and it's going to add it to your library. And once you add it, you click on your color palette, go to A and check the library that you've added it to. In my case, it's your library, and you will see the color theme. Okay, so we have our artboard set, and now it's time to draw. Let's draw our first basic design for this pattern. See you in the next one. 4. Let’s draw Mandala 1: Okay, so our artboard is ready, and it's time to draw. I'm going to click on Plus to create a new layer. For brushes, I'm going to use a pixel brush. If you're interested in knowing how to make patterns with vector brushes, I do have a Skillshare class that talks about making patterns with vector brushes. I will leave the link in the description here. Click on your pixel brushes, and we're going to go into Ink and Belgian comics. I'm going to set this to 70. You can click and hold and type in 70, or you can also go up and down like that. My flow is at 100, my smoothing is at one. Although the pattern looks quite complicated, it's actually nothing but few strokes on your artboard. If you still think that you might need some extra help, don't worry. I have a sketch for you guys. So go ahead and download it from the resources section. And once you have it, click on images, photos. And bring it in. Click on Done. Go to evens. Click on multiply because this kind of hides the white background and then reduce the opacity to as low as possible. You can also do this and type in. If you see any such box with numbers, you usually can type in the number. I'm just going to keep it around 26 and click. Now, let's choose the color yellow. So this mandala, I'm going to be drawing with the help of these guides. But the next one, because we have two of them in the pattern, I'm gonna be freehand drawing it because I just want to show you that even if you just scribble some lines, it's still going to look pretty. There you are. I'm gonna zoom in with my two fingers like that. And let's draw. Now click on plus for a new layer. One thing you should note is that I want you to create a new layer for every single thing that you draw. That's because it gives you more flexibility. You can go change colors. You can do whatever you want later on. And since we're using pick and brushes, it's much easier to change colors or delete or, you know, just hide things if you have it on a different layer. Let me just go ahead and undo that to finger tap because I think I'm going to make it a little bit different something like this. Yeah, better. Now, plus next layer, I'll use the light blue. I'm gonna do that. And let's draw this like this. And plus maybe the dark one. Like that. Okay. Great. Now, let's go ahead and I'm going to go below these layers here, go below and plus. Let's choose yellow again. We'll reduce it. So this one is going to be all the way like this and like that. And I'm going to check the thickness. I think this needs to be a bit higher. I'll keep it at 90s so that I'm going to put a lot of pressure here. Oh, that's really big, so let's reduce this to 70 again. So I'm going to put a lot of pressure here so that it's thicker, like that. You see what I'm doing. And then here, I'm going to make it thinner and thicker like that. My hands are a bit shaky, so you see these shaky lines. You can avoid it by not having shaky hands or increasing the smoothing a little bit. Maybe let's make it 14 and try it out because on Sundays, you know, your hands, I don't know, maybe because I haven't had anything to eat or just it's not working. There you go. I'm going to ignore my shaky hands, and I'm going to just fix this like that. That's perfect. And now let's go ahead and add the black bits here or the darker bits. Go back plus. Let's choose the dark color here. I go to delete this off. Okay, the dark color here. And we're going to go ahead and add this and color it up like that. It's time to add here. Maybe we can do it in this same layer as well. And we're going to add like that. Perfect. Now, plus, we want this on top of this layer here. So, plus, we're going to go ahead and choose the dark blue. This one. This they're about the same, I guess. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Let's go ahead and add this line here. That's good. And I'm going to fix this a little bit so that it looks nice. I also want one here on top of this, right? So, but that comes below this. So yeah, you can just add that here or plus different layer and use a little bit of pressure to add that. There you go. Maybe add a line. Why not? Okay. Now it's time for this one. Let's choose. It should be on top of this. So plus, I'm going to choose the light blue, and we're going to add goes like this and like this. Perfect. And now I'm going to go This has to go below. So go back and plus. We then choose the dark blue. I'm gonna oops. Is that the dark blue? No. There you go. You can actually reduce the size of your brush if you feel like it's harder to control. And go below that, plus, and we're going to put the yellow bits. So yellow and There you go. Let's color this in. Let's look at our work. Not bad. It's coming great. So now I feel like everything being blue. I mean, this one, you can hide it to see which one. This one, everything blue does not look that great, so I'm going to use the green color, use my fill tool. And one thing you should know with symmetry is that when you're using the fill tool, it doesn't automatically fill everything. So if I go ahead and put this, it's just going to be for that color. So we're just going to do alternate once now. There you go. And for the alternate ones, we're going to change the color of these things as well. So let's choose blue. And let's go to this back here. Is this the one? Nope. This one, I guess. Yes, that one. So we're going to choose that and color that off like that. And we choose yellow, go to the one here like that. Choose color that. Now, let's add these tiny bits over here, so green. I'm gonna go all the way top. Plus, we're going to add these bits. Oh, filtered, cancel, go back to your brush. There you go. Let's do here as well. So now let's add some extra elements to this. I'm going to add one right about this layer, plus, and let's choose white, maybe a little lighter, but not too light. And let's go back to the brush. You're going to add like that. It need not be uniform, so it's okay. There you go. I want some on the green. So we go here plus and clipping mask because I want it to be clipped. And there you go. Our first mandala is ready, so now it's time to make the next one. 5. Let’s draw Mandala 2: Okay, so we finished this one. So we're going to go back here now and click on Create New. And we're going to use the same screen size that we used for the previous mandala. So if you have used a four K one, use that one right now. I'm going to go with the Basic square. We're going to go into our settings here on symmetry, turn this on, and I'm going to use the same symmetry. By the way, for the record, you can use any symmetry that you want for the second mandala. But only thing is when you're arranging it in your artwork, it might look a little different, but you can work with it. So do go experiment with it. I think you'll have lots of fun. Okay, so now if you're using a different artboard, you'll again have to get in your colors. So that is when your library comes in handy because it's always there. So do what is the best method for you and get your colors in. Alright, so let's start drawing the next one now. Like I said, I'm going to free hand this one, but if you do want to sketch, I will leave the sketch as well. So let's do this one. I'm going to go ahead and use the same brush that is ink and Belgian comics. And for colors, let's start off with yellow, I guess. And we're going to go ahead. Oh, that's black. Let's choose the yellow, and we're going to make a flower. And let's go to light blue. Go back plus. Well, let's make a nice petal. Maybe thicker on the top, thinner in the bottom. Go below and plus. I'll choose the darker one. I'll choose somewhere on top. Sco like this, like that, and up and circle. I'm going to choose one more, and then up like this. It's not fully nice. I'm gonna go to my smoothing and increase this so that it gives me some control. So go up that and there you go. I think that should be okay. I want to add something inside. So go back here plus. I'm going to add bit like that. Now go back down and plus. Let's choose some yellow. There you go, and maybe thinner ones up here. Let's give some dark background to the back, I guess, go back all the way down plus, and then choose the dark color that we have. And we're going to go ahead and make a circle like that and then fill that in. We're going to make one here as well. Maybe a little lower. To finger to undo. Yeah, I think this is a very good position for that. Okay, that's good. I feel like we need a lot of yellow for this, so I'm going to go ahead and try to get in some yellow. Maybe plus, let's be in the background. That's okay. We're going to choose the yellow. And make something like this. Okay. Let's make a firework. Some fire. So. Some strokes, seriously, go ahead and enjoy this process, like draw to have fun like this. That looks fine, but I feel like I might need some green. So I'm going to get some green because the other one had green in it. So we're going to go ahead and add some green. Just wondering where I can add it. So maybe below this plus, and I'm going to add some green here. No. Hold on a second. Let's add a bit of green like this there and maybe add some here on top. So plus new one because I don't know if this will look good. So we can do something like this. No. I'm using very less pressure so that it doesn't know, look very odd. Okay, I'm going to use the dark color now and plus on top of this green, and just add something like that. Okay. And for the blue, I'm going to click on plus, and I'll choose white, or you can choose slightly lower color. And again, with your brush, we're going to go ahead and make some lines like this. It's good. And then maybe on the green as well, like that. And on the yellow, we can make things like that. And I think our artwork should be, Oh, no, with the center, let's plus. Let's make this white. And maybe put a little bit of blue in it. No, dark blue in it. Tiny bit. There you go. That's it. That's a second one. It's ready as well. And the next step we're going to try and get all these things to make it into a pattern. 6. Making the pattern Tile: Okay, so we are done with our two mandalas, and now it's time to put it together to create a pattern. So now I'll just go ahead and pick up my first mandala, so click on that. So we're going to group this together so that it's easier to copy and paste it into a different artboard. You can continue working on this artboard itself, but I like to keep my things separate so that I can always come back to my original file. So I'm going to go ahead and click on these three dots here and select multiple. Now we're going to choose all the layers that make up this mandala. Just go ahead and click like that and make sure you select everything. Do not select the background layer and click on this folder. Now, to make sure that you got everything, you can click on this i button, and everything should disappear, except the sketch of course. We don't need this sketch. Then click back. Good. Now, click and copy layer group. Let's go back outside. We're going to click on Create New and digital and square. So this square has to be the same size as the original that you chose. So right now, if it was four K for mandala, please select four K. Otherwise, I'm just going to go with my basic square. Now click Paste layer group. Done. Now click and merge layers in group. So this is our base mandala, and we have merged all the layers. So that means that now you can't edit anymore, so they're all clumped together and, you know, flattened. So now I'm going to click and duplicate layer. I've made two of these. Perfect. But I'm going to make one more, click and duplicate layer, and the bottom one, I'm going to hide. The reason I'm doing this is this is just a backup. But we don't really need it because we have a separate file with the original mandala. So if anything goes wrong here, you know where to get it from. So now I'll go back to one of these ones here, whichever, and I will choose a pixel brush. It could be anything. You can just go ahead and choose the Belgian comics. Doesn't matter. And color, you can choose anything. I would suggest choosing a color which is not in your artboard, but this is a mandala, so the elements don't go all the way to the end, so it doesn't matter, but you can choose bright red, pink, any color that you want and mark the corners like this. And then mark on the other one as well. You could have just drawn it first and then duplicated, but yeah, sometimes my brain doesn't work. Yeah, there you go. Both of them have these corner edges. The reason we are doing this is when we select the transform tool, now it's going to take the entire square into consideration. If we didn't have that, I'll just show you for the ones here. When we click on that, it's going to take just the design, and then we can't figure out how to move it with the alignment wise. So that's why you need those alignment guides kind of thing Meanwhile, make sure your alignment guides are turned click on Transform and move this to left. And you see these blue lines, they tell you exactly where you are. And when you see these blue criss cross lines, like a plus sign, S here, it snaps, actually. So that means it is at the center and let go. We're going to go and click on the other one now still in the Transform tool, and we're going to move this right. And click on done and continue. I'll take my eraser and I'm going to erase this off, maybe make it a little bigger and go to the other layer and erase this off. Now, click and merge down. So now, this is one single layer. So if you want to add elements now, like if you don't want this blank space, this is the time you go ahead and bring in some elements and add it here. So we're going to bring the next one now. Let's go back here. Click, group it together, select, select multiple. I fold it up, hide and check, click Copy layer group. Go back to your file. Click Base layer group. Done. Click merge layers in group. Perfect. Click, Tuplicate layer. And we're going to click and drag it down here and hide it. This is our backup. Okay, so you have here, and you could go ahead and put one here as well. So transform tool and I'm going to decrease this in size so that it fits in this gap. There you go. If you want it, you can make it further smaller, but I think now that's fine. That looks better. So click and merge down. Now we're going to go ahead and duplicate this and make it go one up and one down. But before doing that, let's add our markers. Make sure you don't touch the actual design here and add it only to the cornice. Click duplicate layer. Now transform tool. And this one we're going to move up. There you go. And next one, we're going to move down. Done. Continue. Let's use the eraser and erase this off. Perfect. Now this is huge blank space where you can draw or put in another design. So I'm going to go ahead and uncheck that. Hold your transform tool and reduce this and try to bring it so that it's in the center. You can also hold your touchbr here and reduce it so that it reduces from the center. I know. That's awesome. But if you can't see this, I'll click on done, you can go to settings and touch shortcut. Make sure it's turned on. Great. But I want to rotate this a little bit. So what I'm going to do is click on my transform tool. And rotate this. And you do have a 45 degree and 90 degree turned on. So if you want, you can rotate it however you want. But I think I'm going to put it at 90 degrees so that it looks a little different. Click on T. It looks a little different from the one on top and bottom. So once you've done this, you have your basic pattern tile ready. So I'm going to go ahead and select select multiple, select all three. Click March selected. So this is your basic pattern tile, and this is when you can add colors to your patterns. So I'm going to go to the bottom and hide it. Click on Plus for a new layer and choose any color that you want. I don't know what color I want, but I'm just going to maybe choose this and see how it looks like. You can add vector or pixel anything that you want. Maybe darker colors. Ah, I'm so terrible at this, actually. Okay, maybe some colors like this, and now you have your tile ready. 7. Checking the pattern: Now click and duplicate this four times, one, two, three, four. That's because we're going to use one of them as a backup. And you're going to use this transform tool, and we are going to use the corner ones to transform them like this one up, one this side, one down, and one in that corner and done. And now, that's your pattern that is ready. You can make it bigger by exporting this as a tile or you can just go here and merge these four, select multiple Click Mod selected. Now it's a single tile. Now you can duplicate it again, two, three, four, and use this to reduce. Just so you know, because I started with a very small square, the quality might reduce when you try to reduce it like this, like decrease the size. So make sure that you start off with a high quality pattern so that you end up with a high quality pattern. And once you're ready, you can click on Share, publish and export export as if you're using with the background, you can just choose JPEG. But if you're using without a background, that is you have this background layer and the bottom layer turned off and you see this grid pattern. Check aboard pattern. That means it's a PNG or without a background. So when you do share, publish and export. If you're using without the background, use a PNG. If you use JPEG, it'll automatically take a white background and click on Export and save it wherever you want. You can also export just the pattern tile that is this style, and you can upload to websites like Red bubble and stuff, which help you create pattern by itself, so you don't have to worry about that. And in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how you can make slight color modifications to this to create a pattern pack, I guess, by using the adjustment layer. 8. Color Modifications: So now we're going to do some color modifications to this one. I want you to go to the top of the layer and then click on this adjustment layers. And we're going to click on Hue saturation. It's going to bring up this panel here, where if you move these things, you can see the colors change. There you go. And you can move the saturation level as well to increase or decrease in lightness as well. And then yep you can make it into any kind of pattern that you want. Whatever means good to you. And once you have it, you can export it just like you exported the previous file by clicking on Export, publish and share. And then you can have the same pattern in multiple different colors for whatever you're working on. So that's the end of this class. And in next video, I'll talk to you about Class Perjet 9. Class Project : So the project for this class is going to be super simple. I want you to draw a mandala. It can be this mandala or any mandala, and you can make a simple pattern out of it. You can take it up a notch and put these patterns onto mockups or onto websites like Redbubble and upload screenshots of this pattern on products. I would love to see that. If you want to learn more about patterns, there's another skin share class over here. So do go check it out on my profile. And if you create something, don't forget to share it on Instagram. My name is Print M So Color. I'm also on TikTok by the same name and on YouTube by the same name. Alright, then. I'll see you in the next class.