Modern Patterns: From Sketch to Screen

1. Intro: Hello and welcome to my pattern creation class today, my name is Cat Coquillette, and throughout this class, you'll learn the techniques to create gorgeous on Trends Patterns. Having the skill set to create surface designs is highly desirable right now. If you want to start selling your work on sites like Spoonflower, Society6, or Redbubble, learning how to put patterns together is crucial. This class is for anyone that wants to know these cool skill sets. Whether you are an established creative, or you just want to try something new. You don't have to be a professional artist to benefit from today's class. By learning how to create patterns, you will open up so many doors for yourself. Since I began licensing my artwork under the Cat Coq brand in 2014, I've sold in nearly half a million products with my designs on them through all of my partners combined. A lot of these are goods with my surface design illustrations, like fabric, wrapping paper, wallpaper, phone cases and laptop sleeves, home decor items like pillows, duvet covers, tapestries, furniture like credenzas, bar stools and tables, apparel, like leggings and all-over printed t-shirts, even stuff like fanny packs, tote bags, and studio couches. I've also used patterns for wedding invites, for friends, stationery, headers on my website and blog, and on Instagram post to showcase new work. Basically, you can use the skills you learned today to create a huge variety of things. We'll explore the full process of creating custom patterns. First, we'll hand draw or hand paint our elements. Then we'll digitize them and bring them onto our computer. Whether it's snapping a photo on your phone or scanning in your artwork itself. I'll show you both ways. Then we'll turn our illustrations into patterns. We'll explore different types of patterns, from simple to seamless. By the end of the class, you'll have a variety of costumed designed patterns, as well as the skills to continue creating unique and on-trend surface designs. I'm a big believer in learning as you're doing, so this class will be jam-packed with a lot of action steps. You'll literally be following along with me for every single step of the way. I love using hand-drawn and hand-painted illustrations to create patterns and digitize. The slight inconsistencies in something hand-created makes it feel more authentic and unique. I love scene-visible brushstrokes and imperfections. That's what separates this from clean vector shapes. We'll start super-simple and spend a few minutes learning about basic pattern creation. We'll make a pattern out of a simple illustration that we draw with Sharpie. I'll show you how to snap a picture with your phone, clean it up in Photoshop, and turn it into a simple pattern. Next, we'll dive into some basic geometrics and try out a few styles there. For our third pattern, I'll show you how to create a seamless repeating pattern. These are helpful when you're designing things like fabric or wallpaper. It means that your pattern will line up and tiled seamlessly. Lastly, I'll show you how to do fun stuff like alter the color, infuse metallic accents, and export these cool versions into high res formats. If you have a basic understanding of Photoshop, this class will be easier for you. If you don't have Photoshop, no problem. You can download a free trial with Adobe. Just google Free Trial Photoshop to take you to the Adobe landing page. As far as the digitizing goes, you can either take a photo of your drawing or painting with your phone or camera or scan it in with the scanner. I'll show you both options. The other supplies we'll use in this class is fairly open-ended. As long as you have some way to illustrate the assets that we turn into a pattern, you'll be good to go. I'll be using a variety of mediums just so that you can see all of the options, like Sharpie, watercolor, and acrylic. But what we learned today doesn't hinge on a specific medium. Please feel free to illustrate or draw and whatever you're most comfortable with, whether it's markers, paints, ink, crayon, anything goes. If you have any questions throughout the class, you can post them in the discussion thread down below. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare by clicking the Follow button up top. This means that you'll get an email notification as soon as I launch my next class. Plus I'll occasionally send messages directly to my followers with announcements like giving away a free Skillshare membership or announcing free goodies that I have available on my website so you can get access to all of these, by following me on Skillshare, by clicking the "Follow" button up top. You can also follow me on Instagram @catcoq, and every other form of social media to see my latest works and progress. Ready to die then click enroll, and let's get started. 2. Supplies: Let's go over the supplies you'll need in this class today. We'll be using Adobe Photoshop to create our patterns so you'll need that software. Remember, if you don't have Photoshop, no problem, you can always download a free trial at Adobe.com. This class is all about using our hand-drawn or hand painted illustrations to turn into patterns so you'll need the art supplies to create these assets. This class is about the patterns themselves, not the medium. Please feel free to use whatever medium you're most comfortable with. I want to show you guys the full gamut. I'm working with a lot here. I'll be using a variety of mediums so nobody feels left out. I'll do the first pattern in sharpie, the second and acrylic paints and the third in watercolor. You can use whatever medium you like to follow along the steps to make these patterns in Photoshop or the exact same, regardless if you're using colored pencils, markers, watercolors, whatever. Lots of flexibility. You'll also need a plain white surface to draw or paint on. I'm just using basic watercolor paper. The last thing you'll need is a way to capture your image, to bring it into Photoshop. You can use a phone, a camera, or a scanner if you've got one. I'll show you both options. First, taking a picture with our phone to capture it and bring into Photoshop. Then next with a scanner and I'll show you my optimal scan settings as well. Supply list pretty basic. Let's go ahead and dive in with our first symbol pattern. 3. Simple Pattern: We're going to start super-simple. This is going to be a very quick exercise to warm us up with patterns before we dive in. You will just need a Sharpie, a blank piece of paper, and a phone or scanner to capture your image to get into the computer. Consider this a practice lesson to understand the basics. This is the most basic pattern that we'll create today. We are going to hand-draw a single motif, snap a picture to digitize it, and then turn it into a gridded pattern. I'll even show you how to play with color in about 30 seconds. This is a pretty quick and simple lesson, and what it's going to do is lay out the basics for all the other patterns that we create today. Everything else we learned today stems from these key techniques. So consider this a quick immersion into crafting patterns. All right, let's go ahead and get started. What I'm going to do is draw the illustration that I want repeated into a pattern. So for me, it's going to be an evil eye. It's a simple pattern, so I'm going to keep my illustration fairly simple as well. Cool. I have my final evil eye. It's a pretty simple illustration, and I think it's going to make a nice modern graphic pattern. Next up, I'm going to use my phone to snap a photo so that I can digitize it and pull it up on Photoshop. Obviously, the quality is going to be a little bit better if you scan it using an actual scanner. But for this, it's just a simple pattern, and I want to show you the basics, so a phone photo will be just fine. Just make sure that you're shooting in bright light and that you hold your camera exactly overhead, not at an angle. Cool. I've got my illustration on my phone now, and I'm just going to AirDrop it to my MacBook, you can also e-mail it to yourself or however you get your photos from your phone to your computer normally, will work. Next up, pulling it up in Photoshop. I've got my photo pulled up in Photoshop, and you can see the quality is pretty excellent. You can really see the grain of that paper coming through, so good job iPhone. So what we want to do is remove this white paper backgrounds, and the way I'm going to do it is by using the Magic Wand tool. So if you go over here to your toolbar and under Quick Selection tool, if you click and hold it, you can select Magic Wand. Now, what's the Magic Wand does is it selects colors that are similar. So I'm going to click and select in the black area. You can see it gotten most of it, not all of it though, so I'm going to hold down Shift and select even more. So just clicking all around, all of the areas that still look like they might not be selected. To zoom in, I'm going to do Command plus plus plus, and holding down Shift with my Magic Wand tool selected, continue to grab all those little chunks. Cool. It looks like I managed to grab everything, so I'm going to zoom back out. I'm going to go ahead and copy it onto its own layer. So I'm just going to do Command-J. Awesome. It doesn't look like anything happened, but over here on the Layers panel, you can see that it duplicated itself, but only in the selected areas. I'll go ahead and delete the background, and now we have our eyeball with the paper completely removed. What I usually do for something like this is just start a new document. So we'll go to File, New, I'm going to do this in pixels, so 10,000 pixels by 10,000 pixels. At 300 PPI, RGB is great, and I'll click "Create". The reason I chose the size is it's pretty universal for the print on demands that you sell through 10,000 by 10,000 at 300 DPI, that will more than cover your bases for most products. Now I'm going to go ahead and pull my new board over here, select my eyeball, and just drag it on over. Cool. If you're wondering about how I'm moving it around, it's because I'm using my Move tool over here. You can also press V. I'm going to use Transform, just to make sure it's perfectly centered. So Edit, Transform, Scale. Cool. Those pink lines line up for me and they show me that things are perfectly centered on the page. To set the transformation, I can either double click or press Enter. Now, it's time for the fun part. We are going to duplicate our illustration and turn it into a gridded pattern. The simplest way to do that is to over hear, grab your layer, click it, and drag it into new, and it makes a copy of that layer. You can also do the same thing by pressing Command J on your keyboard. So making sure that your Move tool is selected, that's the one over here, you can get that also by pressing V, click it and drag it upwards. If you hold down Shift on your keyboard, it will make sure that it stays perfectly in line. Without Shift, it goes all over the place. So Shift is selected, pulling it up, and done. Now I'm just going to repeat that into a gridded pattern. Making sure that my new layer is selected, I'm going to do Command J and Photoshop is actually super helpful with this. You can see how it tells you the exact amount of space in between each illustration. That lets you know that it's going to be an equal amount of space between each piece, which is really helpful. I'm going to do another Command J, and click and drag the sky down, also letting Photoshop assist me with that gridded space. One more time, Command J, and bringing it down. Cool. So I have one line perfectly established. I'm going to take all of these layers and group them together. The way you can do that is by clicking and dragging them into the folder, or you can do Command G on your keyboard. I'm going to make a copy of that group, same thing as before, Command J. Then using my Transform tool which is Command T, I'm just going to click it and drag it over to a space that I think looks pretty good, and I'll press Enter to set the transformation. Going to make another copy of that group, so making sure that group is selected over here, I'll do Command J, Command T for Transform and bring it on over. I'm going to do that two more times, just to get the very edge of this composition. So Command J, Command T for Transform, and bring it over. One more time, Command J to make a copy of that layer, Commands T for Transform, and pulling it on over. Awesome. So there you have the basics of pattern-making, it's a really simple gridded pattern. It's not a repeat seamless pattern, but we'll get into those later as a more advanced technique. But for now, that's essentially how you create a pattern in Photoshop using a hand-drawn illustration. Don't forget to save it; File, Save As, and I'm going to call it EvilEye-Pattern. Saving as a Photoshop document, so all the layers are intact. Before we move on to the next lesson, I want to show you guys real quick how to edit color really fast. So I'm going to select all my groups and group them together, and call this individual eyes. I'm going to make a copy of that then I want to flatten it, so I'm just going to go to Layer, Merge Group. You can also do the same thing by pressing Command E on your keyboard. To explore color, you can use Hue and Saturation. So Image, Adjustments, Hue, Saturation. Now select Colorize, bring up the lightness and bring up that saturation, and you can literally toggle across the entire rainbow to look at different colors. I really like that navy. I think I'm going to make it a little darker, a little more saturated, and press "Okay". If you want to be extra organize like me, you can go ahead and change the name of that layer to the color you're using. Don't forget to save. All right, I hope you enjoyed that process for simple pattern and creation. Now that we have a simple understanding of how this is all going to go down, let's dial it up a notch, starting with building an asset library. This is just a fancy way of saying, "Let's paint our pattern pieces." 4. Painting Our Elements: Now that we've got a basic understanding of how you turn your hand-drawn or hand-painted elements into patterns, I'm going to show you a few more techniques to create gorgeous patterns out of your artwork. The next few lessons are going to be focused on creating two different types of patterns; geometric patterns and seamless patterns. First things first, let's create the assets for each type. Geometric will be easy. We are going to paint or draw a few basic shapes, like triangles and rectangles. For the seamless pattern, I want to try something entirely different. I'm going to be water coloring some oranges, and lemons, and leaves. For this, the supplies we'll be using are some different types of paints. I've got acrylic over here on the left, and then watercolor over here on the right. Again, you can use whatever medium you feel most comfortable with. I've also got a few different types of brushes, some paint water, and a sponge, because I couldn't find any paper towels in this Airbnb. So pretty simple. Again, the medium is up to you, but this is what I'll be working with today. Let's start by creating a few basic shapes for the geometric pattern. For my paint palette, I've got an old cigar tin, and what I'll be doing is just painting some triangles and rectangles. I'm going to use three colors, they go together pretty well. I like having one dark color, one light color, and then something that feels a little bit more saturated. I want to make sure my three triangles are pretty much about the same size. They don't have to be perfectly matching. In fact, minor discrepancies are part of what makes creating hand-painted patterns so unique. I could draw a triangle in Photoshop in about two seconds, but it wouldn't have the same visual interest that a hand-painted one would have. All right. Cool. Like I said, pretty basic. Just three triangles that are about the same size, and a color palette that looks great together. Next, I'm going to paint two circles and an asterisk. I want to try out a warmer palette for this, so I will be using some warmer tones. All right. Lastly, I want to paint an asterisk shape, just to break up that pattern with a little bit of poses. I think I might want to turn it white in Photoshop later, so I'm going to paint it with a lighter color. Cool. So pretty simple. We have our basic shapes drawn for our geometric pattern. I'm going to go ahead, and since I have a lot of room left on this paper, go ahead and fill in my watercolor elements for my seamless pattern as well. Like I mentioned before, I'm envisioning something where it's maybe a few oranges, lemons, and a few leaves. We're just going to dive on in. I'll be doing this in watercolor, but again, follow along with whatever medium you feel most comfortable with. I want to keep it super simple, so simple shapes. There's an orange. Perfect. Okay. I've got one orange down, time for a lemon. I'll also add a few leaves just to break up the pattern a little bit, to insert some green. Last but not least, I want to add a few abstract spots that we can use for filler in the pattern, if we have some white-space areas. Cool. Within all of my illustrations on the page, I kept it all pretty opaque. There's not a lot of papers showing through, and the reason I did that is because it'll be easier to remove the background in Photoshop if there's not a lot of white paper coming through on those paintings. All right. So next up, I'm going to give this a couple of minutes to dry, it really won't take that long, and then I will scan it in. Remember, you can either scan it in, or take a picture with your phone if you don't have access to a scanner. Let's go ahead and dive into that in the next lesson. 5. Digitizing: Now it's time to get our hand painted elements from paper to screen. We've got two options here. Option 1, is what we did earlier, snap a photo with your phone. This is the quick option and it will work just fine for today. Remember to hold your phone perfectly overhead and not at an angle. It's always best to shoot in bright light with no shadows. Keep in mind that the quality won't be as good with your phone as it will with the scan, but if you just want to get the gist of patterns, then this will work fine for today. Option 2, is scanning. This is the most professional method and the quality will be much better. When I travel, I use a Canon Canoscan LiDE 220, which I bought for about 80 bucks on Amazon. Today I'm going to scan this in at 900 DPI. The standard is 300, so I'm just going above and beyond for resolution. By scanning this in at a higher DPI, I'll have the flexibility to use these patterns on larger surfaces, like tapestries, betting, shower curtains and whatever else. If you scan them in at 600 DPI, they can be replicated at twice the size you originally painted them. Nine hundred DPI, three times the size and so forth. When it comes to resolution, you can always scale images down, but if you size them up too high, then you're going to to lose quality and it will get a little bit blurry. Now that my assets are all scanned in at 900 DPI, I can go ahead and open that file up in Photoshop. 6. Removing the Background: All right. So I have opened up my scan in photo shop, and this is what it looks like straight out of the scanner, so you can see it's not absolutely perfect. You see some paper corner edges up here, some elements down here. I think that was paint on my scanner. But what we're going to do is get rid of this paper background so that our elements are isolated and we can start turning them into patterns. So first things first, I'm going to use my marquee tool. It's over here on the top left. You can also get there by pressing M. And I'm just going Teoh, select a lot of this stuff and cut it out that way. I'm just working with the cleaner surface and it's a little bit easier. Cool, I consuming of it. So this is the paper background that I want to have removed. So I'm going to again use my magic wands tool that we used in the previous lesson. You can also select it over here. We're press W on your keyboard. So what I'm going to do is go up here and turn continuous off. So let me show you what that means with continuous turned on. And I select this area. You're not getting any of the paper, but when you turn continuous off, you select the same area. All the sudden you're getting all of that paper, which is exactly what I want. So I'm going to go ahead and hold down shift, grab that white that I erased out earlier. And one more trick that I use is because I want to use some of these elements on a colored background. I want to make sure that there's no white outlines over here, so it got pretty close. But you can see within this un selected area, there's still a little bit of a lighter area, so I have a trick for that. I go to select, modify, expands, and I'm going to expand it by three pixels. Now what that did is it cut into my illustration a little bit, which is exactly what I wanted. I want to make sure that there was no white outline a soon as they isolated that background , and one more trick I use is I want to soften that edge. If I were going to cut that paper out right now. It would be a really harsh line. So instead I'm going to go to select modify feather feather by one pixel you can't really tell. But what it did is now. When I cut this out, it's going to have a slightly blurred edge. So it'll feel a little bit more natural and not like it was just directly cut harshly out of that paper background, some going to zoom back out and now get my inverse of that selection. So select in verse, and I'm going to make a copy of that. So command J on my keyboard, I can go ahead and delete that original backgrounds. And now I have just my elements isolated on this backgrounds. So pretty simple. So the next thing I'm going to do is cut each individual piece out and put it on its own layer, and this just helps me stay really organized. So using my lasso tool over here, I'm gonna use the political last. So for this you can just click around, isolate out that elements, and then I'm going to dio at it, cuts and then edit paste special paste in place. So it's exactly where it was before, but now it's on its new layer, which I will label Blue Triangle. And I'm gonna go ahead and using that lasso tool. Repeat that for all of the elements on this board. No, that's a good one. Remember, if you're trying to cut it, you need to make sure that same layer is selected. So I'm going to do command X two cuts and shift command V to paste in place and go back to my original layer and basically repeat that process for all of the shapes Command X command shift to be. And now that I have all of the acrylics isolated, I'm just going Teoh, select them altogether by holding shifts and do command g to group them. And I'm going to call this geometric Awesome will turn that after now and now. Time to isolate all of the watercolor elements. Cool. I'm going to do the same thing. Select all of my watercolor elements by holding down shift, group them together and call it seamless because this will be the seamless pattern can go ahead and delete that original layer. And now I have my two groupings of elements. You can turn on and turn off those layers. But yeah, it just days more organized. So now that we have our hand painted elements scanned in, removed, that background isolated each individual shape, let's go ahead and make our first pattern, which will be the geometric pattern. 7. Geometric Pattern: In this lesson, we are going to make two different geometric patterns. We'll do this by overlapping the shapes that we just painted into interesting compositions. We'll start with the triangles, and make a pretty simple pattern with them first. Then we'll use our circles and asterisks to make another geometric pattern that feels modern and unique. We can do all of this with just a few simple tools in Photoshop. Let's dive in with the geometrics first. I'm going to start by making a new document, File, New, and it's going to be the same dimensions as that first pattern we did, 10,000 pixels, make sure it's pixels not inches otherwise, that would be huge. By 10,000 at 300 PPI, and RGB looks great, so "Create" awesome. This will be my pattern art board. I'm just going to pull it over to the side, and select all three of these elements and pull them in one by one. Remember for this one I'm just going to be working with the triangles. First things first I'm going to select all three of my triangle layers. I am going to make sure that they are aligned on a horizontal center, as well as on a vertical center, cool. I'm going to zoom in a little bit so I can see what I'm doing. Now it's just coming up with a cool composition for this pattern. I think what I want to do is have this dark green peace, be a little bit behind everything else. I'm just going to click it and drag it to the back, and maybe raise it up a little bit. Then have this blue one overlapping the green a little bit. Then use my turquoise and flip it around. I'm going to use transform, that's Command T, and holding down Shift, I'm going to turn it until it is pretty much upside down, and bring it down a little lower. That feels pretty good, and press Enter. Before you start repeating the shapes into a geometric pattern, I want to make a few slight color adjustments. It's easier to do that now before we start repeating everything because right now there's only three layers. I want this turquoise to be a lot more desaturated. I'm going to go to Image, Adjustments, Hue Saturation, and I'm going to bring down the saturation and then bring up the lightness. It feels more like a minty green, and I'll go ahead and press "Okay". Then I want to this blue to feel even more saturated. Just a shortcut to get to Hue and Saturation, you can also do Commands U on your keyboard. For this, I'm going to bring up the saturation, and adjust that hue a little bit to be a tad bit more green, and press "Okay". Then I want to this last green piece to be more desaturated. Same thing with that layer selected, I'm going to go to Command U, and bring down that saturation. I'm also going to bring down the lightness, so it's a little bit darker. I like the way that's feeling, and I'm going to zoom out little bit. Yeah, I like this arrangement and I want to see what this looks like if I start repeating it over and over again. I'm going to select all three of these guys, group them together by pressing Command G, and then using my Transform tool Command T. I'm just going to pull this into the center of the page and then let those pink lines tell me what the exact center is, perfect. Press Enter to set the transformation. Now it's just a matter of me repeating this into a geometric pattern. I'm going to copy that group by doing Command J, and then using my transform tool Command T, I'm going to pull it up, drop it right about there, and then press Enter. I'll do the same thing, I'll copy that group again, Command J. Use my transform tool to pull it down, and press Enter. Awesome. I'm going to make them a little bit smaller also using my Transform tool, perfect. Now just to stay extra organized, I'm going to group all of my groups together. Command G with them all selected, and just call this one. Now I'll make a copy of that layer by pressing Command J. Using my transform tool, I can pull it on over. I think what I want to do here is have these be a little bit staggered. Maybe it's hitting right there, so we get this fun zigzag going on in between. I'll press Enter to start the transformation. I want to make a duplicate of this guy right here, to go ahead and bring that pattern down. I've opened up my folder, I'm going to make a copy of that one, use my transform tool and bring it on down. Now same thing, I'll select both of these groups, make a copy Command J, and using my transform tool Commands T, I'll just pull it on over and continue that zigzag pattern that's happening back and forth. Press Enter to set. If your computer starts getting bogged down and this is taking a long time to move things around and start transforming. We can go ahead and merge these together. Normally I don't like merging until I'm absolutely certain that's the composition I want, but in this case I'm pretty set on it. The difference between grouping and merging is that when you group, you have all of these individual elements that are still editable on their own. But when you merge something together like this, I'll select it all and do Command E to merge. All of a sudden, this is one flattened piece. I can no longer isolate this dark green away from the lighter blue, because it's been flattened into one piece. In this scenario, I'm going to zoom back out. It's fine because I know that this is the composition I want. But if you want to have more flexibility in variables, then use groups not merging. But for me, I know that this is the composition I want, so I'm going to go ahead and select everything and Command E, merge it together. Now everything is on one layer. Again, you can no longer edit these individual pieces but I know I like this composition, so I'm just going to roll with it. I'll make a copy of this layer Commands J, and then using my transform tool I will drag it on over, and find a good spot for it, and press Enter. Now I'm going to select both of my layers holding down Shift, and then merge them together by using Command E, awesome. I'm really liking this pattern, let me zoom out a bit. I'm loving the way this looks, and here we have our first geometric pattern. We essentially made this thing just by duplicating shapes over and over again and keeping them on a pretty tight grid. Pretty easy, and before I forget, let's go ahead and save, so File, Save As, and I'm going to call this Geometric-Triangle, and save it as a Photoshop file and press "Save" cool. Let's go ahead and learn how to do another one with the circles. I'm going to start the same way, File, New, the settings are the exact same, 10,000 by 10,000, 300 PPI, press "Create". Now I'm going to click the Asterisks the pink dot, and the red dot, and go ahead and pull them over. I was holding down Shift to get them all at once. I have a pattern and color palette in mind for this one already. I'm just going to go ahead and dive in and see if whatever is in my brain looks good in Photoshop. First things first, I want this background to be a peachy color, not white. To do that, I'm just going to go over here to my paint bucket tool. You can also get that by pressing G, and double clicking my foreground color. I want to find something that feels nice and peachy, and little bit pastel. Click "Okay". Now with my paint bucket tool selected, I'm just going to go ahead and click anywhere on the backgrounds. Cool this will be my background color. Next up, I'm going to zoom in a little bit and make some slight color adjustments. I want to this pink circle to be really vibrant. I'm going to make sure that layer is selected, and do Command U, and I'm going to bump up that saturation to be pretty heavy. I'll make it a little bit darker, perfect. That's what I'm going for, and now I want this red to feel a little bit more like coral. With that layer selected, I'm going to do Command U, and bring that Hue to the right side. Yeah, I really like them more tangerine fill to it. I mentioned that I wanted to make this asterisks whites, and I think that white is going to look really nice against this aster background. The first thing I'll do is Command U, and bring down the saturation to absolutely nothing, press "Okay". Now I will use my levels to finish this up to make it more white and less gray. To get to my levels, I'll do Command L. You can also get there by going to Image, Adjustments, Levels. I'm going to toggle from the far right's and bring it up pretty high, until it is bright white, perfect, and press "Okay". I've got my three elements, exactly the way I want them. Colorized to perfection against that pastel pink backgrounds. Now it's time to lay them out into a cool composition. What I want to do is have the tangerine circle overlapping the pink one, and then have that asterisks overlapping the tangerine. Remember to get that asterisk overlapping everything else. Just click it and drag it to the top of the stack on the layers palette. I'm going to use my transform to make it a little bit smaller. That feels like a pretty good placement, so I'm going to press Enter to set the transformation, time to zoom out a bit. Oh too far, cool. Again, if you want that flexibility, you should group them. What I mean by flexibility is if you want to be able to move these things around individually later, you should group. But for me, I'm going to go ahead and merge them all together because I know I like this composition. Now I've got my little grouping, I'm going to put up perfectly in the center. Cool and I'm just going to go for it. I'm going to make a copy of that layer, Commands J, pull it on over to the left. I'm going to do a horizontal stack this time instead of vertical just to switch it up. Commands J, pull it over. Remember, Photoshop tells you exactly how much room is in between those two. I know it's identical, so it's going to be a perfect grid, and same thing. Make some copies, pull it on over and rinse and repeat. Now I'm going to select all these guys together, holding down Shift and merge them by pressing Command E. Now I'll make a copy of that layer Command J. Pull it on down, move it over. Now we have a gap over here, so what I'm going to do is using my Marquee tool, I'm going to select this guy, make a copy, and pull them out over, perfect. Now we can go ahead and put those to back together. Select them both and Command E to merge. Now it's just a matter of duplicating these layers into a pretty cool composition. Command J, and I'm just going to be eyeballing this into something that feels like a nice gridded spacing, and Photoshop is still there to help me out with those pink gridded lines, cool. There's my final patterns. I'm going to go ahead and select all of these guys together. Press Command E to merge them, and do a little zoom out to see how it looks. Again, this is one thing I really like about creating these hand done elements. You see a lot of texture within the brushstrokes. These circles themselves aren't perfect. You can tell they were painted directly by hand. It's a really nice juxtaposition between these hand done imperfect elements, and then this perfectly structured gridded pattern. This is essentially what modern and on trend pattern making is all about. A lot of exploration and play and that combination of something that's hand done or handcrafted, mixed with a modern digital touch. Now that we have mastered our geometric patterns, let's move on to the seamless pattern. Remember those watercolor shapes that we painted of lemons and oranges. 8. Seamless Pattern: Time to tackle our last pattern for today. This one will be a seamless pattern, which is also known as a repeating pattern. What makes this one different is that it can be stacked into blocks, and the edges will line up perfectly. This means that it can be expanded infinitely. For example, here's what a non seamless pattern looks like when I tried to duplicate it and line it up. Here's what it looks like when I've arranged these same elements to a seamless pattern. You can see how all of the edges line up perfectly, which means I can grow this pattern endlessly. The times where I use seamless patterns are when I'm designing fabric with spoon flour or on wallpaper, wrapping paper, even on web design for page backgrounds. When you figure out how to use seamless patterns, it can be an incredible tool. We've already created our elements for this pattern. It's the fruit pieces that we painted earlier. Go ahead and pull up that file and let's go ahead and get started. I've got my file pulled up and I'm going to do the same thing as we did before, which is start a new document. I'm keeping my preset details pretty much the exact same, so 10,000 by 10,000, remember pixels not inches. A 300 ppi in RGB color mode. I'm just going to grab all of my seamless assets, they're already grouped into that folder so it's pretty easy. Just drop them on in. I'm going to start by establishing that Canvas tile. So to do that I'm going to use my marquee tool. You can also get that by pressing 'M'. Then I'm going to draw a square basically around the middle of my page. I'm holding down shift with my marquee tool to make a perfect square. I'm going to start a new layer down here on the bottom corner where it says create a new layer. I'm going to fill that in with a dark color so that I can see what I'm doing. At this point the color doesn't really matter it's just to help me see what I'm doing. Dark gray looks good. Using my paint bucket, which you can get by pressing 'G' or you can find it over here in your toolbar, I'm just going to fill in that selection and then 'Command D' to deselect. Since that background is totally covering my illustration, I'm just going to go over here to the layers panel and click it and drag it underneath that grouping. Cool. Now I'm going to zoom in so I can see what I'm doing, and open up my group. I've already done the boring work earlier which is labeling each individual layer. Again, this just helps me stay organized. I mean, trust me by the time we have started duplicating a lot of these, you'll be glad to I have the file names already established. Okay, so here's the fun part. We're going to start moving these individual elements around and arranging them into the square. So to start moving my elements around I'm going to use my move tool, which is 'V' on the keyboard. What I'll do is work on some overlaps on the left edge and top, but that means that I don't want anything to overlap on the right side or bottom. As a general rule of thumb, I like to keep stuff away from the corners as well. The reason I don't want to overlap on those sides is because anything that's happening on the left edge or the top, is going to be repeated over here. I'm just going to start filling things in. I'm using the transform tool 'Command T' to rotate these guys. Remember to make a copy of any of these, you just select that layer and do 'Command J'. I don't want to leave too much white-space, I want it to feel pretty even. Awesome. As I arrange these I'm trying to be conscious of how they'll be tiled together. For example, because this orange is overlapping this edge right here, just keep in mind that right directly horizontally across is where it's still going to come through. I'm eyeballing it now. We'll test it in a little bit to make sure. I think I have room but we'll see. If not we can always move it around. Same thing for this orange at the top, directly beneath that is where it's going to be peeking over when that tile starts getting repeated. That's feeling pretty good. I think it's time to test it out. You can see that I've left gaps in these areas because that's where I'm anticipating some of these shapes to overlap. To test it, I'm going to go ahead and close my folder, make a copy of it, right-click and select 'Merge group'. What that did is it flattened the group so that everything is in one layer. We can no longer, let me ahead and hide this one so you can see. You can no longer move around individual elements, they're all on the same layer. I did that so we can go ahead and test it. Using my marquee tool I'm just going to select all the way to the edge and then switching to my move tool, which is 'V'. I'm going to click that and bring it over. Don't forget to hold down 'Shift' as you're dragging those pieces across the arts board. That way they stay in a perfect horizontal axis, and they won't shift up and down. I'm going to zoom in to make sure I get it right on the edge, and deselect by doing 'Command D'. That actually lined up pretty well, you can see how it has this nice movements. It's not accidentally touching any shapes. So far so good on the right side. Let's do the same thing for the top. Using my marquee tool which is 'M', I'm going to get a step there as possible, I'm going to zoom in just to make sure I got it all the way on that edge. Perfect. Then using my move tool which is 'V', I'm just going to take that and bring it to the bottom, I'm going to zoom in well so that I can see what I'm doing. Cool. 'Command D' to deselect and zooming back out. I didn't do as good of a job on the bottom, you can see how that leaf overlaps. I also don't like how close these two shapes get together. Other than that, it's feeling pretty good. I think what I might do is add a shape right in here so what I'll do is go ahead and turn back on my layered version. I want to keep the same visual reference, so what I'm going to do is change the opacity down to about 60 and then lock that layer. You can lock it by selecting that layer and then just putting a lock on there. Now when I click and drag my leaf and I can pull it over, you can almost see the ghost shape of what that leaf looks like before. Which is good to have as a reference. I'm just going to move it on over to a space that feels pretty good. I'm just going to move a few more shapes around. I'm going to raise up that lemon so it's not so close to that leaf, and I'm going to bring this little orange up just a tad so that it's not too close to that rind. Last but not least, I'm going to bring this little green chunk right in here to fill that space a little bit so it doesn't feel too empty. Now, I no longer need this flattened layer. I was using it as a visual guide, but now that I've filled in all my pieces we can go ahead and break the lock by clicking it and then just pressing 'delete'. I know things are going to fit together really well now. So I'm going to do the same thing I did before. Go ahead and close that group, make a copy of it by pressing 'Command J' and merging it together to flatten it. Will go ahead and hide my working file, and same thing using the marquee tool which is 'M', I'm going to get close to this edge. Zoom in to make sure that all the way there. Perfect. Then using my move tool which is 'V', clicking it and dragging it over. I can zoom in to make sure it gets perfectly on that edge. 'Command D' to deselect and same thing from top to bottom. Zoom in marquee tool. You can see Photoshop's helping me out by adding that really slight pink line. Got it. Using my move tool which is 'V', I'm just going to drag that down. Oh, and then just a heads up, I'm holding down 'Shift' as I bring these down. That way they stay perfectly on grid. They're not moving around from left to right like this. If you hold down 'Shift', they're going to be perfectly locked in with where they were above. So zoom in any bit. You can go ahead and holding down 'Shift' bring that perfectly to the edge. Zoom in super close to make sure. One more pixel and 'Command D' to deselect. I have my tile established. Now let's go ahead and turn it into a repeating pattern. Zoom in and I'm going to select both of these and make a copy by doing 'Command J'. Now we can simply pull over that tile, don't forget to hold down 'Shift'. Let Photoshop assist you with those pink lines. Damn, it looks pretty perfect. You go ahead and select all of them and pull them more into the middle. Now let's do the same thing except just bringing them down to the bottom. With all of them selected, I'm going to do 'Command J'. Then using my move tool, just bring it right on down. Cool. Here we have the repeating pattern. We can continue repeating this pretty much infinitely. I'm going to go ahead and bring it up here, lock it to the corner, and repeat these last few shapes. 'Command J', hold them on over. Then these guys down here, 'Command J' and bringing them on down. Cool. Let me zoom out so you can see. Awesome. We have our final repeating pattern. Now to stay organized, we can merge those patterns together in one layer. But before we do that, just go ahead and make a copy of one of those blocks. So I've just selected one random one, I'll click 'command J', and I'm going to call this "Pattern Block". Okay, and I'll tell you why in a second, but let's go ahead and select all of the other seamless pieces, not the pattern block that we made a copy of. 'Command E' to merge them together. I'll do the same with all the background squares, 'Command E'. The reason I'm saving this "Pattern Block" on its own, is because when I'm uploading this design to spoon flour or uploading it as repeating wallpaper or repeating wrapping paper, anything like that. I'll want to only upload the pattern block itself so that it's able to be repeated. But I'll keep these guys together and I can save this as a JPEG and upload it to something that doesn't necessarily repeating pattern block. So maybe a throw pillow or phone case. Okay. Hope that makes sense. For the sake of organization, I'm going to group these two together and call it full pattern. Now I have three specific layers here: I have the pattern block which I can save individually to upload later. Just don't forget to crop it before you upload it as a block. The next group is my full pattern layer, which I can use on any product that doesn't require a repeating pattern block. Lastly, I have my working file. This has all those individual elements. If I ever want to adjust it in the future, I've still got that in my back pocket. Before we go any further, I probably should have done this earlier just in case, but let's go ahead and save it. I'm going to save this as seamless pattern, as a Photoshop file so I keep all the layers. Cool we have just completed our most complicated pattern that we're making in today's class. Good job guys. Next, let's dive into some less complicated and more fun stuff, which is going to be spot editing some of these colors. 9. Color & Metallics: All right, time for the fun stuff, playing with color and metallic textures. We're going to have a lot of fun with this lesson as we explore. In this lesson, I will show you how to change up your patterns into two tone pallets. I'll also show you how to infuse metallic textures and into select areas of your geometric patterns. I love this look, it always feels really modern and on trends. Lastly, I'll show you how to spot edit color on our seamless patterns so that some areas change color while others remain consistent. This might look complicated, but I promise you it's actually super simple to pull off. Before we dive in, I am also providing some bonus metallic textures for you guys to download and keep. You can find the files under the Projects and Resources tab. Once you're there, on the right-hand side of the page, you'll see a section called resources. Underneath you can find my zip file. Click to download, and you'll be able to open all of my metallic textures, which I'm giving to you guys totally free for taking my class today. All right, let's get started with the first pattern, we're going to alter the color width today, which is the simple pattern, aka those evil eyes. I've got my first pattern we did today pulled up, it's those evil eyes. This is where we left the evil eyes. We had just turned them navy. What I want to show you here is how to do two tones. I want to keep navy as one of my tones and then use minty green as my other tone. Let's just go ahead and dive in. I'm going to use my marquee tool, which you can get by pressing M on the keyboard. I'm just going to go through and select every other eyeball. Remember I'm holding down Shift so that I can select more than one area at a time. Cool. Now that I have every other eye selected, I'm just going to make sure that my navy layer is selected. Same thing as before. I'll do Command J on my keyboard. It doesn't really look like anything happened on screen but if you look over here at my layers palette, you'll see that a new layer has been created and it's those every other eyes that I selected. At this point it's pretty simple. I'm just going to go to hue and saturation, so Command U. Like I mentioned before, I want this to be a minty green. I'm going to bump up the lightness and toggle around on hue until I find a nice minty green. Ooh, I like that one. I might bump up the saturation a smidge. Cool. Press Enter. There, we have it. It's pretty simple. This is where we were before. I'm just turning that layer on and off. This is where we are now. I really like having that alternating color. Let's learn how to do another one. All right, next step, I have pulled up my geometric pattern of those triangles. What I want to do is turn all of these really dark triangles into a gold metallic foil and we can do that in a few simple steps. First step, I'm just going to grab this gold texture and drop it directly in my file and double-click to set the transformation. Now I'm going to click it and just bring it right underneath the triangle layer in the layers palettes. Now what I want is for all of these dark triangles to be replaced with this gold metallic foil texture. To start that process, I'm going to pull up my magic wand tool, which is W on the keyboard. You can also find it over here. Before we get started, let's just double check a few things on our upper toolbar. I'm going to bump the tolerance up to 50. I want to make sure that contiguous is turned off. The reason I want it turned off is because when I make a selection like this, it's selecting all the triangles, not just the one I selected originally. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in to make sure I got everything. It looks like it got most of the triangle, but there are a few little pieces around here that it didn't grab. I have a feeling they're going to be a little bit lighter. I'm going to get my magic wand tool back. I'm going to turn the tolerance down to about 20 because I don't want it to accidentally select any areas in this blue and then holding down Shift, I'm going to click that little nugget and make sure it got the rest of that triangle. There's one little spot left, so I'm going to hold down Shift and click that one as well. Cool, it got everything. Let me zoom out. I just want to make sure that it didn't accidentally grab anything in this blue area or in this mint area. Everything looks good, going to zoom back out. Before I make a mask over that gold, I just want to use that same technique I used earlier, which is Select, Modify, Feather, and just feather by one pixel. Remember that just blurs the edges slightly, so it's not such a harsh cut-out. All right. Now I'm going to select my gold texture and then down here on the bottom of the layers palette, I'm going to click Add Layer Mask. That was super anticlimactic because this gold layer was underneath so let me go ahead and click it and drag it above everything else. Yeah, this is our final effects. We've replaced those dark triangles with this metallic gold texture and I'm really loving this combination of metallic gold mixed with this teal and mint green. There we have it, pretty simple. Layer masks are one of my favorite tools to use in Photoshop. It gives you a lot of flexibility. Go ahead and save, and let's do some color adjustments for our last pattern. All right, it's time for our last color magic trick of today. What I want to do is spot to edit the color on my pattern so that some colors change while other areas remain exactly the same. First things first, I'm going to select my full pattern layer and make a copy of it. I'm going to hide my other one, toggle down this layer. I don't want that background colors, so I'm just going to go ahead and delete it. That's much fresher in vibrant. Before we spot edit certain areas of color, I'll show you how to change everything at once. With that layer selected, I'm going to go to Command U to pull up hue and saturation. It's pretty fun to experiments. You can just toggle down on the hue to see what it looks like when all of the colors change. I like this, it feels like grapefruits in lines. Anyway, this is just to show you what's possible when you can change all of those colors together. Some really fun stuff. I love the vapor wave aesthetic of this one. That's how you change the color of the entire illustration at once. What I want to do, is spot edit certain colors. I'm going to do Command Z to undo what I just did, go back to where I was. We'll use a slightly more refined technique for this one. I'll go to layer, new adjustment layer, hue and saturation. Here you'll have a little bit more flexibility. What I want to do is click Master to toggle down to all of my options and I'm going to go down and select all of my greens. It doesn't look like much happened on the art board, which is true, but look what happens when I start toggling my hue up and down on the spectrum. You can see that only certain areas of my illustration or changing color, it's this guy right here. It's all of these leaves now that are changing into purple. I'm going to get them really close to something that feels like navy. That's pretty good. I think the reason that the other greens weren't selected is because they're probably keying in as more cyan. Let's go ahead and select cyans now and then move those around. Yeah, that was it. I'm going to pull over to the right side until I get more of a navy look. I'm going to also bring the lightness down and amp up that saturation a bit. Cool, I love the results of that. I'm just going to click the carrot to get rid of the Properties panel. Awesome, so what I've done is only selected the green leaves and changed them into a navy blue. You can turn this layer on and off and see what it was like before and after. I'm really liking that effect. Because I'm extra organized, I'm going to change this folder name to Navy Leaves. Cool and don't forget to save. Speaking of saving in the next lesson, I'm going to show you guys really, really quick, the optimal saving and exporting methods for all of these patterns we're creating. Without further ado, let's get started with our almost final lesson of today. 10. Saving: I'm going to briefly show you my optimal save and export settings. For this, I'm going to use the seamless pattern PSD file as an example. I'm going to double-click it to open. We've already saved it. The most important way that you can save anything in Photoshop, which is saving the original PSD or Photoshop file. That means that every time you open a PSD file, you have all of your layers intact over here. Nothing gets flattened, everything is preserved. You can go back and edit wherever you left off. But if you're going to be uploading this pattern to a print on demand site like Society6, or Redbubble, or maybe you want to share it on Facebook or Instagram, you can't use PSD files for that. For that, JPEG is usually best. Go to File, Save As, and toggle on down to JPEG and press "Save". I am super picky about my file quality and resolution. I usually want to go to the absolute maximum, which is 12. Go ahead and press "Okay". I'll show you what that looks like over here. Now, I have two files. They look pretty similar, but when you open the JPEG, check this out over here on the Layers palette. Everything is flattened and you've lost the ability to edit any of your individual elements. Keep in mind when you save as a JPEG, you lose all of those editing capabilities. It's literally just one flattened file. All of your layers are gone. I'm going to close this one and go back to my Photoshop file. There's another file type that I think is pretty important to learn and those are transparent PNGs. What that means is a completely transparent background. If I go ahead and turn off my background layer, you see this gridded area in Photoshop. That basically means that it's transparent, there's nothing behind there. To save this one, I'll go to File, Save As and select PNG, press "Save". Just a heads up on this, because our file sizes are pretty big, 10,000 pixels by 10,000 pixels at 300 DPI. Oh my God, are you guys sick of hearing me say that yet? Anyway, because our dimensions are so big on our files, it's going to make some pretty big file sizes. I'll show you what I mean. Yeah, this transparent PNG, this puppy is just over 48 megs, which is a pretty big file. For me, I'd rather have my file be too big but not big enough, because you can always scale things down to fit if you need to. But you can't scale up without it getting blurry and losing that resolution. If you do want to make your file size a little bit smaller, for example, if you want to share it on Instagram, it really doesn't need to be that big. I'm going to open up my JPEG and go to Image, Image size, and I'm going to bring that down to 15 by 15 inches at a 150 PPI. You can see how much smaller it got. You can't really tell on screen right now until I start really zooming in and you see the blurriness of those edges. But again, I'm saving this one for Instagram, so the file size is actually pretty perfect. I'll go to File, Save as seamless pattern and I'm going to call this one LowRes. That way I remember that it's a smaller version. Press "Save", and I can go ahead and close it. Yeah, the most important thing to remember here is to always keep that Photoshop working file intact. Because you never know when you might need to open this baby up again and make a few adjustments and re-save. Now that you know the ins and outs of saving and exporting, I've got one more thing to share with you. That's how I actually make a living by selling my patterns. 11. Earn Money with Art Licensing: If you're watching this, congrats on making it to the ends and good decision because I saved the best nuggets of info for right now. I don't just make patterns for fun, I actually built my career out of this. I license my surface designs, artwork, and illustrations to companies that turn my designs into products that they sell to their customers. I get a percentage of sales, which are called royalties. This is how I earn a living, and it's how I'm able to travel all over the world working as I go. Right now I'm in an Airbnb in Tbilisi, Georgia in Eastern Europe. I'll be here for about a month working on my laptop and hanging out with friends. After that, I'm either going to Italy or Poland, but I haven't narrowed it down yet. The point is it's thanks to Art licensing that affords me this lifestyle. I initially got into art licensing back in 2014 with a company called Society6. Society6 is an online shop where you can buy trendy phone cases, home decor items, apparel and more. The cool part is, all of their products are designed by artists all over the world. So when a phone case sells with my design on it, I get a cut of those sales. Over the years, I've sold just shy of a 100,000 products through Society6. A lot of these are products with my surface designs on them, like what we made in today's class. There are a lot of print on demand sites out there just like Society6. It's pretty simple to set up a shop with any of them, Society6, Redbubble, Spoonflower, Zazzle, Design By Humans, Threadless, Fine Art America, there's a lot of options. I've got an entire class dedicated to this topic. In it, I explain everything I know about earning income through print on demand and art licensing. Please feel free to check it out if you're interested in learning more. It's called a step-by-step guide to art licensing. Sell your first piece of artwork online. Check it out here with this link which I've also listed in the class description down below. All right, I hope you learned a lot today. Thank you so much for enrolling in my class. If you have any questions or comments, you can drop them down below in the class discussion. You can follow me on Instagram and every other form of social media @catcoq. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare by clicking the Follow button up top. All right, take care and I will see you guys next time for my next class.