Painting for Pattern Design: Create Botanical Patterns with Gouache & Photoshop

1. Introduction: I think that there's something really human about creating patterns. I enjoy creating patterns for my illustrations because they give my illustrations a new avenue to live in. Hi, my name is Angela Mckay and I'm a textile designer and illustrator based in Brooklyn, New York. Today I'm going to show you how to design a surface pattern with wash. I'll be taking you through how to create your own repeating pattern using elements that you've painted for life. Firstly, we'll be painting a selection of flowers, leaves, and other objects. Once we're happy with this, we'll scan them in and then dispatch them in Photoshop. We then arrange these elements into a pleasing layout and then create a pattern from this. Using your new pattern, you can then apply it to textiles, paper or even use it for a digital application. I think this is an exciting class to teach because it has a really unique perspective of combining analog materials and mark making and then coming out with a completely digital result. Something that you don't really get do a lot in design and its quite an exciting thing to do. So I'm really excited to teach you guys this process. So let's dive in. 2. Getting Started: So for today's class, we're focusing on designing a surface pattern design which you can apply to whatever surface you like. Pretty much, anything can be created and made into a pattern. A photograph, textures, abstract marks, anything that can be photographed or scanned or exists as a two-dimensional thing can be created into a pattern. Today, I'll show you how to create a surface pattern design from scratch using objects that I've collected from a recent trip. Recently, I went on a holiday to Sicily and I was super inspired by the flora and the landscapes that I saw there. So I went out and I tried to find things that would closely relate to the things that I saw on my trip. So I've got a variety of different flowers, different leaves, some little bouquets in there. I have some of these really cool little objects that really reminds me of my trip just like little bras donkeys particularly key and this really cool matchbox which actually has the cathedral of alumni on there. So if your own project, you can really think about what inspires you. Maybe it was a recent trip that you took, maybe it's things that you have found around your neighborhood, or around your home. Maybe it's a particular season that you love. Really anything can be incorporated into a pattern. So really just find whatever it is that speaks to you and go for it. So to start off, we're going to need your paper, your paint brushes and the things that you're going to be painting. I use quash which is mostly Windsor and Newton, I really like this quality of paint, it's really lovely and has a nice application to the paper. There is a wide variety of brushes, but the main ones that I use are these round Princeton ones. The main sizes I use is a four, a two and a zero. Obviously the small one is for creating really small details. But then, these bigger ones will allow you to paint larger expanses of paper. I use a ceramic palette which is really lovely for mixing colors. Also, I use just regular old plastic lids, these are great when you are traveling on the go or if you just need something quickly to mix up some colors. I use these fine outline pens, these are for drawing details over the top, and then I also use these prismacolor colored pencils for additional details if I find I need them. When I'm drawing my initial designs, I just use a regular retractable pencil, and then this is a really handy little thing that I like it's called a kneedable eraser. So once you've sketched out your design, you can just gently erase your pencil lines. But the great thing about this is that it doesn't leave that little rubber things all over your table, so that's quite handy. The paper that I like to use is fluid cold press 300 grams. The difference between hot press and cold press is that hot press has a smooth surface so when you paint you are not going to see any of the texture. Personally, I like the cold press, I do enjoy a little bit of texture in my painting. So that's what I go with and 300 grams is just a nice heavy paper, so it's thick enough to absorb all the water and the paint the way I can draw at it. Gather your objects and supplies and let's start painting. 3. Choosing Your Palette: For me, when I'm creating a color palette, I like to think of splitting them into two sections; the main colors, and then the highlight color that I'm going to use. The highlight colors are the ones that you're going to use as say pop colors, all colors that will complement the main ones that you're using. So for me, the color palette that I'm going with is inspired by the scenery in Sicily. It's quite dry and the leaves on the trees that qualify as very light with dark green. There's lots of brown on the ground, and then sometimes when you're walking through you see nice bright pops of purple or yellow flowers. So this was something that I was really trying to recreate in my design. So the first thing that you need to do is to mix the colors. Just create little swatches of each of the colors and put them together so you can see how it's going to look overall. This color here is the oxide of chromium which is a really lovely olivey color. Then, to darken the color, we are going to use this ultramarine. This is an ocre color which I use in a lot of my work. It's called Raw Sienna. Then, we've got a permanent yellow. So first, I just wet my paintbrush so that we've got some nice viscosity. Then, I know that this is going to be a dark green so I'll mix as much blue and red in there to get that really dark color. You should actually really refrain from using black when you're painting because it can really deaden the overall color. If you mix blue and red together, you get purple which is really soft away to create a darker tone. So this is looking pretty good for a dark one for the darkest color. Let's have a look. That's pretty dark, but that's okay. So I'm just going add a little tiny bit of white and just some back in because I want to just brighten it up a slight bit. Let's see this. That looks good to me. So then, the next color we're going to do is very olivey green. So I'm just going to cover the ocre, and then smooth this oxide green and some white. Well, obviously, you like look at your inspiration but something that I really liked when I was in Sicily was seeing the different shades of green and how they all sat together. Then, the next color we're going to go with is we're going to go with a really, really faded green tone like a silvery green, I might say. As you can see, I mix ocre in everything. Okay. That looks nice to me. Okay. Cool. So those are our greens. Then, after that, I'm just pretty much going to do a straight ocre. I'm going to have some of this ocre color and then some of this yellow. I'm happy with that. Then, the last color is this terracotta red. My palette's getting pretty full. Yeah. Cool. All right. Happy with those colors. So in here, we have the final main colors that we've chosen to go forward with. Something that is interesting with gouache is that you can reuse your colors over and over This is an old palette of mine. I'm just going to work directly back into it. I'm just rehydrating it with some water, and I can show you how we can just use colors straight off what we've already got. Sorry. As you can see, there is a big lump of white here. The next color we're going to try to mix is lilac. See how that come out really, really violet. I'm just going to be going back in and get rid of these gray. I'm mixing because it's just looking a little too sway for me. That looks pretty good. Okay. The next color is a nice bright yellow. This yellow is basically a mixture of primary yellow and permanent yellow. It's a nice bright yellow. Then, the last color we're going to go with is a deep oceany blue. This is one of my favorite colors is dark blue with black. I use it a lot for painting night skies and that type of thing. Working with a nice range of colors is always a positive. It's nice to have some good cool tones as well as some warm tones, some nice colors in between, and then if you want to go for some really fun pop colors as well, by all means, go for it. So these are the colors that are our main colors here. They will be the ones that we use mostly, and then these three colors that we've just mix. These are our highlight colors and they'll be used more as pop colors or accentuating colors for the overall design. 4. Painting Your First Object: Sometimes it's a good idea to start out with an object that has the most colors in it. So you can see how your colors they're going to sit together and if you need to make any adjustments. So for me looking at my objects, I'm going to say it's probably this match box. It has a lot of different colors in it. So I'm going to go ahead and paint this one first, trying to use all the colors for my palate. As this one is quite unique object, I'm going to go in and sketch it in pencil first to give myself a guide of where to paint. It depends how heavy the pencil lines are, sometimes they'll go back in and try and get rid of some of the heavier lines before I start painting, because sometimes you can see them through in the painting. So I feel like because this is quite a detailed illustration. Sometimes you can just fudge the really tiny details because you're not going to see them anyway. So once you have your sketch ready, you can go in and stop painting in the data. Something that I like to do is I roll up my kneadable craser and then I just roll it over the top of my pencil drawing. So it just removes some of the really harsh lines. So I can still see the design underneath, but there really heavy pencil lines is not going to come through when I do the final painting. So I'm going to go in my smallest paintbrush. I just start wherever to be honest. I'm using this object as a guide, but I'm trying to replace some of the colors in there with colors from my own palette. You can always take creative license and change things if you need to. I think it's nicer to use tones of the colors that you've chosen from your palate. So you can always go into lighter or darker on within that spectrum because it's always going to look good and always fit in. I actually find the best way of working is having my color groups on different palettes. So if I have say all my greens on one pallet and then I'll have my yellows and my oranges and my reds all on one pallet. For me, it means that you can mix colors that are all on the same palette. Maybe you can save a bit of time swapping back and forth from one color to another, having to constantly you clean your brush. When you're painting something like this, if your combining it with a lot of other elements, you don't need to go overboard with trying to capture all the little tiny details, just trying to get the overall effect is absolutely fine. I do like to use dark tones to add on. Also this has the fiscal cheating on the sides. So we want to make sure we capture that so everyone knows that this is box matches. I'm going to switch over to this clean palette because I want to get a nice creamy terrain and these are all little low messy right now. Sorry. Let's get in here with this. So basically, we're just taking a little bit of this yellowy pinky tone and we're going to mix in white with that, and then that is going to give us a nice creamy tone that we can use for the outside box part. I'm going to wait for this to dry and then I'm going to go in and add the final details. So this one I'm going to use a micron pen. This is a 0.2 is a really be able to get in and get the really tiny detail that I'm after. Now that my painting is mostly finished, I'm going to go over the top and erase the remaining pencil marks. So to recap. It's nice to start with an object that contains a lot of the colors from your color palette so you can paint them all together and see how they look. From this, I'm pretty happy with the colors that I've chosen. I've also started with the most detailed one which is probably a good way to start because then after that, you can go into your more exciting and will loose leaves or flowers or whatever you like. 5. Painting Your Botanicals: So now I'm going to paint the kumquat. I'm going to start out with a pencil sketch and then I'll paint over the top to that the same as I did with the matchbox. So I've got my basic pencil drawing here. I'm going to just lighten the pencil marks a little, and I will go straight in and start painting. So I'm going to start with the actual kumquat. Sometimes when you're painting, it's nice to leave white space from the paper so that when you're painting a highlight, it has the white to bounce off rather than a darker color underneath, which is going to give you a more dull result. I'm going to mix in this bright yellow color over the top, and then that will be the highlights. While the kumquat are drying, I'm going to get into the leaves and start painting the different parts of the leaves. Feel free to take liberties when you're painting and experiment with different ideas. Obviously in this kumquat, the leaves are a little rolled-up and they're also the same color across the whole thing, but I've decided to depict them with a really highly contrast of the colors that we've got in our palette. So if you want to paint things using the flat gauche, look it will enable your overall patent at the end to have a more cohesive quality, because there's going to be less fading in and fading out of different colors and tides. It just means that overall it's going to look a little tied up. Okay. So I'm going to just do the highlight. You can do this if when you're painting, if you not sure exactly how things are going to work out, just paint another section and just test the colors together. I think for this it needs to be a little bit more orange-yellow rather than yellow-yellow. Okay. Next, I'm going to paint this lovely little guy. You don't need to worry about where you're painting is on the page because we're going to be cutting them all out and jiggling them everywhere when we create the pattern. So just paint them wherever it makes sense. I'm taking some artistic liberties here with this flower because I know that this flower has these types of leaves, but doesn't have any attached. So I'm just painting on some leaves. I would say it's quite nice to have things which aren't too straight. So that is probably too straight. I'll probably have to manipulate that in Photoshop afterwards. Definitely, things that have like a nice curve are advantageous because when you're placing them in your eye is going to fall into the direction of the lions. So it's always a good idea to have a nice flowing lines rather than straight lines I would say. So I'm going to go in and paint flowers now. I've chosen to take some artistic liberties with that. I really wanted to emphasize the texture of this flower. It has these really cool little like bumpy, fuzzy, flower head. So I really wanted to amplify that full in my illustration. Now I'm going to paint this sated eucalyptus stem. It's quite good to have nice leafy textures in your patterns because they're nice space fillers as well. So they can sit amongst your hero objects. I guess you could say. This one has some really cool texture on it. It's got these life funky little bumpy seeds, and then these beautiful flat leaves. So let's paint that. So once again, you can see how I'm exaggerating the curve of the stem. This is simply to give us a nicer result when we're taking it into our pattern. It's nice to add variation in your painting, it always keeps the eye interested in what's going on. So you can do that by changing up the shades of the colors that you're using. If you're painting things that are supposed to be of the same color. Okay. While I'm waiting to the leaves to dry, I'm going to go in and paint the little seeds. Going back to our color palette, I wanted to bring in some of that lovely ocher color that I have, and I think this is a good place to fit it in. You don't always have to paint what you see. So another way to add interest is to paint details to your flowers or your leaves. In this case, I'm going to be adding some veins in the leaves. We want to make sure because we're painting light over the top of dark, it's more advantageous to have your light color that you're painting quite thick, because you're going to be essentially layering in, and you don't want any of the color underneath to be showing. So then, the last thing I'm going to do is do some highlights onto the little seeds. So I'm just going to go back into that ocher color that we had previously mixed, and I'm just going to add a little white so that it's not so bright. I would say always just make sure that you've got lots of paint on your paintbrush when you're going in to do details like this so that the color really stands out. Sometimes it's nice to have extra built out things because you never know how your design is going to end up. So I would always advise just painting extra leaves and extra floral elements or whatever it is that you want just to fill in the little tiny spaces or whatever you need. So we have the finished spread here. This one here, and then this one. Obviously, try and fit as much as you can on the paper, in interests of saving paper. But it is always a good idea to leave a little bit of space around each of your elements so that you can isolate them easier once you've taken them into Photoshop. One other thing to keep in mind is that when you're painting your elements, try not to paint them with a really direct light source, as in where you can really tell where the light and the shadow is falling on your object. This is mainly just because when you are arranging them, you probably going to be rotating things and moving them all around so that the light may not make sense once you've got them all arranged. So it would probably be easier just to paint them with an overhead direct light source or just with a very soft light shadow. Now that we've wrapped about painting, we're going to move into our next lesson of rearranging our elements in Photoshop. 6. Importing into Photoshop: Now, that we've finished up the analog part of the class, we're going to move into the digital part. Once you have all of your elements in Photoshop, we can start arranging them into a design. Some tips for scanning is, you should always try and make sure that you're scanning your pages in a minimum of 300 DPI, higher if your computer can handle it, this is because the minimum file quality for printing is 300 DPIs. So I'm going to open up our original scans, so they are here. As you can see, these scans are in separate parts of the same page, that was just because we had a really big page and I couldn't fit everything into the scanner. So what we can do to join these, is use the Automate, Photomerge, so we go, File, Automate, and then we go into Photomerge, and then we say, Add Open Files, this will open up the files that we've got and you just press "OK". So this is the final Photomerge page, I can show you how each of the pages look when they're brought in, so that's the three original pages, and that's how Photoshop has merged them together, and so this is our final result. You could do this by hand, but Photomerge is a really powerful tool that you can use in Photoshop, and it makes sense to use it to your advantage. Then the next step is, I like to put Levels over my scanned illustrations because they can lose some of their color depth once you've scanned them in, so it's quite nice to just move like the middle points across a little, so you can see it just increases the color richness. The Slider on the far left increases the depth of the darkest tones, and then if you slide the White Slider on the right-hand side, that will just bump up your whites and just make a nice clean background, which will make it easier to detach everything, once we've got these all sorted. 7. Deep Etching: Deep etching is the process of removing the background out of anything that you want to be isolated. Essentially, if we have like a little motif, we want that to be standing on its own. We don't want it to have any kind of background whatsoever. So deep etching each of the elements and having them on their own layer allows us to have total control as to how we may want to move them, or scale them, or manipulate them in any way that we see fit. Now that we've gotten that, I'm going to put all of these layers into a group, and then I'm going to duplicate the group command J, and then I'm going to flatten the group which is command E. So now in-between our group and our flattened layout, I'm going to go down to the fill or adjustment layer file, and then I'm going to put in there a solid color. So the idea behind this is that, when you have a solid color behind all of your elements, you're going to see where the mask has worked and where it hasn't worked. So let's just put that in. You can choose whatever color you like. Let's go for pink. A color that you don't have on the page is probably a good idea. Then let's lock it, let's lock all the layout group underneath, and then we can go up and we can start deep etching. So the best way to do this is go across to your toolbar and select a magic wand tool. Actually, let's take contiguous because contiguous ticked means that it will highlight the white in all of the areas that are joined together. So it won't select the areas of white which are isolated. Say for example, if you have like a painted circle and inside is an area of white, it means it won't select that. This gives you more control and you can use them either way depending on what you're doing. But I think for this, it's probably going to be easier to have contiguous selected. Let's select everything. As you can see, there are some little tiny bits on screen which haven't been completely cleared up. An easy way to solve that is to go into select modify and expand. You can expand it by one pixel and basically, what that does will just mean that it will clean up any random stray pixels that have been picked up. Then on top of that, I like to do a feather of 0.5 pixels, which will just mean that you get a smoother selection just around the edges of all your things. So as you can see in this example here of this painted brass flower, these sections in the middle haven't been selected. So if you hold down the Shift key and then you just click on your magic wand, it will select all of the areas in between and you just click on those and they'll now be selected. There's some parts here which haven't been selected here. Just look around and see which parts haven't been selected. That's the beauty of working with masks, is that you can always go back in and adjust things later on. I highly recommend using masks if you can. They are a really useful tool. Sometimes when you're using the magic wand tool, it will select to much of the white and in some of your elements when you have white sitting next to gray for example, it will just select the whole thing. So you could go back in and adjust the tolerance of your magic wand. What we've seen is how we've already got most of it selected. You can just press the Option Tool while you're on your lasso tool and you can just sort of roughly lasso these guys back in. So you're just pretty much just adding these gray parts back to your original selection. Okay. So we've got our mask in a generally okay way. So then we just go down and we hit the mask tool, that will give us our mask essentially, but we'll obviously want to invert it because we want to see the painted parts not the white. So we go command I, and that will invert your mask. So if we want to look over here, this is like a pretty clean selection here. There's like a little bit of white here that we need to clean out. So let's just select that. We could just go select Similar. Now that we've selected Similar, we can go in manually using the mask. So making sure that the brushes on the black side because we're going to be subtracting from the mask. Then you can just brush over the top and you can see that we are just cleaning up the edges of it. Any other little white spaces that are left behind that we're not happy with, we can just clean them up. Working with these mask, sometimes it's a little fiddly, you've just really got to spend some time making sure that you have a nice clean selection. So as you can see the mask, it selected a little too much of the white and it's eaten into the illustration of the match. So what we're going to do is, we're just going to paint it back in using the brush tool and this is on our mask. So just make sure that the white is on top because you're adding to the mask. So you can just brush it back in. If you look at the mask layer, you will see that your painted elements are shown in white. So if you want to add more of your illustration back in, then you've got to be adding white. If you want to take away from your illustration, you got to switch and make it black. So if you want to create a nice straight line and you're trying to do it with your brush tool, an easy way to do that is to hold down the Shift key and then if you click in one point and then you click in another point, it will create this really nice straight line. Once we're happy with how our mask is looking and everything's looking nice and clean, then we can go ahead and start deep etching out elements. What we do is we are going to duplicate our layer. It's always good to have your original mask layer underneath just in case you need to go back and fix something in the mask. So let's always just keep a copy of it. I like to just hide it underneath our solid color layer. So we know it's there, just switch it off, and then we click on our mask and then we just select the apply layer mask. So what that does is that means that all of the parts that way had masked out are now gone. So if you want to see how that looks, now you can see all the parts that used to be white are now gone. 8. Isolating Your Elements: The reason why we have to de-patch each element is because we want to have the complete freedom to rotate them, scale them, move them in any way that we'd like, and they need to be on separate layers for us to do that. So the quickest way that I find to do that is to select your lasso tool and then just go around the shape of your element, and then go Command X, which is cut, and then Shift Command V, which is paste in place so that we know it's in its position. Then I just then switch it off because it's on a new lasso. I know that's being cut out and then it's ready to go, and then I know what elements I've got left to cut out. So we could go across and we could cut out say our match box over here. So we just got a lasso. The quick shortcut to that is the L key, just go around it, command X. Sorry [inaudible] , Command X, Shift Command V, and there we're pacing in place. Now I'm just going to go ahead and de-patch the rest of these. So now we've made our final de-patching. I want to go in and make some color adjustments to some of my elements. So I think I'd like to change the color of this donkey. So let's select him and then I think it would be best for us and to human saturation on him. Ideally what I'd like to do is match him to the color of this terracotta pot. Just going to switch off this background light, it's a little destructing. So when we're in our adjustment layer, the hue saturation, always click this little square with a little arrow on it. Basically what it means is that this adjustment layer will only affect the layer below it. So let's adjust this color. So right now, it's just sort of ochre color but I want to make it more of these terracotta color. so let's try and adjust that a little. I'm just using those slider, it's pretty simple. It's maybe looking a little hot, I'm going to take the saturation down. I mean, we just darken it a fraction. Feel free to just experiment with this sliders as much as you see fit. I'm pretty happy with that. So now that we've got that, what you can do is just duplicate these, and merge them so that the adjustment layers are floating around, and you can just lock these and maybe switch them off. So now that all the elements are on their own layer and they've been color adjusted as we'd like them to be, we can move onto the next lesson which will be arranging our elements into a new pattern. 9. Creating Your Repeat Tile: Now that we have all of our elements deep edged, we're going to go ahead and arrange them into a tile, which we'll use to create our pattern. The repeat, also known as a tile, the repeat is what I'm calling the arranged elements which we are going to copy and paste over to create our pattern. We have to make sure that the art board that we're creating is big enough to contain the repeat at least a couple of times over, so that we can see what it looks like. These art board is 60 centimeters by 60 centimeters, and I'm going to try and contain my repeat to roughly somewhere between 20 to 40 centimeters. So what we should do first is go back into our scanned deep etched elements. Now that they're all in separate layers, let's select them all, and let's go over here and let's duplicate layers, and then we're going to get this little pop-up window, and then we just go to the drop-down menu, and we're going to go to demo 2, that's what we've named our new file, and then you just click ''OK.'' If you go into demo 2, you're going to see that all of your layers are now in there. I'm going to go ahead and just resize this down a little because they're pretty big, I'm going to scale them down to 80%. The easiest way to do that is to go up into your width and height measurement, things at the top of your toolbar, and making sure that the lock is clipped, it will scale them proportionally to whatever size that you want. Then, I'm going to do the same, I'm going to go into my other elements, just grab all of those duplicate layers into demo 2. So now that there all this, select them all, and then I'm just going to resize those down by 80%. So now that we've got all our elements on the page, let's start arranging them into a nice layout. Some things to consider when you're creating new pattern is to consider the scale of objects when they're sitting next to each other. Obviously, if you have something that's really big, it's going to stand out, and you're going to see it more often in the repeat. That's not to say that you can't have them, they can definitely work. Playing with scale is definitely a thing that you can have a lot of fun with. I find generally, if you're starting out, it is a little bit easier to keep things in a most similar scale. Something else to consider is color, it's probably a good idea to not have things that have painted the same color right next to each other, because your eye is probably going to be drawn to it. So the other thing to consider is the flow of the print, you're wanting something that is going to be pleasing to look at, and that your eye is going to be taken on a journey throughout the repeats. So I would advise against having things that are hard angles, and it's nice if you have things which say for example, one object is curving this way, and then another object is curving that way. It just means that it gives your eye somewhere to move through and just give the flow, I guess. Now, I'll go ahead and start arranging our tile. Throughout this process, I'm going to be using the transform tool to rotate, flip, or resize my elements. So now that we've got all of the elements arranged into a rough repeat tile, what we can do with the elements that we didn't use is that we can put them all into a group, and just switch them off, so that we've got them there in case we want to go back in and at the minimum late stage. So now, I'm going to select all of these spare elements, I'm going to shift them to the bottom, and just put them into a group, lock them, and then switch the eyes off. So when you are arranging your tile, you don't necessarily have to keep it to a block per se, but it will make your life easier if everything is in a general clump, you could say. When we're repeating it out, we will have to add extra pieces here and there around the edge, so it never will be a perfect square. But as long as all the elements are grouped in a nice area, rather than being spread out all over the place, it is going to make your job a lot easier. So now that I've got my elements into a basic repeat tile, I've had to work through some different things, I've had to re-scale some of my objects, I've had to rotate some things, and make them into a pleasing layout. Once you've got something that you're happy with, then we can go into the next step. We are going to use our paint tile to create our final pattern. 10. Creating Your Pattern: The next part of the process is repeating out our tile so that it repeats same as on each side. So the way that we do that is by repeating our tile manually and then adding an extra elements which need to be used to fill up any extra space. The thing about our pay is that whatever you change along the bottom of it, that is going to be happening on the top of it. This will make more sense once we dive in, so let's get started. The first thing I'm going to do is to select all of my elements, and then I'm going to put them into a group. Now that we have them in a group, let's just transform them, let's move them up, and then this is the part where we start repeating it out. Let's duplicate the group, transform it. Let's for example, try and move this tile down say 20 centimeters, it's probably not quite enough. Let's do 25 maybe 26. Yeah, so it is 26 centimeters down, looks like a good amount to repeat it down. First thing I'm going to do, is I'm going to write down the size that I'm repeating it down. So I'll draw little square and then I just draw a little [inaudible] , and then I write 26 centimeters so that we know when we go back, then that's how far we've gone down. So because we're only affecting one of these groups, I would put the bottom group on an opacity, and then I'm going to lock it so that we can make any changes to that group. So let's go in and let's stop and just rearranging these elements slightly. So I'm basically going in and I'm re adjusting the elements to make the space in between the two repeating groups same as. Feel free to rotate and scale as you were doing before. The aim of this process is to create a nicest flowing repeat that we can. So once we're happy with that, we're going to unlock the group that we have on opacity and then we're just going to delete it. So you're always going back, and using the group that you've made the most recent changes on, so let's collect it here. Let's duplicate the group, transform we know that we moved it down 26 centimeters. Let's just go in there and type in 26. You can see that it's looking pretty good. I'm going to just make a couple of little changes. Let's lock that layer that we have, the group that's on our opacity and then I wanted to just go in here, and make a couple of little changes. So let's see. Duplicate the group, transform going across to a y-axis, and repeating it down 26 centimeters, and as you can see it's looking pretty nice, it's looking quite seamless, and I'm pretty happy with how that same is repeating. Let's repeat this one down again, 26 centimeters. Now, we have the repeat happening three times. So what we're going to do now, is we're going to go across, and duplicate all three [inaudible] rotate transform and then we're going to move them across. For these print, because we want to make it as seamless as possible, we are going to offset the second group of tiles that were moving over. This is called a half drop. We've repeated it across 26 centimeters, I'm just going to write that down, and then with the half top, we've got a drop it down half of the increment that we dropped it down the first time. So half of 26 is 13 centimeters. Let's drop it down. So as you can see on screen how elements are now looking offset and all we have to do is clean up the same that's on the inside. So we are always only working on one group because we going to delete everything else. So let's work with this group here, and what we're going to do is, we're going to select all the other groups, put them on an opacity and then lock them. So this just allows us to see which group we're working on. We know exactly which elements we can move around. So let's just arrange these. Something to keep in mind when you're creating a print is, prints can be directional, so if you have all of your elements heading in a particular direction, then that would be considered a directional print. Non-directional prints on more of us tiles so all that means is that when you're arranging your elements, just have some elements going up, some going down, some going to the side, and that all mean that it can be used whichever way that it's printed. So once you've got your elements in a nice filled out formation, we can just close the group, I'll turn the eyes off and then select all the other ones, unlock them and then just delete them. Let's go on a new group over here. Okay let's repeat it down, 26 centimeters. Let's repeat it again, and then we're going to repeat it across 26 centimeters, and then we're going to repeat it down 13 centimeters. Let's check our paint. So we've got quite a nice-looking repeat here, switching off and then select all about other ones, unlock them and then delete them. So now that we've got this, lets give a final repeat to repeat tone to check it. We've been across 26, move it down 13 all that looks good let's do that again. Let's duplicate those three layers, move them across 26 and then move them down 13. So let's see the repeat looks pretty good. So now that we've got our repeat looking quite nice, the next thing that we have to do is to find out our page size. The best way to do that is to figure out your highest we repeated this down 26 centimeters, and then we repeated it across 26. But because we've done a half drop, we have to double the repeat size across, so 26 plus 26 is 52. So we've known our page size is 26 centimeters in height, and 52 centimeters in width. So the best way to check that is, go across to your mark tools, go to style, here on fixed size, going to width and to our is width 52 centimeters and our height is 26 centimeters, and then you just plunk it down onto your output. Grab your guides, drag them down so that it locked away your mark tools are, then go up to edit define pattern, and then it'll set pattern will ever, click "Okay, " file and then open a new blank document, and make it bigger than your paint size, so let's make it 75 by 75 centimeters. Then go down to your fill laser adjustment layers and click pattern, and then in that you see our pattern and you can change the scale. Here is now it's at a 100, and then we can go in, and we can have a good look at it. This is looking pretty good. It has a nice photo of it and nothing's really standing out to mean too much. So I'm pretty happy with it. Now that we have a pattern in the last lesson, we'll talk about how to exploit it for digital footprint. 11. Exporting: Now that we have our finished pattern, we can now export it for whatever application we would like. Let's first show you how we can do it for a digital application. So here I have a mock for my web site, and what I'd really like to do is to show you how easy it is to drop it in. So because we have it as a pattern fill already, I can just drop it in. I'll just put the pattern in, and then I'm just going to put a mask over the top of something that I had masked previously. Then I'm going to re-scale the pattern. So it's looking pretty big right now. I'd say maybe 50 percent might look good, maybe 45. Pretty much. Now we know that this pattern that we have here, let's pop it in there, this is how it can look on digital applications. So we'll just have to figure out what these pixel sizes are, and then we can just save it up, and put it into a website. So if we want to set this up for a print application for example, what we can do is fake it out for a card. So we know that most greeting cards are about five by seven inches. We'll just open a new document, and setup as five by seven. So now, we have our card front, and then what we can do is just again just drop your pattern in there. Looks pretty big, so let's scale it down to 25 percent, maybe 30. What do you all say? So this looks pretty good at 45 percent scale for our card. We need to find an answer. Let's just flatten that file. So now, that it's flattened, let's save it. Then if we wanted to, we could take that to a printer, and they could print it for us. Here are some examples that we had printed out before. This is a card, this is about 80 percent scale. This is another card which is, I think this is the five by seven, and this is a four by six inches. This has the print in a 60 percent scale. But we also have them printed as double cards. So feel free to experiment, and just see what cool things you can come up with. Because yeah, it's pretty exciting. 12. Final Thoughts: Okay, you made it. Well done. Congratulations. We started out without painting and then we've taken up into Photoshop and we've created a beautiful looking pattern. If there's one thing I hope you can take away is that creating a pattern is really easy to do and it's really only limited by your own creativity. So feel free to go out there and be inspired by whatever it is that inspires you and create a beautiful pattern of your own. Feel free to upload it to your Projects tab on the Skillshare website so we can all have a look. Thank you so much for taking the class and can't wait to see what you create. 13. 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