Pattern Play: Combining Illustrator and Photoshop

1. Pattern Play Introduction: Hi, guys. My name's Dylan Mierzwinski, graphic designer and sewing enthusiast living in Phoenix, Arizona. In this class, I'm going to show you my workflow for creating repeating patterns using both Illustrator and Photoshop. We're going to use Illustrator to build shapes, construct pattern repeats, and play around with color palettes. Then we'll bring the patterns into Photoshop to add hand-sketched elements and build dimension and texture. Grab your sketchbook and let's get started. 2. Class Project: For this class, I want you to create a repeating pattern with elements of your choosing. I'd like you to do some sketching for your motifs. Create the repeat tile in Illustrator. Explore at least three color palettes, and do your final rendering in Photoshop. You can refer to my sample project as a basic outline. Showing your work not only strengthens your process as an artist, but gives other students insight and confidence for working on their own projects. Can't wait to see your work. 3. Process Overview: I love Illustrator for its fluidity with creating shapes and exploring color but I love photoshop for its ability to add natural and artistic looking texture. Here's a brief overview of how I use both programs to create repeating patterns. I start by getting inspired and doing some sketching in my sketchbook. Those sketches go into Illustrator and I create the shapes, construct the pattern tile, and explore color options. The tile then goes into photoshop to have hand-drawn lines added to it, and I use brushes to add dimension and texture. I do one final tile test to make sure everything is lining up and that's all there is. 4. Sketches: Although some of the lines from our sketches are just going to be used as guidelines to draw over in Illustrator, other lines are going to be used as drawn in Photoshop. So for this class, it's going to be best if all of your sketches are done with clear black lines. Anything that's gray or sketchy is going to not come over as nicely. When you're done sketching and ready to capture those sketches, you can either scan them in, in black and white at 300 DPI or higher or you can do what I do, which is just take a picture with your phone. Keep in mind that if you're taking pictures of sketches that are on multiple pages, try to keep your phone the same distance away so that all the lines are the same thickness. If you are using your phone to take a picture of your sketches, then there's a little bit of clean up that we need to do before we can use them effectively. So you can see I brought my sketches in here and you can see part of the carpet and the spine of the sketchbook and the color is a little wonky too. So what I want to do first is double-click to change this from a background layer to just a normal layer. I'm just going to grab the eraser by hitting E on the keyboard and I'm just going to get this stuff out of here so that all I'm left with are the sketches. Next, I want to desaturate the photo and I also want to adjust the levels. So normally you want to work in a non-destructive way, meaning you can go back and make changes. But I'm not worried about "destroying these sketches". I know that the adjustments I'm making are what I need to do. So I can go ahead and hit Command U to bring up the hue saturation dialog box, and I'm going to take the saturation all the way to the left. This will make it so that we're just dealing with black, white, and gray pixels. Next, I need to make it so that the paper is bright white and the lines are as dark as they can be. Open the levels, I'm going to hit Command L, and I'm going to drag this slider that's all the way to the right, to the left until I just see plain white. Now, you might be tempted to go this far and stop. But you really want to pay attention to the darkest parts of the drawing to make sure that they're turning white too. So I'm going to really push this over. As you do that, you'll see that we start to lose some definition with some of the black lines. So we want to go to the slider all the way to the left and start dragging it to the right. That's all you need to do. So I'm going to go ahead and save this as a JPEG and I'm going to save it into my sketches folder. I will call this sketch1. Then I have another page of sketches and I'm going to do the very same thing. I already turned this one from a background layer to a normal layer, but I'll go ahead and grab my eraser, get my thumb out of there, get the spine of the book out, and get the base down here. Hit Command U, desaturate. Hit Command L, bump the white up and make the sketches darker. I'll save that as sketch2 as a JPEG. Now our sketches are already flowers. 5. Drawing with the Pen Tool: So we are ready to get started in Illustrator. Now, you can open up a document at any size and I say that because we are working in vector land, which means everything is re-sizable and scalable and nothing is really set in stone as it is with bitmaps and pixels. So go ahead and open up an artboard. Now, I'm not even using my artboard. I'm using this view which show and hide artboards. I use it so often that I actually stole the keyboard shortcut from hide edges and applied it to show art boards. All I have to do to show and hide them is hit Shift Command H. You can see my artboard is over here, but with the artboards hidden, I get one big workable white space, which when I'm starting out is really what I like. We want to bring our sketches into Illustrator and the way I like to do that is by placing them. You can either go up to File Place or the keyboard shortcut is Shift Command P or Shift Control P on a PC. I'm going to grab both of my sketches and if I just click, it's going to bring them in at the actual size of the documents, which is way too big for what I want. So to have more control over it, I'm going to click and drag to get those to be the size that I want. I'll go ahead and rotate this and so now they're in here to draw over. Now before we jump right in, I would like to go over. There we go. I would like to go over some of the tools that I use when I'm drawing an illustrator and the first one is the pen tool. Now the pen tool is a pretty polarized tool in Illustrator. It seems like some designers hate it. They think it's not intuitive. They never really get the hang of it. But other designers really rely on it and think that it's the secret to having success in Illustrator. I'm of the mind that if you either don't have a whack them tablet, or you're needing really precise control over your lines or your paths rather that you really need to be using the pen tool. It does take some practice. It's a new tool, but it really, it's not as bad as it seems and there's a lot of supporting tools for you to be able to use it successfully. The keyboard shortcut for the pen tool is P and for those who are brand new, let me just give a very brief basic overview of what the Pen tool does. The Pen tool allows you to place anchor points which are connected by paths and when those paths and anchor points are all connected, they create a shape. If I click, I get an anchor point. If I click again, I get another anchor point with a path that is connected by those. Or rather it connects those anchor points, I should say. As I keep going around, when I get back to my first anchor point, I get the little clothes icon in that little circle, which is letting me know that I now have a closed shape. Right now I'm working with a stroke. But if I hit Shift X to fill it, you can see I have a filled shape. If I need to have round edges, then I need what are called handles and I get handles on an anchor point by clicking and dragging handles control curves and that's how I get rounded edges with the Pen tool. Going in here, there's a few different methods that you can use for having success with the Pen tool. Now when I'm tracing over drawings, I like to work with a stroke instead of a fill so that I can see exactly where I'm going. If I start to work with a fill, then it can start to block my drawing and that isn't very helpful for me. I'm going to start right here in this corner and the reason for that is because I can just click and make regular anchor point instead of clicking and dragging and having to deal with handles, which is what I would do if I were starting on the curve over here. So we'll start here and some designers suggests placing your points on the extrema of a line. That is to say where the line or where the curve juts out the most. So if I drag a guide down here, you can see that using this top, it looks like the extrema is here or if you look at the curve, it looks like maybe it's around here. The extrema thing worked for me as a beginner, but I found that I am more comfortable with placing my anchor points a little bit past the curve of where I'm working. This curve is right here and I'm going to place my anchor point and go in here. Now, one thing to be aware of is don't be afraid if you start to lay your anchor points and they don't line up with your line exactly like right there. That's not lining up with my drawing. The whole benefit of working with an Illustrator is everything is fluid. You can go in and read massage, all of these anchor points in these lines to get them exactly where you need them. Now, is it helpful if you try and get them in the right place the first time around? It sure does. But it doesn't mean that you can't use it if you're not placing them down in the right spot on the first try. Really quickly, I want to let you know if I switch to my selection tool and I didn't close this path, I can always get back into it by using the Pen tool and when I get close to that anchor point, you can see my icon switches to that line letting me know I'm picking up right where I left off. I can keep going in here and going around. Now sometimes, you can see I needed to drag these handles out to get this curve. But this next part I need is a corner, but that path is only being rounded and that's because there are handles there telling that path that it should be rounded. Now if you need to break those handles, which is to say you want to keep this line here, that curve there, but you need it to be a corner here. All you have to do is hold down option and click with your mouse on that anchor point. Now it holds that handle there for that curve. But you have a corner anchor point to work with for your next point. When I was learning Illustrator, that was something that none of my teachers seem to mention. I watched a lot of online videos and people seem to gloss over that. That's really important. If you're getting frustrated like right here, it's going to happen again because you're getting this really crazy angle here because of these handles.It just means that you need to hold down Option or Alt and click on that to break those handles and then you're free and clear to keep going. I'm going to go around here and I'm going to go ahead and close this shape. So looking back, it's not too bad. There are definitely places that I need to fix. One thing that I'm noticing right off the bat is that my corners are really sharp here and I'm probably not even going to use this as a stroke. I'll probably end up filling it. But what I like to do is open up my stroke panel, which if you don't have it in your side panel, you can go to Window stroke. Is I like to change the corner from a miter joint to a round joint and you can see that that just smooths that out. Like I said, that's just something for me visually. I just like seeing a rounded corner there instead of the sharp one. But anyway, so we've got these points down and one thing that we can do to start massaging everything out is to use our direct selection tool, which is the white arrow next to the black one and this gives us access to all of the anchor points and paths that are creating this shape. So right here I can see that I really think that all I need to do is move this point a little bit to the right and that seem to snap that into place really nicely. Down here, it looks like some of these handles need to be adjusted. I can do that. One thing that I know from being a beginner and working with beginners in Illustrator is that there's a tendency to put too many anchor points in a path. If a shape just really, it's not getting smooth, you can't figure it out. It's either because an anchor point is then a wrong place or you're using too many anchor points. If you find that you come across one that seems to just be extraneous and not helpful, you can hit the minus key on your keyboard and click on that anchor point and it will delete it without breaking your shape. I can get in here and re-figure this out and see if I like that better. Another tip I have, especially as a secret weapon for beginners, is if you've done all you can with your anchor points and you just can't seem to really figure out why something isn't smooth, there is an actual smooth tool. I'm going to go over here. The smooth tool is, it might be showing the shape or two on top because that's the main tool that the flower is under. But that's where the smooth tool is and all you need to do is with the shape selected, click and drag the shape that you're hoping or the line that you're hoping for. The smoother tool's going to refine that edge and it's going to put new anchor points down based on the shape that you're drawing. I can go in here and it's really subtle. You can draw over it as many times as you want. But I find that that can really help me out when I just can't figure out why a line doesn't look how I want it to look. So that's one method to click and drag as you go and then go back and massage. Another way that I like to work is to use the pen tool to just lay my anchor points down where I think they need to be without dragging anything out. You can see I'm just clicking and dragging and getting straight paths everywhere and when I'm done, I can go back and adjust these as necessary. All of these are just corner, they are just corners right now, anchor points with corners and if I want to change those and drag handles out, I can go under the pen tool fly out menu to the anchor point tool, which the keyboard shortcut is Shift C. What I can do is I can click and drag and start making these to be rounded anchor points. Another way to do that is to click on the anchor point that you want to be rounded and there are these two convert buttons up here. One will convert a selected anchor point to a corner and the other will convert a corner anchor point to be smooth. So if I click that, you can see that I now got two handles dragged out here. The convert anchor point tool that drags these out, it's going to give you equal handles on either side of the anchor point, which isn't always what you need. Sometimes I use that tool just to get access to the handles and then I go back to my direct selection tool in order to be able to drag them independently of each other. I can make this one bigger. I can go to the convert anchor point tool to make those round. Looks like this one needs some help and I can go around and around until I have what I want. The other nice thing about the convert anchor point tool is it doesn't only work with anchor points even though that's what it's called. It works with pads too. If I'm having a hard time figuring out what I need to do first, I can go right up to this path with this tool and I can drag this out. For the ultra beginner, or if you're just having a difficult time with the shape, sometimes playing with this will help you get in the ballpark and then you can smooth things out with the direct selection tool to get them where you need them to be and that's helpful tool too. Lastly, if you need a better view of your shape like right now my stroke is thick and I have these lines showing up underneath. I'm having a hard time really telling what my shape looks like. You can go into outline mode, which the keyboard shortcut is command Y or Control Y on a PC or you can go to view outline and what this is going to show you is just the paths and anchor points that are making up the shape and so I just find that sometimes I need to get rid of all the other noise to see where something is wonky. Like I can see right here, there's something weird happening thanks to outline mode and if I click on that, I can see it's because these handles are broken. It's not smooth. I'm going to go up to convert to smooth. That will help make those handles parallel, which will make it a smooth corner. If I drag this out, you can see that we use the pen tool in two different ways, but the shapes that we get are pretty similar. Don't be afraid of the pen tool. Practice with it and see if you're able to get things that you like because there are times when having complete control over where those curves are is really beneficial. 6. Drawing with the Pencil Tool: We are now going to take a look at the pencil tool, which I use when I'm drawing with my tablet. Now, you don't have to invest in a tablet if you don't want to, you can use this tool with the mouse I just find it's a lot more organic to use a tablet. That being said, the tablet that I use is the Wacom Bamboo, which I believe is one of their lowest end tablets that they make. It was given to me by a coworker a few years ago and I've never needed anything else. Thus, drawing area on it is maybe four by seven, which is much smaller compared to their other tablets, but I've really never needed anything or anything more. If you have been on the fence about getting one and you're not sure about spending a few $100, go ahead and get one of their smaller tablets. I really think that it will do the job for you at least when you're starting out. To access the pencil tool, I am going to hit N on my keyboard, and unlike the pen tool, I don't have to worry about placing all the anchor points and pads myself, I basically just draw the shape that I want. So I can go ahead and draw here. When I get close to the beginning, it's going to give me the close icon, I can let go, and the shape is made for me. Just like any other shape in Illustrator, if I select it and hit A on my keyboard to access my direct selection tool, I can go ahead and get in here and play around with any of the anchor points and handles. I still have total control over the shape, I just didn't really have to monkey around with placing all the points myself trying to get everything perfect. Now, as far as options that you have with the pencil tool, you can double-click on it to access the option panel. The first thing we're going to look at is fidelity, which you can see is a scale that goes between accurate and smooth. If I turn this all the way to accurate, you can see that if I draw this crazy shape out here and then close it, it's going to very much make a shape-based exactly off what I drew, which can sometimes not be great if you have these little overlaps in here. You can see that I got a really weird overlapping shape and little peaks and valleys like this that don't look great. But sometimes that's what you want, you want to have full control over the shape that you're making. On the other side, if I go all the way to smooth and I do something like that, what I end up with is something that's much more smooth out, and I don't know if that example really showed it. But you can see the overlap I get is a lot different. If I have little peaks and valleys coming out, it's going to really smooth everything out. If you are a mouse user, if you don't have a tablet, then that can really help you out. Because if your hand jerks out a little bit or you jerk a little bit trying to rotate your wrist around the mouse, it's going to go ahead and smooth that out for you. I like to keep mine not all the way to smooth, but definitely on that end. That seems to work out the best for me, but play around and see what works for you. We have these other options down here. The first one is fill new pencil strokes. That just means you can see I have a fill color right now and if I make a shape it's going to fill it. If I turn that off, then it will make a shape, but it's going to have no stroke and no fill. So if I select it, I can see the shape is there there's just no fill. I actually don't really know why you would not want to fill, you might think like, oh, maybe it'll stroke it. But if I keep this on fill and I set my stroke to a color, it doesn't fill it, it just gives it the stroke. That option is there, though I'm not really sure what it's for. The next one is keep selected. Keep selected by itself isn't all that powerful, but it is really helpful for some of these other options. If I check this and draw a shape, you can see that sure enough that shape is still selected, and I know that it is because I can see all the anchor points in it. Now if I go back in here and also check this option that says option key toggles to Smooth Tool, well, that means that I have access right after I draw the shape to smooth out my lines. If I draw something and I don't like how it turned out, then all I have to do is hold down Option and get in here, and I have access to the Smooth Tool right on the fly. That can be really helpful. The only reason I don't work that way is I don't find that I really need to smooth things out the pencil tool does a really good job. But if you're finding that you're drawing things and they're not smoothing out how you want, then that might be a really powerful combination for you. Similarly, I'll uncheck that, but keep selected checked. If they have this option down here called edit selected paths. With those two selected, what I can do is I can draw a shape and then since it's selected, I'm able to go in here and alter what this shape looks like. I could go in and change that, and you can see that it's adding more anchor points on the fly, which can be really helpful. The only problem that I see with this is just sometimes it doesn't quite understand what you're asking it to do. Of course, it probably won't do it since I am, oh, there we go. Sometimes you can see that it makes these combo shapes that I don't really need, and I actually have a method that I like better for altering shapes when needed. So I don't really keep that one checked. Lastly, we have closed paths when ends are within so many pixels. The default for this is six pixels, and you can see I have that quite higher. That's because when I'm drawing with the pencil tool, I'm usually going pretty fast, and if you don't have that checked and you don't come within six pixels of that first line, then it's not going to close the shape for you, and it's really annoying to have to go in there and close that afterwards. I like to have that hiked up it seems to do a pretty good job for me. For this shape, all I need to do, actually I'll zoom back out. The way that I'm going to be using this is I'm going to make a shape in Illustrator that outlines all of these, and then I'm actually going to use these drawn lines in Photoshop to go on top of it. So all I need to do is trace the outline of all of these together. It would be a lot of work to get in there with the pen tool and lay each of these anchor points and curve, especially when I'm not particular about how I want it to look I just want it to have this natural organic look. That works just fine, and like I said, if there's anything that I don't like, then I can just get in with the direct selection tool and change that. One thing I forgot to mention earlier is if you ever see these little white icons, that means that you have a corner right there and it's a live corner, which means I can round this out simply by clicking and dragging that little icon. Since it's live, that means even after I've rounded it out, I could bring it all the way back and make it a corner again. If you see those, that's what that is referring to. But that's the pencil tool, it's pretty simple and straightforward and really powerful when you want to have a natural-looking illustration. 7. Building Shapes: We're getting closer to actually drawing on top of our sketches. What I want to do to get ready is grab both of the sketches that I placed in here. Go to opacity, bring that down and go ahead and lock the layer that they're on. That way I can draw right on top of them without having to worry about moving them around. Now, what we're going to be working on is sketching or drawing the fill layers. I just want to go over what I mean when I'm saying that. Here is a sketch of one of the flowers I'll be drawing. Right now what I'm working on is drawing the fills. I'm looking at this sketch that I made, and I'm looking at what I want to be filled in. When I say accent lines, I'm talking about all of the other lines that are in the drawing to support the illustration. At the end, the fill and the accent lines will be put together for a final piece like this. Sometimes the accent lines and the fills won't touch each other like this. I have this sketch here, and for the fills, I knew I wanted all of these little pieces, the leaves and the circles to be filled in. I knew the stem itself, I would use as an accent line and put those together later. Right now, we're working on drawing the fills. One last thing before we actually get into it, is I want to go over the Shape Builder tool, and it's a little bit tricky to get it first. I want to show you with some basic geometric shapes, and then I'll show you how it applies to drawing over my sketches. There are times when you're drawing, when you need to combine shapes in various ways. In order to do that, I'm going to use the Shape Builder tool. For designers who are familiar with the pathfinder, when illustrator introduced the Shape Builder tool, in my mind, it made all of these functions a little bit obsolete because instead of meeting a bunch of separate functions, we have one tool that can do everything all at once. I have these two hexagons here. There are two separate shapes. If I go into outline mode, you can see that that all there is there. This line is from the sketch of which is mask, so that's what that line is. Let me actually just delete that so that that doesn't get in our way later because that can be confusing. We have these two shapes, and I'm going to drag this one over so that they're overlapping. Now, we know that there are just two shapes here, and that's what our brain is thinking. We have to hexagons. But if I go into Shape Builder mode, which is Shift M, then illustrator is now seeing this as separate pieces where everything overlaps. If I go into outline mode, you can see that we don't just have two hexagons, we actually have this shape over here. We have this hexagon which is combined of these two shapes. We have the diamond in the middle where they overlap. We have this shape over here, and then if we combine these two shapes, we'd have the hexagon on the right. The Shape Builder gives us access to all of these different pieces that are created by the two paths of the shapes. If I want to make a shape, all I have to do is click. By clicking there, if I leave outline mode and just grab my selection tool, you can see that I was able to cut and make that shape just with that one click. I could also click this diamond in the middle, and now where those paths were intersecting, I now have a diamond shape that I can use. I don't only have to click, I can also click and drag. I can drag these together, and what I get is now one hexagon and one shape of what's left over. You can see that I get a lot of options here. I can click all three of these and make all three of them separate shapes. Now I have one for the right side, one for the left side, and the diamond in the middle, or I can hold down option, which gives me the ability to get rid of pieces. I can click in the middle. If I go back now, now you can see we have these two shapes and the diamond from the middle is missing, or I could decide to get rid of the two outside shapes and all that I'm left with is a diamond. We get a lot of powerful little shapes just from one tool with paths that are overlapping. Now let's make it a little bit more complex. Let's introduce four hexagons. They're separate shapes. I'm going to go ahead and make it so that they first touch each other, and then I'm going to have them overlap. We're used to seeing four hexagons, and in order to be able to use the Shape Builder tool successfully, we need to start looking at these as paths that are overlapping, which give us just a myriad of shapes to work with. I have everything selected. I'm going to hit Shift M. Now you can see that whereas before we only had four hexagons, we now have tons of geometric shapes in here that we can combine or get rid of or click to just create new shapes altogether. If I click on these two, then I get two new smaller hexagons that I could move out of here. If I select all of these again and hit Shift M, then I can go in and I can combine these ones on the right. I can get rid of them. I could combine these ones in the middle, combined these ones down here, combine these two. Now you can see that what I'm left over with after all those shapes, are these shapes that I ended up making with it. We really have a lot going on here. One other thing that's really cool about the Shape Builder tool that the pathfinder tool can really deal with, is even though all of these four shapes are overlapping, it doesn't mean that we have to deal with all of them. If I only wanted to deal with these two hexagons right here, then if I select those and go into the Shape Builder tool and go into outline mode, even though I see all of these overlapping, all we're told Shape Builder tool to pay attention to are the ones that we selected. The only things that I can do right now is either combine or exclude some of these shapes. I can combine these and get rid of this and it's not going to affect the shapes up here. That gives me a lot of power too. Let me show you how this works for my sketches. I'm going to grab my pencil tool, and we'll start with an easy one. I'm going to start with these buds that are down here. I'm going to get a different color, and I'm going to go ahead and start by tracing over the stem. Now I'm going to get a different color just so that we can see, and I'm going to trace these two little flower buds. Now it would be easy enough for me to just take this shape and put it in front and get the result that we want. But if I go into outline mode, I can see that these shapes are overlapping, and it's really unnecessary because I can't see the bottom of this bud anyway. I can use Shape Builder to simplify this. Now, we see three shapes. We see two flower buds and one stem. But as we know from thinking like Shape Builder, we actually have a lot more shapes here. We have this up here 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. We have five shapes. I'm able to Shape Builder tool now to simplify all of these. I have hit Shift M and I'm in here now. Knowing that my drawing where this line is, is where the stem hits, I'm going to go ahead and combine these two. I'm going to do the same thing over here and combine these pieces. Now, instead of having five separate shapes, I have three as I know that I want. Not only that, but these ones are now a lot neater, and they have these perfect lines that meet up with where these shared lines are between those two drawings. That's pretty cool. That's a pretty right example. Like I said, I could have just drawn those buds and put them behind there, but there are times when this is going to be really pertinent for lines that are shared between two drawings. Let's take a look at this one. I'm going to go ahead and draw a shape around this entire leaf. For the time being, I'm going to hide this shape. I use hiding a lot for when I'm drawing and I need something to get out of my way for me to draw something else. Without moving it, that way I know it's in the right spot and so I'm just going to hit Command 3. Now, I'm going to work on this little shape. Well, since I know the Shape Builder tool works with paths that overlap, I'm going to go ahead and draw this. Then I'm not going to worry about what the other side of the shape looks like, because the first shape that I drew is going to help me make the border for that one. I'm going to hit option or Alt Command 3 to unhide that first shape. Just to make things easy, I'll change this color. So you can see, I know that we have two shapes here, but thinking like Shape Builder, we can see that we actually have access to three pieces of the shapes. I'm going to hit Shift Command or just Shift M, and then I'm going to simply hold down option and get rid of that excess. Now, I have these two shapes working together with a really nice shared line, where nothing is overlapping or looking weird. Now technically, if I drag this out, this background is like perfectly formed behind here, and I actually want this line to be where they meet. To do that, I'll select both of them, hit Shift M, and I'm just going to click where this one is. That just told Shape Builder that where those pieces were overlapping, I just want one shape, and you can see that there. Let me show you one more example that's a little bit more involved. Right here, this shape is going to be made up of 1, 2, 3, 4 pieces. But I'm going to create that by drawing some illustrations that overlap so that I can use the Shape Builder tool to pick out the pieces that I want to build this flower. Let me start by drawing the stem. Next, I'm going to go ahead and draw this flower. Go in and connect that. I'm going to hide this while I draw this top part. Now, I already drew this line from the last shape that I drew. I'll now have access to that as a border when I'm in the Shape Builder tool. For drawing this, I really only need to worry about drawing this line which I hadn't had yet. Then I can go ahead and put a bunch of excess up here that will overlap that we can get rid of later. If I now unhide that shape and select all three of these, I'm going to outline mode. We can now see what pieces we need to keep, combine and get rid of and hit Shift M. I already know that this is a shape that we want, that's the top of the flower. I know we can get rid of that because I only drew that so that I would be able to make this shape from the shape. Down here, I know that this is actually a part of the stem. I'll go ahead and click and drag to combine those. Only one piece left, and let me change the color so that we can see what we're doing. That's the bud and that's easy. That's what we've been doing already. I'll draw this bud. I'm going to go ahead and combine them or go on outline mode to make it easy for myself. Hit Shift M, and I can see that this is really part of the stem. I'll combine them and look at that. In our outline mode, we can see that we have our shape exactly as we want it, and everything's nice and clean. The reason this is changing color is because when you use Shape Builder tool to build shapes from two different colors shapes, it makes them the same color. That's why I needed to change that. Go ahead and use whatever drawing tool you want to draw all of the fill shapes from your drawings. Next, we're going to talk about accent lines. 8. Accent Lines: I have all of my fill shapes done, and I'm going to turn off my sketches so that you can see. Not only that, but I started considering color. Now by no means has to be your final color palette. But you do want to start coloring like objects, what that means is, I know, for instance, that I want some of my flowers to be this light periwinkle color and I want some of them to the pink, whereas I want any leaves and stems to be green, those are all the same shade of green. Then everything else are these cream colors. That just helps, so that I know how many colors in general I'm going to be working with in this pattern. They'll be easy to change later, but if you start thinking about it now as we move into tiling, it's going to be easier for you later. Now, before we actually start building the tile, I need to be able to work with these accent lines. As I talked about earlier, I like to add the accent lines in Photoshop, I personally just like the look that Photoshop is able to capture by bringing in the lines from my sketches. However, I can't really effectively make a repeating tile just based on these fill shapes. For instance, these stems, I'm not able to just guess how long they're going to be, and so I need to have some accent shapes to reference. I'm going to turn my sketches back on, I'm going to unlock them and I'm going to go ahead and bring them onto the top layer, so that I can see them. I'll move them out of the way so that they're not right on top of my sketches. What we're going to do to make these usable, is we're going to use image trace. Now, it's very possible that after we image trace these lines and combine them with our fills, that you love the way it looks and you want to use them as is, in which case you don't even have to worry about bringing your tile into Photoshop to add texture. The look of the vectorized lines just doesn't really jive with my style. I really like a more hand-drawn look, It's just a preference, it's totally up to you. But either way, we've got to vectorize these babies in order to add them to our fills to use as a guide, in order to image trace them, I'm going to select my first thing of sketches, and I'm going to open up my image trace panel. If you don't have yours over there, you can go over to window and image trace, and I'm going to go to the presets, and go to black and white logo. It's going to probably warn you that the traces are large and so it might proceed slowly. Now the first pass did, you can see I'm losing some detail around here as well as in these leaves. The first thing I wanna do is in the options down here, select ignore white. We're only using the black lines and clicking that will also make the black lines a little bit more bold. That still wasn't quite enough, I'm still seeing some issues down here, so I'm going to slide the threshold over to the right. That's looking better. Let me try a little bit more, and that's going to work for me. It didn't still bring all of this over, but I didn't actually end up using this leaf when I was making my fills, I'm not really worried about that. I'm looking at all my other lines. That looks pretty good. Now to turn this from one solid traced object into actual shapes that we can use, we need to expand it and expanding it really just gives us all the anchor points and pads that we need. They're grouped together right now, I'm going to hit Shift Command G to ungroup them. Now you can see I can click and move these things freely as I need to. I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing to the second set of sketches, Black and white logo. Let it do its thing, Hit ignore white, we're probably going to need to bring the threshold up. Let me expand it and ungroup it, and we're ready to use these. I'm going to start with this flower, even though it looks like it's all grouped, some of these pieces are separate. I want to draw marquee around all of this flower and hit Command G to group it. I'm going to bring it up to where its corresponding fill shape is. I'll group these together too and we'll move them over to the side. Now in my example earlier, I showed you that when I combine the accent lines to this fill, I don't actually need all of these lines. I really just want the accent lines in here that are inside of the flower and the dots inside of these little flowers, in order to work non-destructively, I'm going to make a copy by holding down option and dragging, so that in case when I'm building my motif, I ever want just the outline of the flower without the fill, I have access to that. Now with this, I'm going to try and get this in place to where I want it. I'm going to hit Shift E on my keyboard to get to my eraser and I'm going to delete all the lines that I don't want to use. Now, if you're loving the way that these vectorized lines look and you think that you're going to want to keep them and not do it in Photoshop, then you'll want to be a little bit more careful with the eraser to not erase too much. I however, I'm just using these strictly as a reference for building my tile, I'm not going to be too careful about not deleting extra lines in here. I'm not going to go crazy, but I just mean, I'm not really paying to close attention to how the edges of these are going to look. I just want the basic idea. I also want to get in, and get these. This is all preference, maybe you decide that you like the way all of the lines look on top of the fill. Maybe you decide that you don't really want any accent lines and you really want to redraw everything. It's totally up to you, I'm just showing you my workflow with how I usually build them. When that's all done, I'm going to take these and group them and I'm going to move these to the side, because these are all taken care of, and I'm going to move on to the next bit. Now, I want to work with some of these because I'm pretty interested in how these are going to look. I'll group them and I'm going to bring them up to their corresponding fill, which is right here, let me group those. Bring them over here, and again, I want to work non destructively because I can already tell I'm going to want to use some shapes like this, especially these lining ones without any fill. I want to make a copy, I did that by holding option and dragging and I'll line up this one on top. This one I'm going to do a lot of erasing because I know that I only really want the stems to be left. I'll click it and hit Shift E and I'm going to this, delete outline around the leaf, around these foams. If you're having a hard time seeing where you're going, you can go up to view hide edges and I still have my line selected for erasing, but you can see I don't have all the anchor points and pads in the way I'm able to just really see where I'm erasing. That looks pretty good to me, I'll select these and group them together. Put it next to this, and I'm going to move those over to the side to where my other ones are. I'm just going to keep on going until all of my fill shapes have some accent lines added to them. Once you've got them how you like, it's time to get pattern tiling. 9. Creating the Tile Repeat: There are a few things to consider when you are creating a repeating tile. The most basic is that, anything on the left side must also be on the right side and vice versa, and similarly, anything that's on the top must also be on the bottom. That's just the rule of making a repeating tile and making sure that it's going to tile correctly. You want to use variation in your motifs and objects. This can be with color or size or the rotation or the way that an object is facing, and this is going to add interest to your repeat. If you use the same object over and over again and don't change it at all, it's going to be boring. Lastly, you want to try to introduce movement and be weary of being two grid-like, unless that's your intent. Pattern tiles by nature are tiled in a grid, and so you need to be aware of that so that when you're placing your motifs, you're trying to break the illusion of that grid so that when a viewer is looking at your pattern repeat as a whole, they can easily pick out where that tile is and where everything is repeating. Let's talk about this in practice. You can see on the left-hand side, I have all of my fill objects combined with their accent lines, and this is my bank for making my motifs or in my instance, or in my case, it's more like a garden that I can pick from over and over again and I can start to build motifs from these things. Now, I know that my pattern is floral, which means it lends itself to being able to build little bouquets more easily than say, if you're making a baseball pattern. But even if you are making a baseball pattern, there might be certain groupings that you want to use to add interest to your pattern. If one of your objects as a baseball and you also drew some kernels of Cracker Jack, you might want to group those together and make a little motif. Whereas another little motif has a baseball bat and a glove next to each other. Or maybe you don't, maybe yours don't need motifs at all, but mine did. The way that I started to build my tile out and build my motifs, as I started to take flowers and pieces one-by-one and group them. Instead of just taking this flower, I'm going to make a copy of it because I want to be able to reuse it, and I'm going to do that by holding down option or Alt on my keyboard and dragging, and then it's just playing around and getting to be a designer with how you want things to look. I want to see this leaf here. I'll bring this out in front by hitting Shift Command right bracket and maybe I'll try one of these. I'm going to go ahead and flip that. So I'll right-click, go to transform, reflect, Flip Horizontally. Rotate that in there. I just did this until I started to get bouquets that I liked, and when I was done with one I would group it and then I bring it over here to use. Now, let's talk about the tile that I started to make. You can see that I have a rectangle back here and that is representing where the tile is going to be. I am working in inches, and I did that by right-clicking on my ruler and going to inches. You can view your rulers if they're not there by going to view and rulers, the keyboard shortcut is Command or Control R, and I made sure to make my tile around number that I'll be able to remember. Minus pretty big. I went for a 20 inches wide by 15 inches tall, and that's because I am going to be printing this onto wrapping paper and I really want the title to be kind of big to have a lot of variation in it so that you can't easily see where the tile is. That's why I'm working with that. The reason that you want an easy round number to remember is because if you'll remember, anything that's on the left side needs to be repeated on the right, and anything that's on the top or bottom needs to be its opposite side. By having a round number, we're making our lives a lot easier. Let's start here with these items I have over here on the left-hand side, and just so you know, the way that I started building this tile is I started in this open area and I started with one bunch. I believe I started with this one, and then I started to grab other bouquets that fit the areas around it. You can see if I move this one out, I had this rounded area. I knew that I would want a motif with a rounded area to fit in there. That's all I did to start arranging this, and we'll talk about a few other tricks that I used in a little bit. But getting back to this, I have all of these items hanging off the left hand side here, and we're going to talk about this one down here separately. In order to get them to repeat on this right-hand side exactly where I need, I'm going to have illustrator do the work. The first thing I'm going to do is make a copy of this motif by hitting command or control C, and then I'm going to paste it in place by hitting Shift Command V. You can see I've got a copy of this and now, I'm going to let Illustrator move it for me. I'm going to go up to transform and I'm looking at my ex positioning right now, and right now it's saying that it's placed at 1.4426 inches. Well, I'm just going to go ahead and hit plus 20 on my keyboard and select "Enter and voila", and moves it over to the left-hand side, in the exact positioning that I needed. I'm going to repeat that for all of these pieces that are hanging off the left. Command C, Shift Command V grew up to transform and hit plus 20. Now, this one down here is special because it's on a corner, which means it's going to need to be repeated on all four corners. First I'm going to copy and paste it and I'm going to move it up. This time instead of working with the X-values, I'm going to work with the Y-values. Since I need to move it up, I'm actually going to subtract my value. I'm going to go ahead and type in minus 15 and hit "Enter" and it pops it right in place, and now I'm going to copy both of these at the same time. Go to transform and go to my X-value and hit plus 20. Now I know that those corners are all taken care of. Down here it looks like I have two motifs that are ready to be tiled. But before we move those, I want to show you how I decided to put this little flower right here. You can see that, this motif is getting pretty close to this top edge. Which means, I don't have a ton of room to have something hanging off down here, and if I move this out of the way, you can see that I had very little space to work with. The way that I cheat it to figure out how much I can have something hanging off down here, is to make a quick shape up in the space that it's going to be repeated into, and I'm going to use my pen tool. Let me grab a different Fill to make just the roughest selection of the space that I have available to me, and I want to be careful to not get too close to these objects because I do want there to be some breathing room, but I just want to get an idea of how much space I have. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab, click and drag, and I am going to hold shifts so that it moves straight down and I'll pop that into place. That gives me a good idea of how much space I have to work with to put something in here without touching other things. I was able to get this in here where I want it and comfortably know that when I repeat it to the top, it's not going to be in the way, and I did the same thing for this right here. I can see that I had some space, but I also knew that I needed to watch out for this leaf. I drew a shape, brought it down here, and then built a motif that would fit perfectly in this space while also going into the space that I knew it would move into in the top. Lastly, I just want to take a look at how I started to repeat some of these or how I would start repeating them. I have some space right here, and I think I want to use this motif again. I haven't seen it in a while in this area, but I don't just want to just do a simple copy and leave it as is, because that just isn't very interesting. I want to change it a little bit. Already, I can see that it would fit better into this space if I rotated it a little bit. You can see it fits in there pretty nicely, and not only that, but I'm going to change the colors of it so that it doesn't stand out as a copy so easily. I'm going to go ahead and grab my direct selection tool so that I can just select this bud right here. Because all of this is grouped. If I used my regular selection tool, would grab all of it. But using my direct selection tool, I can get right in there, and I'm going to change that to pink and then I'm going to go ahead and change this bud to this darker color. Now, when that's repeating, those aren't going to stand out as much as being copies. I'm going to use that as a vehicle for making this whole pattern. You don't have to come up with fresh new motifs for every single spot. That will add interest, but you can reuse them and if you do, I suggest either changing the scale or rotating them or changing the color or using some combination. Down here, I have my tile all done. I filled everything out, and I'm ready to now test it to make sure that the pattern works. What I'm going to do is I'm going to grab this rectangle back here, and I'm going to copy, and I'm going to paste it in front. To do that, you can do Command F. I did Shift Command V again because I knew it would paste it in the front and that's all that works for me. We're going to select everything, and I'm going to hit Command 7 to make a clipping mask. What that did is, it took the tile size that we designed everything to, and it clipped off everything hanging off the edge so that when we tile this, you can see this rose over here is going to line up exactly with this rose. Now, I'm going to grab my tile. It should all be grouped together since it's in a clipping mask, and I'm going to go to object, pattern, make. Now, you can see that right now, all of my tiles are spaced out from each other, and that's because Illustrator is really smart, and even though we made a clipping mask, it knows that we have artwork that is really hidden and coming out to this far. All I need to do to override that is click this checkbox that says Size, title to art. That's going to put them all together. Now, yours might by default have some of these check boxes checked. It might have the tile edge showing, and it also might be dimming the copies to 50 percent. I turn those off so that I can get a really good idea of what I'm looking at, and I also like to go into full screen mode by hitting F. Before I do that, I want to turn my copies up to nine by nine so that they're taking up my whole screen. I'm going to go into full screen mode. I'll tap it once and twice, and now, I can really start to get in here and use my command plus and minus to start getting around and seeing if I'm noticing anything weird. If I zoom out, I can really get a feel for the movement in this pattern. There are instances like here, these four flowers, it looks like they're making a tile, but the tile arg is actually here. There are just, like I said, since we are tiling using a grid, you're going to get instances like this where you can see the four of them or you can see that there's a grid there. But as long as you have enough interest, then it's going to be okay. I'm not going to be printing this wrapping paper at this scale. It's going to be a little bit bigger. So I'm not too worried about those flowers standing out. Everything looks good to me. I'm going to hit F again to come out of full-screen mode, and I'm going to hit "Done". Now, you've got a working pattern, an illustrator. I can drag out another rectangle and go up here and click in my swatches and you can see my patterns there, and now I've got my working pattern. As we talked about earlier, if you like the vectorized lines and you're happy with how this looks, then you're done. You just made a pattern. But if you're interested in taking it to the next level and adding in some texture, then we're going to be bringing into Photoshop. But next, our color options, and that's where the fun begins. 10. Playing with Color: All right, guys, it's time to talk about color. Although color is a huge topic, I'm really only going to touch on the points that I use in my personal workflow. We're going to start off by opening the Swatches palette because that's where we're going to be working from. If you don't have your Swatches palette in the right-hand side, you can go ahead and go to "Window" and "Swatches" to open it. You can see I have a lot of swatch groups already in here, that's because I really like to hold on to color palettes that I've had success with in the past or that I seem to be drawn to. The first thing I want to do is I want to make a color group from this pattern that I've made. Not only to hold onto the palette because I like it, but also to see how many colors I've used to color this pattern. I'm going to go ahead and hit this folder icon for a new color group at the bottom of the Swatches panel. You can name your color group if you want, and then you just want to make sure that selected artwork is chosen, and hit "Okay." Now, we can see that these are all the colors that it took to create my pattern. Now, black is in there because black as the color of my accent lines. I'm going to delete that because I'm not really interested in having that be part of the palette. I'm going to be handling my lines in Photoshop later and sometimes, I like just keeping the lines black anyway, so deleted that from there. Now, I can see that I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven colors that I used to color this pattern. That's what I'm shooting for when I'm going to start recoloring it and coming up with new pallets. Now, to be honest with you, I'm not the strongest at coming up with my own color palettes. Some people, they just have a real gift for combining colors that are really, really great to look at. I need a little bit more work and help with it. I usually bring a picture in that inspires me or has colors that I really like. I simply make some squares and I use the Eyedropper tool to go in and sample colors from it. The nice thing is when I look at this, I see the colors that I know the flowers are. For instance, I know this ranunculus right here has a really nice peachy color. But when I sampled it, I was actually getting a lot of mauve tones. Similarly, I didn't really realize that this golden color was down here in some of these leaves. When you're sampling, you really get some colors that you didn't know were there. Since you know that the colors in the picture already go together, you can really start making a cohesive palette from it. Go ahead if you want to, and start making color groups from pictures that you've taken. I'm just going to select all these and make a color group from it, and hit "Okay." I'm going to hide this for now. Now, we can get into recoloring. Since I like this first pallet I came up with, I'm going to go ahead and make a copy so that I don't lose that. I'm going to zoom in. I want to keep my artwork to the left side over here because once we go into the Recolor Artwork tool, it's not going to let me pan around in the document. I'm going to go ahead and select all of this. The Recolor Artwork tool is this icon up here that looks like a little color palette. When I go into it, it's basically going to show us, "Hey, these are all the colors that are in your illustration and you can move them around over here." You'll notice that black doesn't have a little square over here, and that's because I have my settings set to preserve black and white. If you want black to be one of the colors that you can move around, all you have to do is click in that area and say yes to adding a new color to the current harmony. I also want to say that Bonnie Christine recently published a class that goes really into depth on how to use this tool, as well as going over color in general and creating pallets. If you want more information, I highly recommend taking that class. I had been using the Recolor Artwork tool before, but her class definitely gave me some tips that I hadn't known before. What you can do is you can do this manually and start clicking and dragging to come up with new combinations to see if you like any of them. Additionally, you can hit this magic button right here which is what I usually do. This is going to randomly change this color order to recover your artwork. You can start to get combinations that you didn't know that you would even try or that you would like. Right now, you can see that since black is one of the colors that sampled, black is one of the colors it's using, and I don't really want that. So instead, I'm going to click on this color group that we made from this artwork that doesn't include black, so that I can start cycling through those. If I find one I like, I can hit "Okay." Now, I personally don't want to see this color group redone. I already like the one I came up with. I really want to explore new color groups. I'm going to try out this one that I made and I'm already really liking that dark green color as the background, but I'll cycle through a few more to see if there's anything that I like. The nice thing is if you come across one that's pretty close but not exact, you can go in and change it yourself. I could make this the background color and once I find one I like, all I have to do is hit "Okay", hit "No" to alter the swatch group, and my artwork is recolored. I can spend hours doing this and sometimes, I do, because it's really fun to find that exact color palette that just makes your heart pitter-patter because it just really brings your pattern to life. I make a copy, go back in, and I'll try another group. I like these vintage yellows. You can see that this color group only has five colors, even though our original artwork have seven. You can see that it's combining some of these too and making shades and such to make this color palette work. I can go ahead and hit "Okay" and so on and so forth. Play around with the recolor artwork tool to try and come up with at least three color variations that you like for your pattern tile. 11. Exporting from Illustrator: By now you've taken some time to explore some color palettes and figure out which ones that you want to bring into Photoshop to render and we're getting ready to export. Up until now, I haven't been paying attention or talking about art boards, and that's because when I'm first designing, I like to work in this big open whitespace under this view mode where you can show and hide your art boards. But now that we're getting ready to export, it's really important that our art boards are set up correctly and in the right spot. I'm going to hit "Show art boards" and you can see the only one that I have is over here and it doesn't even have any artwork on it. I'm going to make some art boards that fit the exact size of the tile that we need. I'm going to grab my art board tool over here. The keyboard shortcut is Shift-O, and instead of trying to drag this out exactly where the background is and hoping that I get the 15 or the 20 by 15, I'm going to let Illustrator do the work. I'm just going to click once on the background rectangle and it's going to make an art board that's that exact size, and so I can look up in the info panel and see that sure enough, it made an art board that's 20 inches by 15 inches. I'm going to do that for each of these. Oops. See that time I clicked my motif instead of my background image so I made an art board that is the size of that motif. I'll hit Command-Z and be a little more careful. Here we go. There, and now I don't need this art board over here, so I'm just going to click it once and hit "Delete." We've got our art boards ready and now a little tip I have is if we were to export these right now, there would probably be a very faint white line going around the outside of this, which is really annoying when you're trying to tile. We're going to make the background shapes a little bit bigger than our tile. I'm going to hold down Option and Shift and drag from a corner, and since our art board is the correct size of our tile, we no longer have to worry that our rectangle is too big. We're just making sure that there's a little bit of overhang off of the art board so that everything is the right size. I'm sorry, so that everything exports without any borders around it. That looks pretty good, and now the last thing I want to do is if you'll remember, I'm going to be adding my accent lines in Photoshop to have a hand-drawn look, and so I want to export these tiles without any of these accent lines in here. What I'm going to do is use my direct selection tool by hitting A on my keyboard and select one of my accent lines. Go to "Select", "Same", "Fill Color "and it's going to grab all the accent lines that are in my document, and I'm going to hit Command-3 to hide them. Now what I have is only the fill shapes that I created. I'm going go to "File", Export As." I'm going to put them in the right folder and I'm going to call these tile no lines. I'm going to have them be a JPEG. I'll say use art boards and I want to use export all of them. On the Export, you want to make sure your resolution is set to high and that your quality is set to maximum and I'll hit "OK." Now I'm probably not going to have a really easy time trying to reconstruct where those accent lines go in Photoshop without some guide. I'm going to unhide my accent lines by hitting Option Command-3 and I'm going to export one of these with the lines in there and I'm going to use that as a guide in Photoshop to re-add those in. Go back to "Export As", I'm going to call this one, tile with lines. I'll say use art boards, but this time I just want the first one, Export and okay. So now we're all set to bring these into Photoshop. 12. Adding Hand Drawn Lines: We're ready to work in Photoshop. I have a few documents open right now. I have my tile that doesn't have any lines, I have my tile that does have lines, and I've got both of my sketches open up. The first thing that I want to do is select everything in this tile with lines document. So I'm going to hit "Command A", and then I'm going to hit "Command C" to copy. I'll come back to my tile without lines and I'll hit "Command V" to paste this on top. I'm going to bring the fill down so that the lines are in as obvious, but I can still see them. Now, I can go ahead and close my tile with lines. What we're going to be doing is taking the lines from our actual hand-drawn sketches and selecting them using the Quick Mask mode in order to replace them over the guide. Now, if you like how your vectorized lines look, then you can keep those. Like I said earlier, I just have a preference for the hand-drawn lines. I think the subtle difference is really add up to make a big difference at the end. Let's talk about Quick Mask mode. Quick Mask mode is a way of selecting pixels based on what is black and what is white. The nice thing is this Photoshop does all the work for us. I'm going to go ahead and use the Lasso tool to roughly draw around this flower. I'll hit "Command C" to copy it, and I'm going to go to this blank document just so that I can show you this process. Now, if I were to just paste this flower right now, it would obviously paste the background and the foreground, and that's not what we want. So I'm going to undo that. This time, I'm going to make a new layer and I'm going to enter Quick Mask mode. I can do that by hitting key on my keyboard or clicking this button that's beneath the foreground on the background. I know that it's active when my layer is red like that, and I can go ahead and paste. Photoshop did all the work of separating the white pixels from the black pixels, which for us means it separated the sketch from the paper. I can go ahead and hit "Q" again to exit Quick Mask mode, and you can see that I can see that my lines are selected. But really, Quick Mask mode masks what's black, meaning it's not selecting anything that was black. So really everything except my sketches are selected right now, and I know that because I have marching ants going around the perimeter of the document. It's an easy fix. All I have to do is inverse my selection. I can do that by hitting "Shift Command I" or going up to select inverse. Now, those marching ends around the sides of the document are gone, and I can see that my flower is perfectly selected. All I have to do now is fill it. The quickest way to fill something with your foreground color is to hit option "Delete' with your keyboard. Then, you just have to deselect by hitting "Command D", and we have our sketches perfectly selected without any difficult work at all. Even if I were to make my background darker, you can see that Quick Mask mode does a really perfect job of getting all of the white out of there. There's no artifacts left. This is the way that we are going to bring our sketches over into our document, and we're going to use our guide to figure out where those lines need to go. This might seem like a daunting task, but once you get into the flow of it, it really starts to go faster. I'm going to start in one area. I'm going to start with this rose, and I'm going to go find it in my sketches. I'll use my Lasso tool, hit "Command C", go back to my document, make a new layer, hit "Q", I'll paste, hit "Q" again, "Shift Command I" to inverse the selection, option "Delete" to fill it, and "Command D" to deselect it. If you'd like more information on the Quick Mask mode process, you can check out my other class, digitizing hand-drawn sketches where I go through the process in greater detail. Now, I'm just going to move this sketch and rotate it and scale it until it's in place. This doesn't have to be exact, but I want it close since that's how I know that I liked it when it was in Illustrator. I think it's still a little too big. There we go. Now, I'm going to use a mask to get rid of these extra lines. The reason I'm not using the eraser is that although I'm 99 percent sure that I don't need these outside lines, I still want to work in a non-destructive workflow. That way, if in the future I decide to come back in here and I really want to use those lines, I don't have to redo everything. I still have access to it since they're in a mask. That looks pretty good and I'm going to move on to this leaf. Use the Lasso tool, copy, make a new layer, Quick Mask, paste, exit, Quick Mask, inverse, fill, and deselect. Now, it looks like this leaf is flipped, so I'm going to hit "Command T", right-click, flip horizontal, and I'll go ahead and get it in place. Here's a tip for scaling and rotating things more easily. I like to line up at least one part of this sketch, which in this case is the typical leaf. Then, I like to go ahead and move my anchor point there. Now, it's going to scale and rotate from that spot. So I can rotate it and scale it down, and it just makes things go a lot quicker. It looks pretty good. Make a mask. Get rid of these lines up here that are blocked by the flower and continue on my way. This little motif is now done. I'm going to turn off my guide layer for a second so that you can see the difference here. Now, instead of having these really straight perfect lines, I can see that I really get that texture from them being hand-drawn. I have that little bit of bleed, I can see the irregularities and the pressure whereas pushing down with the pen, and I really like that look. Now that this motif is done, I'm going to group those layers together and move on to another one. I'm going to keep going until all of the lines are filled in. But before I do that, I want to show you what happens when you get to the edges. If you look over here on this left hand side, I have this same motif that I just made. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate that and show you how to make sure that it's in the exact right spot on either side of the tile. I'm going to duplicate it, and I'm actually going to bring it over here. It's going to be easier for me to line up this motif based on this leaf over here. I'm going to go ahead and rotate it around. I'm going to use my trick and line up the tips of those leaves and go ahead and put the anchor point there and pop it into place. I'm going to need to duplicate it again for this one over here. Now, the only thing is that Photoshop isn't going to do the math for us, quite like Illustrator. What I need to do is go into image in canvas size, and I want to see how wide this canvas is. Its 6,001 pixels. That's the number that I want to remember. I'm going to go to the copy that I want to move over here, and I'm going to hit "Command T". Up here, just like in Illustrator, we have the x and y positioning values. Right now, it's at 6,046. I'm going to do the math and subtract 6,001 from that, and what is left over is 45, and that's going to be the x value that I want to type in. Type in 45 and hit "Enter", and you can see that it moved it right into the right spot. If I turn the guide off, it's easy for me to see that these are pretty perfectly lining up. Go ahead and keep moving forward. Start bringing your sketches over with the Quick Mask mode, and anytime you run into something on the edge just easily do the math based on the canvas size and snap everything into place. 13. Painting: We made it to the last part. You can see here that, in my Layers panel, I have quite a few groups. These are the groups of all of the different lines that I made and copied and moved around to finish off this tile. Now, I have saved this at its current place. Now I want to go ahead and save a copy of it because we're actually going to merge all these lines now. I'm just going to put, merged, in the name. What we're going to do on this copy is we're going to start ungrouping and merging all these layers of lines together to simplify the document. What I'm going to do is select one of my groups and go to the top and Shift click. I'm going to right-click and hit "Ungroup Layers". What we need to do before we can merge these is we need to apply all of these layer masks that we had been using. If we merge them before doing that, it throws these out, and all of those lines that you took the time to get rid of are going to start showing up again. You can either right-click and hit Apply Layer Mask" or, if you want, I actually went into "Edit", "Keyboard Shortcuts", and I changed the shortcut for this to be Shift, Command, A to make it quicker. So I just go to each layer and apply all those layer masks. Everything is ungrouped and all of the layer masks have been applied. Now, I'm going to select all of those layers, with all the lines on them, and I'm going to go to "Merge Layers". Now, all of our hand-drawn lines are on one layer. I'm going to go ahead and save this, and before I get too far, I'm going to start saving out copies with our different colored backgrounds. So you can see I have opened one of our other tiles, and I'm going to go ahead and hit Command, A and Command, C to select all to copy it. I'm going to go on top of our background and I'm going to paste this in place. Like magic, all of the lines are already taken care of. After you rebuild this once, it's really simple to just pop in all those colored backgrounds. Now I'm going to go ahead and save this as, I'm going to call this one Cream Background. Then I can open up another one. Maybe I can do this one. Save as, I'll do this one, Yellow Background. So you can keep doing that for all of the color ways that you have made. Now we get to get into painting. The easiest way that I find to do the painting so that it's non-destructive is to solo the layer that just has all the colors on it. Go up to "Select", "Color Range", and grab one of the colors. I'm going to do the cream one. I've really been wanting to paint this cream background one. I'm going to open that up. I should point out, before we start painting these background layers, if you don't want your lines to be black or you want to experiment with different colored lines, it's really easy to do. If I click on the layer that has my lines on it and I go to lock transparent pixels, then it's going to make it really easy for me to paint over these, any color I want. If I want this flower right here, these lines to look like the lines or the color of the background, I can just grab a brush and paint right over it. Now, if a lot of your lines are going to be different colors, then instead of going this route, I would recommend grabbing the lasso tool and actually cutting those lines out from the rest of them. I know we just merged all of those, but that makes it easier then to grab only the ones you want. So I'll grab these, hit Command, X to cut, hit Shift, Command, V to paste them back in place. Then when you have a bunch of lines that you want all colored the same way, you can group them. You can add a solid color. Then all you have to do is apply a clipping mask to that whole group, and then those lines will become that color. Again, this is something that I go over in my digitizing hand-drawn sketches class, so if you want to learn more about that, you can. I want all of my lines to be black, so I'm going to undo that. I'm happy with all of them looking how they look. But what I do want to do is I want to start painting in some texture. If I look at this bud right here, this is just one flat piece of yellow, and I can add so much dimension in with fun Photoshop brushes. That's why I took all the time to really get in here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select that layer, with my lines turned off, and I'm going to go to "Select", "Color Range", and I'm going to hit that yellow. You can adjust the fuzziness. I found that, with this, it seems like it does a pretty good job at grabbing it. I'll hit "Okay". I want to hit Command, C to copy and Command, V to paste on a new layer. Now I have all of those yellow shapes just on their own layer. They're still on the layer behind it, but I'm doing this so that I can work non-destructively as I'm painting, in case I changed my mind about the painting. So I'm going to lock the transparent pixels on my yellow layer. I'm going to turn my lines back on so that I can see them, and now I'm going to have some fun with brushes. Since I'm working with the yellow, I want to set my foreground to the yellow color, and I want to set my background color to maybe just a bit darker. The brushes that I use for artistic painting in Photoshop or these Kyle T Webster's various sets of brushes. I think I have all of his. I think I've spent money on all of them because they're so high-quality, they're really not too much of an investment. He just does incredible work with creating these. I'm going to grab his oil rich brush from his paint box, which is one of my very favorite brushes, and I'm going to start coming in here and just painting in some texture. Now, sometimes I'll just paint the edges, so I'll add some texture in there. Whereas, other times I want more of a muddy look, and so I'll paint over the whole flower. Then I'll go back, I'll hit X on my keyboard to switch back and forth between my foreground and background. Then I'll paint over this and both colors are going to mix together continuously. I can get in here and just start getting some really nice texture. This is how I work. I usually just work one color at a time. I've done this before, and when I get the wrapping papers printed, it's amazing how inky they look. It just looks totally like I painted these or had them screen printed. What I like about it is it really has that vintage look to it. I'm really inspired by vintage paintings and vintage children's books, and they all have this inky imperfect look to them. Now if you kept your vectorized lines and you didn't take the time to rebuild the lines in Photoshop, then you probably aren't able unless you exported them separately to just turn off your lines while you're selecting color. My guess is that the, select color range is still going to be able to ignore black. But you still want to make sure that when I go to select my next color, I do want to turn off everything but the layer that I'm selecting from. Because especially as we start to introduce new shades here, it's going to be harder for that select color range to grab only the color we want. If you look over here, I have only the colored tiles selected. Now I can go in and grab my next color. I'm going to turn the fuzziness down. I'm going to hit "Copy and paste." Again, this is just so that I can work non-destructively so that if I change my mind on the painting, I want to try some different methods of painting, I can do it without messing up the background tile. I'll set my foreground color to the screen, and then the background color, I'll make a little bit darker. I've locked my transparent pixels and I'll get back in here. Where is my brush? This oil brush has really become part of my signature style just because I really love the vintage look it gives me. But he's got watercolor brushes, he has half tone brushes. Let me show you these half tone brushes, screen tone rather. I'll grab one of these. I'm going to make the color a lot darker just so you can really see what these do. They are just so well-made. I'm using my Wacom tablet right now, and these respond really well to pressure. He has some of them that are bigger. That's a really cool look that you can go for. He's got these watercolor brushes. I'll go for, let's see, soft wash and look at the edge of that. There are definitely ways to build texture in Illustrator. But just for me, I just as an artist, it just is really nice to have this organic extension of my arm. When you have someone like Kyle T. Webster making these brushes that are just so incredible. Look at that. If I turn off that layer, the difference is really, really sublimes. I'm going to actually delete that layer. I'm going to recopy it because I really just want to have, I want to use all the same brush. Copy and paste lock transparent pixels. I want to change this. I'm going to go back to my oil-rich brush, turn my lines back on so I can see him now. Get in here. Now if you're interested in designing patterns for fabric, you'll have to be a little bit more careful with your textures because restarting to introduce a lot of colors here, even though it looks like I only have two shades of green. The way that these are mixing they're actually introducing a lot of colors. You might have to index your colors when you're done, if you have fabric printing as your end goal. But for wrapping paper printing, it's no problem. It's going to be able to pick up all this texture. Not only do I rush do brushing on the shapes, but another thing I like to do is use some of his spatter brushes on top of everything to make it look like some of the ink didn't lay down all the way. I'm going to set my color to the background of this. I'll zoom in a little bit. I'll start to paint. See it looks like these were printed and some of the ink didn't get laid down all the way. I don't know if it's just for the books I had in my childhood or my mum's old sheets or what it is, but this just makes me giddy. I'm so excited that I can recreate it digitally and have fun with it digitally. It's too much. I'll do that here. I encourage you to have fun with the brushes. This is the whole benefit of working in Photoshop. We took all that time to use Illustrator's strength of creating shapes, and then exporting it and bringing it in here and bringing the hand drawn lines. You may as well take advantage of it. Before we wrap up, or rather before I fall too deep into painting, I do want to show you one more awesome reason for bringing your lines in through Photoshop. Now we already have a pretty good hand-drawn line look going. But I do want to emphasize it a bit. I'm going to take the line or the layer that my lines are on, and I'm going to right click and convert it to a smart object, going to go to filter, distort, and go to ripple. Ripple does exactly what it sounds like it's going to do, if I bring it to large, you can see it just ripples the line. We don't want to go crazy here, but I like to go small and dial it in. If I zoom in here to 100, you can see that it just accentuates that inky look, maybe I'll bring it up a little bit more. If they're starting to look a little too rigid and you can tell, then you can counterbalance it a little by adding under noise this median. You only need one or two pixels, and that's just going to smooth that out. That's something I like to do to accentuate that hand-drawn look. Have fun painting, have fun playing around with filters. Next, I'm going to show you how to do the final tiling to turn this into a pattern in Photoshop. 14. Final Tile: Congratulations on your beautiful final tile. I know that it's a long journey from when we start In Illustrator, just working on these fill shapes and then making the motifs and making the tile, but the final piece is always worth it when you see it all put together. Let me show you how to actually make this into a Photoshop pattern. I am going to go to Edit and Define Pattern. I'm going to call this, I guess Cream Background. That's it. It's a pattern. Now, I like to test mine when I get wrapping sheets printed, they are 20 by 29. I like to make a blank document, and go down here to the Adjustment Layer and have select Pattern. Then from this drop down, I have access to all of my patterns. You can see that right in here is my printed pattern. The nice thing about doing it this way is I can play around with the scale. So if I want it to be bigger or if I want it to be smaller, it's really easy to mess with that. I'll do a 110 percent. It's just really fun to go in and see your work. It's tiling beautifully, we don't have any weird lines. On top of that, we have all of this beautiful texture that we took the time to build up. 15. Thank You!: Guys, thank you so much for taking this class. I hope you were able to pick up plenty of new tips and tricks or going on my workflow journey of creating repeating patterns using both Illustrator and Photoshop.