Perfect Plaid: Design Easy, Fun Plaid Patterns in Procreate, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator

1. Perfect Plaid: Design Easy, Fun Plaid Patterns in Procreate, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator: Hi there. My name is Carrie Cantwell, and I'm an illustrator and a surface pattern designer. What does that mean? Well, I draw pictures and I design patterns, and then I sell them on products. I license my art with companies like Target, Wayfaer, and Bed Bath and Beyond. As far as patterns go, I love plaid. Plaid is so cool. It is timeless and yet universally on trend. Plaid can be made really fun and whimsical, or it can be traditional, depending on what colors you use. There are all kinds of different types of plaid, like gham plaid and tartan plaid, just to name a few. It seems like the possibilities with plaid are endless. By the end of this class, you will have your own plaid repeat pattern block that you can sell anywhere. I'm going to show you in this class, how to create a plaid pattern with different software. I'm going to show you how to use Procreate an Adobe Photoshop to create a really cool textured plaid that is interesting and has some really cool effects. I'm also going to show you how to create plaid in Adobe Illustrator. If you don't have an iPad, that is okay because I will also show you how to create plaid using just Adobe Photoshop. One thing that I have noticed is Plaid is universally a good seller for me. I want to show you in this class how you can create your own plaid pattern. So you can add some potentially best selling plaid designs to your pattern tool kit. So, are you ready to create some cool plaid patterns with me? Let's do this. 2. Plaid: A Brief History: Plaid is often associated with Scottish culture, and it has a rich and varied history that dates back centuries. The pattern composed of intersecting lines in various colors, actually originated as a fabric design known as Parton in Scotland. Tartan was used to distinguish different clans in Scotland. Each clan had its own unique pattern that symbolized identity and heritage. The term plaid in Scotland originally referred to a piece of clothing, specifically, a large blanket or cloak worn over the shoulder, often made from tartan fabric. It wasn't until later, particularly outside of Scotland that the term plaid became synonymous with the tartan pattern itself. By the 20th century, plaid had become a global fashion staple. In the United States, it was popularized through workwear, especially with brands like Pendleton and Woolrich, producing plaid shirts for lumberjacks and outdoor workers. During the mid 20th century, Plad found its way into sub cultures like punk and grunge, and that further solidified its place in popular culture. Today, plat is used in various forms of fashion and interior design, symbolizing both tradition and modern style. Clads history reflects a journey from a regional marker of identity to a universal fashion statement. 3. Create a Plaid Pattern in Adobe Illustrator: These are some examples of some plaid patterns that I created in Adobe Illustrator, and they do really well in my spoon flower shop. So let's create a plaid pattern in Adobe Illustrator. I am in Adobe Illustrator right now, and I'm just going to create a new file. I'm going to do 1,000 pixels wide by 1,000 pixels high. And then I'm going to make sure my color mode is set to RGB because my intention, what I'm doing with this is I'm going to be putting it on spoon flour. So, RGB is how they print with their di sublimation printing, RGB is perfect. And then I'm going to have it at 300 DPI, PPI DPI, same thing. So I'm going to click on Create. The first thing that I want to do is create my background. That's always the first thing that I do. I'm going to double click this layer here, and I'm just going to name it BG. For me, that's my code that just means background. And I do not need to worry about in my other half drop class, I talk about how we're going to use this as a guide, the background square. You don't have to worry about that with a basic repeat. It's just not as important. So I'm just going to create a background here and make sure that my stroke is not on. I just drew a square, and it really doesn't matter what size it is as long as it's a perfect square, or at least hangs over the edges of this perfect square. You want to make sure that you have an art board that is exactly the same width as it is height. It's 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels. I held down the shift key when I drew this square. It drew a perfect square. I'm going to do a little pull up a color palette here. I'm just going to load this into here, and then I'm actually going to click on this last purple here and then hold down shift, click on this white thing. I'm deleting all the other colors in this document because I don't need them. It's a really interesting palette. It's like some earthy tones, and I think this would make for a pretty trendy plaid. So I'm going to make my background color. I'm going to use this off white, I think, and it did my strokes. Let me make sure I have my fill selected here, and then I'm just going to select that as my background. It's like a beige. I'm going to create a new layer here in my multi plaid here. Do you see how, I have everything separated out onto layers. So I have all my backgrounds on one layer, and I did a lot of, they're all pretty light colored, and then I have all my horizontal stripes on one layer, and then I have all my vertical stripes on one layer. So it's just easier that way, especially when you're doing something like stripes. You have a lot of similar elements or the same elements, or when you're repeating colors, it's just going to help you keep better track of things. Let's go ahead and name this layer. I'm going to double click on it. Let's name it horizontal. Stripes. Perfect. Now, we just want to create some horizontal stripes with some of these colors that are not obviously the background color because if we use that, it'll disappear. You can use the line tool if you want. But what you'll have to do is go to your stroke here, and if you don't see that, you can also go down to window and stroke. But you're going to have to make it py thick because you want it to show up. I am actually going to grab the rectangle tool though and I am just going to draw a box. The most important thing is that your box is wider than the width of your artboard. My box is going to need to be wider than 1,000 pixels. So I'm just going to drag this up here. And you should get some helpful guides. Do you see when I drag it up here, the center of my rectangle is snapping to the edge of my artboard? That's what you want. That's why I'm doing actual shapes rectangles instead of the line tool because you're just going to get you're going to have more controls because right now we have this little center mark, we have a center mark there. It's just a little bit easier, and I'm going to center it on the artboard. Perfect. So this is the top edge of our artboard here. What we're going to want to do is everything that touches the top of our artboard has to be repeated at the bottom. That's what's going to make it seamless, and it has to be duplicated in the exact same way in the exact same position. The easiest way to do this is if you click on the object and then you go up to object, and then you go to transform, and then you go down to move. We're moving it. What we're really doing is moving and duplicating it. Click on that. Now, horizontally, we do not want to move this because if we move it horizontally, it's going to jump to the side. We don't want to do that because what we're doing is going down right here. We're going to leave. We're going to make sure the horizontal axis is at zero we're going top to bottom, and then the vertical is going to be 1,000 pixels because that's how big our artboard is. That's our height. If your artboard is 2000 pixels, you want this to be 2000. If your artboard is 500, you want it to be 500. And then what we're going to do and you can leave these the way they are. What we really just want to focus on is horizontal and vertical. Then you want to click on copy. What we just did was we duplicated this rectangle, exactly 1,000 pixels down from where the original one is. That should work perfectly. Now, we want to create another stripe here. So I'm just going to click on this top rectangle. I'm going to hold down the option key, and I'm going to hold down the shift key at the same time and I'm going to drag it down. I'm not going to worry right now about the distance and when we start positioning these, if they're all equal distances from each other, I can show you how to do that. Let's do another color. I'm going to do this Navy blue here. I'm going to make sure that I'm on my fill, which is the one right here, that is not the stroke, but it is the fill. I'm just going to click on that. Go back to my swatches and then I'm going to click on this Navy blue. These look so good together. Right now, what we want to focus on is right here, this stripe does not need to move down at all. It does not need to be duplicated because it's not touching the top of this artboard right here. So the important thing that we have to focus on is, see how it's hanging over the side of our artboard right here. What we want to do is make sure that what is over here, what is touching this artboard, which is this blue shape that's this height is the same as this. This is where if you're doing something with texture, it's going to be a little trickier. Because what you want to do is make sure that whatever is literally touching this line is duplicated over here exactly. Because this is the same height all the way across, I did not draw something where it's like this. So because that's the case, see how this over here, this blue does not match that blue height. So as long as your height is the same, and you're using something like the rectangle tool, then we are okay. Now I'm just going to do the same thing again, and I'm going to draw more stripes with the rectangle tool and play around with some cool colors. See that space right there, it's so much bigger than like that space. So there's a really cool trick that I love, that's really easy to do with the Align tool. So I I grab all these, I'm just going to rubber band around them and they're all selected. If you go to your aligned tool, I'm going to pull this out. There's a little part a little section called distribute objects. If you click the middle one, what it does is it's going to vertically distribute all of the objects. They're all going to be the exact same distance from each other. But the objects on the very end are going to stay in their original position, which is definitely what you want. So you want to make sure that you don't select just these, like this one and everything below it, and you want to make sure also that you don't select just these. You want to select either all of them, or if you just want these to be equally distant, you just select these. But remember, this top rectangle here at the top and this one at the bottom, need to be in exactly the same position that they're in now because they're completely they're perfectly duplicated where they will repeat. So I'm going to select all these and then I'm going to click on the vertical Distribute center. Do you see what that just did? It made all of them the same distance from each other, but it did not move the top and the bottom. If you want all of these to be the same thickness, that means that this brown rectangle here you do not want it up here like this. You do not want it right to the edge, also because you would get hair lines, you want it right at the center where see where it says intersect right there. Basically, what is happening is you have half of this thickness here up here. You have half of the thickness, it's half of the height, and then the other half of it is down here so that when you repeat it, these come together to form a whole stripe. Which is the same thickness as these. Now, we want to go ahead and create our vertical stripe layer. I'm going to go ahead and create a new layer, and I'm just going to name it. I'm going to double click on this. Vertical stripes. I'm going to just grab any one of these stripes from the other layer. I'm going to hit command C for copy. I'm going to go ahead and lock the horizontal stripe layer, and then I'm going to click on vertical stripes and paste, which is command V the stripe into the vertical stripes. Layer. We want to rotate this. All I'm going to do is selected, I'm going to hover my mouse over it to the right, see the little arrows. Hold down the shift key, so it does a perfect 90 degree rotate, and I'm just going to turn it if I could get my mouse to actually respond. There we go. Perfect. All right. Now we have a vertical stripe on our vertical stripe layer. We're going to do the same thing again, and I'm going to start with a not brown color. I I don't want it to be Let's see. What is the color I use the least of? I guess I used three of the blue, three of the brown, but I only used two of the black and two of the top. I'm going to do the tope. I'm going to change this to the tope color, and then I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to drag it until it is centered. See where if you guys can see the little center mark right there. See where that is right here. If I just drag this until that is over top of the edge of my artboard, it's snapping in place for me. It's saying intersect right there and it's giving me a nice little pink guide basically saying, that's okay. You got it. So there we go. But now, you see how it's just disappearing over this tope. Don't worry about that yet because we're going to play around with transparency. Now I have this tope here. What I'm going to want to do is I'm going to want to duplicate this over here on the right hand side, so we're going to do the same thing we did. And we only have to do this twice because this is a basic repeat. All we have to do because we're doing stripes is just do these two edges, and then everything else is going to fall into place as long as these are all the same thickness. So I'm going to click on this tope here. I'm going to go to object, I'm going to go to transform, and then I'm going to go to move, and we're going to do the same thing we did last time, but now we're going to move it horizontally 1,000 pixels. We're moving it along the horizontal axis, which is this right here. And we're going to duplicate it. So we're going to do plus 1,000 pixels, and we want the vertical to stay at zero pixels, and then make sure you click on copy, and there we go. So now it's perfectly repeated over here on the right hand side. Now I'm just going to duplicate these rectangles, and I'm going to play around with some cool colors, and all I want to make sure of is that my thicknesses are the same on either side. This is the, I guess, beginnings of our plat. But this is not plaid at all. So what I did at least in like these patterns. See how in this example, I did different opacities. That is what really makes this turn into a plaid. Let's start with our horizontal stripes. I'm going to hide and lock the vertical stripe layer. I think what I'm going to do, I'm going to change this blue here to be maybe 75%. I don't know. I'm going to go to window, and I'm going to go down to transparency, and then now I can actually change my opacity here. I'm just going to change it 100-75 perfect. It doesn't really change that much, but once we start layering these, it's going to be really cool. I'm going to go ahead and change this black and I'm going to make it 50%. Yeah. It's a little more dramatic. And then I'm going to take this black and I'm going to make it 75 there. See how it's just variations of gray. I'm going to take this brown and make it 25. Actually I'm going to make it 50. There we go. Then I'm going to make this 75. Let's see. Actually, I'm going to leave that at 100 and I'm going to make this 75. Now, it's the same as above, so I want it different. I'm going to do 50. Then I'm going to really, I'm just playing around with it right now and just seeing what I think. I feel like that, that's fine. But we don't want to We can change the opacity of this brown on the edges, but if we do, we have to change both. I'm going to change this to 75. There we go. And now let me lock this layer and put the other layer on top of it and we're going to do the same thing. I'm just going through both layers, and I'm just clicking on each of these rectangles and just adjusting the opacity to something that I think looks good, and I can do all kinds of different percentages, just whatever works with what I think will look good in the moment. You can also play around with different widths of these rectangles. So as long as they are the same thickness on both sides, either the top and bottom or the left and right, where they repeat, touching the artboard, You can play around and have in stripes and thick stripes. And now I'm going to export this to my desktop so I can test it. I'm going to go to File Export As, and I'm just going to export it as plaid test, that's the file name. I think I already have one, and I'm going to make sure that I click Ue Art boards because we want to have our artboard selected. I'm going to export it as a PNG hit Export. I'm replacing an existing file, leave it at 300 and click Okay. All right. Let's test this bad boy. I'm in Photoshop, and I am going to open the file that I just exported from Adobe Illustrator. I want to define this as a pattern, so I'm just going to go to edit and define pattern. Then I can close this file, and then I'm going to create a new file, 12,000 by 12,000 pixels and 300 DPI. Then you can go to Layer and New Fill layer and pattern. Let's test this. All right. So let me go down here and see what I think. I'm going to make this a There we go, a little bit smaller. This is technically a plaid. Now, I feel like it needs a lot of work. I feel like for instance, these two right here are way too dark. This is just a matter of playing around with different colors, different opacities, but technically, this is a plaid pattern. If you feel like your plaid is looking a little bit boring, try playing around with opacity, color, and even varying the thickness of your stripes, that can really make it look a lot more interesting. I'm going to save this. I'm going to export it. I'm going to go to file export Export As, and then I'm going to save it as plaid test two just because and save it as a PNG, click Ue Artboards Export. Then I'm going to leave this here, but I'm going to open the new plaid test. I'm going to define the pattern, which is Edit defined pattern. Close that. Then I'm actually going to do another layer. I'm going to leave that one alone, and then I'm going to do a new fill layer, and I'm going to plop this in here. Then I'm going to check what is my percentage on this? 40. I'm going to change this one to 40 because what I'm doing is comparing the two. There we go. That was my original. This is where everything is equally spaced. See, it's all the same thickness, space, the same. Technically, that is a plaid, but if you want it to look more interesting, try playing around with thicknesses, opacities, colors, and then you're going to start getting into some really interesting territory. These are all the same thickness, even. I was just not even being that interesting, but I played around with fun color palettes and color combinations, and just opacity. That's it. I ended up with some really fun patterns. 4. Create Plaid in Procreate + Photoshop - Part 1 - Drawing in Procreate: So I have a procreate Canvas here. It's a new file and my Canvas is 20 " wide by 20 " high. What I'm going to want to do is go to my little wrench icon in procreate here, and where it says drawing guide, I'm going to toggle that on. Underneath drawing guide, when you toggle it on, you're going to get this little menu option here that says edit drawing guide. You want to click on that. Then down here at the bottom, you're going to see a little bar that says two D grid isometric perspective and symmetry. Click on symmetry. Then now if you go down to the very bottom right, you'll see where it says options. Click on that. What we're going to want to do is I'm going to do vertical drawing assist. Rotational symmetry is off, and assisted drawing at the very bottom is toggled on. Now I'm going to go all the way up to the top right where it says done. There's a little orange button. I'm just going to click on that. I am in my drawing brush box here. You guys may recognize this and I have a brush called Flat writing. I use this for a lot of my hand lettering, but you know what else it's really good for is drawing stripes. This has a little bit of texture to it. It's going to look a little more interesting than if you were doing this in Adobe Illustrator and you had these really flat, smooth, perfect lines. This is going to look a little bit more hand done. Currently, I have a bright blue color selected. I'm going to stick with that for now. I'm going to start at the left hand side, and I am just going to pull my apple pencil over here to the right until it meets in the middle. And now you can see it's helping me and it's actually connecting in the middle here. Now, if I want to completely straight line, all I have to do is hold my finger down and anywhere on the canvas, and now you can see it's not really letting me move it anymore. So that's what I want to do. Now, if I zoom in, you can see, see this lovely little edge texture here, so it just has a little bit more interest to it. That's one of my stripes. Now I know that it lines up and it's connecting. If I turn the drawing guide off, you can see that this is basically a seamless stripe there. I'm going to turn the drawing guide back on a little trick is, if you go to your layer where you're drawing, You'll see a layer name right there, it says Layer one, but underneath it you're going to see where it says assisted. That's like your little hint that you know you're drawing, you're using the assisted drawing helper, I guess. Tool. Let's draw another stripe. I'm going to change my color. I have this little palette I made for some swimming dogs. I'm going to change the thickness and I'm just going to do another stripe here, I'm going to hold down my finger and then I'm going to connect them. Perfect. That's a little bit not as long, but that's okay because I'm going to be doing some adjusting in photoshop. Let's do another color. I'm going to do this pink, and I'm going to go down even further here, actually, I'm going to do it up here. I'm just drawing stripes right now and connecting them, and then I'm making them straight by holding down my finger. But the cool thing about procreate is see we're getting these little rough edges. You just get a little bit more texture. You can use any brush for this. If I switch to Let's see. What other brush do I want to use? Let's try. There's 1 million. I have so many brushes. I love these pencil brushes. Let's see what happens if let's do a gold, stripe and let's do this. See the thickness is different there. One thing that you want to pay attention to, is if you want all of these even thickness, that's why I like that flat writing brush tool. You're going to have to be really careful about holding everything down and not increasing or decreasing your pressure. Also, if you're using something like a pencil brush, you're going to have some overlap here. Let's try maybe a smoother brush in terms of a pencil, but I'm going to hold it down or try to hold it down equally. This one is way too thin. But you see where I tried a different brush. Now I'm just getting some interesting textures. Go ahead and play around with making some stripes in procreate, and what you want to do is just make sure that you don't have too much weird overlap where you have some areas that are opaque and some areas that are transparent, you want it to be even all the way across. Now, go ahead and play around with some interesting colors and some different brushes and textures. Just make sure that you have these stripes going all the way across where they are the same thickness is all the way across the page. Right now I'm using dry ink. If I'm on that dry ink as my drawing brush, but I want to change it to my dry ink. I'm just going to hold down the eraser button there, and now I have a dry ink eraser. It's the same tool that I'm using to draw with, but it's the eraser. Can you guys see where it goes out right there? I'm just going to try to draw across here and just smooth it out a little bit. And make it a little less obvious. This is where they meet. I'm just going to draw some more stripes until I have some cool textures and different colors and thicknesses. All right. Now I have these fun stripes here that are all different textures and they're different colors, I have different thicknesses, and they're pretty well matched up and straight. Now I'm going to hop over to photoshop. I'm going to import this procreate file as a PSD, that's a photoshop file. I'm going to drop it over onto my computer, and then I'm going to continue from there. 5. Create Plaid in Procreate + Photoshop - Part 2 - Create in Photoshop: Okay, so I am now on my computer, and I am in photoshop, and I have opened the procreate file that we just created. This is the 20 inch by 20 inch file with our stripes. And now what we're going to want to do is turn these into a repeating pattern. So with this file open, I have two layers. I have a background layer, and then I have my stripes on a separate layer. This is just the same thing I created in Procreate. What I want to do is create a new photoshop file, so I'm going to go up to file and new I'm going to do inches and I'm just going to choose 20 by 20 " resolution 300 pixels per inch. Color mode is RGB. That's what I'm using. You can use CMYK if you want. Now what we're going to want to do first is create our background color and lock it. This is going to be our background layer. I'm going to go over to my foreground color here and I'm just going to choose like an off white. That looks good, and then I'm going to go to my paint bucket and I'm just going to drop it in there. Cool. Now I'm going to name the layer. I'm going to double click on the layer name, and I'm going to name it BG. That's my code for background. If you don't see your layers panel, you can just go up to window and then drop down to layers, and then you'll be able to see it. Now I want to lock this layer. While I have this layer selected, I'm going to go up to layer, and then I'm going to drop down to lock layers, and then I'm just going to choose all and click. Now I have my background and it's not going to get moved around or messed up or changed at all. But now I want to start creating each one of these stripes that I drew in procreate, and I'm going to have it on its own layer. Each one of these stripes is going to be on its own layer. That way we can layer them on top of each other or closer together, further apart, et cetera. I'm just going to go to my rectangular Marquee tool, and I'm going to rubber band around one of these stripes, and I am going to hit command C for copy, and then I'm going to go back over to this document. Here, this is going to be my pattern block, and I'm going to hit command V for paste. I'm realizing now that we haven't named this, I'm just going to go ahead and name it. Pre Let's do block. Pro create Plad. That's fine. And it save. One thing that I've noticed my photo shop doing lately, it's not actually saving the one that I'm working in. I'm going to close this. I'm going to click, Don't Save. And now I'm going to go ahead and open the one that we were just doing. I don't know why it does that, but that's my work around. Okay, so now we have our pink stripe there. I'm going to go ahead and go through each one of these stripes. With my rectangular Marquee tool selected in photoshop, I'm going to rubber band around each one of these stripes individually. If I go outside of it as long as I don't grab any other part of another stripe, and I'm just going to do copy, and then I'm going to drop back over here to my document and hit paste that's command V. I'm going to go ahead and do this really fast. All right, so now that I've got all of my stripes plopped into this new document that I created, and I can see each of them on its own layer here. I am good. I'm going to go ahead and close this procreate file. Each one of these stripes on its own layer is going to need to be a smart object. And that is so when we do pattern preview, we can see where this repeats. You just want to go up to layer and then go down to smart objects and with whatever layer selected that you want to turn into a smart object, just do convert to smart object. Now over here in our layers panel, we can see that the on, the little layer icon has changed, and if you hover over it, it even says Smart object thumb mail. I'm going to go through each of these layers now and turn each one of these layers into a smart object. Now you will notice that each one of these stripes is its own layer, it's on its own layer, and each one of these stripes is a smart object. I did not name these layers. Often, I will. If I have something like dogs and beach balls and I have one dog breed on one layer and another dog breed on another layer, I will name the layer so that I can keep track of it. But the thing is each one of these are stripes and they're some are green, and there's other ones that are green that are different texture. I'm not going to bother doing that because these are all really similar. So What I am going to do though is if I go up to my move tool, which is at the very top of my toolbar, At the very top of my Adobe Photoshop menu here in this top bar. You'll see where it says auto select. There's an option for that. And then you can have this check mark, this little box here toggled on or off. I'm going to make sure that is on and then next to it where it says Auto select, I have it at layer. If for some reason, you're in photoshop and you're not seeing that top options bar there, where the auto select is, you can just go to window and drop down to where it says Options. And then it will show your top tool bar there, which is your options, and that is where auto select is located. If I hover over a layer and I want to move it, it's auto selecting it with the move tool, so then I'm going to hover over whatever the layer is now and I can just move it around. I don't have to sit here on the right hand side and figure out, k, which layer is that because these are really tiny little visual aids. So I'm just going to Yeah. Basically, I can just go around and move these as I need to with just the move tool, and it's just going to hover over that layer for me. It's going to show me where I'm about to select it. I went ahead and pulled each one of these stripes away from the ones that were below it. So each one of these stripes is now visible. Basically, there isn't one that's on top of the other one. I'm just going to move them around into a layout that looks good to me. Now what we're going to want to do, now that each one of these is a smart object. Now we can do the pattern preview, and this is how we're actually going to be able to see where these stripes are going to repeat and what they're going to look like in a seamless pattern. I'm going to go ahead and save this. And now what I want to do is go up to view, and I'm going to drop down to pattern preview. This is how we're going to preview how this is going to look as a repeat pattern. Now, this is our pattern block, this is our repeat block, but pattern preview is going to let us see what this looks like as a pattern. I'm going to click on that, and I'm going to get a little warning message that's okay. It says, Pattern preview works best with smart objects. The thing is, we all each one of these, we have smart objects. We are good. I'm going to click Okay. And now we are seeing what this would look like as a pattern. I'm going to zoom out. Right now, what we have is a pattern where we have these big spaces and everything is broken up where the edges of these stripes are. But that's okay. We are going to continue those stripes and fix this. I'm going to zoom back in and I want to show you a little trick. So the first thing that I want to do, let's start with our top stripe here. What I want to do is with my move tool selected, I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to take the very top stripe and I'm going to move it over so that the space where the stripe begins and ends is inside this artboard here. This blue thin line here, that is our artboard edge. What you want to do is make sure and I'm going to move it over even more and up here. You want to make sure that the break between your stripes is inside this blue box. I'm going to zoom in. I'm going to go to my Zoom tool and I'm just going to drag my mouse to the right while holding it down. Now you can see here, see where this breaks, and that is going to show up in our repeat pattern. But I love using the clone stamp tool to replicate and duplicate things and really just make them connect or repeat where I want them to. So right now, I am on the layer where this red stripe is, that's good. And what I want to do is go over to my clone stamp tool. That is over here in my menu. It looks like a little ink stamp pad thing. I'm going to click on that, and now I have my clone stamp tool selected. The way I have it set up and it should be default, if I hold down the option key on my MC, Then I click anywhere in this stripe while I'm holding down the option key. It's basically recording or copying this texture here right exactly as I had it. See now when I move my mouse around, I'm not doing anything other than moving my mouse. It's showing me a preview of how it's going to be duplicated. Now, do you guys see where it's blurry and soft on the edges? That's because I have my softness turned up. All I have to do is hold down the shift key and I'm going to type on the keyboard, I'm going to hit the closed bracket key. If I do that, that thickens it up. That makes it more solid. If I hold the shift key and I type or click on the key on my keyboard that is the open bracket, see how it goes back down to this soft. That's if you want stuff like soft edges or you want a really subtle duplication. But this is a pretty thick, solid line here, and I don't want any weird spaces or blurs or anything, weird opacity. I'm going to turn it all the way up until it stops. Okay. So now you can see where this is going to be repeated. So I'm going to go ahead and just click my mouse once there and now you're going to notice that this smart object here, you get a little warning, it has to be rasterized before proceeding. Because what we're doing is now we are duplicating pixels, and it can only happen if your object is rasterized. That is okay. I'm going to click on k. And now when I do this, check it out. It's actually repeating this stripe and it's connecting it. So, isn't that cool? And now, if I zoom out, I'm not going to do anything other than zoom out, check it out. Now I have a connected stripe that goes all the way across. So now I have a solid stripe. It still has texture, which is what's great about procreate. But it is continuing. Now, before we move any further, before you do anything else, we want to convert this back to a smart object. I am going to go to layer, and then I'm going to go back down to smart objects and then convert to smart object. Now we can see here that our layer is back again to being a smart object. It has that icon again. The reason I had us go through and convert each of these to smart objects before doing the Clontmp tool, and then I know we have to turn the smart object off. But that way, I want to have these already ready to go, and then we just rasterize one at a time and then move it around and then we can go back to it being a smart object. Let's do the pink layer now. I'm going to go back to my move tool here and I'm going to hover over the pink layer and I'm going to figure out where I want that. Let's do it maybe right here. Again, what we want to do is move the place where the break is between the beginning and end of our stripe inside this blue box here, that's our artboard. The reason is because when we rasterize this and we start messing around with it a whole bunch and we start using the clone stamp. We want all of that to be on our artboard. We don't want it off the artboard because what's off of the artboard is the repeated part. But the main motif needs to be inside this artboard so that we can mess with it in there and then turn it into a smart object again. I'm going to do the same thing I did. I'm going to make sure this is pretty far inside here. I'm going to zoom in Then this is pretty forgiving. You see how this is all really solid. I should have no trouble just duplicating this. Let's go back to our clone stamp tool. I'm going to hover over a part of this that I want to duplicate. I'm going to just without holding down the shift key, I'm just tapping on the open and closed brackets on my keyboard so that it's changing the size because you want this to capture the whole thing. If you want to just capture the edge, you can make it smaller and just do the edges. Just know that you're going to want to connect it. But I'm going to just capture the whole thing. And I'm going to hold down the Shift key and click on the or type the closed bracket and make sure that I'm as solid as possible. Now I'm going to go ahead and hold down the option key. I'm going to click somewhere inside this area here and now you can see that it's going to repeat. But we're going to have the same thing happen again. When I click my mouse in here, It's saying that we have to rasterize it. Again, that's okay. I know it's a little bit of an extra step, but that way, we're not accidentally having some things that are smart objects, some things that aren't, some things are rasterized, some things aren't I can just get really confusing. So we're just doing one at a time. I'm just going to click here and that connected the two. It looks completely reasonable, natural And now you can see that stripe is continuing on. Isn't that cool? That was it. That's so easy. Again, I am going to want to do layer and I'm going to go to smart objects and I'm going to turn it back into a smart object. Now we know that that layer is a smart object. I can show and hide the layer with the eyeball. And I see the smart object thumbnail. If you have a stripe that is semi opaque or has a really unique texture, you may need to do a little bit of fine tuning with the clone stamp tool to make sure that it continues seamlessly, and you can't see where the brake is. If you're struggling, especially with a stripe that is semi opaque, you can just duplicate the layer to thicken it up by hitting command J. I hit command J just now about three times. We still have our texture, but we don't have that problematic semi opacity. But what you will want to do. See how we have all these duplicated layers that are adding to the opacity. They're doing a good job of hiding that difference in opacity, but you're going to want to merge these all onto one layer, which is totally doable. If I go to the very top layer, I'm going to hold down the shift key and then I'm going to click on the very bottom layer, that is all of the layers I just duplicated. It's just this stripe, and then I'm going to hit command E for Elizabeth. That is on a MAC or control E on a PC, and now we can see here that it's all on one layer. Now I want to turn this into a smart object again. I'm going to go to layer, smart objects and convert to smart object. Now if I zoom out, we can see that this is being repeated seamlessly. Now going to go through and do the same thing with each one of these stripes, and I will meet you right back here in a moment. All right. Now I have gone through each one of these layers, each one of these stripes, and they are all connecting and they are all converted back to smart objects. Now they are repeating. They're all connected across the pattern and you can see that if you zoom out and they all look pretty good. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this stripe. I'm just going to hit Command J. What that did was create another identical green stripe right on top of this one, and I can tell because if I grab it with my move tool, I can move it around, and it is a smart object still. When I duplicated it, it kept it as a smart object, but I want this to be going vertically instead of horizontally. Okay now with this layer selected, I hit command T, and that is for transform. And now I want to rotate this 90 degrees. So we can see here where the repeating piece is and it is outside the artboard, but that's okay. While I have the transform tool on. I am just going to hold down my shift key on my keyboard. I'm going to go over here to the edge, and you'll see this little black arrow here that kind of looks like a little curved arrow. I'm going to hold down the shift key. I'm going to grab the end of it, and I am just going to rotate it until it is 90 degrees. It is connected still, and it is still a smart object. So that's all we have to do. I'm going to go and repeat another one of these stripes, and I'm going to make it vertical. So let me click on my move tool here, and I'm going to hover over the gold one. Make sure that that's the one that I have selected, cool. And I'm going to hit Command J, and I just duplicated that layer. Now I'm going to hold down the command key and hit the letter T, and we're going to do the same thing. I'm going to hold down the shift key, grab the edge of it, pull my mouse down until I get it rotated. Now, you can see it's being hidden under here. I want to go ahead and move that somewhere else. I'm going to move it over here, and I'm just going to click on the rectangular Marquee tool and deselect it. So isn't that cool? And now you'll notice too, do you see how the one green stripe that we duplicated is in front of this red stripe, but the gold stripe is actually behind the red stripe. So you can just adjust that with your layers if you just go through and drag your layers above and below what else you're looking at. If I move this down, now you see it's behind the blue. I'm going to duplicate and rotate another stripe. Go ahead and duplicate and rotate some more stripes in your pattern so that they are going vertically. You can see here that we just duplicated this teal stripe and we made it vertical, and it's in front of this red stripe right here. What if I want some of the red stripe to peek through? All I have to do is with this vertical teal stripe selected, I'm going to go in my layers panel to opacity. I can change the opacity, for instance, maybe 50% or even 75%. Then we can start getting into some fun opacity here, and then we can see part of that red stripe from behind there. You can also play around a lot with your blending mode. Right next to opacity here, I'm going to go ahead and turn this back up to 100, but next to opacity where it says normal, this is our layer blending mode. We can try and play around with some of these blending modes here and really some interesting effects. This is hard light, vivid light. It really again, it just depends on what look you're going for. But the blending mode is so much fun to play around with. Look at this one. How interesting is that? Now it's almost like this orange color, but it's making these other ones that it's in front of darker. You can really get some fun effects this way. I want to save this as a J peg. I have a JPEg pattern block. So if I just go down to File and Save As, I'm just going to leave the name where it was. I'm going to go to save a copy, and then I'm just going to choose from the Dropdown JPEG, and I'm going to click on Save and click Okay, I can click Save again, and I'm going to close this. And then let's test it. So let me go ahead and open that. And that is the Block Procreate plaid JPEG, and that is my pattern block. I'm going to click on Open, and then I'm going to go to edit, and I'm going to drop down to define pattern because now what we want to do is define this pattern block as a repeat tile so we can test it. I'm just going to do that. It doesn't matter what the name is, and I'm going to click on k and then I can close that. T test it, I am going to create a new 12,000 by 12,000 pixel document in Photoshop and click on Create. Now if I go to layer and new fill layer, I can drop down to the third option, which is pattern. It doesn't matter what your layer name is called right here, and then it will pop up my pattern fill little box here. All I have to do is click on that arrow and go to the very bottom. This is really huge, so it's hard to tell how it would look as a pattern, but I'm going to lower it down to about 50%. So check it out. That is our plaid. Now, I didn't get too crazy with duplicating a lot of these stripes or playing too much with blending mode. But hopefully, now you get the gist of how to create a lovely, textured plaid using P create and photoshop. 6. Create Plaid in Photoshop - No iPad Required!: If you don't have procreate, or you just feel like using Adobe photoshop by itself. You can also do that. There are so many cool photoshop brushes out there. You can find some really awesome ones that look like paint brushes or oil paint. You can find all kinds of textures. Basically, what you want to do is the same thing we did before. You're going to create a background layer and lock it. And then create a new layer and you can just start drawing, and you just want to make sure you have one stripe per layer. Then if you get your paint brush tool and find a color that you enjoy, Grab a brush. You can use any brush you want, a smooth or a textured one, and then just draw a horizontal line. If you hold down your shift key, it is going to help you. Basically, see how I'm pulling my mouse down and up right now. If I hold down my shift key while I draw this, it is keeping a straight line for me, and everything is pretty much uniform and level. Then, you just want to do the same thing we did before. We will convert this into a smart object. Make sure you keep each of your stripes on its own layer and then convert each layer or stripe into a smart object. Then you're going to go to view pattern preview, click Okay, and we're going to do the exact same thing we did before. All you have to do is grab your move tool, hover over your stripe. Make sure auto select is on, and it is set to layer. And then just move it over until the break between the stripes is right here inside your artboard. I'm going to do the same thing I did before. I'm going to go to my clone stamp tool, and I am going to sample a piece of this stripe here somewhere over here. Hold down my option key. And then I am going to move over between where this break is, and I'm going to start filling it in. But remember, when we click on this, we are going to get this warning that it needs to be rasterized. That's okay. We're going to continue, and we are just going to connect these two pieces. So you may want to play around with it and adjust the height and just make sure that everything lines up the way you want it to. That may mean sampling from different parts and moving your sample moving your brush up and down. But basically, you can create a solid long stripe here that just continues on and on and on, and now we just want to turn it back into a smart object. All we have to do is go to layer Go down to smart objects and convert to smart object. And now we have a smart object. We have our st, and that is continuing on. So you can do the exact same thing that we did previously with Procreate and Photoshop. You can do the same thing again with just photoshop. So you can skip the procreate part altogether if you would like to. 7. Class Project: For the class project, create a plaid pattern in any software you choose. You can use Procreate and Photoshop or you can use photoshop by itself, or you can also use Adobe Illustrator. Go ahead and create your plaid pattern, and you can share your pattern block or the repeat pattern itself or a with your plaid on it and share it in the class gallery. I cannot wait to see what you come up with with your plaid. Okay. 8. Thank You - Final Thoughts + a FREEBIE!: Thank you for taking this plaid journey with me in this class. I hope you had fun and also learned some really cool tips and techniques, so you can go forth and create many more plaid patterns. It really seems like the possibilities are limitless. Please be sure to follow me on skill share so you can stay up to date every time I publish a new class. Just click the follow button on my profile page. I would love a class review. Class reviews are a great way for other students to find me, and I always love reading all of your reviews. A special thank you gift for completing this class. I'm giving you six free color palettes that are perfect for fall and perfect for Plaid. Just visit Carrie camwell.com Forward Slash Plaid, or scan this QR code with your phones camera. You'll be taken to my Super secret website sign up form where you will subscribe to my e mail newsletter. And within a few minutes, you'll get a high resolution JPEG with the color palettes sent to your e mail. You can download it directly from your e mail and then sample the colors and procreate, Photoshop, Illustrator, or any software you choose. You can unsubscribe from my e mail newsletter anytime. No hard feelings. Thank you again for taking this class. I can't wait to see what you create, and I will see you next time. Bye.