Transcripts
1. Introduction: Welcome to my quick class on creating repeating
patents in Photoshop. In this class, we're
going to learn how to set up pattern
preview in Photoshop, create smart objects, arrange
our motifs in a passion, scale our pattern, use
basic keyboard shortcuts, make a po half drop, and Master Passion preview, as well as easily change
the background color. If you are new to surface
pattern design and would love to learn a passion
preview in Photoshop, this class is perfect for you. I'm Ashley Fish, a
watercolor artist and surface pattern
designer from New Zealand. Once we have created
a pattern together, your class project is
going to be to put that pattern into a
social media post, which you can post in the
class project section or share your beautiful
work on your social media. We are going to use Patent
Vill to do this so that you can show off your work
safely. See you in class.
2. Organise motifs and create smart objects: First thing we are
going to do is open our file with our
watercolor motifs. These paintings here have
already been digitized. If you would like to
learn how to take your paintings from a scan and photoshop and digitize them, please watch my two ways to
digitize watercolor class, which includes a scan
of these motifs that you are welcome to use
for your practice. The first thing we need
to do here is make sure that every motif
is on its own layer. I also like to
name each layer so that it helps to keep my
document nice and tidy. As you click each layer, you can see which one it is. It will shot with this
blue border around it. You can turn it on and off
to check or if you click it, it will highlight the
layer here for you. Now, if you have some that
are on different layers, the way I like to do this
is to press L for the assu, and I'm going to just
go around like this. Right click layer via cut. And then you can see that's
on its own layer there. I'm going to just
press Control Z because I like this as a three. Now that every single
motif is on its own layer, we need to convert them
all to smart objects. So I'll just go up and start at the top of my layers panel here, and I will right click and
come down here and click, Convert to Smart object. We can do that for
every single motif that we are wanting to
use for our pattern.
3. Create a working file: Next sep is to create
a working file. This is the document that
I put all of my motifs into that I want to use for my pattern or for my
pattern collection. Once they are in
the working file, I know that they have
been edited that they are smart objects and that
they are ready to use. To create a new document, we're going to go to file new or you can use
the short cut here. I am going to create my
working file to be 24 by 24 ", that is nice and big. You can change in here. If you need to, please make
sure that it is at 300. RGB is fine, and
I'm going to call this orange flower working file. Press Create. Now, all of these motifs in here need
to move into this document. So we can either click and
drag and drop them in. Perhaps if you're only
wanting to do a few, but if you want all of them, the easiest way is to head
over to the layers panel on your right here and
click the top one, scroll down to the
bottom, press shift, and then click the bottom, which will select all of them. Right, click, and the press
duplicate layers here. And then the destination is the orange flower working file that we've just
created and press. Now when we head into here, we will have them all together, and this one behind is the one that I dragged
in individually. So we now have our
working file document. Every single motif
is a smart object. They have all been edited
to be transparent PNGs, which I'll show you in my
previous skill share class, and they are ready to
turn into a pattern. Now going to save
this working file so that we always have it
on hand ready to go. I'm going to go file
save my folder, which I have called the orange
floral tutorial folder. So that everything's just
going to go in here, which means that
when I go to find my patterns later, they're
all in the same place. This is called the working file. I'm saving it as a photoshop
document. I'll click save.
4. Set up pattern preview4 : Now that A motifs are
saved and ready to go, we are going to create
our pattern document. I like to use a 12 by 12 inch, but you can use any size
square or rectangle. So we're going to do the same
will be create a new file. I have a preset one here, but I'll set it up over
in the side panel, so you can follow along with me. I'm going to call it
again orange flower, and this one's going to
say repeating pattern. I would like it to
be 12 " by 12 ". And this one here, the pixels per inch is really important. It has to be 300 so that when it it prints
nice and crisp, RGB color is fine, and then I'm going
to go to create. And it has created this
12 by 12 inch square. We can see here that
we are viewing it at percent 12 by 12 " at 300 PPI. So to turn it into
a pattern document, we're going to go up to view and then click
pattern preview. It will tell you that it works
best with smart objects, which is fine
because we've turned everything into a
smart object already. Now we have this big white
screen with this blue box, and this is the bounding box. The edges here are
all going to repeat. This within this box is where your pattern
is going to go. To bring your motifs into
the pattern document, you can either drag
and drop them in like this and you will see that you can preview
the repeat here. You can also see if you
pop up on this line. It is exactly in half the same on this
one or in the corner. So it creates the repeat for
you, which is really handy. I Jag and dropped
the sunflower in, and I want to show you one thing that we
can do with it being a smart objects we can rotate
it around as we please. We can also click on
if we click on it, and then click this
border around it here. It will bring up these
options where you can flip it around, which makes it really
easy to maneuver. You can also make it smaller than the
original, but not bigger. If you want to make it
smaller, that's fine. Then now that it's small,
you can make it bigger but just to the same
size that it was before. If it isn't a smart object, when you bring it
onto this line here, when you rotate it, it
will split in half. But because it's a smart object, we can move it around
as we like no matter where on the pattern,
the motif is. You can drop them in
like that or you can press shift and select a few that you want and drag
and drop them in. Or what you can do is
select all of them from here and go to duplicate and pop it into the
repeating pattern. Press. Come across the
repeating pattern and they'll all be smashed
together and just grab the corner of it and make it smaller so
that they all fit.
5. Create your pattern: Now, for the fun part,
arranging our motifs. I'd like to move these around in the document and play around
with different compositions. I try to make sure we don't
have any obvious lines. At the moment, you can see a really obvious repeat
with the sunflower. As you zoom out,
you'll be able to see your pattern more
and as you zoom in, you'll be able to work on
your pattern more easily. We can with these motifs, click on them and then click
this outside box here, and we can flip them. Up and down side to side. However you like, we can
also hover until we get this bendy arrow
and that means that we can turn them around. We can also drag them
over this line here. Wherever you want them to go, you can put them to
create your pattern. If I drag this past
the line over here, you'll see that it's popped over the side and I can
just pick it up over here. Again. I'm going to start working on
arranging my pattern. I think I'm also
going to do it on perhaps just this
half to start with, and then I will show you how
I can create a half drop. Hat. I have this in real time for you so you
can watch how I work. I'll explain what I'm doing, and I will also have my
keyboard shortcuts and explanation at the bottom of the screen for your reference. Feel free to change this to two times speed down
the bottom left, where it says one times, give it a click and it will show a few different speed
options for you. I am just dragging my
motifs around the pattern. I like to zoom in and
out as I go so that I can get a overall
perspective with the Zoom out and zoom
back in to be able to easily click individual
motifs and move them around. To select two at once. I like to click
the first object, then press and hold shift
while I click the second one, and then I let go of shift, and then I can drag the two motifs together
around the pattern. If I want a motive
to be duplicated, I can hold down option, and it brings up the
black and white arrow. That's normally
just the black has got the little
white arrow there, and I will click and drag while holding option.
Now I've got two. So these look exactly the same, and I will probably just
flip it and rotate it a bit. So that it looks like I've got two different flowers there. So with this duplicated flower, I am going to rotate
it around and flip it a bit and
things like that to make it look a little bit different to
the original one, make it a bit bigger,
a bit smaller, and hopefully it will
look a little bit like there's two separate flowers
that I have painted. You'll notice when I grab this branch on the left
here that is actually outside of the
pattern swatch and the blue box pops up on the
one, that is to the right. So I move over to
the right to grab the motif that is within the pattern swatch to be
able to move it into place. Here I'm holding shift to select these three pink
flowers and letting go of shift to move them around. Same again with the
sunflower here. And again, with these leaves, I hold shift to be able to
drag them into place and then hover my mouse on the
corner of the blue box to bring up that little arrow
to be able to rotate. So again, I like to zoom in
and out so that I can have a close up view
of the pattern in the really specific place
that I am putting my motif, and then I find it important to oom back out again
to be able to get an overall view of what the whole pattern is
starting to look like. I just click on the
white background and drag my mouse across to be able to move
my screen around, and I use my track bad with a pinching motion to be able to zoom in and out Ds like
like you would on a phone.
6. Half drop and filing spaces: Okay, so you can see that I
have pulled these all in. I've kind of made a bit of
a stripe at the moment. But what I'm going
to do is I'm going to drag to select
all of them here and hold down my
option key and drag them across so that I've
got another stripe. I'm also going to
drag it halfway down. So you focus on one flower like the sunflower, for example. We're just going to try to
get that in the middle. And then let go. You'll see that that helps the pattern
to flow a little bit more. We've still got lots
of stripes going diagonally like this and
obviously down here. Now it's just a case of moving
these around a little bit more and rotating things and filling in all
of these spaces. My favorite way to do this
is by duplicating motifs. I've got these
three flowers here, and I'm just going to
hold down the option key, drag them into place
and then unclick, and they should have duplicated. This is one of my favorite
ways to fill in spaces in a pattern is by using motifs
that are already there, duplicating them,
sometimes rotating them once they're in
place so that they look a little bit different and filling in all of
the little gaps. You'll see here that I just hover them out
on the outside of the motif until that
little bendy arrow comes up to be able to
rotate it into place. The great thing about
this live preview is that you can see exactly
where it's going and zoom in and out as
needed to be able to get an overall view of how the
pattern is starting to look. I often find that just simply flipping my motifs helps
them look a little bit different as well as
changing the scale slightly to add a slightly more dynamic
effect to my patterns. You'll notice when I duplicate
this motif to the right, it ends up underneath
some of the leaves, so I will explain to you how we can fix that when that
happens in your pattern. Now, to bring this in front of or behind different motifs, I can go shift command and then the right bracket
to bring it forward, or shift command in the back
bracket to bring it back. We can also see in
the layers panel that when I've sent
it to the back, it has gone all the
way to the back, so I can also drag it and zoom it all the way up
to the top if I want to. So I'll oom back out again
and see how it's going. So there's still a
few gaps to fill in, so we'll put some more
flowers in there. I find that my watercolors always take quite a long time to paint and to edit and get them looking just
right for a pattern. Once I am in pattern
making mode, I really like to do this method of duplicating
them and rotating them, flipping them so that
it looks like I've got more motifs painted
than I actually have, and it helps to add
a bit of consistency and flow through the
pattern as well. You've done all the work to get them painted
beautifully and edited. You might as well use
them as much as you can. We are getting towards the
end of building this pattern. It's really starting
to come together, and now it is just a case
of filling in all of those gaps so that we don't have those big vertical stripes are running through the pattern. When I get towards the
end of the pattern, I spend a lot more time
zooming in and out, especially zooming out to see how the flow of
the pattern is going, and if there's any big
patches where the motifs are really standing out or spaces within the pattern
are really standing out. When it comes to
arranging your motifs, there are lots of
different ways to do it. You can tuck your motifs in behind each other
like I'm doing here. Some people like to have
all of their motifs placed intricately and not
touching each other at all. I quite like having
a pattern like this, my florals to the front
and then having lots of beautiful foliage tucked in behind to help fill all
of those white spaces. The way that you do
this becomes part of your signature style
or your personal style, and it's really up to
you what you prefer. There's no right or
wrong way to do it. Just do what you think
looks best to your eye. Another thing to keep in mind is the direction of your pattern. This one because of the
sunflowers that I have in here, which have the stem on them is a little bit of a one
directional pattern. So I'm trying to make sure
that all of my leaves are pointing up slightly
rather than pointing down. But if you are doing a
non directional pattern, which is really helpful for
things like fabric that you want to be able to have going
in more than one direction, You can put your motifs
facing in any direction, and it's good to have a mix of motifs that are up down and
pointing left and right. I sometimes find that the state of pattern making can
take the longest where you're filling in all of the spaces and making sure that everything
is perfectly placed. It can be one of
my favorite parts, but I find that I can get really stuck in
the stage as well, tweaking all of the elements to make sure that they are
in the perfect spot. If you find this is happening, one easy trick is to step
away from it and come back in half an hour or come
back tomorrow and look at your pattern
again with fresh eyes. I have a really good example
here of being able to see the spaces in your
pattern as you zoom out. I'm going to zoom out and
you will see that there is a big white patch that is
just waiting to be filled in, and as we've out, we can then it on that patch, a flower in there,
and we should be. Now that the pattern
is pretty full, I'm going to zoom
out and have a look. Anytime you zoom
all the way out, you're always going
to see lines. Just so out a little bit until about the size that you
might imagine it to be in real life and
have a look and see if there's anything that
looks a bit funny. For me. This one here is standing out, and I'm just going to twist it like this to give it a bit of better flow and maybe move these little flowers around to fill the space a
little bit better. I'll zoom back out again, and I think this leaf here
could come out a little bit. And give a bit more space
to these motifs over here. And I think this one is a little bit cramped
on this sunflower. So I'll pop it down here. This these leaves here. I think they can move
over a little bit. So we just kind of
have a bit of a play around and zoom in and out as we go to kind of make sure that we have even spacing
in our pattern. You might not want to your
pattern as full as this, but I do tend to like my
patterns to be quite busy. One thing that
sometimes happens, especially in
pattern preview mode is when you go to
select one motif, it accidentally
selects more than one, which you'll see just here. I go to move the sunflower, and there's a few
other motifs that all seem to move
together as a group. So to stop this from happening, just click into the
white space and then click back on your motif
again, and you should be fine. Just go around and tweak your pattern until
you're happy with it. I like to zoom in and out as I go that I'm getting a look
at the pattern as a whole, and then zooming in
that I can easily select my individual motifs. If you get this, and can't seem to click on
anything else properly, just hit Enter or
come up here and press the check mark and that
will get rid of it for you. Go. Now we can see the blue
line around the edge here. This one here that shows us
where the pattern swatch is. Everything will
automatically happen. You can see it's cut
through the petals here. Everything on this side is
over the side here. So out. We can see how the repeat looks. I'm with that. A few little things
where I think maybe I want these leaves here
on top of the sunflower. I can just go command and then right bracket and you can see over
here is jumping up. Is going to do that
until it gets on top of the sunflower. Let's just touch the end
of that sunflower nicely. Perfect. I am with that.
7. How to choose a base colour: So now I'm going to show you
how to add a background. As you can see, the
background of this is white, which is really nice for some applications,
but for others, I think you are
probably going to want to have a
colored background. So to add in a
colored background, what we're going to
do is just going to click on this
background layer here so that we're at the bottom
of all of our motifs. If you don't do this, we can
just drag it down later. Then we're going
to go up to layer. We are going to click New fill layer and solid
color, and then just press. And you'll see it brings
up this color picker hair. Now, the reason I'd
like to do it this way is because you can either use your eye dropper to pick a color from your pattern. You can go around and even if you just move
it very slightly, you will see that it picks
up different colors. You can also go through
and say you want yellow. You clicked yellow
from the sunflower, and then you can
tweak it in here. Maybe you want it a
little bit darker, drag it and then as you let go, it will show you straight
away what the color is. You can drag it around all over the place to see some
different color options. I was going to press
with this pate color here and zoom in a little bit. Now, across here, we have
our color pattern swatches. I'm going to click
swatches and we can see there's all the
different colors that I have been using lately. If we have this
layer selected here, so if it's on a different one, just click and it will
go this different color. Now whenever we click any of
these swatches down here, it will automatically fill. That is another way to have a look at the
different colors. If you want to get back into
that color picker option, just double click in this box, and it brings up
the color picker, and now you can scoot it around this way or use
your eye dropper. That's a really fun
way to play with some different colors
for your pattern. I personally quite like to pull colors out using
the eye dropper. If I am making a
collection of patterns, sometimes I'll have matching
colors picked out that I have in my blend de prints like in a stripe
or something like that. I might have a color that
I'm already using for that, and I want it in the background. In that case, I would use the swatches here to make
sure that, for example, this shade of blue is the exact same shade
of blue that I have in my stripe so that they will
match together nicely.
8. Save and export your pattern: Now that we have all of
our motifs in place, and we have a background
color picked. It is time to save our pattern. To do that, we're going
to go up to file, and then we're going to
go down to save here. And this is going to say orange
flower repeating pattern, and we want to save this photoshop document
that we can get back in and then if we want to do a different color or move any of the motifs,
we can do that. This is a photoshop document. So we're going to
save that. We are also going to save
a pattern tile. So this is what you would
upload to Spoonflower, or if you were selling patterns
to someone or licensing, they might want the
repeating tile. So this is what we're
about to save now. And to do this, we
go to export export as and we want a JPEG, high quality, and scale, 100%, and this is it here. You can see this is the pattern. We've got half the sunflower here and other
half is over here, so everything on the
edge will repeat and the pattern preview tool does
that automatically for you. This will come up
with the same name as your photoshop document,
which we don't want. I'm going to take out this repeating pattern and
it's going to say on flower pattern, tiling square. Then I know that this here is going to be the tiling
option that I would upload to spoon flour and
things like that and it is in the same folder here.
I will click Okay.
9. How to use pattern fill to share your pattern: For this step, I'm going
to show you how to use pattern fill. There's
two ways to do this. So the first way we're
going to go into our documents and open up this tiling square
that we've just saved. So we're going to
go right click, open with photo shop. Now, over here, we've got color swatches
gradients and patterns. If you don't see patterns, head up to window and
come down and click it. If I take it away, it's gone. Come up and just click patterns and it will
pop back into there and we have this pattern here and we are going
to press the plus. It will come up say orange
flower pattern tiling square, and you can now see
that it is here. Another way to do that is from
this potter shop document, here we are where we
made the pattern. You can do the same thing.
In this patterns area, come over and press the plus. It'll also give you the
option to name it. And press. Okay. So that is how we get
our pattern swatch over here. The next thing that I will
do is create a new document. So the example I'll show you is to create a post
for social media. So we're going to go file
new or use our shortcut. And for I'm going to call this social media, social media. Post, and maybe we will call it One Bower Pat and
social media post. Now, I always like to put social media post because then I know it isn't going to be
my tiling square. So both my tiling square and my social media posts
have been named. So they need to be about
1,000 by 1500 pixels. And if it is for
on social media, it doesn't need to be
this high resolution. You can bring it down to 72, which is good for screens. RGB for screens
and click Create. Now, this is our social
media document here, and we're going to come over to the Layers panel and
press this plus icon. And we've got this new layer, and then all we do come down to patterns here and click it and it will fill
it with the pattern. Now, because it's 72 DPI, it will often be too big. I come over to the layers
panel and in this little box, double click and you
can change a scale. Either with the slider, or I actually just like to type in the kind
of scale that I want. That might be a
little bit small. Let's try 50%, maybe 40, 40%. And then you can drag it around to get the best
position that you want. You can also change the
angle of it if you want to. But I don't want it on its side, so I'm not going to
do that just now. Arrange it how you
want and press. Okay. I then like
to pop my logo on. I've got it here, and I'm just going to
drag and drop it in and pop it down the
bottom somewhere. Like this, if I
want to send to it, I can use these tools up here, so I'm just going
to say align to Canvas and then pop
it in the center. Is it up a bit cut to
the bottom of that off. There we go. Now this has filled the
square with the pattern and we can use this on Pinterest on social media and
that kind of thing. We also use the same
method of pattern fill for creating mock ups,
creating cell sheets, anywhere that you
want to be able to share the pattern
that you have created, use this pattern fill
because you want to save that tiling
square which has the actual pattern in it
for when you go to sell your pattern or upload it
onto print on demand sites. To save this, I will go file export and
export as still JPEG, just double check
your within and height and make sure that
it says social media. That when it saves
into this folder, we can see the different
kinds that we have. At a quick glance, with our folder open, we have got the
working file here, which has all of our
motifs ready to go. If we want to make another
pattern using these motifs, all of these motifs are ready
to use in another pattern. We have our repeating
pattern in Photoshop. If you want to edit it,
change the background, anything like that, this is the document you
want to be clicking. We have our tiling square here, we can upload to Spoonflower
or send to clients, and we also have a very clearly named social media post so that if we are posting our beautiful
patterns to social media, we are using this one
here with our logo on it, not this tiling square. I hope that makes
sense with how I set my patterns up and make sure that I have all of these
different documents here. I find that when I
create the pattern, it's easiest to save them right then and there
so that I don't have to go back and reopen the documents to save them later
unnecessarily.
10. Final Words: Hope you loved this
bit sized class. You now know how to use patent preview and create repeating patterns in Photoshop. You can apply what you've learned here to
the class project, where we are going to use
Patent fill to create a social media post without
sharing our repeating tile. Make sure you share
your work below in the project section as
well as on social media. You can tag both Skillshare and I Ashley Fish Studio
on social media. I would absolutely love to
see what you have created. Thanks for hanging
out with me today. I can't wait to see your design.
Ashleigh Fish, Watercolour artist and surface designer
