Seamless Patterns in Photoshop: A Beginner's Guide

1. Introduction: Patterns are great, especially used in digital art. You can use patterns as the background to digital art, you can use it to create texture, you can also use patterns to reinforce your branding. Creating patterns in Photoshop is fun and easy too. The more patterns you make, the greater your library of patterns becomes that you can use in all of your future digital art projects in Photoshop. Hi there. I'm Sam Concklin. I'm a digital artist, and I animate and draw comics. I basically make lots of digital art in Photoshop. In this class, I'm going to be teaching you my methods of creating a pattern completely from scratch. If you're a complete beginner, that's okay. I'll walk you through setting up the document, drawing the pattern, and then applying it in a piece of art. In this class, we're going to talk about how to create checkerboards, words, doodles, and wooden planks. At the end of the class, I will do a project run through. I'll walk you through the steps you need in order to create a piece of digital art using patterns. It's super easy and quick, so definitely stick around for that. This class is best suited for beginners. If you've never touched Photoshop, no worries, I got you. If you're familiar with Photoshop but you've never used patterns before, this is also great. If you're familiar with patterns but you haven't touched it in a while, this class will be great review for you as well. All you need to get started is a Photoshop and preferably a drawing tablet, which I will be using throughout the lessons as I draw the different patterns. Ready to get started? Awesome. This is creating seamless patterns in Photoshop. I look forward to seeing you in my class. 2. Document Setup: As with any Photoshop project, the first step we're going to take here is create a new document. I like to do the document setup process for every class that I teach just because, in case you're new to Photoshop, I can walk you through it. I got you. Let's create new. There are lots of options here, but what we're mostly going to focus on are the pixels over here. We want the width and height. That's going to be how wide and how tall your Canvas is going to be. We want those to be measured in pixels, and we want the number of pixels to be two things. We want it to be a large number, and we want it to be divisible by four. Now, I'll teach you in a later lesson why it's important for it to be divisible by four or two. But we're just going to put in 1200 by 1200 pixels. The resolution of 72 is just fine, and the RGB color is just fine for us as well. With that, let's create our Canvas. 3. What Are Patterns?: With this, the first thing we're going to do before we even talk about how to make a pattern is what even is a pattern in Photoshop? A pattern in Photoshop is a repeating image, a repeating rectangle basically that tiles over, and over, and over just to create a pattern behind a piece of art or to give texture to something. Those are a few different applications of patterns. Let me show you what I'm talking about. We're going to create a new layer down here. We're going to go up here to Help, we're going to type in pattern, which I just did earlier, it auto filled here. We've got pattern and the three options in the menu. There's Defined Pattern; there's Layer Style, Pattern Overlay; and there's New Fill Layer, Pattern. We're going to choose that one. If you already have a pattern that you would like to use, you can select "New Fill Layer, Pattern", and we're going to say, okay and it's going to fill up the canvas with one of the patterns you have in your library. To open up your pattern library, it's automatically going to pull up this window here. I'm going to click this down arrow. You can actually click here to switch between different patterns. Now, these are different patterns that I have made in the past. Some of them are bigger, some of them are smaller, that's just based on the canvas size that you start with. You're not going to have all of these because these are ones that I've made and put in here, but you might have a few to start with that are just default with Photoshop, including this diagonal line on the grid here. We have some polka dots. These are very small. I'm assuming they're made for printing for black and white art if you want to fill in something but you don't want it to be gray, you want it to be mix of black and white. That's just my guess, but I personally would not use these because for my taste, they're very, very small, they're very tight. If you wanted to change the scale of this, let's say we want to go with this, you can barely see that it's a grid. But let's change the scale here. This is the real size of the pattern that you're working with. If you go bigger, there's a problem. If we go bigger, bigger, bigger, up to 1,000 percent, if you look here, the grid looks very fuzzy. That's because in Photoshop, you don't ever want to go bigger. You want to create something large that you're able to make smaller because if you take something small in Photoshop and try to make it bigger, you're going to lose some quality to the image. It's going to look fuzzy, it's going to look bad. We don't want that. But for some reason let's say we wanted to use this pattern. I'm going to say, "We have our pattern here." Now, if we hit V for the move tool and we have this layer selected, we can grab the grid, and we can actually move it around, which is pretty neat. If you have a pattern that's not a grid, you have something a bit more complex and you want to adjust it so it's just right, this is great because no matter how much you move it, the pattern will always be there. It's a perfectly repeating pattern that will always look the same. That is our goal with this class. I'm going to teach you guys how to make a pattern from scratch that just like this one repeats perfectly. It tessellates, if you will. Throwing back to geometry class there. We have a pattern and this is great. Why would we want to use it? What's the point of patterns anyway? Well, let's say you want to draw something. I'm going to draw myself a beautiful heart here. As you can see, I created a new layer, and I put this one right on top here. Then, we can actually move this around still if we want. We can even turn down the opacity and boom, we have a heart, and then we have a backdrop that compliments it. There's a bit of difference there. There is a contrast between what you drew and what's in the background. That's probably my favorite way to use a pattern is as a backdrop for whatever art I'm drawing on top. It's a lot more interesting visually than just having the heart by itself. Patterns are great. They're awesome. Let's get started. I'm going to show you guys, we're going to make our very first pattern. 4. Working with Grids: Let's turn off this layer's visibility. We're going to click the eyeball here just to turn that off and we're going to create our very first pattern. I'm going to click the "Folder" button here to create a folder for our layers in the layer panel here. Let's double-click it and call it checkerboard. I'm going to put all of the checkerboard stuff within this folder. Our very first pattern is going to be a checkerboard pattern because I believe it shows off how patterns work the best, so let's do it. The first thing we're going to do is create a grid. Now, make sure you go down here and double-check how big your canvas is. If you followed my example, it's going to be 1,200 by 1,200 pixels but if you're not sure how big your grid is, you can actually go down here, click on this document, little information here. Click and hold down and it'll say what the width is, what the height is and some other information. Mine actually is 1,200 by 1,200 pixels, and that's great. I personally want to take this whole grid and I want to split it into four squares like this. That would be basically splitting it in half this way and then splitting it in half this way. Since the whole thing is 1,200 pixels, half of it is going to be 600 pixels. Let's do just that. What I'm doing here is we're going to create a guide for all of our patterns that we're going to make using the grid. Let's go to the ''Help'' part, type in G-R-I-D for grid. We're going to go to ''Show Grid''. Perfect. Mine already looks good like this, but in case yours looks a little bit different, we're going to change the grid options and make sure that it's laid out and looks exactly how we want it to look. Let's do Preferences, Guides, Grid and Slices. Now here we have all sorts of options. We're mainly concerned with the grid option. You can choose whatever color you want. I prefer something brighter, so I like magenta because it just pops off of whatever I'm making. This here says Gridline Every however many pixels. Mine defaults to 300 pixels. There is a limit here, you can actually make it 1,200 pixels. You see this is every 120, if I add another zero, the program doesn't care. There is a limit to how big that these grid lines can be. Since mine is 1,200, let's try 600. It's like I said before, 600 will split the entire thing into four quadrants, which is exactly what we want for our checkerboard. Follow this example here. If your number isn't 1,200 just divide whatever number you picked by two and assuming it's a square, it will split it into half, just like a window, like this. This is our guide. You'll see there's no extra layer here. This is just something that Photoshop puts on top so that while you're working, you can see whatever you're drawing lines up with the grid. When you export your art or when you save something, it will not have the grid on top of it. This is just a guide for us to use as we're working just for reference. Let's create our checkerboard. 5. Draw the Checkerboard: I have my Checkerboard folder selected here and I'm going to click "Create New Layer", and we have a new layer here, completely empty. Let's pick the Paint Bucket tool over here, or you can press G to pull that up. I'm just going to click and it's going to fill the entire canvas with black, or whatever color you have selected over here in color. For all of these, I'm going to be working with black, it's simple, it's more universal so we can go ahead and stick with that. Now something interesting is if we just make a pattern out of this, the entire pattern is just going to be black. It's just going to be a black color. There's going to be nothing to it, because that's what we see on the canvas. Let's take this layer that's selected. Let's press V and we're actually going to shrink it, so it takes up only this one square right here. Let's grab this corner down here, and move it up, and we're going to move it up until it just about snaps. If it doesn't snap, we're going to go up to help, grid and make sure that Snap to Grid has a check mark next to it. See how layers and document bounds of a checkmark? We want grid to also have a checkmark. Let's click that, and now as we drag it, it should snap right to it. If it still doesn't, what I'm doing here is I'm holding down shift, and shift is a great way to relax the balance so it no longer has to be a square, but holding down shift also allows something to snap. As we're moving it, it snaps to that side and it snaps to this side and that's perfect. Now, if we were to make a pattern like this, I want you to guess what would this look like. Let's create a new pattern and just practice. So help. We're going to go to Pattern, Define Pattern, and we're going to say Checkerboard 1. Now, let's create a new layer, and let's check out what this checkerboard pattern is going to look like. Help, New Fill Layer Pattern. We're going to apply the pattern that we just created with Define Pattern, and at scale, this is at 100 percent, because this is the exact size that we just created. Let's make it bigger, and it fills up the whole thing. Let's make it smaller. See how the pattern, we only put the black square in the one corner, but we didn't put it in the other. We have this basket weave pattern. This is great, but it's not a checkerboard. Let's try again. Let's turn off this pattern that we have there, and we have just this one square and this way, we're going to duplicate this pattern here. Let's duplicate this layer, by selecting it, hitting Copy and then Paste. It will paste it in the center, and let's move this down here so it snaps, and boom, we have this awesome tile. Now this, if we make a pattern out of this one, this will be a checkerboard. Let's do that one more time, make another pattern. Help, Pattern, Define Pattern. This is going to be Checkerboard number 2. That's the pattern name. Let's create a new layer and test this out to see what our checkerboard looks like. New Fill Layer Pattern. Now let's make it smaller and see what it looks like. Awesome. We've a checkerboard pattern. Very 1950s diner. I love it. Now we have our checkerboard pattern and you have the basics of how patterns work. Basically, all we're doing is drawing something in this canvas, telling Photoshop, "Hey, define find You see this stuff, make it be a pattern, and then boom, it's a pattern, you can name it yourself and you add it to your arsenal of different patterns you can work with. If you check right here, I'm just double-clicking this pattern image right here. You can click down and you can see both of the patterns that it just made are accounted for in right here. Beautiful. That's your very first pattern. The next lesson, we're going to take it up a notch. I'm going to show you how to draw your own doodles and have a cute little repeating pattern of doodles that you made all on your own. 6. Doodles in the Grid: Doodling in the grid. This is probably one of my favorite ways to make a pattern, because it's just so open-ended. There is structure there, but it's a pretty easy thing to do. I'm going to do here is create a new folder here, I'm going to call this "Doodles". We're going to create a new layer here, then on this layer, I'm going to be drawing my own pattern. It could be whatever you want. For me, I am feeling inspired to draw cats and dogs, so let's do that. What we're going to do is basically draw something in each of these squares, then when we create a pattern, those images will be repeating all over, so let's do it. We're going to edit, undo all of those. If you've seen my brush that I'm using right now, is actually this big old stamp here. I actually made this brush myself. If you zoom in really closely, you can see all the different ways that I doodled here. If you are interested in learning how to make your own brushes, let me know, I'm definitely interested. I'm making that a class, because brushes, just like patterns, are super versatile, and super fun. Like I said, I'm going to be drawing a cats and dogs theme. You can draw whatever you want in your four squares, just as long as whatever you draw is pretty much centered in each square, and doesn't touch the edges. You want nothing to touch the edges as you're drawing these. Let's do it. You can see here I have all my doodles here, they're all in the same layer, no worries. But one thing I noticed is, I drew this paw, up here in the upper right, I drew it a little off-center, so I'm actually going to move that. We're going to go over to the "Lasso Tool". You can select "L". There are different kinds of Lasso tools. I'm just going to use the classic one right here, and on my drawing tablet. With this layer selected, I'm going to go all around here, press "V", and move it down. If you found while you're drawing that you get too close to a grid line, and it's snapping to it, you can go ahead and go to "Help", and "Grid", and uncheck "Snap to Grid". That's something that sometimes messes with what you're trying to draw here. I'm just going to erase that. Just in case any of you run into that, be aware of whether your Snap to Grid is either on or off. Then, I'm actually going to circle this one, and move this part as well. Beautiful. I have my beautiful art here, perfect, beautifully symmetrical looking animals, let's go ahead and turn this into a pattern. Now, first thing before we actually do that, the pattern we made so far was black and white, but if you wanted to use a pattern that has transparency, we can actually turn off this background layer, and let's create a pattern out of this. "Pattern", "Define Pattern", "Cats and Dogs 1". Now, let's turn off visibility for that, and let's create a new layer, and fill the layer with the cats and dogs pattern that we just made. Turn down the size, not too small, we have this adorable looking pattern that has cats, and dogs, and paw prints all over, and it's super sweet. I don't know about you, but I love it. I think it's cute. This would be great for, if you're creating art and you want to have some wallpaper in the background, or if you just want some texture in the back of your art, that would be great. 7. Coloring Basics: One more thing about this pattern is maybe you want to color the whole thing in. An easy way to do that would be to select everything, inverse that selection so we're selecting the inside, and then color it in. Let me show you exactly what I'm talking about. We're going to hit W for one tool, and make sure this layer is selected. We're going to click the outside here. You see there's these little zig-zaggy lines sort around the black lines that we drew. But if we were to color in that, there's a technical thing that goes on. If we were to color in that, it would also color in these light gray areas, because Photoshop, while it is an awesome program, it's not super perfect at determining the edges between what's there and what's not. Let's select, modify, let's expand our selection about four pixels, let's say. Let's do one more thing, we're going to select "Inverse". Now, instead of the outside, the inside is selected. We're going to color in the insides of them, and boom, they're all colored in. Now that we have all of these guys colored in, let's create a new pattern with these guys, because the one before, it wasn't colored in, this one is. Let's do Define Pattern, cats and dogs too. Let's turn these off. Let's create a new pattern here, New Fill Layer Pattern. Let's turn down that scale. Beautiful, these cats and dogs are all colored in. Just to make them pop a little bit more, we can create a layer down here, color it in. That is very bright. We can see that these guys are colored in, and they're popping, and it looks great. The next thing that we're going to learn is working with corners, so stick around for the next lesson. 8. Working with Corners: We're going to bump things up a notch. Let's create a new folder here. We're going to call this one Corners. We're going to create something that repeats in the corners. Let's do something celestial themed. I'm going to make sure that I have black selected here, B for brush. I'm ready to draw. Awesome. Let's say that I wanted to create something instead of having art here and here. If I wanted to have small piece of art repeating in the corners, you would have one part here, one part here, one here, and one here. Let's create a pattern with that really quick and see what that looks like. "Help", "Pattern", "Define Pattern". We're going to call this Celestial Corner Test, just for funzies. Let's create a new layer here. Once again, create a pattern with that. Let's see what it looks like. If you look here and you see that there's this funky looking shape between the sun and the moon, those are actually the four corners that I just drew. As you see, they don't quite align properly. If this is the look you're going for, glitchy, that's perfectly fine. But, for most pieces of art, you're going to want even more control over it. Drawing it yourself in the corners, probably not the best idea. But, if you did want to utilize corners, I'm going to teach you, let's do it. The first step is we're going to create our new layer here. I'm going to draw a shape, a moon. That's very c-shaped moon. Let's do something like that. Cool. There we go, we have a moon shape here. I'm going to move it right in the center here. That's just fine. The first thing we want to do is take this moon and we're going to move it all the way to the side here. This doesn't have to be exact, this can just look however you want it to look. The next step, which is very crucial, is we're going to take this layer, drag it down to the new layer, and this will duplicate the layer so that it's exactly on top of the layer it was copied from. Normally, if you copy and paste, it doesn't do this. Make sure that you select that layer and drag it down to the "Create New Layer" to duplicate it. Now, we're going to do some math magic with Photoshop here. Let's select the corner here, we're going to have one of these layer selected. Click on the corner. Currently it's located at zero and 600 pixels. What does this mean? Well, if we were to measure this piece of art's location from the top corner, it would be zero pixels to the right and 600 pixels down. If we want to move this to the right, the X increases. But the question is, how much do we want the X to increase by? In this example, it's pretty easy. We want to move it over 1,200 pixels. Boom, perfect. I'm just going to tell you right now if we made a pattern out of this, we would have a moon repeating perfectly. That's how to ensure that your pattern can perfectly tessellate, no weird overlaps, no missed art, that thing. But let's put it in the corner. Let's select both of these, move them straight up here somewhere. Let's do the same thing we did with both of them selected. We're going to drag them down to create a new layer, move them down here. But the thing is we don't know exactly how far to move them. Let's do what we did before. Now that we have these guys duplicated, let's click on a corner to pull up these coordinates. Now, the X is fine. That's a 600 pixels, that means between these two objects, the center is right in the middle here, 600, because we have 0, 600, 1,200. It's in the middle. But the Y is at negative 28, meaning it's slightly above here. Now, you could do some math. You can say, well, it's 1,200 pixels tall, minus 28 is this new number. But the easier way to do that, have the program do the math for you. We have negative 28 pixels. We know we want to move it down exactly 1,200 pixels in the Y-direction. Let's do plus 1,200 pixels and boom, it's perfectly put down there in the center. Now, if I were to create a pattern with the guy, Just the Moon is the name of this pattern. Let's create it. Let's turn off these guys. Let's take a look at how this moon pattern looks. Scale at 100, it looks like that. Let's turn it down, and the moon is perfect. It works because our piece of art that we drew is perfectly identical and each part is 1,200 pixels away from the other parts. Let's finish up this piece of art. Let's draw a sun in the center. This doesn't have to be perfect. I'm just going to do that. Draw some lines here, have some fun. You can feel free to draw whatever you like. You could do suns and moons, you could do more cats and dogs, you could do plants, whatever is your fancy. I'm also going to draw some stars just to give this some personality. We have some stars, we have a sun, we have a moon. Super cute, I love it. You can add whatever you want to this. Again, as long as these don't touch the corners because if they do touch the corners or the walls, we would have to make sure that it repeats on the other side. This pattern is going to be Celestial Repeating. You know the drill, let's turn off visibility for these guys. Let's test out this pattern. See how it looks. Looks super cute. How's it look when it's smaller? Brilliant. I love it. It's super cute. This is super sweet. Something else to note when you're making patterns is you can test things out by making it smaller. If you notice in here, maybe there's some spots that could use a couple more stars, just something to fill it up. You can make a note of that. Then when you go back and edit your piece of art here for your pattern, you could actually add in those stars and then that'll be just fine. Go ahead and do that. Make your art look exactly how it looks. That's how to work with edges and corners in Photoshop. That's basically the biggest lesson. That's basically the hardest part of all of this; is making sure that your patterns perfectly repeat and that they tessellate and there's no funky lines and everything. You did it. We're over the hard part. Since we're about halfway through, I'm just going to put a little shout out there to say thank you to everyone who has been leaving our views to my previous classes. This is my third class on Skillshare. I'm pretty much starting to get the hang of things here. But, if there's anything I'm doing that you would like to see more of or if you have any tips or ideas for things I could do differently in the future, I would really appreciate it if you would leave a review and let me know what you think. 9. Patterns with Words: At this point, we already know how to use corners, how to use walls, and everything like that, for example, whatever we draw over here has to reappear over here. That's how patterns work. Let's apply this knowledge to our very next lesson. In this lesson, we're going to talk about how to make a pattern with words or phrases. I love working with this. I think it's super fun, but there's one thing we need to do before we get started. We're going to adjust our grid. As you know, to get to our grid, we're going to go up to "Help", type in "Grid". We're going to go to "Preferences", "Guides, Grids & Slices", all that good stuff. I'm going to chop this in half. Instead of having a grid line every 600 pixels, we're going to have a grid line every 300 pixels. Another thing I could do, which would essentially be the same, would be every 600, but then have more subdivisions, subdivisions of two. As you can see what that created, we have the main quadrants and then we have the smaller quadrants here as well. If you wanted more, you could type in three, you can type in 36, well, however many you want. We're going to go with 600 pixels and with two subdivisions. Click "Okay". We're going to use these subdivisions here as a guide as we draw some words. If this is hard to see, we can turn on our background visibility right now. Then this is actually how I normally work. I normally have the grid lines here when I'm working with them and there are a lot easier to see with the background here. Then when I'm done, I'll turn off the visibility. Therefore, you have more transparency, that kind of thing. Enough with the semantics, let's draw a pattern using words. We're going to pick a theme. For my theme, I'm just going to write my name that way I can use it in my future videos. I like to pick a word or a phrase that you believe in your handwriting will fit well within a block like this. Or you could have something fit within a block of three and then have a heart. Basically, what we're going to do is write something like this and then we're going to have it shift over here. We're going to have another version that shifts over this way. Then for the last one, look like this. Basically you have 1, 2, 3, 4, and then 1, 2, 3, 4, and 1, 2. Basically recreating this pattern where you have words and they change their positions of where they are so that when you zoom out you have a diagonal pattern going. If that doesn't make sense, hang on. I'll just show you exactly what I mean. Let's turn off this visibility. Let's start writing our words. My handle is @SAMCONCKLIN, so I'm going to write that in here. I'm actually going to decrease the size of my brush here by hitting the left bracket @, make sure it looks as nice and neat as you like, @SAMCONCKLIN, so that actually touched the edge a little, so I'm going to fix that up real quick. Erase that little bit there, and it looks pretty good to me. Time to make the next one. I'm going to draw this on a new layer, just so that we have it written out nicely, and this one we're going to do something similar to what we did with the moons. We're going to move it till it's about, we have this square open here. We're going to duplicate that layer down here. Click the corner to get these numbers here. Since we're moving it horizontally to the right, we're going to edit the x. Keep whatever is there, minus is 307 plus 1200 to move it to the right. Now, this part will perfectly repeat, and that's good. Let's go ahead and draw the other ones and do the same thing, @SAMCONCKLIN. This one, once again, we're going to move it over. We're going to duplicate it down here, click the "Corner" and then the x plus 1200, the width of our canvas here. If you don't like the way this looks, if we want to align a little bit differently, we can actually select both of these. No matter how much left or right you move it, it will always perfectly repeat pattern-wise, which is super good to know. For example, if I want the art to be a little bit more over, I can do that. I'm going to leave it just like that and then we'll move on to the final one. Let's take this and move it so that the L-I-N is all the way over. We're going to duplicate that, and then move it over 2 plus 1200 pixels, and there we go. My whole name is written out here and if you want to make any less changes, you can. I like to stay wary of how much space is between these grid lines. They make a wonderful guide. I see this was a lot bigger, this one's a bit smaller, so I'm actually going to move these up here and then move the third one up here as well so that things are spaced a little bit more evenly. As you guys know, the real test for this is we were to take these and just create a pattern and take a look, see how everything lays out. "Pattern", we're going to define this pattern @SAMCONCKLIN, put it in all caps just for fancies, @SAMCONCKLIN. Turn the visibility off for those guys. Let's make this pattern and see how it looks when it's smaller. Awesome, I like the way that looks. I like it a lot. You can even see the at symbol has this sort of cascade 45-degree angle going down, which is pretty fun. Actually made one of these before with my other handle, well not my handle but I made it @SAMC. I put this in the background with some of my other stuff. This one was super fun too. This one, as you can see, it's a lot shorter and smaller. 10. Adjusting Patterns: I think there's a space here that could be filled a little bit better, so I'm actually going to go ahead and edit that. I found that there was a lot of space up here between this guy and this guy. I'm actually going to move the bottom one as low as I can to remedy that. Move it a little bit lower. We want, visually, the space between these, space between here, and here, and here, to all be about the same. Let's move these guys down just a touch. That should be better. Let's create a new pattern with this and see if that looks better. Turn this off. New pattern, make it smaller. That's super tiny. I think it looks a lot better and I love it. I even love that there's that little pop of goofy Sam Concklin in the middle of all the ocean of my name. I think that's fun. This is how to do words in Photoshop as a pattern. Again, feel free to have fun with it. I've made words tons of times before and it's probably my second favorite way to use patterns. The next lesson, the final thing I'm going to teach you guys as an example of patterns in Photoshop, it's a challenge, but we're stepping it up. Let's take a look. Let's do it together. We're going to do wooden planks. 11. Wooden Planks: We've gone over how to make a checkerboard, how to draw doodles, work with the corners, work with words. This final lesson I'm covering different patterns we can make is going to be a bit of a doozy. It's a challenge, but I'm glad you're here because it's super doable. It's a super cool effect and it's pretty useful in a lot of illustration that you might be doing. If you're an illustrator, this is going to be super helpful for you. We're going to learn to draw a wooden plank, a repeating pattern of wooden planks that is seamless, and gorgeous, and hand-drawn. Let's get to it. Let's create our folder here called wooden planks, and we're going to draw some planks. I think I might end up drawing five of them so to make a quick sketch, something like this. Make them about the same height as each other, but make them a little bit different. It's going to be something like this, so let's get started. I know I want them to be about this wide, so I'm going to try to guesstimate it and make it about that big. Let's say about that tall, I'm holding down Shift as I draw these just to make straight lines. Now, just know the longer you make these, the line here, the shorter these other ones are going to be so just keep that in mind as you're drawing these planks. This one, maybe we'll make this one a little less wide or a little less long, like that. This one, we'll have this one go to the side. A bit like that. Do our best to align it, but it doesn't need to be perfect. Erase some of that overlap there and move this down just a touch more. Move this just so it's almost touching. It's going to be about half as large. Cool. We have this done, and the last thing we're going to do is move it down here. We're going to duplicate it. Click the corner. We're going to move it 1,200 pixels up, which means we're going to keep the y the way it is minus 1,200 pixels. Finally, let's draw that final plank. I'm going to merge these two together so that this is all one layer together. I'm going to select them both, right-click, merge layers. Boom, now it's one layer with all of that art still on there. Let's create that final plank by connecting these guys. I'm going to put it right here. I want to make this align with none of the ones before, so I'm going to put it right there. Perfect. We have all of these here and if we want to, we can have them align perfectly by putting the black line right on the edge. We want a little bit of the black line on top and a little bit on the bottom. Now the next step of this is we're going to go in, we're actually going to draw in a plank pattern so you can feel free to take a look at this. I'm going to speed up this part, but basically, we want to draw a nice loose line and then draw one right next to it where it's a bit wider in some parts, thinner other parts, and then wide again. Every stroke we draw is going to be nice and loose. A nice long, loose stroke. That way it looks more natural and more confident and so let's get to it. We have our planks drawn here and we have all the details put in as well. I'm going to go ahead and erase some of the extra bits here. Just let things look nice and even and now we have these awesome planks that we are going to work with. Let's take this entire thing. At this point, this pattern will repeat up and down, but we also need to fill in the planks on the other side, basically the other half of the planks. Let's take this guy, let's move it all the way over here so that we have a little plank each place here. We don't want any holes like any white here or here. We want each plank to be accounted for on the left. Now let's take this and duplicate it. Click on one of these little squares to get this. We're going to move it 1,200 to the right so let's do plus 1,200 and that x and then we get to play some connection. Let's take these two like we did before, right-click, merge them. We're going to hold down Shift as we draw just to connect these planks just so. We're going to do a tiny bit up here and a bit more down here. Perfect, so that these are all connected just like that. The final step is going to be drawing more plank details so let's go ahead and do that. Once again, the trick for these planks is just to use nice, long, smooth strokes. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just keep it nice, and loose, and confident, and you'll end up with a pretty neat pattern. That's part of what I like about these patterns is that everyone's handwriting, everyone's art style is completely different and unique so you always end up with something a little bit different and special for each artist. Let's go ahead and clean up some of these lines that I drew here. I'm going to take my eraser, make it small. Let's get in here and erase these little nubs here. When it's small and repeating, you won't notice this as much, but just for me as a pet peeve, I like to make things as even as possible, including this line right here could be a little thicker. Going to erase the corner right there. Once again, it's all up to the artist to make things look how you want it to look. To me, this looks like a pretty awesome repeating pattern here. Our plank pattern is done. It's a little bit extra work than some of the other things we've gone over with these lessons, but it does turn out being pretty awesome. Let's take a look at how this turned out. Pattern, define pattern, Wooden Planks 1. Then for the last time, we're going to do a fill layer pattern. Scale 100 percent. Let's make it smaller. Awesome, that looks great. With that, we have gone over some awesome examples of ways you can draw, and photoshop, and turn those into patterns. For the next lesson, I'm going to talk about what the project is and I'm going to show an example of how to use these patterns in an actual piece of art. 12. Project Walkthrough: We've gone over in this class how to create all of these different awesome patterns. But how do we actually use them in a piece of art? One of my favorite ways is to draw a piece of art and then have there be a background. Create a new folder here called Art with Patterns. I think I'm going to draw a little alien dude, we're going to have that be the top, go straight down, around, just like this. Draw another line like that, maybe put some circles in there to represent the little lights that are on the sides. We're going to draw alien here and the aliens going to have a little peace sign and this is my piece of art so far. Let's color it in. Let's hit the wand tool and select right outside of here. We have these marching ants right on the outside here. We're going to do ''Select'', ''Modify'', ''Expand'', expanding about four pixels and we're going to hit on "Mac Command" "Shift+I" to select the inverse. We're going to hit ''Command'' to create a new layer underneath, and let's color this in just with some bluish gray color. Perfect. There's my beautiful art and I'm going to color in the alien with a green tone. I'll color this one in by hand, this is just for fun. I'm going to color in just by tracing the outside just to make sure we don't miss anything and then going and fully coloring it in. Make the brush a little bit bigger there. Beautiful. Our alien look super happy, but they need some art behind them, right? Let's create another layer underneath and go to "Help", fill layer pattern and the pattern I'm going to use is the celestial one that we created. Let's make it a bit smaller. Beautiful. I love that. Let's create a layer right underneath that with some kind of color. Let's have a dark bluish color. Now, this is pretty neat but the pattern doesn't really show up so I'm actually going to take this and rasterize it. That means that it's no longer a pattern you can move around, it means that now these are actual pixels that we can work with. I'm going to hit "Command+I" on my Mac, which inverses that pattern. Let's turn off the grid we can see what we're doing here. I'm going to take this and use a blend mode called overlay. What this does is the white lightens the background to the same hue, the same color but it's just a lot brighter. Since that has a bit more contrast than I would like, I'm going to take that pattern layer, hit ''Opacity'', turn it down to maybe about 50 percent and boom, we have this piece of art and it looks beautiful and I love it. The only thing I probably do now is color in the eyeballs in the aliens, so let's do that. I have my piece of art here, I have the background. All you need to do for your project is to create a piece of art and use a pattern in some way. Feel free to make whatever you want. If you'd like more ideas for how to use patterns, definitely leave a comment on this class and let me know, if you have any questions, anything you want to learn more about, a great way to do that is to leave a review of this class. If you have ideas on things I can improve on or things that I can do better next time or if you just really love this class, it would mean so much to me if you could just leave a review and let me know what you thought.