Seamless Patterns Made Easy: A Fresco + Capture Workflow

1. Introduction: When I first learned how to make patterns, I couldn't stop. I made so many that it was like unlocking a superpower. Taking some random doodles that seemed like nothing on their own, but when arranged into a repeating pattern, suddenly, it was like, What? What? Wow. What, what's the noise that I'm trying to make here? It was like, Whoa. Look at this. It's infinite. It's forever. It's infinity. It's Hey. I'm Chris Biasi. I'm an illustrator with a background in graphic design. I've had the opportunity to work with a ton of big brands and great clients, including Nike, Google, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and so many others. One of my favorite things to do create seamless repeating patterns that you can use in anything from products to wallpapers. There's just something so satisfying about taking some random drawings and turning them into something that can go on forever. Am I communicating the forever part of this? I don't know what it is about that, but it just it's nice. Feels good. Over at Nickelodeon headquarters, my patterns are on wallpaper, they're on furniture, and that's wild to me. Little Baby Chris would never have imagined that I'd be making custom patterns for packaging, desk mats, and even the envelopes I ship things in. In this class, I'm going to show you one of my workflows for creating patterns that speeds up the process and makes it easy for anyone. It's perfect for beginners, so no need to have any existing pattern making background. If you can doodle, you can make a pattern. Even if you can't doodle, you probably still make a pattern. I'll walk you through the entire process from brainstorming ideas, sketching out those ideas, and then turning them into a repeatable pattern. Perfectly repeatable design. We're going to cover everything you need to know, including how to choose your elements, how to arrange them in a way that works and makes the repeatingne seamless and, you know, not have any weird gaps. I'll talk about how you can add color to really make it pop. Plus, I'll show you how you can export your pattern so that you can use it on actual products. Could be custom packaging, could be wallpaper for your phone or for your wall. Everything about? Even fabric. You can get some fabric made with your pattern. For this class, I'll be working on my iPad using Adobe Fresco and Adobe Capture. Both of these are free apps, so you don't have to get any new apps. You don't have to pay for anything. By the end of this class, you'll have your own custom seamless pattern. And if you're anything like me, you're not gonna be able to stop once you've done one. Whether you're looking to expand your creative skill set or just add another tool to your creative tool belt, this class will get you there. Let's get started. I can't wait to see what patterns you come up with. 2. The Project: For your class project, you'll create your very own seamless repeating pattern. Whether it's for a seasonal theme like Halloween or something entirely random. This project will help you practice the skills from this class and walk away with a finished design you can apply to products, packaging, or even just a cool wallpaper for your phone. First, we'll start by brainstorming concepts and ideas for our pattern. Different kinds of nuts, toys, Popsicles, penguins, parrots, different kinds of birds, duckbill, platypus, and then we'll start sketching elements that maybe we could include in that pattern. We'll think about the shapes and sizes and how they may fit together. Next, we'll narrow down our sketches to include a variety of different shapes and proportions, simple things and more complicated things. We'll then create tightened up versions of our drawings in Adobe Fresco, add in some color. After that, we'll be able to seamlessly bring them into Adobe Capture and create our repeating pattern tile. Winter satisfied with how it looks. We'll then export and share our patterns. As a bonus, I'll show you how to easily use these patterns in Photoshop and other apps. We'll make some product mock ups and more. By the end of this class, you'll have a custom pattern that you can apply to real world projects and the skills to design 1 million more. As always, don't forget to share your work in the project gallery. Definitely feel free to show mock ups of your own that show how your pattern could work on different objects or products or whatever you want. The possibilities are endless. Sharing your work will inspire your classmates, prospective students, and myself, as well. I always love to see what you all do. In addition, a pattern quick tips guide will be provided to help you get started with positioning your elements. Are you excited? Because I'm excited. Let's get into it. 3. Choosing a Theme: Although you don't have to, I suggest coming up with a theme for your pattern. This will help in the ideation process when you're coming up with a list of things that you could potentially include. Well, I mean, I guess your theme could just be things you want to include in your pattern. I mean, really, they don't even have to be things. They could be shapes or words or literally anything you want. This is your pattern. I'm not telling you how to make. Well, I'm gonna show you how to make a pattern, but if you're someone who struggles with ideas and you just want me to give you some ideas, here's some. What about holiday theme? You like a holiday? You like a Christmas theme? What about a spooky Halloween pattern with lots of scary monsters and candy and pumpkins, skulls? What about outer space? Rockets, aliens, planets, stars? The milky way or food. Different kinds of snacks. I'm hungry. Music? Instruments, animals. Different kinds of nuts, toys. Popsicles. Penguins, parrots, different kinds of birds, duckbill platypus. Superheroes. Super villains. Bananas and pajamas. Eyeballs. Fruit with attitude. Pair don't care. Technology, keyboards, mouse, mice, microphones. Cars bikes, bananas. Once you've settled on something, make a list of things that you associate with that theme. Don't just think of things that you can draw. You don't want to limit yourself in this stage. You're not writing a list of things you're going to include in your pattern. You're just getting your brain moving, getting the brain juices flowing so that you can Wow. Brain juice is disgusting. What is brain juice? The brains floating in. But seriously, though, letting yourself think more broadly can lead you to unexpected places that you wouldn't have thought if you were just, like, thinking of things that you could draw or wanted to draw. Because maybe this thing that you think of will trigger something else that you might want to draw. Also, you actually don't even have you could do this with collage. You could cut stuff out and use that. Doesn't have to be drawing. And also, we're not going to use everything on this list, so calm down. Don't worry about it. We're just just putting down as much as you can. Don't make a short list because you're worried you're gonna have to draw it all. I'm gonna pick. I'm gonna pick what we want. We make up their own rules here. You make up your rules, I make up my rules, and we come together to make patterns. Alright, I'm gonna go figure out my theme. Also get a snack. You go figure out your theme, do some brainstorming, and we will meet back here to start sketching. 4. Making a Good Pattern: The key to pattern design is making something that will repeat when tiled. Pretty obvious, but there's more to it than that. A good pattern will make it less clear where that transition point from one tile to another tile happens. I'll just look more organic and natural, not like clear tiles, like a checkerboard. I've always been drawn to illustrative patterns and just things where illustrations are jam packed together like a puzzle, filling in all the little spaces. Just something satisfying about that. Even before I learned how to create patterns, I would just fill compositions with lots of different little things. I enjoy doing it. It was fun, but it also took the pressure off of drawing one good thing. I would just start with something small and then just keep filling the page until it was all done. I always just felt so accomplished when the whole space was filled with lots of little drawings. Learning how to make repeating patterns just took this to a whole other level. I mean, the possibilities for filling a space became literally infinite. There was no composition safe. I could fill it with pattern forever. In the past, when I was making a repeating pattern, I would illustrate everything in the center of my composition without touching any of the outside edges, and then I would divide it into four quadrants. And you would push the middles out to each side, and then you would have to fill in the space in the middle that was left over from the stuff at the edges, and then you would have your repeating tile. The process we're going to use in this class completely eliminates that step in that process altogether. However, because of that, if you're wanting to create that same sort of tight pattern where everything fits together like a puzzle. We're going to have to set ourselves up for success by creating some things that will help fill in those leftover voids and spaces between our elements. I suggest aiming to have a selection of main elements, that'll be your bigger, more focal point elements, and then an assortment of small supportive elements that you could use in small spaces and maybe not use at all if there's not a need for them. But having those options will make it a lot easier to get things nice and tight. If, however you want to keep things more loose and airy in your pattern, you don't really have to worry about this. Oh. 5. Sketching Pattern Elements: I guess I was hungry because I ended up choosing the theme food. Well, sort of. Food food friends, food with faces. And I don't know, maybe some more stuff. Alright, so I got my list here. I'll read you some of the items on here. We've got a pizza guy. This is basically just a guy, and he's also a pizza. A doughnut friend. It's a doughnut. He's your friend. Then I wrote down Hot Dog, and then I was thinking hot girl summer and, like, hot hot dog summer. And then I was like, Wait, hot dog bummer. Like sat hot dog. And then I wrote down Yum, chomp. See? Like, this is not serious business. You're just coming up with things. I wrote down yum and chomp, 'cause I thought maybe some hand lettered words would be nice in there. Chips, Dido. Drink, like a fountain drink. And then I was thinking, Oh, what about some, like, drips or splats? Those will be helpful in some tricky areas. What about the word slurp? You ever thought about that? Fries would be good. They can bend in different shapes. Fit different areas? Popcorn. Popcorn's little. And then, taco friends. At this stage, I'd just like to loosely doodle things from my list of ideas and not worry too much about the pattern yet. I'm basically just playing around and maybe auditioning some characters to star in my upcoming pattern. Working this way allows me to generate a lot of ingredients. See what I did there that I can choose to include in the pattern or not. In addition to bigger, more clear items like this pizza guy here. I'm adding in little things that will work in weird little spaces when we assemble the pattern like this sauceplat or this french fry, things that are maybe skinnier or more flexible in how they can be drawn that might work in some sort of weird space between two things where something bigger or more complicated or more needing more particular shape won't work as well. For example, a sauce flat can be any shape you want it to be. And that's a pro tip. As you work on your sketches, make sure you're covering a broad range of things of different shapes and sizes and proportions because it's gonna make your life easier when we start to assemble this later on down the road. If you still haven't made your idea list yet, get going, go do that and then sketch out some ideas, and we will meet back in the next lesson. Don't cheat. Go do your stuff. I'll be waiting. I'll wait here. Take your time, but go do it. Go do it right now. 6. Finalizing Pattern Elements: You can do your final drawings, however you want to. The only thing that you'll need to remember to do is to make each one of your elements have their own layer within Adobe Fresco. For me, tightening up my drawings isn't much different than the sketching process. I'm just refining what's there in the sketch, tightening it up where needed, and just making my lines a little bit better, a little bit more confident, a little more precise. And then every time I draw one of these, I just start a new layer. So they're all on their own layers, ready to go. Alright, so I got my tightened up drawings here. You may notice that these are all on one layer. And you said, Hey, you said the only thing that's important is making sure they're on individual layers. And listen. Yes, that is true. However, because of my style and the way that I work and the fact that I'm just going to be using the paint bucket to color these, it's gonna be easier to do it like this and then break them up after the fact. You do what works for you. The end result is that each of your elements is on its own layer. Now I know this class isn't about patterns. No, this class is about patterns. I know this class isn't about color, per se, but because we're working with patterns and thinking of something as, like, a cohesive repeating things, I feel like color plays a big part into this. I like to keep things a little bit minimal because it's going to be repeating, like crazy anyway, but, you know, maybe you could lean into the crazy and do a whole bunch of colors. I have a whole bunch of different elements here, and instead of coloring them each on their own as individual things with their own individual colors, I want a consistent pattern for each of these things. So I want to color them all with that same palette, and it's just going to make it feel more like a finished refined thing. I picked a color palette here. It's Honestly, it's more colors than I was hoping. I wanted to stick to four to five, but you know, we didn't we didn't get there. Let me tell you how I pick this. I start with the things that I know are non negotiable because you just need them. We have a taco and we have pizza as, like, main stars of the show. We can't do that without yellow, so we got to start with yellow. Next on the list, we have a hot dog. Hot dog is not going to be a hot dog unless there's some sort of reddish pink involved. So that took me to that pink color. And then our taco has lettuce on it. Lettuce has to be green. So I put the green in there. I mean, I guess it could have been I mean, tacos don't have faces, so I could have change. The good thing about the pink is it works for the doughnut. We can have a pink strawberry frost thing on that doughnut. And then we've got a variety of other colors that we could use as sprinkles on there. The yellow we also need for the French fry. Thought I was gonna be all good, but I remember we got a burger on a skateboard, and we don't want it to look like raw meat. So we're going with a darker version of that, but there's sort of, like, different values of the same tone. I like to tell myself. So when I'm coloring my work, because it's solid shapes like this, I can use the paint bucket, as I said, but I like to do it on its own layer so that I have some more flexibility and I can go in and adjust things. So to do that, I just tap on my linework layer, and I go to set as reference. And now on the layer below, I can go ahead and fill in colors there, and it won't mess up my linework layer. So I can start with this yellow color, and we just start filling in. And I sort of just kind of stick with one of the colors and use it everywhere and then move on to the next color, and then I sort of spread them out as we go. It's just a process that works for me. It's not crucial to patterns. You can color any way you want to. But we got we're we got stuff happening here. Was this Dido? This french fry. Also, this darker red is probably crucial for this soda, 'cause it's like Coca Cola or something like that or Pepsi. It's a cola beverage, or maybe it's a doctor Pepper, if you will. Having this little bit of a darker pinkish red, too, allows us to have some variation on this little sad hot dog, right? Alright, I'm gonna color the rest of this in and check back in with you. 7. Making Your Pattern Tile: At this point, you should have all of your different little illustrations colored in and finished on their own separate layers in Adobe Fresco. With everything ready to go, we're just going to use Fresco's built in publish and export options at the top right to send them directly over into Adobe Capture. So you choose Publish and Export, and then you'll see the last option on the left, capture pattern, and this is going to load Adobe Capture, and you will see all of your different layers here as separate elements. You're going to go ahead and select all of them unless you have things that you don't want to bring in to capture. And then once they're all selected, you'll hit the done at the top right. Here, it'll bring it in as like a default setting and just a square, and you won't see all of your elements, but that is okay. I recommend changing this over to freeform grid so that we can move things around and keep things flexible. And then I like to choose the hexagon for my overall shape. Just find it's the most flexible. At this point, it's as simple as selecting individual items and then sort of scaling them and rotating them and moving them around. To find the stuff that is not showing up by default, you're just going to click over on the left, you tap that little shapes icon that'll give you a menu with all of your items, then you can just drag them onto your canvas. Move things around, you'll start to see how it's affecting the overall pattern. As you can see here, having some different varieties of shapes and sizes and proportions really allows you to fine tune this. And you could noodle around with this. I should have put noodles in here, huh? Why didn't we put noodles on the list? The spaghetti? That would be great for this. You can put it anywhere. You can play around with this until you are satisfied. Sometimes this is a quick process for me. Sometimes I noodle for a long time, especially if you've got a lot of elements. Fitting them all in, you know, can be a little bit tricky. I'm gonna mess around with this some more, get it to a spot that I'm happy with. You know, I like my patterns nice and tight. So I'm gonna get this as tight as possible, and then I'll check back in with you. Alright, I'm feeling pretty good about this. I got everything nice and tight. One thing I forgot to mention was we've got an option for background color. You can throw a background color in here. Can be a nice addition to your pattern. Sometimes I will leave this off so that I have the flexibility to change my pattern up after the fact, or I can just throw in different color backgrounds or, you know, have it transparent. So whenever you're satisfied, you can just go ahead and click the save at the top right, and it's gonna save this pattern to your library. It'll then open it up within your libraries. Look at this. You can just zoom out. Look it repeats forever. Can you believe that? It's amazing. From here, you can export the tile itself, or you can export a nice sampling of the pattern to use as, like, a wallpaper on your phone or your desktop or whatever. It'll also stay in your libraries so that you can use it in Photoshop or Illustrator or any of the other Adobe things straight from your library, which I will show you in a minute. 8. Using Your Pattern: Alright, now I'm going to show you some more things you can do with these patterns, especially utilizing other Adobe apps. For example, if you have Photoshop or Illustrator or you're using design. So I'm in Photoshop now. All I'm going to do is go up to the top to Windows and then choose libraries. This is where it would be in any other Adobe app as well. And then you'll see all the different libraries you have. I've got a lot of them. You may not. But I'm going to open up the patterns one. You'll choose wherever you saved your pattern too. And you'll see a little preview of all your little patterns. So the simplest way to use them is to just drag it into your artboard, and you'll see it just applies the pattern there. You may look at that and be like, Hey, that's a lot bigger than I want it to be. All you have to do is double click on the pattern thumbnail and your layers, and then you'll get a little menu where you can control the scale of the pattern. You can control the angle if you want it to be, like, rotated a little bit. You could do all kinds of stuff like this, and it will just repeat infinitely. You can even decide that you want to change where it is in your composition. You can just kind of grab it and move it around, and it'll repopulate the areas where there wasn't a pattern anymore. I told, I'd show you how this could work with some mock ups and how you can make some real looking stuff using Photoshop in the libraries like this. So let's get into it. I got a sample of different mock up files. I got these off of creative market, but, you know, you can find free ones online. You can, you know, make your own doing a little bit more creative photoshop work. But these templates are pretty cheap and work really well. So if you want to make some professional looking real looking product mockups, I don't know, check out creative market or something like that. So we got a T shirt here. Let's say we wanted to see what it would look like if we didn't all over pattern shirt. With these mockup files, you will often have, like, a smart object where you will update that to add your design. So here, it says T shirt design, so I'm going to double click on that, and this just opens up a place where we can put our designs. This is where I'm going to put my pattern. So I'll turn off the example they have there, and I'll just drag this food friends pattern into here, and I will size it the way I want it to be. So I'll just make this a wee bit smaller, maybe like that, and then maybe we'll just, like, throw a slight angle on it. So you just save the smart object, and then we come right back to our shirt file. And would you look at that? We got a cool repeating pattern, sir. I think it's a pretty cool shirt. I got to say. Let's do something else. What if you wanted to see what it look like if it was the cover of a little book or maybe you're making you want to make a sketchbook. We'll do the same thing here, update this artwork, we'll delete their design and put our pattern in it looks cool. I like that. I'd buy that sketchbook. Would you buy that sketchbook? Let's see what it would look like a some straight up wallpaper on the wall. So for this one, I'm just gonna drag it in to where the wall is because it's pretty simple. It's flat. I'll put this in here. Us already looking cool. That looks pretty fun. It's a little loud. Maybe we should try that really simple shape space pattern that I showed as an example earlier on. I think that might be a better solution for this clean modern living space. Look at that. I made that as a mindless little demo just scribble in some random shapes. And I got to say, that looks pretty rad on this wall. Let's Let's adjust the wall color and see if we can make it even cooler. This is what I was mentioning before where you could decide to not have a background color to give you more flexibility as you're using the patterns. So here we could just kind of move stuff around. That's kind of cool. I like it. I could sit there. What about this hoodie? Let's put our shapes on this. So with this one, the smart object thing isn't gonna work because the graphic is in the center of the hoodie, but I'm just going to clip it to the shape of the hoodie, just where the color is. So I'll just click on our pattern layer, and I will go to create clipping mask. And now it's clipped right there. What we can do is just scale this down. That looks pretty neat. I want to wear this hoodie right now. Are you excited? 'Cause I'm excited. I want to make more patterns right now. 9. Final Thoughts: I hope this class has helped you unlock the endless possibilities of creating repeating patterns. Whether you're designing for fun or looking to apply these skills to real world projects, there's so much you can do with what you've learned here in this class. Over the years, patterns have become a big part of my work, and I hope that they will inspire your creative process as well. Don't forget to share your custom patterns in the projects gallery. Seeing what you do will inspire me and your fellow classmates. Plus, it's a great way to get feedback and continue improving. I do my best to get feedback on all the projects submitted into the gallery. So keep experimenting, keep creating, and most importantly, keep having fun. Thanks for joining me, and I can't wait to see the incredible patterns that you've come up with. Okay, bye.