Sketches & Brushes to Whimsical Patterns in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. From Sketches and Brushes to Whimsical Patterns in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, sketches and brushes to whimsical patterns in Adobe Photoshop. This is part 2 of my series on whimsical textures and whimsical patterns that you can use in your drawings. In this case, we're going to take it a step forward from creating brushes and actually create some some patterns. We're going to do this by hand, and we're going to do this with brushes, so there's a mix of techniques here. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes to the fact that you would recommend it to others, and then just write a few words about why you enjoyed this class. These recommendations will help other students to see that this is a class that they too might learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so, and do this in either the community area or alongside your class project. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started creating hand-drawn style whimsical patterns in Photoshop. 2. Pt 1 - How to draw patterns: In a few minutes, we're going to have a look at the process of creating some of these patterns using brushes in Photoshop, but you can also start with traditional materials. I have a few pens here. I'm using a big Mark-It, so this is a fairly thick pen and you get about the same effect with perhaps a fine point Sharpie. I also have a Micron as occur a Micron pen here, I'm using a 005, but it's got a slightly damaged tip so it probably draws a little bit thicker than that. But I like them once they've got damaged tips because they're a little bit more flexible. I also have this Stabilo worker. Now, it's a medium point, it's a 0.5 millimeter, and I like that as well. I'm going to get different marks with each of them. When I'm looking for a simple dash mark, I'm going to use the Stabilo worker. What I'm going to do is start drawing out some little dashed lines. Generally, I'm working on the bases so I'm going to throw out the first line or two of these patterns because they're going to be regular. To make it irregular, what I found is that you actually want to impose a little bit of regularity on this. What I'm going to do is put my second line of strokes just offset from the first. I'm not really looking for things to be perfect, I want them to be imperfect. I would continue to do this until I have a range of lines. I would probably be looking for 10 or 15 lines that I could use as a pattern. Some of the other patterns that you can create with, for example, these thicker markers is that you could just create dots, so just coloring dots. These could be far apart or they could be close together. Then to get this whimsical pattern, you're just going to create a second series of dots and then a third series. We're thinking of tossing the first couple of lines and just using the less perfect lines. You find that the more I draw, the less perfect things become. Then start taking on a little bit more character and a little bit more organic style. I would probably fill this page across. I'd be looking for about half a page of this dots. Another line that you can make is actually a circle. You might create a circle that is a filled shapes. Ultimately, we could fill this. In this case, I'm just going to be drawing circles. I'll be pretty careful to make sure I finish off these circles so that they're not open. Although once we get into Photoshop, we will be able to solve the problems if any of these circles are not filled in. Again, same process, I would be creating a number of lines of days. You could do this with these very close together or further apart, just something to give you some textural elements that you can then use later on. The kind of paper I'm using, I'm using a fairly heavy sketching paper. So I just this Esqisse Croquis Canson sketchbooks, but you could use most papers. I'll just want to make sure you're using a good sketchbook, that you place a sheet of paper behind these because you will find that these pens will tend to blade through the pages. Once you've got your pages of illustration created, then you can scan these. I'm scanning them in just a flatbed scanner, and I'm scanning them at 600 DPI. I like to work with scans that are larger perhaps rather than smaller, because it's easy to make things smaller later on, but a lot more difficult to make them larger. I also have an option with my scanner to save my scans as JPEG or TIFF. I use TIFF as the format because TIFF is not a lossy format. I'm not losing any quality in my scans by saving them as TIFF. I'm getting high-quality scans to work within Photoshop. I'll go ahead and scan each of the pages that I have of textures, and then I can open them in Photoshop. I'm going to show you some of the textures that I've actually made. I've got one that is just a series of loops and another one, a series of close filled pen lines. This is a set here of larger or more spread out pen lines, little bend arrows or little bend angles. I've got some dots here. I wasn't very careful about completing the shapes, and that's probably going to bite me a bit when I get it to Photoshop. I have some smaller dots with the finer pen. This would have been done with the Micron, the 0.05 Micron. This one's probably going to be very difficult for you to see because it's just a series of really fine dots on the page. Again, done with this very small Micron pen, so just very faint dots. Then I have one that's made obviously with a thicker pen, possibly with something a bit like this big Mark-It or a Sharpie, and these are heavier dots. Go ahead and make some patterns in a sketchbook or make them using even photo copier paper would be fine. Scan them using a scanner or you could, if you didn't have a scanner, you can always just take a photograph of them, and open that photograph in Photoshop. In the next video, we're going to take these designs and we're going to start making patterns from them. 3. Pt 2 - Clean up the scan: I'm back here in Photoshop and I've opened up my scans and we're going to work on this one first, but it's upside down. I can just choose Image, Image Rotation, 180 degrees to turn it up the right way. I'm going to crop it. In cropping it, what I want to do is to crop away the edge of the paper. But I want to make sure that I'm going to have enough room for my pattern. What I'm looking for is for the distance between this top row of dots and the crop area to be about half the space that there is between this dot and this dot. I don't want to make it too big, but I don't want it make it too small. It's pretty easy to overestimate where it needs to be. I'm going to go a little bit closer because I know that I have a pretty poor eye for this. Same thing here, this leftmost row of dots, I want to be close to that so that the distance between this dot and the crop is about half the distance between these two dots. We're going to do that all the way around. I'm going to complete my crop. I'm going to turn my background layer into a regular layer, and recent versions of Photoshop, just click on the lock icon. In earlier versions of Photoshop, double-click on this layer and just press Okay. I'm going to use the magic wand tool to select and delete the white because I want to be able to put a different color perhaps underneath my pattern. I'm going to set a sample size of three by three average. What that means is that when I click, Photoshop is going to average out the nine pixels under this cursor and it's going to match colors to the average color that it sees there. Tolerance is going to allow us to choose how many pixels close to this white color that we're about to click on are going to be selected. The higher the tolerance value, the more pixels will be selected, and the highest value is around 256. If you think that perhaps a higher value would be better than a lower value, let's just test it. When I click a high value, you can see that we're eating into these dots. In fact, we're going to destroy most of these dots in the process because these aren't really dark pixels. I'm just going to undo that. In fact, high tolerance of around 10 or 15 is plenty for this image. I have Contiguous deselected, that means that if there are some little spots in the middle of these dots that are white, then they can be selected and deleted. It's up to you whether you want to delete them or not. Contiguous when it's deselected will ensure that they can be deleted. If you don't want to delete them, then select "Contiguous" because that means that only areas that are adjacent and connected to each other can actually be selected. I'm just going to disable it. I'm going to click once on the white background to make my selection and press Delete. These are the dots that I'm left with, so I'll choose Select, Deselect, or press Control D, command D on the Mac. I'm going to add a layer beneath this layer so we can check it out. I'll hold the Control command K on the Mac and press the icon here to add a new layer. I'm just going to add a pale blue background, the background that I might actually use in a document that I might want these dots to be placed over. The color is my foreground color so I will press Alt backspace on the PC that would be option Delete on the Mac. When we come to create this as a pattern, if we want to get rid of these gray areas around our dots, what we would do is go to our pattern layer and just set it to something like either Darken or Multiply, and that will darken the pixels here. We get a slightly better results. That's the look that we're going for. For now, I'm just going to make my pattern using normal blend mode. We've got a series of dots here and they've been isolated, so they're on their own layer, just the dots, no background. But we need to make a seamless pattern out of it. We're going to have to adjust this document to get a seamless pattern paste from it, we'll do that in the next video. 4. Pt 3 - Make Your Pattern: To create our seamless pattern, we're going to need to know how big this document is. I'm going to choose image and then image size. It's huge. It's 2,275 pixels by 1,348 way too big for a pattern. I'm going to make this 1,000 pixels, and that makes the height 593. Now, it's going to be a little bit inconvenient to me that the height here is actually an odd number. What I'm going to do is click to unlock these two values. The height at the moment is 593, but you know 600 is only seven pixels away from that. I'm not going to get a lot of distortion if I type 600 in here. What I will generally do is just round up to a nearest biggest figure that's going to be a little bit easier to work with and I'll click "OK". Now, if you need to know the dimensions of your document, or you will need to know the dimensions of your document when you go to make a pattern out of this. What I like to do is go to this area down here and just click this arrow and set document dimensions to be turned on. That way I don't have to remember how big it is because I can just read it off the bottom of the window here. What we need to do at this stage is to use the offset filter on this layer here. We're just going to target this top-most layer. With the offset filter, what we're going to do is we're going to enter into the filter, half the width and half the height of the document. The width and height are down here. Half of 1,000 is 500, half of 600 is 300. Just dividing by two is all we need to do. With this layer selected, I'll choose "Filter", "Other", "Offset". The horizontal value is the larger of the two, so I'm going to type 500 in there and the vertical value half of the height is 300 and I'll just click "OK". This is what my pattern is looking like right now. I'm a little concerned that I think I didn't crop it close enough. I'm getting a gutter through here and a bit of one through here. I'm just going to choose "Edit", "Undo". I'm going to crop it a little bit closer. Now, if you've got snap turned on, you're going to find that things are going to snap a lot. You can just go to view snap and turn snap off. It's a little bit easier for you to drag on this crop rectangle particularly since we're pretty close to this shape, but just not quite close enough. I'm just going to run that as a crop and click the check mark. Now, let's go and resize the image, "Image", "Image Size". At the moment it's 985 by 585. Well, I'm going to make my 985, 980, and my 585, well, I'm just going to make that 590. Just a couple of pixels, half a dozen pixels, a little bit larger or smaller and the image is going to be just fine, but we're going to get numbers that we can easily divide. I'll click "OK". Now, let's go back to our Offset Filter, "Filter", "Other", "Offset". The width is 980. Half of 980, if you can't do it yourself in your head, just go and grab a calculator. You have on your computer, 980 divided by two, it's 490. We're just going to type 490 in here. The vertical value, well, it says down here it's 590. Let's take 590 and divide by two. It's 295. We'll just type 295 and click "OK". Now we don't have the problem across the document. We've got a little bit of a hole in here, but that's going to be really easy to fix. What I want to do is put a couple of dots in here. I'm going to the clone stamp tool. I'm going to set the clone stamp tool to normal with the opacity at a 100 percent that's really important. I'm going to use a hard brush. I'm going to select this hard brush and I'm going to turn sample from all layers into just current layer because I don't want to sample the blue underneath, but I do want to sample the black. I'm going to look for a dot to replace this one with, so I'm going to go for a dot that's fairly distant away from it, so it's not too obvious that I've used it as a patch job. I'm going to "Alt", or option "Click", if I'm on a Mac on the dot to sample it and just click once to paste it in or to paint it in. I'm going to take this one up here, so I'm holding the Alt key on a PC, option on a Mac, clicking wants to sample that dot and now I'm just going to paint it in. I think I want one down here and I want a pretty small one. Let's go and get this one, "Alt", click to sample it, option "Click" on a Mac and let's just put the little dot in there. You don't want to overdo it, but you do want to fill in any obvious gaps. You also don't want to touch anything around the edges here. The fact that these are running into the edge, just leave them there. You don't want to tidy them up because half of this dot is over here and half of this dot is down here. It's all perfectly aligned if you've done your offset filter correctly. I'm going to turn off the color layer behind because I want to make my pattern out of just this layer. I'll choose "Edit", "Define Pattern". I'm going to call this dots and click "OK". Now, let's go and see how it works. I'm going to choose "File", and "New", and I'm going to create a big document. This one's going to be 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels, and it's currently set up for a white background, so I'm just going to leave that and I'll click "OK". I can replace my white background with the current foreground color by pressing "Alt", "Backspace" option "Delete" on a Mac. Now, let's create a layer with our pattern. I am going to choose "Layer", "New Fill Layer", "Pattern", and I'll click "OK". The last pattern that I created, which is the one that we just made, is now used to fill this document. I'm just scaling it at a 100 percent, but you can scale it to whatever size you like. You can go really large or really small. That's why I like this particular pattern fill option because it gives me the flexibility to scale my pattern after I've created it and when I'm placing it inside my document. I'll just click "OK", and there we have our pattern and it's erratic, it's not an even pattern. It wasn't supposed to be that, it's supposed to have that sort of whimsical, imperfect look to it. 5. Pt 4 - Recolor your pattern: Now that we have our seamless pattern of dots, let's have a look and see what we're going to do if we don't want black dots, if we want something else. On a Mac, you're going to choose a tool that is not a brush tool, so something like a marquee tool, is a great tool to choose. On a PC, it doesn't matter at this point. You're going to choose from this Blend Mode list here, the first of the Blend Mode, which is dissolve. It doesn't do much, but it gives us a good start for navigating this Blend Mode list. On a Mac, press "Shift and the Plus" key or "Shift Minus" to navigate through the list. On a PC you're just going to press the "Up and Down" arrow keys and you're going to run through this list to see if you get a blend between the dots and the layer below that you actually like. Screen is always going to give us a lighter result. Multiply always a darker result. This is Color Dodge, Linear Dodge. We're just going to run through this to see what affects we might be able to achieve by just blending the black dots in with the layer below. This is Hard Mix, always a really good choice here. I want to look at this Blend Mode, it's called Divide. It was added in CS5, so if you're using CS4 or earlier, you're not going to have the Divide Blend Mode. But this is actually making these dots white. So if you want to turn black into a white, just go straight to the Divide Blend Mode, and that will do it here. If you're working on CS4 or earlier, we'll have a look in just a second as to what you could do. Let's just continue through these Blend Modes. This is hue, saturation. When we get to the bottom of the list on a PC we're going to have to press the "Up arrow" to go back up, on a Mac keep pressing "Shift Plus" and you'll continue to roll around the list. Let's have a look at CS4 and earlier people. You're going to use the Screen Blend Mode, that's good choice for you and then add an adjustment layer. What you're going to do is choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, and then click Invert". Click "Okay". Right now, this invert adjustment layer is affecting both layers but if you want to affect just the lab below, which has the pattern layer, then you're going to click on this "Invert layer" here and choose "Layer", Create Clipping Mask and that's going to give you your white pixels. So that's an option if you're using CS4, CS3. If you're using CS5 or later, you're going to get this effect by just choosing the Divide Blend Mode. Having done that, let's go back to our normal Blend Mode and let's look at the situation where we actually want to color these pixels. We don't want white, but we want to choose a color. For example, a yellow. This is what we're going to do. Layer, New Fill Layer, Solid Color. Click "Okay", and we're going to select the color to use. I'm just going to choose a pink color. Now if your color picker doesn't look like mine, just click on these icons here because each one of these makes the color picker look a different way. If you want to use this option, just click on "H". Doesn't change anything except the way the color picker looks. So if your color picker decides to take off on you and change the way it looks, then you can just click on this option buttons to get it back. I'm just going to choose a pink and click "Okay". Like that previous effect where we were using the invert, this color fill is just going straight across the top of everything. So what we want to do is to clip it to the pattern fill. With the color fill selected, we'll choose Layer, Create Clipping Mask, so now it's just affecting the layer below. With the normal Blend Mode, this is the effect that we're going to get, but you could also try some other Blend Modes, so you may want to try Lighten, Screen or even something like Linear Dodge, might give you an interesting effect. But there are plenty of Blend Modes there that you can also use to try and blend this color fill layer in with the layer below, but you can also just use normal. That's a way of turning your pattern into an any color pattern. You can make it any color that you like. 6. Pt 5 - Working with hollow shapes: This time let's have a look at a pattern that has a couple of other things going on that it's time to address. One of them is at the way it's being drawn and cropped. You'll see that when we go to create this as a pattern, this dot here and this dot here are going to be placed close to each other. But you can see that they're already very close to each other. So I've actually got more dots than I need and this is not going to repeat very well at all. What I'm going to need to do is to carve off the edge of this pattern a little bit better. So I'm going to the crop tool, I'm going to just bring this in here. When we create this as a pattern, this dot here and this dot here are going to end up next to each other. So that's looking pretty good. We might need to work this dot around a little bit, but we've got this dot here is going to line up over here. This dot here is going to line up over here. You can see that we actually ended up with more patterns than we need. It's actually going to cause us a lot of problems when we go to create this using the offset filter site. I'm going to carve this off and this is going to work much better when I use the offset filter. The other thing is that this was designed as a pattern that would have circles with little white bits in the middle. The trouble is that when I go to use the magic wand tool on this, there are some open circles. We're going to need to deal with this. What I really want out of this is a pattern of black shapes with white in the middle. So let's see how we would do this. First of all, we're going to turn the background layer into a regular layer. However, it is that your version of Photoshop works. We're going to use the magic wand tool. We're going to use exactly the same settings as we used before, but we're going to select contiguous because where I can, I want to save this white bits in the middle. I'm going to click once on the background here to select the area that I want to delete. I'm going to press Delete. Now I'm going to put a layer beneath everything, so I need to deselect my selections. I'll just choose Select Deselect or Control D or Command D on a Mac, I'm going to hold the Control key on a PC Command on a Mac as I click on this New Layer icon to add a layer beneath everything. I'm going to fill it with a color. Again, just the lightish blue. This blue color is my foreground color so I'll press Alt backspace on a PC, option delete on a Mac to fill the layer with this blue color. We can say now which of these dots has white in them and which of them don't. So I'm going to add another layer between these two. I'm just going to select the bottom most layer and click the New Layer icon because that adds a layer between the two. I'm going to select the brush tool. I'm going to switch to white. I'm going to select a hard brush, and I'm just going to make sure that I size it appropriately. So it doesn't want to be very big at all. I'm going to zoom in to where the problem areas are, which is where any of these little circles don't have fills in them. Making sure I'm on this layer here and with my brush, I'm just going to paint in the missing color. I'm doing this on a layer below because it means I don't have to be too careful with my paint. I'm effectively using the black outline to mask out the edges of my painting. I'm holding the space bar, which is allowing me to move the image around so I can easily see where the missing areas are. When I think I've got everything Control zero to go back out. So now we've got a pattern of black hand-drawn circles and white fills. 7. Pt 6 - Make and Edit your Pattern: Now we've got hand-drawn circles and they're fill. We can go and merge these two layers together. We're going to click the topmost layer. We can right-click and just choose Merge Down. We don't want to merge into the bottom layer, unless you actually want your pattern to have a fixed blue fill. If you want your pattern to be transparent so that you could use it over any background at any time, you won't want to merge it into this color area here. Let's just check our size. So I'm going to choose Image, Image Size, and again, this is a really big document. So I'm just going to size it down there. First of all, I'm going to lock these two together, because I wanted to scale in proportion at least at this point. So I'm just going to make it 1,200, and in actual fact, the height comes down to 1,072. So that's a pretty good value. If you wanted to set it to something a little bit easier to do the math on, you could just make it, for example, 1,080. Now, I need to be careful a little bit on re-sampling, which I haven't been, but let's just do that. When we're re-sampling because we're reducing the size, we're going to choose Bicubic Sharper, and I'll click "Okay". I still have my dimension showing up down here. Let's go and do our offset filter. First of all, we're going to make sure that we're on the layer that we actually want to run the filter on, which is this topmost layer, and we'll choose Filter, Other, Offset. Again, we're going to set the horizontal and vertical to half of the dimensions of this document. It's 1,200 in width, so I'm going to make this 600, and the vertical height is 1,080, so I'm going to make this 540. I've got wraparound selected, I'll click "Okay", and this is our pattern, paste. Now we're looking for anything that just doesn't look right, so any place that we may want to fill in this pattern, and I honestly don't think that this is going to need any filling. I think it's going to make a really nice repeat pattern just as it is. I'm going to turn off the bottom most layer, the color fill layer, and I'm going to choose Edit, Define Pattern. Now let's go and test it. File, New, I'm going to test it on a large size document, 2,000 by 2,000 pixels in size. I'll click "Okay". I'm going to fill this layer with my current foreground color or backspace on the PC, I'd use option delete on the Mac. To add a new pattern layer. Layer, New Fill Layer, and we're going to choose Pattern and click "Okay", and our pattern is going to be the one that's selected. All we need to do is to decide how we want to scale it. I'm just going to make it a little bit smaller so we can say how it is repeating, and this is a really nice little pattern. But of course, if you had to look at this repeat and decided that you wanted to edit the pattern a little bit, you can always go back to the document that you created the pattern from, and what you can do is move things around. I've got this last selected, the layer with all the dots on it selected, and say, I want to move this dot over a little bit. Well, I'm going to select over with just the elliptical Marquee tool. I'm going to switch to the Move tool, and I'm just going to drag this dot into a new position, and because we're just moving the dots around, not the background, we can continue to do that. So you can just adjust the positioning of these if you think that they need a little bit of work, and you can always make a duplicate of a shape, so you can select over a shape. Let's go and grab this one here. To edit copy and then edit paste. Of course, you can use the shortcut case for that if you want to. Switch to the Move tool so you can say where the shape is and just go and grab that, and you can use it to fill in an additional spot if you want to. Once you've done that, you want to merge this down, just right-click and choose Merge Down. Turn off the background so that you just have this layer selected, and you're going to choose Edit, Define Pattern, go back to your document here, double-click on the pattern layer. You're going to select now the last pattern, because that will be the pattern that you just created, and just click "Okay", and it's updated with this new pattern. You can edit it on the fly if you need to. Once you've got your patterns settled, of course, then you're ready to use it in a project. 8. Pt 7 - Turn Brushes into Patterns: Now if you took my last class on whimsical drawing, you know that we made some interesting hand-drawn looking brushes where you can create patterns from them as well. I'm going to choose File New and make a document that's 500 pixels by 500 pixels. I wanted to be a reasonable size. This is going to be my pattern. I'm going to fill it with a background color that I can just work against. I'm just using an orange here. I'm going to add a new layer to this document and we're going to paint with it using the brush from the previous class. Now if you didn't watch that class, I'm going to give you a link to it in the class project area. I'm not going to show you how to make the brush because we did that in that class, but what we're going to do is go and use the Brush Preset that we created. I'm going to choose Brush Preset. This is the Brush Preset that we created for the hand-drawn dashed line. It's already sized up to 75, which I think is going to be a pretty good size for this. But I do want to paint in black, so I'm going to press the letter "D" to get my default colors. What I'm going to do here is just zoom out a little bit just so I can see the work area. I'm just going to go to my brush and I'm going to start painting now. I'm going to start painting off the edge here. But my first row, I'm going to make sure that everything is just inside the top of this document. I'm going to click and then "Shift" click. If anything goes over the top, I'm just going to undo it and try again. Just moving down a little bit. Click, "Shift" click. Just want to make sure everything's inside there and if it is, I'm good to go. Again, click, "Shift" click. Not worried about things over the edge. In fact, I do want things pretty close to the edge here. If things overlap, you can just press "Control" "Alt Z" to just undo them. With this last row, again, I want to make sure that nothing is going over the bottom edge of the artboard. Now, I think that this is a little bit too far away from the bottom edge of the artboard. I'm just going to crop it a little bit closer. But again, making sure that the top and the bottom are intact. I'm not worried about what's happening down the sides because I crop something off this image, I just need to check my height and width. Well, it's even numbers, so I'm pretty happy with that. Now I'm going to go and do my offset filter. Making sure that this top layer is selected, I'll choose Filter, Other, Offset. Again, the same rules apply. All we're going to do is to divide the width and height of the document by two, and put those values in here. The document is 500 pixels wide, half of 500 is 250. It's 482 pixels tall. Half of 482 is 241. Just type 241 and click "Okay". Now, the areas that we get to fix are the problems down the middle here. We're not going to touch anything on the sides at all. That's really important. I'm going to wipe out this one. I'm going to Erase tool. I'm selecting a circular eraser hard edge. I'm on the layer that has these marks on them. I'm going to take this one out. Now because it was overlapping, it's going to have a component piece or a matching piece down here, and I want to get rid of it as well. I want to get rid of these spaces that are causing problems here too. I'm going to go all the way up the document, just removing the fractional pieces that I've got here. I'm using a hard edge brush because that's going to make it easier for me to get rid of these shapes. I don't want anything left behind of these. Now let's just zoom back out. I'm going back to my Brush tool. I still have black selected, and I'm going to fill in these gaps. Now if I get a brush that is not the right size or I don't like, I'll just press "Control" "Alt Z" and just put down another brushstrokes. Control Alt Z, and try a different brush stroke. The brush settings are all still there, so it should work just fine. Now with this one, I can say that I could safely put in a shape here. I don't want it to overlap the top of the document here, but I'm going to put it in just there. I think it will work with that pattern. If there was anything else that's causing your concern, you can erase it. If we didn't like this one, we could just erase it, switch the Brush tool by pressing letter "B" and replace it with something that we do like. But let's see how our pattern is going to go now. This is all ready to go, so I'm just going to turn off the background layer. I'm going to choose Edit, Define Pattern. Now let's go and test it. File, New, create a document that's big enough for us to actually see the pattern at work, to see how it looks. Mine is 2,000 by 2,000 pixels. I'm going to fill the background with a color. We're going to choose a different color to the one we were using previously. Then we're going to do a pattern fill layer with layer. New Fill Layer, Pattern, click "Okay." The pattern that is being used is the one that we just created. I'm going to just click "Okay." If you see problems with the pattern at this stage, again, you can just go back to the original document and work out what you need to do to make changes to it. I think that this is the big gap, this line across here. We could just wipe out all of this line if we wanted to. I'm just going to the eraser here. Let's just erase out this whole line. Let's go back to our Brush tool press the letter "D." I'm going to be careful that I don't go over the edge here, but I can go close to the edge. I'm just going to put in a line that is a little bit better spaced than perhaps the one that we had in the pattern previously. Let's go and remake that as a pattern. Edit, Define Pattern. We'll go back to the document we're working on. Let's double-click on this pattern layer, and we're going to just select the very last pattern, which is the new one that we create. You can say the spacing is a bit better on that and click "Okay." Any of the brushes that we made in the whimsical drawing class can also be created as repeating patterns watches in Photoshop using this process. You just going to put down a series of those marks and then you're going to make it into a pattern using the exact same processes if this was a hand-drawn pattern. 9. Pt 8 - Using the patterns: Now that we've gone ahead and created all of these patterns, we're going to have a look at a practical situation, where we could use them to color a piece of art. I'm going to give you the download link for this particular piece of art, but if you want to use your own, that's fine. What I suggest you do, is to make sure that any of the areas that you want to fill with a pattern are trapped, so you make sure that they've got a solid line around this area. It's going to make things a lot easier to select. Although we're going to see how you could make a selection even if an area is open. Now this image that I'm going to give you is just a scanned image. We're going to have to clean it up to start off with. Again, I'm going to the Magic Wand tool, I want to make sure that contiguous is not selected. I've got a tolerance of 20 here, I'm just going to click on the white area here, so I can select it and delete it. I'm just going to press Delete. You'll, of course want to make sure that your background layer has been converted into a regular layer before you do that. I'll choose Select, Deselect, that would be Control D on the PC, Command D on the Mac. I'm going to hold the Control key on a PC, Command on a Mac and click on this icon here to add a new layer at the bottom of the layer stack. White is my background color, so I'll press Control Backspace if I'm on a PC, Command Delete on the Mac to fill the background layer with whites. We've got our art isolated to allow all by itself, it's just going to make it a lot easier to work with. Now if you have a piece of art and it's not as clean as this one is, this is how you can clean it up. You're just going to click the effects icon and click Stroke. You're going to add a red stroke to your art. You're going to make sure it's on the outside and click OK. That's going to make it really obvious where you've got excess pixels. You're going to select a small hard brush, it needs to be 100 percent hardness, it needs to be quite small. You're just going to click on the top of any of these circles that are indicating that you've got pixels underneath that have dots in them, and you can see that you've got uneven lines. Now generally, what will happen is that you'll have lots of dots all over your document and you just want to clean those up. This one is actually pretty clean, so there's not much I need to do. If you want to see how that's done in a little bit more depth, I'll link it to a class. We're actually going to this process quite detailed to show you how to do it. But that'll be in the class project area. But for now, we've got our art on a separate layer. What I want to do, is to start with the background wall here. I'm going to click on the Magic Wand tool. This time, I am going to select contiguous because I want to select everything that is outside this art. I'm just going to click here once. Now up here, I'm going to select the rectangular marquee talks, I want to take off a piece at the bottom of the artwork. You've got a lot of icons up here and the one you want is this one. It's Subtract from selection. When you click on that, anything that you select now is going to be subtracted from the selection. What I'm going to do is select or remove the bottom part of this image. What we've got selected is what would be conceivably the wall behind this couch. Now we need to apply a pattern to it. We're going to choose Layer, New Fill Layer, Pattern, click OK. The last pattern that I made is going to be used here, but I don't want that pattern. I'm going back to filled dots here. I'm going to select that pattern, and then I'm going to adjust the scale. I think I want it to be about 30 percent, and I'll click OK. Now this pattern has some transparency in it. If you remember it, it is a circle with a white dot in the middle, but the rest of this is transparent, which means that we can drop in a color behind it. I'm going to select the layer immediately below this one. I'm going to choose Layer, New Fill Layer, Solid Color. I'm going to select a color to use. Right now I'm ignoring what's happening on the screen because there's obviously a problem with the image having disappeared, I'm just looking at the color. I'm just going to make that a little bit lighter. I'll click OK. What we want to do is to borrow this mask for this layer. Because we've got a mask here that's masking the pattern really nicely. You can see the pattern is going in the right place. Well, we want the color to go in the same place as the pattern. We can borrow this mask by holding the Alt key on a PC, Option on a Mac, and just drag and drop the mask on top of the other mask and click Replace Layer Mask. Alt or Option Drag lets you copy the mask. Now we've got the background here, nicely filled in. Let's go to the couch. I'm going to select this layer that's got our artwork on it. I'm going back to the Magic Wand tool. I'm going to make sure that contiguous is selected because I want to select just this area in here. This time I'm going to hold the Shift key, which is the same as clicking here on this icon to add to the selection. I'm going to add this piece of the couch, and then click on the seat of the couch. Now I've got the couch selected, but not the cat and not this scarf thing hanging over the back. Again, Layer, New Fill Layer, Pattern. I'm going to choose a pattern to use. In this case, I'm going to choose my dark dot pattern, this one here. Again, I'm going to scale it down to what I want it to be, thinking about 75, maybe 50 percent here. Click OK. I'm going to do the exact same thing to color the couch. I'm going to click on the layer immediately below this layer, choose Layer, New Fill Layer, Solid Color. We're going to ignore what's happening on the screen. I'm just going to pick my color, click OK, and then Alt on a PC, Option on a Mac. Just drag this layer mask over the top of the existing one and replace it. Now this point, if I don't like the color, it's really easy to fix. Because I'm just going to double click on this icon and I can just start dragging around my color picker and I can see the entire image as I'm working on it. Now, I'm going to go forward and color a few more pieces of this, and then we're going to come back and talk about how we're going to deal with a pattern paste. That actually has some white in it, it's actually been made with a white background. But for now, I'm just going to speed up the video while I finish the floor and the carpet here. Now at this point where I want to select the floor, I'm forced to select the floor and the wall, but what I'm going to do is exactly what I did the last time when I selected the wall, but I'm going to do it in reverse. Again, I'm going to the rectangular marquee tool. I'm going to select the subtract option, and I'm just going to select either the area that I want to subtract from this selection. That just gives me the floor. Now of course you don't have to fill everything with a pattern, if you wanted to, you could just fill the floor, for example, with a solid color. But I think I'm going to use a pattern. Remembering of course, that you can also use blend modes to blend these layers together. Let's look at the special situation of the shawl that's over the couch. Again, I'm going to select this area and I'm going to fill it with a pattern. I've made knitting stitch pattern here. I'm also going to apply a color to this, so I'm going to the layer immediately below, and I'm going to choose a color. Right now, I'm not going to say anything because the layer above the pattern has white in it. I'm just going to bring down the mask though. It's all masked and ready. What I can do here, is just again, use a blend mode on this pattern. I'm actually going to make the stitches white. I'm going straight to my Divide blend ode, which of course is going to work on Photoshop CS5 and later. If you're working on an earlier version of Photoshop, then you could perhaps do something like screen, and then do that in the layer over the top. But this's how you can go ahead and use the patterns that you've created to recolor a piece of art. Of course you can use not just the patterns, but you could also go and use the brushes that we made in the previous class and use a combination of those with your art pieces. The beauty of this is that all of the colors are on separate layers, and so if you don't like a color that you've used, you can just double-click on the fill color option here and just go and select another color. I really like these fill layers, I just think that they're just so smart in terms of allowing you to change the colors live. You can actually just drag around and see what it looks like in situ, and then just click OK, much better than just creating a layer and just dumping the paint in it. These fill layers really are a better option. 10. Project and Wrapup: Your project for this class is to go ahead and create a series of patterns and show me an example of these patterns in the class project area. You can use them to fill a image that you have drawn, or you can download my image and use that, you're most welcome to do that. Post an image that includes one or more of your patterns as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and you've learnt some additional things about creating whimsical patterns in Photoshop using either scanned sketches or brushes that you've made. As you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt to recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed and are learning from this class, answer yes when prompted to recommend this class. If you'd write just a few words about why you enjoy the class, that will help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so, I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.