Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Anne Butera. I'm the artist behind the website and blog, My Giant Strawberry. It took me along time to reclaim my creativity and begin learning how to paint. Now I'm passionate about encouraging you to embrace your creativity and to discover your joy. Seeing your own artwork on fabric and on product is such an exciting and satisfying thing. If you would love to create your own repeating patterns using your art, but have no idea how to do that, this class will help you get started. I'll take you through my steps for creating perfect repeats. We will design a couple patterns together. I'll even show you how to upload your designs to Spoonflower so you can have your own fabric, wallpaper or gift wrap printed. So if you're ready to begin learning, I'll see you in the first lesson.
2. How Basic Repeats Work: Before we get started actually creating our designs, I just wanted to show you how repeats work. Taking a look here at one of my butterfly designs, you can see where these large butterflies especially repeat throughout the pattern. When we're designing the pattern, we design just the part that is going to repeat. Here is the block that builds this large pattern. I'll show you another example. Here's my goldfish pattern, here is the simple repeat. Here is the viola pattern we're going to create in a little while, here's the simple repeat. Then we're going to also create, in just a moment, this pattern. But to make up this pattern, we have this simple tile. A pattern that looks like this, it comes from something as simple as this. A good way of visualizing this and thinking about it is imagining that this basic repeat, this square is a tile. Like if you picture a floor tile that you're going to be putting together, here is the pattern that we're going to create in just a moment, the first simple pattern. It's very easy to see with this one. Let me give you a little demonstration. Although this isn't how we build a pattern, it'll help you see how the pattern works. Here is our basic repeat for this pattern. I'm just going to replicate that. You can see this tile is being repeated. The corners are meeting and creating the entire shape. All of the smaller tiles fit together to create the larger pattern. Once you understand that concept, it's a little bit easier to understand the process for putting together your repeating pattern. When you're putting together your repeat, you have to make sure that anything that hangs over the top edge also will hang over onto the bottom edge. The top of this splotch is here, and here is the bottom of this splotch. The same goes for the corners and the sides. Everything that overlaps on one side also overlaps on the other. We'll work through that process in the following lessons. Don't worry, we'll take it slow. If you're ready to get started creating this first simple pattern, I will see you in the next lesson.
3. Creating a Simple Repeat: The first thing you need to do is to prepare your images. For this pattern, I'm using just four little watercolor splotches. What I did was I just scanned images from my sketchbook where it had been mixing colors and isolated them and plopped them down into this Photoshop document. If you need a refresher on how to do that, you can take my first-class about Photoshop called digitize your watercolors, getting started with Photoshop, and I'll show you how to do that. If we go back to our image here, we're going to open a new document. For this document, what I want is 1,200 pixels by 1,200 pixels. I want it to be 300 dpi. I'm leaving it at RGB for the color mode. Say "Okay," when the background is going to be white. Here is our document. Before I start putting any elements in it, it's going to be helpful to add some guides. The way you do that, remember, is to go up to View, and then New Guide. I figured out already how I want my dots to be spaced out in the pattern. This document is four inches by four inches and I'm going to put my guides at one inch mark. Actually I also do want a new guide at the zero mark, because we're going to have things hanging over the edges. I'll show you why that's important in just a moment. We'll just continue putting our guides on the inch, and again on the edge here. Go back and do the vertical guides. Now you have a grid marked out with your guides. When you're making your patterns, you don't always want to be this precise, but it makes it a lot easier if you do want a precise repeating pattern, like a polka dot, or stripes, or something like that to have guides there to line up your imagery. The next thing I'm going to do is start adding my splotches. I'm going to start with this rust colored one, and I have named my layers so I can differentiate what the different images are. There's rust, this one, it's mostly rust, light turquoise. This one is a lighter color turquoise. Turquoise, is this odd shaped splotch. Then rust turquoise is this one that's both rust and turquoise. However, you want to name your layers so you'll know what they are, it's helpful to do that. We're going to start with this rust colored layer, this image, and I'm going to duplicate the layer into my document, here we go. I'm not seeing it because it's probably hanging off the edge somewhere. What I'm going to do is Edit, Free Transform, and there it is. In this square, when it's in the free transform function, that free transform tool, you're going to get points at the corners and the center of the sides. What I'm going to do is line up this dot so that it is hanging over the edge and it's right on this intersection of these two guides. You can see how it's hanging over into this square. I am just going to hit "Return" to carry out that transformation, and there's our first dot. Now, we're going to need this dot to repeat over on this other corner at the top, and also on the bottom corner and this other bottom corner. But I'm not going to do that just yet. I'm going to align my other dots first and we'll go back and add the repeating dots. Don't worry, it's not as confusing as it sounds. Before we go any further, I'm just going to save this file, and let's call it Polka Dots. You can call your files whatever you want as long as it's going to be something that you'll remember. The next one, let's see. We use to the rest. I think I would like to use this light turquoise. I'm willing to go up here, Layer, Duplicate Layer. We'll go to our polka dots file, say "Okay", and here is our little dot. I'm also going to go to the Edit and Free Transform. So I can know that I'm going to align this dot exactly with the intersection of these two guides. I don't want my dots, see there's not enough room for them to be like that. We're going to skip the one inch mark and we're going to go to the two inch mark. When you're figuring out the math for your pattern, sometimes it's going to take you a little experimenting to see, how many inches do I want my document? How far should my images be spaced across the document? Those kinds of things sometimes take a little trial and error. I know that when I'm creating patterns, I often tinker with them for a very long time, and go back and move elements, and rotate them, and change them, and try things a few different ways before I'm satisfied. I'm sure you'll end up doing the same thing with your patterns. Coming back here, what I'm going to do to keep from getting confused is pay attention to the order of my layers over here. That way I know what goes with what and I can easily go in and change things if I need to. I'll show you what I mean once we get a few more layers. I'm going to keep things going from top down. The rust is first, this light turquoise is next, and then underneath we'll do the next polka dot. I'll show you what I mean. Let's see what should we do next. We did the rust, we did the light turquoise. I think I'm going to do this rust turquoise dot next. We'll go here, remember, Layer, Duplicate Layer, choose our document. Come back over here, here it is. Go up to Edit and then Free Transform. You can use the keyboard shortcuts too, Command T on the Mac. I'm going to align this one right here. Actually, I'm going to switch that. I'm going to put this one over here and the other dot over here. I said that anything that's hanging off the edges has to repeat on the other edges. In the center, you can create your repeat however you would like. Since this is a geometric repeating pattern, we're going to repeat in the center, but if you had something like a tossed floral or those butterflies that I showed you, you can arrange things however you want in the center. So let's go back and add our last little splotch. This one is the turquoise one. Go up to Layer, Duplicate Layer, back to our polka dots and here it is. Edit, Free Transform will give you that box around it and we'll put it right here. Hitting "Return" will carry out our transformation. Instead of going directly with a repeat of this first row down here, so then that rust would come here and the light turquoise would go here, I'm going to reverse it. First, let me get our layers in order here. Again, rust here on the top, light turquoise next, and then our next row turquoise, and rust turquoise. It just helps to keep from getting confused and to easily be able to move things around if you can find your layers because you have them organized. The next thing I'm going to do, and we're going to work on this next row, I'm going to take this light turquoise next. Now we can take our layers from directly within this document, duplicate it, say "Okay". If you want to change the name to something that is more meaningful to you, that's fine too. I'm going to go up here to Edit, Free Transform. I'm going to move this here. I want to make this a mirror image of the dot that's up here. I'm going to go here to Edit and then in the Transform menu, I'm going to Flip Horizontal. So it's just going to flip it so that it's a mirror image and then I'm going to align it with these two guides. Hitting "Return" will complete our transformation. This is repeated here in a mirror image. Now one thing I'm going to do that is helpful in terms of organizing our layers, is to group the layers together. This row with the turquoise, and the rust turquoise. See I'm just making the layer invisible. That's how I can check and see which layer is which. I just use a little eyeball toggle and that'll easily confirm which layer I'm using. These two, in this row, I'm going to group together. With this highlighted, I'm going to hold down the "Shift" button, click on the next layer in this row, go here to Layer and then Group Layers. It's also Command G, keyboard shortcut on a Mac. This is group one. I'm going to call this Row Two. I'm not yet going to group this row. I'm going to wait until I add the last dot, and I'll do that in just a moment, so hang on. We've got the light turquoise. What we need next is the rust. We'll go back up here. Remember Layer, Duplicate Layer, I'm going to move this down here. These two are in the same layer. Remember I want to do a mirror image. So we go to Edit, Free Transform, that brings up our little transformation box, and then Edit, Transform, and we'll go to Flip Horizontal. We have a mirror image and then line it up. Hit "Return" and there we go. I'll show you how I will repeat the layers that are hanging over the edges. We'll start with this first row, this corner rust dot. I'm going to do the same duplicating that we did before. Duplicate Layer here. All right. I'm going to move this down, so now we have them in this order and actually you can't see because these are right on top of one another. I'm not going to move it yet. One way to move something and know you're getting it in exactly the right place is if you go up here to Edit and then Free Transform. If you look at these numbers, the x and y axis for your image here, I know that my document, which is four inches wide and four inches long is 1200 pixels. To move this image into place, I'm going to have to move it exactly 1200 pixels. This one is easy, I just add 1200 pixels to point five pixels. So I'm just going to put 1200, and you can see, there it is, moved exactly into this place. Because I have the grid created by my guides, you can also see that it's lining up with the corners, just like that. The corner and that center dot. I could have just moved it into place with the center dot, by using the numbers, I know that it is exactly correct and that my figuring with my guides was correctly figured. If you are not creating a repeat that is perfectly geometric and symmetrical like this, so that you don't have a grid, moving your images in that manner is the best way to go. So what I'm going to do next, I'm going to group my first row. So you can either go up to Layer, Group Layers or use the keyboard shortcut Command G. So I'm going to rename this to row one. So now here's our row one, here's our row two, let's complete row three by repeating this light turquoise we'll go up here to Layer, and Duplicate Layer, and then just like I did with the top, I'm going to go up here to Edit, Free Transform, and this is going to have to move 1200 pixels over. So just like before, with our X-axis, we're going to add 1200 pixels, and there it is precisely in place. Hitting Return will complete your transformation, and so here then, is our row three, which I'm also going to Group, Command G, and I'll name this row three. So now we have three rows done and we're going to do the fourth row. Then the fourth row again, like the first and the third, is going to repeat from the second, but it's going to be the mirror image. I'm going to open up this group and you do that by just clicking on that little arrow, right there, and so here are the two images that are in this row. You can start with this turquoise one, we're going to go up here, Layer, Duplicate Layer, say Okay. Right now, this is in the same group. I'm going to pull it out, so that it's not, and we'll create another group for row four when we're done. Going to go up here, Edit, Free Transform, and we're going to want to move this over here, but we also want it to be the mirror image, so back up to Edit and then Transform and then we're going to Flip Horizontal, and that will give us the mirror image. We'll line it up with the center, and the intersection of these two guides, we'll hit Return, and there you go. Now we're going to do the same with this other image, the rusty turquoise color. Go up here to Layer, Duplicate Layer, say Okay. We're going to pull this one out also and actually that's going to go above the other one because we're going from left to right. So here it is, and we want it to be lined up and to be the mirror image, so we'll go Free Transform, and then we'll also go Transform, Flip Horizontal. You can do it in the other order if you want. Where the center of this image lined up with our intersecting guides, we'll hit Return to finish the transformation, and here we go with row four. So I'm going to close up row two and then I'm going to group row four. Do that Layer, Group Layers or Command G, and we'll call this row four. So now according to our pattern, the next row will be a repeat of row one, exact repeat of it because we've already had our mirror image in row three, and we're going to go back to the original. So I can just do a duplicate group, from row one, change this to row five, say Okay, and we're going to move this into place by going up here to Edit and then Free Transform and we have to move the y-axis by 1200 pixels. So I'm going to add right up here 1200. You see it move into place and you can see that our images are aligning. Here the center is aligned with the center. I'll hit Return to complete the transformation, and now when we look at our pattern, you can see that what is occurring along this edge is repeated over on this edge. So this image hangs over this edge. This image at the top hangs over the bottom edge and this side both on the top and the bottom. So in the next lesson, I'll show you how we can test this repeat to make sure that it is perfect. I'll see you there.
4. Testing Your Repeat: Before we test this pattern, I just want to say a word about the creation of patterns in this way. Creating a repeat with the grid and the similar motifs. The reason I chose to demonstrate creating a repeating pattern with watercolor splotches is because just about all of us have watercolor splotches that we could use for something like this. If you're still getting started painting and you don't have a lot of images to use, this is a great way to practice. I'll show you a couple more of my designs that I created in a grid like this just to give you an idea of the possibilities. I used some of my tomato paintings to create a pocket of tomatoes. I also used some butterflies to create a very simple repeat. This is something that is pretty easy and will give you a really beautiful design. Then let's test this repeat that I just created. To make sure our pattern works, I'm going to go up to edit and then I'm going to define pattern. Our pattern is called polka dots. I'll say okay and then we will take a new document. I'm going to make this one larger here, will make it 2,400 pixels by 2,400 pixels, change the resolution to be the same. Here's our blank document. If we go up here to layer, we're going to create a new fill layer and we're going to use the pattern that we just created, we'll say, okay, here is our pattern. So if we pull this around, we can see there aren't any gaps. There aren't any problems with the pattern at this point. Testing out the pattern, I may look at how it repeats and decide I want to move things around. I don't like how this is kind of creating a stripe of rust and turquoise, and rust and turquoise upon, shake things up a bit. I might move these pieces, but actually I like the way it looks and I like to use these pieces here because they're mirror images and because this shape especially is a earthly shaped, it gives a little movement to the pattern. It's all whatever your personal preference is, what you want your pattern to look like, how you want the finished pattern to work. As I said before, you can definitely tinker as much as you want and come up with all sorts of variations on your pattern but I'm just going to leave this as it is for now and call it finished. In the next lesson, I'll show you how you can take your basic repeating tile and upload it to spoon flour if you wanted to create fabric from your design. See you there.
5. Uploading to Spoonflower: If you wanted to have this printed on fabric by Spoonflower which is the company that I use to print fabric with my designs. You would not use the pattern that you created as a fill layer. You would just use this basic tile. On Spoonflower, when you upload your design you would just upload a single tile. You can't upload a Photoshop document so if we create a new document, I'm just going to Save as change this to a JPEG. I'm going to leave it as Polka Dots, say Save. Say Okay. I'm also going to just save this because I realized I hadn't saved it already once we finished the design. I'm going to go into Spoonflower here is Spoonflower. I'm logged into my account and I'm in my design library right now. I'm going to Upload. I'll show you how this works. choose my file. Let's see. Here's our patterns. Here's the one I just created. The JPEG, we'll say Open. Here it is chosen. Before we can upload it, we have to confirm that we own the rights to it. I check that little box and then I say Upload File. Right now it's uploading my design. It'll take a little bit of time. Now you see here it is, just like we had previewed it in Photoshop. Right now, the repeat is the basic repeat. That's what you want. You can see, if we did a half drop repeat, it wouldn't work because we didn't create our pattern like that. This won't work either. If we center it, that's how it's going to print out. Mirroring it. It looks like a tan line up. Just looks a little different. But what you want is your basic repeat because our file was 300 DPI and we uploaded that size. The minimum size on Spoonflower is 150. We can go smaller. If you wanted to make your design smaller, you can do that. Right now, these are pretty big polka dots but however you want to do it. This is now uploaded in here. The nice thing about having this in your design library is that then you can take a look and see how it would look in different contexts. Here is wallpaper. Here's gift wrap. They also give you the option of seeing what it would look like as a wrapped gift. That's fun to do. Before you're able to offer your items for sale, you have to purchase a swatch to test it. That's just the way it works in Spoonflower, so if you're looking to start designing, that's what you need to do. One more thing I want to mention about Spoonflower is that once you have your design in here, in addition to getting your swatch printed, you'll also want to do a little bit of renaming and tagging. If you wanted to put your design into collections grouped together, that's all up to you. When you upload, it's going to put an underscore between words so you'll want to change that. Let's see, actually I'm going to change it totally. Watercolor SplotchDots. That might not be the best name, but for now we'll call it that. You'll want to write up a description. You may want to give some details about the design. You can add tags. When you suggest something it will give you other words as suggestion. It'll tell you whether your tag is weak or strong. You'll want to do that, you can have seven tags. You can also choose the colors that you want to use to represent your design and you can only have four of them. I'm going to take away this gray and maybe put this brighter turquoise. They don't match up perfectly, but that's just the way it works. It's computerized. Then you can decide whether you want to display it in your public gallery so other people can see it or if you want to sell it. You'll have to have printed a proof first. Now, when you're searching in Spoonflower, you're going to see here are the designs that I have in my design library. You get to choose how your thumbnail displays, so you can choose it as a Fat Quarter, a Swatch or a Crop. Sometimes the Swatch and Crop are the same and sometimes the Swatch and Crop are different. If you chose that as your view, wait until it says Updated. Then that's what people will see when they're searching for designs and your design comes up. The next thing we're going to do is create a slightly different pattern. We're going to work differently. We're not going to have the grid. We're going to use some different motifs a little more sophisticated than these little dots. I will see you in the next lesson and we'll get started.
6. Creating a Tossed Floral: I'm going to demonstrate how I create a repeating pattern with a different sort of design. This time it's going to be a tossed floral, which is just what it sounds like. It's as if I took all these flowers, like the ones here and threw them up in the air and they fell down on the page just however they land. It's springtime here and the violas are starting to bloom in my garden. I love painting them. I have a collection of flowers that I'm going to use that I've painted and I think it'll be a pretty design. Here are the prepared images. Each of the flowers is a single motif and we're going to work in another document just like we did with the other design. For this one, I'm going to make it 1800 by 1800. You don't have to work in a square. You can work in a rectangle that is fine too, but just for simplicity sake for me, in terms of the math involved, it's easier if both axis, the x-axis and the y-axis, up and down are the same size. What I'm going to do is just start adding flowers to our design. I'm going to arrange the sides and the top and bottom first. Then come back and fill in the center. That seems to work well and we'll see how it goes. I'm just going go down the line here and plop the flowers onto our page one by one. We'll do that by Duplicate Layer and adding them to our untitled document, which now I'm going to go up here and save it. They'll call it Biola pattern. Take this little flower. One thing I want to have happened in this design is the flowers all be in different directions. Let's see. Let's start with this one being upside down. This one is going to have to be in all four corners. We'll get there just wait I'll show you how to do that. I'm just going to add this flowers. One thing I'm going to try and do here is keep our layers organized so it's easy to find things if we need to re-arrange. Gets a little tricky later when you're doing the center especially in a pattern like this, because there's not specific rows and columns. Now this little guy, we have one little one here. I'm going to hold off on arranging this one because I don't want to have two small ones in a row like that. Arranging the flowers is a trial and error thing. Moving them around, switching, rotating until they feel right. Now I want to see where this orange flower is going to fall here, on the bottom. I'm going to duplicate it and move this one. This is moving up and down. That's the y-axis. Right now, this layer is at 64.5 pixels. We're going to add 1800 pixels to that. That's pretty easy to figure. I think I'm going to come back. This little guy and put him upside down, but at a slight angle. This is our left edge. I'm going to group all of these layers together to help keep us organized and just to make things a little easier. We go to Layer and then Group layers or use Command G on a Mac keyboard shortcut Command G, it groups the layers. Each of these images as a layer is still here. They're just in a little folder together. I'm going to call this left edge. Makes it easy when we want to duplicate this whole edge and move it over here to this side. We're going to duplicate the group. I'm going to change the name to right edge. Move their arrangement. The right edge group, I'm going to free transform that and move it over. This is the x-axis that we're dealing with here. Moving or adding 1800 pixels to, this was 9.5, so it's 189.5. Here we go. This looks pretty good. We've got both the sides done. Now I'm going to come in and fill in the top. Then we'll do the same thing, will group all of the images and then duplicate them. Here comes our next flower. You can do this in a more precise way if you want to. Planning things out more but it's entirely up to you. Think I like this one just sort of straight up and down. One thing is that we can always go back in and change things if we don't like how it's looking. Or if things don't work, we will test out the pattern. Once we have these flowers in place. Again I'm going to try and keep my layers organized so I can easily find the different motifs. When you're overlapping the edge sometimes it's hard to see what's happening. These three, these are the top edge that we're going to duplicate and move down here. The orange flower is technically in the top edge, but we already have them represented in the sides, so we don't have to worry. I'm going to group these, Command G or Layers, Group layers, whatever works for you. I'm going to call this top. Then I'm going to duplicate that and call it bottom. Then move it down. This one is the y-axis. We're adding 1800 pixels to 162. It becomes 1962. We've got the edges, now we're just going to work on the center. This is a bit of a time-consuming process. I'm speeding up the video so you don't have to watch me take my time placing and moving and rotating. When you're working on your own, definitely take your time, take breaks, step away from your design so you can look at it with fresh eyes. Just know that you have to give yourself time to come up with a good design. I know that may bother me, so I'm going to make this one sideways. We're back to the little sideways one. Then once that one is in the pattern will have each of these images represented. Since we have one of each of these already. I'm going to go and add them in one more time. Possibly more than one more time. If I have an idea of how I want this to look, as I go along, I may end up just duplicating from within this document. Try not to have anything that'll be distracting. If things are the same angle and they're lined up, it could end up looking like a stripe in your design which can be distracting. Also, if everything ends at the same point or begins at the same point, it can give a stripe in your design and again, be distracting. Knowing that we'll probably move things around makes it a little easier. Another thing when you're duplicating images that are already within the pattern, you may want to make a mirror image or change the direction of the image. Again, as I go, I'm trying to keep the layers in some sort of logical arrangement just so it's easier to move around later. I like the idea of this repeating upside down here. These two are parallel. I'm going to come back and change the angle of this one and maybe move it aside a bit. I'm going to do a similar thing here. This one can have it repeated up here but upside down. I may come back and move those. Other than the basic format of sides, and top, and bottom, I'm not doing this design in any logical way. Go with the flow and see how things fall. Now I feel like I want this one to be in the same direction. Oh, no, I want this to be a mirror image. Sometimes I don't really know how something's going to look until I place it in context and see how it reacts with the other images. I'll show you one thing. I did this before. If we can change the angle up here with the free transform, if we want it to be exact. I'm going to make this a mirror image. This is creating an undulating line, which I'm not sure how that's going to work. I'm going to take this one from inside this document so that I have an exact mirror image. Just looking so far, which directions we have what I think, sort of a sideways like that might be good. Then sometimes I'll look at the design and change my mind. Even though these two are similar, I like the way it looks like they're moving. We're getting there. You just have this little spot here, left. At this point, we may want to just look in the design so far. What I mentioned before about things getting a little messy, this is where it happens. We may want to look and see what other colors that we want to include, what do you think it needs, look at it and see. I want to move this one up a little bit. I really like this one and I'm going to move this one to be sideways. This yellow one, that's is in the top edge. Pull it out of there. I'm going to pull it down and flip it like that. These guys are in line more or less. I'm not sure if it's going to be distracting in the repeat or not. I'm going to move it over a little bit. Then we're going to take another one of this side. I'd like one more flower right here. In the next lesson, we will test our pattern and see if it needs any revisions.
7. Testing and Revising Your Design: Let's test this pattern, we'll do it the same way as we did before. We create a new document that is bigger than our tile. Then we'll go up here to Edit, Define Pattern, say, "Okay.", Go to our new document, Layer, New Fill Layer, Pattern, say "Okay." Here is our pattern. Just looking here, you don't really see any problems. But there are a couple things that bug me. We'll take care of them one at a time, and then retest our pattern. This one and these two flowers being end-to-end like that, just sort of bug me. It's this one and this one, one way around that would be to change the angle or turn one of the flowers upside down. I'm thinking I want to turn this one upside down. If I can find this one, it's this one. Just try rotating it, I don't think it fits in there quite as nicely, like that. Hang in there, I've got a plan I think. I'm going to move the one that's underneath there, it's this one. I remember, I didn't like the way those lined up. But another thing I'm going to do then, is switch these and it's this one. I'm not quite sure how that's going to work, but we can easily test this revision by defining this pattern. It's not going to overwrite the other one. When we go in here and get our pattern, going to delete, I'm going to go in here in our pattern library, if we right-click on the old one, it'll let us delete it. Here's our revised pattern. A few things stick out in my mind looking at this. This area here looks a little sparse, and we've got all these stems together. Looking at these two yellow ones that are next to one another, I don't think that works quite as well as I'd hoped. I'm going to take this yellow one, I hope it's this one, and switch that up a little. I'm also going to flip it horizontally, so it's a mirror image of that other one. I'm going to switch these two. Let's see. Going back here, I can fit another flower in, to help with how sparse it's looking. I'm going switch these two first though. Here's this, move it over here, that one. I'm going to change the angle on this one. Then will fit one more over here. Just looking at the image, I'm thinking maybe this one, I hope so. Even though these two are based on the same image, that'll be okay. We'll define our pattern again. Say "Okay." We'll delete that pattern fill, and then layer new fill layer pattern. It's going to pop up with our new pattern going down here, we'll delete our old pattern. Say "Okay". I could probably tinker with this for a long time, but it looks pretty good, we'll leave it like this. If I wanted to upload this to Spoonflower, I'd do it the same way, saving a copy of the file or JPEG and uploading it like we did in the other lesson. Before I talk about the class project, I just want to show you one more thing that will help you with your designing. Right now, this pattern just has the white background, that we created when we were creating our blank document. But you can definitely change the background color. I'll show you how I like to do that to be most flexible. We'd go up to Layer, and then New Fill Layer, and choose Solid Color.Say "Okay." Then you can go in and choose whatever color you want for your background. If you want to have some kind of gray, maybe a pale green. Any color that you think will work for your design, maybe a brown. You can also have variations with different colors. That just gives you one more option for your designs. In the next lesson, we'll talk about your class project. See you there.
8. Your Project: For your class project, you should create a repeating pattern. You can either do something that is designed on the grid using guides that are evenly spaced, or you can create something that is more like this design. It doesn't have to be a floral, you can use other motifs. Create your design. It can be whatever size you want it to be. But when you're ready to share it on Skillshare in your Project section of the class, you're going to want to save it at a lower resolution than you're creating here. When you're in your Photoshop document, you'll go up to File, Save as, and then first we're going to change it to JPEG, and then when you have it saved, you'll take your file back into Photoshop. This is the JPEG image here. You can see up here, you go up here to Image, image size, and you're going to want to change the resolution to 72. Now, I am going to make mine 800 pixels wide. You could also make it a different size, whatever you'd like. This gives just a nice size for viewing on the screen. We'll say "OK". Now this is at 50 percent. Here your document is at 100 percent. That's how large it would look on the screen. Then you'll just upload that file for your class project. If you also want to share a larger view with your repeat, you could create your document with the Fill layer of the pattern and then save it in the same way. Saving it as a JPEG, and then going up to the image size and changing your resolution to 72 DPI or pixels per inch. I'm looking forward to seeing what you create in your class project. Thanks so much for taking this class, wishing you much joy.
Anne Butera, Artist. Instigating creativity and joy.
