Lessons

Lesson Info

Seamless Pattern Design

we're going to talk about designing a seamless pattern. We've made patterns already so far. We made that glitter picture into a pattern that we used to create a glitter effect. We just In the last segment, we used patterns to define the, uh, area to place the logo in a image that we then batch and automated. But within this one, we're going to create a seamless pattern. So the difference is going to be that a seamless pattern can be scaled down and replicated seamlessly. As the name suggests across whatever you want. And because it's seamless, it can fill any amount of space that you needed to fill. So it's a lot of fun, and it's a pretty cool thing, and I think the process itself is kind of interesting. So we're going to create a pattern. Then we're going to take that pattern and use it to create a print design like a poster kind of print. Then we're gonna take that print design, and we're going Teoh, um, mock it up and actually put it into a frame so it looks like we've printed it an...

d framed it, and we have a beautiful apartment and then we photographed it. Okay, so this is really handy stuff. If you are at all, I think you would ever be interested in designing textile stuff. Or if you're interested in mock ups, we'll be doing several different mock ups so you can learn how to take your digital designs and maketh, um, look as though they exist in the real world. So it's a great way to highlight them, showcase them and sell them ultimately. All right, so to do all of these things, how do we start? Well, we're going to be creating this pattern that is rather large. So when you create a pattern file, you have to think about the size that you're creating it and ultimately what you might want to use it for, because if you created at a small size, you can't scale it up as high as we saw when we did the nineties type thing, we filled it with that checker pattern that was created specifically for the web. So it was a very small pattern file, and, um, we sort of bent the rules there to make that work in that peace we were using. But most of the time you wouldn't want to take something. Certainly if we were going to create a design and put it on a shirt or some textiles, whatever. We We want to make sure that it can actually appear and be rendered as large as we need it to be. So I'm gonna create this file to be pretty big. Then we can always size it down. So we're gonna start by creating a new blank documents. I'm gonna choose file new, and this takes a lot of experimentation because how do you know exactly what size you needed to be? It's a little bit of like try it, tested out, see how it works and maybe go back to the drawing board and then make some changes. But in this case, I've fiddled around with it enough that we're gonna create a document that will be eight inches by eight inches, aunt, a resolution of 300 pixels per image. Okay, so that's gonna be our tile are singular pattern piece will be that big, and then it could be repeated. So that's a pretty good size. I mean, you could, like, have that printed onto fabric and make drinks out of it or something. But we'll go ahead and, uh, click create. So now we just have this blank document. So what are we gonna put in here? Well, I happen to have a file that I've, um, got ahold of and included the link to download. It's a free file, but I couldn't distribute it, so Oh, and it's an E. P s file. So my computer wants to open it with illustrator. We're just fine if you have illustrator, but you don't have to. So that's what happened. I double click this and it said, Hey, look, illustrator grabbed it. But you can open GPS files with photo shop, and I'm going to show you that. So to change that, to open it instead with Photoshopped, I'm gonna right click on this. And instead of choosing open, I'm gonna choose Open whip, right click or control click. That was then we'll come over here and you'll notice that this is the default. But I want to open it with photo shop CC, so I'll click that. And here is something interesting that will hopefully make more sense now than it would have before the last segment. It's asking too. Rast. Arise this E P s file. So E. P s is a file format that stands for encapsulated post script for all you trivia junkies and still waiting to end up on jeopardy or something where I can win with that answer or question. But eso that's an E. P s format. E P s is a format that is used to output vector information for the most part. So you may find that if you are downloading digital assets and getting them from different places, you may find a lot of UPS files you don't have to have. Illustrator. You can open them in photo shop, but in photo shop, it wants to rast arise it. That means converted into pixels. Now, the cool thing is that because it's these pixels that were about to get are being born from a vector file when we open it and converted into pixels, we get to tell Photoshopped how many pixels we wanted to have. So we're starting with the vector file. We can choose anything we want here. So in this case, I'm just going to tell it. I want this file to be 15 inches wide at 300 pixels prints. That's pretty big. I figure that's big enough to use these elements the way I want in the design. So great. So I'll click. OK, so here it's opening the file, and it's an E. P s file that is now converted. Teoh. Uh, just pixels. So I can't. It's all just one layer. I can't just grab any of these pieces and do something. I have to cut them out. Say, this is pixels now. So what I'm gonna be doing is using the lasso tool someone to come over here and grab the lasso tool in, and I'm going to select Let's say this piece right here. So with the lasso tool, I'll just click and drag around this to make a loose selection. And I could be sloppy about it because, um, there's nothing else on this layer. When I've got that selected, I'll copy it, Commander Control, see? And I'll move over here and Commander Control v to paste that it. So this is again. It's no longer vector, but so we can't like, scale it up. But if we dragged us in and we decided we wanted something bigger, we could just go back to the E. P s file and close it, reopen it and just Rast arise it to a bigger size if we needed it. But I think this will work. So I'm going to grab my move tool and position this here, this is going to become the pattern. So what I want to do is designed something that looks pretty good. And I want to stay away from the edges. So I'm not going to put this right up against the edge. Because once we get the tile designed, we're gonna offset it, which will make sense in a minute. Um and that will create a seamless border, basically, which allows us to tile this without knowing where one pattern stops and one were one tile stops and one begins. But for now, we stay away from the edges, so I'll put this may be here. We'll go back over here. Maybe I'll get Oh, I don't remember what I Let's get Thea Lasso tool and all. Grab these guys here. Copy again. Come over here, paste. Put. These may be here. I'm pressing Commander Control to delete pressing L to get my lasso again and maybe I'll scooted this all off the page. Come over here and get this little guy. Copy it, Commander Control, Seed paste. I'll press V to get my move. Tool. You can see how that really comes in handy. Maybe just a couple more elements. Maybe do these guys. I'm just repeating the process, copying and pasting and sort of just filling in this space in a way, maybe Let's get this little guy. See how that looks. So this one all press commander control T and scale it down, not up. We don't scale up unless we're working with Victor's. Maybe all, Commander control T and rotate this a little bit. Just I feel like that's kinda nice. All right, so this is sort of our rough design of a pattern tile. Now, to make it seamless, we need to do this thing called Offsetting and offsetting is a filter that we run, but the filter can only work on a single layer. So what we're going to dio is a pretty meat. This is a pretty swanky technique. I'm going to create a blank layer at the top of my layer panel, and then I'm going to do this ridiculous shortcut, which is, like all the keys that you use for shortcuts. So shift command or control and option or Ault and e. Oops. And actually, before I do that, hide the background layer. We don't want the white to come through, so we hide the background by clicking the little eyeball. Okay, So a press command shift option or control Ault shift E for merge. And what that does is it takes all of these layers and it merges them a copy of them into one layer. So I can hide all of these now. And basically everything is on one layer now. But I also still have the individual layers down here because we may need to edit this. So we've got emerged copy of everything. So maybe I should just name that, so it's easier to follow along. Merged. Copy. Ah, and instantly I don't Even where is the copy? Merge, Create merged copy. I'm just wondering. I don't even remember where the longhand way to do that is somewhere. But again, that keyboard fork it was shift. And then both of the other modifier keys Ault or option and Commander Control E. Okay, so three modifier keys plus Keep, uh, now we can run the filter. So we're gonna come up to the filter menu and choose other filter other. And then you may have wondered, what are these other filters? And then you may have looked at the use of been, like one. Early is things were gonna choose off set. So offset is going to take our whole design and basically shift it so that we can make certain that we're not gonna have any weird edge stuff happening. So what we want to do here is shift half of our total distance. So out of 1500 pixels, we want a shift 7 50 and we'll click. OK? Is that right? No, we have 2400 pixels. Yeah, so I want to see. Let's try that again. Filter other offset. I'm gonna do it that way. So 1200. So we want to be shifting half of our total with, so this document has 2400 pixels across. So when I run this filter, all choose filter, other offset and I want half of that. So half of is 12 right? Unless I'm even worse at Mass than I thought We'll call it good. All right, so that I'm gonna click. OK, so it's screwed up our design. Or so it looks like. So it shifted everything. If I undo this and redo this, you can kind of see what happened. It basically shifted things. Teoh give us sort of a preview of what it would look like if we tiled this as it is. Okay, so it's shifted it. Now we can see that where this piece cuts off at the bottom, we see that it reappears here a the top. And where this one cuts off with the top, it reappears at the bottom. So we don't want to mess with any of these pieces that are around the edge now, But we might want to fill in some of the gaps with some design elements so we could duplicate some of the pieces or I'm just going to go back to this file, grab the lasso and bring this and I'll pace. Listen, maybe here, Maybe I'll put it here. Maybe I'll flip this instance of it so it doesn't look too repetitive. So compress, Commander Control, T right, click or control click and she's flip horizontal. Maybe even all actually rotate this a little bit. So I'm just kind of filling in the space now, how do you know if your pattern is good? You test it, and sometimes you know you can. I mean, this will work. It will be seamless. So that's good. We know that. But, um, in race not look great on Maybe we don't know that it looks great or not until we test it. So there's a lot of trial and error here. Um, so you just had to have toe plan for that. But now that we've got this set up and we've offset it and then filled in the gaps, we now have a seamless tile. Now we need to define the pattern. Before we do that, we can decide to if we want any colors in here. I think that I would like to actually have these characters thes, um, designs. I'd like to have them actually be inverse, so I want them to be white. So one thing that we can dio is merged thes three layers together, so I'm gonna click one and shift, click the other so that they're all selected and then all press commander control E alternatively, if you right click or control, click over here in the layers panel you can choose merge layers is that just pushes them all onto one layer. And now I can paint them all and change the color if I want. So let's say we want a white. The easiest way to do this is toe lock the transparency of this layer. You can do that at the top of the layers panel. We have a number of locks here, and this one that that's a checkerboard pattern. Remember that this checkerboard represents transparency. So I'm gonna lock the transparency. And then just to show you what that's doing, I'm gonna grab some color like red. Just you can see it and I'll grab my paintbrush. And now that that's locked, I can just pain anywhere on this layer, and the paint will only show up in the areas where there's already paint or pixels. Okay, so in this case, I want I want them all to be white. So e happened already have white selected as my background color. If you don't, you can just press d to get your default colors and then you'll have black and you'll have white and there's a keyboard shortcut at any time you want to use it. You can use the keyboard shortcut to fill whatever you've got going on with either your foreground color or your background color. So I want to fill with white, so the keyboard shortcut for that is command or control. Delete. Now it's hard to see because it's on a transparent background. But you can. I mean, if I zoom in, you can see it here. Okay, so we know it's there. Now we're going to define this pattern so we'll press commander control a just like we did with the glitter. And just like we did with what else did we make into a pattern? Remember now something else. We made a pattern. Oh, well, the action we made that into a pattern to So we select all and we're gonna choose edit and we'll choose. Define pattern and we'll call it. What are these things? Dandelions are I think they are. Uh, we'll click. OK, I hope that's why he's built. Believe it or not, Photoshopped does have spell check. It does. It's under the tight menu. Check spelling somewhere somewhere in here. Or maybe it's edit. Edit check spelling. All right, So we defined this pattern. We selected all of it. We chose edit to find pattern. Now it's saved in her pattern presets. So now we can apply it Teoh anything that we want.