April 2012
29 posts
Play
How to make a repeat pattern
Here’s a guide for everyone who wanted to know how to make a repeat pattern. There are probably lots of ways to do this and most of them will be much more efficient, but this is the method I invented for myself…
1. Do a drawing. You’ll be doing yourself a favour if you make it sort of diamond shaped. Scan it and open it in Photoshop…
… put guides at 50% horizontal and 50% vertical and use the marquee tool to cut and paste each of the four segments into their own layer…
… move each of the segments into their opposite corner…
…at this point you could just paste the original drawing into that middle gap and that would work as a tile, but I want to add more stuff so change the lines to blue…
…print this out onto whatever paper you like to draw on. Get your drawing pen out again and draw some more stuff in the middle.
Scan this, remove the blue lines (If you’re not sure how to do this… google it) and paste it into your first Photoshop file. Line it up with the original drawing, merge it and change all the lines to black.
This is a tile that will repeat. If you go to “Define Pattern” you can add this tile to your photoshop patterns and use it with the paint bucket tool. You can do this now to test it and make sure it’s repeating properly. If you see any small bits that aren’t lining up properly, cut it into 4 squares and switch them to the opposite corners again. The edges will be in the middle now so you can make corrections if you have to.
You can colour your repeat pattern however you like. I took the last drawing I did and a new piece of paper on a light box, drew some grey shadowy bits with a marker and scanned this in…
…then I added the grey bits into the Photoshop file under the black lines. If you’re going to use some kind of hand drawn technique, you’ll need to divide it into segments and move them into the opposite corners again because there will probably be a few errors which need to be fixed where it doesn’t match up exactly. Here’s the finished tile…
…and here it is repeating. The end.
