Repeating Patterns – Part Deux

As promised, here’s the second installment of creating your own patterned papers. (I hope our lovely designers aren’t mad we’re doing an end-run around them… but sometimes the overall design cries out for a paper they didn’t give us.) Today I’ll show you how to create a staggered pattern repeat the quick and easy way. Refresh your memory if you need to… I’ll still be here when you’re done!

If you remember, my first effort was really odd because I hadn’t made the original stamp image small enough to give it a good repeat. So here’s the Resized stamp. I went with (almost) 2 inches square for a six-time repeat across the page, but you can go with whatever makes you happy. After I Resized my stamp I just pushed the bottom of the canvas up to make it a perfect 2 inch square to calm my OCD.

Then I actually shrank the stamp down a bunch more so the staggered repeat would look better. And I filled the background with a solid colour by adding a new layer BELOW the stamp layer then flooding it with white using my Paint Bucket tool for it’s more usual purpose. And I Merged the layers into one.

This step is something we’ve only rarely done, and that’s to Resize the Canvas. What does that mean? (Yes, I heard that!) The stamp is an IMAGE. The workspace behind it is the CANVAS. The keyboard shortcuts are almost identical. CTRL/CMD>ALT>I for the Image and CTRL/CMD>ALT>C for the Canvas. Easy enough to remember, right?

I doubled the WIDTH but left the HEIGHT unchanged. I also moved the Anchor point over to left-centre by clicking on it in the diagram. This is the most important part of this step. So many new things we’re trying here!

And it’s time for another new thing! We’ve looked at the Blur filter, and the High Pass filter and we’ve played with some of the others but we’ve never talked about the Offset filter.

Isn’t it awesome that all you have to do is choose it from the drop-down menu and Elements runs with it? Now that there are some terrific staggered stamps here, I’m going to Define the Pattern in the same way we did it last week. Edit>Define Pattern… super simple.

I gave it a name that is different from my other defined patterns so Elements wouldn’t mix them up.

Then I went back into the Paint Bucket and chose the Fill Pattern mode. A single click on my gray paper and voilà! A staggered pattern all over my paper. (Of course, the gray paper is completely hidden by the white fill layer from way back in step 2…)

But that doesn’t matter because if I choose the correct Blend Mode, it’ll show back up with just one click. I went with Linear Burn.

And there’s the gray paper! Now to save my paper for future use. I used the Save As (CTRL/CMD>SHIFT>S) method, which lets me decide what kind of file I want it to be. Papers are always .jpg files, so that’s what I’ll do.

I have a folder on my laptop for “my” papers and that’s where I’m putting this one.

And we’re done!! I’m going to experiment before next week to make papers with more than one pattern. Wish me luck!

Repeating Patterns – Basic

Last week’s tutorial attracted some comments, as they usually do, and thanks to Karyn Concannon I have some topics to work with for the next couple of weeks. She’d like to know how to use repeating patterns to create her own paper – let’s take a look at that one now.

I’m pretty sure this has been covered in a previous tutorial but when I went to look for it so I could link it, I couldn’t find it. So to recap… I think. To create repeating patterns you can use brushes, stamps, elements, shapes – whatever your heart desires. For my example I’m using a tribal-looking stamp from Connie Prince‘s Roar.

The first step is to Define the stamp as a Pattern. Click on Edit>Define Pattern. This is the easy part.

The menu opens up this box, where I named my pattern Connie’s Roar Stamp.

Next I chose a background paper (from Aprilisa‘s All American): neutral, gray with a git of texture.

Next, I chose the Paint Bucket tool (Work Smart Not Hard shortcut is the K key); as you can see, I’ve added a blank layer on top of the paper layer. This is an important step, so don’t leave it out.

The Paint Bucket menu has two options. The one on the left is the colour fill setting, the one on the right is the pattern fill one.

When I click on the little triangle inside the frame for the pattern fill setting, the default patterns open up, and so does the one I just defined from the stamp!

I clicked on the stamp pattern and WHOA! That wasn’t what I was ready for…

It turns out I should have resized the original stamp png BEFORE I turned it into a pattern. That can be accomplished one of two ways: Image>Resize>Resize Image or CTRL/CMD>ALT>I. Then decide how small to make it. Keep in mind your canvas size (3600×3600 pixels or 12×12 inches in my example). Once it’d been Resized, I went back and Defined Pattern with it, giving it a different name.

Then I used Pattern Fill and got what I was expecting the first time.

There are so many ways this can be jazzed up – Blend Modes have a lot of options, texture filters can make your paper look flocked or sponged, the colour can be changed in several ways. Give them all a whirl! For my example below, I changed the Blend Mode to Dissolve and made it look like I’d stencilled it on.

One way to change the colour is to add a Fill Layer using the Layer menu. Layer>New Fill Layer>Solid Color

By ticking that box, you’re telling PSE to clip the new colour to the layer below it.

When the Color Picker opens up, you get to choose what colour you want to go with. I like this method because it’s much more reliable than using the Paint Bucket to fill the design – that usually ends up being a lot of work for a not-so-great result.

If you want to make further adjustments to the pattern layer, Merge the pattern layer and colour fill layer together. (CTRL/CMD>E)

The merged layers will lose the Blend Mode so I hit it again with Dissolve.

That’s how to make a simple repeating pattern. All the control is in your hands. Next week I’ll show you how to do a staggered repeating pattern. It takes a few more steps and some experimentation…