How to Create Dot Patterns with GIMP (3 Methods)

hello and welcome back to another video my name is mike davies and in this tutorial i'll be showing you how to create your own dot patterns using i'll be using give version 2.10.22 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial before i get into that don't forget to check out my website at daviesmediadesign.com as always i have tons of and inkscape tutorials on here you can get more by becoming a dmd premium member and i have tons of free software help articles so definitely check that out you can enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy and as i mentioned you can get more by becoming a dmd premium member and i'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video all right so let's dive right in here as you can see i have opened up and i also have my bucket fill tool selected from my toolbox with the fill type set to pattern fill so let's come over here to my patterns dialog this should be open for everybody by default and i created a bunch of dot patterns ahead of time and so i'll just pick a random one and i can click to fill in the pattern layer that i'm on right now with this pattern so this is just one of the numerous dot patterns i can create using the methods from this tutorial let's go with another random one here there's another and by the way i have a 40 dot patterns pack available to my dmd premium subscribers but for starters i'll create my template file so i'll go to file new and i've noticed that 60 by 60 templates fit pretty well inside of 1920 by 1080 documents you can go with whatever as you want to though here so 100 by 100 120 by 120 300 by 300 whatever you want to do really i'll go with this size and click ok and hold ctrl and zoom in with my mouse wheel and the next thing i like to do is add some guides here some center guides so i'll go to image guides new guide by percent and let's just go with 50 horizontal click ok image guides new guide by percent and we'll go with vertical this time click ok so now we have some center guides next i'm going to create a new layer to put our dot patterns on and this one i'll just name dot and i'm going to fill this with transparency and click ok so this first method will be the simplest method i'll come over here and grab the ellipse select tool and click and drag to create an ellipse in the center of my composition and let me come over here i like to go with a 30 by 30 ellipse and making sure both the dimensions of the ellipse are the same so we get a perfect circle and now i need to fill this in with the color i can really go with any color but i'm just going to go with black to simplify things so there is the black color there i'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that and if i come over here and hide the background layer there we have our first dot pattern i can hit ctrl c to copy that and if i scroll up here inside of my patterns dialog the very top option is actually the clipboard image option which means that anything you copy to your clipboard can now instantly become a pattern this is just a great way to test out your patterns as you're designing them but now i'll come over to the blank document i created you guys can just go to file new and create a 1920x1080 document if you also want to test out your patterns but i'll hit shift b on my keyboard to grab my bucket fill tool make sure pattern fill is selected and with clipboard image checked i can click to fill this in and there you can see a live preview of that pattern so let's come back over here that was the first pattern style if i wanted this to be more dense and also a seamless pattern i can come over here and just duplicate that dot layer and then i can hit the forward slash key on my keyboard or just go to help search and run a command and then inside of here i'll type offset and double click this is going to bring up the offset tool so now i'll come over here and just go with by width over to height over two so that's going to offset this to the corners and i'll come over here and click ok the reason i copied this layer or duplicated this layer is so that we have the dot in the middle if you don't want the dot in the middle you can always just hide it like that but i'm going to keep the dot in the middle for now and now once again to test this out i'm going to copy this to my clipboard but because we have two layers i have to do copy visible the shortcut key for that is ctrl shift c or simply go to edit copy visible and then we'll come over here control z to undo that first pattern we did grab the bucket fill tool and click to fill this in so there you can see it is slightly more dense and it's going to go all the way to the edge this time so ctrl z to back up that's method number two let's come back over here so if i wanted to start creating a more complex pattern i can do so using something called the symmetry painting feature so let me open that up by going to windows dockable dialogs symmetry painting by default this is set to none but if i click on here i have three options so mirror tiling and mandala let's come over here to mirror to start with and i'm going to check the first three options so horizontal symmetry that's going to paint the same thing on the top and bottom vertical symmetry the same thing on the left and right and then central symmetry just make sure that everything is going to be totally reflected along all four quadrants here and by default this should be set to exactly halfway so in this case it's 60 by 60 so these little lines are going to be at 30 by 30. i'll come over and grab my paintbrush tool and what you can do is set your paint brush to any size and any shape really but in this case we're doing dot patterns so i'm going to go with a circular shape so this brush right here set the size to whatever you want i'll go with a smaller brush size but let's just increase this a bit to eight hit the enter key and finally make sure your hardness is set to a hundred that's going to give you a nice hard edge here so once you have that figured out what you can do is come over here create a new layer let's name this dot small hit the enter key and come over to the lines here and if i click once you'll see you're going to get that reflected across the other side automatically and same for up top here so just click once and there you can see that's automatically reflected and you can do that anywhere here so i can randomly click and there you see we have a much more complex design there so ctrl shift c to copy that let's come over here shift b on the keyboard to grab the bucket fill tool and then i'll click to fill this in and there you can see the result of that so hit control z to back up come back over here let's control z to undo that and actually let's just delete everything here and start over so create a new layer we'll just name this dots click ok so let's go with the different symmetry option this time we'll go with mandala and now if i grab my paintbrush tool come over to one of these lines and click you'll see this time it's going to create six different dots here so you got three on the top three on the bottom i could also come over here and single click for a middle dot ctrl c to copy that because we only have one layer this time shift b click and there we get a live preview of that let me just come back here to our template so once you're finished designing your dot pattern you're going to want to save it as a pattern file so that you can import it into and use it during any of your sessions and one thing i want to mention before i dive into that is to make sure you turn off the symmetry painting so make sure you turn that to none otherwise every time you try to paint from now on with the paintbrush tool it'll just do a symmetry painting even if you close this out so make sure you set that to none before you proceed but once you're ready to export this as a pattern file you're gonna go to file export as and here you can see i've already saved this one so i'll just create a dot pattern from tutorial 2. make sure it ends in dot p-80 and come over here and hit export and the description by default is just going to show up as whatever you named your dot pattern as you could change this to whatever but the description is what's going to show up here inside of your patterns dialog i'll go with the default and hit export and i do want to mention that the background will show up if you keep this unhidden so if you prefer to have a transparent background like i have go ahead and keep that hidden otherwise you can keep this unhidden and set the color to whatever you want and that will show up in the final pattern i do show you how to import pattern files into using my seamless pattern tutorial which i will link to this tutorial so if you want to learn how to do that definitely check that video out but that's it for this tutorial thanks for watching if you liked it don't forget to subscribe and click the bell icon to be notified each time i have a brand new tutorial you can also check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video but thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 18,186

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2020

Id: 6TTLVlR7KHA

Length: 9min 17sec (557 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021