How to Create Seamless Repeating Patterns in GIMP

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you how to create a seamless repeating pattern using this is conversion to point 10.14 which at the time of this tutorial is the latest version of but of course before I get into that I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies media design.com as always I have tons of and Inkscape tutorials on here as well as my book of layers and and Inkscape help articles so definitely check that out you can enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy you could check out any of my Skillshare classes by visiting school calm and you can get more with a premium membership to Davies media design your membership includes access to things like my help center app as well as my book of layers ebook and future ebooks that are released on my website you can start your premium membership with a 7 day free trial and I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so here is the graphic I'm going to be using for today's tutorial this is a sugar skull it's often seen in Dia de los Muertos celebrations and you can click here to download this for free I went with the smallest download size here because we're going to be creating a pretty small pattern so minimize this here is the final result so this seamless repeating pattern was created using what's called the offset tool this tool was introduced in to point 10 point 12 which I went over briefly in my what's new in to point 10 point 12 tutorial I actually released a how to create an import patterns tutorial before this new feature was released right before it was released actually so definitely check that out if you want to see how to create your own seamless repeating patterns by hand or manually without using this offset tool but this tool is great whenever you have something like a design like this where it's already done you just need to bring it into and turn it into a seamless pattern so let's start off by creating a new document I'll go to file new and I'll change the size to 250 by 250 I should note this is a fairly large pattern size usually they're around the 100 by 100 size but the reason I'm creating a slightly larger pattern here is because I'm going to be using this for a pretty large final document as you can see here the in the final result is 1920 by 1080 so I don't want these sugar skulls being too small for that so you can make this whatever size you want I'm gonna go with 250 by 250 for now and click OK once I've done that I'm gonna come over to file open as layers and this is going to allow me to open up the design we're going to be using as a layer so I'll come over here to my folder I'm going to try to search for the download here okay so here is the download if I click on it I get a preview over here on the right side so now I'll come down and click open that's gonna open up my sugar school here as a new layer we could just rename this sugar school so just double-click on the name to rename it and I'll start by grabbing my scale tool so I can hit shift S on the keyboard or come over here to my toolbox and click on the scale tool make sure the little chain link here is locked and I'm just going to resize this a little bit if I hold the ctrl key that's going to allow me to resize this from the center and that may be the command key for those of you on Mac so I can make this little larger here right there and now I'll just click scale and this looks a little bit pixelated right now because we're zoomed in at 200% so you guys can ignore that but the next thing I want to do is I want to Center this up on the page otherwise the repeating pattern will look a little bit off so what I'll do for that is I can come over here to my alignment tool and just click on the object here make sure it's aligning relative to image and then just click to align this to the center of target and then click to align this to the middle of target and that will ensure that this is Center aligned so next we're going to use the offset tool and I'm going to start by duplicating this layer because I want there to be a more densely populated pattern in terms of how much of our final vector design here is going to show up in the pattern so to do that I'll come over here to the sugar skull layer and click the duplicate layer icon and now with this duplicated layer the first thing I need to do is I need the layer boundry to be the entire size of my composition so I'll come over here and go to layer layer to image size and that will extend the boundary of our copy next I can come over here and go to layer transform offset so this is the new offset tool and with this tool you can create a uniform offset based on whatever parameter you want so for example if I just want the width to be offset I can click on that and that will create a pattern with the sugar skull going across the middle here so it'll be like a row like this and then down here will be another row or I can hit reset I can do by the height so that way when I'm creating a pattern it will look like there is a line of sugar skulls like this obviously I would want to decrease the size of the sugar skull before doing this technique and I'll come over here and hit reset the other option is I can offset this by manual amount whatever I want or I can click this button here it'll just offset this by both the width and the height so when I click on that that puts the design up in the corners here and this just ensures that when I'm creating a pattern it's just going to have various sugar skulls going across the entire page this is what I want for my pattern so I'll just come over here and click OK and you guys will remember my final result looked like this so there's quite a bit of these sugar skulls if you didn't want this many you can always come over here and work on the original layer when you're doing this step instead of creating the copy layer and that'll make the final result look something like this but in my case I wanted to have this one in the middle I want there to be a more densely populated pattern ok so now we have our design in place next what I need to do is get rid of the background and then export this as a pattern so I'll come over here and just hide the background layer there's actually two different options to use this as a pattern if you want to use it immediately you can go to edit copy visible so ctrl shift C or command shift C on a Mac and then let's create a new document so I'll go to file new and we'll go to 1920 by 1080 obviously I got to correct this and click OK hold ctrl and use the mouse wheel to zoom out a bit so now if I hit shift B that'll grab my bucket fill tool and make sure the fill type is set to pattern fill if I come over here I can click on my clipboard image so this is when I hit ctrl C on my keyboard I'm sorry ctrl shift C since we copied all the visible layers so the pattern is on your clipboard and now when I fill this in you'll see that we'll go ahead and fill the pattern and immediately there I'll hit ctrl Z on that the next method is better if you know you're going to use this pattern at a later date or in a different session so what you need to do is export this as a pattern file and then drag and drop that pattern into your pattern folder for a so to do this I'll go to file export as and I'm going to navigate to the folder where I want to export this it doesn't quite matter right now because we're going to move it in a second just remember where you're saving this I'm going to name this sugar skull pattern dot and make sure this ends with PA T that is the file type for a pattern and and I'll click export this is the description that's going to show up over here in the pattern section so I'll just click export now I'll open up my file explorer here and just navigate to where I save this so here is our pattern document and what I need to do now is I need to drag this pattern file into the pattern folder for so we need to locate the pattern folder to do this I can come over here and go to edit preferences come down here to folders and scroll down until you get to patterns so this one has a little X by it click on that and I'm just going to hit ctrl C to copy that you can also come over here and just click on this little icon here and they'll open up your file explorer so there's our patterns I'll double click on that and you can come back over here to the file explorer that has your pattern and just drag and drop this directly into the patterns folder so there's our sugar skull pattern there so I'll just minimize this and cancel that if I come over here I can hit the little Refresh icon and now here is the pattern we created I did this earlier so I have a similar one right here if you click and hold your mouse it'll show you the full size view of your pattern so come back over here to the document we are working on I still have this set to pattern fill and right now this is set to my sugar skull pattern right here so once again I can click on this and that'll give me my seamless pattern one thing you might notice though is the pattern is a little bit off it's not entirely centered on the page here so this part of the skull is being cut off in this part is almost entirely full or entirely visible so hit ctrl Z what you can do is create a new layer and I'll just name this pattern and click OK then what I like to do is go to layer layer boundry size that's going to give us this little dialog I'm going to change this to percent I like to increase the layer so it's 200% or two times the size of the original and then click this little center button here and that'll Center up our composition on this new layer we created and I'll click resize so if I hold ctrl and zoom out you can see the layer is now much larger than the visible composition then I can fill this pattern layer in with our pattern and in 2.10 point 14 you can go to view show all and that will show everything that goes off the canvas here this is a brand new fee and I'll hit em to grab my move tool and now I can click and drag on any of these objects until I get basically the look I want to get here and if it's not quite the size you need it to be you can always hit shift s scale it down a little bit here and you can also adjust where this sits by dragging the little middle icon here and I'll drag this up a little bit like so hit the scale button so now the pattern sets a little bit better in the document here you can always continue to adjust this to your liking but now I can come back to view show all to turn that off and there is our final result alright so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did you can subscribe to my youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davies media design don't forget to 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 thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 72,214

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, patterns, custom patterns, custom pattern, seamless pattern, repeating pattern, import pattern, save pattern, GIMP 2020, GMIP 2.10.14, offset filter, create patterns in gimp, repeating patterns in gimp, make patterns gimp, gimp pattern tool

Id: 1wJT5Q4ALvU

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 08 2020