How to Make Repeating Patterns in Procreate

hi i'm lisa bardeaux and today i'll be teaching you some easy ways to make seamless repeating patterns in procreate [Music] when you make a repeating pattern it kind of feels like magic repeating patterns are not only super fun to make but they have so many different applications patterns are great for designing fabric apparel surface design web design and more because of procreate's snapping feature it's actually really easy to make patterns right on your ipad without any additional software follow along with me as i teach you two methods for making patterns a simple pattern with basic shapes and a more complex pattern with multiple layers if you're new to procreate i highly recommend watching my procreate for beginners tutorial so you can learn all the basics and if you want to learn more about drawing illustration and of course working in procreate be sure to subscribe and hit the bell icon so you don't miss any future tutorials let's get started in order for a pattern to repeat seamlessly objects along the edges need to match up perfectly with what is on the opposite edge now if the words make it line up perfectly give you anxiety fortunately there's a really cool trick that makes it super easy to do this to show you how it works let me show you a quick demonstration using a piece of paper and these dinosaur stamps i borrowed from my kids i'm going to stamp a bunch of dinos over the center of the paper making sure that no dinosaurs go over the edge next i'll cut the paper into four equal pieces like this now if i move the papers from the right side to the left side and the papers from the top to the bottom i have instantly made an infinitely repeatable pattern you can see that the body belonging to this head continues over here and the top of the stegosaurus matches up with the bottom up here i can even add more dinosaurs into the empty spots like this then if i move the left to the right and the top to the bottom again those new stamps get split up and lined up to make a seamless repeat this entire square is a block of a pattern that i can seamlessly repeat infinitely this is exactly what we're going to be doing in procreate but it will be even easier to make sure that everything matches up perfectly so i'm going to begin by creating a canvas that is 3000 by 3000 pixels large for this pattern i'm going to be using one of the free procreate color palettes that i have available on my website this one is called yam i am and the brush i'm going to be using is one of the built-in procreate brushes this is in the inking set and it's called syrup we're going to keep this really simple and just make a pattern that's made up of basic shapes so i'll start with the darkest pink color and draw a couple of large circles on my canvas to do this i'm just drawing the outline and then filling them in with color drop next i'll grab one of the lighter pinks and draw a triangle and maybe like a weird blobby shape then i will grab this gold color and do a couple more shapes maybe like a half circle and another smaller circle the most important thing here is that none of these objects touch the edge of the canvas and the other thing you'll notice is that i'm not putting my shapes really close to the edge either i'm leaving a little bit of room because we're going to be adding more shapes there later okay so we've got several shapes on the canvas with a little bit of room around the edges and of course nothing going over the edge so the first thing i want to show you is what this looks like as a repeating pattern without doing anything special to it i have a tool on my website that lets you easily test how your pattern repeats you can find this tool at bardobrush.com repeat i recommend using this in the split screen view swipe up from the bottom and drag safari over to the side i've already got the page loaded up swipe down on the canvas with three fingers to invoke the copy paste menu and then select copy all what this does is it takes all of your layers including the background and puts them onto a single layer and this is what we're going to use to test our patterns so if i swipe down again and hit paste and go up to my layers you'll see now that i have a layer with all the shapes and the white background then all i have to do is tap hold and drag that layer over to the pattern tester anywhere on the page and let go and i'll instantly see how my pattern looks when it's repeated you can also use this slider here to adjust the scale of the pattern to see it at large and small sizes so as you can see there's definitely some empty spots here and that's no surprise because we left some empty space around it so now we're going to take what we have and turn it into a repeating tile so that we can fill in the empty parts of this pattern for this pattern we're just going to be working off of a single layer so with the layer that i just pasted in selected i'm going to go to the transform tool and this is very important you want to go down to where it says snapping and make sure that snapping is turned on having magnetics turned on too is also very handy and then all you're going to do is just slide that whole layer over until it's halfway off the canvas you'll notice you'll see yellow lines and the nodes in the center of the selection will match up perfectly with the corners of the canvas and then i'm going to go ahead and swipe down again with three fingers and hit paste it's going to paste that same pattern again and i'm going to move this one the other way again make sure that those center nodes line up with the corners it should just snap right into place and finally i'm going to just go ahead and merge those two layers together and what i am left with is the same exact pattern but now i have access to what were the edges are now the center of my pattern and i can fill those in with more shapes so i'm just going to go ahead and create a new layer for these new shapes and i'm going to use the red and just kind of draw another blobby shape and now maybe i'll pull in that green color and add a couple more shapes some half circle triangles and now i'm going to go ahead and test what that looks like so again i'm going to swipe down with three fingers choose copy all swipe down again and choose paste and there is my new pattern all on one layer i'm going to go ahead and drag that and drop it onto my pattern tester and you can see some of those spots starting to fill in so now i think it's pretty obvious that we haven't added anything to the top edges so now we're going to repeat what we just did but we're going to move the layers to the top and bottom so select the transform tool and move the layer up until it snaps to the halfway point make sure those nodes are lined up with the corners swipe down with three fingers again hit paste and then we're gonna move that downwards until it hits that halfway point and then i'll go ahead and merge those two layers together create a new layer to draw in some shapes into those empty spots and i'm also kind of just paying attention that all my colors are spread out i've got a variety of not only shapes but also sizes like there's some big things and some little things i'm going to copy all again and paste the layer in so that i can test and see how that's looking now looking at the pattern test i'm just i'm really getting into the nitty-gritty here and just looking for any little empty spaces that i might want to fill in and i can see a space right here kind of between this large circle and the plus sign and the little red half circle now looking at my pattern i can see that that spot is right on an edge so i'm just gonna move it side to side like i did before so that i have access to draw in that little hole without it being on an edge so i'll just add a little shape right there copy all and paste and then i'll drop it onto the pattern tester and now i can see that pretty much all the little spots are filled in you could keep going as much as you like with this if you want to fill in more spots and add things to it but i think this looks pretty good another fun thing that i can do is go to the adjustments menu hue saturation brightness and then layer and then i can just adjust the hue slider to kind of get like a whole nother color scheme of this same pattern i'll drag that onto the pattern tester just to kind of see what it looks like altogether next i'm going to show you how to do a more complex pattern with artwork that utilizes multiple layers so we're going to create a new canvas and i wanted you to know that you do not have to set up your pattern as a square you can do any aspect ratio that you want i'm going to be using my medium res canvas size that i use for just about everything it is 3800 by 2800 pixels and again i'm going to be using the syrup brush from the inking set and i'm going to select a nice bright pink to draw some strawberries i'm going to draw three big strawberry shapes or kind of like rounded triangular shapes and then i'm going to create a new layer to draw some green stems and for the stems i'm actually not going to use any brushes at all i'm going to use the selection tool with the color fill feature so go to the selection tool and make sure that color fill is selected down here and let's zoom in on this strawberry and i'm just going to tap tap tap all the way around until i make kind of like a stem shape with some like spiky leaves sticking off of it and the color will be filled in automatically because i have color fill turned on so i'm going to go ahead and repeat that for the other two strawberries and because i have them on their own layer i can move them around if i didn't quite get them where i wanted them to be and another benefit of having them on their own layer is that i can apply a blend mode to do kind of a cool transparency effect i'm going to change the blend mode of this layer to multiply and you'll see it has kind of this cool darkening effect where the two overlap now i'm going to go back to the layer that has the pink strawberries on it and i'm going to choose kind of a yellow color and then i'm going to grab the mercury brush which is in that same inking set these are all built-in procreate brushes so you should have them and then with a flicking motion i'm going to draw in some seeds all over these strawberries and then i'm going to add in one more element i kind of want to have something going on in the background so i'm going to create another new layer i'm going to place it below the other two layers and i'm going to select an even lighter pink and then using that same selection tool method i'm going to draw just some weird little quadrilateral shapes just kind of like behind everything again it's important to mention that you want to make sure that nothing is touching the edges and that there's also some space everything's not like crammed right close to the edges and that pink looks a little too dark for me and since i still have the selection tool active i can just adjust the color on the fly like this it's a pretty cool feature and then i'm also gonna set the blend mode of the strawberry layer to multiply so i have a little bit of that transparency effect showing those background shapes too okay so we've got what we could call the first round of our artwork ready to go and now we're gonna set it up as a tile so if we want to preserve our layers we're going to have to do this a little bit differently than we did before so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select all of these layers and put them into a group in order for our artwork to be able to snap into place precisely we need to make sure that we're moving the entire shape of the canvas if we were to move just the artwork it's not the same size as the canvas so it wouldn't line up correctly so we're going to need to create another layer that helps us out with that so what you're going to do is you're going to create a new layer and then fill this layer with black then i'll reduce the opacity of the layer to about like 25 and then before we move anything we're going to duplicate our artwork group select the black layer and one of the groups and then move it over halfway just like we did in the previous example now we have access to that space where the edges used to be what now becomes the middle of our pattern and we can start adding more strawberries but before we do that i like to kind of consolidate the layers and clean it up a little bit so it doesn't get like way too many layers and get all crazy so i'll select the two stem layers and group them and then select the two strawberry layers and group them and then the two background shape layers and group them then i'll go through and flatten each of these layers just tap on the group and hit flatten then i've got this other empty group so i'll just delete that alright so everything is nice and organized and we don't have any extraneous layers so now i'm going to go to my strawberry layer and draw in a new strawberry just like before i'll sample the pink color from the other strawberries and draw in a couple strawberry shapes and you'll notice i'm drawing my strawberries not all in the same direction if i were to print this on fabric or something like that i'm kind of going for a pattern that doesn't have like a top and a bottom and up and down it doesn't have to go a certain way you can use it any way you want i'll use the same technique with the selection tool to add in some more stems and then i'll grab the mercury brush and draw in some seeds in yellow and then i'll fill in the background area here with another of those kind of squarish light pink shapes all right now we're going to tile this vertically so we're going to move the top to the bottom and vice versa so we're going to repeat the same thing so we're going to turn on our black guide layer and then fill it in so the canvas is completely full otherwise the snapping won't work properly i'm going to duplicate the group select one of the groups and the guide layer and this time we're going to move it down fill in the guide layer completely grab the other group and move it up again always be sure that your center nodes line up with the corners turn off that black layer i'm going to repeat that process to consolidate all my layers just select the two stem layers group them same with the other two group group flatten flat and flatten all right now i can draw in more strawberries to kind of fill in all these little empty spots i'll do the strawberry shapes on the strawberry layer the green stems on the stem layer and then finally some more light pink shapes on the background layer all right so this is looking pretty good we've pretty much filled in all the spots so now we're going to check and see what this looks like as a completely repeating pattern so swipe down with three fingers to pull up copy paste menu select copy all swipe down with three fingers again and hit paste and there is our completed pattern all flattened i'm just gonna move that to the top so it doesn't look so weird and then i'm going to drag that over into my pattern tester and if i scroll down i can see kind of it without that info box and you can see what the pattern looks like and this is really helpful because just looking at this i can see i have kind of a weird thing happening where it looks like there's like a stripe of blank space going all the way down so i'm going to look and kind of see where that's happening in my pattern and maybe change some of the strawberries so it fills that space so looking at my pattern i can see that blank space is actually here on the edges so what i'm going to need to do is i'm going to need to tile it again so that i can have access to draw into that space or move things around so i'll delete that flattened layer i don't need that i'm going to duplicate the group turn on the black layer make sure it's fully filled in select the black layer in one of the groups and move it to the side repeat the same with the other group and as i do this i can see that things weren't lined up perfectly when i slid it over to the side so make sure you pay attention because if you don't get it in the right spot you might have like weird lines like this so i'm just gonna undo that and try again and this time i got it no problem sometimes that happens all right so what i think i'm gonna do is just instead of drawing in more strawberries i think i'm just going to go ahead and move some around so i'm going to select the layer with the strawberries and the stems select both layers and then use the selection tool to kind of select those strawberries move them around change the scale kind of fill in that area and then i'm also going to kind of change i didn't really like these triangle shapes how i did them in the background so i'm going to delete those and make a couple new shapes move around some of these other background shapes just kind of refining it until it looks exactly as i want it to look and of course i can test it by swiping down with three fingers copy all swipe down again paste now i have that flattened version that i can drag that layer over into the pattern tester and that looks way better i hope this tutorial has got you super excited about making patterns i have made a ton of patterns over the course of my career and every time i tile a pattern block it always feels like magic before we wrap up i wanted to show you a few patterns that i've made in procreate and how i use those patterns to make t-shirts and fabric this is an artwork that i made not intending it to be a repeating pattern but it is kind of like a pattern this was actually a prompt for making art every day the prompt was wishes and this is my interpretation of that prompt and i thought it was really cute so i actually re-drew it and i made it into a repeating pattern using the same techniques that i've shown you today so this is what that looks like and i've actually had this one printed onto fabric from spoonflower which is a really awesome company they print artwork and design on fabric and a bunch of other stuff but this is the fabric that i got i think it's super cute and i'm excited to make it into something this is a snake with flowers that i drew a couple years ago and i thought it'd make make a really fun pattern so this is the pattern that i made with that you can see that i flipped the snake around and like mirrored it turned it everywhere and just like arranged them all kind of in almost like a grid and then i also added in some additional flower shapes and leave shapes to kind of fill in the holes and that's what this pattern looks like and i also had this one printed onto fabric as well um i went with this kind of like nice drapey blousey fabric and so maybe i'll make it into a skirt or a shirt or something like that i don't know i'm excited to try it these banana shirts my husband and i are wearing are made using a pattern i drew and procreate not gonna lie it's pretty much his favorite shirt in fact so much that he wore it out and i had to make him a new one this time i made it with an updated banana pattern and that is this shirt here this is another pattern i had printed onto fabric from spoonflower i love these little zebras maybe you guys can think of some fabric projects for me to make with these in the comments thank you so much for watching please be sure to subscribe to learn more about drawing illustration and of course working in procreate again i'm lisa bardo and i teach people how to find their creativity through drawing on the ipad i'm the owner of bardo brush one of the leading brush creators for procreate if you'd like to support me i hope you'll take a look at my premium brush that's that inspire creativity at bardobrush.com i also run the making art everyday challenge a free series of daily drawing prompts tutorials motivation and a supportive community all with the goal of helping you overcome your creative fears and establish a daily art making practice this tutorial is actually a part of our make stuff may a whole month dedicated to making things with your art learn more at bardotbrush.com joinm a e if you're posting artwork to instagram made with my brushes or tutorials i would love to see it use the hashtag bardo brush thanks and happy art making if you like this video please subscribe for more awesome tutorials and check out one of my other videos have a great day

Channel: Bardot Brush

Views: 90,391

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Id: 6vyHrj-z1Zo

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Sat May 08 2021