Hi everyone! Today I'm showing you how I make a repeating
pattern of a watercolor painting in GIMP. I painted this Easter egg pattern in last
week's video and today I'm scanning it, editing the scan in GIMP, turning it into a repeating
pattern also in GIMP and uploading it to my Redbubble shop. So, let's start with the scanning. Watercolor paintings tend to buckle unless
you use very thick paper or stretch the paper before painting. To make sure the paper is flat while scanning
it, I put a pile of normal, white copy paper on top of it inside the scanner and I sometimes
also put a weight on top of the scanner like a pile of books to make sure the painting
is pressed against the scanner. Otherwise some parts might scan not sharp
enough. Moving on to the computer, I make sure the
scanner settings are correct. I want it to be a colored scan and the resolution
at least 600 dpi and I'm saving the image as a PNG file. My scanner is a combined scanner and a printer,
it's called Epson Expression Home XP-245 Wi-Fi Printer, Scan and Copy machine, which means
you can use it wirelessly. I'll link it below if you're interested. I think I chose it because it was the cheapest
one I could find at the time. The scan needs some tweaking and I'm doing
that in GIMP, which is a free image editing software. If the image is a bit crooked, you can use
the rulers as guides and straighten it out with the rotate tool. The next thing I'll fix is adjusting the levels. I'm going to colors and levels and choosing
the white eyedropper and clicking on the lightest part of the image and choosing the black eyedropper
and clicking on the darkest part of the image. This works well if you have something white
and something black in the image. I didn't have anything that dark in the painting. You can also just use the brightness-contrast
tool. Then I'm adjusting the sharpness by going
to filters, enhance, sharpen. Looking at the preview image, I increase the
sharpness as much as possible without making the picture look grainy. These are the basic things I usually do to
edit a painting. With this one I also tried if I could make
the yellows a bit brighter with the hue-saturation tool, but it didn't really work. So, finally I cropped the image with the rectangle
select tool and going to image, crop to selection. And I exported the image as a PNG file. To turn this into a repeating pattern, I go
to layers, transform, offset... and click on the button that says offset by x/2, y/2. And click offset. Now you can see the edges between the repeated
images. We have to blend those in so that the pattern
looks seamless. I'm using the clone tool and making the brush
size bigger and then choosing the area I want to clone by pressing down ctrl and clicking
the part I want to copy. I'm also decreasing the opacity to make the
blending smooth. And then I'm just painting over the harsh
lines I want to blend out. I've made two similar videos before about
making a repeating pattern in GIMP. This one differs from them in that the painting
has a background so you have to do the blending part, but other than that, it's the same process. When I think I'm done with the clone stamping,
I'm gonna fill out the empty area in the middle. I open another copy of the edited painting
and cut out two eggs with the free select tool, I copy them by pressing ctrl C and go
back to the repeating unit and paste them with ctrl V. I'm also using the rotate tool
to turn them in different positions so they don't look too similar to the original eggs
I copied. I also turn the eggs into new layers. I export the whole thing as a PNG to make
sure the extra eggs are included in the image. I also save the GIMP file so that if I want
to tweak the positions of the two eggs later, I can do that since they're on different layers. I can upload this image straight to Redbubble,
because Redbubble allows you to tile the image, but I'll also show you how it looks tiled
in GIMP. I'm going to filters, map, tile and increasing
the width and height. And here's the tiled image, it's a seamlessly
repeating pattern. But make sure you use the last exported PNG
file for this so that those extra layers are included. Moving on to Redbubble to upload this image
for art prints and other merch. I'm going to add new work and choosing the
one repeating unit to upload to all products. You can edit the image and choose how you
want it to repeat. In this case I'm choosing the regular grid
for it to tile correctly. If you want to check out this or other paintings
in my Redbubble shop, I'll leave the link below. Thank you so much for watching and I hope
you found this useful. Subscribe for more art videos like this, I
upload a new one every Friday. Bye!
