Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial.
Today I'm going to show you how to create half-drop repeating patterns in
Photoshop.
To create a repeating pattern I'm just going to create a new document of a fixed size.
So I'm going to make mine 100 x 100 pixels in size,
RGB color with a transparent background and I'll click Ok.
I'm going to zoom in here so we can see it a little more clearly on the screen.
And I'm going to use a path for mine but you could start with anything you like
at all. And I'm just going to click and drag
and then click and drag in this direction because I want to make a sort
of boomerang shape and click back over the starting point.
Now I'm going to select my Direct Selection Tool,
click on this point because I want to adjust it and Alt drag to split these
two handles from each other,
Alt drag again
so that I can create this sort of boomerang shape.
And I'm thinking that that looks pretty good.
So now I'm going to turn this path into a selection by clicking here on
the Load Path as Selection.
I'm going to display my Layers palette so we can see what's going on here.
I have a color already selected so I'm just going to Alt Backspace
Option Delete on the Mac to fill this shape with my color.
Now I'm thinking I would like a stroke around this as well so I'm just
going to stroke it.
I could stroke it from the work path but it's easier just to stroke this selection.
So I'll choose Edit and then Stroke and then let's select a darker version of this
color for the stroke.
And we'll stroke it in the center. And we'll stroke it by 2 pixels and just click Ok.
So there's my shape and now I can deselect my selection using Ctrl D
or Command D on the Mac.
So now I have my shape I'm ready to create my half-drop repeat.
To create a half drop
repeat I have to break this up into four pieces and put it in the corners of
the image. Luckily Photoshop can do that for me.
So I'm going to start by making a duplicate of this layer and I do that by dragging
and dropping it onto the New Layer icon. So I now have two copies of the
image. I'm going to turn off the background copy so I have only the top version
visible.
And now I'm going to choose a filter that's going to do all the splitting
work for me,
Filter Other
Offset.
And the offset filter will break the shape up for me. All I need to do
is to tell it
what half the distance is of the vertical and horizontal size of this
image. Now I set up my image to be 100 pixels by 100
so half of that is 50 x 50. And all I need to do is type 50
and 50 into these boxes. And you can see that Photoshop has now broken this
image up into the required pieces. I set the undefined areas to wrap around and
just click Ok.
And there is the breakup for my half drop repeat.
And all I need to do now is to drop this middle shape back into position.
And this is exactly the pattern I need for a half drop repeat. So I'm going to
choose Select All and then
Edit
Define Pattern.
And I'm just going to click Ok. I could call it something if I want to. I'm
not going to bother at this stage. Let's hide this.
And now let's create an image with that half drop repeats in it. So I'm
just going to get rid of these
tools over here and let's create a brand new image File New. Let's choose
a US paper, let's do it letter size.
But I'm going to do it landscape.
No background, we'll just do a transparent background and click Ok.
And here's our
image that we're now going to fill with our half-drop repeat. And we do that
using Edit Fill.
And here we have in the Fill dialog the option of choosing a Pattern.
And your pattern is always going to be the very last one in the list. It's the last
one because you just created it
and click Ok.
And here's our half-drop repeat. Now I'm just going to drop a layer in behind
this and we'll fill it with
white so I'll just make white my foreground color, Alt Backspace or Option Delete on the
Mac.
And there we have our shape filled with our half drop repeating pattern.
Now if that's not the half drop repeat that you wanted but it's too small or too large
we could use a different way of doing this.
I'm going to choose Layer
New Fill Layer
Pattern.
I'm going to create it just as pattern fill layer, just click Ok. And now
what we're doing is we're filling it with our pattern. But since we decided our
pattern was either too small or too large, let's say it was too small,
we can now scale it up to 200 percent
by typing 200 percent in here and click Ok.
And now we have a pattern that is much larger than the original.
So there are different options that you have for using your half-drop repeat
pattern
once you've created it
in Photoshop.