Working with Patterns

Working with Patterns in PS6
by Josh Spivey.

The art of making patterns and textures takes some practice. With time and patience you can create some great effects. Here is the key to great textures and patterns... experimentation. Seriously, try out anything and everything you can think of. There is no stopping you from running 100 filters on a document, so try it and be the next guru. Of course you can create some great geometric shapes, stars, circles, green clovers, blue diamonds and other such tasty breakfast patterns, but you can also do so much more. Take the following example. Last week I was playing around with taking samples of scanned photos and using them in my patterns pallette. I found this sample of carbon fiber material and made a pattern out of it.

I zoomed in to the photo really close to see what the pixels looked like, and used the marquee tool to select a portion of the photo, that when tiled, would look perfectly accurate to the original. Then I hit Edit -> Define Pattern. Once that was done, the pattern was in my palette and I can use it whenever I want now. Wait, let's go over that again.

Step-by-Step
1. Have an entire image that you want to make into a pattern, or using the rectangular marquee tool, select the portion of an image that you want to use as a pattern.

2. In the toolbar at the top of your photoshop window or screen, hit Edit -> Define Pattern.

3. Now with the paint bucket tool selected and the pattern option selected at the top toolbar, simply pick your new pattern in the palette.

4. With the paint bucket tool, click on the canvas area and the pattern will appear like magic. It's really not magic though.

Ok, now that we have gone over that, let's talk about some types of patterns that are actually useful. I like to make patterns that are based on geometric shapes, like green clovers and blue diamonds, in my channels palette. They aren't green or blue in the channels palette though. I create a new channel (alpha) and inside it I create the shapes. Using the marquee tool and some serious zooming in, I create a rectangle around the part of the image I want to be my pattern. Then I define it as I did above. I create another new channel, and with nothing selected on the canvas, I use the paint bucket tool to fill it up. I have an example of this on my site at jlswebsource.com tutorials. In my example I used a hexagon pattern to create a small pattern shape.

When done, the paint bucket tool will tile my pattern making and endless grid of hexagons. You can do the same thing for lines, square grids, circles, squares and of course... rock hard marshmallow shapes. Why is it useful you say? Well the advantage is that when you select the transparency of the alpha channel (Command/Control for PC and click on thumbnail image in channels palette), it only selects the white portion. This allows you to use this selection, create a new layer in your layers palette, and fill it with any color you want. You are not commited to any particular color as you would be if you created the pattern on a layer.

You can then use it over and over and over again to create a rainbow of fruit flavors. Wait.... that's a different cereal.