How To Make Cute Seamless Patterns in Photoshop

Today I’ll show you two ways to make a custom seamless pattern in Photoshop. Let’s get to it!

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Alright, let’s get to it and open Photoshop and get going on this first pattern. See you there. Okay guys, full disclosure. I am doing a voice-over, because I did record this with audio and it turns out I can’t work and talk coherently all at the same time, although it is yet to be seen whether I can do this coherently this way too.

So, anyways, let’s get to it and start by going into Photoshop, I’m going File New and I’m gonna make a new document that is 4000 pixels by 4000 pixels, nice and big, and 300 DPI. And I’m gonna push okay.

Okay, and then I’m gonna go into my finder and grab some elements from my Snow Adorable pack here… I’m gonna grab… Let’s see… I’m gonna grab… I’m gonna get some trees and… Let’s see what else, let’s scroll down… And some, and more of these… And some triangles. I’m just gonna drag and drop into Photoshop.

Alright, now let’s change the background color to a nice blue so we can actually see what’s going on.

It always helps.

I’m gonna take this blue and make it a little bit darker. Perfect. Alright. I’m just gonna drag these guys around to make an irregular pattern. And just tweak them a little bit just by going Command-T to scale them. And then I’m going to take my lasso tool to get these little triangles here… I just want one of them to make… I don’t want that pattern always, so I’m gonna select the triangles layer and go Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V to paste so now I have a new little triangle on its own layer and I’m gonna duplicate that by going Command-J and moving it.

Command-T to transform to just make it a little bit on a different location, perfect. And then I can just use that guy and dot them around wherever need be. Fill in the holes, fill in the gaps.

Okay, I’m gonna select all these and move them up to the left hand corner. Then Command-J to duplicate and Command-T to move over, which I really didn’t need to do Command-T, but anyways… Habit. Just Command-J to duplicate, and then I’m just gonna move them around.

And then we’ll just fast-forward a little bit while I just place all these little guys around.

I’m gonna select everything I’ve put on the canvas here…

and move it up to the top left hand corner, so that just the outer elements just touch the edge.

You can see they overlap the edge there. Then I’m gonna take my selection tool and just select the very edge, so anything that touches that very edge at the top, I’m just gonna grab those and then do Command-J to duplicate, Command-T to transform, and at the very top.

You’ll see that in the Y-axis, I’m gonna take that duplicate and move it down by 4000 because I know this canvas is 4000 x 4000, so I’m going to move it down that full 4000 pixels. Gonna do the same to the left hand side.

Select the very edge and Command-J, Command-T to transform and move it over to the other side in the X-axis this time, and that way it repeats perfectly ’cause I know the dimensions and I realized there was a gap at the top there, so I’m just gonna place another leaf and I’m going to Command-J and Command-T, transform in the Y-axis, so I will move it down exactly 4000 pixels. Now I’m just gonna fill in the holes.

Just to make this pattern look like there’s no big gaps. So now I’m gonna take this one, I think I need one over there, so I’m gonna take that and Command-J duplicate, Command-T on the X-axis, 4000 pixels over. It’s starting to fill in nicely.

Okay, so now I’m gonna take all my layers…

And just group them so it’s not messy. And then I’m gonna go Edit and Define Pattern… And you can name it whatever you want.

And then I’m going to go Layer, New Fill Layer, Pattern, click Okay, and then I’m gonna scale it smaller, so I can see if how this pattern has worked out. And this is just my test, so that I can see how it repeats and if it’s repeating perfectly or if I’ve missed anything.

It looks like we’ve got everything just so, so you can see it’s a perfectly repeatable seamless pattern. So this is one way to make a pattern and I’ll show you another way in the next little section.

So, of course you’ll wanna save this, save it as a Photoshop file and save it as a JPEG as well. So the JPEG is the finished pattern and it is a tileable seamless pattern that you can just repeat and repeat over and over.

So then, next what I’m going to show you… Actually, I’m gonna do some stripes first. And this isn’t very new, but I always found stripes to be a little bit confusing.

I don’t know why, ’cause it’s really actually simple,  once you do it a couple of times. But here we go. What I’m gonna do… And this is gonna be an irregular stripe so it’s actually not something that I want to be a perfect line.

I’m gonna use this Kyle Webster brush…

that comes in Photoshop and it’s just like the speckley one. You can see I’m going to make it 800 pixels, that’s the size of it.

So I’m gonna go across here, and I didn’t like that, I want it to go so it’s full on either side. So first of all, I’m gonna actually make this so that it does repeat perfectly because I want the edges to match up and I’m gonna move it over on the X-axis to zero and then I’m gonna duplicate it, so Command-J and I’m gonna move it over 4000, just like I did before, ’cause I wanna make sure that the edges match up perfectly and they do.

And because it’s irregular it actually wasn’t too difficult. So if there were any gaps or anything that looks weird, I could fix it then with a clone brush or something like that, or the stamp tool.

And so I’m gonna take this and I’ll move it up to the zero, the Y-axis there, and then I’m gonna duplicate it, and I’m gonna move it down 800 pixels, and that way I’m gonna get an even stripe because it’s 800 pixels and it divides it nicely into 4000 so I’m just doing multiples of eight… Doing my times tables, trying to remember them…  It’s not that hard.

Anyways, it’s all good.

We’ve got one more to go, and…

There it is at 4000 and now we have a nice stripe pattern. So I can just merge these all together and that’s Command-E, then we’re gonna define the pattern just to check to make sure it all worked out nice… Go over to… Not there… Layer, New Fill Layer, Pattern… And, yep, and I’m going to scale it down and that looks good to me.

Awesome, okay, so that’s the backdrop I want for this pattern. That’s not the new part I want to show you, it’s this part. So I’m gonna go grab some elements from Snow Adorable again, and grab these cute little bears in hot chocolate cups… Mugs… Right?

Okay, I’m gonna scale them, ’cause this is too big and I’m just gonna make sure that the mugs are the same size, so this top guy can scale up a little bit. There we go, getting better. Okay, so pop these guys in the middle, and this is the part that’s important.

And then go Filter, Other, Offset and the settings are going to be half of the width of your canvas. So we know it’s 4000, so it’s going to be 2000 x 2000 and it’s going to be wraparound. And then this little guy can just stay right where he is, and that’s perfect.

And so now you have all those four quadrants…

Perfectly done, you know they were right and the way they’re supposed to be.

Now we’re gonna go and grab some little snowflakes from the snow globe here and this is just gonna add a little bit more texture. You’re not going to see them too much, it’s just gonna be a little bit more subtle, but I think it just adds… Adds a little bit more to this little project.

That looks… Good. I’m gonna take them and I’m going to group them and I’m gonna duplicate the group and I’m gonna take the original group and I’m going to do the same thing, just gonna merge those and go Filter, Other, Offset because there you have it set up, it does it perfectly anyways.

And that just scattered them about to the corners, touch the edges and that repeats perfectly, and I’m gonna bring back the other ones and just move them around just a touch. And… I’m not gonna do that, because then I will have to repeat it and you’ve already seen that box.

Alright, let’s just move these guys around, and that looks good. So now we can go and just tidy those up, merge them together… Edit, Define Pattern, say Okay and then go Layer, Fill Layer, Pattern and test this out just to see how we did, so I’m gonna scale it down and here we go, and so you can see how easily that this type of pattern is to create with the offset method, and that looks good.

Perfect. I love that little bear, so cute.

So that was two ways to make a seamless pattern in Photoshop. I hope you found it useful and you can use that in your next project. If you haven’t already, hit Subscribe, that really helps me out and then you don’t miss out on any of the upcoming videos. So, I love you guys, I appreciate you so much, and hope to see you in the next one.