Learn how to create a half drop repeating pattern in Photoshop. Also see how to fill a layer with a pattern and how to scale a pattern in Photoshop.
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Complete transcript from video:
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.
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this video I’m going to show you have to recolor spirals in Illustrator and we’re going to do it the easy way. Before we start this tutorial I want to show you what we’re going to end up with. I have a shape here that I have been creating in the last few video tutorials. And I’ve showed you how to turn an oval and a circle into a shape like this using Pucker and Bloat and then Transform. And in this video tutorial I’m going to show you how we can recolor this shape. It may not be easy to see unless I point it out but this basic shape actually has a gradient fill in it. It’s a yellow to orange gradient. But the center of each of these flowers is colored orange. And some of these petals have been individually colored with solid colors. And I’m going to show you how you can create not only this Gradient Fill effect but also isolate different areas in this shape to apply different effects to them. So let’s get started. And here I have the basic shape that we’re going to work on. The trick with working with a shape like this spiral here which hasn’t been expanded so right now if I affect the colors on this particular shape I’m going to affect the colors in the entire spiral. The trick is being able to isolate the component parts. We’re going to start by applying our gradient. So I’m going to select the foreground fill and click Gradient. I’m actually going to select one of the built in gradients and we’re going to use orange to yellow gradient. Now it’s not working particularly well. But that’s fine because I’m just going to hide that dialog and go back to the Gradient Tool because now I can drag over the shape to apply the gradient the way I want it to be. If I drag from the outside across the shape the inside of the spiral becomes red and the outside is yellow. If I go the other way the outside of the spiral is red and the inside is yellow. And I just need to pick exactly what I want this shape to be. And by dragging smaller gradients I can affect more of the shape with red and less with yellow or drag the other way to add more yellow and less red. So I’m just going to find a sort of good intermediate position and call that good. The next thing I want to do is to isolate the middle of the shape and then isolate some of these petals. The easiest way to do that is to go to Window and then Layers. Now you may find that the Layers palette is a little bit confusing but it’s actually going to help us a lot here. So this is our main layer and it contains a group and the group has lots of little bits in it. So I’m just going to click these fly out menus so that I can see exactly what’s in my shape. And the thing I’m interested in right now is this bit because it’s the bit in the middle of my flower. So if I click this icon here I’ve isolated just that middle shape. And now I can fill it with whatever I like. So I’m going to choose green because it’s going to be really obvious that it’s happening. And this color is changing throughout the entire shape. Now I can isolate individual bits of my shape so I can select for example this piece here. And this is going to be this object. So I could apply a solid fill to it. I could also apply a gradient fill if I wanted to but I just want to isolate a few of these petals and just change their colors. Let’s have a look at this one. This is two around the path and that’s a good area for me to affect. I’m going to make that blue. And let’s have a look and see which this one is. It’s again two more around and I’m going to make it red. And now that I’ve finished with my layers I can just hide it. And let’s just click outside the shape and this is what we came to do. You can see that we have our gradient fill across the flower. The center of the shape is green and some of these petals have been refilled with solid colors. In future if I want to affect this shape I’m now going to have to be a little bit more discreet. If I want to affect my gradient I can come back in here, target my shape, go back to Window and then Layers and this time I’m going to hide the pieces that I don’t want to affect. So I’m going to hide the blue and the red and the green pieces. Now I have selected only the objects that are filled with the gradient fill. And now I can go back and grab my Gradient Tool and try and build up a different gradient effect for the image. I could even change the entire gradient, change the colors in it. And then when I’m ready to go back I can just redisplay these other pieces so that they are now visible. But you can see that because they weren’t visible when we applied the gradient they’re not actually being affected by it. So there we have our recolored shape. I hope you’ve enjoyed this video tutorial. I’m Helen Bradley. Look out for more of my Illustrator tutorials on this YouTube channel.
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today I’m going to show you how to make cool shapes In Illustrator the easy way. Before we get started on this video making shapes let’s have a look at the sort of things that we’re going to do. The first thing I’m going to show you how to do is to create this shape really, really easy. And then having created this shape all I did was duplicate it to make these shapes. And all of this is done with just an ellipse and a circle. And you’re going to see how all of these can be done really, really easily. Let’s get started with a brand new document. Now I’m just using a letter size document, RGB color space. So I’ll click Ok. Let’s just size the document and create an oval. Now I’m going to fill this oval with a purple color, and I’m just going to extend the stroke to about 4 points. Now I’m going to click the move tool to just position it where I want it to be and then select the rotate tool. Now this tool allows me to rotate the shape. And what I’m going to do is set the center point, which at the moment is here in the middle of the shape, and I want it down here. So I’m going to position my cursor there and Alt Click. And this allows me to now rotate around this location here. I want 13 petals on my flower. So I’m going to type 360 divided by 13 and Illustrator will make the calculation for me as to how many degrees I need to rotate this to fit 13 in exactly around the circle. I’m going to click Preview, make sure that it rolls forward, which is exactly what it’s supposed to do, and then click Copy. And now I’m just going to press Ctrl or Command D another series of times and each time I press one of things shapes is created and rotated. And I do that until I have my 13 petals. Now I’m going to add a center to the flower. So I’m going back to the ellipse shape. I’m going to drag in here to create a flower center. Now I want my circle over the middle of my flower so I’m just holding down the Spacebar as I draw it to make sure it goes in correct position. If I hold Shift it’ll be constrained to a circle shape. I’m going to let go now and I’m going to fill this with orange. Ok, I now have my flower shape so I’m going to select it all with Ctrl or Command A, and I’m going to choose Object and then Group. And this will group this object together so now I can operate on it as a single shape. And this is my starter shape. This is the flower that we were going to create. I’m going to select it again and this time Alt or Option drag on it because I want a few more copies of this shape because I want to show you what the possibilities are for working with a shape like this. And the first one we’re going to focus on is this one here, so let’s just zoom into it. I going to select the shape and now I’m going to transform it. I’m going to use Effect Distort and Transform Pucker and Bloat. And what this allows me to do is to create interesting effects. You can see that all I started with was an ellipse and a circle and already I’ve got a shape like this because I have my Preview turned on and I have Pucker and Bloat selected. And I can drag across here and create all sorts of different effects with my shape. If I didn’t have a really thick stroke then I wouldn’t have quite such strong black lines, but you can just determine exactly what you want. And this Pucker and Bloat will give you all sorts of shapes. Just a few extra percent and you’ll get a different shape entirely. So I’m just going to look for a good shape there and when I’ve got it I’m just going to call that done. So there’s one of the sorts of shapes that we can create just using a starting point of an oval and a circle, create a flower and then use Pucker and Bloat to create a shape like this. Let’s have a look at this flower. And this time I’m going to choose Effect Distort and Transform and I’m going to select Twist because twist allows me to twist this shape. You can see that I’m getting those curly ends to my flower. And I can go more or less. So let’s try say 30 degrees and see what that gives us. And it gives us a less of a twist. And if we go to 90 let’s see what we get there. We get a much greater twist. So you can do all sorts of things with your basic flower shape with that twist tool. And finally let’s have a look at another one of these effects. I’m going to choose Effect Distort and Transform again, and this time I’m going to select Tweak because what tweak does is actually fracture this image. You can see that we’ve got a horizontal and vertical setting of 10 percent here. And look what happens when I preview this and then go and really, really tweak it. If I choose between relative and absolute you could see I’m getting a sort of almost graffiti style effect. And it’s all done without having any skills at all in creating shapes beyond an oval and a circle. And you can experiment here with these sorts of options that allow you to get different effects from this tweak tool. So there we have a different effect from our flower. It’s obviously something very, very different but we could use this for example as a background for something later on. If we want to use this you’ll see that whenever we select it we’ve actually got our basic flower shape. Here’s a basic flower shape. Here’s our basic shape. If we want to use it elsewhere in Illustrator we may want to convert this. So we would choose Object and then Expand Appearance. And now we’ve actually got the shapes selected not the original flower, Object, Expand Appearance. And now we’ve got something the vector paths are actually around the physical shape not what it had been before we worked with at, again Object, Expand Appearance. And that would allow us then to come in and do things with the shape itself. Let’s just go and grab an object here and you can see that we can then start rescaling this portion or we can work with it in some way. But we can do things with it because it is no longer a flower shape. And we can do things such as dragging on points and making it all sorts of things. So I’ve totally messed that up there, but you get the idea as to what Expand Appearance will give you in terms of turning this flower shape into a something that then could be taken further in Illustrator, for example a repeat pattern. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video. Look out for more of my Lightroom, Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials on my YouTube channel.
Learn the Illustrator Pen Tool to draw a folk art shaped heart. You’ll learn how to draw with the Pen tool, how to know which way to drag to make a shape and how to adjust the path when done. Also shows using the Twirl, Scallop and Crystallize tools.
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can use the Illustrator pen tool to draw a folk art heart. I’m going to focus on how to use the pen tool for people who haven’t used the pen tool very much before. And in the process we’re going to create an interesting heart shape that could be used for a lot of things including adapted for use in one of my other tutorials which shows you how to create a half drop repeating pattern. But let’s get started on the folk art heart. I’m going to show you how to use the pen tool here to make a folk art heart. So we’re going to click the pen tool to begin with and we’re going to draw the heart shape. I’m going to start with some color though because it would be really nice to see this heart as we make it. So I’m going to give it a dark pink fill and I’m going to make a darker pink for its stroke. Let’s take this pink and let’s just adjust it a little bit. I’ll double click on it and let’s make it a bit darker. And we’ll give it a bit of a weighted stroke as well, let’s say 5 points. I think this document is a letter size sheet of paper so this should be a pretty good start. So with the pen tool selected I’m going to click and drag. So my first point is going to be at the sort of bendy bit of the heart, so I’m going to click and drag. And I’m dragging up here in the direction that I want to go in, and then I’m going to let go. Now my paper on art board has taken off so I’m just holding the spacebar down to move it back into position. I haven’t lost my pen tool or my shape. I’m all ready to go and do the next bit. Now having gone up here the next point I want is about here. So look at my heart shape. I’m going down towards here. So I’m going to click here and drag in the direction I want to go in, and I’m going all the way down to the bottom pointy bit off my heart. I still haven’t let go of the mouse button. I’m not overly worried about the shape. I’d like it to sort of look heart shape, but I can fine-tune it later on. Now I’m letting go the mouse button. The next bit I need to focus on is where I want the pointy bit. And the pointy bit because it is going to be pointy, I want it to come down, point and up again, I’m just going to click. So I’m thinking about here is a good spot so one click is all I need. And now I have half my heart shape. Now I could do all sorts of things like flip this over and join it back together again, but this is a folk art heart so it’s supposed to be uneven. So the next point is going to be up here somewhere and I’m going to be drawing in this direction. So I’m going to click here and drag in the direction that I want this line to go, click, drag. You can see if I went the other way my line wouldn’t go the way I want it to, so I have to click and drag up towards the top right hand corner of this art board. And I’m just going to shape it as I go. And I think that’s a nice sort of shape. I’m going to now let go the left mouse button. And here’s the next piece of our heart shape. The last piece is the final piece, and I’m just going to click here to finish off. And there’s the end of my heart. This is a closed shape, so if I click the move tool or press V to move I can now move my heart around. And I can also adjust it with this tool, the Direct Selection or A tool. And what I do with that tool is just drag over a point on the heart that I want to adjust, and then I can pull it into a different position and I can reshape the curve. And if I want these handles to work independently of each other they will. All I need to do is hold my mouse pointer over the handle and hold the Alt or Option key so it gets that little plus symbol beside it. That means that these handles will now operate independently of each other. And sometimes that allows you to create something that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to create. Now I want as I said a sort of folk art style heart so I want a beefy side and a less beefy side. Now I’ve got the Direct Selection Tool selected but you can see that when I’m dragging on it I’m actually dragging on the path. That’s because I don’t have just this point selected. To do that I just drag over this point, and when these are hollow boxes and this is a filled one it tells me that I’m working on this point alone. And I’m going to call this good. This is now my folk art heart shade. Now because it’s a shape in Illustrator we can do some other things to it. So let’s look quickly at how we might decorate this heart using some of Illustrator’s tools. There are some fun tools in Illustrator that you can use to work on this heart a little bit to give it a more sculptured look. For example there’s the Twirl tool. Now I’m going to select the Twirl tool. My brush is pretty big. So I’m going to Alt or Option drag on it, and I’m dragging down towards the bottom left corner of the image to make the shape a little bit smaller. That’s a good sort of shape for this brush. And now I’m just going to twirl. Now I twirled a little bit too much there so that you really can’t see what I’ve done. What happens when I use the Twirl tool is that it twirls the edge of this shape. So I could create my heart with a twirled edge by just twirling this edge with this brush. Now I’m pressing Ctrl or Command Z to undo that if I don’t like the twirl. So I’ve just got my fingers over Ctrl or Command Z so I can undo a twirl if it’s not to my liking. So that’s one way that we could decorate the edges of this heart. We could also use tools such as the Scallop Tool, and scallop will allow us to scallop the edges off this heart. But I’m thinking that I don’t have nearly a big enough brush here. So I’m going to Alt or Option drag towards the top corner of this image, the top right hand corner, and see if that’s a better option for the Scallop Tool. And I can pull out the edges of the heart. Now it’s not looking particularly effective on this heart shape but for other shapes it may be of interest to you. Let’s have a look and see what the Crystallize Tool will give us. This will give us some crystallized edges. So in actual fact for this heart that may work reasonably well. Let’s just undo it and have another shot at it. I’m just going to click and drag as I click. So undo it again, click and drag and just see if that’s going to give me anything of interest. The other tool I could choose is this Wrinkle Tool, and that will wrinkle the edges as well. So we could run that around the edges of the heart if that was the effect that we were looking at. But there are some interesting tools here that having drawn your heart shape you could now come and do something a little more interesting with it. This might do for somebody who’s trying to illustrate something on say looking after someone’s heart because we’re getting almost a sort of blood pressure reading or heart pressure reading effect around the edge of the heart. So there are a whole heap of tools here that you can use. Having already created your heart with the pen tool it can now be adjusted because it is a vector object in Illustrator using all these tools.
Convert an image into vectors using Live Trace in Illustrator and then paint it using Illustrator Live Paint feature.
The Complete text from this video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial we’re taking an image that we already prepared inside Photoshop and we’re going to use it with the Live Paint tool in Illustrator to color the image. If you haven’t previously seen the Photoshop video and if you’re not sure how to isolate and prepare an image of the kind that we’re way using in this tutorial you may want to watch that one first. But here we’re going to open up our image in Illustrator, trace it and then use Live Paint. To work on the image that we’ve already pre-prepared in Photoshop I’ve created a brand new portrait size image. I’ll choose File and Place and we’re going to bring in the isolated bathing box image that we worked on in Photoshop and we’re going to trace this. But one of the things that you can do in earlier versions of Illustrator that you can’t to do in this version is actually blur the image at the same time as tracing it. And I think this image would be helped if I blurred it a little bit before I actually trace it so I’m going to choose Effect Blur and apply a Gaussian blur to it. And I’ve experimented and about a 3 pixel blur is pretty good for this image so I’m going to click Ok. And what this does is blur some of the noise so I’m going to get a chunkier tracing result. So I’m going to click Image Trace. The initial result is not very spectacular but I’m going to click here for the Image Trace Panel and I’m going to make some additional selections which is going to improve my tracing. But I’m going to start by turning off my preview. I’m going to select Color and I’m going to set this to, for example, six colors. I’m going to set up a low paths and corners setting so that we get chunkier pieces in our image and I’m going to increase the noise reduction to 100 pixels. I’m going to ask to ignore white. I’m going to click either preview or trace. Preview would let me see see these options in place to see if I like it. I know I’m going to like it so I’m just going to click Trace to get all the way there right now. And now we’re done. I’m going to expand this by clicking Expand and now we’ve got an expanded image. I’m also going to ungroup it with Object Ungroup. I’m going to make sure that there is no white in this image. And their actually is white behind it so I’ve actually now selected the white and I’m just going to press Delete to remove it. So now all that’s left in my image is not white so it’s all colored so I’m going to regroup it. And I’m going to convert this for Live Paint so I’m going to choose Object and then Live Paint Make And this converts the object so that I can use the Live Paint tool on it. So let’s go and get our tools. And this is the Live Paint tool here. It shares a toolbar position with the shape builder tool and its letter is K so that might help you to find it a little more easily in future. Now we need our swatches so I’m just going to make sure that my Swatches are visible here. Nope, they’re not, so let’s go and get. Here they are. And I would like to get a special swatch to use here so I’m going to go find some Kuler colors. I’ll choose Window Extensions and then choose Kuler. I already have some Kuler summer colors here so I’m going to select a color combination here that is reminiscent of summer and that will look good on my image. I’m going to choose something that’s quite a ways from the image we already have so let’s choose iGadgets. I’m going to click here and add it to the Swatches panel. That puts it in my swatches so I can now use it. With the Live Paint Bucket tool selected I can click on a color here in this Kuler swatch here and and now watch as I hold my mouse over the image. The areas that are colored in this salmon pink are the areas in which I’m going to be dropping that blue color in. This is my selected color and blue is over the cursor so if I click here we’re going to start painting in blue. The color purple is to one side of the blue and the color yellow is to the other side and you can see them here on the screen on my cursor. If I want to change to use the purple I can just use the left arrow key and start painting now with purple, dropping purple in wherever I want it to be. And if I want to change and paint with a different color such as that green then I can go back over with the right arrow key and drop that into a different position and then perhaps go to the orange and drop that in and even the red. So I can go all the way around this color swatch and if I go all the way around I’m just coming back to the exact same color. So let’s go to red. I’m just going to circle around these colors. Now in some cases you may want to go for something a little bit different so you may want to bring in a color that’s not in the current color scheme here. And we can do that too. So let’s go and get another color. Let’s say that we want to add to this particular color scheme a sort of well let’s go and get some color we don’t already have, say this green here. So I’m going to click on that green and now I’m working in this area of the palette. So now I can add that green to my image. And if I press the left and right arrow keys I’m going to move around the colors in this part of the swatch, no longer in this part. So I’m going to call this good for now so let’s just say that we’re going to use this image. So I’m going back to my Selection Tool. Now the fact that we’ve used Live Paint on this image doesn’t preclude us from doing other things that we’re used to being able to do. I’m going to select the image and I’m going to make a new color group from it. I’m going to choose Selected Artwork and I’m going to include swatches for tints. So these are all the colors that I’ve been using in this image so far. Now with this selected I can click the Edit or Apply Color Group option. I’m just going to move my image out of the way a little bit so that we can see it as we’re working. And the same options that are available to us when we’ve been in this dialog before are still available. I can use this option to rotate around the colors that we have so we’re remapping the colors. What was pink is now some other color within our fixed color scheme. We can also use this one to randomly change saturation and brightness, again within the same colors and we can use edit. And this allows us to move the colors around to make them more pastel, to make them more saturated. And we can even unlock the colors to then apply different colors to our image by just dragging these colors around. And if we get something that we like and that’s not what I’ve got here but let’s say that we like it I’m going to click to create a New Color Group from it and then click Ok. And this is the new swatch for my image. So there we’ve used Live Paint to paint a traced image in Illustrator and all of shapes remain vector objects in Illustrator.
Come and see all our video tutorials on our YouTube channel.
I’ve just come back from Photoshop World in Las Vegas. My head hurts so bad with things I’ve learned.
One fun thing that happened amongst everything else is that I got interviewed by Dave Cross’ daughter and the clip was used in the conference closing video – second time it’s happened to me – must be the red hair!
So, it’s now up on YouTube and here’s the link (I’m the red head – duh! 19 seconds into the video) how cool is that?
I will be posting some tips and tricks I’ve learned in my Photoshop blog real soon.
