Photoshop Tutorial- Perfect Pixel Patterns

Create perfect pixel patterns in Adobe® Photoshop® every time!

This tutorial was made in Adobe® Photoshop® CS2. It can be done in most earlier versions as well.

Hello there! How are you doing? Good? Good. So, I see you want to learn how to make perfect pixel patterns every time, huh? Well, you came to the right place! In this tutorial, I will show you how make seamless pixel patterns using Photoshop's Pencil Tool and a little bit of imagination!

The first step is to, obviously, open up Photoshop.

Now, the next step is to create a new document with a transparent background sized 25px by 25 px. Why so small? Because this will only be one fourth of the final pattern.

Once created, you're going to wan't to zoom in all the way so that you can see what you're doing. To do this, simply hold down the Ctrl key and tap the + key repeatedly until it won't let you zoom in anymore. This should be 1600%. You can also use the Zoom Tool (Z), but you should really become acquainted with hotkeys as they save a lot of time and effort (because moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse is just sooooo hard :-) ).

Now, select the Pencil Tool and set your foreground color to Black, and the background color to White. This can be done by simply pressing D.

Here comes the fun part! Working your way from the lower right hand corner, start drawing your pattern. Be as imaginitive as you want. Staying symmetric, as seen in this tutorial, can leave your final result looking very seamless and nice on the eyes, although it is not completely necessary, as you will see at the end of this tutorial.

Continue to fill the canvas:

When you zoom out to the actual size, you should find yourself with a nice, small, pixely looking thingy. Well, select it and copy it! Or press Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+C.

Next, create a new document (Ctrl+N) with the same settings except sized 50px by 50px instead of 25px squared.

Press Ctrl+V in the new document, pasting the copied work from the previous document. Position it so that it "snaps" into the lower right hand corner.

Now, duplicate the layer, or just press paste again, and drag this part so that it snaps into the lower left corner. Press Ctrl+T to transform it and rotate it exactly 90 degrees.

Repeat the process for the other two corners. Then press Ctrl+E to merge all the pieces into one layer.

Next, select everything by pressing Ctrl+A. Goto Edit > Define Pattern...

Call it whatever you want and press "OK".

You're done! Now when you choose to use a pattern for something, you're new pattern will show up with the rest of them!

Here's a shot of the pattern in action!

And here's a bunch of examples I made:

Here's the one we just made:

This one didn't use symmetry:

Here's a larger one:

Thanks for checking out my tutorial! I hope you learned something or were inspired in some way by it!

For more tutorials like this one, visit http://cornoncob.com

Contact:
dansolomon@cornoncob.com