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HomePosts Tagged "pattern" (Page 3)

pattern Tag

Illustrator, Patterns, Photoshop, Textures, Tutorials

I’ve been creating more patterns in the last year than I ever have before. Patterns are such a wonderful tool to add personality quickly to designs without a ton of effort, or overthinking. One of the best parts: they can be added to backgrounds, text and design elements with just a click of a button in both Photoshop and Illustrator. Say you have a Photoshop pattern, maybe a watercolor texture pattern, like we created in this tutorial. If you’d like to use it as a pattern swatch in Illustrator, how do you convert that Photoshop pattern file? In this tutorial, we go step by step on how to convert any Photoshop pattern into an Illustrator pattern swatch in a few quick steps. Read on for everything you need to know!

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Freebies, Hand Lettering, Resources, Skillshare, Typography

In my newest Skillshare class, Intro to iPad Lettering, we start lettering on the iPad using some guide sheets to get comfortable writing on a tablet vs. paper. If you’re on your way to iPad lettering, guide sheets are wonderful tools. Practicing on paper before making the leap allows a more seamless transition when you’re ready. To help the transition along, this week’s freebie is a set of printable hand lettering guide sheets to improve consistency with uniform letters.

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Color, Patterns, Textures, Tutorials

To finish up Photoshop month, this week I wanted to share one of my favorite ways to work with watercolors in Photoshop – turning them into seamless texture patterns! If you’ve taken my Watercolor Textures for Graphic Design class over on Skillshare, this week’s tutorial will be a refresher for you, but I’m also sharing how to take the pattern you create and convert it into an Illustrator pattern swatch (check out around 8:20 for that), so there’s something new for everyone 🙂 My newest watercolor texture kit (vol. 3) just went live today, so I’m excited to share textures from the new kit throughout the video – these are my most detailed and colorful ones to date! Click below to get yo’ pattern on!

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Freebies, Hand Lettering, Typography

Happy April tomorrow!

Everything felt very non-stop sprint throughout all of March. Most of it was due to my ocd with getting the ebook as perfect as possible. If I didn’t become a designer, I would have been a writer, so I naturally spend more time than I probably should carefully crafting sentences and evaluating word choices. But! It’s finally out into the world and I’ve returned to breathing once again 🙂 (I made a free preview of the book available yesterday! If you’re interested, click here to download it!)

I’m really looking forward to diving back into design tutorials this coming month. It seems like I’ve been away from them longer than 4 weeks and I’ve missed putting them together. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of prep on an upcoming Intro to Photoshop class. This will be the best quality course I’ve ever done (a real production team-quality!) and it’s hard to keep in the excitement for it, but I’ll have many more details as the month goes on 🙂 I’m also planning my next Skillshare class this month, so if you’re on the every-tuesday email list, keep an eye out because free spots to the class will be heading your way soon!

Until then, pick up your free April 2016 desktop wallpaper to keep things on track in two common formats: 1920×1080 + 1280×1024 both with and without dates. Download link + previews below!

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Hand Drawn, Illustrator, Patterns, Tutorials

A few months ago, I shared how anyone with any version of Adobe Illustrator can create a seamless pattern. Once Adobe created CS6 a few years back, they included the pattern tool and it was a giant game changer for anyone who loves to create vector patterns. Not only did it make the entire pattern creation process faster, it eliminated Illustrator’s tendency to get glitchy with those white hairlines that would sometimes appear in our patterns.

In this week’s tutorial, we’ll go over everything the pattern tool can do, all the different pattern styles you can create using the same elements, and we’ll do it all by using the same menu. Head’s up, this tutorial only applies to CS6 or newer versions (CC) Illustrator users. Let’s make some patterns!

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Patterns, Resources, Tutorials

This week’s tutorial isn’t the sexiest thing ever, but it’s extremely useful if you work on multiple machines, need to share digital assets with clients + fellow designers, are a super organized person looking to be more digitally organized, or have an old computer you’re in constant fear will crap out on you at any moment. This one’s for you!

One thing’s for sure, if you’ve been designing for any length of time, a program has crashed on you at some point and when you reopen, things look a little different in the swatches, brushes and patterns department. If you never saved these digital assets pre-crash, they are lost (along with that pleasant mood you had 5 seconds before) in file purgatory.

In this week’s tutorial, we’ll dull the pain of lost assets by going over exactly how to save patterns and brushes in Illustrator and Photoshop so you’ll know where to find them if you ever need a reinstall, or if you just want to share them. Read on to see how!

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Branding, Business, Illustrator, Tutorials

Happy Tuesday! I’ve gotten quite a few requests lately on layout design for a business card, so this week I wanted to share some design friendly layouts that could be used for different types of businesses, and also make each one print-ready using Illustrator. At the end of this tutorial, you’ll have 3 business card design layouts (front and back!) you can print at home using the bulk print method, or send off to a professional printer. Read on to see how – links to the fonts and resources used included below!

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Hand Drawn, Illustrator, Tutorials

One of my favorite things is taking a doodle and reimagining it digitally. If you’ve been here before, you know that’s true! One thing I find myself doing a lot with my mini doodles lately is turning them into seamless pattern brushes so they can connect to make (any length) dividers, laurels – you name it. There’s a little trick to getting them seamless and once you do, they are so much fun to play with. In this week’s tutorial, we’ll take a mini doodle, vectorize it, make it seamless, then convert it into a multi-purpose, seamless pattern brush in Illustrator. Read on to see how easy it is!

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Color, Patterns, Roundups, Textures

Things have been all about watercolor typography lately – and having the versatility to create such specific detail with a waterbrush, I started to wonder – what else can I create fine detail in with a waterbrush? I am self admittedly not an illustrator – or painter for that matter. I’m a designer that has always loved to also doodle and create things with my hands. When I was young, I’d ask for an ‘art kit’ from the craft store every Christmas and birthday and I’m grateful my parents always found a way to deliver. I could doodle some legit cartoon characters (following an 8th grade standard), but realism or the patience to carry out long form artwork has always been MIA in my gifts department.

I’ve always had a passion for logic + mathematics (totally weird, I know – almost became a math teacher, but that’s another story). I think it’s probably the geometry of it all, but I am a complete sucker for textiles. Anyway, the idea of putting patterns and watercolors together prompted a pinterest hunt, which brought about this post today. If you like watercolors + patterns, this is some serious kind of eye candy. I had to make this post have a theme or I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself from posting every beautiful piece of artwork I came across. So! Here are 10 dreamy watercolor patterns to go extra swoon-mode over 🙂 Happy Thursday!

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Hand Drawn, Illustration, Illustrator, Patterns, Tutorials

Seamless patterns in Illustrator have been on my tutorial list for a while, so I’m very excited for this week! There’s something about the anticipation right before you test your pattern that I love. The total surprise when you see this pretty little square you made repeated a dozen times – suddenly the little square looks the same, but entirely new. And then go ahead and imagine it on your favorite throw pillow, mug, notebook, mousepad, comforter, wallpaper..it’s a great moment for a designer, even if they’re just daydreams 😉 My goal is to bring you one step closer to those daydreams this week with a method you can use to create seamless, repeatable patterns no matter which version of Illustrator you have. We’ll take a square with elements from the 100+ Vector Leaves and Flourishes pack and go step by step to achieve a fully usable pattern at the end – color palette included. Let’s go!

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Freebies, Illustrator, Patterns

I was going to say a few months ago, but I just checked, and last year (holy moly), I shared some geometric photoshop patterns. They’ve been downloaded almost 20,000(!!!) times, so I thought it might be time for some Illustrator ones! This week’s freebie is a set of 4 geometric Illustrator pattern swatches to use on whatever you please 🙂 I’m also sharing some quick tips + tricks on using them you may not have heard before – read on to see!

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Hand Drawn, Patterns, Roundups

Do you guys get as sucked into a hand drawn repeat pattern as I do? When a great one catches my eye, I typically stare it down for at least 1-3 minutes. I’m not kidding. There’s something totally hypnotic about it that I can’t resist. I started a pattern inspiration board on pinterest a while ago and ever since, my stream has seriously toyed with my time. I get stuck there so long! This post is also taking me the longest to put together because I’m getting re-mesmerized with each delicious one. It’s a small sacrifice, but I think it’s worth it 🙂 Here’s a roundup of some of my recent favorites from pinterest, and some you can even own if you’re in the market. Enjoy!

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