APP Words: Tea Leaves Pattern

[9]

Right, now it's time to (finally) produce the tea leaves pattern! I haven't really done many - if at all - patterns on the computer so I might learn something new today. 

Luckily I found quite a detailed tutorial (here) [4] to help me out with this, because even though I have roughly sketched my pattern I know that it wouldn't be ideal as everything needs to be placed perfectly so that it would repeat effortlessly. 

I first start off by uploading a photo of my pattern sketch and draw out vectors of all of the elements that I want within the pattern design. Once I was done I selected them all, copied them, and created a new document sized 600px x 600px. I then pasted them and shifted them to the side for a bit.

I used the rectangle tool to create a box by selecting it and then clicking anywhere on the screen, then I typed in the dimensions 300px x 300px. While it's still selected I went to View > Snap to Grid so that it'll be easier for me to place all of the tea leaves in, and put the box at the centre of the document. I locked this box. Then it was just the case of placing all of the tea leaves, taking reference from my sketch.

With the basic layout done I want to shift some so that they actually went outside the box. This is because when it comes to repeating the pattern it wouldn't look so 'boxy' and everything would be smoothly connected.

Once done, I selected one 'outside element' at the time, copied and pasted to front. Still having this copy selected I used the transform tool and typed in either "-300" or "+300", depending on where it was. This then shifts it so that it's at the exact location of where it would be when repeated. It's quite hard to explain!

And that's my pattern done (sort of). My next step is to unlock the box, make it transparent, and with that still selected I select all of the little elements within the pattern. I go to Edit > Define Pattern, add in a name, and tada! My pattern is now created and shown in the swatches panel!

Conclusion: [5]

This tutorial has really shown me that patterns aren't as hard to do as I thought they were! I'm so glad that I was able to learn this. I used to do patterns but there was always something wrong with it...

Now I just need to put all of the design together, connect my teacup and teapot design with the banner, and then I could finally lay down the colours. I've still got a long way to go yet!

[n] Learning Outcome