Let’s talk about fills. You probably already know about solid fills and gradient fills in Photoshop, but it seems a far underused fill is the pattern fill. With the ability to customize and create your own fills you have an awesome tool at your disposal for just about anything requiring a repeating texture. I predominantly use them as subtle backgrounds and often on websites. Let’s take a look at how they’re made. (Hint: It’s really easy)

Step 1

First, I want to point out that we’re not going to be making anything revolutionary here. Unless you consider a bunch of dots mind-blowing. This tutorial is to show you how to create your own patterns. That being said, let’s begin.

The first and most obvious thing to do is determine what type of pattern you are looking for. Snowflakes, dots, or diagnonal scan lines are all examples of patterns that can be repeated. For the sake of simplicity we’ll just make a pattern of dots. Yay.

Step 2

Create a scaled version of your pattern. Unless you are able to visualize what a repeating pattern will look like when it’s cut up you probably want to start with a working version first. Here’s an example:

Here we’re simply going for a pattern of dots that will just repeat itself indefinitely. Notice how I used guides to define a perfect square. This is important for correctly aligning your repeating elements. It will also be helpful later when we crop our pattern.

Step 3

Now that we know what pattern we are going for, we need to crop our pattern into its repeating form. As I already have the guides setup, I’ll just be using the inner sqaure for the crop. The following image shows the result of the crop.

Needless to say, if you were to just copy and paste this image in both the x and y directions you would end up with a repeating pattern. Yay!

Step 4

Now that we have our desired shape we need to define the pattern within Photoshop. To do this go to Edit > Define Pattern…

You will be asked to name your pattern, call it “Dots” or something that makes sense to you. Finally select OK.

Step 5

Believe it or not you’re done. You now have the pattern you created at your disposal. In order to use it you need to select your paint bucket in the toolbar or press “G” on your keyboard. Once you do that you’ll probably need to change the fill selection from Foreground to Pattern.

Once you’ve done that you just need to to fill in a layer just like you’ve done a thousand times before in Photoshop. Feel free to try creating your own patterns. This tutorial just brushes the surface and shows the technical side of defining the pattern. I’ll leave the imaginative possibilities up to you.