Introduction

Hello, in today's tutorial I will teach two techniques to help you create fun seamless patterns that tile perfectly in Clip Studio Paint!

These techniques are perfect for crafters, artists and sewist who want to create patterns of their art for multiple projects or products such as wallpapers, pencil cases, notebooks, dresses and even Youtube banners. There are endless possibilities and uses for this, so without further ado, let's begin!

Create Fun Patterns for your Art Projects

In the following tutorial video, I explain in detail each and every step I take in order to create my patterns. The video itself features my two favourite techniques for pattern creation along with cute and creepy original art I created just for the occasion. Enjoy!

Overview of the First Technique

1. For this technique what you will need is to find a theme and design up to three elements that will be repeated in your pattern.

 

2. Export them as high resolution .png images, like this, perfect.

 

3. Create a new square canvas. I personally work with a pretty big 4000 pixels square canvas at 300 DPI, but you can easily work with a 2000 pixel square one if it’s easier on your computer. I’ve found that Clip Studio usually deals very well with bigger canvas size so I have not been restraining myself on that aspect.

 

TIP: Always keep your DPI at 300 by the way, this is a general printing resolution and going lower than that might highly affect your ability to make high quality prints of your art.

 

4. Press ‘’G’’ twice on your keyboard twice to get the bucket tool, select a plain color for your background and click on your canvas to fill it with your chosen color.

 

5. Go back to Edit → Change Canvas Size → and increase your canvas size by 2000 square pixels.

 

-Now what you should see is that we added a white border to our colored square, this will be very important when repeating our first pattern, so make sure you leave enough white space as buffer, otherwise you won’t be able to repeat your designs properly.

 

6. Import your three designs into your new canvas. To do this, simply drag and drop your .png images from your folder right into your layers.

 

 

Now that we are all set, it is time to experiment with the placement of the characters within the canvas.

 

7. Duplicate your design layers and hide the originals.

 

8. Let’s start moving the designs around to create the actual pattern.

Make sure you leave part of the design inside the colored square and part of the design outside the square and avoid placing your design over more than one edge of the square like this. Repeat the same process for the two other elements of your design and make sure to leave some space between them.

 

TIP: Try to avoid making a straight line with your designs and instead try to place them in diagonals from each other. This is purely for aesthetic purposes, it will make the repetition much less visible when you scale the pattern up and down.

 

9. Select the layer of your colored square, press W on your keyboard to summon the auto select tool and select the white outside area of your canvas.

 

10. Select each of your characters layer and press ctrl+x, ctrl+v on your keyboard. What this will do is it will separate your layer in two parts, one that is within the colored square and one that is outside of it. Go ahead and repeat this step for the two other characters.

 

11. Once you’re done, take the new layer of your first character and if the character is at the top, you will need to bring this part all the way down to the opposite side.

 

TIP: Don’t be afraid to zoom-in in order to leave no space between the edge of the square and the art. You may also darken or saturate the color of the square to make it easier to tell the pixels apart.

 

12. Unhide the original layers and use them to fill the empty space inside our pattern. Make sure you leave more or less the same space between your designs or it might break the repetition if you scale it down a lot.

 

TIP: Feel free to add tiny elements between your character to make the pattern more interesting, I personally went with adding simple leaves, nothing super fancy, but I think it adds a cute little touch to the final product.

 

13. Put all of your layers inside a folder, duplicate it, hide the original and merge all the layers of the folder copy into one single image.

 

14. Go to Edit → Change Canvas Size → And decrease your canvas size to the original size of your pattern.

 

15. Now all that’s left to do is to take your art layer, click on this little arrow to open the material window and inside this is where you can find all the patterns Clip Studio has to offer by default.

 

16. Drag and drop your pattern layer inside the colored pattern library,

 

17. Go into the pattern settings and check the tiling box. Choose your tiling preference and press okay.

 

TIP: Remember that you can always edit those preferences and create multiple instances of the same pattern if you wish. And right next to the settings button you also have the option to favourite your design or delete it.

 

18. Hide all your layers and simply drag and drop the pattern into your canvas. You can scale it up and down to see how good the repetition looks and if you are happy with the final result, then you are all done!

 

Overview of the Second Technique

1. Design a creature or any other element you want to repeat in your pattern.

 

2. Create multiple variations of the same creature, but try to make them different, yet not stand out too much from each other.

 

3. Center your creation in the canvas as much as possible and leave some empty space at the top and bottom

 

4. Once you’re done, group your layers into one single folder, duplicate it, hide the original and collapse the art into a single image layer.

 

5. Go to View → Grid → activate the grid

 

6. Go back to View → Grid/Ruler Settings → Set the gap of the grid to half the size of the canvas (unless it goes over the maximum of 1000, in which case simply put 100 and it will work anyway). Secondly, set the number of divisions to 1

 

7. Press M to get the selection tool and make sure the rectangle shape is selected and then select half of the canvas (you can start from any half you want).

 

8. Press Ctrl+c, Ctrl+V

 

9. Move both images to the opposite side they’re facing by pressing K and then pressing Shift + left/right arrows, so the left side goes right and the right side goes left. Again, make sure no gap sneaks its way between the edge of the canvas and your art or it will create a seam in your pattern.

 

TIP: Zoom in more if necessary because the move tool gets more precise as you increase your image size.

 

10. Start filling the middle of your canvas with more of the same designs.

 

11. Move the art back into place and repeat the same steps but this time select the top half of your piece, cut it and moves both pieces up and down.

 

12. Draw a few more creatures to fill in the gap between the top and the bottom.

 

TIP: if you notice any more empty spaces, feel free to go back to moving your pieces around and fill them.

 

13. Drag and drop your image in the material library like we did for the first pattern, go to the pattern settings and check the tiling box again and press okay.

 

14. Hide every layer and drag and drop our pattern into our canvas

 

And we're all done!

 

Final Thoughts

The two techniques might be similar in some aspect, but they serve different needs and purposes and wield pretty different results, so be creative with it and have fun!

 

I really hope this tutorial helped you, I really want to make more of these tutorials if I can and feel free to tag me on my socials if you do create your own patterns with this tutorial, I have an addiction to feed after all guys.

 

Have a beautiful rest of your day and I'll see you in my next tutorial! :)