Learn how to make seamless background textures for your surface pattern designs!
I love to use texture on my motifs and it really makes a pattern look pulled together if the background has some texture in it too. It’s easy to forget that this also needs to be perfectly seamless, but it’s easier than you think to get it right using a free piece of software called GIMP.
You can use this method for any type of texture image, either a photograph, something you’ve hand painted or something you’ve made in Procreate.
In the video, I’ll walk you through 2 examples; one is a textured background I made in Procreate and the other is a texture I’ve grabbed from Unsplash.com
First of all you need to go to gimp.org and download it to your desktop computer. Unfortunately you wont be able to get it on your iPad. There is something looking very similar to GIMP in the App Store but it’s NOT the same thing, it has awful reviews and as GIMP say on their website: “GIMP team does not provide any downloads using Apple’s App Store at the moment. Any downloads on the store are created by third party and is not in anyway connected to the GIMP team.” so definitely make sure to avoid that one!
Using Seamless Background Textures in Photoshop
Place your texture into the pattern tile you want to use it in. You can adjust the size and colours at this point. Now hide any other layers above it and export this as a png file.
Open up your texture file in Gimp. Go up to filter>map>tile seamless and you’ll see it jump a little. This is now a seamless tile. With just one click!!
Now you just need to save this tile, either overwriting the original or save a copy if you want to keep the original file.
Now you can add the background to your pattern in Photoshop and your pattern now has a seamless textured background too.
Using Seamless Background Textures in Procreate
You can make textures in Procreate and then send them over to your computer to make them seamless in GIMP. Then you can send them back over to your iPad to use in Procreate. And now you can see it’s a lovely seamless tile! Just make sure that you are adding it to a file that is the same dimensions as your texture tile already is.
Changing the size of the tile in Procreate can make gaps appear when the tile gets interpolated.
If you want a deeper dive on any of this I have a full in depth class on this over on Skillshare, which covers making your own painted seamless background textures and how to correctly resize your tiles using Photoshop so that they do stay seamless and so that you don’t get this white gaps creeping in.
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Have fun, stay creative and I will see you next time.