Patterns

This tutorial will show you how to make your own patterns and use the fill function to cover selected areas with a pattern of your choice.

First of all, open a new document. 100x100 px should be enough. Fill it with a gray color. Not too dark, not to bright. We want to be able to see the white and the black pixels. I used #A3A3A3. Now let's forget about this document a moment and move on to the next step.

Dotted pattern

Open a new document. Make it 4x4 px with a transparent background. Zoom in as much as you can - 1600%. Select your pencil tool and make sure it's a 1px brush with 100% opacity. Now draw four pixels as seen to the right.

Now go to Edit > Define Pattern and give it a decent name. Congratz! You've just created a pattern, WOHO! Now it's time to make use of it. Switch to the document you created earlier - the one with the gray background. Make a new layer and go to Edit > Fill. Select Pattern from the drop-down and then select the pattern you've just made. Check out the screenshot down to the right.

The result should be lots of dots all over your image. Thanks to the use of white, black and gray pixels the dots look indented.
As you can see there are a lot of dots. To make less with more space between each dot, go back to the dot you just made. Go to Image > Canvas Size and set it to 7x7 or something like that. Now you can define this as a new pattern using the same method as before. Once you've done that you can return to the gray image and fill it with the new dotted pattern.

Below I've created 5 nice patterns you can make the same way as above. Have fun!

45° lines. 8x8 px

Scanlines (best result with low opacity). 3x3 px

Big dots. 20x20 px

Arrows. 10x10 px

Dots with white center (hint: use elliptical marquee tool with anti-aliasing). 15x15 px