From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

768 Painting a free-form mandala pattern

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

768 Painting a free-form mandala pattern

- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to "Deke's Techniques". Today, we'll be looking at mandala patterns, and that's how they're pronounced, by the way, not like Nelson Mandela, which is spelled differently, but mandala. Now, mandala patterns enjoy a rich history as spiritual symbols. That's not what we're talking about at all. We're talking about their recent history, as wildly symmetrical brushstrokes inside Photoshop CC 2019. Now, as you can see, the final artwork is quite intricate, but we're going to start things off very simply. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, so let's take a look at how you might go about creating a mandala pattern here inside Photoshop. And I've got three examples open, just so you can see the variety of options that await you. All these are pretty unconventional by mandala standards, but of course you can research how to create conventional mandala patterns on your own if you like. Now, I do want to stress that you'll need Photoshop CC 2019 or later in order to pull off these effects. In which case, go up to the File menu, and choose the New command, because after all, we're going to be creating a pattern absolutely from scratch. Notice that my unit of measure is set to inches, and I've dialed in a width value of 19 inches, and a height of 13 inches, which just happens to match the paper size that I want to print to. The resolution is 300 pixels per inch, I definitely recommend that you set the color mode to RGB, and finally, notice that my background contents are black, and that's because we'll be painting white brushstrokes against a black background. Alright, so I'll go ahead and create that document, and then, I'll create a new layer, by pressing Control-Shift-N, or Command-Shift-N on the Mac, and I'll call this guy mandala, and I'll click OK. Alright, now I'll go ahead and grab the brush tool, which you can get by pressing the B key, and next, I want to set my foreground color to white. And notice, in my case, I'm seeing my default colors, which means my foreground color is black, and so I'll type the X key in order to swap 'em. Alright, now what you want to do is go up here to this butterfly icon, again, you're only going to see it by default anyway, inside Photoshop CC 2019 and later, then go ahead and click on it, and choose mandala, like so. Now, at this point, you can choose how many axes that you're creating, which can be as low as three, and as high as 10, as things stand now. I'm going to set my value to six, and click OK. Now, Photoshop gives you the opportunity of moving your axes to a different location, in case you don't want everything to be centered. You can also scale the axes, which is not actually necessary, and if you like, you can move your cursor slightly outside of this transformation boundary, and you can drag, in order to rotate the axes. However, I want it to appear as it does by default, so I'll press Control-Z, or Command-Z on the Mac, to undo that rotation, and then I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, to accept those axes like so. Alright, now what you want to do is right-click in the image window, and then twirl open General Brushes, and assuming that you're working with a drawing tablet, as I am, then you want to select hard round pressure size, right there, and that way, the brush will respond to your pressure-sensitive stylus. At which point, I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on a Mac to accept that change. A couple of more changes I want to make, go up to the Window menu, and choose Brush Settings, in order to bring up this panel right here, which includes this spacing value. And notice, when you're working with that preset brush, that the spacing gets reduced to five percent, which is too tight, by the way. It is going to give you nice smooth brushstrokes, but it'll also mean Photoshop will have problems keeping up with you. So I'll go ahead and raise that value to 10, and then I'll hide that panel, and next, I'll go up here to the Options bar, and I'll change the smoothing value right here, to 50 percent, so that we end up with some extremely smooth brushstrokes. Alright, now I'm going to press Control-1, or Command-1 on a Mac, to zoom into 100 percent, and then, notice as I begin to paint, Photoshop goes ahead and repeats the brushstroke. And because I'm working with the mandala setting, and I have a total of six axes, Photoshop is repeating the brushstroke a total of 11 times, which is to say that I'm actually drawing 12 brushstrokes simultaneously. Alright, now I'll zoom out a little, so that I can take in more of my artwork at a time, and I was telling you, it's not necessary to scale your axes, and that's because even if you paint beyond the axes, as you're seeing me do right now, Photoshop will go ahead and repeat those brushstrokes. Alright, now, if you take a look at all the examples I drew in advance, they include the year, 2019, repeated over and over again, here, a little bit too obviously, I think. But I like what I came up with in this case. Alright, so I'll go ahead and switch to my artwork in progress, and I'll zoom in, let's say, over in this region right here. Now, it's a little difficult to paint text at an angle, so notice even if I try to make it cursive right here, it gets a little crooked-y. And so, if you'd rather paint on the horizontal, then click and hold on the hand tool, down here at the bottom of the toolbox, and switch to the Rotate View tool, which you can get by pressing the R key, and that'll allow you to rotate your view of the artwork on the fly, and then, you can go ahead and switch back to the brush tool, and in my case, I'm going to go ahead and draw that year once again, this time, not quite so cursive. But notice that I am able to keep those letters in line with each other, and I could even add an underline, and an overline, if I like. Alright, now I want you to see that even though I'm zoomed in nice and tight here, if I press Control-0, or Command-0 on a Mac, to take in the entire image, I am repeating those years over and over again. Alright, so assuming that I want to make my image perpendicular once again, I'll just tape the Escape key, to un-rotate my artwork. Now, when you're working in a non-square image, like this one, that is, to say, it's rectangular, in my case, it's wider than it is tall. You have to be careful when painting to the edges of your artwork. So let's say I go up here to the top, and I add a few lines that appear to go all the way to the edge of the artwork, as we're seeing right here. However, if I were to press Control-0, or Command-0 on the Mac to zoom out once again, you can see that my lines are petering out pretty early over here on the right and left-hand sides of the image. And so you just want to keep an eye out for that. And so, rather than undoing those brushstrokes, I'll just go ahead and zoom in on the right-hand side, and I'll paint a little bit of a curly brushstroke, like so. And I'll add a few additional brushstrokes, as we're seeing right here. And you can see that I'm going all the way past the edge of the artwork, and so now, if I were to press Control-0, or Command-0 on the Mac, you can see that I'm painting all the way to the top and bottom edges as well. Alright, one more thing I want you to note, I'm going to zoom in more or less tight to the center of the artwork, and I'm going to add a few more brushstrokes, like so. And I'm painting back and forth along this axis right here, so that I'm crossing my lines, but I don't necessarily want to see the axes, because it's kind of getting in my way. In that case, you would click on that butterfly icon once again, up here in the options bar, and you would choose Hide Symmetry. And that way, even though those blue lines disappear, Photoshop continues to paint multiple symmetrical brushstrokes. Alright, now I'm going to press Control-0, or Command-0 on the Mac, to once again zoom out. So now we're going to fade forward to some additional brushstrokes that I've drawn off-screen. And that is at least one way to draw, in my case, a very unconventional mandala pattern, here inside Photoshop CC 2019 and later. In the next episode, I'll show you how to draw these pressure-sensitive dotted lines. Now, if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, then I have a follow-up movie in which I show you how to create these pressure-sensitive dotted lines right here, which is an awful lot of fun. It does require the possession of a drawing tablet with a pressure-sensitive stylus, such as a device from Wacom, and incidentally, that's how the company's pronounced. It's not wack-'em, it's not a mole, so it's mandala, Wacom. If you're looking forward to next week, I'm going to show you how to take our black and white artwork so far, and we're going to render it in full living color. "Deke's Techniques", each and every week. Keep watching.

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