How to create a seamless texture in Procreate

A simple way to level up your patterns!

While there is certainly a place for untextured patterns, I've found that a relatively simple way to take your patterns to the next level is to add texture.

This can be easy when you are adding texture to individual motifs in a pattern but how do you add a background texture that can repeat seamlessly without looking broken?!

If you are working with vectors, adding texture can be tricky (so I’m told…) but in the Procreate app this is a fun process and with a little bit of time and effort you can create for yourself a set of seamless textures that you can apply easily to the background of your patterns to add depth, interest and character.

Take a look at the two identical elephant patterns below.

In the first I have used no texture on the motifs or background, and on the second I have applied a texture to the motifs and to the background.

I think it gives the pattern a very different feel!

In this Procreate tutorial I will focus on how to create a background texture which repeats seamlessly. (I won’t dive into adding texture to the motifs in this post)

1. Find yourself a texture brush

To make a background texture you need first of all to find yourself a texture brush.

There are a few places to find one of these:

• The easiest option is to choose one of the free texture brushes that come already installed in the Procreate app brush library. There are lots to choose from!

• You could buy one. A great place to look for a texture brush is Etsy or Creative Market.

• Lots of surface pattern design educators have free brushes which you can download when you subscribe to their email list.

• If you have a Skillshare membership, many of the classes come with free brushes (I have got some of my best brushes from here)

• You could make one yourself! The texture brush I use most frequently I made myself in Procreate, and it’s not actually too hard to do this. I have a whole blog post on how to make your own texture brush!
  

2. Apply your texture to the canvas

Create a new canvas (I usually use a 12x12 inch canvas at 300dpi) and apply your texture brush to the whole background making sure not to leave any gaps.

It depends what brush you are using, but often you need to do this without picking your pen up otherwise the texture will look broken.

(It doesn’t matter what colour you use at this stage, you can always change it later.)

Below I have filled the canvas with the 'Furneaux' brush from the 'Materials' section of the Procreate library.

3. Make a repeat tile

Start making the repeat in the same way you would do so with any seamless pattern in Procreate:

Duplicate the layers so you have four identical layers.

With snapping and magnetics turned on, drag each layer to each of the four corners and ensure they snap in the middle. (You’ll know it’s got to the middle when the lines turn orange.)

4. Fix the broken lines

At this stage you have a tile that repeats at each of the four edges but is broken along the horizontal and vertical centre. Our job now is to clean up this brokenness so it looks seamless.

This is the bit that can take some time. But don’t worry, because when you’ve done it once, you can use it over and over!

First of all, merge the four layers together again so you’re working on one layer.

Now you need to zoom right in to the middle horizontal and vertical lines and bit by bit connect the texture where it doesn’t align.

You can join up the texture by selecting another brush (and the colour of the texture) and just drawing over the join in the same style as the texture. As well as adding bits where the line is broken, you can also use the eraser to rub them out.

In the pictures below the first one shows the broken texture along one of the middle lines (very zoomed in!) In the second picture you can see where, with another brush, I have joined up the pattern so you can't see the broken line.

The brush that you use to join the texture should match the texture in some way. Here I just used a dry paint brush which blended nicely with the texture itself.

This process may take a while as you need to work all the way down the horizontal and vertical lines. Keep zooming out to check it looks like it is blending in.

Remember it doesn’t need to be absolutely perfect as you are going to be placing your pattern motifs over the background texture so a lot of it will be covered up anyway!

5. Save your texture

When you have finished, save the file as a Procreate document and when you’d like to work with this background texture you just import the document into Procreate again and start designing a pattern on top in the normal way.

If you’d like to change the colour of the texture, select alpha lock on the layer, select your new colour and then select fill layer.

6. Next steps

You can create your pattern as normal on the top of this repeating texture layer. I think it looks good when you apply the same texture to the motifs as you do to the background, but you can experiement to see what works and what doesn't.

As I mentioned before, you can check out this post if you'd like to know how to create your own texture brush in Procreate. Making your own texture brush is a great way to make your designs totally unique to you!

I hope you’ve found this useful, if you have any questions or need some clarification don’t hesitate to ask!