How to create fun hand drawn stripes in Procreate

Stripes make a great blender print to add to a pattern collection!

Stripes are a pattern essential in my opinion! They are always going to be in fashion and they make excellent stand alone patterns as well as blenders for collections.

There are so many variations on stripes, but in this post I am going to focus on one of my favourites - the fun, hand drawn stripe!

Once you have learnt to do it there are so many variations you can try and textures you can add.

Here is this stripe alongside a couple of other prints in a collection I am working on at the moment.

It makes a great blender because you can choose to use some or all of the colours in your collection so it works nicely alongside your other prints.

Setting up the Canvas

I always start with a 12x12 inch canvas at 300dpi.

Then it's important to turn on the Drawing Guide. To do this go to the spanner (wrench) icon on the top left and then 'Canvas' and toggle Drawing Guide on.

When drawing guide is on it will bring up lots of little squares. We want to change the width of these squares so it helps us know where to draw our stripes.

Click 'Edit Drawing Guide' and then tap the little box above 'Gride Size' and change the measurement to inches and type in 1.5 inches.

You should now have a grid of squares - 8 across and 8 down.

Drawing the Stripes

This is the fun part!

You can choose any brush for this. I always go for a textured brush where I can but a monoline would work too.

The whole point of these stripes is that they are hand drawn and not perfect so you don't need to draw a straight line - you can make is as wonky as you'd like.

The key thing is to keep your line roughly in the middle point between each guideline.

Usually when making patterns in Procreate you never go to the edge but in this case it doesn't matter at the top edges - we will fix the bits that don't line up properly later on in the process!

When you fill in the stripe you could either use the Procreate fill tool or just colour it in if you are using a textured brush as this will keep in all the lovely texture and add to the fun feel.

Using a grid of this size will make the space for four stripes, so you could either choose four different colours, one colour for all the stipes or alternate between two colours.

As you can see from the image below, I've kept it simple by keeping all the stripes on one layer and I've also added a background colour as a separate layer.

Looking good so far!

Making the repeat

Next we are going to create the repeat so it will repeat as a seamless pattern.

For this the whole canvas needs to be selected, so we need to make a small diagonal mark at the top left and bottom right corner as you can see in the image below.

Then duplicate the layer three more times so you have four stripes layers.

Then make sure Snapping and Magnetics are both on (this in on the bottom panel when you select a layer to move)

Move each stripes layer to each corner. When it is the correct place you should see orange lines appear from the drawing guide to signal it is in the right place.

You will notice that the stripes all change places!

When you have finished you should have something that looks a bit like the image below. You can see I have also turned the drawing grid off and merged the four stripes layers back into one (keeping the background layer separate).

Fixing the broken lines

The next stage is to fix the obvious repeat lines we have here!

On the stripes layer, simply select the colour of each stripe and patch up the broken bits - simple as that.

I would also suggest that on one side of the stripe you add colour to fix it and on the you use the rubber tool to fix it so the middle of the stripe doesn't bcome much thicker than the other parts.

You will also need to rub out the diagonal marks we made which are now in the middle!

TIP: Don't feel as though you have to just add or take away colour from the very middle where it is broken, you can change the stripe all the way up as long as you don't change anything at the top and bottom of the canvas as that is already in repeat!

Hooray - your pattern tile is complete and looks great! You can now scale it down multiple times to create different size variations too. (If you're not sure how to do that, check out this post here)

Adding Texture - an optional extra :)

If you know me you know I love to add a bit of texture to my patterns, so I'm going to show you how to add some texture to your stripes using some of the textures from my texture overlays pack.

If you have already bought these you can follow along but any seamless overlays would work.

Linen effect

I've created this linen effect by adding the Linen 2 overlay to the background and also as a clipping mask to the foreground layer.

The great thing about these overlays is that they are already seamless so you just pop them on and the texture part is already in repeat!

Speckled effect

I think this is my favourite for these stripes and is made using the Speckles 3 texture from the texture overlays pack.

I have simply coloured it the same as the background layer and added it as a clipping mask on top of the stipes.

If you'd like to know more about the seamless texture overlays click the image below to visit the product page. They are a great way to very easily add some stunning textures to your finished patterns!

What next?

There are lots of ways you can vary this stripe pattern...

• You could vary the colour palette - try fewer or more colours.

• You could make the stripes really wavy and crooked!

• You could create stipes of varying widths.

• You could make horizontal stripes instead of vertical.

• You could experiment with adding different texture overlays at the end.

If you've enjoyed this post or have any questions drop me a line in the comment box below, I always love to hear from you!