How to rescale patterns in Procreate

The simple way to provide multiple sizes for your Spoonflower shop

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my time selling on Spoonflower – the more patterns you have in your shop, the more likely it is for you to make a sale!

But when you’re just starting out, patterns can take a long time to make, so it can seem impossible that you’ll ever be able to fill up your shop.

Don’t despair though; the more you practise, the quicker you get at making patterns.

And more importantly, there are some simple tricks you can employ to maximise the hard work you have spent creating your beautiful repeats.

One of these is to provide multiple sizes of each pattern.

Why provide multiple sizes on Spoonflower?

It’s important to remember that people shop on Spoonflower for lots of different purposes.

Some customers are there to buy wallpaper. They will be looking for much larger motifs. Smaller scale patterns will be lost on a wall.

Other customers are there to buy fabric to make clothes. They will be looking for much smaller motifs that will work nicely on the clothing they are making.

There are also customers shopping for home décor such as bed linens, or cushions.

By providing multiple sizes of each of your patterns, you are ensuring that you are catering for all of these different purposes.

Can you rescale patterns made in Procreate?

Yes you can! (But there are some things to be aware of…!)

There is sometimes some confusion around rescaling in Procreate, as it is a raster program. This means that images made in Procreate cannot be scaled without losing quality.

This is in contrast to something made in a vector program (such as Abobe illustrator) which can be scaled up indefinitely without losing any quality.

The key is that while you can’t scale up in Procreate, you can always scale down without losing any quality to your designs.

Although Spoonflower provides a rescale tool when you upload your pattern, I prefer to rescale all my patterns within Procreate, save them as individual files and upload them separately. I then feel more in control of the sizes available and I have them all saved if I ever need them again.

What size canvas should you start with?

You always need to create your pattern in the biggest size possible.

You may have noticed that when you create a new canvas in Procreate, the larger the size, the fewer layers you have to work with.

So there is always going to be a balance between creating at a big size, and having enough layers to create your pattern.

As a good rule of thumb, I always create patterns using a 12x12 inch canvas at 300dpi. Dpi stands for ‘dots per inch’ and 300dpi means that every inch contains 300 dots of ink. This is generally considered ‘high resolution’.

Although Spoonflower doesn’t require 300dpi (we’ll come to this later…) if you were to later use this pattern for something else, you would want to make sure it was created in a high resolution.

How to resize a pattern in Procreate

Once I have created a repeat tile on a 12x12 inch canvas this will become my largest size. I then usually go on to make a medium and a small.

If you’re anything like me, you will have a lot of layers to your finished pattern. You definitely want to protect this multi layered canvas in case you want to come back and change something, so my first advice would be to save this finished canvas to your files as a Procreate document as soon as possible when you have finished.

To create your medium scale pattern, duplicate your pattern so you’re working on an identical canvas, but leaving the large scale one with all the layers. (You could rename this duplicate medium so it’s easier to see when you come back to it.)

For this medium size you will want to merge all the layers together, including any background texture you have used so it is all on one layer. (It doesn’t matter that you have merged the layers as you still have the original multi layered document)

Now duplicate the layer 3 times so you have four identical layers.

With snapping and magnetics turned on, scale each layer down so it takes up one quarter of the canvas size.

Make sure it snaps in the middle so the repeat works perfectly. The lines should go orange when it has snapped correctly.

This has now made a pattern that is twice as small as the large size.

Now to create the small scale, duplicate the medium sized document. Rename it small and merge the four layers together. Duplicate the layers as you did before and scale them down again.

This has now made a pattern twice as small as the medium size.

Creating a Procreate to Spoonflower Workflow

It can be frustrating sometimes that you have to spend so long uploading patterns to POD sites when really you want to just be creating them!

So it’s important to get a productive workflow so you can spend as little time as possible uploading and the most time possible creating!

Here is what has worked for me…

Once I have created my three sizes in Procreate I make sure they are named with the title I want them to have in Spoonflower. This might be something like ‘forest animals in green LARGE’ etc. (Naming them now in Procreate saves time later on!)

Then I select the three together and export them to my files as PNGs. (In the stack you are working in press select then select the three canvases)

Then when I come to Spoonflower I can also upload the three files at the same time.

When they are uploaded, the title of the patterns should already be filled in with what you named it and then you just need to fill in the extra bits. I tend to write one description and then copy and paste it into the other two.

A note on Spoonflower’s preferred dpi

Spoonflower prints all their fabrics and wallpapers at 150dpi and therefore they will automatically rescale anything that is uploaded at a different dpi.

I create all my patterns at 300dpi but I don’t need to change this before I upload to Spoonflower. If you upload a pattern as 300dpi Spoonflower will automatically change it to 150dpi and this will mean the pattern will show as twice as big.

This is great new for us Procreate users as it means our patterns can be used at an even bigger scale than we have created them!

So don’t worry about uploading your patterns at this higher resolution. Spoonflower will automatically resize them and they will show in the preview at the scale they will be printed at.

If you have any questions or need clarification on anything, leave a comment in the comments box below and I'll get back to you. If you've found it helpful, I'd love to know too!