How to Make Striped and Plaid Paper, video

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How to Make Striped and Plaid Paper, video

Making striped and plaid papers is really easy! In this first part of the tutorial I'm going to show you how to use the shape tool to make a simple stripe pattern. (text and photos follow video)

To make stripes I use either the line tool or the rectangle tool depending on how exact I want to be. With the line tool you can specify how wide the stripe will be. With the rectangle tool, you can just draw until it looks good.

Hold down on the shape tool icon to get the fly out menu to choose what shape you want. I'm going to start with the line tool.

Specify the weight of the line here.

I've made 3 lines, each on it's own layer, at different widths.

Now I'm going to switch to the rectangle tool to make a fatter line.

I have 4 stripes now.

This next part allows you to easily fill an area with the pattern. First, I'm going to trim the canvas to remove the extra space.

Since I do want a little padding between the end stripes, I'm going to add space to the width of the canvas.

Now there's a little breathing room for the end stripes. I'm going to go ahead and crop the canvas to a square. This isn't necessary, but I like to save my stripe patterns for easy reuse later, so this makes them nice to look at.

Now my pattern is ready. Be sure to turn off the background.

Go to Edit --> Define Pattern.

Open a new canvas at the size you want to make your paper. Make a new layer and with the paint bucket choose "Pattern."

A little pattern box will open. Your pattern should be the last one.

Now fill the empty layer.

Stripes! To make a plaid paper simply duplicate the striped layer, and rotate it 90 degrees. Set the blending mode on the top layer to "multiply." Plaid!

You make it look very easy, Marisa. Thanks for the tutorial.

That's very cool and good instructions. I am going to try to figure out to see I can do in Photoshop Elements. Thanks

Neat! I love a good plaid. smiley

This seems so easy!

Can it really be that easy? Hope so.

Thanks so much for sharing the tutorial, Marisa! Love it! smiley

Ready to try. Hope it is as easy as it looks.

You make it look so easy! I can't wait to try this with Tennessee Volunteers colors! Thank you!

Marisa you make it look so easy. I have never used photo shop because it looks so difficult to use. I just might have to try it.

Thanks so much for a simple method to make plaid. I just love plaids--especially for fall and winter!

Thanks for the video *

Very informative, thanks

Thank you so much Marisa, took hours to make this kind of paper, your tutorials are wonderful!

wasn't aware it was that simple to make plaids, thank you for your very easy and quick tutorials - I learn so much in such little time

Wow thats a good one!

Awesome! Thank you smiley

I need to try this !! Great tutorial

Thank you for the tutorial, I really would like to make my own smiley

If anyone is interested, I found a great and fun and free online tool that can create a variety of plaid patterns with colors of your choice.
Tartan Maker

Choose the 'Tiled' option then after downloading the resulting ,png file, open in Photoshop and using the Edit menu, choose 'Define Pattern'. Once that's done, you can flood fill your canvas with the pattern to create a full plaid paper.

I hope this is useful to some.

Awesome! Thanks for sharing!

Not sure what step I am missing but I made a striped paper (thank you!) But I can not get it to rotate to save my life lol. I have repeated the instructions just as you have stated not sure what I am missing.

You can also try rotating from the menu:

I did try that Marisa, The issue was is was turning both of the layers instead of just one.

I luv this tut...was easy to follow and now i can make new patterns.

So that is how plaid papers are made smiley Thanks for this tutorial.

holy cow that's easy! THe pattern fill always throws me off

There must be some sort of re-jigging you have to do in Elements, cos I can't do this! I got as far as Trim, but I can't see a Trim option anywhere. I cropped instead, and cropped again to a square, but Define Pattern is greyed out! smiley

I like the tut but it's only for PSP. I have Gimp so the tut wasn't very helpful to me as the set up's for the two programs are very different.

very nice!

This looks so easy! Now I just need a program to use!! Anyone have any iPad programs that work well to create patterned paper?

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