My journey through seamless patterns has definitely been a learning experience. I’m so excite to share a little about what I have learned in this little series.

This next background I did get the image from The Graphics Fairy.  The original image was from an 1895 hardware catalog:

I think that is just so cool.  Not exactly the kind of door you could find at Walmart, eh? I love the design but no doubt a hand-drawn image is never a seamless pattern from the beginning.  Jacob showed me how to straighten a picture, which was crucial for the side bars to be exactly up and down.  I used the ruler tool to pick a point at the top of the picture and at the bottom of the picture that I wanted to be aligned, for instance the right side of one of the vertical bars in the image.  Then Image>Image Rotation>Arbitrary will line up those points.  I had to do a lot of hand editing on this one.  The realignment left holes on either side of the pattern and the top didn’t match up well to the bottom but I added some extra bars and hand drew the bands with the pencil tool.  I put a lot of time into it but it is probably my favorite background I’ve made, out of like the six or so I’ve made so far.