Making a cowboy shirt pattern in Photoshop

I got inspired with my new shirt and the way colors mix and form nice tones. To demonstrate this in Photoshop I applied masks and patterns, played with the grid and snapping and so on. It took less than 30min. So this is a short guide about it.

1. Create a new document.

2. Set the grid: View -> Show -> Grid.

3. Adjust the grid: Edit -> Preferences -> Guides, Grid & Slices... and in the Grid section specify Gridline distances to your taste (your future stripe widths).

4. Set snapping: View -> Snap to -> Grid (and also snap to Document Bounds).

5. Make solid color vertical stripes: Use the Rectangular Marquee Tool and the Edit -> Fill -> Color... to choose specific colors. In this example every odd color is black and I use for the even ones white, pink and lilac.

6. Cut the document to a square shape (with an even number of stripes) using a Rectangular Marquee Tool and Edit -> Crop.

7. Duplicate the layer, Select All and Edit -> Transform -> Rotate 90deg CW.

8. We'll need fine diagonal stripes to simulate the fibers. Duplicate the top layer. Select all and Edit -> Transform -> Distort to move the middle handlers on both opposite sides of the selection up and down to fit the opposite corners of the document - this way the stripes will tilt to exactly 45 degrees.

9. Select a square section of the diagonal stripes (use the Rectangular Marquee Tool while holding Shift down; make sure opposite corners are not both black). Copy-paste in a new document.


10. Use Magic Wand to select and delete all non-black stripes. Flatten (Merge all) layers in that new document. Use Image -> Image Size to scale it down as much as possible so that you can barely distinguish the stripes. Go to Edit -> Define Pattern to add the image to your patterns list.
(You may want to save this document in its original resolution so you can easily define patterns with another size later).

11. Go back to the colorful striped document. Delete the layer with the tilted stripes leaving only the two colorful striped layers in the document. Hide the grid (View -> Show Grid).

12. On the top layer Add Layer Mask. Holding the Alt key click on the mask image to enter it. In the mask space Select all. Go to Edit -> Fill -> Pattern and choose your diagonal stripes image.

13. Return to your layer (click on it's image). Ta-da!

close up view

14. Now you can play more with the colors in each layer or flatten this document and globally change the Hue/Saturation to make it blue-green, yellow-brown or anything crazy. Invert works cool too.

15. Make a pattern of it. ;)

p.s. There are free online tartan pattern generators, yes.  And some of them are pretty cool too! But still, full fun comes only when full effort is applied.