Pattern 23

Saturday, January 31, 2015
Here is a little exercise in playing with the size of your pattern and how it appears when filled into a space.  For this pattern, I again started with my original one inch repeat pink dot.  I had saved it as a .png file so I could reuse the file to create my next pattern.  Using the 'move' tool, I shrunk the size of the actual dot down a bit so that there would be a little more blank space all the way around it.  I made sure the dot was exactly centered within the square canvas.  And just for fun, I changed the color of the dot using the Hue/Saturation dialogue box.

Next I resized the file, Image -> Resize -> Image Size.  I changed the size to .5 inches x .5 inches.  Now my dot file is half the size of my original.  I then selected all and saved the pattern.  I named this one Dot003 .5 in.  My filled in square is 8 inches by 8 inches.

Just a note I'd like to share about file sizes and resizing your files.  As long as I keep the dpi consistent (in my case I have been using 300 dpi) then the pattern will repeat in your drawings the size you expect.  That is, a one inch repeat will appear 16 times across a 16 inch square.  If, however, the resolution of your pattern is different than the resolution of the file you are filling it with, then the pattern will appear smaller or larger than you would expect depending on whether the pattern has a higher or lower dpi than your picture file.  If the dpi of your pattern is higher than the dpi of your picture file, the pattern will appear larger than you might expect.  And the reverse is also true.  If the dpi of your pattern is lower than your picture file, then the pattern will repeat smaller than you may expect.

Let me give you an example.  Let's say you have a 1 x 1  inch pattern at 300 dpi and an 8 x 8 inch square at 150 dpi.  You might think your one inch pattern will repeat eight times across your square when actually it will only repeat 4 times (larger pattern with less repeats).  This is because your pattern has 300 dots (dpi) to repeat and will take up 300 dots of space in your 150 dpi file, which is 2 inches.  So your one inch repeat becomes a 2 inch repeat in a file with half the dpi.  And likewise, a one inch repeat will become a half inch repeat in a file with twice the dpi. 

I know this all sounds a bit confusing, but if you play around with it a little, you will see how it works. If, on the other hand, you don't want to think about all this and you just want to avoid the confusion, I would just stick to the same dpi for all your files where you are using your fill patterns.  If you do that the patterns will repeat the size you expect them to.