Creating your own source material for pattern-making

How do you make your first own source image? Just open a blank image, grab some brushes, pick a few colors and start painting. You do not need to create complex images or spend a lot of time to make unique and stunning patterns in Repper with your own source images.

Let me show you!

Let's create our first custom source image from scratch!

I made these examples in Adobe Photoshop. But you could use any image editor, and there are many free options too like photopea.com or gimp.org.

Create a new blank image file. Give it a color you like:

Use different brushes to create different textures:

Pick a nice complementing color and brush and just start painting on your image.

Tip: Check out this post about the color wheel to learn more about combining colors!

Perhaps add another layer with a different color and brush:

You could be playful by adding some letters and/or numbers with beautiful fonts. this may look a little strange now, but you’ll find it can create some really surprising patterns:

Combine your image with an overlay (or even 2 or 3?). This could be any picture you've created or found online, just make sure to use royalty free images not to get any copyright issues. Just put the image on top of your picture and try different blending modes in order to create different effects.

In the example below I have set the blending mode to “Lighten”. You can keep playing around with blend modes until you get the effect you like! Increase or decrease the opacity until you feel satisfied.

Now let's import your image into Repper, play around with the pattern type and size, and see the results. Here are 6 examples of patterns I generated with my own source image:

Check your unique source image on some 3D models:

Are you lacking inspiration regarding what colors to use? See our post regarding color harmonies. Are you not satisfied yet with your final image? Merge your image and try to play around with things like contrast, hue saturation to suddenly get a very different image.

Have fun creating your own unique source images!