We’re big fans of Colourlovers, a site for making color swatches and all kinds of other neat things. Their community has been around for many years, and they joined Autodesk not too long ago with the team from Creative Market. We’re always using Colourlovers to grab ready-made color swatches for our graphic design projects, but you may not know that they also have some very neat pattern-making tools. What’s great about their Seamless Pattern Maker is that you can make a very colorful pattern and download a copy of it in multiple sizes. We use it sometimes to make Overlays to use in our Pixlr app.
You can make your own overlays?
That’s right, you can actually make your own custom Overlays by using the Double Exposure option to add a patterned image to your photo. Once you add your second image, adjust the strength of the overlay, use blending modes (when possible) to make the overlay work better with your image, or use the Eraser to erase parts of the overlay. Once you realize this, you no longer have to settle for the hundreds and hundreds of Overlays already in Pixlr apps. ?
Prax: an expert pattern maker
Within the Colourlovers community, Praxicalidocious — Prax for short — is an incredibly prolific swatch and pattern maker. It may be hard to believe, but using Colourlovers’ online pattern making tools Prax has made a whopping 14,569 patterns! She’s very good at it. It follows that she would be the perfect person to make patterns for Pixlr, so we commissioned her to help make the new Patterns content pack that you’ll see debuting today. Each of the 14 patterns in this pack are named after patterns she made on Colourlovers. We made a few to show you how we use them.
Double up and rotate
We used the Potatostamp option once on the photo below, but then we applied it a second time and rotated this second overlay for a bit of an offset effect. It ultimately gave this photo a bokeh-like patterned background. We also used the Eraser to paint out some of the effect on her figure.
Double up and saturate
- We doubled up on the Swirl pattern and increased the Saturation (+10) and Vibrance (+20) because these swirls look so pretty in this landscape that has a lovely mirrored vanishing point.
Spotlight a subject
These patterns have radial masks in the very center, which means the effect lessens toward the center of your photo. It can give a clarity to something in the center of a photo, especially portraits. But it works in landscapes, too, like this bridge photo below.
Those are just a few ways to use the new Patterns Overlay pack. This pack will be sticking around for good, but we’ll be promoting it in the app for the next week or so. We’ll also be spotlighting some of our favorite community made images on the @pixlr Instagram feed, so please tag the images you make #pixlr so we can find and feature them.