Create a Photoshop Shamrock Pattern for use on some St. Patrick’s Day graphics or for something more with the wishing of luck.

Step 1 – The inevitable ‘New Document’

Open Illustrator and create a New Document.
For the purpose of this tutorial, I’ve gone with 630 pixels square… a convenient size for the blog ;)

Step 2 – Create a guide

Some designers will argue using guides are the way to go but for me – as I’m dealing with pixels in photoshop – I prefer to create a more physical guide.

Using the Rectangular Marquee tool, draw a box and it doesn’t have to be square.

Lower the Fill to 0% and apply an inside, one pixel stroke to the layer.

Step 3 – Create your Shamrock / Clover

Next, using the pen tool, create your clover in a path. This can be a three-leaf, four-leaf or the world record breaking 21-leaf clover.

If you’re struggling to imagine the dimensions and shape of a clover, Google search an image or base it on some stock photography. Alternatively you can download the source file here and use the path I created for this tutorial.

Step 4 – Fill your Shamrock / Clover

With your path selected, create a new layer and go to the Paths Panel (if not present in your display, go to Window > Paths).

Select a suitable shade of green and click on the ‘Fill path with foreground color’ button as shown below.

Step 5 – Pattern Beginning

Make a duplicate later of your clover and filling it white, scale and position it on one the of the top corners. To make things easier on your eyes as we’re working with white, create or darken the background layer.

Zoom in and using the Rectangular Marquee tool, select the top side of your shamrock up to the line of your guide. Next, move the selected part of your clover down to the opposite area of your pattern guide with the Move Tool (v) and holding Shift. If you are not confident about keeping it inline – which is important – use your arrow keys to nudge it into position. You want for the pixels of your clover to be lining up on top of your guides lines. This will make sure everything is seemless later.

Repeat this stage now on the horizontal line and you should have something that looks like this :-

Before moving onto the colour clovers, I placed on slightly turned clover also in the centre. As it is not over our guide, we do not need to worry about repeating any of the above steps on it.

Step 6 – Some green.

Using your original green filled path, position it to one of the sides and repeat step 5. As the clover is positioned centrally on one of the guide lines, we only need to cut and move it once.

Finally, create duplicates for some smaller clovers and rotate/flip them to give some veriety, making sure at all times to keep everything within your guides or cutting/moving them if they fall outside.

Step 7 – Create your pattern.

Selecting all the layers that make up your pattern – this excludes your guide – duplicate them and merge them together. use the Rectangular Marquee tool to select around your pattern and go to Edit > Define Pattern.

Once you have done this, you can then apply your pattern to a entire layer through the Pattern overlay, Layer Styles or using the Pattern, Bucket Tool. Alternatively though, if you’re like me and in this instance working of a small piece, just duplicate the layers over the necessary area.

Step 8 – Complete

I hope you got something out of this tutorial and if you would like to use this pattern in some of your own work, you’re welcome to!! Please just provide a little credit somewhere to Zen Elements or mention it below in a comment!

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Thanks for reading!

Alex | Zen Elements