How To Make A Polka Dot Pattern In Photoshop

Posted on 18. Sep, 2009 by Shawn Ramsey in Articles

The polka-dot pattern. It’s been showing itself in a lot of TV shows and commercials that I’ve seen lately. I thought, what better way to remind myself how to create this design and share it with others, than through a tutorial. So here it is, How To Make A Polka Dot Pattern In Photoshop for your pop-culture, retro or something in between designs.

Let’s get started

Step 1:

Choose the image you wish to use. I chose a colorful image of an eye found here for this tutorial.

colorful eye

Step 2:

Open the image up in Photoshop and apply the Mosaic filter by going to Filter>Pixelate>Mosaic. Make sure that you remember the cell size that you use in this step. I chose 9.

Step 3:

Create a new document in Photoshop the same size as the cell you choose in the last step, in my case 9 X 9 pixels. On a new layer using the Elliptical Marquee Tool (while holding shift) drag out a perfect circle within the square. You’ll have to zoom in considerably ( 1,000% ) in order to see the circle selection more easily. As you can see, zoomed in at this level, the circle is pixelated and does not appear round even though it is at 100%.

Hit CTRL+SHIFT+I to select the inverse of the selection.

Step 4:

Fill the selection with white using the paint bucket tool, deselect the selection by Right-click>Deselect (the selection tool must be highlighted for the deselect option), and go ahead and make the background layer hidden. Your document should now look like this.

Step 5:

With only the white layer selected go to Edit>Define Pattern and call the new pattern Circle.

Step 6:

Now go back to your other image, create a new layer above it and fill with any color.

Step 7:

Double click the new layer to open up the Blending Options and drop the Fill Opacity to 0%.

Choose the Pattern Overlay option and select your new pattern named “Circle”, click OK.

Your image should now look like the one below.

You can experiment with the size and color of the circle pattern to alter the image however you wish. Here is the image with a 15px black circle pattern added to it.

The new circle pattern will be saved in Photoshop and can be now be pulled up whenever you need.