How learning Photoshop changed everything about my surface pattern designs

From Illustrator to Photoshop, the software shift that changed everything for my surface pattern designs

If you'd asked me a couple of years ago whether I'd ever leave Illustrator, I'd have laughed. It was my comfort zone, my creative home base, and honestly, I was good at it. But discovering my style as a surface pattern designer led me somewhere I wasn't expecting: Photoshop.

Here's the thing about design software, we can get very attached to it. And I get it. When you've put in the hours to get comfortable with a tool, the idea of starting from scratch somewhere else feels like going backwards. But sometimes, growing as a designer means following where your creativity is pointing, even when it takes you out of your comfort zone.

This is the story of how I went from being an Illustrator devotee to realising that Photoshop was the tool my work actually needed, and how signing up to a Photoshop course made that transition so much less scary than I thought it would be.

My Illustrator era (and why I loved it)

I started in Illustrator, and for a long time it made complete sense. It's an incredible program for vector-based design, clean lines, infinitely scalable, endlessly tweakable. I got comfortable with it. Then I got really comfortable with it. I started experimenting, pushing it further, learning all its quirks.

And for a certain kind of design work? It's genuinely brilliant. I'm not here to bag out Illustrator, it absolutely has its place in surface pattern design, and plenty of designers thrive with it as their primary tool.

But as I started really discovering my style, something shifted. I found myself drawn to painting. To the kind of marks you can only make with a brush in your hand, the little imperfections, the texture, the way ink bleeds slightly at the edges, the character that lives in a slightly wobbly line. That quality, that handmade soul, was what I wanted in my patterns.

The more I leaned into painting, the more I realised Illustrator was quietly flattening out everything that made my work feel alive. When you bring hand-painted artwork into Illustrator and trace it, you're inevitably tidying it up, smoothing it out. And that's fine, until the thing you're smoothing out is exactly the part you love most.

Why Photoshop changed the game for me

Photoshop is built for raster artwork, which means it works beautifully with scanned paintings, digital brushwork, and any artwork where texture and imperfection are features, not bugs. It lets you preserve brushstrokes exactly as they are. The paint, the grain, the happy little accidents, all of it stays intact.

For surface pattern design specifically, this opens up a whole different way of working. You can bring in your original scanned artwork and work with it in its truest form, rather than converting it into something vector-shaped. You can build seamless repeats that still feel organic and alive. You can recolour collections efficiently once you understand the workflow. And the blending modes and adjustment layers mean your digital work can genuinely feel like it came from a studio, not a screen.

The learning curve felt steep at first, I won't pretend otherwise. But the difference in my work once I understood how to use it properly? My designs finally looked the way they did in my head.

One of my painted elements, arranged into a repeat pattern in Photoshop.

How Photoshop course gave me the confidence to actually use it

If you're wondering where to actually start with Photoshop, not just fumbling through YouTube tutorials and hoping something sticks, this is the course I used, and honestly, the one I'd recommend without hesitation.

👉 Cass Deller's Photoshop & Illustrator for Surface Pattern Design course

What I love about the way Cass teaches is that she doesn't just show you where the buttons are. She walks you through different ways of creating patterns in Photoshop, explains the thinking behind each approach, and gives you enough context to actually understand why you're doing what you're doing. That means you're not just following along,you're building knowledge you can actually use independently.

After the course, I wasn't just less confused by Photoshop, I was genuinely excited to open it. If you've been circling around the idea of learning Photoshop but feeling like you don't know where to start, this is exactly the course I wish I'd found earlier.

Then came the SPD course, and it all clicked together

Once I had a solid Photoshop foundation, doing Cass's Surface Pattern Design course felt like everything I'd learned suddenly had a home. The SPD course is where the bigger picture comes together, building cohesive collections, understanding repeats and colourways, thinking about your work from the perspective of licensing and selling.

Doing the courses meant I could focus on the creative and business side of things without constantly stopping to untangle the technical stuff. The software felt like a tool I was in control of, rather than something I was fighting with.

And if you want to take it further and really dive deep into surface pattern design, the collections, the colourways, the business side of it all, Cass's SPD course is where it all comes together. It's the next step I'd wholeheartedly recommend.

👉 Cass Deller's Surface Pattern Design course

Affiliate disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through my links, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. I only ever recommend courses and resources I've personally used and genuinely believe in, and Cass's courses are ones I recommend wholeheartedly, because they actually changed the way I work.