3D Y Shape Pattern in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. 3D Y Shape Pattern - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Create a 3D Y Shape Pattern in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're going to be creating this 3D Y shape pattern. But unlike all of my other pattern tutorials, we're going to start this a step before we even hit Illustrator. We're going to have a look at the pattern on a sheet of paper and we're going to work out where our repeats are going to be. You're going to learn how you could go from paper to a pattern. I'm also going to show you my own thought process when I was looking at this pattern design and working out how I would do it in Illustrator. It turns out my first thoughts ended up not being the way that I actually developed the pattern. I'm going to talk to you about that as well. Then of course we're going to open Illustrator and make the pattern. Along the way, we're going to create a grid as well, a hexagon grid that I think you'll like as a foundation for creating a geometric pattern. Now as you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoy the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs-up, and secondly, write in just a few words why you enjoy the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started and we're going to take this pattern from paper to Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 - Plan the Design: Before we actually get to work, starting to make this pattern, I wanted to step you through the process that I went through when I was designing the pattern. I found that the basic pattern online, and I wanted to be able to reproduce this in Illustrator. Typically what I'll do is go and print a larger version of the design so I can have a really good look at it. Now, one of the things that you need to do when you're designing patterns is to work out where your repeats are. So with this pattern, I'm going to look at this point as being my starting point. I'll look then for the next time that I see this point in the design, and it's down here. So that's going to be one side of my repeat. I'll have a look hear and see where this point is next in the design, and it's over here. So I'm going to draw a line between these two. Then we can just finish this up because this is going to be the extent of our pattern repeat. You'll see that for every element within this design, even if it's cut off, the missing piece, which is the base up here, is here within the design. Here we've got this side but not this, but here it is over here. So when the patent lines up, this shape is going to be complete. We're missing a little bit down here, but it's up here. If you check, you'll find that within this area, is every element that we need for that design. The first step is working out what my repeat's is going to be. The second step is trying to work out how I'm going to make this pattern. One of the things that I saw in this pattern, where there are a lot of cubes. This was actually a cube, it just has its corner cut off, and this corner's cut off too. In here is the top end of the cube, even though the top end has been cut off. I start here and draw cubes over each of these shapes, and try to work out the overlaps. Well, the upshot of drawing these cubes was that it's actually impossible to build these shapes in Illustrator as cubes and overlap them, because things were required to be under one thing and over another thing. But in places it just wasn't possible for them to be simultaneously under one thing and on top of another. Then I looked at the pattern and looked at the possibility of removing this element here. If I remove that element but still created my cube with this missing piece, then I could successfully create the design. But you know what, the design was really hard to draw exactly, and I was really concerned that it wouldn't be able to be easily reproduced. So I came at the design again and looked at it from a different point of view, and I had looked at the shapes. Although they look like a somewhat confusing shape to design, they actually became quite easy when I thought in terms of creating a hexagonal grid to draw them with. That's the approach that I'm going to take with this particular design. We're going to create a hexagonal grid, that's going to give us the ability to draw out the shapes really, really accurately. I like the final representation of the design, and I've made it a few times, and I haven't had any problems with it lining up, and to me, that's a big plus. I like to make designs that are very easy to reproduce, and that have the minimum amount of problems that could potentially go wrong. That's typically how I'll look at a pattern and try and work out how I'm going to create it. I'm going to look at the repeat, because that's really important for me to know what elements I need to create the design, and then I'll develop some plan for designing it. Cube was a possibility. Cube with a corner cut out of it ended up being a workable option, but this one here ended up being the easiest to create, and that's how we're going to create this design now. 3. Pt 2 - Draw a Hexagon Grid: To get started with making our pattern, we'll choose File and then New. Making a document 700 pixels square RGB color mode, it's pretty important to leave a line new objects to pixel grid disabled. It's not going to help ewe if you have that set on, I'll click "Okay." We're going to draw a hexagon grids, so it's going to be based on a hexagon. I'll click the polygon tool and click once in the document. A hexagon has six sides, so I've set sides to six and the radius to 50. I'll click "Okay." The fact that the radius is 50 means that the shape is a 100 pixels wide, but it's not a 100 pixels tall, it's only 86.6 or three pixels tall. That measurement is really important, we'll need it shortly. I'm going to turn off the fill on this shape and just leave a stroke in place. So I just have a very simple hexagon. I'm going to align tool. I'm going to click once in the document. I want my line to be a 100 pixels because it's going across this axis of the hexagon and the angle is zero degrees. I'll click "Okay." With the line still selected, I want to copy and rotate it, which I can do in one step: Object, Transform, Rotate. I'll rotate it 60 degrees and click "Copy." Then I'll go and do that over again. Object, Transform, Rotate 60 degrees, click "Copy." Now I have three lines over here and a hexagon here. I'm going to select everything. I'm going to the Align panel. If you don't seen your Align panel here, choose Window and then Align. I'm going to click the hamburger menu and click "Show Options" and then make sure that aligned tool is set to selection, not artboard. Then I'll click here on Horizontal Align Center and then Vertical Align center. What that does is it places all the shapes centered on top of each other. At this point, I can choose Object, Group, to group them. Going to move them across here to the top corner of the document. We're going to build this as our grid. We'll choose Effect, Distort and Transform, and then Transform. I'll turn preview on, and I want about four copies. I'm going to move this shape a 100 pixels in this direction so that each one of my hexagons joins up to the very next one, but just at one point. So I'll type a 100 pixels and press the Tab key. On reflection, I think eye can get another shape in here, and I'll click "Okay." Now we want to take this shape and move it down and across. So it's going to move half of its width across to fill up this gap here and it's going to move down its height. Its height is 86.603. I'll choose Effect, Distort and Transform, Transform. I'll click "Apply New Effect." I'm going to move this horizontally half its width, so that's 50 pixels, and vertically 86.603. I'll turn preview on and now I want a few copies of this. Now, my grid is not only at an angle, but it's also far bigger than I need it to be. But you just need plenty of hexagons here at this point and just click "Okay." Because this is not going to actually be part of the pattern, we're just going to use this grid for designing our pattern. Next up we're going two expand this. So choose Object, Expand Appearance, and then Object Ungroup. I'll continue to do that till Ungroup is no longer an option. Let's have a look at the last pallet and see what we have. Well, we have lots and lots of shapes. We have h of the lines and h of the hexagons and everything is selected. I'm just going to group them into a single group; object, group. Now that this is a group, I need to rotate it because the hexagon shape grid than I need needs to bee on an angle of 30 degrees. So I'll choose Object, Transform, Rotate, I'll type 30 degrees and click "Okay." So this is the grid that we're going to use to create the shape that's going to be the basic shape for our pattern. 4. Pt 3 - Make the shapes: What I did to make it a little bit easier for us to say exactly what we're going to be doing in making this pattern is I extracted a paste from the pattern image. I've marked out the shapes that we're going to be creating using this grid. I'm just going to keep it here because it might be easier for you to visualize exactly how you're going to create the pattern. Over here in the layers palette, I'm going to lock down this group because I don't want it to move. I'm going to select the pen tool. I'm going to turn off the stroke and I'm going to select the fill and I'm going to choose a fill which is a bright color. We can change these colors easily later on, but you're going to want to be able to see what you're doing as you draw. We're going to start with this piece here. I'm going to select any of the points on this grid to start off with. But you can seen that I'm looking for that intersect where the pen tool is write over the intersection of these lines. I'm going to click, I'm going down two grid points, and I'm going to click here. I'm going up one grid point here. I'm going up here, one grid point, across here, one grid point, up, one grid point, and back to my starting point. That's this shape here in blue. I'm going to click away from the shape to deselect it. I'm going to make a new fill color. I'm going back to my pen tool and we're going to create this shape here, but so that we don't interact with the pink shape will lock it down before we start. Again, looking for these anchor points and just following the pattern that I have here for the green shape. Now, I've got an anchor point that's off here, but I can fix that in a minute. We're going to lock that down. I'll select the grain for the final color. Again, select the pen tool and draw in this shape, just clicking at each of these points, using the grid as the guide. Making sure that I close up all the shapes. Now my blew shape, as I said, was off. I'm just going to unlock it and I'm going to zoom into this position to say if I can found a better position for this anchor point here. This going to move it over this anchor point. I'm going to check all these anchors just before I leave the grid. Everything's looking really nice. Even you can see that I've got a very even element of black along all of these edges with the possible exception of this one here. But all the others look really neat and tidy. That's what you want to have at this point. You want to have perfect shapes. I'll press ctrl+0 to zoom back out. Now, that I've got my shape, I don't need my grid any longer, so I'll turn it off. I don't need the illustration any longer, so I'll turn it off to.o But I'm going to unlock these three shapes. I'm going to select them, and I'm going to group them. By grouping them and making sure that the shapes are not going two change there relationship to each other. If they're all stuck together, they're going to stay stuck together. Now, I have the basic shape for the piece that's going to be my pattern. I'm going to recolor it before I continue, I'll click recolor artwork. I'm just going to the edit option here and I'm going to select a series of blues for this. The lightest blue is going to bee on the top. This is going to be the middle blue hear. This is going to be the darkest blue, more purple blue. I'll click "Okay", so that's one of my shapes, but my pattern is alternating colors. I'm going to select this and Alt drag a duplicate away. I'm going to color this differently. Now that I've got my colors, I'm just going to link them together so that they travel together. Perhaps pick a better yellow for this. Now, I have my two shapes and each of them are in groups. It's time to start aligning them. With the selection tool, I'm just going to place these shapes aligned to each other. I'll select both of them and I will drag a duplicate away. I'm going to select the two purple shapes and just make sure that they are perfectly aligned vertically and do the same thing with the two yellow shapes. Then I'm going to take a duplicate of the yellow shapes and just move them across the document. If I add the Shift+K as I move them, they're going to be constrained to moving in a perfectly horizontal direction. Once I've got six shapes in place, I've got everything that I need for my pattern. Because I'm looking for a patent piece that goes from here across to here, down to here, and across to here. Very, very simple pattern. I'm going to go and get the rectangle tool, and I'm going to draw out my rectangle again looking for my anchor point here when I go to draw my rectangle. Now, if I don't get it exactly right, that doesn't matter. I'm going to make it a no stroke, no fill rectangle. I'm going to zoom in here to checked its positioning. With the selection tool, I can just snap it into position right over that point and just make sure it's running down the exact position that should be through these bends in the pattern here. That it's perfect at the bottom here. I'm pretty happy with that. No fill, no strike rectangle. The problem is it's at the top of the pattern piece and it needs to be at the bottom. I'm going to drag it down here behind the very bottom of these groups here. I'll lock everything else down because that means I can click on the layer here. I've selected all the groups and the no fill, no strike rectangle. In other words, everything I need to make my pattern. I have my selection tool selected, so I'm going to drag and drop the hole thing into the swatches panel. That is my pattern. 5. Pt 4 - Test the pattern Project and Wrap Up: Once we've created our pattern, I'm going to press "Control 0" to zoom back out. Since everything is selected, I can just move it out of the way. I'm going to leave it there just in case there's something wrong with my pattern or just in case I want to make some adjustments to it. Certainly, with the patterns complex as this, I would not be deleting it until I make sure that it works perfectly. I'm going to select the "Rectangle Tool" and create a rectangle that is the size of my artboard here, 700 pixels by 700 pixels in size. I'm going to set my align to artboard and then just align it so it's right over the top of the artboard. I'll open up the swatches panel. Note that my fill is selected or targeted and I'll click on my pattern swatch. It's perfect. It's not even a fracture line in this pattern, it just looks exactly the way that it should look. I'll choose "Object", "Transform", "Scale". I'm just going to reduce the scale on the pattern, but not the object, and click "Okay". As I said when I was talking about how we would create this pattern, I tried a few ways of creating it. This way, building up that hexagon grid gave me the best chance of making sure that this pattern would be perfect, and it is. Now once you've created your pattern, of course, you can start working with your colors. Click on "Recolor Artwork". You can click on "Edit", and then you can go and change the colors. Now, for each of my colors, I'm going to send them back a little bit more to grayscale. I'm going to go to the brightness and I'm going to reduce the brightness on them. But there are a lot of color combinations that you could use for this pattern, and it is really quite a sophisticated pattern. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you enjoyed the look at how patterns can be developed from images that you find, how you can work out what your pattern repeat is going to be, how you can work out the elements that you're going to need to build, and some of the thought processes that you might go through when you are trying to develop a solution for building the pattern. Also be aware that the first thing that you see may not be the most efficient, effective, or even the most accurate way to build the pattern. It certainly wasn't for me. I thought that I could build it using cubes even with cutout pieces, but in the end, the hexagon grid was a far more sophisticated way of building it with a whole lot more accuracy built in. Your project for this class is going to be to build your own pattern. Feel free to do this one. I wanted you to be able to see how you could build it, so that would be a really good class project. If you want to go and find a pattern on the Internet and work out what the repeats are going to be and then build it yourself, please do so. But please promise me that if you get stuck, you will let me know that you're stuck so that I can help you work out how you're going to do it. Now, as you were watching this class, you will have seen a prompt to recommend it to others. Please, if you enjoy the class, do two things for me, give it a thumbs up and write in just a few words why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or pose a question, please do so. I read and I respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.