5 Hexagon Patterns in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Hexagonal Patterns in Illustrator Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, five different hexagon patents made 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. Now in this illustrator course, we're going to look at a few hexagon patterns, from relatively simple to more complex. I'll show you a four hexagon pattern that can be repurposed as a large half drop repeat, and a nested hexagon pattern and the dimensional pattern in pattern effect. You'll learn other illustrated techniques too including using scripts, making a half drop repeat, aligning objects, creating dimension with color using blends and transformations, and much more. By the time you've completed this course, you'll have some handy illustrated skills and some wonderful patterns for your pattern collection. These will be suitable for sale as digital assets and print-on-demand products sold through sites like Spoonflower, Redbubble, Zazzle. Without further ado, let's get started making hexagonal patterns in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1: Hexagon Pattern with a White Border: One of the really nice honeycomb patterns that you can create in Illustrate has a white border on it. But creating patterns with white borders is a little bit problematical. Let's see a work around for doing that. I'll choose File and then New and just make a document 1200 by 1200 pixels in size. I'll select on the polygon tool click once in the document and just create a six sided figure that has a radius of 50. We're going to make it a white border and I'm going to change the fill on this. I'm going to choose a pink color. Now the problem with a white border on a shape in particular, when you're trying to make a pattern from it, is that as soon as you choose object pattern make, you won't be able to see the white border, and so it's a little difficult to work out whether you've made your pattern correctly or not, so I'll click cancel. For this shape, I'm going to reselect it before I start and I'm going to change the border color. You can change it to absolutely anything. I'm going to make it darker, but in a minute that's not going to be a issue because we're going to make it white once we've actually finished creating this pattern. Now I'm going to set the stroke width to what I want it to be. I want this sort of ratio in my pattern. But I'm also going to select stroke here and make sure that my stroke is on the inside of my shape. That's going to be really important and quite helpful to us in a minute. With my shape selected, I'm also going to work out what the width of the shape is because that's the width of the entire shape, because I put the stroke on the inside. The shape itself is a 100 pixels wide, and that's going to help me with my pattern. I'll select over the shape and choose object pattern make. I'll click OK. I'm going to set this to a Hex by column pattern. You can see that the width is set to 100. We need to make it a bit smaller so that we narrow this area around the hexagons, so I'm going to bring it down seven pixels. I'm going to bring it down seven pixels because the stroke width was seven, and that means that I've now got these shapes nice and overlapping. If the stroke width were different, then I would bring it down the number of pixels that I've got in my stroke width, so we get this single line effect around our pattern. Once I'm done, I'll click Done. Next, I'll add a rectangle so we can test out our pattern. It's going to be 1200 by 1200 pixels in size. We're going to give it any stroke. I'm going to align it to the artboard and then fill it with my pattern, and it's filling really nicely. But of course, the pattern that I wanted in the first place was going to have a white border around it and this one does not have a white border. To get a white border around my pattern, I'll first make sure that I have this rectangle that's filled with my pattern selected. Choose the recolor artwork tool up here. We want to turn this redy color, this dark color into white. Double-click on this color here and just select white. Click OK and OK again. Now my pattern filled object has the white border that I wanted in the first place. Over here in the swatches palette, you'll see that we've got two patterns, we've got the original one with the dark border and we've got now one with the white border. When you want to use white borders for patterns anytime in Illustrator, it's a really good idea to just make your border a different color so you can see it while you're designing your pattern. Then afterwards just go and change the color of it and you'll get the second pattern in your pattern swatches. 3. Pt 2: Dimensional Hexagon Pattern: To create a dimensional hexagon pattern, we're going to start with a new document. I'm just making my document 1200 by 1200 pixels in size, RGB color mode, I'll click "Create". To create a hexagon we'll go to the polygon tool, click once in the document. Make sure it reads six sides. Just ignore the radius amount, just get a shape in here. Now, if our pattern is going to be see-through, we can put something interesting behind it. We will turn off the fill and we will just select the stroke. I'm going to make a narrow stroke width. I'm thinking something like about three or four pixels will be quite sufficient probably for ultimately we're going to duplicate this shape and put a slightly smaller version in. I think in terms of whatever stroke width you use now as being double by the time we've got the dimensional elements created. But before we do that, we're going to expand this shape with object and then expand appearance. Now what was the stroke is now actually a filled shape, that means we can cut it up in a minute and do all things with it. Now I want to duplicate this choose Edit copy and then Edit paste in place. Now the second copies on top of the first, so let me just go and re-color the second copy so we can see it a bit more clearly. I'll hold "Alt" and "Shift" that would be option and Shift on a Mac and just size this, so it's sitting just inside the original shape. Now, I'm having a little bit of difficulty lining this up because of the snap on this object. It's leaving a little bit of white divisible if I choose view and then turn off snap to pixel. I think I'll also turn off snap to point. That might give me a bit of a better opportunity of sizing this shape without that snap happening, That's much better, I've got my shapes nested inside each other and they're both filled shapes. Let me go and choose a color two years I'm going to use a dark gray because that's going to allow me to recolor it also very shortly. I'm going to choose this dark gray color, I'll click "Okay". You want to select the sort of darkest color you plan to use for this dimensional object. I'll go to the swatches panel and I want to add this as a new color group. I click here on new color group. I'm going to make sure that I've got selected artwork enabled so I'm going to sample the color from the selected artwork, but I do also want to convert process to global. That's pretty important. I'll click "Okay". I've got my gray color here now as a global color, it's got this little white corner. Now if I go to Window and then color guide, I'll get tense and shades of this color and it's the tinsel. I want these lighter colors that are also global colors. This is the settings that I've got here. I've got show tin sun shades and from my color guide options, I have four steps and variation set to 100 percent just in case you're curious. This is the color I'm working with at the moment, and I need to pick two other colors. I'm going to take this one here and this one here. I'm just control clicking or command clicking on the two colors that I want. I'm going to click and choose save colors or swatches they are also added to the swatches palette. Now, just going to rearrange things here so that these three colors are exactly where I want them. I don't need this color groups so I'll just get rid of it. These are my three colors. The outside of these hexagons, I'm going to color them middle color that's pretty important. Now we're going to carve up this pink one. Let's go to the last palette, and let's lock down a larger outer size hexagon here, so that we can only select the pink one. I'm going to draw a line because I'm going to use this to carve up my shape. I'll hold the shift key as I draw just a vertical line. Let's give it a color it can be black, that's fine. Just one pixel where only using it to divide up this hexagon. Now going to select my line and my hexagon. Well, from the drop-down list up here, I'm going to choose aligned to key object, and I'm going to click on the hexagon. That's really important because I don't want the hexagon to move, I want the line to move. You can get to the same align options using the align option over here and again it would be aligned to key object that's really critical to have selected. Let me just go and re-select everything and go aligned to key object. Click on the hexagon so it is selected. You can also get the align panel obviously by window and then align. Now I am going to choose horizontal line center and vertical aligned center to make sure that the line is centered immediately over the hexagon. Now I'll just select the line. I want to rotate it 30 degrees, so it runs through this corner here, object transform, rotate. I'll just type in 30 and click "Okay", now that's lined up perfectly. I need two more lines so with this line still selected object transform and rotate. This time it's a 60-degree rotation but I want the original plus this version, so I'm going to click "Copy". I can do that again. Object transform, rotate 60 degrees. I want the original which was running across the shape here plus the copy that I've just made. So I'll click "Copy". Now I have lines that run through the point of this underlying pink hexagon and I've got my gray hexagon locked down, so nothing's going to happen to it. I'm going to select everything that I can select, which has everything but this gray hexagon. Go to the Pathfinder palette and click here on Divide, what that does is it just divides everything up. It's going to divide this hexagon up into little pieces. Let's just open the panel here. I'm going to make my row size just a little bit bigger here so that you can see it a bit more clearly. We've got a whole series of lines and then we've got these which are no fill, no stroke shapes. I'm going to select all of these. I can just click on the path there and shift click on the bottom most one. These are all no fill, no strike rectangles and something else in here that has no, nothing on it. I don't need any of that and we'll just drag it into the trash or we should have left is these six paces, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I'm going to select them and ungroup them with object Ungroup. This gives me access to each of those paces. Now I can select on the places that I want to recolor this one. Shift click on this one and "Shift" click on this one. These are going to be dark. We'll go back to our swatches panel and make them this darker color. Now, we want them to be filled with that and not stroke with anything. Just make sure that you're using the right options there. Now I'll select the remaining three. Click on the first one, "Shift", click on all the others, make sure the fill is in front and go back and select our lightest color. This is giving us a hexagon shape that has dimension in it because we've added the shading. But the beauty of this is that because we've created global colors. If we were to change this color here to something different, then the entire shape is going to change. When I turn preview on, you can say that all the shading has changed with this shape just by changing one color. That's why I suggest that you use a global color for this, then press "Control" or "Command zero" to zoom back out, I've got a nice thin shape here. I think this is going to make a really nice pattern. I'll select over it now, I need to unlock the pace that I had locked down, so let me just go back to the layers palette and unlock this compound path at the base. Let's go back and select everything and object pattern, make. Click "Okay". Now our pattern is going to be a hexagon by column patents who want to set that on. Let's zoom in because we've got some overlap happening here that's not particularly attractive. Let's click here on this option which maintains the proportions here. I'm just going to decrease the width and just keep an eye on my illustration to make sure that I'm not distorting my shapes now, I think this is a pretty good value here. I'm working on 96 for the width, the height is going to be a fractional number because a hexagon does not have a height and width are the same. If it's going to be a regular hexagon, it's going to be considerably wider than it is tall. Just be aware of that. I'll click Done and that's added a pattern, two patterns, swatches or to our swatches. Let me go ahead and get rid of this shape. For now let's go and create a rectangle, the size of the art board and we'll just center it on the art board. I'm going to select aligned to art board to make sure that the centering works as desired. Now with the fill at the four, I'm going to select my pattern and this is my pattern fill. Of course we can scale up with object transform scale. I'm going to deselect transform objects. We're going to scale my pattern to about 60 percent and click "Okay". Now we can add a color or even a gradient behind this, and a gradient works particularly well. I'm adding another 1200 by 1200 pixel rectangle. Let me just fill that with a color for now. Let's center it they aren't bored and move it behind everything with object arrange and then sent back. It's now showing off this very dimensional hexagonal pattern. But it's going to look even better if we add a gradient to it. Let's add a gradient and of course you can adjust the gradient by giving it some color, for example. Let me just go and get a darkish teal color here for it. I'm going to choose hue saturation brightness. I tend to like hue saturation brightness for this dialogue because that's usually why I'm coming to do is to fix the brightness of one end of my gradient. I'm just going to give that some color. Let's go to this other end. Let's go and get the same turquoise but let's go back to hue saturation, brightness so that in this case I can lighten this side of the gradient. This is a dimensional hexagon pattern. We've created this little dimensional hexagon that has given us this look in our pattern of it having some depth. Also because we made it transparent, where able to say things through it. 4. Pt 3: Create a Faux Hexagon Pattern: Sometimes when you are creating a pattern and you wanted to be irregular, for example, irregular colors. It's just easier to create that pattern at the size that you want it for the finished product and do it as a flow pattern, not a seamless repeating pattern. We're going to do just that right now. I'm going to create a sheet of scrapbook paper, so I'll choose File and then New. Scrapbook paper is traditionally 12 inches by 12 inches. I've got a document set up the right size here. I'll click "Create." If you were doing a different project than you would start with a document the size that you want the finished project to be, for this particular one because it's going to be an irregular pattern. We're working with hexagon, so back to the polygon tool. Click once in the document. I'm going to create a polygon that has a radius of half an inch and six sides. I'll click "Okay." I'm going to start with the color that I want to use for the fill or at least one of the colors for the fill. So I'm going to fill this with this sort of pale pink color. For the stroke, I'm going to choose a darker version because ultimately I want this to be white, but it's going to be easier to work with if it's not white to start off with. I'm going to use a stroke weight, I think of something like five pixels. I'm going to take my shape next and position at right at the very bottom of the document and it can be a little more than half over the edge of the bottom of the document, that's fine too. Now we're going to do a transformation to put this shape across the bottom of the document, effect, distort and transform and then transform. I'll turn "Preview" on. I want quite a few copies, so I'll start with 20 and see where we go to from there. I'm going in a vertical direction, in a negative vertical direction, and I'm going in a positive horizontal direction. Then I'll click here on "Reflect Y", and that starts breaking these shapes upside. Obviously I need to go a bit further horizontally. I also need to go more in a negative vertical direction. What I'm looking for here, I actually haven't got yet. Let's just go in and have a look. You can say that my shapes aren't aligned really, really well. I'm going to need to alter that transformation. With my shape selected, I'll go to the appearance panel and click on this "Transform" option because that lets me change the values that I have here. Now, my vertical transformation isn't quite enough. I haven't gone up high enough. It's at 0.375 inches. I think if I go 0.4 inches, I might be closer to where it needs to be. I'll turn "Preview" on. That's not quite far enough, so let's try 4.25. I think 4.25 looks pretty good for now, but we've gone too far in a horizontal direction because this overlap here is too wide. Let's bring it down 2.7 and say how that work. That's not quite small enough, so let's try 6.8. Working in inches is a little bit of a nuisance because they take off on you, the default values of increasing and decreasing them is way different to, for example, when you're working in pixels. But once you've got it, you should be pretty right. I'll click "Okay." Now let's just zoom back out, and I've got too many, so let's again go back into a transform and let's just reduce these numbers a little bit. I wanted to a good overlap, so I'm thinking that this is probably a good set of values. I'll click "Okay." With this shape still selected, I'm going to do another transform, but I'm going to press "Control" or "Command Zero" first because I want to see the top of the document here, effect, distort and transform and then transform. We are going to apply a new effect so that we can move this entire shape up the document. Turn "Preview" on so you can see what you're doing. I'm going to increase the number of copies. I'm going to start to decrease the vertical value because that's going to bring the objects up the document. You can say that I've gone a full inch, it's way too much, but let me just increase the number of copies before I go. I'll click "Okay." I'm going to zoom into this bottom area, so I can be a bit more accurate with the values that I'm working with. With this single shape in the bottom corner of the document selected, let's go back to the second of these transforms because that's the one that's moving things up. We need to just start bringing this down a little bit. But I'm going to turn "Preview" on, so I can just say it when it gets the right position. Well, 0.875 in a negative direction is just a little bit too much. Let's try 0.8. Let's close it up really nicely and I think that's a pretty good value, so I'll just click "Okay" and then "Control" or "Command Zero" to zoom back out. I haven't quite filled my document, so let's just go back into that transform and let's increase the number of shapes until I've totally filled my document. You can easily click on either of these transforms to change the settings that you have. But basically what I needed to do was to cover this entire, what is going to be a shade of scrapbook paper with the element that I want to be my pattern. Having done that, I'm going to expand this with object, Expand Appearance, and going to the Layers Palette. Let's just open up the Layers Palette so that we can make sure we're clear as to what we've got. I've got a lot of groups here and I've got my expanded shapes in the groups. In this case, the stroke has been expanded as well as the fill. That's going to be fine because that's exactly what I want. I'll go to this polygon and I'll choose object and then ungroup. I'm going to continue to do that until ungroup is no longer an option. Basically what I then have is a whole series of shapes that are filled shapes. I've also got the strokes or what were the strokes around the shapes which are now compound paths. Let's go and select the first of these compound paths. In other words, this red filled shape, which is the shape around the edge of one of these hexagons. You just need to select one, and then choose, "Select Same" and choose "Fill Color." That selects every single one of these. Every single one of these compound paths is instantaneously selected. I want them to be quite so. I'll click on "White." But I'd also like them to be all joined together because that would be really handy. I'll go to the Pathfinder and I'll just click "Unite." That just makes one single compound shape, which was all of these white areas. My plan is to make some of the shapes, different colors. I wanted to do a sort of tone on tone pink. In the next video, we're going to see exactly how to do that. 5. Pt 4: Color the Faux Pattern Using a Script: In the last video, we created all of these shapes and we did it as a faux pattern because what I want to do is to be able to select NRI color, these hexagons, to give me a pattern that is a mix of shades of pink and perhaps a little gray. Now there's an easy way to do the selection. I'm going to swing across the web here where I'm going to introduce you to a script which is called randomselectv02. What you'll want to do is come in here and download the script. When you've downloaded it, you can use it to make selections in Illustrator, just makes the job really easy. I'm going to give you the link to this particular script. Once you've downloaded it, of course it's going to appear in your Downloads folder. Let me just go to my Downloads folder. I actually have it in my AI scripts because I've moved it already. Here it is, randomselectv02. What I want to do is to go the JavaScript version, it's just easy because it works on the Mac and the Pc. Now you can run it from your Downloads folder, but it's a lot easier if you install it correctly. What I'm going to do is show you how to install it. You're to locate your Random Select jsx script. Now you might have to expand that ZIP file to get access to it, but you're going to locate this file and right click it and choose Copy. Then you can go back to Windows Explorer or this would be Finder on the Mac and what you want to do is to locate the application now on a Mac that's going to be in your Applications folder, on a Pc it's going to be in your "C" drive and you're looking for your Program Files folder. Then you're looking for Adobe. Then you will look for Adobe Illustrator and you want to match the version of Illustrator that you happen to be using. Now I'm using Illustrator CC 2019, so I need to locate the folder for Illustrator CC 2019, which is here. I'll double click on it to open it, I want to go to Presets, I want to go to en_US or whatever language you happen to be using and then we're going to Scripts. In here are the scripts that are installed with Illustrator. Now, I can right click and choose Paste. I've now pasted Random Select into this folder. Now I've got a tool called Teracopy working on my machine but you can just use Windows Explorer or on the Mac could you just use the Finder copy. It's important that the script is installed in your Scripts folder. Now at this point you will need to close Illustrator, so you'll need to go ahead and save your file, close and reopen Illustrator. I'm going to do that now and I'll come back when I've done it. I've now saved my file, closed and re-opened Illustrator. Now with the last panel open, I'm just going to lock down that compound path because I don't want it to be selectable, but then I'm going to select everything else with Select and then All. That selects all of these colored hexagons on the art board. What I want to do is to just randomly select a few of them. Because my script is installed, I can now choose File and then Script, and I will go and run the Random Select script. It asks me the maximum amount or percent of objects to randomly select. I'm going to start with just 12 percent of these objects, so I'll click "OK". It will now go ahead and deselect a whole heap of objects just leaving 12 percent selected. For this, I'm going to recolor them, so let me just go and get my fill color. I'm going to choose a slightly darker color here. Now having recolored one set of objects, I'm going to select another object, an object that wasn't recolored last time. Up here, I'll go to make sure that this is reading Fill Color, and then just click here. You can also choose, Select, Same and choose Fill Color. That would select all of the objects that haven't yet been recolored, so they're selected here. We're going to run this script again; File, Script, Random Select, this time we'll type in 25 percent. This time 25 percent of the objects which weren't recolored last time have been selected. I'll double click on the color because this time I want to go a bit lighter, but I'm going to also select brightness here because it's going to be a little easier for me to get the tones that I'm looking for here. I'll click away and it's already becoming a little bit difficult for me to see exactly which color I still need to work with. I think this is the color, lets go and select everything that it's colored that color. Yes, this is the one that there's still a lot of them colored that way. Now, I am going to use a gray color in this design, so I am going to select and make them gray now because it's just going to make them a little bit easier to see. Let's go back and re-select always grays and now let's run our script here again; File, Scripts, Random select, this time I'm going to choose 33 percent of the remaining colored objects, the ones that haven't been recolored. I'm going to select the base pink that I've been using here and then double click on it and I'm going to go a little bit lighter again. By selecting and re-coloring the objects so I'm still working with this gray color, I'm making life just a little bit easier for myself. Again, select the gray object, again, select everything that is colored that way, again run my script. This time I'm going to choose 50 percent of these. Again, I'm going to select a pink color and then I'll double click on it because I want to go a lot lighter again. Now I have my faux pattern and I've been able to randomly color it, but I need to finish it off as a shade of scrapbook paper so I'm going to unlock my compound path, I'm going to select everything with Control or Command A. I'm going to put this all in a group with Object, Group. Because it's now in a group, I can align it to the art board. Let's go to align to art board, and I'm going to center these objects on the art board. I could do that through the align panel here as well. By grouping everything and then centering it on the art board, I'm going to ensure I have nice even edges to my design. It's time now to clip the design so we can get a good look at it. I'll click on the Rectangle tool, click in the document, and I'm going to make a rectangle that's 12 inches by 12 inches in size. Illustrator is playing up a bit for me right now. I'm just going to click "OK" again. It keeps doing this and I get two rectangles, but I only need one so I'm just deleting the one I don't need. Let me just make sure that this is aligned to the art board as well. It doesn't matter if it has a fill, it doesn't matter if it has a stroke, we're just going to select over everything, the rectangle and the group of objects, right click and choose Make Clipping Mask. What that does is just uses that top rectangle to clip the design so we're getting a look at our finished shade of scrapbook paper. Now I'm really happy with that, I really like the design, so to save it as scrapbook paper, I'll choose File and then Export and Export As. Now I'm going to call this hexagon pattern. I'm going to select Use Artboards, I'm going to click Export. It's being saved as a JPEG image. Now I need to select these options. It needs to be color model RGB because that's typically used for scrapbook paper. I want this to be a high quality file so I'm going to set it to maximum and I'm going to set the resolution to 300 ppi. If I do all of this with a document that was 12 by 12 inches in size, I'm going to end up with a JPEG image that's 3600 by 3600 pixels at 300 dpi and that's exactly how scrapbook paper is packaged and sold in the most part on the web, so I'll just click "OK". Now if we have a look at the final image, this is the scrapbook paper image that I just created. If I have a look at the files properties, will see in the details area that its dimensions are indeed 3600 by 3600 and the horizontal and vertical resolutions are 300 dpi. Perfect size for scrapbook paper. 6. Pt 5: From Faux Pattern to Half Drop Repeat: Now we just put a lot of effort into making this scrapbook paper. And I'm thinking that while we here, we could also create a half drop repeat pattern from it. So what I've done is I've saved this as a separate file. I'm going to show you how you can quickly and easily turn this into a half dropped repeat, and this is a really cool pattern. What I'm doing is I'm opening up the clipping group that we created. I'm just going to grab the group of objects themselves and just drag them out of the clipping group so that we can see them clearly. The clipping group itself, I'm just going to put in the trash can. What we're going to do now is create this design as a half drop repeating pattern so I'll select either everything, and then I'll choose object and then pattern and make. We'll select brick by column. That's what you'll use for a really good half drop repeat. You're going to make sure that your block offset is one-half. I'm going to click to make sure that the width and height are constrained as I bring in the width. I'm just going to start decreasing this. I'm looking at the height now and it's just joined up perfectly height-wise. But the sides here are not perfectly lined yet. I'm going to deselect this option and I'm going to continue to bring in my widths. With just a few clicks of a mouse, I now have a huge seamless repeating pattern of being able to capitalize from the flow pattern that we created and actually make it into a seamless repeat. Now I've done that, I'll click Done. Let's just move out of the way and let's go and create a much, much larger rectangle, and I'll fill it with my new pattern. I'll choose object, transform, scale, and I'm going to bring it down quite a bit. I'll turn preview on. I'm just going to bring it down to about 40 percent. Just so you can see how good a seamless repeating pattern it is. We spent, I know a lot of time on that scrapbook paper to get that flow designed, to get these really interesting colors in this design, and now we've got a huge seamless repeat for this pattern. Of course, because we've got all these colors, we can re-color it. So I'll just click on the re-color artwork tall, I'm going to leave white unselect because I don't want to re-color the white, but let's just go to Edit. Let's make sure that we've got our colors locked down. Now as I swing this around, we're getting a whole different set of colors in our seamless repeating pattern, and so you can just roll it round to get different color wise. Then you can of course, unlock everything and you could bring these colors into different areas so that you can get a way larger volume of colors than we had previously. If you're done, just click Okay, and of course that's going to give you two patterns, the original color way that you had and your second color way. So be aware that whenever you spend a lot of time creating a photo design, there's always the possibility to actually turn it into a seamless repeat as well. 7. Pt 6: Nested Hexagon Pattern: It's possible to create a really nice pattern in illustrator using some nested hexagon. We're going to do that now. I'll choose file, add new, and create a document 1200 by 1200 pixels in size. We'll go and select the polygon tool click once in the document and create a polygon or a hexagon that is radius 50 pixels and side six. I'm going to increase the stroke width here, I want a, quite a thick strokes. I'm going to wind this up to about 11 pixels, and it's critical, absolutely critical for this design that you don't have a fill on your hexagon, so you would turn off your fill. Now I want this to be colored, so I'm going to choose a dark turquoise color here for the stroke on my hexagon, and let's just turn that fill off. Now I want a duplicate of this shape, so I'll hold the Alt key on a PC option on a Mac as I drag a duplicate away, and then I'll scale it down holding Shift and Alt on the PC, shift and option on the Mac. Now, you'll say that the stroke around this shape becomes much smaller because it's scaled. Now if that doesn't happen for you, you're going to undo that, you're going to go and change this setting. On a PC, you'll choose Edit and then preferences, and on a Mac, you'll choose illustrator and then preferences, and you'll go to the general tab, and you need to enable scale strokes and effects, and that just makes sure that the stroke width is decreased when the size of the object is decreased. Now that said, I want this stroke to be a little bit more but not that big. I'm going to take this up to six pixels of stroke width. The bottom line here is 11. I'm going to select both shapes, choose aligned to selection and then horizontal align centers so that these two shapes are immediately on top of each other. It's now time to create our blends, so with the two shapes selected, we'll choose object and then blend make. Now what you see here may not be the exact same thing as I'm saying, and that's just fine. You'll double-click on the Blend tool here, because you need to make some setting changes. Turn preview on so you can see what you're doing. Select specified steps. There are two things that we're looking for here. One of them is we'll need an odd number of steps, so it needs to be 15 or 13 or 11, it can't be even. The other thing is that you need a space between these first two hexagons, we can get a space here, you're got have spaces all the way up. Obviously we need less steps. So if 10 is going to work, 11 is just going to work, and I think I'm going to go with 11 and fix up the problem in just a minute. I'll go with 11, I've got a slight space here, not enough, but I'll click okay. Then I open up my layers panel, let me just make everything a little bit bigger so you can see what's going on here, and when you create a blend, you'll end up with a blend layer that has the path which is this line here, and then your two polygons, well, where does going to target this bottom one, the one at the very bottom. With it's selective, we can now move it, and we're moving the entire blend, so we're re-scaling the blend, but we're able to add on a little bit of extra space in here. I just want that little bit of extra space. Once I'm happy with that, I can just click away. I don't need my layers palette any longer. Now, I do need to expand this blend. With the blend selected, I'll choose object and then blend and expand, and that gives me a group with all of these shapes in this group. Go to scale it down a little bit. I'll hold the Shift key as I drag on it, just scale it a little bit, it's a little bit too big. Now let's invert this, what we're going to do is, we're going to roll it around a 180 degrees and we're going to make a copy. To do that all in one step, object transform, rotate, we'll rotate at 180 degrees, so what that does is it puts the big ones on the top instead of on the bottom, but we want the original plus this new set will click copy. That gives us two sets of shapes, one on top of the other, and one of them is selected. With that one still selected, let's change the color so that's going to be easier for us to see what's actually happening here. I'm going to choose orangey, pink. I'm going to zoom into the middle of this area here because that's where I'm going to get two shapes that are going to overlap. I'm going to re-target the selection tool and then just press the up arrow key. Because what I'm trying to do is to get these two shapes over the top of each other. Now they're not going perfectly over the top of each other, so as I'm rocking the up arrow and down arrow keys to just say what movement I've got, we will be looking up here It's going from 530-532. I'm just going to round those off and let's try 531 and see if that gets us over the top of each other. Not quite so let's try 531.5. You might need to fiddle these around just a little bit to get them over the top of each other. Now that I've done that, I'm going to re-select all of these objects and again do a 180 degree rotation, object transform, rotate a 180 degrees and I want a copy, so I'll click Copy, and because one set of these objects is still selected, I'll hold the Shift key down as I move them across, and I'm also going to move them down. What I want to do is to tuck these shapes into each other, so I'm going to just zoom in here and just adjust their positioning until they're nicely arranged. I'm looking for this to be really neat here. You can say these two points here if I choose view and then outline, they're pretty much on the same alignment here, and I think that's a really good look. Lets just zoom out and you'll see what we've got here. Well now, we're going to make our pattern, but before we do so, there's a slight problem in the middle of this design that you may want to consider fixing. These two shapes here are two shapes on top of each other. I'm going to the group selection tool up here. Here is a toolbar position with the direct selection tool. I'm going to select either both of these shapes and go back to our layers palette. I'm just pressing F7 together. You'll say that there's something selected in this pink group and there's something selected in this blue group. We've got two shapes on top of each other selected. I'm going to the blue group one. Well, it's here, and you can see that because this little box is telling you it's selected. While you grab this and drop it on the trash can, and that just means that you've removed that second shape from here so that it's never going to appear around the edges of the other shape. We're going to do it again over here. I'm going back to the group selection tool, I'm going to select over both these objects and I'm going to find out where that extra shape is in the blue area. Here's the group of blue objects, here's this extra shape that's behind this pink one, I'm just going to drag it onto the trash can, and that will neaten up the elements that you're going to use in your pattern and you won't have some extra bleeding if you like in your final pattern. Now let's select over everything., I'm going to shrink it a little bit, hold the Shift key as I do it so that the proportions are constrained. Now everything is selected, so I'm going straight into my pattern with object, pattern make, I'll click okay. Now I've got dim copies set on, I'm going to just disable that right now, and let's go and select the pattern type that we're going to use, and for this grid pattern is just fine. We will need to close up these gaps, so to say the gaps, you'll go to dim copies and set it to 40 or 50 percent because that shows you very clearly where your gaps are. In the pattern make tool, you can use the zoom tool, so you're going to zoom in here so that we can see really clearly where the gaps are that we need to close up. For now I'm going to click this option so that we're constraining both the width and the height, and go start decreasing these values. What I'm looking for here is for this gap to be about the same as this gap, maybe even a little bit smaller and you can see it's not smaller here. I'm going to deselect this constraint option so that I can adjust the height independently, so I'm just going to walk that in a little bit, looking for it to be a little bit smaller than this one up here. I think that's looking pretty good. Let's go and have a look at the spacing here. We've got extra spacing around the edges here, and this is what the spacing should look like, so I need to bring in the horizontal value or the width, then start bringing that in, and again, I want this width here to be the same as this width. If I think I've got it right, I'll zoom back out. I'm going to turn dim copies off and I'm going to increase my number of copies so that I can see the full stretch of my pattern. Everything's looking really good, so I'll click Done. Zoom back out with Control or Command zero. Going to grab my pattern pieces and just pull them off to the side, and let's test our pattern. I'll make a rectangle 1200 by 1200 pixels in size. It's not going to have any stroke, but it is going to have a fill and our target, the fill. I'll go up here and select Align to art board, and that will allow me to use horizontal align center and vertical align center to align my rectangle on top of the art board, of course, you could also use the align options here. With the fill targeted, I can now go to these watches palette and grab my new pattern. I'm going to scale it down a little bit just so you can see what this pattern looks like, object transform scale. I'm going to deselect transform objects, I'm going to make sure I have preview turned on, and in this case, I'm just going to scale it down to about 60 percent because that's going to give us a good look at this pattern. Now the pattern colors may not so true, but that's such an easy fix with your pattern filled objects selected go to the recolor artwork tool and click Edit. You only have two colors in this pattern. If the icon here looks like this, you can move one of these to the exclusion of the other, I'm just going to adjust these colors a little bit. Maybe darken up the blue color here, and perhaps lightened the pink a little bit. If I like that, I'll click okay, and now I have a new patterns watch, so I've got the original and I've got my new patterns watch, and of course we can reselect the recolor artwork too go back to Edit. Going to this time, just put my two colors opposite each other so they're complimentary colors, I'm going to lock them down. Now I can move these colors around the color wheel and get colors that are complimentary to each other. At this point, you may want to drag one out to make it more saturated and drag one in to make it less saturated, little bit more pastel. You can get some interesting recolors on this pattern by just dragging these handles around whenever you see something you like, just click okay. That gives you a new pattern pace and you can just come back and click Edit and just keep moving it around and get different color waves for your pattern. You want these two handles to move together, going to have to lock them down so that they will move together. I think this is a really attractive repeat patterns watch and I hope that you like it too. 8. Pt 7: Hexagon Pattern in Pattern Effect: It isn't possible in Illustrator to use a pattern inside the pattern make tool. But you can get a pattern in pattern look if you design your pattern that way. We're going to create one now choose "File New" and create a document 1200 by 1200 pixels in size. I'll go to the polygon tool, click once in the document and make a polygon that's a 100 pixels in radius and obviously six sides. Now, this is not going to have any fill on it and it's going to have quite a thick strike. I'll use a 20 pixels stroke. The stroke here is on the inside. When I open the Stroke panel up, I've got this option selected, stroke on the inside. Now, I'm going to make a duplicate of that shape so our hold the Alt or Option key as I drag a duplicate away. Now, we're going to color this and for this one, I'm going to make the outside border a very light turquoise. Then the inside is also going to be turquoise. I'm going to click on the Fill, click on Color, and then double-click on this color so I can make it a slightly darker turquoise. For this one, I'm going to make the outside edge dark red. I'm going to place both of these on top of each other. I'll select both of them and click a Horizontal Align Center and Vertical Align Center. Now, that actually aligns them to the art board as well as centering them over the top of each other. I'm going to open up the last panel because I want you to be able to see what's going on here with our two hexagons. The bottommost one, I'm going to turn off for now and I'm going to lock it down and this topmost one, I'm going to expand. I want the combine shapes to be separated so I want this to be a filled shape and the center to be a fill shape. With the polygon selector, I'll choose Object and then expand appearance. Now we get a group with the two pieces in it. With the group selected, I'll choose Object Ungroup. Now, I have the path that is this top shape and then the path underneath. Well, I'm going to lockdown and turn off the top path. We're just going to focus on this shape here. Now, I don't want to move this shape. I'm going to be very careful about not moving it because it's perfectly positioned. I'm going to draw a line through the center of it and this line is going to be black. I want the line to be perfectly centered across these shapes. I'll select both of these shapes. By locking down and turning off these two shapes, the only thing I can select is the line and the shape. Now, I want to use the key object option here, so I'm going to choose Align to Key Object. Right now, this line is the key object. I want it to be the hexagon so I'll click on the hexagon. The concept of a key object is it won't move but the line will. That's going to ensure that this hexagon stays in the exact same position it was in relative to these other pieces that we've locked down. If we didn't use this key object, it could move and that wouldn't be a good thing. I'm going to choose Horizontal Align Center and Vertical Align Center and now the line is centered over the top of the hexagon. This time I'll select only the line and I'll choose Object Transform Rotate. I'm going to rotate it 30 degrees because that makes it now runs through the points on the hexagon. I'll click "Okay". Now, I want to rotate it 60 degrees, Object Transform, Rotate, this time, I'll type 60. I want the previous line plus this line. I'll click "Copy." Finally, object transform. If I choose transform again or press Control D on a PC, Command D on a Mac, then I'll get the third line I need. Select over everything, go to the Pathfinder palette and click "Divide", and that divide this up into little pieces. We should end up with six pieces. Now, I want to color these pieces but it's going to be a little bit easier to see what I need to color and how to select those, if I make this hexagon visible and pull it to the very top of everything. Ultimately, it's going to be moved. It's going to be moved to around this position. If you move it before you actually need to move it, it's going to be a little bit easier for you to see which bits you need to color. It's not in the exact right place but it's okay for now. I need these two pieces to be the same color. They're inside a group right now, I can choose Object Ungroup. I'm going to select the two pieces I want to be the same color. Double-click on this color and I'm going to make them lighter. Now, I want these two pieces to be the same color. Select them, double-click and I'll make this a darker color. Now, these six pieces have been recolored in pairs. It's going to look like a dimensional box, when I turn it off, it looks like a dimensional box. But the piece that's visible through this hexagonal frame must be colored the same way. Now, these shapes, these grain shapes, I'm going to put together in a group. Now, I'm just going to lockdown that polygon and so the only thing I can select is these shapes that make this polygon up so Object Group. Now they're going to move together. I'm going to make my compound path visible and I'm going to add it to the group, I can just drop it into the group. I want this thicker line so I want it to be at the top of the group. You might have to adjust its position if it doesn't go into the right place. Now, the only other thing we have to do before we make our pattern is make sure that these two hexagons are in the correct position and I don't think that they're quite right. What you want to see here, the bit that you're looking for, is that this bend here, this little angle here is in the middle of the line that runs around the edge of this bottom shape. It should be in the same place here, about in the middle and about in the middle. But to get it in perfect position will choose View and then Outline. Zoom in up here because this is what's wrong. Now, you've got a whole heap of lines here that relate to this polygon here. You've got this line here which relates to this one. Well, this is the one we want to move. It's just going to be much easier to move it. Don't worry about all these other pieces. That's pretty critical. Now, all I'm going to do here is look at a couple of things, you can see here, this is its midpoint and it should be here and this line is out. I'm thinking if I press the Down arrow, I'm going to move this a little bit and Up arrow, it moves a little bit. But neither one down arrow or one up arrow is getting it in the exact right position. Let's have a look up here. It goes from 350, this is the y position, 350 to 352. Now, obviously, this is a bigger area than this. If I go like 350.6 or something, that's probably going to move it down about as much as it needs to move and that's pretty good. It could be a little bit better position, but I'm going to call that good. We're going to zoom back out and we're going back to View and then Preview. These are the shapes that are going to make up our repeating pattern. I'll select all of them and choose Object Pattern Make. The pattern is going to be a Hex by column pattern. I'll select Hex by column. Then we're going to change the overlaps because what we want is for this red hexagon to be in front of everything. If I click here and then here, it's going to appear in the front of everything. I'll click here to lock the width and height. I'm going to start decreasing these so that the shapes are coming together. At some point, you're going to have to unlock this and adjust the height independently. Now, it's a little bit finicky. Let's see how are we going to solve this. I'm going to the zoom tool, I'm going to zoom in to about the middle of this design. Now, I'm going to select here on dim copies too, and I'm going to make sure it's set to about 40 percent, because this is what the problem is, we've got double lines here. What I'll do is start moving these so that I'm getting single lines. Now, the height was pretty good. I'm thinking a height was perfect, which I don't usually get right. But the width was not. I'm just adjusting it until it looks neat. Now, I'm going to disable dim copies and we should say our pattern piece. Everything looks just fine, I'll click Done. I'll grab these two shapes and just move them to one side. I'll create a rectangle that is the size of the art board. I'll center it on the art board. I'll take its stroke and make it the fill, target the fill, and let's apply our pattern to it. We have this dimensional hexagon pattern that looks like this red hexagon design is over the top of this other hexagon pattern behind. Now, it's possible to change the shading of the shapes really easily. We're going to select this rectangle, the Filled Rectangle, and go to the Re-color Artwork Tool. Now, the red is obviously this hexagon here, and the lightest of these colors is this line here. But these other three colors are the shaded areas in here. Well, I can pick these up and start rotating them. I'm going to take the top one and drop it onto the next one. I'm going to take the next one and drop it on top of the bottom one. I'm going to take this one and move it up here. If I think there's not quite enough difference between these colors, I'll double-click here and make this perhaps just a little bit darker. When I'm done, I'll click "Okay." That gives me another pattern piece. I've got my original pattern, this is the one we designed in the Pattern Make Tool and now we've got one where the shading is a bit different. You can play around with the shading here until you get the dimensional look that you want from your pattern. Of course, you can also change this overlay color. We could make it something like a darker blue. You can do whatever you like with that, click "Okay" and of course, that's going to give you a third pattern. This is the first one, this is the recolored version and now this is the one that has a different overlay color on it. This is a pattern in pattern effect that has been created in Illustrator, but we've done it just simply by designing it all as a single pattern. 9. Project and wrapup: We've now completed the video content for this course, so it's over to you. It's time for you to practice the skills that you've learned and create one or more hexagon patterns. Follow the instructions in the videos and once you've created your hexagon pattern, post it as your class project. I hope you've enjoyed this class and I hope that you've learned things about Illustrator of which you were previously unaware. Now as you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asked if you would recommend this class to others. Please would you complete the course recommendation for me. It really helps other students to say that this is a course that they too may enjoy and learn from. Now if you see the follow link on the screen, click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. As always, 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. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon. 10. Bonus: How to Install Scripts on a Mac: This is a quick additional video just to show you how you're going to install RandomSelect on your Mac. You are going to come to the exact same location as I gave you in the video and you're going to click on Downloads. That's going to be downloaded into your Downloads folder. So I'm going to find it here, and here is the script. Now double-clicking on it will expand automatically on the Mac. So we'll just open up this folder and we want to go to the JavaScript version because this is the one I want. I'm going to copy it to the Mac clipboard with edit and then copy. Now I need to find the location to place it in. I've got Illustrator closed and that's pretty important. I'm going to hold down the Command key and click on the Illustrator icon. What that does, is it opens you up in the location in Finder where your Adobe application is actually installed. This is the Adobe Illustrator application that I'm using, it's same one that's here on the doc. Well, I don't want to open up the application itself but I do want to go to the preset folder. So I'm going to click here on the presets folder. I want to select whatever language version I'm using, so I'll just open that up. Then we'll go to the scripts folder so double-click on that. Here are the scripts that are installed by default in Illustrator, all I need to do at this stage is to choose Edit and then paste item and that will paste in that script that I just copied in from the downloads folder and it's now installed into the location that illustrator expects it to be in. So going back, I can now re-start Illustrator. Now that I've done that, if I choose File and then Scripts, you'll see that RandomSelect is added to the scripts menu in this version of Illustrator. That's how you install scripts in Illustrator on the Mac. 11. Prepare a Swatch for Spoonflower and other online sites: One question that I get a lot is, how do you prepare a pattern like this for uploading to a site such as Spoonflower. I'm going to show you a method that's going to work regardless of what's in your pattern pieces. I think that's pretty important. To begin with, i'm going to just select this pattern piece, and i'm just going to delete it from the art board. I'm going to the swatches panel because I want to grab from there the actual swatch that I want to send up to Spoonflower. I'm just going to drag and drop this particular swatch into the document. Next up we're going to need the Layers palette, and that's going to be absolutely critical. Now, you don't need these shapes down here, which were the original pattern pieces. I'm just going to delete those. We're going to focus on the element that we just dragged out of the swatches panel because that's absolutely all that there is in this document. Now, a very robust way of preparing a pattern swatch like this for Spoonflower is to go and grab the path at the very bottom of the group that you just dragged out of the Swatches panel. It's going to be a rectangle and its going to have no fill and no stroke, and it's always, always going to be at the very bottom of this group. That's because what it's doing is it's marking out where the actual pattern swatch is. It's only this area inside this rectangle that we're actually interested in. Technically we don't need the bits around the outside. But if any of the bits around the outside have strokes on them, then we need to protect those strokes. This method that i'm about to show you will do just that. We're going to select this no fill, no stroke rectangle. Then we'll go to the artboard tool, we'll click on it once to target it, and then we'll double-click on it to open the artboard options. From the drop-down list here, what you're going to do is choose, "Fit to Selected Art". Because the piece of selected art that we've got selected is this no fill, no stroke rectangle. That's going to give us an art board that is the exact size of this no fill, no stroke rectangle. I'll just click "Okay". What's happened is that now the art board has been shrunk to just this exact size. In fact, this is the swatch that we need to take to Spoonflower, just the area on the art board. Next up we have to export this in a way that only exports this art board object. Then we can do it in one of a couple of ways. You can choose "File", and then "Export", and then "Export as" choose a location to save it in and make sure that you select "Use Artboards" because that's going to limit the finished file to only what's on that particular artboard. You get various options here for your file format. For example, if your site, it may not be Spoonflower that needs this pattern swatch, but if your site wants a high-quality JPEG, then you will just select JPEG. I'm going to click "Export". Now I would select my color model again for Spoonflower, that's typically RGB, but other sites might need something different. I'm going to send up a high-quality image. I'm going to make sure that the quality is set really high. I'm going to set the resolution to whatever the site that i'm uploading it to requires. Spoonflower will take 300 ppi. The optimum for Spoonflower is 150, but 300 would be just fine. I'll click "Okay". Now, another method of doing this, which allows you some flexibility in picking the size of your pattern swatch is to export for web. We'll choose "File" and then "Export" and we'll do to "Save for Web (Legacy)". Now, one of the reasons why I like this is that moment it's going to tell me what the size of my swatches and it's really, really small. It's 266 by 153. Well, if I want to increase that size, I can do so. I'm actually going to multiply it by 10. I'm going to make it 2,660 by 1,530. Now it's a really big swatch. That's going to give me a lot of flexibility when I get to Spoonflower for actually making this larger or smaller. I'm just going to click "Save". I've got a JPEG here of maximum quality, so I'll click "Save", and I'll call this pattern-in-pattern pink, and I'll click "Save". Now let's see the files that we've managed to save. This is the pattern-in- pattern pink element. If I go to file and then properties, we'll be able to read off the size of this document. It's 2,660 by 1,530 pixels in size. It's got a resolution of 96 dpi. That's obviously going to be scaled when it gets to Spoonflower. Now, this is the second image that we saved and let's have a look at its properties. Well, it is considerably smaller and we didn't get a lot of flexibility when we went to save like the one that we used export as to save, we didn't get any choices to the file size, although it's 300 DPI, it's an image that's half the size of the one that we were able to create when we used Save for Web. I prefer Save for Web, even though the resolution is much less, I get a bigger dimension image. That's going to scale better at spoonflower. It's going to allow me to enlarge or shrink my images quite a bit on Spoonflower. That's a way to save your swatches as images that you can then upload to sites like Spoonflower, or indeed to any website that requires the actual physical pattern swatch. Not something that's filled with the pattern, but actually something that is the repeatable patterns swatch. I hope that helps you if you're looking to take these patterns that you're creating in this class to Spoonflower or another online site. 12. Bonus Faux Hexagons without strokes: This is a bonus video for the hexagon class and it's a video that's going to show you how you can make that full pattern but without a stroke. Because this came up with one of my students who wanted to make the full hexagon pattern but without a stroke and she was having a lot of difficulty with it. So let's choose File and New and let's go back and make it a 12 inch by 12 inch document. Now we're going to add our hexagon, so let's go to the polygon tool, I'll click once in the document. Now I'm going to make a half-inch hexagon, so its radius is set to 0.5 and six sides. The measurements here are going to be critical so if you want this to work, I suggest strongly that you use these exact measurements. So I'll just click "OK" and of course these were the measurements that were used in the video. So let's go and turn the stroke off. We've removed a stroke entirely and we're just got a filled shape. I'm going to move the filled shape to the bottom of the document and let's just go fill it with a color that's a little bit less in your face than that very black color. So I'll select over the shape and we're going to do are distorting the transform, Effect, Distort and Transform and then Transform. You're going to set the rotation point as this middle point. That's really critical. Turn Preview on, you need to reflect why this is exactly what we did in the video. Going to add 20 copies at this stage. Now we're going to start working with this shape. So when we're starting to look at how far we're going to move horizontally and vertically, let's look up here on the control bar. We've got a shape that has a width of one inch and a height of 0.866 inches. So what we're going to do width-wise, is we're going to move it width-wise three quarters of the width value and one inch, three quarters of an inch is three-quarters of an inch. So let's go to the horizontal value here and let's type 0.75. In terms of the vertical height, because we are going in an upward stretch, that's got to be negative, so I'm going to type the minus key and we're going to use half of this value. So half of 0.866 is 0.433, so I'll type in 0.433 and click "OK'. This is the shapes that are touching exactly. So now we'll go and do a second transform Effect, Distort and Transform, and then Transform. Apply a new effect, click Preview, make sure that we've got the center selected here that's critical. Then I'm going to do 20 copies. Now we just have to go in a vertical direction again, we know that that's got to be a negative direction because we're going up the document. Well, we're going to go up the full height of the shapes, so that's 0.866 and I'll click "OK". Every one of these shapes is now butted up tightly against every other one of these shapes. When I click the colors here, you will say that there are no spaces. Now, I'm seeing I very faint line here, but if I zoom in, it just doesn't exist. So as soon as we zoom in, it's just not there. So this is nudging up and fitting perfectly. So of course we'll choose Object and then Expand Appearance and then Object Ungroup until Ungroup is no longer an option. Make sure everything is selected, which it is, I'm going to target my colors and go and run my script. We now have a full hexagon pattern that has no spaces in it. The critical thing is going to be that movement and you're going to move it width-wise, three quarters of the width of the actual shape and you'll get that by just reading it up here and then height-wise, you're going to move it up half of the height the first time. That's when you're doing the transform with the reflect why. When you're doing the second transform, then you're going to go up the full height of the shape. So I hope that helps anybody who wants to do this pattern but without using the stroke and I know that these values are very tight. So that's the easy way of working out how to do it. Hope that's helped you.