Learn Simple Pattern Design in Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction: This is a course where you will learn simple surface pattern design and Adobe Illustrator. Hey there and welcome back to another Skillshare class. My name is Allie. I'm the owner and designer, quite creative and I'm really happy to share with you my process and creating simple repeat patterns in Adobe Illustrator. This class is really made from anyone who beginner to advanced. I know I personally love to learn about other designers processes and workflows in something that you might work in daily. Or if you are very beginner at any of the pattern world. This class is going to go through step-by-step in Illustrator, and I'm going to break it in really simple videos to follow along. I used to teach full-time at a university. I worked on a visual communication curriculum, product design, and taught design studios in both private assignment architecture. I'm really happy to apply all of that technical knowledge and teaching in some new courses this coming year. So if you're curious about more different design techniques in both illustration, surface pattern design, and even stationery design. Stay tuned. Join my newsletter. I'm happy to share when the classes are released and we'll go ahead and get started. The next video we're gonna talk about our class project and then we're going to jump right in. 2. Class Project: The class project. Looking way ahead to the end of this course, you are going to not only learn my process and setting up files and art boards and all the different file organization through pattern design. But we're also going to create several different kinds of patterns. In the class project, I want you to choose one of the types of pattern. So for example, a half drop repeat, and create that pattern in two different color ways. You can see in my example here there's two different images. One with a blue background where I'm more of a green background. And you're gonna submit both images of a pattern in either PNG or JPEG format. And you can choose if you want to use a brick repeat pattern, a half-drop or tossed, all of which I will go into more detail throughout this class. 3. Free Resources & Downloads: In this video, I want to talk about free resources and downloads. I have created three different files just for you. If you click on the link below, you will be able to access all of these files sent straight to your inbox. One, I've made an Adobe Illustrator template. Even though I'm going to go over all of the steps to set up your own file. I've also included a template file, which you can save for Adobe Illustrator files now and in the future. If you want to skip those steps too, I've made some predrawn motifs, including these six little tulips shown here below. If you do not have access to digitally drawing or want to follow along with all the steps of making the pattern and not focused on creating the art. And then three, lastly, I have a little guide. Speaking of the ten design principles for surface pattern or pattern designers. Again, you can access all of these, the link below, scroll down the page and look for a link. 4. Drawing Elements: In this video, I'm gonna be talking about drawing elements. The drawing elements are all the different motifs and essentially the design that you're gonna be using for your pattern. Now a quick disclaimer here. I am going to go into my process and illustrating and far more depth in another course. So for this time being, I will show you some quick motifs in Adobe Fresco. You can also make some quick shapes in Adobe Illustrator. Or lastly, you can download the motifs I've included in the download section for this class and use the tool ups and follow along as I go. Diving into Adobe Fresco on the iPad, I am going to go to my Home menu and create a new document. Now, I prefer to set this to inches and create a 12 inch by 12 inch art board. Now this is going to make sense once we dive into Adobe Illustrator, but this is my preference for any kind of pattern because we're sending it straight to Adobe Illustrator and we're working in all vectors. The pixel size doesn't really matter. However, it's good habit to set this to three hundred and thirty three hundred. There we go. Then I'm going to go ahead and rename it. I'm going to call this document tulips, as I worked through a very simple pattern to show you all the tools and techniques and click Create Document. Now once I'm in my document, you can notice here my layout is in the dark color mode. I like to keep the layers panels open on the far-right. I also like to turn on the grids. So under the precision guides, you might have to expand that, toggle the grids on and just make sure it's the graph because we're drawing in 2D, not in perspective. You can play with the opacity. You can change the grid color to something different. We're going to go ahead and close that. Now. You can notice here actually before I close that the spacing is at 100 pixels, I could change that to 1000 and they're going to be a lot larger. Or I could change it to 20 and they're gonna be a lot smaller. I typically start with a 100 pixels, which is 12 inch by 12 inch artboard. Because one, they fit perfectly from left to right, top to bottom unto it tends to be a good size to work with as my default. But I will often change that depending on the drawing. Opening up the layers. The next thing we want to do is fill a background color. Coming into the colors on the far left. There are several ways you can add color. If I go under all, you can notice here I have integrated color pallets from my Adobe color. I am also going to be creating a very extensive color video. But if you want to learn more about this, I recommend going over to my YouTube. I have a few quick tutorials on it. For this tutorial class, I am just going to go over creating and picking some colors from the color wheel. I might pick just a neutral beige using the paint bucket, tool, paint bucket, the back. Now this is important. I'm going to be working all in vector for the sake of this tutorial and course. I'm going to click vector there for the background. Now, don't worry about the guides, they're going to disappear. That grid will not come out. I have my vector background layer, I'm going to click New Layer. And now we're going to go over and we're gonna start drawing. There's three different types of brushes here. There are vector brushes where I'm selecting the basic round. There are watercolor brushes, which are considered live brushes, where there's watercolor and oil options experience. Then there's pixel brushes, which there are tons of different kinds of pixel brushes. But I am going to save that for another tutorial. And today I'm just going to keep it really basic using a vector brush. I've got my basic round set to about 12 points for that size. Smoothing is set to about 44. And then I encourage you to play around with some of the brush settings. I have set mine to the roundness of a 100 with a slight angle. And you could see some other other settings where I like to keep the taper at 0. I went a really simple brush. Now, I'm going to choose a different color and draw a couple of different clips. Let's go ahead. I'm going to pick a deep navy, choose whatever you would like. And don't worry, you can always change the color later. So just pick something that maybe has a nice contrast for now, we're going to start drawing. Jumping in. I like to use the guides to create something similar for multiple tulips. Editing out there, I'm going to mark three grids wide. Two grids tall, that center point. If I really wanted to stay super regimented about this, which I just want to show you this trick. I am going to change the opacity of that layer. So while I had it selected, I'm going into the settings and changing the opacity. Then I'm creating a new layer where I'm actually drawing above it. And then filling that in. Now it looks a little bit wide. I might turn off that layer or I can move it over to keep drawing some more. I'm actually going to delete it and work on another tulip. I might change the size up a little bit. Maybe I'll drop it a little. There we go. I'm going to start to create a couple of tulips. Follow along, start drawing, and I will come back in once I go for the next color. All right, so let's say that I got six simple tulips. I might do one small change. So you can see here how my tulips aren't necessarily aligned on that grid. While selecting those layers. I can grab my Marquee tool over on the left. Circle around what I wanted to change. Clicking on the Select tool, I'm going to make sure all of these tulips align on the bottom there, those top grids, and then de-select it and do the same for the next one. Now, you can do a lot of this in Adobe Illustrator, but I personally like to get a really rough idea and fresco just to make sure all my drawing components are somewhat similar, but I like the imperfect funkiness of the hand-drawn elements. So that's why I'm gonna go forward with these tulips. I just want to make sure the top and bottom is a little closely closer aligned. Accidentally clicked over here. I'm going to click Cancel lasso, and then do that one more time. And move this around. So again, player on the tools, de-select it after each one. And then I might even move this to the center. Now that TO line is coming up because over in my incision panel, I have alignment guides turned on. I like to have that checked checked there, just like smart guides when you're working in the Adobe desktop programs. All right, so next layer, I want to be underneath of these tulips. I'm going to click on the background and click on new layer. In order to draw that underneath. You can also click and hold and drag these layers around. If you need to move it. Let's pick another color. I think I'm gonna pick the orange here and see what that looks like. I might make this a little bit thicker. Then I'm going to start drawing some stems. Now, if you click and hold, you're going to get a straight line, but you can move around. I'm going to click and hold once I draw the end of the line to make it straight. If you've aligned your tulips on the guides or the grid, it can be really helpful to draw a straight line and use that to help you. Once I've got that drawing, I'm going to go ahead and turn off the grids and see how everything looks. And now I'm ready to send it to my computer. We're gonna talk about sending it to the computer and uploading it in the next step. But take your time here, take your time drawing a few motifs. I recommend drawing one motif and six variations to keep this pattern really simple and follow along to the best of your abilities. Have fun drawing, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Sending the File: In this video, I am going to show you how to send your file from Adobe Fresco on the iPad to Illustrator on your desktop or laptop. Opening up Adobe Fresco on the iPad, I have got my six tulips drawn here as the motifs that I want to bring in along with an idea of a color palette. But don't worry, we can change that later in order to send it straight to my desktop or laptop computer. I want to go up to the Share button in the top right of the screen, right next to the little gear icon, settings wheel, the top right of your Fresco page. Now clicking on that, I have the option to send to Illustrator. Then I can send it to desktop, not the iPad application. It's going to take a little while to essentially AirDrop it. While I'm connected with Adobe Creative Cloud, we're going to move over to Adobe Illustrator on desktop. Pulling up my desktop or laptop screen. I've got this new panel that came out by opened up Adobe Illustrator. And even though it says Photoshop import options, that's okay, that's what Adobe uses as the panel to share because you can bring in both raster and vector-based artwork. I'm going to make sure convert layers to objects is selected in order to preserve my layers rather than flattening them into one single image. Now, you also have the option to Import hidden layers. But I typically turn on or off the layers I want in Fresco before bringing it in and click OK. Alright, so this should pull up a brand new file. It's going to come in with whatever name that you had. An Adobe Fresco. If it was untitled, it'll come in with untitled and perhaps the date or time. If you see here on the far right in my layers panel, it's broadened my linears. So I've got the default background which I always delete, the white background that Fresco creates. Then everything else will either say pixel or a vector layer, depending on what brush or brushes you use to create the artwork. You can see here, each layer is separated. Now I will eventually rename this, but I want to create a new file where I bring in all of these elements by selecting them all. Copying and pasting gel show you in the next video and setting up all of our art boards in order to create some patterns. 6. Keyboard Shortcuts: In this video, I am going to talk about keyboard shortcuts. The few commands that I use time and time again, making patterns in Adobe Illustrator, the top seven keyboard shortcuts, you might hear me refer back to R as follows. Please note I am referring to command or Cmd for the Command key on a Mac. But if you are a PC user, just replace that with the Control key. Now you've probably heard of copy and paste and are really familiar with it. Maybe paste in place. But what I want to point out here is the move key, Shift Plus Command Plus the letter M is probably the most helpful keyboard shortcut I find when creating patterns in Illustrator, Command D and Command S or other just short ways to either transform again or Save. Then the option key is really nice key to copy. If you click on some object, hold the mouse and hold the option key, you just click and drag and it automatically makes a copy. I'm also going to be showing you how you can hold down the Option and Shift key at the same time to proportionately scale. 7. Setting up Artboards: In this video, I'm going to talk about setting up art boards and getting your Illustrator file all set to go. Opening up Adobe Illustrator, I still have the tulip files sent from the iPad, but I want to create a new document with several art boards and show you my process. Now quick disclaimer. Please note if you are using the Adobe Illustrator template I have provided in the free resource link at the bottom of this page. Please go ahead and open it now. So just go up to File, open and go ahead and navigate that thought AIT file. And then you're going to come up with the same thing that we're going to go over from scratch. Those of you who want to follow along. Let's go ahead and go to File New. Now, I can name this pattern. I want to make sure my units are set to inches. My width and height is set to 12. And I have numbered 12 art boards because I want 12 different art boards under advanced options. This is where I can change the color mode, but don't worry, you can always change this later as well. This really just depends on the use of your final pattern and if you are printing it, how and who is printing it? What kind of color mode you need to be in. I'm going to stick to RGB. If you are say, making this for your digital portfolio or uploading the Spoonflower, you can go with RGB color. Cmyk is for cyan, magenta, yellow, and key, which is black. That is the ink cartridges using a printer and most likely for many different print variations or in different ways to print your fabric. So I'm going to stay RGB color, raster effects. This doesn't matter right now, but I like to leave it at 300 pixels per inch at a pretty high resolution. Then closing advanced options, I want to go down to More Settings and make sure that the spacing is set to somewhere between 24 inches. And I'm setting my columns to three because we are going to create three different patterns today. And then at the end you can choose which color ways in which version you like the most. Create Document. Zooming out. You can see here that I have my own set workspace. If you haven't set up your own custom workspace, I recommend going up to window workspace and going all the way down to Essentials Classic. I think this workspace is the most similar to what I'll be showing you. And probably the most helpful for the different tools we're going to use. I'm gonna go back to my custom workspace, which you can learn a little bit more about on my YouTube channel. Opening up Adobe Illustrator and I have my new tulip pattern art boards. There's 12 art boards here. I'm going to close out the layers panel for now and talk about the art boards. Now, selecting the Artboard Tool, which you can see in parentheses, the keyboard shortcuts Shift O. It's going to select the art boards. I want you to note the first number and you might already know this. But just to review, if you do, the first number is the number of the art board important to note when you're exporting out only certain images. The second is the name. So I could call this brick pattern, which is what we're going to be doing for the first pattern, half-drop pattern for the second, the pattern for the third. When you go to expert this, this names will come with it. So sometimes it's helpful to go through and name each one. Now the last thing that I really like to do in my own workflow is holding the Shift key, clicking on the art board, moving it and then holding the Shift key so it stays in alignment. I'm going to click and drag the top three. There's a little bit of space between those three art boards and everything below. The idea behind this in my own organization is that these are the files of the actual pattern that I'm working on. And then all of these art boards are going to be the different color ways to view at all in one mini collection. Now the last thing I want to do is save the file, File, Save As, as a dot AI or typical Adobe Illustrator file. Somewhere on the computer that you can refer back to and know where to find. So go ahead and save the file and we'll come back and talk about the next steps. 8. Layer Organization: In this video, I am going to go over layer organization and how to set up your art boards in order to make pattern swatches. Opening up the file in Adobe Illustrator that we just created. Or if you're using the template, you can double-check the layers and understand the idea behind it. I am going to open up the Layers panel on the far right and expand this so you can see it. I'm going to zoom in here to the top three art boards. Now, when I zoom, I use the Option key and the scroll on my mouse. But you can always zoom in a couple of different ways. And there is a zoom and pan tool on the far left. And z is the short key for zooming. Now, first I'm going to, I went three layers total. I'm going to create two layers, one to next. I'm going to move the green to the bottom, red to the middle, and blue to the top. The colors don't matter. I just think it's important to have three different colors. If you double-click the layer, you can actually change the color anywhere in here. And I'm gonna go ahead and click Cancel. I just find it important to have contrast. I'm used to setting it the green, blue, and red, but you can set this any color you'd like. We are going to rename these. So let's call the bottom one swatch the middle layer background, the top layer design. Now, this is how I set up all my patterns. The reason I have denying altogether is because I'm actually putting this all as a digital RGB file. But depending on how you're printing, again, if you have to separate the colors, you might have several design layers, each one named and filled with that specific color. The swatch layer needs to be on the bottom and the order or stacking of these layers over here is really important. Some CAD programs or computer aided design, the stacking doesn't matter. But for adobe programs it does. We're going to start by clicking on that green layer, making sure we're actively drawing in it. Head on over to the rectangle tool. For short. I'm going to click on that first art board. You can see here it's already typed in. We can type 12 inches making sure its IN. And you should get a rectangle. This rectangle is kind of overlapping two art boards. It's also has a fill and a stroke that is black. We are going to set these to nothing. The red strike through. Is the global a symbol or empty or none? Now, I could select this with this selection tool, but it's pretty hard to get it aligned perfectly. So I am going to use the Align keys, which is in my Home menu panel up here. And click on Align to the horizontal center. The vertical center. Now if you don't see this at the top, you can always go to Window Align and it will pull up the Align panel. I'm going to tuck that back over and you can see if I expand one of my panels on the right, that I have all the align and distribute objects together. Now that I've got one swatch set and double-checking it's set to a blank or transparent background and fill in stroke. I'm going to hold, click on the rectangle, hold the Option key to make a copy the Shift key to bringing over exactly to the right. And then do that one more time. Now, here we go. I've got a rectangle, but it's not exactly there. I'm going to align it again. If it's aligning to the old art board, you just have to make sure to click out of it and then click back into it to align it. And you can see that actually moved over. I'm going to bring it back over, click out, click it. Then do that again. If I highlight everything, I've got a green swatch and outline for all three art boards. I'm gonna go ahead and lock that layer. Then head up to the background layer. We're gonna do the same thing. Clicking on the first art board, 12 by 12. This time I am going to set some kind of color. So maybe I'll click light gray so you can see it. Then keep the stroke empty. Now, I want to get this in the center. I'm just going to click the align. The last thing I want to do is make sure the background color is extended outside of the art board. And this is where that shift and option key held together just moves the rectangle proportionately larger. Now, the only important thing to note here is that this background fill is overlapping your art board. On every side. It doesn't have to be perfectly even. I'm going to click it and hold the Option key and the Shift key to make a couple of copies. All right, so I've got all of those. Now. The next thing I'm going to do is actually copy this down to every single art board down here because I'm going to fill those with patterns, swatches, and replace that light gray in the future in a future video. So don't worry about whatever color you chose. I just wanted to show you clearly what I'm doing. So we've got the background all setup across all the art boards. I'm going to turn that into Lock mode. And then going up to design. The last thing I want to do is go to my tab. The other Illustrator file. Just select everything here. And click copy or Command C, and then Control V or paste. Then we're going to bring that in. Now I'm going to talk about how to clean up these different elements, the motifs, and use the colors in a future video. But for now, I want you to bring in everything into this one file and then go up and save Command S for short. Then we're going to talk about setting up your color palette and Swatches panel in the next video. 9. Color Swatches: In this video, I am going to talk about color swatches, setting up your color palettes within Adobe Illustrator and making sure everything is integrated into your swatches panel. Opening up your Adobe Illustrator file. We can now delete or get rid of that other tab that we had, the fresco file or motifs because now we have everything in the same working file. The next step I want to do is pull up the swatches. So I have the swatches over here. If I expand my second kind of ribbon, you can see all of the colors that come with the default Adobe Illustrator file. If you're in the template, I have already cleaned this up for you. But I want to talk through and show you how to do this. Now if you don't see the swatches, as always, you can go up to the Window menu at the very top and go all the way down to swatches and make sure that's checked. The first thing I really like to do is to select and hold down the Shift key, all of the swatches except the pure black and white values there. And click Delete. Now I've got a cleaned up empty swatch panel. Then I want to go into libraries. I've got properties and libraries and my own workspace. You can view it under Window and go all the way down to libraries. And this is where I have saved several color palettes and Adobe Color through an Internet browser connected to my Creative Cloud account. If this sounds way too confusing to you, don't worry about it, you can skip this step. The goal is to come up with a color palette with five colors. If I go under one of my collections, I have a color palette here that I can right-click and add this theme to the swatches. So it's going to add all five colors into what's considered a color group. Another way I could create colors is to select the Rectangle Tool. Copying this a few times. This is where I can use Command D to repeat that. I can come up with colors now, feel like it's really important to think about your color harmony and palette together. There are a lot of different color theory rules that you can base things off, which I'm not going to go into too much detail here, but please know I am going to create a course in color. If I haven't done so already. By the time you're watching this, you might eyedropper a photograph that you took. You might have some colors that you've been saving, or you might try to be choosing them using the color guide and picking different color theory rules within that, and working on some themes. I really prefer to use Adobe color because I find it really nice to save specific color palettes and refer to both on my desktop and on my iPad. So I've selected all five colors here and you can see I had a few colors and fresco. That's okay. I can change them. I forgot my background color, which I'm honestly just gonna delete for now. Then I have all my little motifs which you can see some of the extra line work is overlapping and all of that we will cover how to enter those in another video. But for now, what I want to do is I'm actually going to select all of these light gray boxes. And you can see it didn't select because that layer is locked. I can select it either by click and drag over everything or if I go into my layers panel, clicking on that circle and it's going to select everything in that layer. That becomes really handy once you have a ton of overlapping things and elements. But for now, it wouldn't matter if I selected everything or click that. Next. I'm going to actually turn them into this beige color I have in my palette. Next, I'm going to leave the motifs and make sure all my swatches are saved. Go up to File Save, and I'm all ready for the next video. 10. Editing the Motifs: In this video, I am going to talk about editing the motifs and going over a really brief overview on how I might edit some of the illustrations. Opening up our Adobe Illustrator file. I have saved a couple of the motifs up here on the top right. And if I select them all, you can see it has a blue outline, which means it's on this blue layer. If I double-click it and change the color in any way, and click Okay, it's going to reflect that. So that just means those are on the correct layer, the design layer. Now if I accidentally had them on another layer, I can click this tiny little square icon over in the Layers panel and the far-right, click and drag it to the next layer. While those elements are selected that I want to move. Now anytime I work in the design layer, I typically lock all of the other layers. You can actually quickly do this by click and drag. You can do that for the eyeballs to view it or not. I'm going to lock the background and swatch layer. Then I'm actually going to drag these over to the art board so you can follow along a little better. I have my background set to a very dark gray, so I'm gonna make sure you can see what I'm doing. I've got several little tulips here. They're not equally spaced out very well, but they are aligned at the top and the bottom. I'll show you all the different ways I might edit that, as well as their shapes. If I zoom in, you can see there's an overlap. And if I move this out, It's a separate element. Now because I'm combining this altogether into one object, I am going to merge them. And I can do this by using the Pathfinder tool. Now, the Pathfinder tool can be found under Window and go all the way down to Pathfinder. And this is one of the most helpful tools. It pulls up a shape modes and Pathfinder in Adobe Illustrator to edit illustrations. Now, I am going over a really quick overview on how to maybe edit some basic motifs for this pattern design class. But if you really want to dive into my digital illustration process in Adobe Fresco with much more complicated drawing. And then bringing it into Adobe Illustrator to create site either a spot illustration for a print or a greeting card. I am going to create another class on that, which you can find on my Skillshare page. Coming back into our simple motifs, I'm going to select this first tool of under the path finders. The third option is merged. I'm going to merge them. If I Command Z to undo. If I go to the Shape mode where I make it one shape, it's going to take one of the colors. I don't want that. I wanted to keep the two different colors or anything more than one solid color, but merge them together. If I de-select and then click on that tulip, it actually comes up as one shape. I can double-click on any element to come into isolation mode where I can actually move things around. And if I double-click outside, exiting isolation mode, those two items are still together. So Command or Control Z to undo, double-click outside. And you can see that that's a clean layer. Sometimes I might have drawn, hand-drawn in this tool up, in which case, merging this together and using Shape Modes and the Pathfinder, going to really clean up the number of anchor points and paths to make the file functional lot quicker and be a lot smaller. I'm just going to go through each of my little tulips, selecting the stem and the top, and select Merge. Think of this as any individual motif you might move around. You can merge it together. Now. I could click on each one. Alright, so now I have cleaned up all of my motifs. They are all on the design layer. If I zoom out, I can view that I only only have those by selecting everything on that layer. I'm going to go ahead and save my file again, will be already to talk about the types of patterns that you might apply to these motifs. And then we're going to dive into the fun part, the actual making of the pattern. 11. Types of Patterns: In this video, I am going to talk about the types of patterns and three really basic patterns that I will be covering in this class. First of all, there's so many different types of patterns, but the three most common are considered a brick repeat, a half drop repeat, and a tossed repeat. Brick repeat is best thought of as rows, rows of motifs. The motif being a small illustration or image that you are using. And they're just perfectly aligned and kind of stacked in different rows. A half drop repeat is more like offset rows still aligned and release similar but they're offset so they're a little bit more like indented and opposite as you can see here in this example. Then the last one I'm going to cover is considered a tossed repeat, sometimes known as a random repeat, where it's multi-directional. You can see the little tulips are pointing in all different directions. So if you were to apply this to say, a piece of clothing, it wouldn't matter how you sewed it in which direction it was laid out because the pattern doesn't really have a direction at thesis every way. And all little tulips look tossed like you pick them up and drop them on the ground and they all kind of scattered in different ways. In the next video, we're gonna talk about actually creating these patterns. And we're going to go through the brick pattern, the half-drop pattern, and the toss pattern in more detail. 12. Scale: In this video, I wanted to talk about scale and what to consider when you're creating your patterns, but also how you might edit the scale after you've made your patterns. Just as a really quick overview, I'm sure we can all think about scale and a lot of different sizes and applications. But for the sake of this video and course, I really want to talk about just small, medium, large, and thinking of a hierarchy of scale in the size of your motifs and pattern. Now, for this Skillshare class, I am putting together a really simple tool that motif that I've repeated six times. And then used to make repeating patterns in the brick half-drop and tossed pattern types. When I'm talking about scale, I really want to think about what motifs I'm even using and the size of those. So you might have a whole pattern collection that's so much more complicated than these patterns. But you might want to think about the overall US and what you're using those patterns for. What's, what's the end result or use sewing up little dog bandana has and went a smaller scale or are you creating wallpaper that you want to put in house? In which case you might want to go for a larger scale. I'm going to jump into Illustrator, which I know is jumping ahead just a bit, but I want to show you what you can do after you've created your patterns. But I also want to challenge you to think about the scale as you're designing. Jumping way ahead into the Adobe Illustrator file. I just want to show you what you can do with scale. I've created, and I'm going to create in the next videos these three patterns and then applying different color ways. And don't worry, you're going to get there. But when you're done, you can actually change the scale by right-clicking. Once you select a swatch, go to Transform Scale. What you want to note here is that because I have a 12 inch by 12 inch artboard, I want to either duplicate or cut my skill in half. I don't want to give some arbitrary number like 127% because it'll lose my repeating pattern. What does that mean? That means I can select the uniform under scale. Hitting Tab to go to the next option. Because the uniform is setting horizontal and vertical the same percentage. I'm going to uncheck Transform Objects. So over here on the left, it's only transforming the pattern. And I have my preview box checked so I can see it and click, Okay. Now it's kind of hard to see, but this is actually repeating and I can always hold down the option key, drag it over. Then selecting the corners of this. I can start to drag it out. Now, you can see here I'm getting the weird anchors. This sometimes happens. And I just want to go up to View Show Bounding Box or Shift Command B. And that'll pull up those toggle points. Now, it's changing. So I could go back into my swatches. Click on that swatch, right-click Transform scale 200, OK. You can see that it repeats. I'm gonna go ahead and delete that for now and then come over here to this third example. Let's make this one smaller. Let's go to 50% because it's half of everything. And click Okay. Zooming in. I'm actually you could see this one tulip on the right here on the edge or look at quite frankly, any of these on the far-right. Looking over on the other side, you could see it is repeating like I just did. You could make a larger box and look at it. But this is how you can quickly either make your skill half is small or twice as large. My kind of main drawing art boards up here, if I unlock all my layers, you can see I've got a swatch the background and all the motifs. I've created them all at the same size. But alternatively, I could have started with a smaller scale and I'll often do that. It's just sometimes I'll want to create a design that is at a smaller scale for quilting and at a larger scale for wallpaper. But I'll keep that kind of middle of road, medium-scale, if you will, for the creation of the pattern. Hopefully that wasn't too over your head and you might have to come back to this, but that's a little overview about scale and what to consider as we dive in to making patterns. 13. Creating Patterns!: In this video, I am going to talk about creating patterns and showing you how we can actually apply everything we've talked about so far to the designs in Adobe Illustrator. Opening up the file, this is the fun part we're going to start. I'm making patterns. I am going to create a brick pattern and this first art board at the very top here, half-drop pattern and the second one and a tossed pattern in the third. Let's go ahead and move all these motifs over to the first art board. Zoom in to their, we'll begin. The brick pattern is really similar rows. And there are many ways to do this in Adobe Illustrator in general about making patterns, but I'm gonna show you how I go about making a brick pattern. The first thing I want to do is align all six of these different flowers using the Horizontal Distribute Center. So now they're all distributed. Distributed if you look at the stem there even but the top's like I mentioned before, are a little bit imperfect and wonky. Now the next thing I want to do is select all of them and move them to the top left corner. I might end up I'm spacing them out just a little bit, selecting all of them and distributing again. Now, I'm not adding anything to the far-right because everything that's touching the edge of the art board, which is this black line, needs to be repeated on the opposite side. If you're really familiar with patterns, you understand this concept and if you're brand new to creating them, watch what I do for a few steps and then I'll go back and talk about how it's working. This first flower I'm going to select. And then using the Shift Command M, the Move tool. I am going to type in 12 inches, making sure to type IN if it's not automatically coming up as inches. And click Copy. I'm copying that flower over. Now. A quick way to change your increments so you don't have to always type in IN is to go up to View Rulers, Show Rulers, and then right-clicking them to make sure you're in inches increments. There are also handy to have in case he went to pull out guides. Now I've got the left and the right copied. I'm going to select everything. Shift Command M. And those 0 inches horizontal, but 12 inches vertical. And click copy. Now I've copied all of the corners, but the far left and the far right is still blink. Selecting all of these, I'm going to keep moving them. And I've created a 12 inch by 12 inch art board. That's my preference because I find it really easy in my head to start to devise things in 12. I might print on yards more than I'm printing on meters. And so it's a nice number to work with. But you can imagine doing this with any size art board. I just feel like 12 by 12 is keeping it nice and easy and it works really well to understand the scale. Selecting that top row Shift Command M, I'm going to move everything to inches and click Copy. You can see here if I zoom in, it's actually overlapping. So I'm going to move out again, and I'm just going to move at one inch and click Okay instead of copy to clean out a little bit of space. And that means I actually move out his role three inches. I can keep doing that. 03 copy. Shift Command. 03 copy. I have everything here now. If I didn't evenly distributed those perfectly, it just worked out. But 12 is divisible by three. I could select the whole column and distribute everything on the center. Let me throw off a couple of these so you can start to see what would happen. They all align. You could go through that with all the different rows or columns rather and organize them. Now, I like to just bring up all of my artwork, selecting everything that's same time into the center. And we've got our brick repeat pattern. How do we test this? How do we know that everything on the right is exact copy of the left? I could delete everything on the right. Do everything again. But that's going to take up a lot of time. What I like to do is unchecking the background and going into that layer, will grab a rectangle. Draw rectangle in the background. Now, I can't fill this yet because I haven't created a swatch. I want to open up my swatches panel. Over on the right here. A mixture. My design background and swatch layers are unchecked or sorry, unlocked. Select everything on that first art board, making sure it's got the blue, the red, and the green layers. I'm gonna click and drag this whole, entire piece over to the top here of my swatches. And now I've got this little thumbnail clicking outside of that, just make sure everything's deselected. I'm gonna go over to this rectangle I drew and click on that swatch. I could click on different colors here. Solid colors or the pattern swatch. And making sure to make this big enough, click on the swatch if you move that rectangle to see everything. And you might even want to zoom in and double-check. But this is a great way to check that there is not anything that's slightly skewed. So let's say that this was actually in a little bit. I had made a swatch. It all looks good to me. Can't really see that. I'm going to test it. Look, there's a big, there's a weird double stem. This one actually really sticks out that it's wrong. I'm gonna go and try to find where it is. That can also be part of the tricky, tricky bit about this. I'm going to recopy that over. I'm going to make a new swatch. Test that again now making sure everything's unselected. I'm going to hold down the Shift key and select these first two and delete them just so I don't accidentally get confused. Okay, so I'm gonna leave this rectangle here for now, and let's move over and do the next pattern. I'm going to lock background in the swatch. I'm going to copy the first row, hold down the Option and Shift key to bring it over. And now we're gonna work on a half-drop. There are some ways to do half-drop, so the pattern tool, but again, I like to do it myself. So I'm gonna delete every other to make a little bit more whitespace in this pattern. Actually know it. I'm going to select every other Command, Shift M. I'm gonna move it three inches vertically and click Okay. Now I have got a half-drop. It's going down and over, down and over. And I zoom in here. Oh, no, that's just something on my computer. I move that down three. I'm going to select all of these and move them vertically six inches. And don't worry if this seems confusing, it step-by-step, feel free to pause and replay. This is how I use the Move key and I use it a lot. So I'm gonna move that top row exactly 12 inches. And now I've got a really simple half-drop, unlocking all of the layers, selecting everything on art board to dragging this into my swatch panel, and then clicking on that test rectangle, the new swatch, I am going to look at everything and make sure it looks okay. We're all set with our half-drop pattern. Let's move over and do the last pattern, be tossed pattern in. So I'm going to lock background and swatch. This time. I'm actually going to copy everything from the half-drop pattern. So you can see I'm doing these in our particular order because they each can help me make the next pattern. Now, often the collection, your patterns won't be using the same motifs necessarily. But I want to use this just to understand and to show you how you can start to make patterns in my process in doing so. Once I'm here, I don't want all of the tulips facing up. I'm going to start to do is first delete the far right. We're going to work on these far left one. So I'm going to select one and just start to rotate them. Then selecting them. Shift Command M 120, copy it across. I'm going to delete the bottom to do the same for the top quarter. You might have to come back through here and play around with them. The toss pattern usually takes the most time to play with. I'm going to copy them 12 inches to the bottom. And now I have all these center motifs. To move around. This is the part, but you can start to have a lot of fun with. It can also become somewhat frustrating if nothing is really aligning the way you want it to. And you might have to play around with it a bit. So take your time here, have fun with it, and create some tossed patterns. So I'm using the half-drop to lay out everything in a rough area. But you can see these two are really close together. So I might end up moving some of them in a different place. I just like to start with the half drop because that really helps me start to organize it. This looks good enough for now. But oftentimes, when I test this, there might be some weird gaps. This is where it applies back to some of the design principles, thinking of balance. We have a mistake, we'll talk about that one too. And alignment and movement. You don't want to have huge gullies going through here that are obvious to see, this one is actually pretty good except this mistake. I've got two flowers that look exactly the same next to each other. That's not great. I'm gonna look for those two to find this one coming over here. I think it's here and here. We've got this flower in the middle. What I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to see, I think it was right below. It was on the far right. I am going to move this over. Then. I'm also going to take these two at the top and move them down. Let me show you what I did here. I treated all four corners it differently. I need to delete these because all four corners need to have this exact same to left. Let's go ahead and bring this over and use the last swatch and it's fixed now, looks much better. So that's a quick fix. But sometimes it takes a little bit of digging to figure out what's wrong with it. Now, I'm going to delete these old to swatches because they are the wrong ones. I'm all set. I've got my tossed pattern, my brick pattern. I've somehow accidentally deleted my half drop, so I'm gonna bring that back in here. There we go. Half drop, tossed the brick pattern. So go ahead and save your file. In the next video tutorial, I'm going to talk about recoloring the artwork, which is my favorite part of the entire process. So save your file. Go grab a glass of water, a cup of coffee, whatever you might like. And we're going to dive in and talk about recoloring. 14. Recolor Artwork: In this video, I am going to talk about recoloring your artwork using many different color ways. Opening up our Adobe Illustrator files, I am going to actually delete this big rectangle, the left, just because it's distracting. I'm also going to lock my design and swatch layer. Don't forget, you can always toggle that on and off to know which one's which, but I highly recommend naming them. Now, if you remember, we created these rectangles in a solid color, which are all on that background layer. I am going to select the entire left row and set it to the brick repeat pattern. The center row to the half-drop, the right row to the tossed. Now I am creating three different colors of each pattern, and I'm going to keep the files up here untouched. This is my preference and how I organize my working file. And I wanted to just show you how I start to think about it at all and see all of the colors together. I'm going to keep this first row as, as kind of our cream colors. Then I'm going to see what I wanna do for the second row. So clicking on one or all, I'd like to do one at a time. One of my rectangles with the pattern swatch filled in it. You can notice here at the very top or on the left, there's no stroke. I do not want an outline. I'm going to go up to this little color wheel. And if I hover, it says Recolor Artwork. Now if you don't have that, you can go all the way up to Edit, Edit Colors and Recolor Artwork. This is going to pull up. Now I have it set to open an advanced recolor. But if I click Okay and click on that again, it's going to look like this. I like to go to the Advanced Options and then just make sure that this is checked for the future. Now, right now my pattern has these three colors, bij and navy, and the Campbell's, rusty orange. If I select, my color group, is going to come up with my entire color swatch. And if you have many color groups, it's going to all come over here. If I click on this, it's going to automatically reset this to these colors. If I click this first option, randomly change color order, going to slowly fill in those colors. Now I can't go back if I like that one, I'm going to click OK. Not going to change, change that. Now, the first one, it looks like it was actually a different Navy. I can go ahead and click on that specific color and go to color swatches, and then go down to more of my greenish navy color. Then same here. Go to that kind of camel ate color. Lastly, the beige. Now don't forget, these are just black and white. And click OK. If I might want to do that for all of these at the same time where I'm going in and I'm finding the color. Changing it individually, this can become a little bit tedious. So if you're doing all of them, I recommend doing them at the same time. Then we're gonna move on. Let's go down into this last one. Click on our colors, then start to shuffle through them. Now, I've got all five colors. I really like this super light background and super dark. I might want to go with something in the middle. And let's say that I really liked these three, but I want a light blue background. I can also click and drag to up colors. We can start to kind of play around with that. And I might even want to change this to a darker color and click, Okay. Now, looking at what I have so far, I really liked this navy and light blue. I might want to stay to three colors. I think it looks really nice and simple. I might go in here and pick that light blue and stick to those three colors. If I decide to change this color group, I can either click and move colors out of it, or I could delete them altogether. But I like to keep the color groups pretty clean and organized. Let's do the same for these two, but do them at the same time. I know that I want to have a dark background. Maybe it'll keep the white tulips and click Okay. Then for the last two, clicking on our color group, and it automatically fill it in. So I'm all set and click Okay. Now I want to change these two to the right colors. Clicking on the color group. I'm going to move these around just a bit. Clicking OK. Don't want to change the group. And there we go. Make sure to save your file as you go through this and take some time here, really play around with this color options, making sure you have some kind of consistency. But again, it's up to you. This is my way of going about it. Thinking of these different rows as each background color and really organizing and looking at them altogether on different art boards. So when I go to expert them, which we'll talk about in the next video. I can easily export out every single file together, rather than coming back and exporting out one-by-one as I turn layers on and off, tap some fine, take your time here. I find it really fun to play with the recolor artwork and definitely take some time to get familiar with. It might even take you a little time of changing your color palettes are really adjusting that. Finish. All of your different patterns here in different colors. And meet me in the next video where we will talk about exporting out images in the different file types that you should be aware of. 15. Exporting Images: In this video, I am going to talk about the very last step, exporting out your images. As many of you are probably already familiar with. There are so many different file types and uses for the files. Whenever you're creating a pattern design, I would begin by thinking, what is the outcome of this before I even start sketching ideas. In this exercise, I am actually going to show you exploiting out images that I could either upload to portfolio or to Spoonflower. There are two main types of images. Png files or JPEG files. The PNG file is, It's known for its ability to have a transparent background. So it might be really useful to not have a solid background. Whereas a JPEG file is just a typical image file. And both are pretty interchangeable when uploading to different websites or different platforms like Spoonflower dot AI file is the Adobe Illustrator file, which I imagine everyone already knows out. But it's worth mentioning here because that's its native Adobe Illustrator file that will always be using, that is in vector format. The JPEG and PNG or actually rasterized, they are based on pixels and every single grid and how many pixels determine the resolution of that file. Whereas the AI is always a vector-based unless you bring in some rasterized imagery. The dot AIT, which I mentioned earlier in this video, is the template files. So you can always save those as templates and then save them as Illustrator files when you're working on, say, a new pattern collection, an EPS file is actually used mostly for manufacturing. It's really similar to a dot AI file. And I view them and really similar ways, but I've definitely had to export out EPS files when working on something like say, labeled designs for liquor bottles. A dot PDF file is something that maybe you're also really familiar with, but this is best for flattened documents to share. Then the last two things I really wanted to note here, even though they're not necessarily file suffixes, is just the color mode, RGB versus CMYK. Rgb, red, green, blue is what's used digitally. The only exception is that Spoonflower actually once RGB color files, then there's CMYK, which is most often thought of as the print color mode. This is just a very basic overview and hopefully just helps you think about it as we dive in an export out our image images. Coming back into Illustrator. You can see here we've got our three art boards at the very top. And then I have nine artboards with the three patterns and three colorways. Now, I'm considering a color way to be this beige background versus the kind of greenish blue and the light blue. You can also come up with several different color palettes where you have collections in completely different color palettes that are the same design elements. When I go to Export, I only want to export these nine images. I don't want to change my original files up here. What I want to do is click on the art board tool. I want to note here, Artboard four to 12 is what I want to export. Going into File menu and going down to Export, I'm going to click on Export As and go navigate to a folder where I can find all of these images. Navigating to a folder of pattern images. I am going to name this as Trump to lip patterns. Click on Use Artboards and make sure in that range I am typing for dash 12. If I wanted to just say export for 79, I could use a comma in between them, but I'm just gonna, in week four to 12 is a range. Click Export. This is the last time you can change any of your options. So this is our last dialog box to edit. There is kind of low, medium and high resolution, whether it's 70 to 150 or 300 pixels per inch. Just make sure you know what the platform is recommending. If you go with a 150, that is what Spoonflower recommends. Although for most everything else I use 300 pixels per inch. So let's stick with 150 for now and see what happens. I want to make sure I have art optimized selected instead of Type Optimized. Because this is how Adobe Illustrator we'll sample the image related to the art board. I'm going to leave interlaced unchecked. The background color doesn't matter here. But because of exporting it as a PNG, I have the option to have a transparent background, so I'll leave that for now, but it's going to fill with that solid age, greenish color and bluish color. And click Okay. Now this might take a second. Now all my files have saved. I'm gonna make sure to save this Illustrator file. And if it's grayed out, that means it has saved most current version. Let's go ahead and open up some images just to double-check how they look. And then we'll talk about the next steps. Opening up my pattern images. You can see here that tulip patterns came in the name and then the number of the art board. And if I click through them, I can see all of the different patterns. And they repeat across at first glance, they actually are all aligned to that 12 inch by 12 inch art board. This is the chance where you could rename it. If I wanted to go through and call this brick, Let's say brick, call this green. It's more of a green and a navy right now. Then brick blue. You could start to do this. And this is just really helpful because whenever you upload this file, say to a website, the SEO or search engine optimization is actually going to help read that filename. Not only is it helpful for you while organizing your files and referring back to it, but it can also be beneficial. I always try to get into the habit of naming my files once I export them. So go ahead and go through them, name your files, you don't have to do that. It's just something that I always recommend. And I'll even add my quite creative brand name at the very end. So it's always tied in there. So now that I've got my file here, the last thing I'll check is pulling it open. The dimensions, the 1800s by 1800s, That's an pixels. That's not huge, but it's not small. That's great for the use of portfolio or putting it into a PDF, putting it online for Spoonflower, depending on what you're using it for, you always just want to pay attention to the resolution and dimensions. 16. Final Steps: Congratulations, you've beta to the last video in this Skillshare class. I want to talk about the final steps. What I would love it for you to share a class project by picking one of the patterns you've created and uploading two images in two different colors. So pick whether it's the brick pattern, the half-drop pattern at the top, just choose one of them. Pick two colors and upload either PNG or JPEG files. There's more information in the project description. I think it's a great challenge to name or title your pattern, and I encourage you to try to do so. And lastly, I would love to hear one tip, but you've learned in this class. As always, you can subscribe to learn about future courses all send out some free links and maybe some other goodies. Just head over to quite creative.com slash course dash info. And you can learn about all future courses in addition to some free downloads and other resources on that page. If you could take a moment to rate and review, I really appreciate it. This helps other creatives just like yourself. Learn about this class. Learn about simple patterns. Helps me provide better material moving forward. Thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate you being here and happy pattern-making. I can't wait to see what you've created.