Actions and Symbols in Illustrator to Help with Pattern Making

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Sarah Barnes. I am in middle school art teacher in Southern California. And I love working in Adobe Illustrator and making patterns. So in this class we're going to work on teaching you how to use actions to make your pattern workflow a lot faster, as well as using symbols, symbols to check your pattern as well as setting up some awesome templates so that you can just plug in some assets and create amazing patterns really quickly. 2. Class project : Our class project today is going to be creating a pattern using the actions and symbols that are show you how to use Adobe Illustrator, as well as setting up a template so that you can create at least six awesome patterns really quickly. And now Adobe Illustrator can be tricky. So make sure you take your time. Pause, repeat the video as many times as you need to. Have fun. 3. Setting up your workspace : All right, let's get started. So open up your Adobe Illustrator. I'm going to be using Adobe Illustrator Creative Cloud 2022 wrote today, and I am using a Mac. And so when I say command, that's Control on a PC, and if I say Alt or Option, Alt and Option at the same key. All right, so we're going to start by choosing a new file. And I work with a 600 by 600 pixel. If you want to follow along with me. Stick with these. If you want to work in something else, just remember that for future when we go to make our actions. So it's 600 by 600 pixel. You can change the name of your document here. Okay? And how many artboards you want? We're going to start with one today. I work in print with fabric cell. Sometimes I work in the CMYK color. You can choose RGB. That doesn't matter today. Create. All right, so here we are in, I'm currently in Essentials Classic. So if you want to change that, you would go up to Window Workspace. And down here you would choose Essentials, Classic. It's going to have all the things you need. And personally, I like to move my toolbar to one side, so everything's in one area. That is a personal preference. You do not have to do that. All right? And things that I use on a regular basis are the layers tool. And so sometimes I'll have make sure I have that. And the other one is the Pathfinder in a line and swatches. So I'm going to pull those out. So I'm gonna go to New Window at the top here. And I'm going to click Pathfinder. And the nice thing with Pathfinder, it's got aligned with it. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to grab Pathfinder and bring it out. And I'm going to stick it to the top up here. And then I'm going to grab a line and drop it. You see that blue line tells you where it's going to go and don't need transform tools today. And then the other thing that I use on a regular basis are my swatches. So I'm going to actually pull that out. I'm bringing it to the top as well. And today we're going to be using symbols. So just make sure you have access to symbols there. And it looks like the clover from a deck of cards. Okay, so that is our workspace are ready to go. 4. Setting up a symbol system: All right, So now we're gonna go ahead and set up a three-by-three grid of symbols to be able to quickly see the progress of your pattern. So I found this a fast and easy way to check your pattern as you go rather than creating a swatch every time you want to check your pattern. So let's go ahead and get started. First thing I wanna do is I want to choose a rectangle shape. And so if you can't find the rectangle, it'll be hiding behind one of the other shapes. So here it is, rectangle tool. And so I just long-held on that shape and then the other shapes showed up. So there we have that. And I want to make sure that I have a color and I don't have a stroke. The reason being is you don't want to have that stroke showing up in your pattern later on, right? You don't want unwanted lines. So now I'm going to have my rectangle. I have my fill color and no stroke. So I'm going to just go ahead and click down once and you'll notice that a rectangle box pops up now you can click and drag, that's fine, but I want to have it exactly 600 by 600. So I'm gonna go ahead and change that one by 600. Now if things are acting funny, you may need to link or unlink your properties here, and then you can either press Enter or okay. You'll notice that it popped up. It didn't go exactly in the center. So I'm going to find my align tools here. I'm going to center it and center. Okay? So now I have the shape I want and I'm going to make this a symbol. So now I'm going to grab that shape and just drag it into my symbols pattern. Now, before I do that, one more time, I'm going to show you. So if it's not showing up here in your, on the side, you can always go up to window and then symbols, and then it'll pop out for you. So let's go ahead and do that now. Drop that in. I'm going to title it square. And I'm going to change it from a movie clip to a graphic and make sure it's a dynamic symbol and press. Okay, and so there we go. Now this symbol, whatever I do to this symbol, is going to do in any instance that I have. Okay, now that we have our symbol, we're going to create a three by three grid so that we can check our pattern. And we want to be precise because we want everything to line up perfectly. So the first thing you're gonna do is click on your symbol. And we are going to right-click. Oops, I didn't click on it. And one-click, very gum. Now I have the bounding box around it. You can see it is selected. I'm going to right-click and press Transform. You can always go up to object transform as well. Now, I don't want it to move vertically this time, so I'm gonna make sure it's a 0 vertical. And because it was a 600 square, I want to merge, move horizontally 600. And so you'll see if you have preview, preview checked, it will show you where it's going to be. That's perfect. Now here's the important part. Make a copy. Don't just press Okay, So make sure you make a copy. So now you have these two instances of the exact same symbol. We're going to continue with this and now we need to go the opposite direction. So I clicked it. I've got the bounding box, right-click transform and move. You can use your hotkey Shift Command S or Shift Control N. I'm going to move it now this time, I want to go in the opposite direction. So I'm going to say negative 600 pixels. And you can see if you click over it, I'll show you where it's going to be. And again, so important press Copy, not okay. And there you go. So now you have three instances of the exact same symbol in a perfect position. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to drag a box around all three So that all three are selected. You could also shift click to grit all three as well. So again, you're going to right-click, excuse me, transform and move. Or you can shift Command M, and it does the same thing. All right, so this time we are not moving horizontally, but vertically, we need to go up and down. So I'm going to go 600. And if you have your preview on, it'll show you where it's gonna go. It's gonna go right below. So again, so I'm presents important. Don't press Okay. Press Copy. Okay. And zoom out just a little so you can see. So now I have six instances. I'm going to grab my three middle ones and Shift M. This time I need to go same 0 her horizontal, but this time I need a negative 600. And you can see it shows me where it's gonna go and again, I press Copy. And then you'd have it, you have a three by three grid with repeating symbol to check your pattern. So to start making our pattern, we're only going to be working in the 600 by 600 square in the center. So what you wanna do is you want to double-click the center title tile. Now what you'll notice is everything around it went gray and up at the top you'll have the name of your symbol. So remember I labeled Ln squared, years could say untitled, but this is the current isolated symbol. So we're going to be working in this area. So Command Plus to zoom in, Command minus to zoom out. So I'm going to switch over and grab some illustrations here. So I grabbed all of them and just Command C, Control C to copy. Go back over. And now I'm going to Control or Command. I did Command F to paste in place. You do Command V or Control V. It's fine. So now I have these items until, let's go back and see what happens when I exit out of my symbol. So notice now it shows up in all instances exactly where I had it in the first one. So it's repeating and all nine. So this is when you could just start getting into your pattern and moving things around and creating that pattern you want. Now, before we get to our next video about making the actions, we want to make sure that your pattern, whatever you do on one side is the exact on the other side. So I'm going to show you that in the next video and why that's important. So real quick, I'm going to just quickly show you why what we're gonna do in the next video is super important. So you'll see here we have this square and I exit. And now half of that is gone because it's not perfectly aligned on both sides. So you can see, even though it's perfect on this side is not perfect on that side. So we're going to work with actions and get everything lined up beautifully. 5. Creating actions: Okay, we're gonna make some actions. So as I said in the last video, you want things to line up perfectly. So if I were to grab this guy and say, oh, let's move him over here because he's about over there, right. So you eyeball it. Now if you were to go check that, you'll notice that immediately it starts to act a little funny. So we want to make sure that we're moving things perfectly the right amount of pixels. And that can get tedious over time if you're doing it over and over again. So that is where actions come into play. So what you're gonna wanna do is make sure that you can see the actions window. So to do that, you'll go up to window and then make sure actions is checked, mine is already checked. So it shows up over here. Now. It may look like this. This is Button Mode. This is great for later when your actions are all set up. But for now we're gonna go with not button mode and regular mode. Okay? So first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna create a folder. So I'll make sure we have folder patterns, Skillshare. Okay, So we have a folder now. And this just keeps everything nice and neat. And see I have a few different folders. I'm going to close those up. So patterns Skillshare here. So what we're gonna do is create a action from, that goes from one side to the other. And perfect pixels every time, remember I work in a 600 by 600 square. All right, so I'm going to press I'm highlighted my folder. I'm going to press this plus sign, which will create a new action. I'm gonna give it a name. So this one we're going to move from left to right. So I'm going to say Move right, make sure it's in the right folder. And then I'm going to give it a color just to have it nice. All right. I'm going to press Record. So here's what I'm gonna do. I wanna make sure that my object is selected. And then I'm going to do transform move just like we did last time for the symbol. Move. Now again, I want it to move exactly horizontal, 6000 vertical. Otherwise we'll get those weird overlapping. And again, the most important thing is make a copy. Okay. And that's that now we press the stop sign and it stops. Now we want to test this. So I'm going to grab this little guy, put him over here, and I'm going to click the move right, but not down here because that's inside the, the, the action. And then I do the title of my action move right? And down at the bottom, I'm going to press that play sign and there it is, perfect movement. And if I were to leave this symbol, now everything lines up beautifully. And I'm going to go back into the symbol and zoom in. And we're going to continue that and with all four corners. Okay, so now I'm gonna go ahead and make our next pattern action, which is going to be moved left. So I'm going to click on my pattern, press the plus sign, move with the next color and record. So now I'm going to grab this guy here. Command Shift M. I'm going to horizontally move it negative 600 and vertically 0. So it should just move to the other side and I'm going to press Copy. So now it should be over exactly right in if I were to test it on the other ones, everything would look perfect. Okay. So I go back in. Now I'm going to make my next pattern. Movement, action of moving from top to bottom. Don move left. So make sure you click on patterns when you create your new action. So this will be move down. And we'll make this one green. And I will record it. Okay, so now if I grab this guy and move horizontal 0, vertical 600, and I press copy, There it is. Okay. All right, that works better. Let's delete that because I just did that. Let's stop recording. That's where I went wrong. I didn't stop recording. There we go. Okay. We are back. Okay. Patterns. And this'll be our last one. This will be move up. We'll click Record. So down here, a whole line to it, but it moved it. So I want to, I want to start recording and delete that cell, showing you all the ways you can troubleshoot here. So I'm gonna delete this one. So now move up, press the record button. Okay, so now Command Shift M, horizontal will be 0, vertical will be a negative 600 because we're going in the opposite direction. And press Copy. And maybe go. And stop recording. There we go. So now we have our four major items. We have our move right, move left, move down, lift up. So we're going to test these in a different way. I'm going to show you how to use the button mode. And I'll show you that. So if you press those three lines up top, you're going to go into Button Mode. Okay, so now you can see everything is you can see I have a lot more, sorry. It's a little bit of a mess. But here are the ones we made. Move right, move left, move down, move up. Okay. We're going to test these out. So I'm going to just let me delete some of these extras. Okay? So let's make this pattern here. I'm going to grab all you guys and make this pattern over here. Okay? So next, so now I want to grab these four items and we're going to move them right? So I'm going to click the right, doesn't get you out of there. So now I need to make some things from the top to the bottom. And I keep cramming things. This lemon is not grouped. Okay, let me align that back up. Here we go. Okay? So now right, there we go. So now I can move these guys down. Okay, Let's test. Move up. Move up. Beautiful. And let's grab this guy and the corner here and move it left just to test it. Okay, looks good. Now let's go. I'm going to I recommend you always having something in the middle, just easier to tap on something to get back into the symbol. Then if you're trying to go around the edges, so I'm going to have this guy in the center click out. And I'm going to go check out my pattern so you can see everything kinda lines up beautifully, top and bottom. There's no weird overlapping items. And that is the best part of just these actions. It makes it super fast to get things with precision. 6. Other actions: Okay, in this video, I'm gonna show you how to create some other actions that I use regularly. So those are going to be flip horizontally, flip vertically, 10 percent bigger, 10 percent smaller, lock, unlock and ungroup. So same process goes, go back into not Button Mode. Hey, we're going to click on patterns. We're going to click that new action. And this one will be horizontal. Let's give it the next color, violet and record. So I'm going to grab this one. I'm going to transform this time instead of move, I'm going to rotate. No, that's wrong. And we're flipping horizontally. Alright, so transform. This time we're going to reflect. Okay? So if I click Reflect and you can see I want it to flip horizontally and I just press Okay, and there it is. And I press Stop. And now I'm going to add my next one of flipping vertically so I make sure I have patterns plus, and then this is flip vertical. Give it the gray and record. This time I'm going to right-click select, Reflect. And this time I'm going to use that vertical side and press Okay. And then stop. So now I've got those flipped vertically. So if I want to flip it back horizontally, done, okay, so now we're gonna go in and do the next one that I do often and that's rotate. All right, so I'm going to create a new action and this is root k 41. Yeah, a record. So I'm going to right-click Transform, Rotate and we're going to give it a 45 degree angle and press Okay. And stop. Okay. So there it is at a rotated angle. So if I wanted to test it, I could just press play, play again, play and it rotates. And okay. So there's that one. All right. The next one I like to use is 10 percent bigger. So we're going to create a new action. So 10 percent big, bigger. Start backup was red record transform. And this one is going to be scale. So you can see it has a uniform and that's what I want. And then want to scale strokes and effects. You can also scale corners. I'm going to just stick with this one and I'm going to bring it down 10 percent. So that would be a 90 percent. You can preview it, just kinda click somewhere else and that's perfect and press OK. Stop recording. Grab up here, patterns. This time I'm going to make it 10 percent bigger. So I'm gonna click on that guy again. Press Create New Action, 10 percent bigger record. And this time, I'm going to right-click and Transform and Scale. But you'll see it already started at 90. So I'm gonna make it go back to a 100, right? And then we want it to be a 110%. Because if we have something at a 100 percent we wanted to scale then at a 110%. So that won't press, Okay. And we can test these. So if I grab the sky and so we want this one to be 10 percent bigger and this one 10 percent small. There it is. Okay. And then the nice thing is you can keep going with these until you have a anthracis you want. Just like, okay, the next one I use all of the time, especially for these backgrounds because they get grabbed and they move. And it's very frustrating. So I'm gonna make sure it's in the center, it's selected. I'm going to add a new action. And this is going to be law, so important to be able to lock and unlock it. So let's make this one green Record. And I'm going to go up to object. Lock selection and then stop recording. Okay? And then we need to do the opposite to unlock it. But we're going to have to unlock all cell. I'm going to click this and we're going to say Unlock All and record. So this time we're gonna say object, unlock all and stop recording. So now we see it's unlocked because it has the bounding box. And I click my lockbox there, it's locked. I can't move it around. It's staying put. And then I press my unlock. All but ten, Mary goes back. So that is super-duper helpful in working with patterns. Especially if you want to work in backgrounds and foregrounds, you can have something locked and then something else can move around without you grabbing that background. And the last thing I use on a regular basis, because it's not as fast for me, is ungroup. So to group, It's really easy. You just grab your items and command gene. And that's super easy. So now they're all grouped together. But I'm ungrouping. Object, ungroup it would be Shift Command G. And for some reason, I always forget Shift Command G. Maybe you're better with hotkeys, That's awesome. I'm not. So I'm gonna go ahead and make a button that is called unlock or sorry, ungroup. It's just for some reason that extra button is sometimes hard for me. So I'm going to record and I'm going go up to Object Ungroup, stop recording. So now if I were to look, these are all separate pieces. Again. Take that backward needs to be hand, lock it so it stops moving on me. Okay? So now we have all of the actions created that I use on a regular basis. And then I'm going to switch it over to Button Mode because then it is super easy. Again, sorry, I have all these extra ones. But you can see all of the ones we created are all the way at the top here. So I've got move right, left, down, move up. And so everything's just at a click of a button now. So I can make that 10 percent smaller. I can make this 10 percent bigger. I can rotate around. I can flip it horizontally. I flip it vertically all at the click of a button instead of having to go through all of those extra steps. So super helpful and I hope it helps your workflow. 7. Make your pattern: All right, Let's go ahead and start making our pattern. So I'm not going to walk you through my whole process, but you're we are going to talk a little bit about just some general pattern-making. So the biggest things or your corners, if you put one thing in one coordinate, remember it's got to go to the other corner. So let's say I stick my jug here, remember to move it right? And then I like to shift click both of them and move it down so that now I know for sure my four corners are correct. And then you're going to just fill in the space as you would like. I like to start on one side. Oops, let's lock that. I like to start on one side and then move it over and then move it over. So you'll notice I'm using the Alt or Option key to move things or make copies of things. And then the bounding box with the corner, mix those little arrows I just click and drag. I could've used my rotate tool if I wanted to. Let me use my smaller items to just fill in the empty spaces. To fill in spaces. They're crap and sky make it 10 percent smaller and stick it there. So I like the way that looks. So then I'm just going to grab all of these pieces, which is why I mean, sure, I locked that background and then press move, right. And then it automatically fills in group are there. Alright, and then I'm going to go ahead and do my top. Now. The same idea. Filling things and rotating, maybe merging a little. Oops. Using those items to fill in. Oops. Alt, moving thing. And if you hold the Shift key and you drag, it resizes nicely, okay, so I think that's about what I'd like for the top, I'm going to draw a box around those items. Remember the backgrounds locks? I'm not going to grab it and I'm going to move it down. So now I have a nice frame for my pattern and you can start filling in the rest. Okay? So I'm feeling pretty good about this pattern. And now what I wanna do is I want to check it. I'm going to go out to my symbols, my three by three grid here. And I can see a. Now if you were kinda look at it and you squint, you can kind of find things that you want to tweak, things you want to change. Maybe there's too much yellow in one area. Maybe there's just a little cleared. I feel like I know I have this empty space right here that I want to fill. Maybe I'll go in with another one of these small at leaves and grabbed me, make it smaller right there. So if I were to zoom out again, that feels a little bit better. So now that I'm happy with my pattern, we'll talk about exporting. 8. Export your pattern: Now that your pattern is complete, we want to export it for things like Spoonflower or any other use you might have for it. What we're gonna do is we're going to click File. We're going to click Export for Screens. There are other ways, other people like different methods. A lot of people like the Export As. But this just seems to be really simple. So if you export for screens, I'm going to change your Artboard 2. So kind of change what you want to name it. There we go. I'm going to put any underscore, okay, so there's what I want to name it, and then make sure you choose where you want your item to be saved. So mine's going to this folder and then click Choose. Now I'm going to make sure that create some folders is an unchecked. Otherwise it's going to show up with your scale labeled instead of where you want it. Then I'm going to change my scale. And I typically like to do the width so that I have the right size. And I'm going to be putting this on Spoonflower. So I'm going to say 5000 pixels is what I want. Okay? You can go PNG or JPEG. I'm going to stick with P&G here. Everything else is good. And then I'm going to just click Export Artboard. Now on my computer because I have a Mac, it opens right up into that folder, but you may have to go search for it. If you're on a PC. And you can see here it is. If I open it up, and there it is. And you can see since it's a vector size, retained its shape because it is a vector image. The other thing to notice is that the artboard was the only thing that was saved. So all of the extra stuff around the art board, you can see that 600 by 600 square art board. That's not showing up. And which is okay because we already made sure that all four corners line up perfectly. So if you were to put this on the fabric, it would be a seamless repeating pattern. Alright? Alright. And so that's exporting. 9. Using symbols to create template: I'm gonna go ahead and show you how to use symbols to create multiple patterns at once by creating a this huge template that you can use over and over again. So the first thing you're gonna do is create a new file. And with this one, again, you want the 600 by 600 pixels. But over here where it says Artboards, we're going to want six artboards. We're going to have six different patterns going here. Everything else can stay the same unless you aren't RGB color. And I will title it. Pattern, template and click Create. Now, these patterns are going to make more of a uniform type pattern look over and over again that you can use with the assets that you created the first time. So you'll notice that they come in really close to each other. And you saw when we made our patterns the first time that we had a lot of overlapping shapes on the outside. So we want to make sure we spread these out. So to do that, we're going to work in our artboard area. And I just clicked this artboard tool. Or you could go up to Window and then click Artboards. Well, I'll go ahead and click on, rearrange all artboards and this object will show up. So if you went through your window, art boards, so this is what you're looking at. It's down here where it's going to rearrange all art boards. Okay, so what I wanna do is I want to have the grid by Ralph. I want to have three columns. And I want the spacing to be about 400. And then I'm going to press, okay. And so now they're a little bit more spread out and move that out of the way. That way. We can make sure that things won't overlap when we're working. I'm going to just go ahead and close this area and zoom out so you can see all of them. Okay, So there in my, my six artboards. All right, so the first thing we're going to do is create our symbols. So I'm going to create three rectangles that are 600 pixels by 600 pixels. And I want to make sure that there are no borders, no strokes. And I'm just going to pick some colors. I'm going to have a dark color and have a medium color and light color so that we differentiate them. These symbols, these will now be the symbols for our background. So if I went ahead and opened my symbols panel, either here or by going to windows symbols. Okay, and I'm going to drag each of them in, change into, so this'll be dark graphic. And okay. This will be medium graphic. And this one I'll be like Graphic. Okay? Next we're going to create symbols that we can use over and over again in our patterns. And I'm going to use an arrow and a circle to help show with spacing and directionality. So to create that, I'm going to start with my ellipse tool, doesn't matter what color right now. Then I'm going to go in and grab the Star tool. So again, the shapes tool, I'm gonna grab my circle. I need to make a triangle. So I'm gonna find a point here. And I'm going to click and drag my star out. But before I let go, I'm going to press the down key. And that will create this triangle. And you can play with your triangle, make it a little fatter so that it fits into your circle. And then let's go ahead and grab our rectangle tool to make the bottom of the arrow. You don't need to do this. You can just stick with the triangle part in them that would help with your directionality. But I'm going to, now I'm going to put these two together and unite them by using the Pathfinder tool. And there we go. And then I'm going to group them together by Command G. We're going to need four of these, 1, 2, 3, 4. And then we're gonna go in and change the color. Let's change this one to this purple, this one to orange, this one. And this one. Okay, so now we have four different items. We're going to make them into symbols. So we'll go over and click on symbols. I'm going to grab this guy, put it in, this is going to be my smallest symbol. Press Okay? This one is going to be medium one. This one. And it's going to be a medium two. And this one will be my largest. Okay, so now I have all my symbols are ready to go. 10. Pattern template 1: This first template pattern we're going to create is lining up to make rows using the blend tool. So I'm going to grab, let's grab one of these and I'm going to make a copy of it. So to do that, I'm going to hold down the Alt key, bring it and drag it. And then I'm going to let go of my mouse before I let go the Alt key. And then I'm going to make sure it's lined up. And then I'm going to grab my symbols. Let's start with, Let's say my largest. Oops, I need to make a copy. Copy of my largest copy of I'll just bring all of that. Okay. So I'm going to resize them here. So let's bring my largest, a little bit smaller. And then we need to bring these guys smaller as well. Let me see what this purple. Okay. So this is my smallest one. And you can change them around. Okay. So I need this to make sure it's at the bottom first, let me lock my background so it doesn't move around. And I'm going to bring that to the bottom, move down. Okay. And then let's see. We want these to kind of lineup in the center here. I think I'm going to put the smallest in the very center. So Henan intersect at the center there. And then we'll put that here. And here. And I think I'm going to distribute aligned to key object here. So I'm gonna go over to my align tool click key object, make sure at line to this first yellow one. Oops, that's 0 spacing. So let's see. Let's try it with 50. Yeah, I kinda just test things out here. Let's try that one out. That's not bad. We want to get the yellow at the bottom as close as possible. That looks like it's as close as possible to that. I'm going to take this, I'm going to delete it because we want to make sure it's perfect. So I'm going to move that down. Okay. So now I'm going to take all of these. I'm going to group them together because now we need to move them to the other side. And to do that, we're going to click move right. Now I have two groups of these lines. I'm going to press the Shift key and click both of those. I'm going to go up to Object, Blend, Blend Options. Now, I'm going to choose specified steps, so I want an odd number, so probably one. Or maybe, let's see 123. Let's start with three and see how that looks. I'm going to press okay. Then we're gonna go back up to Object Blend Make you could use the hotkey Alt Command B. And I think that looks pretty good. So everything's kinda lined up. Everything is lined up nicely. Now, if you liked the way it looks, you can stop here or you can play around with your Object Blend Options. So I like this. So I'm going to go up to Object, Expand, expand object and fill, press. Okay, so now they are all still symbols, but now they are all individual pieces. They are grouped as one. So I'm gonna go ahead and ungroup this. So now we have what? Each one of these is grouped. So I'm going to just drag here and I'm going to ungroup those as well. So now every single one is its own piece. So if I wanted to, I could rotate these guys however I wanted to. But remember whatever you do on one side, you need to do on the other side. So I'm going to delete these and make sure I move those down. And then I'll probably do the same with these rotate. Actually, let's go this way. This way. You could easily do this with the corner and shift. Shift. Okay? So I'm liking the way that that's turning out. So that is our first one. Not too bad. I might actually even move keys a little bit down to even things. Okay, cool, looks good. So there is our first pattern template. 11. Pattern template 2 & 3: Our second pattern template now is using two that are kinda offset from each other and we're still going to be using them Blend tool here. So the first thing I'm doing, I'm going to grab the next color. Remember to Alt, click and drag, and then make sure it's aligned and locked so that you don't mess anything up and going to grab all of those and I'm going to Mellon going to use. So let me actually use a large and a medium and bring those in. And then I come in here, zoom in. So I remember my yellow is my large and make green as my medium. And I want to kind of have them interspersed here. So let's see what size let's make these. I'm going to change the size of this, so I'm going to transform scale. Let's have it go 50 percent, see what that looks like. Okay. So then Transform Scale 50 percent, okay, so that's pretty good. So I want to have these outlined here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to have that move down. And now I want one to be perfectly in the center. So I'm going to go Object Blend, Blend Options and I only want one now. And press Okay. And then Object Blend Make. So now it's perfectly in the center. So this one, I can actually find the center pay intersecting here. Okay, I'm going to Alt, click down here. Finding the center there. Okay? And then we want to make sure we expand the risks. I forgot to do that. So click Object, Expand, OK, so that they are all their own pieces. Let me see if I can do this now. I can't, okay. Okay. So looks pretty good. So what I wanna do now is I want to group control G. And I want to move it to the right. And then I'm going to do the same thing, but I'm going to to opposite way. So object blend. And then it still should have the same blend options as last time where it's just one step. So there it is. Okay, and then I'm going to Object Expand. So now what I wanna do is I want to do kind of offset here. So I'm going to take this, I'm going to ungroup it. So now this shouldn't be It's excuse me, its own item. So since it's its own item, I'm going to click Alt. And I'm going to drag it to the center here. But I'm going to bring it so that it kind of lines up here. Okay. Now I need to ungroup this so that I can move things around. And ungroup again, because I don't need that. I'm going to delete that. And I want to move this green one down. Move down. So now I can just grab all of those selected press holding the ALT key and the Shift key, so it moves over perfectly and bring it over. And there we go. We have our second pattern. Now for the third pattern, when I do the exact same thing only with the smaller too. So I'm going to probably just work through this quietly and then speed up for you. Ok. And there are two kind of offset patterns using two different objects. 12. Pattern template 4: Alright, but this pattern, we are going to use one symbol and put it all over and then just kinda flip them. So I'm going to grab this one here, make sure it's aligned properly, and then I'm going to lock it. I'm going to grab grab my medium one. So I'm going to grab it and bring it over here. And then zoom in. Okay, so for this one, Let's get smaller over here. And I'm going to move it down. I am going to Object. Blend, Blend Options. Let's go 35 steps. And let's see how that looks. Object and make. Okay. I think I went a little bit more space in there. I'm going to make this smaller. And then move down. And then Object Blend Options, five steps, okay? Object Blend, Make. That looks a little better. Okay, so now I'm going to expand this object. Expand, OK. I'm going to move it to, whoops, move it to the left or sorry, to it right? Go. And I have two groups. I'm going to object, blend. And then I still want five steps. I'm going to make it there. So you could keep it this way if you wanted all your pattern, one item going all in the same direction. But I'm going to take it one step further. It's press Expand. Okay? And then I'm going to ungroup. And let's ungroup one more time. So now each one should be individual awesome. So we are going to take this row and we are going to, if I flip horizontal, this one, flip horizontal, and this one, foot chords on the Hill, feel like it did a weird thing or it could just be an optical illusion. So let's double-check that it's not an optical illusion or it isn't optimal. Goal Login looks like it's going down in the ankle, but it could just be my arrows. So move. Right. It just an optical illusion. Okay, awesome. Now you can even take this another step and take these and you can add an, a passive eat them. I go over to Properties and I change my opacity to say like, Hey, let's go with like a 75% and just give it a little bit of extra on there. Okay? You could even change this background to be a different color if you'd like, but we'll get to that later. Okay. So there is pattern number four. 13. Pattern template 5: All right, this next pattern is gonna be kind of a four corners style So I'm going to grab a color. That's good. This one. Okay. And make sure I alignment and lock it. For this one. I'm going to need a large, medium two and a small. Okay, I'm going to zoom in here. Okay, So for this one, I'm gonna kinda look at my shapes sizes. So my large one is actually going to be at a size of two 25 squared. So I'm going to change my width and my height to 225. Okay There's that one. And then my medium, I'm going to make it 250. I'm working over here in my Properties panel. So if you don't see this, you can go to Windows and then Properties. Okay There's that one. And then my smallest who I hope I did my colors, right Let's see. No. Okay, So this is, this one should be 220 to large. Was right? To my mediums would be 250. 250. Okay. So yellow, 225, green, 250, purples my smallest, and that's going to be a one. Now let's zoom in a little bit. Okay, sorry about that. All right, Here we go. So I'm going to stick my large, which is my yellows into the corners. And I'm going to align them to intersect with the center, going to move right. And move them down. Okay. And I want to have one of these large ones smack dab in the center. So I'm going to align it and you can go precisely with your line tool for center incentive. Oops, and I did not copy it, so let's move that right. There we go. Okay, so now I've got my five in the corner and I'm going to bring these over to the center here. So I want it to intersect with the center in line here. I'm going to move it right. Now. If you're nit-picky, you probably want to make sure your arrow was lined up in the center in the first place. That's an error on my part. I'm going to press Alt ups, doing make sure I did that right, move right. Let me go and then click Alt and grab it so I can bring it up here. And then I'm going to align it with the Senate term. But then bring it here. Okay, so that is center. And then I'm going to move it down. Now we've got our a little extra guy here. And I'm just going to line it up. And you could be precise if you wanted to I want my center to be exactly the center of my object. And you can do that by doing the move tool, the move tool. So if you want things to be absolutely exact, You probably want it to half is 300, you want it to be. That's not what I'm looking for. Window appearance. That is what I'm looking for. I think its properties, but we want the x to be at 150 and they. I don't think that's right. Oh, because we're done working differently. So you can, you press Command R to get the ruler and you could kind of find the center if you'd like to do that. I'm just going to eyeball it here and here. Okay So there is kind of a four corner style pattern. 14. Pattern template 6: This final pattern is going to be a completely random one, or not completely random, but it's going to be a random style. So I'm going to grab a background, make sure it is centered on my art board. And I'm going to lock that. Now. I'm going to grab all of my pieces. Bring him down. Man 0 to I can zoom in. Hi, So I have my small pieces, my medium pieces, and my large pieces. So I'm going to start with my large pieces and then just kind of reshape them. So let's make this smaller. I'm going to stick on right here. I'm going to do Let's do medium to bring that smaller. Change. The right, you see a small. Make it a lot to bring that over here. Let's get another petal at home. So this is similar to what we did with just making our pattern in general. And we're just gonna go through and make a random pattern. Now remember, you gotta bring this one down, so down. So then you can go ahead and do that. Up here. Let's see. Let's make sure we move that Hooper. So now let's take this whole panel. We don't eat that whole. Oops. Whoops, click and things. Take this down. All right, so we've got kind of a random pattern mixing up the big signal smalls. Okay? Now we have our six different pattern templates. 15. Using the template: Okay, Now that we have our templates made, we're going to go ahead and use this or save it as a template for later use. So what you're gonna wanna do is you're going to want to go up to File. And then UPS, make sure illustrated selected, okay, go File. And then you're going to save as template. Okay, it should automatically send it to your templates folder. And then you'll just name it what you want to call it pattern template and click Save. I'm having some problems with my Mac giving me allowances here. So but that's how you'll save it as a template. So I'm going to just save it on my computer frame for right now. So if you're having some permissions issues, maybe you're at school and you don't have permission to save things, just save it to a folder that you can. And then you can use it as a template as long as you remember to Save As when you're working in that file. Click save. And I'm going to click Replace. Okay? And there you go. Now if you were able to save it as a template and you want to use it later, you would go File New from Template. And it would open up your templates folder. And you can see it here. And click New. And then it would open all of your template up. And you can see it saved. It's a new document, so it just keeps using it. If you had to save it to maybe your folders and it's called Pattern Template. Remember to File Save As if you're going to create something new with it. For this video, I'm gonna go through and show you how to use your new pattern template. So if you remember symbols, you just need to change one and then it changes them all. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go over and grab my items, bring it over to my template, and paste it in. And then we're going to come up to our symbols here. And let's see, I'm going to go with maybe it's the little cup as my large item. Actually will cup onto the picture. This funny face lemon. And maybe we'll do actually going to take the cut out. And let's do this lemon here. And oops, and maybe the full hour. Okay? So now notice that there are different sizes. So because they're vectors, you can scale them. No, no problem. So I like to first see what size my symbol is, and it is about 176 circle. So I'm going to make my height here of this lemon 176. And I'm in the properties panel on the side here. So that kind of fills that frame. Same goes for this one. Even though that's our small. Okay, so 176 there, grab that one and suddenly six fills that area and the sky. And 76. So what I like to do, I'm going to meeting that a little bit smaller. Maybe even smaller. 155. Okay. That's a little better. Okay. I like to have them kind of lined up. So then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take one, I'm going to say Command X. To cut it. I'm going to double-click into my symbol here. And then I'm going to Command F to paste in place. Now you'll notice that my size on the inside does not match my size on the outside. So that was an error on my part. Usually it's the same size. So I'm just going to enlarge it to fit that same size. Okay, so now it fits. And then the next important step is to delete your arrow out of there, and then you can leave the symbol. So if I zoom out, you'll notice that anywhere that small little purple is where the flower ended up. Okay, so we're gonna do that with the next ones. So I grab it. By clicking on it, I'm going to press Command X to cut it. Double-click into the symbol Command F to place them place. And then of course, like I said, my sizing with a little off. So I'm going to bring it a little bit bigger. If, if you have your citing the same inside and out of symbol, then it won't be a problem. I'm going to delete the background. And there we go. And then I'm going to get the same thing here, command X, double-click Command F and resize. Delete the background and exit the symbol. Last one command X, double-click Command F, resize to fit. Centered a little. Okay, delete the background, leave the symbol. Now. If I zoom out, now you can see things have automatically gone into the patterns. So you can see here this linear pattern and you've got this fund. There we go. Now it's back. And you can see are and a great outline. You can't really see the difference in this one because it's kinda of a circle. And you can see the four corners, one here, and then the random mix. Now, you can always go in and when you're like, I don't really like the way that this one turned out. You can go in and you can change things. So I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to change this circular lemon slice to make it this company. So Control C. And then I go into the symbol and then paste it. And I'm same process as before with the circle with the arrow, you can just kinda lined it up approximately the same size. Your background. And now the symbol has changed to this cups. If we go out, you can see now it is now the cup and the picture, you can see it didn't change that one, but it did change in here. And it did change in our upside down one. So you can see how it kind of made that reflection there. So that is how you use your pattern. You can also change the colors. So let's say I want this to be a bright pink, right? Grab that bright pink, and now those are changing. Now of course, if you want to go in and change an individual one to, this would be like if you want to keep a color scheme together, you can just easily change the symbol and then move things around. You can also just take something out and replace it with a rectangle. So let's say I don't want that to be this symbol anymore. I just wanted to be, let's say a white rectangle, right? So I'm going to click down 600 by 600, okay? And I align it to the center here. Now I want it to be the back. So I'm going to go Command Shift or Control Shift and back and back, left bracket. And it'll send it all the way to the back. And now it's all white background, just like that. Okay, So that is how to use this template. And remember if, if you weren't able to save it as a template because maybe your student or you don't have access to the folder. You want to make sure that you file. Save as something different so that you will have it for later. And it's a bigger file because there's more artboards. So let's say laminae set. 16. Exporting patterns from your template: For this final video, I'm gonna show you how to export all six of these art boards at once. So you'll go up to File Export for Screens. And then here it'll show your artboards. You're going to want to make sure that you change your artboard name. And sometimes I like to go by the color of the background. So Linear. Light blue, lemon on purple and so forth. So you go through, rename all of your upwards, and then make sure you choose the correct folder that you want it in. Twos. I work. I like to work with the 5000 pixels as far as the width goes. I'm working in a PNG. I want to make sure that create sub folders is unchecked. Otherwise it's going to be in a folder called 5000 pixels. And then when I have a collection like this, I like to add a prefix. So, so lemonade and then, and then that's good. So then I'm going to click Export Artboard. And then if you are on a Mac, it may just pop up. If you're on a PC, it Could, you might have to go search for it to make sure it's there. But you can see it is here now and you can see it has the prefix. If you had put in the little underscore, may have at, it would have added that for me. But there is my collection and it is ready to be uploaded or used however you would like. 17. Thank you : Thank you so much for choosing my class today. I hope you were able to make some awesome patterns using the template. And I hope you were able to learn how to use symbols and actions in Adobe Illustrator. If you haven't already to please check out my other class creating cute characters in Adobe Illustrator. And I hope you have fun creating pets.