Técnicas avanzadas en el diseño de patrones de superficie

1. Trailer: Hi, my name is Bonnie Christine and I'm an illustrator and surface pattern designer. In this course we're going to tackle some more advanced techniques for a surface pattern design. Think about patterns that maybe are diagonal or have a lot of layers of textures to them, they're geometric or they have lines and you can't tell where they meet up. I have crafted this class for the person who is familiar with Adobe Illustrator and can make a simple repeating pattern. But it's for the person who's really ready to take it to the next level. If you start seeing patterns in trying to find a repeat or can't really figure out how the artists setup their file, this course is for you. Come join me in class as we take our surface pattern design skills to the next level. 2. Repeat Patterns Refresh: Sketching: In this series, we're going to cover how to make a repeating pattern. It took me almost two years to learn how to do this, the first time I learnt and it was quickly addicting. One of my favorite things to do now is teach other people how to do the same thing. In this first lesson, we're going to cover sketches and perfecting our sketches so that they work for us in Adobe Illustrator, all you'll need is a pen or pencil and a piece of paper. If you have tracing paper or a Lightbox on hand, it could come in handy too. I think it could be important to answer the question, "What is surface patterns design?" Before we get started. I remember when I first learned I could not believe that this was a career option. If you're new to the idea, if you just look around from where you're sitting, you'll probably see several surface patterned designs. Things like fabric and wallpaper to ribbon and napkins, aprons, stationary, book covers, lace. All of these things have an artist behind them that design the pattern. Typically, surface pattern designers license their artwork for companies to use on their products. But learning how to make a repeating pattern is so much fun for personal use too, it's really easy now to upload designs to websites like Spoonflower or Society6 and get products like fabric and wallpaper or wrapping paper, and even things like mugs and rugs made with their designs. They make really fun projects and gifts as well. By the end of this series, you'll have a lot of resources in your tool box to not only make surface patterns designs yourself, but potentially start a career, or at least start getting some of your products printed with your own artwork. Let's get started sketching. For this first exercise, I want to start with our sketches. This can be anything you want it to be, it can be flowers or something intricate like animals, or it can be something really simple like circles and dots. I'm going to start with some flowers. There are two ways you can work, you can either start with a black pen right off the bag, or if you're more comfortable, you can start with a pencil and move to a black pen as you go. In order to show you that process, I'm just going to start with a pencil and show you why it's important to end with basically a perfect sketch. For this technique and to vectorize, we want to perfect our sketches on paper before we put them into Illustrator. As I mentioned before, there are a bunch of different ways to work. You can always perfect them once you get them in Illustrator using the pen tool or the pencil tool. But for this exercise we're going to use the live trace tool, and it's going to require us to perfect our sketches before we scan them in. I'm going to start in pencil and then I'm going to trace over them with a black pen. The important thing is to use a plain piece of very white paper that's going to scan in really nicely. I'm going to get started by sketching just some simple flowers and petals with a couple of leaves that we can work with. I'm not worrying too much about the placement of these leaves or the flowers really, because once we get them vectorized, we'll be able to rearrange them and even make their sizes different. I also don't like how far apart the statement is in the first flower. It's something I'm going to correct when I go back over my drawing with a black pen. I'm happy with this as a pencil drawing. I'm going to leave these little stars as a pencil drawing because I think they'll scan in a little rougher that way and that's going to be fun. But I'm going to go ahead and trace over the rest of my pencil sketches with a new piece of paper with my black pen. There are a couple of ways to do this, I have a light box which I'll be using today. I have the light pad, 930 by art graph. But you can also use tracing paper, If you have tracing paper or if you don't have either, you can even take this up against the window and place another piece of paper on top of it and work with it that way. But I'll go ahead and turn my light box on, and then when I lay another piece of paper on top of it, it makes it really easy to trace over it with the pen. That's what I I'm going to do now. I made a mistake here on this one. These over crossed, and I really don't want them to, so I'm going to put an X over this one. I'm going to save the rest of this sheet because it looks really good. I'm just going to grab a new sheet to do this one for hours. You may have several pieces of paper before you're happy. You could trash them away, but you should probably have several before you're happy with all your final sketches. I'll turn my lightbox off, and you can see I have one flower here that I'm planning to use. I'm only going to be scanning in these stars on this one, and then my original inked one, that I'm happy with too. Get your sketches to a place that you are happy with no matter how simple or complex they are. In the next session, we will go over how to scan them in and get them vectorized. Have fun. 3. Repeat Patterns Refresh: Scan + Vectorize: In this lesson, we're going to take the sketches that we worked on, scan them and vectorize them for use in Adobe Illustrator. As always, with Illustrator, there are several ways to accomplish the same task. In order to get your sketches into vector format, you could use the Live Trace tool, which is what I'm going to show you today. You could also scan your photo, lock it in Illustrator and trace over it with something called the blob brush tool or the pen tool. Or you could take a photo of your sketch, put it into an iPad Pro, lock it, and trace over it using an app like Procreate or Adobe draw. For today's session, we're going to stick to perfecting our sketch on paper with a black pen, then scanning it in and automatically vectorizing it using the Live Trace tool. This is probably the most simple and straightforward way to do it, so that's what we're going to cover today. Let's get started scanning and vectorizing. The next thing I want to talk about is how to get our artwork into the computer. There are a couple of ways to do this. You can either use a scanner or you can take a picture of it. I'm going to show you both techniques. The first thing I'm going to do is just take my iPhone and open the camera. I don't want to take a picture way up here where the edges are showing. Rather I want to zoom in where the paper fills the entire screen. The next thing I want to be careful of is that I'm not tilting my camera even a little bit will skew your artwork. You want to make sure that there aren't any shadows and if this was a notebook, that you weren't getting, the crease of the binding or the outside edges. Your artwork should fill the entire photo, and there's no skew and you can simply take a picture. Now, send that to your computer and you can use it the same way that we're going to use our scan. Now, that we have our sketches perfected, I have moved into Adobe Illustrator on my iMac. The next step is to take our illustrations and get them vectorized in illustrator. The first thing we need to do is either import the photo that you took with your phone or scan them in. Since I've showed you how to take them with your phone, I'm going to use my scanner. I'm using a Canon MP495 scanner, but most scanners should have the same capabilities. I'm just going to open the scanner dialog box here, and it shows me a preview of my sketch. Everybody's options may be a little different, because this is just a pen and paper sketch, I'm going to keep this at black and white at 300 DPI. Now, mine allows me to draw a marquee of the area that I want to scan in. That way I'm not getting the edges of my paper or anything else. The other thing that's nice is if you can manually do image correction, you can bump up the brightness and the contrast so that it's going to make a really nice vector image once we get into Illustrator. Now that I have that set, I'm going to select scan. If you'll remember, I'll switch the sheets. I had one flower that I needed to redo. It has saved all of my previous settings. I'm just going to make this square a little smaller and hit scan. In this final scan, I just want to grab these little stars that I had done with pencil and I'll show you that a pencil sketch can sometimes give a nice effect too. I'll hit scan one last time. If I go back to Illustrator, all I need to do is drag and drop the scanned images into my document. I'll find them in finder and drop them right in. Now, I'm going to take one of them at a time and vectorize them. This one is up and down and I really want to rotate it to the right, so I'll hit R on my keyboard. You can see the little marquee there and just start dragging it to the right. If I hold the Shift key down, it will stop me at exactly 90-degrees. You can tell that this is a really nice scan. It's black and white. There's not any kind skew on it or anything like that. The next thing I want to do is use Live Trace. I have Live Trace over here in my toolbar. But if you don't have it there, you can come up to Window and make sure that you have a check by image trace. Yours will either be called image tracer or Live Trace. There are a bunch of settings in here, but when you're working with a strict black and white sketch, they're pretty simple. If you go to the preset, just use black and white logo. You'll probably get a warning and you'll just select Okay. Immediately, this looks pretty good. You can play with some of the settings, the threshold, if you take it up, will pick up more of the black line and most likely make it darker or thicker. I always select ignore white because we're going to delete that bit anyways, which automatically makes it darker for some reason. I'm going to take the threshold back down some because that's a really thick stroke. The only other thing that I play with is the paths. Sometimes you can take these up and get more of like a hand-drawn, rigid fill to it. I can't tell a huge difference with this illustration. Once you're happy with the settings for this, you will need to come up to the top of your toolbar and hit expand. This turns your entire illustration into vectors. Vectors basically mean that they are endlessly scalable and they'll never lose their integrity. That's what Illustrator is all about. Currently they are all grouped together. I'm going to right-click and ungroup everything. That way, I can delete the one that I know I didn't want. But the other nice thing to do is to group back anything that you want to be able to work with. All of these are grouped because they touch each other, but, well, for instance, right there, this is not attached, so I should grab this entire flower and group it together by hitting Command G. That way, I can move it as a single illustration. I think everything else is grouped together because all the lines are touching. I'm going to go through the same process for my other two scans. This flower, Live Image Trace is already up, but I need to go back to black and white logo. Illustrator resets this dialogue box, so I'll hit ignore white and that looks pretty good. I'll expand it. That one is ready to go too. The last one is this pencil sketch. I'll rotate it this way and see what we get when we hit black and white logo. Because it's pencil, it's not coming through quite as well, so I'll have to up the threshold, and go ahead and ignore white. These are just really sketchy. They're not perfect, and that's why I like them. I think this looks pretty good. I'll expand it and go ahead and right-click and ungroup it. That way I can delete these bits that we don't want. I'm going to zoom in over this so you can see what I'm doing better. To do that, I'll hit Command Space bar and draw a marquee over where I want to zoom into. This one is all by itself. This one's great, this one's good. This one has a little bit right here, but I don't think we need it, so I'll just delete that, same, same. Well, let's see, that's two different pieces. Let's group this one together. These look like they're all one piece too. I'll delete those extra bits. Now, we have our sketches vectorized and ready to use in Illustrator. In the next lesson, we'll cover how to get your illustrations colored. I'll see you there. Bye. 4. Repeat Patterns Refresh: Coloring: In this session we're going to cover how we can color our illustrations. I'm back in my document and the first thing I want to show you is how to create a custom color palette. Illustrator adds several swatches into your document, and they're just really primary and usually not the kind of colors that we would pick for an illustration. My favorite way to do this is to pull colors from photographs that I've taken, usually ones from outside. So I've already pulled a couple together. I'll just drag and select them and drag them into my document. So if I space these out some, I have four photos and I'm going to build a color palette from these photos. I would suggest trying to get between eight to 12 colors depending on how complex your pattern is, you could even go up to about 18. The first thing I'm going to do is draw a square on my document. The keyboard shortcut for that is M. If I start drawing a square and holding down the Shift key, it'll keep that a perfect square for me. It's black and that's fine. I'm going to duplicate this. Probably let's do ten times. So I'll select V on my keyboard for the black arrow tool. If you're not familiar with keyboard shortcuts, you'll be able to find all of these tools over in the toolbar on the left. So I'll start dragging this square over to the right. If I hold down shift, it will keep it in line so that I can't move it up and down. Then if I hold down the option key, you can see that another arrow pops up. This means it's going to duplicate it for me. Now, one of my favorite tricks in Illustrator is, if I don't do anything else and that still selected, I can hit Command D on my keyboard for duplicate, this duplicates the last action and makes little things like this really easy. The next thing I want to do is get these colored with colors from my photographs. So I'll select the first one. Hit I on my keyboard for the eyedropper tool, that's also over here in the toolbar. The first thing I want to do is grab a couple of neutrals. So neutrals are kind of easy to forget about, but they're really important. I usually like to have a cream. Also some grays or browns to really give the illustration a base. Once you're happy with the color. Hit "Command", to go back to the last tool that you used, which would be the black arrow tool. Select the next one. As you come up from command, it will automatically go back to the eyedropper tool. Now you can also just manually click in between these two, but that's just a keyboard shortcut that comes in handy. I'll grab a couple of yellows. Let's do that one. Go on to the next one and maybe grabs this brown, which is really rich and pretty. I think I like some of these greens. Maybe that one. Keep going. This is a nice [inaudible] that's an interesting color, really pretty plum color and maybe another dark brown. It's just really fun to click around and see what colors you can pull from pictures that you've taken. The sky blue is so pretty. That's a pretty green. Now just a couple of more to round out our little color palette here. I wasn't sure what I was going to pull out for this one, but they are also pretty these purples and pinks. I think this gives us a good start. We can always pull in more colors and change them if we need to. This is a good start. The things that you want to make sure you have in your color palette, are neutrals, and enough contrast. So you can tell I have some really light colors and some really dark ones too. This is going to give you lots of options for your pattern. The next thing I'll do is just delete these pictures from my document. What I want to do is select all of the squares that have these colors in it. Come over to the swatches panel and click on the small folder at the bottom that says new color group. Now this little box will pop up. You can name it if you want, and if not, just hit Okay. Now we have a custom color palette with these colors included in it. I can just delete the boxes off of my Illustrator document. The next thing we need to do is get our illustrations colored. There are so many different ways to do this. I go over them in depth and my courses. But I'm going to try to keep it simple for today. Probably some of the easiest are the stars. I'm going to hide my edges for this so that you can really see what I'm doing. For me I'm going to hit command H. These are still selected, but it just hides all those little tiny blue dots so that you can see what I'm doing. It's a really nice tip for when you're working too. Right now I'm not going to stress out about color too much. I'm just going kind of toss color on these illustrations and we'll perfect them later. The next thing I'm going to do is color all of these leaves. There's a couple of ways to do this, but I think the thing that I would like to do most is make them solid. I'm going to select all of them. I'm going to use the Shape Builder Tool to make them all solid leaves. The Shape Builder Tool is over on your Toolbar on the left. You can also hit Shift M on your keyboard. What this does is just allow you to draw through any openings in an illustration and it makes it completely solid for you. So I can do all of these just really quickly. Make them solid. Just like that, we have solid leaves and I'm going to make them green for now. If I zoom out a little bit, the next thing I want to do are these large flowers, and I'm going to color all of them the same way. At least to start with that way I know how my pattern is going to get built. I'm going to zoom in on these four, select all four of them. For this, I'm going to use something called the Live Paint Bucket Tool. The Live Paint Bucket Tool is under the fly-out menu of the Shape Builder Tool. You can find it right there. There's a keyboard shortcut for that is K. What this allows us to do is click inside of these openings and color them. So I'll hit "Command H" to hide my edges. I'm going to start with maybe a pink for the insides of these petals. I can just quickly work my way around and get them all colored up. Now the insides of these, I think I'll make this dark, kind of Sienna color. I see I accidentally colored the black outline and that's fine. In fact, you can even hold down your mouse and drag and drop. I'll show you what I'm going to do with outline in just a moment. Okay, so with them still selected, I can change the color of the outline just by selecting one in my color palette and then clicking on the outline. See this is really pretty with the outline. That would be a great option. But the other thing you could do is select none, no fill and come in and just kind of bleed it. That's what I had in mind when I made these sketches, was that I would just end up deleting the outline and letting the background color that I choose show through. I think this is what I'm going to stick with for now. If I bring my edges back, you can see that these outlines are still there. One of the most important things to do after you're done live tracing. This is important even if you didn't use the no fill stroke like I did, it's always important to expand because the easiest way to explain this is that using the Live Paint Bucket Tool is sort of like using an effect in Illustrator. Using several effects will bog down your document, make it runs slow and make it really large. The easiest way to combat that is after you're done with the Live Paint Bucket Tool, Everything is selected, come up to object and expand. You'll just select Okay when your dialog box comes up and you can see that it's just really simplified this. Now there are a couple of funny things about a Live Paint Bucket Tool for one, it groups everything together that you worked on. So these are all grouped together now they weren't when we began. What I want to do is "Right-click" and ungroup them. Sometimes you have to do it several times. okay, now they're completely ungrouped. What I want to do next is go back and group the flowers together so that I can move them as one solid illustrations. With that selected, I'll hit "Command D" on my keyboard. Group them all back together the way that I want them. Its steps like these that make working in Illustrator and building patterns much easier. The last two that I need to work with are these two over here. For these, I'm not going to be able to delete this outline like I did here because stem is part of it. So I think what I want to do is paint them the same way I painted these flowers and leave the stroke. So I'll come back to my Live Paint Bucket Tool, grab this light pink color and do the pedals. The green for the leaves and probably this kind of dark maroon color for the outline. Of course we need to object and expand everything since we use the Live Paint Bucket Tool that will in turn group them so we have to ungroup them and then group them back together. Now I have everything in my document colored and in the next session, we will build our repeating pattern. 5. Repeat Patterns Refresh: Building the Repeat: Welcome back everyone. In this session we're going to build our repeating pattern. The first thing I want to do though, is show you that I'm not really happy with how I illustrated these two flowers with the outline. So, I had an idea of how to change it and I'm just going to walk you through exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to ungroup both of them. That way I can select just the maroon outline. You can tell that I have just that selected because it is the fill in my color box. What I want to do, is just kind of cut it in half. I'm going to grab the eraser tool by hitting "Shift E" on my keyboard. The left and right bracket tools, increases and decreases the size of this brush. I'm going to take it down pretty small and just cut this in half. Now I can take my black arrow tool and just delete the outline on top, and change this one to green. I think this is going to work in my document a lot nicer. The only thing left to do that I don't like is that this is still two parts. So I could go back to my shape builder tool and correct that. Another way to do it would be to select both of these, come up to your window and make sure that you have checked by pathfinder. With your pathfinder box open, just hit "Unite". That's going to make all of this one shape. I'm going to do the same thing over here. I have just the dark outline selected. I'll hit "Shift E" on my keyboard for the eraser. Just cut that in half, remove the outline on the top. Then really I can go ahead and select both of these and unite them first, and then change their color to green. This is going to work nicer. I'm going to group these back together, so that I can use them in my illustration. I think that flows looks a lot more natural with the rest of the illustrations. Okay. So we're moving on to building our pattern. The first thing you want to do is set your repeating bounding box. This is also going to be just your background. This can be any size, rectangle or square, but you need to remember the size of it. I like to make it something, I can always change it, but I like to start with something that's easy to remember. To draw a box, I'll hit "M" on my keyboard, the Rectangle tool is also over here in your toolbar. You can always drag and drop a box, but more precise way to do it would be just to click once, and then manually input the width and the height that you want to use. I could do something like, 600 by 800, 1200 by 1500 pixels, or for this session, I'll just do a square, 500 by 500 pixels. So this is on top, and that's not the right color. I want to change the color to cream and I'll hit, with it selected, I'll hit the right arrow on my mouse. Come down to arrange and select "Sent Back". Now that it's in the back, I going, you don't have to do this, but I'm going to lock it on my documents, so that when I'm dragging around these motifs, I'm not also accidentally grabbing the background. To do that, the keyboard shortcut is command two. You can also come up to object and select "Lock". Now I can't select this box, but I can still move all the motifs on top of it. So what I want to do is kind of create a little cluster of flowers with leaves coming out of it. The techniques that you need to know in order to build this is, I'll bring in flower over here to demonstrate. You want to be able to resize them. I'm a big fan of keyboard shortcuts, so I'm going to go through them with you. S is for scale, and all of these keyboard shortcuts you'll be able to find in your left hand toolbar. S for scale, you'll be able to scale this up or down, but always holding the shift key in order to keep it proportional. I let go of the Shift key, I can really distort it. I'll hide my edges. This is not a look we're going for. So I'll undo that by hitting "Command Z", and I can scale this. The next skill you'll want is to be able to rotate it. So if I hit "R" on my keyboard, the same little mark key shows up and I can rotate this around that mark key. I can also move the mark key by simply clicking with my mouse, then if I start to drag and drop, it, rotates it around that mark key. The next thing is reflect. If I hit "O" on my keyboard, I'll move the mark key back to the center, and start dragging it is going to reflect it at exactly. Another way to say that would be to mirror it. So if I undo that, I'll move the mark key out here, and reflect that you can see it's an exact replica. Now one more trick is that if you wanted to replicate this in the same way, but not move it, but rather make a copy of it, you can hit the option key to duplicate that and make a copy of it. So as I move around my document, I'll talk you through what I'm doing, but I will use these techniques in order to really make my motifs work. So the first cluster, I'm just going to work with placing some leaves around to fill in the empty space. I can use all of these and know that I can always make copies on them to use again. So for instance, I have this small one selected and as I drag it, if I want to make a copy of it, all I have to do is hold down the option key and drop it. That way it'll just make a copy of it for me. Okay. I think I'll add in these little guys somewhere like this. There is my first cluster of flowers. I'm going to select all of them, and reduce them in size. The first thing I'm going to do is make sure that some of my motifs lay over the left-hand side of my document. Let's do something like that. The next thing I'm going to do is just grab all of these, make a copy of them, reflect them so that they look a little differently, maybe I'll break them apart and change their scale a little bit. This is just going to make them look just kind of like entirely different flowers altogether, just by rotating and reflecting them. Then I can make maybe two smaller clusters, and I'll reuse all of the same leaves. You can change the scale on these as well and just really make your motifs stretch. This is going to make a really cohesive looking pattern. And really this is the fun part, so just have fun playing with all the different ways that you can build your pattern. Okay, so I'm going to grab all of this one and place it over here. I think I'm going to make this one bigger and make it also overlap up top, and then this one I'll just put in the middle somewhere, like so. I haven't got into to these yellow ones yet, but I will. The next thing is that I want to go ahead and start replicating and building my pattern. Basically the concept is that everything that crosses over the top margin must always crossover the bottom margin at the same exact place, same with the left axis and the right one. I'll do this several times because I haven't built out the top of my repeat all the way, but to get a sense of this pattern before having to do that, I'll go ahead and select these two pieces that crossover this margin. I'll right-click on my keyboard, come to "Transform" "Move." Okay, so Illustrator jump that to some crazy pixel point, but you'll just enter in zero for the horizontal, and vertical works a little backwards, if you want it to go up, it's negative, if you want it to go down, it's positive. So I want to move it down 500 pixels because if you remember, my box is 500 by 500. If yours was a different dimension, you would put your different dimension in here. So rather than hit "OK," I'm going to select "Copy," which copies my motif perfectly. I'm going to do the same thing on the left-hand axis. This axis might be finished. So I'm going to select everything that crosses over that margin, right-click, come to "Transform" "Move " and again my move's 500 to the right and zero up and down because my background box is 500 by 500. Rather than hit "OK" I'm going to select "Copy." So now I can really see the areas that I need to fill in. So I can just grab some of these motifs and reuse them. This one I'll rotate around and with it selected, I'm going to go ahead and move it down. So right-click, "Transform," "Move." Now it's zero horizontal and positive 500 down, and I'll hit "Copy." So I think it's time that I start inserting my little yellow stars. I knew that I was just going to need some fillers and these are going to work really nicely for that. So I'll hold the "Option Key" down as I drag these around just to fill in some space and it would be nice to rotate and reflect these as well so they don't all look the same. I think I've got plenty of room to add in some more flowers here. So I've only used this cluster once, so let me break it apart and do some filling in here. Now as long as you're not crossing one of the edges, then you can move things about freely, but as soon as you move something that crosses an edge, you've got to re-replicate it. Another way to do that would be to select it on both sides and move them together as long as you're moving them up or down or left and right, you can do it as one, as one piece. Okay, so let's add in some more stars. Okay, so I think what I want to do next is test my pattern, see how it looks and repeat. What I need to do first is unlock my background box. The easiest way to do that is come to Object and select, "Unlock All." The next thing and most important key to building a repeating pattern is the repeat bounding box that you make. The way you do this is select your background box, make a copy of it by hitting "Command C," and then make an exact replica behind it by copying behind. You do that by hitting "Command B" on your keyboard. Now it's hard to tell, but if I move one, you can see that there's still another one there. So the most important thing next is to give this very back box, no fill and no stroke. So I'll hit "None" over in my Swatches panel. You can see up here that there's No Fill and No Stroke. If your bounding box that lies on the very bottom of your document is off even by one pixel or it has a stroke on it, you will have a line in your pattern. So if you ever have a line, the first thing you need to do is delete your bounding box and redo those last steps. "Command C" to copy it, "Command B" to paste it behind, give it no stroke and no fill. Now, all we need to do is select everything on our document and drag and drop it to the Swatches panel. Now I can move over here, draw a big rectangle and test my pattern. So one of the easiest ways to test a pattern is to decrease or increase its scale. So there's a handy trick for that, of course, if you hit "S" on your keyboard and you hold down the "Shift key" you can scale and make everything smaller, but if you just want to make the pattern smaller, you'll start dragging in diagonally towards the center, hold the "Shift key" down, and also hold down the "Tilde key," and then release. The "Tilde key" is that key that has a little squiggly mark, it's to the left of the one. So I think this looks good, I can see a couple of holes. Right here is a hole that's kind of screaming at me and I don't love how both of these are the same and going in the same direction. So I'm going to come back over to my document and try to figure out where those are. Here are the two, that are too similar. So I'm just going to delete this one and move things around a little bit. Maybe something like that would be less obvious, and then I have this gaping hole, I think it's probably right here. Yeah. So I'm going to add some stars down here. I could fill in just a couple of other places. Now, I'll test this again, so I'll select everything, drag and drop it over to my Swatches panel, select my repeat, and then test that new pattern. I still have a bit of a hole right here, and I think that it's in this area, so let's add. So let's add some over here and see if that fixes it. That looks much better. I'm going to increase the scale a little bit so that we can see it better, and now that I have everything colored, not necessarily in the colors that I like, but in the way that I want it colored, meaning all the petals are pink, all the leaves are green, I can really play with color and see how it's going to work in this pattern. So with my pattern selected, I'll come up to the top toolbar and select "Recolor Artwork." Now this is going to have all the colors in the document listed under Current Colors. It's also going to have all of the color groups that I've made in the Swatches listed over here. So there are a lot of ways to use the Recolor Artwork tool. You can drag and drop to change colors, you can also click on a New Color Group, and you can basically scroll through color options by coming down here and clicking "Randomly change color order." This is a great way to test your pattern and see what works and what doesn't work. It's also a great way to see new things that you missed about the repeat. The other thing you need to know is that if you want to drag and drop colors and you want to see all the ones that are available in the color group, you can select "New Row." Now you can drag and drop all of them at one time. So I'm going to work on getting this colored in the New Color option and I'll show you it in just a second. Okay, so I've landed on two new color options that I think work really well. This kind of pink, peachy color option, and then this really deep emerald color option, and all of these colors came from the photographs that we used in an earlier lesson, and I think they work very well. 6. Technique #1: Geometric Patterns: Hello everyone and welcome to our first more advanced type of pattern, which is the geometric pattern. A common misconception with geometric patterns of every kind is that they require some mathematical equation or knowing exactly how to set up your files in a particular way. Really, it just involves building your pattern with a slightly different technique and it's really fun and easy. Traditionally, you would start by building your background and you're repeating bounding box first. But a different way to do it would be to draw the motifs exactly how you want them and then make the bounding box fit them. That's what we're going to do in this. I'm going to start with this simple motif that I made using lines and start to replicate it. The first thing I want to do is rotate it. What I want are these two segments to intersect. I'm going to select it, hit R on my keyboard for rotate, and I'm going to drop the rotate mark somewhere inside this bottom corner. I'll start to rotate this down. Holding the shift key will keep it in line and the option key will duplicate it. If I zoom in, I was off just a little bit, so I can straighten this up. That makes a perfect X. The next thing I want to do is select both of them and just move this one straight down. Your geometric pattern could be absolutely anything at all. Doesn't have to look like this whatsoever but the pattern building technique is going to be the same. I want those to line up just so. I'm going to take all four of these and then replicate it over one line, then I want to move these. This is going to be my middle row and I just want them to line up somewhere down here like so. Now I'm just eyeballing this repeat but we're going to make sure it's perfect soon. Now I'll take this row again and duplicate it one more time over here. I'll hold the shift key and the option key to drop it. Now you can see that we're already starting to get a repeat. You can find the repeat with your eye from the center of the X to the center of an X. It looks like I'll probably have to replicate this one up here one more time, so I'll just eyeball that. Now you can really easily see the repeat. What I want to do is draw a bounding box that's pretty close to perfect. I'll hit M on my keyboard for the rectangle tool, change the color to something different, let me zoom in. I'm just going to eyeball dropping this rectangle to the center of 1X, to the center of the next, and down to the center of the following ones. By doing this, I'm basically eyeballing the repeat and we're going to make sure that they all line up in just a second. With that selected, I'll right-click, select a range, and send back. I know I won't need this one because it's nowhere touching the repeat. The next thing is that I need to know exactly what size this rectangle box is. I figured it would be something pretty random. But as long as the chain link is broken right here, if I click it, it will keep it in proportion. But if I break it, I can change these to whatever I want them to be. I'm just going to round up and down to the closest pixel since this is pretty close to what it needs to be. I'm going to change this to 151 and this one, the height, to 289. Now I know that my repeating bounding box is a 151 pixels wide and 289 pixels tall. The next thing I need to do is make sure that my motifs align to this repeat bounding box perfectly. I'm going to delete everything on the right-hand side and select everything that crosses the left-hand margin. I'll right-click, come to transform, and select ''Move''. I know I need to move this 151 pixels to the right and zero up and down. I'll hit ''Copy'' instead of Okay. Okay would just move it. But if I copy it, it'll drop a duplicate for me. Now I need to do the same thing with the top and bottom. I delete everything that crosses the bottom, select everything that crosses the top, grab this one too, right-click, transform, and move. This time, I know we need to go zero, left or right, but 289 down, so I'll hit ''Copy'' this time. Now we should have a repeating pattern. Let's go ahead and check it. I'll select the background, hit ''Copy'', Command B for paste behind, give it no stroke and no fill. Now I'll select all of it, drag it over to my swatches panel, draw a new rectangle, and see that it lines up perfectly. We can zoom in. This technique, you really could use with any kind of repeating pattern, as long as it's something that needs to be quickly replicated and where you can eyeball the repeat. This is the best way to make geometric patterns with no math. Look great. In the next lesson, we'll cover making diagonal patterns. I'll see you there. 7. Technique #2: Diagonal Patterns: Hey everyone and welcome back to class. In this session, we're going to cover one of the most complicated ways to make a repeating pattern, and that is a diagonal pattern. I'll show you a couple of tricks on how to make your patterns look diagonal even if they're not, but it is often the case that you actually need the bounding box and the repeat to be diagonal on its own, which is another process on its own. But it's definitely possible, and I want to take you through the steps today. Let me first show you how to make your patterns look diagonal even if they're not. I am going to draw a square by hitting "M" on my keyboard, and just drawing a square. I will fill it with a geometric pattern that we just recently made in the last session. In order to rotate this, there are two ways. You can right-click, come down to transform and rotate. Now, if you uncheck Transform Objects, it's only going to rotate the pattern inside. You can manually do this, say if you wanted it 45 degrees, or you can take the little line here and drag and drop it until you're happy with it. I'm going to cancel this and show you one other way. If you hit "R" on your keyboard for the rotate tool and start to rotate your box, if I hold down the Tilde key, which is that little squiggly line to the left of the one on your keyboard, it will only rotate the pattern inside. This also works with all of the other tools, like the scale tool. If I hit "S" on my keyboard, you can start decreasing the scale and hit the "Tilde" key to only change the scale of the pattern. It works with all of the tools. That's a great way to hack a diagonal pattern if that works for your purposes. But if you need the actual repeat to be a diagonal, then this is how I go about it. I'm going to start by drawing my repeating bounding box. I'll hit "M" on my keyboard and I'll just drop a rectangle, let's say 600 by 400. I'm going to give this just a nice neutral background, and I'm going to start laying my motifs in a diagonal pattern. You can draw guidelines if you want. Sometimes I start with a line, and if I hold down the Shift key, I know it's going to be at a 45-degree angle. I'll give that a black stroke. This is sometimes just a nice way to give myself a guideline for that diagonal. But I'm going to go ahead and grab these motifs and just start laying them along this line. I need to take this to the back. There we go. Since we already have these motifs from our first session in this class, I'll just reuse them. They're going to work great for this too. I have my edges hidden. If you can tell, you can't see anything. If I hit Command-H, it brings back all those blue dots. I think it's hard to really see what I'm doing. If I hit Command-H, it hides my edges and allows you to see better what I'm doing. But if you wonder why that is, that's why. I'm not going to worry too much about the insides yet. I can always come back and perfect those. But what I really want to be concerned about are my edges. The key to creating a successful diagonal pattern is really just not to get ahead of yourself. As soon as you have your first row, then you need to start building off this row by starting to replicate your boundaries. The first thing I'm going to do is select this flower that overlays the top boundary. I'll right-click, come to Transform and Move. I want to move it zero, left and right, but replicate it exactly on the axis below, which would be 400 pixels down. Now, I want to hit "Copy" so that it makes a copy of it. Then I can move my guideline over here and start following it for this next row. Now, this corner flower crosses over the top and the left, so I'm going to have to duplicate it twice. I'll select it, come down to Transform and Move. I'll go zero across and 400 down, and hit "Copy". I need to take this one, 600 to the left. I'll come to Transform and Move. This time we're going to go negative 600 pixels to the left, zero up and down, and hit "Copy". Now, I need to do this. Let's see. No, I think we're good. The next thing is that I need to take everything that crosses over here and replicate it to the right. If I Right-click, "Transform" and "Move", will take this one positive 600 over to the right, and hit "Copy". I'll just start filling this in with some of my motifs. I need to make one more row in the middle, so I'll select what crosses, come to Transform and move it. This time we'll go negative 400 vertical and "Copy". I need to add one more line in here, and the easiest thing to do might be to grab what I've already done and replicate it. I'm going to work with this. It's not perfect, but it saved me a lot of work. I just want to define this diagonal a little bit better. By creating some extra space in there, it should work really nicely. I'll delete this one. I think I can make this one work perfectly. I'll grab that, come down to Transform and Move, and take it down 400 pixels. I have a little gap to fill in right here. I will come back and work on the middle sections here, but the first thing I want to do is go ahead and test that this pattern works. I'm going to delete my guide. I'll grab the background, hit "Command-C" to copy it, and "Command-V" to paste it behind, give that one no stroke and no fill. Then I'll select everything that makes my pattern and drag and drop it to the Swatches panel. Then I can come over here and draw a big rectangle to test it. One great way to test it is to decrease the scale too. I can see an error right here already, but if I hit the "Scale Tool" and then hold down the Tilde key, you can see that it's nicely going in the diagonal, but there are some issues with the pattern. This is too heavy right here and one of my repeats is off. I'm going to come back and troubleshoot a little bit. I knew that this looked a little too thick. I'm going to just thin it out some, move some of the greenery around so it's not so heavy right here. I think this is already looking much more balanced. The next thing I want to do is make sure that all of my boundaries are setup correctly, because I could tell that one of the leaves was getting cut off in the repeat. The easiest way to do that is just delete everything that crosses the right-hand axis. Delete it, select everything that crosses the left one, and duplicate it. I'll right-click, come to Transform and Move, and I'll take this 600 pixels across, and zero up and down. Now, I'll hit "Copy". Now, I need to do the same thing for the top and bottom. Delete everything that crosses the top, and move everything that crosses the bottom back up. Here was my mistake because I have that overlapping already. I can just move this down. It looks like I missed a hole right here, so I can fill this into. Let's test this and see how it looks. I'll select everything that makes the pattern, come and drag it and drop it over to my Swatches panel, and test it. That looks much better. There's a hole right here that I want to fill in, but I will work on that, and this will be a really nice diagonal repeating pattern. Hey, we'll test it one more time. I think this is what I was going for. I can increase the scale a little bit and play with the colors to make sure that everything works well, and I think it does. This is one of the ways to make a diagonal pattern, and they're always a little different. Sometimes repeat has to be big, sometimes you can figure it out in a much smaller way, but it's a nice way to make a tricky pattern come to life. In the next session, we're going to talk about building layered patterns and really adding a lot of depth to them. I'll see you there. Bye. 8. Technique #3: Layered Patterns: Hey everyone. Welcome back to class. In this session, we're going to talk about making layered patterns. This is often a question. You can find patterns out in the wild and not understand how they were created. If you're like me, try to deconstruct them and try to figure out how they set up their file to make such a layered pattern. If you've ever worked in Illustrator, you've probably gotten that error that says, you cannot make a pattern painted with a pattern. Which means you can't literally layer patterns on top of each other. You can trick Illustrator into letting you layer your patterns. It's really easier than you might think. I'm going to show you how I put together this pattern. What I did was basically make shadows. I wanted them to look like shadows of the flowers that lie beneath the actual flower motifs. I'll bring you over to the actual different elements that make up this pattern. You can see these shadows and also the actual motifs that I already have illustrated. The first thing I'm going to do is start with my repeating bounding box. This is 500 by 500 pixels. You can layer as many different patterns on top of each other as you want. The secret is that you just start with the bottom layer. Then lock it in place and start adding more and more on top of it. The bottom repeating texture or layer is going to repeat just the same way as the motifs on top. I'll show you what I mean. If I start laying these shadows on the bottom, with my particular example, I don't even have to be very careful with the way that they line up because I'm going to be covering them up with the motifs. I'll just go ahead and start placing them all over. I'm going to start with the top in the left-hand axis. Then go ahead and replicate them so I know how I need to move things around. I'll move these 500 pixels to the right and hit "Copy". I actually think these touching totally work for this application. I'm going to take the ones on top, and replicate them to the bottom. That would be 500 pixels down, and I'll hit copy. I'm okay with these intersecting as well since we're going to be covering them up, basically trying to add some added texture to them. I'll make some duplicates. Move them around. Remember, as long as you're working in the middle and not crossing over either of the sides, then you can duplicate and rotate without having to worry about messing up your repeat. This same technique will work with textures and is the secret to layering your patterns. The first thing I'm going to do is test this. I will grab the background, make a copy of it, and hit "Command V" to paste it behind. Give it no stroke and no fill. Then I'll drag and drop it over to my swatches panel and test the repeat. If I reduce the scale, the first layer looks perfect. The next thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to lock all of these in place so that I'm not moving it around as I place my second layer of motifs on top. These I'm going to want to be a little more careful with. I'm still going to work with them in a tossed pattern. I'll start by replicating these over to the right-hand side. That would be 500 pixels to the right and copying them. Then I can also do the same with the ones, let's see with this one on top and need to move this one up. It's starting to come together. All I need to do is fill in the middle parts. Here, let's see if that works. If I copy these to the top. Negative 500, moves it up and copy. I need to move. If I grab both of these, I can move them both together and not mess up my repeat. I think this looks good. Next I want to test this repeat. I could have also started with even a more simple texture on the top layer and then layered the shadows and the flowers. You can do this with as many layers as you need to. In the next session we'll cover adding texture to them as well. I'm going to first unlock everything by coming to "Object", "Unlock". Then I'll select everything that creates the pattern and drag it and drop it over to my swatches panel. Now I can use the same square to test this. I think it's exactly what I was going for. This is a great way to add depth to your patterns to really make them pop. You can do it more subtly like if this brown was a little bit of a tone deeper than the background, it would be more subtle. Have fun with your layered patterns. I'll see you in the next session. 9. Technique #4: Textured Patterns: In this lesson, we're going to talk about adding textures to your patterns. There are lots of ways to get textures. You can make your own in Illustrator or Photoshop, or you can buy a ready-made textures on places like Creative Market. Adding texture to your patterns is a great way to give them depth, and take away some of that overly vectorized feel. A few of my favorites, come from this big handmade brush texture, and stains bundle that I got of Creative Market. This one is almost like a canvas texture. This is another canvas texture that I think I'm going to try to manipulate this one. This is the way that the file comes. They are Illustrator files, and unvectorized. If I "right-click", I can release the clipping mask, I want to delete this no fill square. I'm just going to grab the first half of these. I'm going to copy, and paste them over to our diagonal pattern that we made a few lessons back. What I want to do is play around with adding a texture to this very bottom layer. I'm going to paste this here. Obviously it's way too big hit "scale" and reduce it in size. The next thing I want to do is sort to distort this, I'm going to hit the "scale tool" and start bringing it down it looks more like rose. What I want to do is replicate these in a way that will be hard to find the repeat because this is a lighter up here, and darker down here, the easiest way to do this will be to rotate this whole gamut, duplicate it by hitting the "Option" key, and just drag it up to where those meet. Now, there's a lot of loose in the middle, and not much at the end. Then I can select all of it, and drag, and drop it up again. These are going to line up pretty nicely. Before I go too much further, I want to group all of this together so that I don't start losing them here. With textures, I have found there's a lot more freedom in being able to distort them, and move them around. I'm just going to eyeball how I want these to go. We're going to change the color in a second don't worry. Textures are usually really forgiving because you can skew them, and they don't even necessarily have to match up just perfectly, and you won't be able to tell in your patterns. I'm going to nudge this up a little bit. Before I go any further, I'm going to group all of these together. I'm going to go into isolation mode by "double-clicking" on it. This means that I can't select anything behind it, It's just the black texture. What I'm going do is clean up this bottom line. With my white arrow tool, I'll hit "A" key on my keyboard, and just select everything that falls beneath that, and delete it. If you want to, I'll "double-click" to exit isolation mode. If you want to, you can build this texture exactly like we did in the layering module, and make sure that it repeats perfectly. But I think for this texture, you're not going to be able to tell. Before I go any further, let's change its color. I'm going to "right-click" and send it to the back. With it still selected, I can move to just in front of the background color by hitting "command right bracket" tool. I want to give this just a really settle color that is just of the background color. In fact, one of the easiest ways to do that would be to make it the same color as the background. Then double-click on the fill color, and just slightly make it darker, and select "okay". That gives a really settle pattern to the background. Now, if I remake this pattern by selecting everything, and dragging it over to my swatches panel. You'll be able to see that it adds just a ton of depth, and interests to the pattern with these waves of lines in the background. That's just one example, there are tons of textures, and you can change them with scale, and color, and really bring life to your patterns. I'll see you in the next, and final segment bye. 10. Technique #5: Lined Patterns: Hello everyone. Welcome back to class. We're going to shift gears a little bit and talk about patterns that have lines that move seamlessly from the top to the bottom or to the left and the right or sometimes on both directions. One of the best ways to illustrate this will be with some hand-drawn lines that I have all ready drawn. I have them scanned and I'm just going to drop them into my document. These lines I drew with a thick black marker, they're wonky, they're not straight, and what I want to do with them is make a wonky plaid. It's going to be important that all of the lines match up in both directions. The first thing I'm going to do is get these vectorized by using Image Trace. I'll open the Image Trace dialog box and choose black and white logo. This looks pretty good. I'm going to ignore white and play with increasing my paths a little bit. Let's go with that. I'll expand it and ungroup it. If you start to eyeball a repeat just by doing this thing, how you do sometimes to see if a pattern is going to work or not, right after that you can see that we are misaligned pretty significantly. The first thing I want to do is just straighten these, the best that I can. What I'll do is make a guide by choosing the line tool and holding my shift key down to make a straight line, giving this a black stroke. I'm going to lock this by hitting Command 2 on my keyboard. One by one, I'm going to bring these over and just try to straighten them basically from the top to the bottom as best as I can. Then I'll keep moving them over. A lot of them are pretty straight all ready, they just weren't straight on the page. The actual lines are pretty good. This technique is going to work for anything that crosses over completely from top to bottom or left to right. It doesn't have to be lines, it could be trees or chain links or tree branches or just anything like that. I'm going to unlock everything and delete my guide and the next step will be to draw my repeating bounding box. I'll hit M on my keyboard, drop a point, and let's go with 400 by 300. I'll give this a no stroke and then fill color and send it to the back. Since I know this is 400 by 300, I'm going to go ahead and lock it and start working on our repeat. I know that I'm going to want two rows of this, I'll just reflect these so that they look a little different and space them out. This is going to work really nicely because these are all ready just a little bigger on both sides. What I want to do is delete everything that crosses this bottom boundary with my eraser and then I'll work on replicating these to where they match up. I'll select this and hit Shift E on my keyboard. I need to increase the size of this brush significantly so that it's the right hand bracket tool. Then I can just in one fast swoop, delete all these by holding down my shift key in a straight line and just delete the bottoms of those. Then I'll bring this down, I'll right-click, come to transform and move, and take them zero across and 300 down instead of hitting okay, I'll hit Copy. You can see these are jumping all over the place. If I zoom in, I'm going to work on correcting the bottoms of the first ones to match the tops of the second one. A couple of things that I do just to keep this document clean is go ahead and erase everything down here because we all ready have that in our repeat. The next thing I'm going to do is take this and lock it so that I'm not touching them because these are the ones that cross the border and we don't want to mess with those. I hit Command 2 on my keyboard. I'm going to double-click on this and go into isolation mode. I'll hit A on my keyboard to get the white arrow tool, which is going to allow me come in and move this illustration pixel by pixel. I can grab one of these at a time and bring it over to where the bottoms are going to meet up really nicely. One thing I'm battling with this is just a difference in the thickness. I'm just going to level that off as I go up so that it's not going to be obvious. I could also switch over to the blob brush tool and take care of it pretty quickly too but either way will work as long as it doesn't jump off really quickly. Another great tool that might come in handy is the smooth tool. So under the pencil flyout menu, you can choose the smooth tool and come in and smooth things out if you got them a little choppy. If I double-click back on my art board, you can see that it gets from thicker to thinner, thicker to thinner and you can't tell where that repeat is except for just a little bit right here. I can correct that. Just like that. I'm going to move on and do the same thing for every single one of these and I'll meet you back in just a second. Now I will show you this, if you do run into a problem with one of the ones that you've locked, you can isolate that and just delete a little bit more of it as long as you're not changing anything that crosses over the border, you will be just fine and safe. But sometimes you need to grab one of these pixels and correct them. If I zoom out, you can see that these align really nicely together. You can't really tell where they start and where they stop. The next thing I want to do is test this pattern and make sure that what I've done works. I'm going to unlock the background, select it and hit Command C to copy it, and Command B to paste it behind and give the very bottom box no stroke and no fill. Now I'll select everything, drag and drop it over to my swatches panel and see if this all lines up the way that I hope it does. I can decrease the size. It does. I think it looks really nice. This one you can tell is a replica of itself and that's because it falls on the left and the right hand side. Maybe the easiest way to take care of that would just be to delete the one that's the duplicate and space these out a little bit better. Test this again and that corrects that error. We can also of course, change the colors on this to make sure that it's working and it is. It's working great. Now, if I wanted to take these lines and say, duplicate them again to make a plaid, I could do that. Just select just the lines, rotate them, holding down the shift key to keep them in line and the option key to duplicate them. This wasn't a perfect square, which would have been a better idea. Because what I would do now is, take everything that crosses here, replicate it 400 pixels to the right, and say copy. Then I will need to make these two meet in the middle, which I could do in the same way that I had done the other two, by locking these and just coming into isolation mode and stretching them to bring them together and then making sure that this lines up just right. I can clean up these extra bits over here. This one doesn't fall on our art board. Then I'll check this repeat and it repeats great too. This is exactly what I was going for. Just a really hand-drawn wonky plaid. I didn't really pay attention to the colors as I worked here but, maybe if we made this cream and yellow, [inaudible] then it would look really nice. That is the gist of how you go about making a pattern where the lines either cross vertically or horizontally or both. If you start working on it, you'll see that it's the same technique for even the most detailed of illustrations. I'll see you in the next session. Bye. 11. Student Projects + Next Steps: Welcome back everyone and congratulations on finishing class. I hope you feel much more confident in your pattern building skills. We can't wait to see what you create. Please upload your project to the student project area. If you'd like to see an example, you can view my sample project by finding it in the student project area as well. If you're new to Illustrator or feeling a little lost after taking this class, I recommend checking out to other classes I have available on Skillshare. I teach Illustrator from the ground up and would love to see you in those classes as well. Finally, if you'll hop over to my blog, going home to roost.com, I would love to have you sign up for my newsletter and join us and my membership for designers called The Roost Tribe. The Roost Tribe is a really great resource for artists of all kinds. We do monthly design challenges, give each other feedback and support along the way. I'll be checking in on your projects and can't wait to see what you make. Until next time, bye. [ MUSIC ]