Block and Half Drop Repeats in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch Complex Block and Half Drop Repeating Patterns Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class, creating large or block and half drop repeat patterns in Adobe Illustrator. Now today's class is a bumper look at making large block and half drop repeat patterns. First of all, we're going to look at what a half drop repeat is and what a block pattern is, so that you can just learn what it is that you're going to be doing and then we're going to source some art. I found some art that you can use that is free to download. We're going to prep that art in the second video. Then we're going to split into two streams. First of all, we're going to look at Illustrator CS6 and CC because it has a pattern make tool. I'll show you how to use that pattern make tool to make firstly a block repeat, and then secondly a half drop repeat pattern. Now if you happen to be using an earlier version of Illustrator CS5 or CS4, then the last videos are for you because what we'll do is we'll go and create a large block pattern and also a large half-drop repeat pattern by hand. You're going to see how you can do it in your version of Illustrator. It's a little bit tricky, but I'll take you through it step-by-step. Regardless of what version of Illustrator you're using by the end of this course, you will have added a range of techniques to your Illustrator skill set. Now as you're watching these videos, you are going to see a prompt which ask if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes that you would recommend this class and secondly, write in just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started making large block and half drop repeat patterns in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 Block Repeat vs Half Drop Repeat: Now before we look at how we're going to make these patterns in whatever version of Illustrator you happen to be using, we're going to look at what a block repeat is and what a half drop repeat is. In front of us here is a block repeat. When you see a block repeat, this is how you will identify it. I'm focusing on the spaceship here. I'm looking across this document to see where the spaceship exists elsewhere. If I look immediately to its right, there's an iteration of the spaceship here. If I look immediately below it, there's another one down here. But between the square that has made up of these four spaceships, there is not another spaceship. That means that this is most likely to be a block repeat. Every element is going to have this square relationship with other elements of the same type. So here, the clouds, and they're in a nice box relationship. Here, they spaceships and they're in the same relationship and so too with the suns. This is a standard block repeat. This is a half drop repeat. It's a very big one, but it is a half drop repeat. There's a skull over here, a red skull. We'll look and see where we see the next red skull. Across here, is one immediately to its right. Quite a waste across the document, but here it is. Here's one immediately below it. So we can see a square where the skulls are at each corner of the square. Because there's another skull of the same color in the middle of this area, that's indicating to us that at some offset repeat and this is a half drop repeat. This skull here has been repeated over here and over here, that's offset by half. So our pattern piece goes from here, from this skull to this skull, all the way across here and all the way up here, it's a very big pattern piece, but it's got every element in that pattern piece is repeated twice. So there'll be two green skulls and two red skulls, and there will be two of these cacti and there'll be two green bottles. We'll see that as we're developing this pattern. But this one is more sophisticated than the simple block repeat. Even though our block repeat here has only got a few elements in it, even if these were a block repeat, it would still look quite a bit simpler than the image that we're seeing here. We're going to be creating a block repeat like this and then a half drop repeat like this. We'll start by doing it for Illustrator CS6 and CC, and then we'll do it for Illustrator CS5 and earlier. Let's have a look at the stock we're going to be using. I found these elements free for download at vecteezy.com, and I'll give you the download links for them. We're using the space vector set that's got some really nice elements in it, and then we'll use these free flat Mexico icons. So again, I'll give you the download link to those as well. When you open them up in Illustrator, let's have a quick look at these files. Mopping up the last pallet here, so I can see what's going on. One of the reasons why I chose this file, it is an APS file but opens just fine in Illustrator, is everything was really neatly organized. Each of these elements is in a group by itself, so that's a nice, easy way of working with the shapes. They're going to be easy to pick up and do something with. Space 19, again, similar, they've got everything in layers here. There's a set of stars and there's background. Everything's pretty nicely labeled. It's pretty easy to work with. Now, one of the things that I was concerned about with this free flat Mexico icons was that they weren't really a lot of them. So I'm going to show you in the next video how I'm going to make these eight icons into 16 icons that we can use again. This is going to be appropriate for any version of Illustrator. So that's what we're going to do next. 3. Pt 2 Prepare the artwork: we're going to be making some quite large patterns in this class. I'm a little bit concerned that I don't have a lot of elements from this, Mexico said. Although I like the set a lot, o shrink it down so I can set a little bit more clearly on the screen. I'll go to the art board tool and enlarge the art board quite considerably. What I want is room to make a few extra sets off those icons selecting over the icons, cult or option, drag some duplicates away. I'll make three extra sets just so I have plenty to work with. I'll save the colors that I'm using in the art in the swatches panel. Let me just Ray set my panels and let's go to this watchers. I'll remove all the swatches I don't need, and I do that by clicking on the first watch shift. Click on the last and click the trash can here and choose Yes, and that removes everything that we don't need from the swatches panel. You will never get rid off none or registration, so it's not worth selecting them. Just select everything else to make a color group, select all of the art. Click the new color group icon, Click selected artwork and check both these boxes and click OK, so we now have a color group that is all the colors that were using in our art. What I want out of this exercise is another set of eight icons that are the same colors as thes but in a different arrangement. So I'm sticking with my basic color palette, but I just want a duplicate of every single one of these icons with different coloring. You may opt to make mawr than just a duplicate set, but you've got plenty here toe work with will select over all of the ones we're going to change. We're gonna leave these as they are, because they were the original set and go to the re color artwork dialogue. If you say this panel here, just click here on the disclosure triangle toe. Hide it. Let's move this out of the way so we can see where we're working right now. We need to set up this dialogue because there's a couple of problems. One is that this color, this dark color that's used for the eyes, is going to be part off the color change. We're going to use this tool here randomly change color order and because there's an arrow here, this is going to be changed along with everything else so we could end up with red eyes or green eyes. And then the dark color could be met, for example, onto chili pepper. I really want to keep the dark eyes here, so I'm gonna have to protect this color so it doesn't move. The other problem is one that you won't see quite so clearly right now. But I can promise you is about to happen. If you click, this icon here, illustrate, is going to start putting these colors together. It's going to say, Look, you've got a lot of colors. He got about 16 colors. I think it's too many. So let me start putting some of these reds and oranges together, and we'll just map them all onto the one green or different tints of the green. And that may not be what we want. It's going to start decreasing the colors that were working with, so they're a couple of things that we need to do to tell illustrate effectively, hands off on what's here. Just do what I want to do, not what you think you're going to do it. The first thing is to set colors from auto, which is illustrated. Has control to all, which means we have control. Were saying hands off. Do not reduce the number of colors here. The other thing we'll do is click on this arrow, and that changes it to a dash. And that removes this color from the cycling. So when we click to randomly change color order, this one cannot be changed. Their two other colors that we don't want to be able to change. And that's this white, which forms an edge around each of the icons. We don't want it to be green or orange or red. We wanted always to be white, because that's the look of these icons. We also don't want this gray, which is the shadow to change either. So we need to protect white and gray. They're down the bottom here, and they are already protected. You can tell they're protected cause there's no color that they're mapped onto. And there's no arrow here but worth checking because we definitely do not want those to change. Everything else has arrows. Everything else will change. Will click here randomly change color, order. I will start to say Rick coloring in these shapes. The only disadvantage off this dialogue when you start clicking on colors is if you see something you like and think, Oh, well, I'll just click again in case I see something I like better. You can't go backwards. You'll have to just keep going around and hope you hit that combination again. Well, I'm going to stop right now. I'm gonna click, OK? Because I really like this skull. So let's pull the skull over here cause that's one element I really do want to keep, not just double check to see if there's anything else I want to keep it This stage. This is looking pretty good. I often have a bit of difficulty with this glass, so let me go and just bring that one in a swell. I'm just gonna arrange these in the same order so that will be able to compare them in a minute. Will raise select what's left. Click the re color artwork dialogue set this up toe all you're going to lose your settings every time. So you need just come in and check them white and gray protected. So no problem with that. And let's start clicking around to say what other color combinations we can get. I'm gonna grab this one here for the taco, kind of like that. So let's grab that taco kind of like this, too. So let's grab that. Even though you have to race at your dialogue each time, you'll find that that happens pretty quick. It's not a really big effort once you know what you need to do to reset it. I'm looking for some strong colors. It's gonna grab this here and let's keep going with this now, even if you only want another eight icons, I suggest that you make a few duplicate sets because what happens when you start moving icons out of the way when you get them? The right color is that you can start removing colors from what's available in what's left of the icons. But by making a few extra sets, you're going to have all the colors that you want to have as options to use in the artwork that's left behind. So if you go to the re color artwork dialogue. You'll say that we've still got our 16 colors, so we've still got this rich variety of colors. But if we've been pulling these icons away as we went than we could get down to the stage where, for example, we had this icon, and when we go to break color it, then the only colors that are going to be available to us of the colors that were in the pace in the first place. So make mawr sets than you need, even if you're just going to select over them and press delayed at the end of the day. Now, if you want a few extra icons, feel free to add them in. So you might say, Well, I really like that and, for example, I really like this one and this one, and so you're gonna have more than six Dane. But I suggest that you have at least six Dane. I'm just going to settle for 16 now. If we have a look at the space collection here, there's another issue with the Mexico icon set. The space set has these extra little background elements. There's some dash lines and their stars and these dots and this leasable elements here. So if we're going to fill in the snow bases in our patent and make it look a little bit more generous, we may want some of those elements to be able to use. Now there are a couple of tricks here that you condo's let's have a look in here. And let's say what sort of elements are already used in the pace is that will be using. So let's go to the group Select all. If I click on this element here and do edit copy, edit paste, you say that there's a nice, curvy little element. Now a few of those could make really interesting background elements. We could go on, get this 12 again, will do edit copy, which is control or command, say, and then control or command V to Paste. You don't want to ultra low option drag to make this copies because otherwise the copies are going to be kept inside the original group. It's gonna be really hard toe work with so use edit, copy and edit paste. Now we could also make stars. We could make these little elements here If I go to the group selection tool, let me go on, get one of these. It's just a little dash shape so we could use those for additional elements. I got an extra one there, but you can also make your own element. So what would be quite unacceptable element for a collection like this is just a triangle, So I'm going to the polygon toolmaker three sided shape Click. OK, here is a triangle Now it's a bit big for a small before background elements. I'm gonna shrink it down and then I'll make some copies of it. This time I can alter option drag copies away. Now, as I do that, I'm going to recover them, too. A different set of colors. Ultra eruption drag away. Let's make some darker green ones. Ultra option. Drag away. Let's make some dark red ones. So I've got four sets of colors here, all of which is sampled from the colors that are in use in the art itself. Let's select over all of these shapes, choose object, transform and then I'll choose Transform Age. Ah, tone preview on the rotation for a triangle is going to be 120 degrees. If I rotate everything 120 degrees, it just goes back to where it waas. And now if I click random, I'm going to get these triangles to each rotate somewhere between zero and 120 degrees each one of them is rotated a random amount. So I've got some variety in here. I'll just click. OK, so there are some triangles I could use their some additional shapes that I could make duplicates off and use Should I wish to do so? So I'm assuming that if you're following along by the time you get to the next video, you have something like six days elements that you can use and you've got some other bits and pieces that you could use to fill in the pattern. Now, if you think that they are still too big or too small and always just select over them on shift drag to make them a bit smaller. So there's a going to bay the shapes that we're going to start working with in the patterns themselves. In the next video, we're going to look at C six and C C users and first of all. We're going to make the block repeat, and then we're going to make the half dropper Payton. For that, we're gonna be using the pattern make tall. And then in the last videos, we're going to look at, says five and says four years is so I'm going to show you how I can build a block patent a large block pattern by hand and also how to build 1/2 dropper pate pattern by hand. 4. Pt 3 Block Pattern Repeat for CS6 and CC: To make our block repeat pattern, we're going to use the pattern make tool. But before we do that, it will really help if we make some minor adjustments to our document. I'll select the "Artboard" tool and I'll drag in on the artboard to approximately the size that I want my basic pattern to be. Obviously it's got to encompass all of these spaces. Then I'll rid off the current dimensions and just round them off. Well, they are near enough to 1600, so I'll just square this up at 1600 by 1600. I also want my artboard to be positioned exactly over a pixel point. Up here is the top-left corner of the artboard is selected and if the x value is at zero, the y value is at some fractional position, it's near enough to a 1000. Let's put it at 1000. Everything is nice round numbers. I'll click on the selection tool and now just move everything so that it's well inside the artboard. With the shapes here, I can just split them into two groups, moving them inside the artboard. Now, I very seldom create patterns with backgrounds, but I give a lot of questions as to how you would make patterns with background. Let's go and see how you do this. I'll add a rectangle that is the size of the artboard for my background. That's going to be 1600 by 1600. I need it to be centered exactly over the artboard. Let's just go and get a color for it for now. We'll borrow this color, and to center it will go to the align panel. If you don't see this choose "Window" and then "Align". Click the "Fly out" menu and choose "Show options" because down here you need to select "Align to artboard". Then you can click "Horizontal align center" and "Vertical align center". The reason I'm not eyeballing this, is that this has to be dead accurate, because otherwise it's a recipe for disaster with your pattern. You need this rectangle to be exactly the size of the artboard. It can't have a stroke, it has a fill, and it has to be dead center over the artboard. Now we'll select it and move it to the back with "Object arrange", "Sent to back". Now that we've got all this done, we're ready to go and create our pattern. Select over everything and choose, "Object", "Pattern", "Make", and click "Okay". There's a chance that your screen won't look like mine, and if I set my copies to 100 percent, this might be what you're seeing. You'll see here that I've got quite a few squares. There's a square here and there's a square over here. It's really difficult to say exactly what's going on. This is what I suggest you do. First of all, dim your copies to about 30 percent, so that it's really obvious where your art is. This is my artwork. You also want to make sure that this pattern tile is 1600 by 1600, which mine is. Now I want to move all of these elements over the top of my artboard. With the selection tool, I'll select over everything. I'll move it into position and then double-check its positioning up here because I've got all of these objects selected, I can choose one out of these nine boxes as my reference point. I'll choose the top-left one and then it needs to be positioned at zero zero relative to the artboard. I'll just make sure that everything is perfectly centered over the top of the artboard. Now that we've done that, we're ready to go ahead and to make our pattern, and to do that, we'll pick up individual pieces and move them into position. If you just saw what happened there, you're probably thinking there is something really wrong here. Well, it does look as if there's something really wrong. What's happening is that this cactus should be repeating in the corners of the shape, but it's disappearing. It's actually been cut off by the background. When you see this happening, it's not your fault, it's the background that's causing problems. You'll need to go to these overlap options and click on them to break your shape out. Now you should see that your cactus is in all four corners of the shape, and I suggest that you start with an element in all four corners, because until it's appearing in all four corners, you've got problems. Now we can move our cactus into position. We can also rotate it a little bit, if we wanted a bit more interesting. Then we'll start selecting and moving these other shapes around, but you always want to have regard to whatever this shape is having an accident with on the other side. Because when it's over the edge like this is, then it's going to reappear over here and you don't want it over the top of something. I'm going to move these triangles in a minute, so that's not an issue, but you certainly don't want two pieces like these intersecting with each others. You just want to be careful that anything that you place towards the edges of this main pattern area doesn't actually conflict with another piece. Let me just move that one back out of the way. I'm going to move these shapes around, just rotate them a little bit for interest. I'll add some variety by reordering these pieces, so that they don't look the exact same order as they came out of the original file. When I'm arranging pieces over the top edge here, I'll make sure that some are just over the edge and some are well over the edge, because that will give us a lot of variety in the final pattern. Here you'll see that because most of this pepper is inside this shape, there's only a little bit here, but if we put a shape here where most of it is outside, then down here, a lot of it is going to appear, and of course we are going to have to move this bottle out of the way because otherwise it's going to have a accident with this shape here. I going to speed up the video as I place these big pieces. I'm ignoring the little ones right now, but I'm just focusing on the bigger pieces. If you want to get a better look at what your art looks like, you can turn off the dim, so that you actually haven't set at a 100 percent. That's going to give you a better look at your art, and of course, you can also zoom in and out should you wish to do so. What you're looking for is an even design. If anything is a problem, if you've got two pieces that are too close together, you'll need to identify where the originals are because you can't move these, because you can't even select these over here. The originals are here. When you've got your basic shapes in place, you can start bringing in the little pieces that you created. You can just move them into position to fill in the gaps. At this point, you may want to zoom in a little bit to see things more clearly. If you make a mistake and select something in error and find that, for example, your background moves, just be sure to press "Control" or "Command Z", so that you're undoing it. It's really important that your background is kept in place and that things don't move. You can also place these little elements over the border line just make sure that they don't have a nasty accident with something else or they're not too close to other elements on the other side of the pattern. Zoom back out so you can get a better look at your art and just make sure everything looks pretty balanced. If you need some extra little elements, you can just alt or option drag a duplicate element away from the original to make some extras if you didn't have enough. When you're happy with your pattern click "Done". You'll come back to seeing the original work. I'm just going to move out of the way and add an extra artboard. I'll click on the "Artboard" tool. I'll start dragging out my artboard. I want to make it a fixed size, so I'll click here on this top right-hand corner because I want the artboard to increase in size from this point out. I want it to be 1920 pixels wide, and I want it to be 1080 pixels tall, just a standard screen size. I can also move it now that I've sized it a little bit closer to the original art. I'll make a rectangle the size of my artboard. I'll locate it over the artboard. I can use the align panel options to make sure that it is centered to the artboard, just making sure that we have aligned object to artboard selected. The fill is at the four over here, so I can close the swatches panel and click once on my pattern to fill my shape with that pattern. To re-size it, object transform scale. We don't want to transform the object, we just want to transform the pattern. I'll set the pattern scale to about 45 percent and click "Okay". We can "Zoom" in here and just check our pattern. This is a standard block repeat, we should see each of these elements repeated horizontally and vertically. Our pattern pace is from this red skull across to here, down to here and across to here. Here are our green skulls, our green cactuses, our green peppers, our red peppers. Everything is in a nice simple block repeat, but it's a large block repeat. There's plenty of things happening here. It's just that it is a very simple block pattern design. 5. Pt 4 Half Drop Repeat CS6 and CC: To create the half dropped prepaid, I'm going to be using the space elements. This is space 19. I've already opened the AI file. I'm going to create a new document for my pattern, I'll choose File and then New. We're going to create a document 400 pixels by 400 pixels and click Create. Although this is quite a small document, that doesn't really matter since we're working with vector art. This time I'm going to grab the paces from space 19 that I want to use. So I'll grab my rocket and then Shift Click on the other elements that I plan to use in this design. I'll leave unselected anything I don't plan to use and I'm not going to use this one over here, but I'm going to use pretty much all of these other big elements. I'll choose Edit, Copy, swing across to my new document and Paste them in with Control or Command V, or you could choose Edit Paste. Now, obviously my elements that I've copied from space 19, are way bigger than my art board. So let's go to the zoom tool and zoom out so we can see everything. Everything is currently selected. So I'll hold the Shift key as I drag in on the sides to shrink my shapes. So I think that's a pretty good sort of arrangement there. A little off the edge of the art pool, but it's very easy for me to bring them in, so I want everything to start on the art board. The art board is also a known size, that's also pretty important. So if I think there's places are a little bit small, I can just enlarge them against selecting them and holding the Shift key as I enlarged because I want to enlarge them in proportion, I don't want to skew them out of alignment and have oval planets for example. Everything is looking pretty good here. Now in the last video, I showed you how to create a block pattern with a background. I'm going to do that here too because if you try and do it, there's something that's going to happen that you're not going to be happy with and I'm going to show you how to solve the problem. So let's go to the rectangle tool, we click once in the document, make a rectangle 400 pixels by 400 pixels, and then we're going to center it now. I'm going to fill it with a color right now and let's center it using the align options here. If you don't see them, you can use the align options over here. Now, you might be doing this and be a little bit confused as what's happening because our rectangle has appeared behind one planet. Let's choose Object, Arrange, Send to Back because that's going to be spectacularly unsuccessful. Let's have a look and see what the issue is because there are a lot of issues with this particular file. The way that it's been created is that each one of these elements is in a layer by itself and why I did was I just went and dumped my background in a layer. So I'm going to add a brand new layer to this document. Let's put it at the bottom, and let's put our rectangle in it. So we're going to have to do that sort of manually so that we can say what's going on. So now that we've done that, we're ready to go ahead and to create our half dropped pattern. For this, we're going to select either absolutely everything and will choose Object, Pattern, Make and then click Okay. Now we're going to have the same issues in terms of placement possibly with this document. So I'm going to make sure my copies are deemed right down, so it's really obvious where my artwork is. My total width and height is 400 by 400, which is the size of the art board, that's exactly as it should be. But we do want a different pattern style. So let's choose Brick by Column. That gives us the main pattern pace, and then this pace will be offset up here and offset down here, that's giving us our half drop prepaid. So I'll select over everything here, so I've got it selected. I'll make sure that I have the reference point in the top left corner selected. We know our art board reference point is up here that we need to position this pace relative to, so I'll just type zero and zero as the x and y values and that just squares everything up on top of the art board. We're going to do exactly as we did before and start moving the spaces around. I'll take the spaceship and drop it up into the top corner and I chose the top corner for a really good reason because it's where things are going to start going spectacularly wrong because when I move this spaceship up to that top corner, you can see that the spaceship is all there, but it's not appearing where it should be and there a cutoff pieces of it all throughout the pattern. Well, to make it more visible, we need to look at the overlap. So if I click here on this Overlap, you can see that the spaceship is starting to appear, and obviously this overlap is going to control it as well. So now I have my spaceship in the two corners of my patent tile and I've got it in the middle of the opposite side, this is what makes this a half drop prepaid, things are repeating very differently. So you need to keep your wits about you as to where paces are going to appear. But we look like we've solved the problem, but we haven't quite. So let me go and get a pace that we can work with this one here is pretty handy. Let me move it over the edge over here and you'll see that it repeats really well, it's here and it's repeating really nicely over here. But if I drag it down a little bit, it starts to break up. Now, it's not repeating correctly. We're missing a pace out of it. So you might think, well, it's just an overlap issue. Well, it isn't overlap issue, but it's an unsolvable overlap issue because as soon as we get this looking correct, look what's happened to our spaceship. So we're going to lose some part of our pattern if we continue the way we're continuing. So we get a couple of options here and this is why we're working with these backgrounds because they really do cause a problem for this pattern. So one of two things, either you can move this shape up so it's always in this top quadrant and so you don't ever have a shape that's over the edge here. So that's limiting you in terms of your design. You can have paces all the way up to the edge. They just can't be over the edge because as soon as they're over the edge, they start to be cut off, they're disappearing. That's one possible solution. The other solution is to go to the Layers Palette and I have close my layers palette, so let me just go and get it and I'm going to open up the last pallet and down the very bottom is of course, our background. Now, if I lock down and turn off the background, then things are going to be very different. In this case, we're going to have no background on our patent. But when I move this shape down here, it's not going to have a problem repeating because there's no background to cover it up. So these are two choices you can put your background in later on, or you can have it in now and you're limited in terms of where you can put everything. So make a decision as to what's going to work best for you. I'm going to stick with my background on this one, so I'm just going to persevere with it. Over the top here, whenever we have a shape over the top, we want to make sure that it's repeating perfectly which it is and then we're going to go looking for the next iteration of it, which is going to be halfway between here and the next place we see it and somewhat offset so we can just double-check things as we go. Now I'm going to do as I did previously, and go ahead and fill up this patent swatch and just make things look good and then I'll come back as we're ready to finish it off. When you're pretty happy with what you've got, you could go and borrow some additional elements from space-19. I'm looking here at the stars, which are at the very bottom of the last pallet, going to select on the stars and I'll choose Edit, Copy. We'll return to the document we are working with and choose Edit, Paste. Now the stars are going to be much bigger than we want them to be. I'm just going to zoom back out so I can see them a little more clearly. I'm looking for the handle that's up here, I'll Shift Drag on it and just want to position them over the top of the artboard. The stars are in a different proportion to the artboards. I want to cover up the artboard, but I don't mind that there are some sticking over the edge because they're going to be cut off by the pattern. Let's just zoom in a little bit to see how this is looking. The issue that I've got with the stars now is that the stars are on top of all the planets than things and I want them to be behind. Let's go to the last pallet, and here's the stars' Group here at the very top. I'm going to pick it up and move it to just above the background rectangle. That's going to hide the stars behind the shapes, a little bit better. There's another element here in space-19 that we might like and that I particularly like is the curly lines. I could borrow them from space-19 or I could just make them myself and it's probably going to be easier to make them myself, because I can make them around the shapes that I now have. I'll go to the Pencil Tool, going to make sure that I'm working with a pencil color that's going to work with the art. Let's just borrow this color from the space ship. I think that's going to be a good color to work with. With the Pencil Tool, we'll double-click on it to see how it's set up. I have the Fidelity set Smooth, so I'm going to smooth out things as I go. That's pretty much the only option I need set, so I'll click ''Okay'' and now I'll go around some of the shapes and create some lines that are interesting, the lines that we saw on space-19. I'm going to come around this planet here, and I'm going to loop around and end up in this planet here. It doesn't end up in there yet, but when I move it down the layer stack it's going to end up in that planet. You can draw things that you want to draw rather than having to use the elements that were created in space-19 for you. Let's go and create one more element here, I think I want one more out here too. All of these elements are going to be at the top of the last pallet, so we'll select on each of these. We want them to be dashed line, so we go to the Stroke panel and we'll click here on Dashed Lines, we'll increase the line weight a little bit so we can actually see them and right now we've got no gap sets. I'm going to set a gap of about five to close up the gap a little bit. Let's drop the stroke down to 2.5. You can type in 2.5 you can't selected it's not selectable, but you can certainly type it. Let's go and see what this looks like. I'm pretty happy with those, if you wanted them to be a bit smaller you can make them a bit smaller. Let's go grab them all, so I'm just going to Shift click on each of them to select them. I'll choose Object, Group, so they're in a group so that they're going to move as a single object. That's nice and handy and let's pull them behind everything. They're disappearing into the planets, it's a nice option to use. I'm thinking this one could be better positioned, so I'm going to the Group Selection Tool just so I can target it within the group to give it a different position. Before we leave this dialogue, we should make sure that our paths are working perfectly and nothing has been cut off because we know that there is a propensity for cutting things off. What we need to do is to check anything that's over the edge here and to make sure that wherever it is, it is a whole shape. Our spaceships are all entire shapes, this is an entire shape. This one here is down here and over here it's an entire shape. This one is not cut off anywhere or over here. The pattern is looking like it's pretty good. The only thing that's going to be a problem is if there's anything over the edge of the artboard here that we brought in in the stars. But that's looking pretty good, there's also seem to be anything. Here's one. In the stars background, there's a little element here that's over the edge, so I'm going to pick it up and just move it inside and everything else looks fine. This shape here, it's over the edge it's because it's up to the top. It stays at a very close over the edge down the bottom here that are going to be problems. This one might be a slight issue, I'm just going to make sure that it's in there so it can't possibly be cut off. This one here is repeating perfectly down here and we don't have anything cut off out of here, it's all looking good. You do need to check, particularly with those little background elements that you haven't caused some to be cut off there, because can be really obvious once you create your pattern. Let's zoom back out again. If we're ready, we can just click ''Done''. We're getting a warning because there are some elements in here that cannot be stored inside a pattern. But in this case, Illustrator can do the expansion for us. It's not like we're stopped, which we would be if we were trying to put a pattern inside a pattern here. It's just a case of expanding some objects and so Illustrators saying, ''I'll take care of it.'' We're good with that, we'll just click ''Okay''. Let's go and try our pattern. I'll go to the Artboard Tool, click to start dragging out an artboard, I'm going to change my reference point up to this top right corner. I can create my artboard at screen size, which is 1,920 by 1,080. By making sure that I had this reference points selected, any sizing is going to take place to the left and below where I am not running to this artboard here. It's a little trick for sizing your artboards. Let's click on the artboard and center it, we'll add a rectangle the size of the artboard which is 1,920 by 1,080. I want to center it on the artboard, I don't want it to have a stroke which it doesn't have I wanted it to have a fill, I've got the Fill selected. Let's go and get our pattern and we'll click on our pattern. To re-size it Object, Transform, Scale. I'm going to scale the pattern but not the object, I think I've dropped the pattern down to about 75 percent that all we find click ''Okay'' and then we'll double-check it. Here's an Earth, here's another Earth and somewhere between this Earth and this Earth, slightly offset from it should be another one, so that's working perfectly. Here's an alien spaceship, here's another one and down here is the one in the middle, so there's the offset for that and there's another one up here. Nothing is cut off here, the elements that were over the edge and they are looking just fine. If we zoomed in there, we would find all our stars are intact. That's how you create a half drop repeat pattern in Illustrator [inaudible]. If you don't use a background, it's relatively easy, if you do use a background, you need to keep your wits about you to make sure that you don't create a pattern that has little bits missing. If you do get to this stage and realize there's a mistake in your pattern, this is what you're going to do. You just come to the Pattern dialogue and you'll double-click on the pattern, and that opens the pattern backup. Here's your patent options dialog. You can go ahead and edit it and when you're done, you'll just click ''Done''. So making a mistake is not the end of the world, it's very easy to edit patterns in Illustrator just try to be aware of where the problems are likely to be, so that you can fix them if they occur. 6. Pt 5 Block Repeat for CS5 and earlier: If you're working in Illustrator CS5 or earlier, you don't have a pattern make tool, so you'll have to make your patterns by hand. I've opened up all the red colored artwork that we created in the earlier videos. We're going to make our pattern by hand using this. Our work off this document just for ease. I'll start by targeting the art board tool. Because I want to make the art board the size of my pattern piece. I'm going to make a square, but you could make a rectangle should you wish to do so. Just moving the edges into approximately where I want it to be, about the size I want it to be, and I can read off the values up here. Well, it's near enough to 1600 square, so I'm going to make it 1600 square, working with integer values here and not real numbers, so nothing with a decimal point after it. I'll also move the center point of the art board, making sure that these values are rounded off to the nearest value and so they're whole numbers as well. Everything's moved just a little bit, that's just fine. Clicking the Select tool turns off that art board feature. Hold the space bar down just to move everything where I can see it. I'll now move these elements roughly where I want them to be. I don't want these elements for now because they're going to be filler paces. I'll start putting things where I want them to appear in the artwork, but I think this would look better if they were rotated a little bit. I'll select over just eight of the icons, choose object transform, and then transform H. Make sure that preview is turned on. Now you'll probably find when you get here that this angle is zero. I'll just increase it a little bit. Just adding a little bit of rotation to the shape click "Okay", and I'll do it the same with the shapes, but type them in the opposite direction, object transform, transform H. That looks pretty good to me, I'll click "Okay". That saves me from having to rotate each shape individually later on. Now I'll start moving the shapes into the position I want them to be in. I'm going to add a little bit of variety to my document this way. Let's just mix up some of the shapes, so that we don't have them laid out necessarily the same way as they came in the original art. I'm also trying to intersperse some of the colors as well. Working on some rough placement to start off with, and then we can start finessing things. What we'll do is decide over which sides of the art board we will actually place our shapes, and we want to do that to two sides, and they need to be adjacent. I'm picking the top side here and the left side, which means nothing goes over the bottom or the right. In actual fact, everything needs to stay a little bit away from the bottom and the right because they shapes when they're duplicated, are going to appear over here. If that shape we're already there, then when we duplicate this shape and move it over here, it's going to have an accident with the glass. We need to leave room for the skull to appear over here, so just be mindful of that when you're laying things out. You do want to lay things out with a bit of variety. I might put this skull, so that only the tip of it is over the edge. Most of the skull is going to appear over here. But if I come down here and put this shape here with only a little bit of it over the edge, then here we're only going to get a little bit. We could move a shape a little bit closer to the edge here, because we're just trying to keep away from a literal piece here, not an entire shape. I'll move things around and just try to build a little bit of variety into what's happening here. You don't have to use all of your shapes if you don't want to, you can just delete some of them if you don't want to use some. The starting point here, we know our board is 1600 by 1600 pixels in size. Let's have a look and say how would we create the repeat parts. We need to make a copy of these shapes and put them down here. Anything that is overlapping the top of the apple, we need to select. That's these four shapes here. We're going to move them down to here with object, and then transform move. I'll turn preview on and just ignore what's happening there. Now the horizontal movement is zero point, because I need it to move perfectly vertically, so I'll set that to zero, and the vertical movement needs to be 1600, the full depth of the art boards. I'll type 1600 in here, and you can see that the pieces are appearing across the bottom. The fact that these two are really close doesn't matter right now. We're just going to click "Copy" so that we keep the original, and make a copy. Now we can move this one in a little bit, because obviously it's too close to the shapes across the bottom. Let's do the horizontal translation here, and in this case, we're going to select absolutely anything that is over the edge of the art board here. The cactus and the skull and this cactus are pretty obvious, but we also need to select this one because just a little bit is over the edge of the art board. I'll select object, transform, move. This time we want to all add shapes to move 1600 pixels in the horizontal direction, so I'll type 1600 here. You can see how valuable it is to have nice round numbers here that we're using. We want vertical movement, nothing at all. I'll type zero, hit tab. Not worried about this, that's just fine. We'll sort that out in a minute. I've got a visual here that everything is going to copy perfectly, but I do want my original as well as the copy, so I'm going to make sure I click "Copy" here. Now let's have a look and see what might need to be moved. This is a problem area here, if I move this skull, I have to move this one. It's probably easier to just adjust the position of the paper. But if I did want to move the skull, let's see how we do it. I'm going to select this skull and this one. I've got both skull selected. Now, I can move both at once and they're going to maintain this perfect relationship between them so that the center of this skull and the center of this skull, are going to be 1600 pixels apart. It is possible to move ones over the edge, but you need to make sure that you have your wits about you and you understand what you are doing. I need to move this one as well. I think this pair. I'm thinking, I'll move this pair across to here, probably about there, and now I'll grab the heads. Click on one shift, shift click on the other, just making sure that I'm not moving them until they're joined together, and just move them into this position. I'm pretty happy with that, so now I can just readjust some other pieces here. You will need to readjust probably after you have made these copies because things won't look exactly as you want them to look. Let's just switch those out. The only thing you have to be aware of is, if you want to move anything that is over the edge of the art board, you have to move its corresponding pair and if it's the cactus, then you've got to move all four of them. Anything that's in the middle, you can move to your heart's content because it's not affecting anything else at all. Once we're pretty happy with what we've got happening in the pattern. We're ready to add the additional elements. I'll select and move these into position. All I'm doing is using them to fill in the gaps, just add a little bit of variety into the background, so it's not quite as static as it would otherwise be. I've been pretty cautious so far not to put any over the edge here, but I am going to put a couple over the edge. Let's go and get one of these, and I'll "Alt" or Option Drag it into position over here. It's going to be over the edge of the art board. Let's do a second one while we are here. Because these are over the edge of the art board, they too need to be moved across. I'll select both of them, and let's do our object transform, move. It has to be moved 1600 pixels horizontally, zero pixels vertically. We need to make a copy, so I'll click "Copy". We're just checking to make sure that these haven't run into close to anything else as they've been copied. They look fine. If we do want to move either of these, they both have to move. You would click on one, "Shift" click on the other, and then you could move them so that they're both moving the exact same amount. That's ensuring that the distance between them remains that 1600 pixels. I'll do one over the top as well. "Alt" or Option Drag this one up. I'm just doing that because I don't have any spare ones to use. Let's just duplicate that object transform move. Zero horizontally, 1600 vertically, make a copy, click "Copy". You can make any final adjustments at this point. If you don't have any more adjustments to make, then you're ready to create your pattern. To do this, we need a no fill, no stroke rectangle the size of the art board. To do this target the rectangle tool click once in the document and create a rectangle that is the size of your art board. In my case, it's 1600 pixels square. I'll click "Okay". That it's filled with green right now, it's just fine. It makes it easier to see it. Selecting the rectangle, I need to ensure that it's positioned exactly over the art board. I'm going to do that using the align options. You might also find the align options here, but they're also accessible through window and then align. Now from the drop-down list here, I'll select align to art board, that's also available over here in the panel. By clicking the fly out menu, choose Show Options and then align to art board. Now when I click horizontal align center, and vertical align center, the shape is positioned exactly over the art board. Again, the sizing of the shape and the positioning is critical. You also want to make sure that it has no fill and no stroke. Let's get rid of its fill as well. The other thing that that no fill, no stroke rectangle has to have as a property, is that it has to be behind everything. I still have it selected. I'll choose object arrange, and then send to back, that sends it to the very back. If I wanted this pattern to have a background, I could do that now. I'd go to the last pallet, and let's just have a look in the last pallet, we've got all these paths. In fact, I'm going to group these little triangles as a group. Let me just do that. It's just going to make life a little bit easy. Here I'll load groups for the shapes. I'm just going to lock those down. If I lock those down, and the path at the very back the no fill, no stroke rectangle, that means that the only other things that are unlocked in this document, are those little triangle shapes. If I drag over the entire document, I'm just selecting these shapes. Just makes it really easy to find and select them, especially when they're scattered everywhere, object group. Now they are a group, and they're going to behave the same as any other group. It also means that they're a little bit more manageable. Let's just drag down here to unlock everything. To create the background for the pattern, I'm targeting the bottom most element, which is the no fill, no stoke rectangle. I'll drag it onto the new icon here. I am creating two, and I'm going to fill one with color. The one I'm going to fill with color for the background has to be the one that's not at the very bottom, because this no fill, no stroke rectangle has to be underneath everything including any background. Here is the path I'm going to fill, and we can just go and apply a color to it. It's not the color I really want to use. Let's go and choose a lighter color. I'm sticking with colors from the basic color scheme but you could use any color, of course at all. Now we're ready to make our pattern. To do that, we'll just select over everything. Absolutely everything in this document is selected, including the no fill, no stroke rectangle at the very bottom of everything. I open up the swatches palette, and drag, and drop this into the swatches palette. Now, one can go in at the end of the color group as much as you might like it to, it's not going to appear there. You have to put it up here next to the nun and the register and sit quite happily up there. Let's go and test this pattern. To do that, we need a new rectangle. I'm going to make a new art board for this. Click on the art board tool, and click, and drag to start creating my art board. From the nine boxes up here, I'm going to select the top right. I'm making the changes to the size of this art board with reference to this point here, which is going to stay stable. I'm going to make the width and height,1920 and 1080. There is my screen size art board. I can also move the artboard at this stage into position should I wish to do so. Click the selection tool, click the rectangle tool, make a rectangle the size of the art board. Again, align this to the art board just for neatness. With the fill selected, we can click on the pattern that we created to fill the shape with pattern. To re-size it, object transform scale. Turn objects off. Because you don't want to scale the object, you just want to scale the pattern. I'll scale this down to about 30 percent. I think that'll give us a bit of a look at what's happening. Actually 40s pretty good. Click "Okay", "Ctrl" or "Command zero" to zoom in. Let's have a look and see how our pattern is looking. Here is a element, this glass here. We'll see it again over here. It's going to be again down here, and again over here. This is how big our pattern pace is. We can see now that it's repeating seamlessly here inside our rectangle. If you saw something here in the design that you didn't like, this is how you would go ahead and fix it. You'll go back to your original patterns. I'm just going to target this art board here. "Ctrl" or "Command zero" to zoom back out or make a change. Let me see a change that we can make. We'll just switch these two around. Once you've made your change, we'll just zoom out a little bit so I can grab everything. Go to the selection tool, select over all of these elements, open up the swatches panel, and to replace this swatch, you drag and drop this new swatch on top of the one that you already have in there. Holding the "Alt" or "Option key" lets you just drag it on top. When you drag it on top, that rectangle over the left-hand side of the screen here now, will update immediately. We're replacing one pattern with another pattern. Anywhere it's in use in the document, it's going to be replaced. There's a standard block repeat created with the number of elements for illustrated [inaudible] five and earlier. 7. Pt 6 Half Drop Repeat: We're not ready to make by hand the Half Drop Repeat Pattern for Illustrator 6, 5 and earlier. You might also want to draw this if you're using Illustrator, say a 6 or so, say just to see how these patterns could be made by hand. Now I'm going to use space-19 for this, so I am going to double-click on that to open it because that's got the objects that I'm going to be using in my illustration. Then I'll create a brand new document with "File" and then "New". I'm going to make mine 500 by 350 pixels in size. That's going to be the size of my staffing pattern swatch. Then I'm going to take that and offset it. My pattern swatch is going to end up being a 1,000 by 350, but it's best to start with 500 by 350 in terms of getting things in the right place to begin. I'll click "Create". Let's go to space-19 and get the elements that we want. Of course, space-19 has everything nicely arranged in it, so it's nice and easy to work with. With the selection tool you'll click on the first object and then Shift-click on every other object that you want to actually use. I'm going to leave this one behind. I don't really particularly like that, but I'm going to bring in most of the others. Once I have them selected, I'll choose "Edit" and then "Copy". As we cross to our document and choose "Edit" and then "Paste". Now everything is much bigger than it needs to be. I'm going to zoom out so I can see everything. I'll select over all of these shapes and I'm going to reduce their size by holding the "Shift" key as I just shrink them. Now I'll move them roughly into position so we can actually see them, and then "Ctrl" or "Cmd + 0" just to zoom back out. In designing this pattern, we're going to put elements over the top edge and the left edge, but we're going to leave the bottom edge and the right edge untouched. We need to make sure that our elements are well inside the right edge and this bottom edge and also being aware that these elements are going to repeat across this design, so we want to leave a fair bit of space for them to repeat. I want this rocket to be quite big and I wanted to be in the corner. I'm just going to place it in the top corner and arrange everything else around it, mindful of course, that it's also going to copy down here so it's going to have a very nasty accident with this shape if I don't move that shape as well. Now we can go over the top edge and we will want to go over the top edge so that we don't get too many lines through our pattern. At this stage, I'm just trying to look at filling in spaces and not leaving anything too open like this area down here, but mindful of course, that these objects are going to copy down to here, so this does not need to be where it is or it's going to have an accident with these two pieces when they get copied down. And aware that this rocket is going to end up down here as well, so you just need to be a bit careful about leaving plenty of breathing room in these areas here. Now there were some other elements, over here in space-19 that you might want. I'm thinking in particular of shapes like these. Here are the stars so I can select them and copy them. Again, "Edit", "Copy", swing across to our document and choose "Edit" and then "Paste". Again, this is going to be ways bigger than it needs to be. I'm just going to zoom out so that I can see it. I have the shape selected that has the stars in it. I'm just going to look at how big it is. I'm going to lock the constrained width and height option here so that whatever I do with these stars, they're going to be sized in proportion. We know that our rectangle here is 500 by 350, so let's go and type 350 in here for the height, and see what the result is on the width. We've been really lucky here, because the width here is just on 500. I'm going to drop this down just a little bit more. Let's take it down to 495, which will drop this down in height a little bit. Let's keep these selected, make sure that the aligned to Artboard option is enabled. Again, you can get to that through the Align panel here. Go to "Show Options" and make sure it's set to align to Artboard. We're going to center this shape up on the art board. Just click to center it. Now that means that all of these little stars are well inside the document that we're working on and we want that to be the case. We don't want any over the edge. They're just going to be too difficult to work with otherwise. Let's just zoom in a little bit. Now the stars are on top of everything, so before I go any further, I'm going to make sure that I move the stars further down because I don't want them to be in front of things, I want them to be behind. Let's go to the stars and just drag them to the very bottom, and that'll put them behind everything. There are other options here that you could take with you each of these lines, but it may also be just as easy to make those lines up yourself and let's see how we would do that. I've got my shapes in position. I'm going to the "Pencil" tool, so I'll target the "Pencil" tool. I'm going to make sure that I am painting with a color here. Let's go and get a blue color. I'm going to double-click on the pencil tool to see what the settings are like. At the moment, it's about midway on the accurate to smooth scale. Well, I want it to be really smooth. I'm going to set it to Smooth and click "Okay", so now when I draw with it, Illustrator's going round everything off. What I'm looking at is the lines that we had in the original here. You can see that these are sort of organic lines. I'm creating a few organic lines around these shapes. Just a little bit easier to do them myself than try and copy and paste the ones from the previous document and then fix them up. You can also go behind shapes if you want to. In a minute, once we've made this dashes, we could move it behind this shape and it would look pretty good that way. Then we could perhaps come out here and go in another direction. If you don't like what you draw, just press "Ctrl" or "Cmd + Z" to undo it and try again. Again, I don't want to go over the edges here. It's just going to be too hard to manage those, particularly on the first run through that you have with creating a pattern like this. Just be nice to yourself so that you get a feel for how to make it without giving yourself too much work to do. I'm pretty happy with these lines that I've created. I'm going to select them all, so I can grab them here in the "Layers" palette because they're very easy to select, they're the topmost lines. We'll go to the appearance panel, and I'm going to click on "Stroke" to open up the stroke box. I want to make these dashed lines. We'll just look at increasing the width a little bit too perhaps. I'm thinking about two pixels is probably good for the wait. I've got a dash of 12 and no gap setting at the moment, so I'm going to set my gap to about five. That'll close them up a little bit. Let's just click away and see what they look like. I'm pretty happy with them. I'm going to grab all of them and just move them behind everything so if they appear in the same space as any of these planets or anything, they're going to be behind the planet. So far, so good. I'm pretty happy with the arrangement there and we're ready to go on in the next video to actually make a Half Drop Repeat out of this basic pattern. 8. Pt 7 Half Drop Repeat (cont.): We're now ready to make our half drop repeat and to do that, we need to double the size of our Artboard. I'll target the Artboard tool, and you'll see here that Artboard's like shapes in Illustrator, have transform points. I'm using the left-hand side, so something there as a transform point for my Artboard, because I want to enlarge it, I'll make sure that this option has a line through it. We don't want to constrain the width and height, because we just want to make it wider not any taller. We want to make it twice its existing width, so it was 500, I'll make it 1,000, and the extra Artboard has been added over here. I can go ahead now and just click on the "Selection Tool" and I'm going to do a bit of a visual check right now, because this element here is going to end up over here, and I think it's going to crash rather nastily into this piece here. I'm going to move some of these piece here so when I click a little bit before I go any further, just because I think I'm going to have an accident. I'm just patching up the areas where I foresee problems. If you do encounter problems, you would just undo what you've done and fix them, and then redo this next step. The next step is to take this pattern piece that we've created and do the offsets. I'll select the Selection Tool. You'll notice that I haven't duplicated these elements down here or these elements across here, and you won't want to do that. You want elements to be over the top and the left-hand side of the Artboard, but you don't want to have done the matching pieces that you need at this stage. We'll select everything and choose Object, Transform, and then Move. For our offset, we need to move everything 500 pixels across here. I've got Preview turned on. I'll type in 500 as my horizontal offset, but I also need to move it vertically, and I need to do that half of the height of the Artboard. The Artboard is 350 pixels tall. Half of that is 175, because I want to go in an upwards direction, I'm typing minus 175. I've got my elements exactly where I want them to be, but I want this set as well, so I'll click "Copy". Just doing a quick visual check, nothing has had an accident so far. There are not two elements in the same place, so everything's looking good so far. I'm going to leave these objects all selected because I'm going to make the next copy. Object, Transform, Move. In this case, I don't want any horizontal movement at all, so I'll type zero for the horizontal offset, and I want to move this down the distance of the Artboard. The Artboard is 350 pixels tall. I'll move it down 350 pixels, and it's positioned exactly where I want it to be, but of course, I want the original set and my copy, so I'll click "Copy", and again, a quick visual check is showing me that nothing has run into anything else. We're looking pretty good so far. If you're familiar with making patterns in Illustrator, you will know that we haven't yet made the duplicates we need of the elements that are over the top and down, the left-hand side of the Artboard and it's time to do that now. I'll go to the Selection Tool. I'm going to select everything that is over the top of the Artboard in the original pattern piece, so that's these four shapes. Now, this rocket is down the left and over the top. We have to treat it at this stage as if it's an over the top pace. I'm going choose Object, Transform, and then Move, and we're just going to make a duplicate of these. Now, they've jumped into the exact correct position, because they needed to be moved down the Artboard to the bottom edge. Of course, we need the original and the copy, so we'll just click "Copy". Doing a quick check with what we know of what a half drop repeat pattern is, let's have a look at these elements. We've got one copy of the Earth here, and these are going to make a second copy. We've got two of these elements. We've got two flying sources, two purple shapes here. We've got two rockets. Well, not quite two rockets. We've got a whole rocket, and we've got about half of a rocket here, we need the other half of a rocket. We are missing half a rocket. We're also missing half of this shape here. We've got some bits here, but we don't have the other half that we need. This is what we need to do here, and this is the bit that is probably the most confusing, because if we were making this as a regular block pattern, we would just be moving this halfway across the shape, but because this is a half drop repeat, things are a bit different, and what's going to have to happen is that these shapes are going to have to go all the way across to here. They're going to have to be moved 1,000 pixels instead of the 500 that logically our brain say, that's where it's supposed to be. Well, that's not correct. They've got to be 1,000. They've got to come over here. Object, Transform, Move, zero vertical. We're going to move them 1,000 the exact width of the Artboard, horizontally so they're going to appear over here and of course, we need the original and the copy, so we'll just click copy. Now we have all the elements that we need for a half drop repeat pattern. But I've got a few extra sort of hanging around here in thin air. These are elements that we don't need. I'm going to start deleting anything that I know I don't need but you need to be really careful if you're going to do this and don't do it if you're not a 100 percent sure because you can't take out this one, because it's over the edge of the art board. You can't take out this one or this one or this one. There's not a lot that you can remove but there are some elements that you could. But just make sure that nothing you remove is actually over the edge of the art board or you're going mess up your pattern. I've just paired things down a little bit. When we make patterns by hand, we have to have a no fill, no stroke rectangle that's going to mark out our pattern pace. Let's make that now, will go to the rectangle tool. Click once in the document. The art board is a thousand pixels wide and it's three hundred and fifty pixels tall. We'll make a rectangle that is the exact size of the art board and click okay. Let's give it a feel so we can see it. It's going make things a little bit easier. With it selected, we are going to make sure that we're aligning everything to the art board, either through these options here or you can check it and do it through the align panel but just make sure you have aligned to art board selected and then you're going to center this, over the art board. It has to be exactly centered on the art board. It has to have no fill and no stroke which I'm now going to set no fill no stroke and it has to be behind everything. We have to send it to the back with object, arrange, send to back. If I have a look in my last pallet now, let's have a look and see what we've got. We've got a whole heap of objects and right at the very back is this rectangle here that is a no fill, no stroke rectangle that is the size of the art board. At this stage, if you wanted to put a background on this pattern, then you could do that. Now, what you'll do is you'll take this no fill, no stroke rectangle that you've already created and make a duplicate of it. The one at the very bottom, you're going to leave alone because that's someone that marks out where the pattern is but the one immediately above it you could fill. I'm going to fill it with a color. Let's just go for this sort of green color right now and then let's just find something a bit more appropriate. I've got a pale sort of color here. A final check, just make sure nothing is locked down. Make sure that you no fill, no strike rectangle is at the very back and select everything with select all. I'll open the swatches palette and I can just drag and drop the pattern into the swatches palette and that's making my pattern swatch. I'll just move out of the way a little bit so I can drag out a rectangle and we can test to make sure that the pattern is working, I've made sure that they fill is in the force so when I click here on my patent, the patent is being applied to this rectangle, will just resize it so we can check it object transform scale. I don't want to transform the shape but I do want to transform the pattern. Just going to reduce that to 75 percent of its original size and click okay. Here we have a hand built half dropped repeat pattern. Let's have a look and say that it conforms with what we understand, a half dropped repeat pattern to be. If we focus on this purple shape here, we're going to move across until we next encounter that shape which is over here. Between these two points somewhere down here, we should see another one of those shapes. This is the ambit of our pattern. Here's a spay ship. When we look across here, here's the next spay ship, but there's one offset from it in the middle. We're going to see that same sort of distance between each of these shapes when we look at this one, go across perfectly horizontally. This is where we run into the next one but we know the halfway between them and a little bit down is another one. That's how you create a half drop repeat in Illustrator [inaudible] five [inaudible] four and earlier. It's not probably the easiest pattern you're ever going to make but it is possible to do and that's the way you do it. 9. Project and wrapup: Now we've finished with the formal part of the class. It's over to you. Your project for this class will be to make either a large block pattern or a half drop repeating pattern or you can make both using your version of Illustrator. Post an image of your completed pattern as your class project. If you're using Illustrator CS5 or CS4, let me know that you used those versions because I want to say an extra well-done to you for making those patterns yourself. You can choose to make the patterns with the art that I've found for you. The download links are here. If you want to, you could use your own art or you could source other art at a site like Vecteezy and use that. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and I hope that you've learned things about Illustrator for which you were previously unaware. As you were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which will have asked you if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you did enjoy the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes that you would recommend the class. Secondly, write in just a few words why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.