Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: Hey, I'm Kelly Reese, an artist and surface pattern designer, living in the mountains of Western North Carolina. In this class, I'll teach you how to create a seamless repeating pattern in Illustrator using an easy block print that I'll show you how to make with simple materials. Creating block prints is such a fun way to see your creativity come alive, and taking them a step further by digitizing them, opens up endless possibilities for what you can do with your art work. By the end of this class, you will have learned materials and techniques for carving and printing a simple block print, how to scan or photograph your print, methods for digitizing your print in Illustrator, and how to create a pattern from your digitized motifs. This is a beginner level course. Adobe Illustrator experience isn't required. I'll demonstrate the full process to complete this project in Illustrator, but if you want to dive deeper, I recommend the myriad of courses on Illustrator you can find here on Skillshare. Having Adobe Illustrator is required in order to complete this class. If you don't already have it, you can download a seven-day free trial from the link in the class description. I'm so happy you're here and I'd love to stay in touch. Click the "Follow" button and I'll keep you in the loop anytime I add a new class. In the next video, I'll go over the project for this class, see you there.
2. Your Project: For your class project, I'd like you to carve and print a block print, digitize your print in Illustrator, and turn it into a pattern. Upload your progress as you go. I'd love to see what you're working on and help you with any questions you have along the way. In the next video, I'll walk through exactly what supplies I'm using and other supplies that would work. But feel free to use whatever works for you. As we go, keep in mind that so much of the journey of being an artist is experimentation, which means that you can make the process your own. I love learning about the methods and workflows other artists use, but ultimately, I adapt what I learned and take bits and pieces and turn them into something that's unique to me. I encourage you to do the same. Don't feel like you have to do something exactly the same way as me or anyone else to be successful. I'll see you in the next lesson.
3. Carving The Block: Let's get to it. In this video, I'll walk through this applies I'm using and then demonstrate how to carve a basic block. We'll talk about alternate methods and some tips for carving with the intention of digitizing. For my project, I'll use some really quick and easy supplies. I'll use a rubber stamp carving block by Speedball from my local art supply store. I also have a carving tool by Speedball, which is usually right next to the stamp blocks in the store. It comes with several interchangeable nibs, which I'll show you how to change out. I have some printmaking paper, but most smooth paper will work if you plan to use a rubber stamp block. Finally, I have an ink pad. I'm using dark green because I had it already. You can use any color for your project, but keep in mind, debit a darker color will make scanning and digitizing easier, and then you can adjust the colors in Illustrator afterwards. As I mentioned, I'll be using quick and easy supplies for block printing. You can also carve a block of wood or linoleum, which typically requires higher-quality carving tools because the medium you're carving is harder. In addition, a stamp pad might not work for this type of block, so you can use block printing ink and a brayer, I usually use a piece of glass to spread the ink out and get it evenly on the brayer when I create woodblock prints. Block printing can also be accomplished with even more humble supplies that I'm using. Grab an eraser, a piece of foam, or even a potato to carve. I've done all of these things. You can use an exacto knife instead of a carving tool. The possibilities are endless and it can be really fun to play around with different mediums. This class in the class project are intended to give you a quick and easy way to expand your skill set and create something fun. That's why I'm going with simple, easy, and inexpensive supplies. Whether you are an experienced block print or not, grab what you have lying around or what you prefer to use and let's get started carving. The curving tool that I'm using came with five different cutting nibs, it has three sizes of a V-nib, a scoop nib, and appointed near basically like an exacto knife. Experimenting is going to give you the best idea of what they do before you start. Let's do that and I'll show you how to use this particular tool. If you turn it to the left, it will open up the spot for the nib. Then each one has a scoop side, a bigger scoop side, and then the point side, you stick the scoop side got down in and then turn clockwise to tighten it up. Then if you take your block and just carve out a sample to see what it looks like. This one's really narrow. You might not even be able to see that. Let's try the next one. This neck size of V is a little bigger, and that gives you a bigger V-shaped chunk out of your block. This is the next size up. That's going to give you an even bigger V out of the block. Now onto the scoop and this is going to take out a really big chunk as you can see. This is the biggest out of the ones we've tried. This is a good for taking out a large area around the carving that you want to make. Let's try out this knife. This is for detail work, so it's a sharp blade. You can use it either way. You can see that's going to give you a really small details and with the ink that I'm using and the rubber stamp, you might not even be able to see that. I'm not going to use this nib at all, but feel free to experiment with it. I've drawn the basic shapes I want on my stamp block before I start carving so that I have a guide. You can carve something as simple or as complicated as you want. But if you don't have as much experience with Illustrator, it might help to start simple and then work up to more complicated motifs. Keep in mind that when you print your block, it will be a mirror image of what you carve. For my acorn, that's not a big deal because it's pretty similar both ways. But if you're using anything else, just keep that in mind. I recommend starting out with a relatively small carvings since you're going to be turning it into a pattern motif. One of the best things about using Illustrator to digitize your print is that it turns your motif into a vector illustration, meaning that you can scale it to any size then. Before we get started, let's talk about safety for a second. For the safety of your works surface I recommend putting your block on top of something if you're worried about nicking your table. Then for the safety of your body, always carve away from your body and away from your fingers. Believe me, I know this from experience. Let's get started. Now that I'm partway through my carving, let's talk about a few things. While you carve your block, be mindful of the spaces between the pieces of your motif. If you have more than one, for example, with my acorn, I want there to be a little space between the top and bottom of the acorn. I want to make sure there's enough space that when I scan and digitize it, it will all get muddled into one piece. I can always skew pieces closer together in Illustrator, but if there isn't enough room to begin with, it will be harder to separate them. Another thing to consider is whether you want your motif to have any classic block print marks, meaning the higher areas of your gouges. If you want a very clean print, you can remove those higher areas with your carving tool or remove them in Illustrator. But if you like those marks, be sure to be a little bit messier and how you carve so that you can retain the marks. It's all up to you to determine the style you like. I like to have some of those marks because it makes digital work retain a more classic tactile feel. I could draw an acorn on my iPad or directly an illustrator. But to me, the process of carving the block and having the marks be more organic gives me a more interesting look. Also as you're carving, keep in mind that any areas left flat will be a solid color. If you want to have some details, you should carve them in. I'm going to add some cross hatching on the top of my acorn and a shine mark on the bottom. If you're using rubber like me, once you've carved enough of the area outside of your motif, you can take scissors and cut off the excess forever to give yourself a little less carving work and make it easier to hold your block. Just remember not to cut off any of those marks you want to retain. I'm all done with my carving. In the next video, we'll talk about printing the block. I'd love to see your process. Take a picture of your block so you can upload it to your project.
4. Printing The Block: Now that we have our block carved, let's grab some paper and get to printing. I typically start by testing the block on a piece of scrap paper. If you're using a stamp pad, use light pressure to get some ink in your block and press it to your paper. When you pick it up to see the print, you can see if there are any areas that you'd like to adjust. For me this is a little unclear, and these two sides are uneven. So I'd like to adjust the areas around my acorn. I'll just remove the excess ink by pressing it a few more times so I don't get it all over my hands, and then I'll make my adjustments with my carving tool. Now that I've made my adjustments, I'll try it again. I'm still not quite happy with the outside of the shape, so I'll make some adjustments. Now that I'm happy with my carving, let's go ahead and print on final paper. When you're happy with higher your printer is looking, grab the paper you'd like to use for our final print, ink your block again and press it to the paper firmly, but not so hard that it smudges. One great thing about digitizing your block print is that you can take as many tries as you want to get it looking how you like because what you see on your paper won't be the final result. If your print smudges or it doesn't have as much ink as you want, just try another print. You can even digitize more than one of the printed motifs to get a little bit of variation in your pattern. So I'm printing my block several times so that I can get some variation and illustrator and decide which motifs I want to go with. Sometimes it helps to use the solid item like the top of your stamp pad to press on a little harder so that you can get more in coverage, both when you're inking and also when you're printing. I have nine different versions of my block print and I'm happy with most of them, so I have options when I move into Illustrator. Once your prints are ready, we'll move on to scanning or taking a picture so we can move into Illustrator. I'll join you in the next lesson to show you how.
5. Scanning Or Photographing: The first step in digitizing is getting an initial image file of your print. Most often that means scanning, but with high resolution photos as accessible as your phone, taking a photo can work just as well if you don't have a scanner. If you want to take a photo, make sure your print is in an area with natural light and hold your photo or camera directly above it so that you can get a proportional image that isn't skewed. Try to avoid having any shadows on your print. AirDrop or send your photo to your computer and if necessary change the file type to a JPEG. For example, my iPhone is setup to save photos as.HEIC files, which I can't open in Illustrator. So I open them and export them as a JPEG first, if I want to use them in Illustrator. On my Mac, I use preview to open the photo and before I export it as a JPEG, I can use the cursor to select only areas with ink so that I can crop out anything in the photo that's not the paper background. This makes it easier to focus on motifs for digitizing, but you can also remove any unwanted areas once you're in Illustrator. Once I've cropped my image, I export it as a JPEG, rename the image, and save it to my desktop or wherever it's easy to find. If you'll be scanning your print, make sure it's completely dry first. I have a Canon CanoScan LiDE 220, but I used to scan my artwork with a scanner that was on top of my printer. Most scanners will work well enough to get the file of your image that you need to work with in Illustrator. Place your print on the scanner bed and open the scanner tool on your computer. I access mine through my Mac system preferences, but you may have a separate program that came with yours. In the system preferences, click on "Printers and Scanners," choose your scanner, and open scanner. The noise you heard is an overview scan so that it shows you what you're scanning before it does the final scan. For the settings here, I choose color, millions, because the other option is billions, which we don't need. I recommend 300 dpi and if you click the use custom size box, it allows you to use your cursor to select the area that you'd like to scan instead of scanning the entire page. Right now I'll scan to my desktop, but you can change that. We'll name it. The format should be JPEG. I don't typically use any of these image correction tools because my scans usually scan pretty well. Then I'll click the "Scan Button." Now that we have our scanned or photographed image file, the next step is to jump into Illustrator. I'll see you there.
6. Digitizing and Adjusting In Illustrator: Let's dive into Illustrator. I'm using Adobe Creative Cloud, which means that Illustrator automatically updates to the newest version. But if you're using a different version, everything I'll be discussing today should be available in past versions as well. First, we'll create a new file. I typically start with the print preset, because 612 pixels by 792 pixels equals an 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper, which is something I can easily visualize in my mind when I'm thinking about the scale of my artwork. I can always add artboards or modify my artboard later, but I like to start with this size. Once my file is opened, the first thing I want to do is place the image that I scanned. I can go to File, Place, or I can use the keyboard shortcut Shift Command P on a Mac. I'll be using the scanned artwork, but feel free to use your photographed artwork instead. Once you click Place, you get this little cursor with the image attached, you just click and drag to place your image. For me, my image is not going the correct way. So if I come up to the corner here and get this little curved arrow icon, I can click, hold down Shift and rotate to the left. Just drag my mouse to the left, and then let go. That will rotate at 90 degrees. Holding down the Shift key allows you to rotate at 45-degree increments. To digitize your artwork, I'm going to show you how to use a tool in Illustrator called Image Trace. I have my workspace setup with the tools that I use most often. So for me, Image Trace is this icon right here. If you're not seeing it on your screen, you can go to Window and Image Trace. With your image selected, choose under the Preset drop-down, Black and White Logo. What this will do is render your artwork completely in black and white. You'll get a pop-up and you can press Okay. Sometimes the Image Trace tool takes a pretty long time to render, so just be patient. You can see that the first pass of this Image Trace didn't render my artwork completely, but that's okay. If you don't see these other options, you can click this Advanced arrow. The first thing I'll do is choose the box that says Ignore White. The next thing I'll do is play with this Threshold. You can see that it starts right in the middle at 128, but you can drag this to the right to increase it. Now you can see that some of my motifs are getting darker, but I still can't see a lot of the areas that I'd like to, so I'm going to increase this Threshold even more. Getting better, I'm going to try it again. I'm almost there with some of my motifs, but I'd still like some areas to be darker in a few of them, so I'll bump it up even further. Now, some of my motifs are looking really good. This one in particular, this one and this one are almost exactly how I'd like them to look, and since I've printed so many, the fact that this one isn't completely rendered is okay, because I can just delete that one and work with the ones that I'm happy with. Right now I'm actually happy with how most of them look. My Threshold is at 231. If you want to, you can actually click in this box and bump it up manually and just press return or enter. I'm going to put mine back down to 231 because I was happy with that. Whenever you're happy with your Image Trace results, you always need to go up to the top bar and click Expand. Now your digitized motifs are in a group and you'll need to ungroup them in order to work with them further. You can go to Object, Ungroup or use the keyboard shortcut Shift Command G. So now when you click, you can see that you're selecting just small portions of the images. For me, I'm going to just completely delete this acorn. What I do is I just click and drag in order to select it. I also don't really think I'm going to use this one. Maybe this one as well has too much white in the center, so I'll delete this one. The top of this one is also a little bit too much white, so I will delete that one as well. That leaves me with five complete acorns which I like. I like to use uneven numbers in my artwork. The next thing I'll do is edit some of the carving lines. I'll zoom in by using Command Plus. Just looking at this acorn, I can see that there are a lot of marks out here that are just farther away that I'd like to get rid of. I can select individual marks and press Delete. I'm going to delete the ones that I don't really want and then I'll add up the ones that I like. This is completely personal preference, you can leave as many as you want, you can delete them all. It just depends on what you want. To zoom, you can also press the Z Button, which brings up a little magnifying glass and click and drag your mouse. Then go back to the Direct Selection Tool in order to continue editing. The amount of marks here I'm pretty happy with, I'm just going to move some of these a little bit closer. I can do that by clicking and dragging, or I can select and use my arrow keys to move them around. I can also rotate using the curved arrow. You can also click and press the R button and then click and drag to rotate. When you have one tool selected and you want to go back to the Direct Selection, you can either press this icon or press your V button. That looks good to me. Once I'm done editing a particular acorn, I'm going to select the entire acorn and do Command G or go to Object, Group. I'll undo that for a second, just to show you another way to do it. If you're motifs are grouped together in a way that it makes it hard for you to do a square by dragging, you can also use this Lasso Tool to drag around your motif in order to select it all. I'll go ahead and edit the marks around the rest of my acorns and meet you back here. [MUSIC] I'm happy with all of my acorns now, I think the last thing I'll do is just to rotate some of them slightly so that they're all pretty much going the same way. Now we have a beautifully digitized version of our block print motifs. I'd love to see your progress, so take a screenshot or save your artboard as an image file and upload it to your class project. You can do that by going to File, Export, Export for Screens and you can choose either a PNG or a JPEG. Choose where you'd like to save it to and press Export Artboard. In the next lesson, I'm so excited to show you how to turn your digitized print into a seamless repeating pattern. I'll see you there.
7. Creating A Pattern: In this lesson, I'll show you one of my absolute favorite things, how to take the beautiful motifs you've created from your block print and turn them into a seamless pattern. When I say seamless, I mean that you can take the block you will end up with today, and tile it together without seeing any break in the pattern. You can use seamless patterns to create mock-ups, make your own products, work with the company, or upload them to print on demand sites like Society6 and Redbubble, the possibilities just go on and on. Patterns are everywhere once you start paying attention to them. Back in our Illustrator file, we'll learn how to create a seamless repeating pattern. First thing I'd like to do is, scale down my motifs a little bit. I'm going to grab them all. Grab the corner, hold down shift, and move my mouse up to the left. Holding down shift ensures that I'm scaling them proportionally rather than skewing them. If I were to select and just grab the corner without shift, you can see that they'll move all around, which is not what I want. So I'll press Command Z to go back. The next thing I'm going to do is just visually setup the repeat that I'd like to create. I'll pull out down this acorn into a vertical line. I'd like for my pattern to just be vertical lines of my acorns that repeat and bumped down as they go. I'm just going to eyeball this. You can definitely use illustrators alignment tools to make it exact. If I were to select all of these and go to my Align icon or I can go to Window and Align. I could use this horizontal align center to make sure that they are exactly centered. I'm going to press Command Z because I like it to be just a little more uneven. I am going to distribute them vertically, which means that the spacing in between will be exact. I'll just take them now and bump them over. Highlight them. If I select them, I can see how much room I'm working with on either side. Okay, so I think that looks good. Next thing I'll do is group them together. I'll take the entire group. Click, press Option which duplicates, and move them over and pull them down. This basic style is called a half drop. Repeat. I could do this in a technical way. But I'm just going to eyeball it for today because, again, I like my patterns to be a little bit more visually playful. So now that I've dropped my motif down another row, I'm just going to grab the entire thing. Press Option and Shift, which also keeps it on the same line. You can see that the little pink guides at the bottom are telling me that the spacing is the same. In the first row as in the second, so I'm just going to drop them here. This is the basic visual pattern that I'd like to create. Now, what we'll do, is make sure that it's technically exact. The next thing I'll do is, duplicate this entire thing down one more row. I'm going to select it all, grab it, press Option and Shift, and pull down. Again. I'm just eyeballing it at this point. Now drop. We'll grab a rectangle to create our pattern block. The rectangle tool is in the sidebar here, or you can press M on your keyboard. I'll create a rectangle over every part of the pattern that we want to repeat. That probably doesn't make a lot of sense right here at the beginning, but hopefully it well a little later on. I'm going to choose a point on this first acorn. I'll do the middle, just eyeballing it. I'm going to take the rectangle over to the middle of the exact same acorn to the right, and then the exact same acorn down below. I'm just going to grab a color for this rectangle and I'm going to send it to the back by right-clicking, going to arrange, and send to back. You can also achieve this by pressing Shift, Command, left bracket. I'm going to go back to my direct selection tool. You can see that our original vertical relative acorns was one, two, three, four, five, acorns. So we've repeated that to the right and down below. Then it's repeated again in this row. Now that our pattern block is visually set up, we're going to make sure that it's exact. So what I'm going to do is select everything I have, and ungroup it. Then anything that falls off the right-hand side or the bottom of my rectangle, I'm going to delete. That means all of these acorns are gone, and then everything here. You can see that what we're left with is our original row of acorns, one, two, three, four, five, and the row that we've repeated. Everything else is going to repeat exactly the way that we repeated these ones. We'll select our rectangle, go to transform. You can see that the width is here and the height is here. What I'm going to do is just make these a little bit more even so it's easier to remember. I'm going to make this 187, and I'm going to make this 554. Makes sure that the link icon here has a slash through it, because if it's clicked, that now means that it's going to constrain your proportions, so that however you adjust it one way it's going to do the other way proportionally and we don't want that. Make sure that's unchecked. We've got 187 pixels by 554 pixels high. I'll press return. The next thing I want to do is repeat these icons exactly. I'll select everything that falls over to the left of the rectangle. I'll right-click. Go to transform, move. I'm going to go 187 pixels horizontally and zero pixels vertically, and I'll press copy. You can see that that's recreated what we did visually, but now it's exactly by pixel. The next thing we want to do is go from the top to the bottom. Select anything that falls off the top of this rectangle. Right click, transform, move. Now this time we're going to go zero pixels horizontally and 554 pixels vertically, which is down. Press copy. You can see that it has copied these bottom ones. This should be an exact technical repeating pattern square. The next step is to make it an actual patterned tile in Illustrator. Click on your Rectangle, press Command C on your keyboard, and then Command B, which pastes the rectangle behind. While it still selected, come over here to your swatches and choose the none for the color. Now you have all of your block print motifs. You have a colored rectangle behind it, and behind that, you can't see it, but you have another rectangle that's the exact same width and height, with no fill and no stroke. To create your actual pattern block, grab your cursor, drag and select everything. Click on it and drag it over into your swatches panel. You can see a tiny version of that pattern here. The next thing we want to do is test the pattern. We'll create another rectangle. Any size that you want to go bigger than the pattern was originally. I typically choose a solid color first just to make sure that it's selecting correctly. Then I will choose the pattern. You can see it's filled this rectangle with the pattern we just created. What you want to do is, zoom in and scroll around to make sure you don't have any breaks in your pattern. I'll show you what it might look like if you did say I accidentally, during the creation of your pattern tile, you bumped this acorn over to the right a little bit. When you select the entire thing and create a pattern from it, and apply that pattern to this rectangle. You'll get one of your motifs cutoff and wonky. You don't want that. We'll go back and do Control Z until that motif gets bumped back to the left. Typically, when I'm working on a pattern, I don't worry too much about the colors until I'm done with the repeat tile. Now that I'm done, I want these colors to be a little less saturated. This black is a little too dark for me, and the green that I chose was just one of illustrators default colors. I'll go ahead and change the colors now. To change the color of my acorn motifs, I can either select them one at a time and then hold shift to group select, or I can grab the entire area, hold down shift to deselect and press this back rectangle twice in order to select that front rectangle and the one that's in the rear. Now I have just the acorns selected, and I'll go ahead and choose the color that I decided on beforehand, this white color and then for my green, I'll do a little bit of a darker green. Now that we have colors selected, I'll grab the pattern tile again, drag it over, then I can select by square and test it. Go ahead and play around with your colors and find something that you really love. You can even have your motifs be different colors from each other. To create an image file with your pattern, you can grab your pattern block and move it off of your art board, and then add a rectangle on top and fill it with your pattern. If it's not quite aligned as you want it, you can click and drag while holding the tilde button. That will make the pattern move instead of the rectangle. Just keep pulling until you like how it's aligned. Then again, go to File, Export, Export for screens. Then choose the art board that you have it on, then press Export Artboard. If you've loved learning how to make a pattern and want to learn more, there are so many wonderful classes to check out here on skill share. We've just scratched the surface today. I'd absolutely love to see what you've made. Upload your pattern tile or a screenshot to your class project.
8. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for spending some of your valuable time with me. I hope you've learned something that inspires you to keep creating and experimenting. Be sure to post your progress in the class project area. Please let me know if you have any questions by posting a discussion. If you want to stay up to date with me, click the follow button and you'll be the first to hear about any new classes or opportunities. Have a great day, I'll see you next time.