Braids, Rick Rack & More in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Braids Rick Rac and More Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, braids, rick rack, and more. As the topic suggests, we're going to be looking at creating braid and rick rack and other design elements that you can use in Illustrator. Now as you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which asks you if you would recommend this class to others. Please if you're enjoying the class and learning from it, do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes that you do recommend the class, and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. Recommendations like this help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. 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 creating braids, rick rack, and more in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 - Simple Braid Brush: We're going to create two different braids here. I'm going to start with the simpler of the two. I'll choose file new, create a document 500 pixels by 500 pixels in size. If you're working in an earlier version of Illustrator, your dialogues going to look a little bit more like this. You'll click to create the document. Now we're going to create three individual shapes to build our shape from. The first is a rectangle that's 50 pixels by 75 pixels. The next is a square, which is 50 pixels square. Then we're going to create a circle which has a radius of a 100 pixels. Will take this square here and just maneuver it into the top corner of the circles and I'm just going move this rectangle out of the way so that I can allow my smart guides to do the work here. I just want to snap everything in place. I'm going to select over my circle and my square. I am going to the pathfinder tab. If you don't see the pathfinder tab here, choose window and then pathfinder. From the pathfinder tab, I'm going to click here on divide. Then I'm going to choose object ungroup. Do that until ungroup is no longer an option. Coming back with the selection tool, I'm just going to select on this outside edge here and press delete. Then select on this top corner pace and press delete. That leaves me with a quarter circle. The quarter circle is going to fit perfectly over the edge of this rectangle. You just want to make sure that these are aligned perfectly. If you want to check that I open the alignment panel, you can get to it by choosing window align, choose show options. Make sure you have align to selection, selected and we're going to align these two. Let's try their right-hand edge here, just make sure they're nicely spaced out. If I choose aligned to key objects, set the value to zero pixels and click vertical distribute space. That'll make sure that these two shapes are butted up perfectly against each other. I can now select them and from the pathfinder palette, I'll click unite to just make a single shape. I'm now going to rotate this 45 degrees and I do that by holding the Shift key as I do, so that it rotates in a perfect 45 degrees. I think I want my stroke to be a bit thicker site, I'm going to add a three pixel stroke to my shape. I'll now choose effect distorted and transform and then transform. I'll turn preview on, I want five copies of my shape. I want to use reflect x, because that's going to give me this braid look. Now I'm going to start increasing the horizontal and vertical values to place these two shapes side-by-side. I know from my experiments that something pretty close to 66 horizontal and 36 vertical is going to work just fine. In fact, I'm looking at 67 horizontal and 35 vertical, and that's giving me a perfect overlap. I'll click okay. At this point I'm going to choose object expand appearance, because that will expand this into a series of shapes. Now seem to have lost my layers palette. Let's just go and get it back. You'll see here, I've got a series of groups of objects. Each of these groups contains the stroke and the fill. To create my pattern brush, I'm going to create a rectangle. I'm just going to drag out a rectangle. I want to go from this point here to this point here, because that's all I need for my braid. This one's the easiest one to get to, I'm just going to hover over this position here and just start clicking and dragging, if you don't get it perfectly alright, that's not a problem because I can adjust it once I've drawn it. But I will give it no stroke and no fill, it needs to be a no stroke, no fill box to be a bounding box for a pattern brush. Let's just go in here and make sure that it is sized correctly. It needs to be outside the edge of this braid element, and it needs to intersect in these little v positions here exactly. I'm going zoom in a little bit closer still. Now, it's pretty much the same position here as it is here. I think this is going to make a perfect brush. Let's just zoom out a bit and I'm going to select either the entire set of shapes and just rotate this 90 degrees. Because this is the way my pattern brush is going to draw. I also need to take this no fill no stroke rectangle that I have created and bring it behind the group of objects. That's really important because otherwise it won't behave as a bounding box. I'll select over all of these shapes. I open up the brushes palette and click to create a new brush. It's a pattern brush I'll click okay. Now you can set a corner if you're version of Illustrator allows you to create a corner. But if you just intend using this brush on sort of curvy lines, then you can set this to none. The corners that are created are not particularly good for this brush anyway. I'm going to set the colorization method to tins, and I'll click, okay. I'll move the shapes out of the way and click into my document here. I'm going to press d for the default colors, I'm going to select the paintbrush tool, I'm going to click on my brush and I'm just going to draw out my shape. Now, it's a very, very large brush, so let's go and select it. Let's double-click on the brush and will reduce its size to about 40 percent of what it was before. Now let's try it again, there is our braid pattern brush. Now you can select over this and recolor it should you wish to click on the re-color dialogue. The brush has black and white in it. You're going to need to click here to make black a color that you can change. You're going to need to click here to add white as a color that can be changed. Then click the edit option. I'm going to increase the brightness here, and I can drag out these colors. I can go and choose a color for the fill here, and one for the outside of the brush. This is a perfectly customizable brush, all you need to do is to select the colors to use. Once you've got your color scheme, click here on new color group and click okay. 3. Pt 2 Create the Multi color Braid: Our second braid brush is going to involve three colors. Let's start with a new document. Again, I'm going to make a 500 by 500 pixel document and click "Create". I'm going to start with a line. I'm just going to click on the line segment tool, click once in the document. My line is going to be 180 pixels long. This is going to help you if you use these measurements to get everything nice and clean and accurate. I'll just click "OK". With the line selected, I'm going to choose Effect, distort and transform and then zig-zag. This is going to give us the bend in the line. I'm going to set the ridges per segment to three. I'm going to make sure that I'm using a smooth line, and I'm just going to set the size to 10 pixels. This is going to give me the curve on my braid, I'll click "OK". We'll now expand this with object Expand Appearance. I'm going to rotate it 90 degrees because it's a little bit easier to see your braid when you're working with it at 90 degrees. To rotate it, just hold the Shift key as you twist it around. That's going to constrain this to a perfect 90 degree rotation. I need two copies of this and I need them to be placed over each other. I'll choose effect, distort and transform and then transform. I'll set preview on and I'm going to transform around this middle points. I'm not going to make any changes to these nine boxes. I want two copies of this shape. I need to select "Reflect X" so that they're going to overlap each other. I'm going to adjust this to 15 pixels of vertical movement. What you should see when you do that is that you get this really even overlap happening with your lines. Once we've done that, I'll just click "OK". Now I'm going to select over the lines and choose "Object Expand Appearance". Because what that does is it just expands these lines so that now we can get to the individual lines. I'm going to ungroup them with Object Ungroup, and I'm going to do that until ungroup is no longer an option. We can see our three paths here. At this point, we're going to color our paths. I'm going to select the first path and it really doesn't matter what color you want them to be later on. We want them to be really obvious right now. I'm going to make one blue, and it's going to be the path that's blue. It's not going to have any fill. Then select the second one and I'm going to make it red. Then the third one I'm going to make it green. Now, I'll select over all of these paths with the selection tool. I'm going to increase the stroke and I want the stroke to be nice and thick, probably something around 12. I'm getting a nice look to my braided piece. At this point I need to expand this right now they're a path that has stroke on it. What I wanted to do is to make these just simple filled shapes. I'll choose object expand. I don't want to expand the fill because they don't have a fill right now. But I do want to expand the stroke and I'll click "OK". What I get now is a series of individually colored shapes. They're wiggly shapes and they're filled with color. I'm going to select these. I'm going to choose object Ungroup because I want to break them again out of their groups. With all of these shapes selected, I'm going back to my pathfinder palette. If you don't see the pathfinder palette, choose window and then pathfinder. We're going to use this option here called divide. What that does, is it divides each of these elements into a whole lot of little pieces, you can see them here. We don't want these pieces down the bottom here because they are no fill, no stroke shapes. We can just grab all of them and just press "Delete" because they have no value to us at all. But we are really interested in these other little pieces. I'm going to select this group and I'm just going to choose object ungroup because there's no point at this stage, four of them all being inside groups. Let's zoom in here because we're going to start doing some coloring work. I'm going to click the "Selection Tool". What I'm going to do is I'm going to look at this top piece and I'm going to say, okay, it's going to go over the top of the red. Because it went over the top of the red, it's going to go under the green, it's always going to go under over. Let's click on this shape which is blue, which should now be green. I'll click the "Eyedropper" and I'll just click on "Green", I'll click "Away". It's going over red, under green, over red, it's got to go under green, will select this piece and go and click on something that's green to borrow the color. This is why we divided it up because we have to go and select these pieces and recolor them where appropriate. Under green, over red, under green, over red, under green, needs to go under the green and over red. That one's perfect. Let's go and check the red. It's going over green, under blue, over green, under blue, over green, under blue, so it's perfect. Let's try the green, under red, over blue, under red, over blue, and it's perfect too. All we had to do was just run through these colors and just make sure that they're going in a pattern of under over, under over. Now we want to stick them back together again because I've got a few pieces here that are blue. The temptation might be in later versions of Illustrator to go and select everything and go to the shape builder tool. It's a really good tool to use. The problem is this, if I go and select over all these pieces that need to be blue, shape builder is going to make them red because that was the color here. It's going to be really difficult to get out the pieces that you want in the right color. I'm just going to choose "Edit, "Undo Merge". If you're working in a later version of Illustrator that has this shape builder tool, this is how I suggest you use it. You click on one of these shapes, the blue shape. From this dropdown list here we can select "Fill Color", and that will allow us when we click on this button here to select everything that is the same fill color so in fact, everything that's blue. Now let's go through with our shape builder tool and will join these three together because they make one piece. Then we'll join these three together by just dragging over them. Join these three together, and these three together. Now they're all done, we're just going to click away. Then we'll go and select the next color. Click here on this icon, because that's going to select all the red ones. Then we'll run through with the shape builder tool again. Select over these three, select over these three, select over these three, select over these three. Then you would go and repeat that with the green, select the green color, click here that selected everything run down with the shape builder. Now if you're not using a version of Illustrator that has a shape builder, then this is what you're going to do. You're going to come in here and you're going to click on all the shapes that need to be merged together. These three here, go to the Pathfinder and click "Unite". Click away, click, click, click to select these three shapes, unite them. Do that with these three too, unite and just check this one. You'd go through your braid that way if you don't have the shape builder tool. We've got our braid now in the next video, we're going to look at how we would go ahead and create this as a brush. 4. Pt 3 - Make and Recolor the Multi color Braid Brush: To finish off creating this as a brush, we're going to select over the entire shape and we're going to rotate it 90 degrees. So you just hold the Shift key as you rotate it around 90 degrees. It needs to be rotated in this direction because that's how pattern brushes work. But I really think it's easier to look at it in terms of a braid when it's up the other direction. Now let's go to the Rectangle Tool and we're going to create a no fill no stroke rectangle. And we want to go from this position here all the way up to this position here. You could do it from here to here as well. What you're looking for is that you're going to start your rectangle where the green and red intersect, and then finish it up here where green and red intersect again. So you just want to find a point that you've got in two places along your braid. And because these are now shapes, it's going to be really easy to line everything up because Illustrator's just going to snap to these positions because we're using Smart Guides. So let's just zoom in here to double-check that everything went as expected. So that's snapped in here, snapped in here. Now, I've tried this a few times before, and really what I like to do, which is a little unusual for these pattern brushes, is I like to use this bounding box to crop the shape. So what I'm going to do is because a bounding boxes on top of everything, I'm going to select absolutely everything, and I'm going down to the Pathfinder and I'm going to "Click" Crop. And what that does is it gets rid of every piece of the brush that I don't need. And I've found that this often gives me just a slightly more successful pattern brush in this instance. So I'm going to select over the shape. Let's go to the Brushes palette, New Brush, Pattern Brush, "Click" Okay. You can create a Corner Tile if you want to from the options available. If you don't want to create a Corner Tile or if your version of Illustrator doesn't support it, don't worry because if you're just going to paint this on Curvy lines then it doesn't matter. You don't want to set a Colorization method because this is a multi-colored brush. But if you wanted to paint a little bit thinner, you might drag it down to about 50 percent of its size. I'll "Click" Okay. I'm going to drag this portion out of the way because I don't need it any longer. I'll press D to get my default colors back and to deselect any special styles that are applied to whatever it is I'm about to make. I'll "Click" the Paintbrush Tool, "Click" My Brush, and just paint a Brushstroke. This is just a beautiful braid. It's just absolutely fantastic. I really really like this brush and I really like this effect. We can recolor it of course, very very easily. So I'm just going to select this long Brushstroke, going to the Recolor options. Here you can see we've got four colors. Well, we don't really want to recolor black, we just want to focus on the green, red, and blue that we're seeing in this brush. So each of those have got little arrows here. Let's "Click" Edit. I'm going to brighten this up a little bit, and I'm just going to create a monochromatic braid here. But you can easily experiment with your colors here when you get a color selection that you like, add a new color group and just "Click" Okay. So that's the second of our Braid Brushes created here in Illustrator. 5. Pt 4 - Rick Rack: For our rick rack design, we're again going to create a brand new document. I'm just working on 1500 pixels by 500 pixels in size. I'm going to create a rectangle. I'm just going to click here and my rectangle's going to be 450 pixels wide, and it's just going to be two pixels high. It's going to be a long, narrow rectangle. I want it to be filled, but I don't want it to have a stroke. For my fill, I'm going to choose a dark blue. I'm going to create a second rectangle. I'm just going to click here, and again, it's going to be 450 pixels wide. This time it's going to be three pixels tall. I'm going to create that as a slightly lighter blue. I'll select over both of these and I'm going to align them. I'm going to the Align panel, I'm going to make sure that I have my options showing and I'm going to choose Align to Selection or Key Object, either will work just fine right now. I'm going to align them with the Horizontal Align Left, so they are perfectly aligned to each other. I'm going to set the spacing here to zero. I'm going to click here on Vertical Distribute Space because what that does is it just puts these two shapes butted up against each other. I'm going to choose Object, Group, to group them together, and now I'm going to drag out three copies of this shape. I'll select over all of them, align them again, and again, go to Align to Key Object, and again distribute them so there is zero spacing between them. I've got a nice little arrangement of lines. At this stage, I'm going to choose Effect, Distort, and Transform, and then Zigzag because that's going to give us our rick rack look. I'll click Preview On. I'm going to choose smooth, and I'm going to adjust the ridges per segment. Now the ridges per segment needs to be an even value or else you're going to get this really weird distortion. You just want a nice even value, and we don't want its size to be quite that big. I might opt for more ridges, and less in the way of size. When you've got a look that you like, just click "OK". You can now select over this shape and choose Object, Expand Appearance so that you expand the shape. If you think it's a bit thick at this stage, just select either the entire group of shapes and just thin it out a little bit. Now you've got a piece of rick rack here, it's just got some really untidy ends on it. What I'm going to do is just zoom in to this end and I'm going to drag a rectangle over the end of it. I'm going to select the rectangle and all the other shapes, and I'm going to click here on Pathfinder, and I'm going to click "Trim", and that will just trim the ends off. I can go to this shape now, let's just go to the Group Selection tool, click on this shape, and just delete it. You can see we've got nice neat ends. I'm going to do the same over this end. Just drag a rectangle over the end, select everything, click "Trim". Go back to our Group Selection tool so that we can select just the shape that we used as a trim and just click on it to remove it. There is our neat piece of rick rack. In the next video, I'm going to show you very quickly how you can create this as a brush. 6. Pt 5 - Rick Rack Pattern Brush: To create our rick rack as a brush, we need to create a no fill, no stroke rectangle, that will be the bounding box. I'm going to select the rectangle tools, select no fill, no stroke and zoom in to a really small area of this rick rack. With the rectangle tools selected, I'll be able to pick up the anchor point at the top of this rick rack here. I'm just going to drag out a rectangle and it needs to go to the exact spot on the next lobe. You should be able to just sense that it is just snapping into position here. You just drag it, it's going to snap with those smart guides and that's going to bring it up here, so it just sits across the bottom of the rick rack. Now as I did with the braid brush earlier, I really like to go and grab all of this and use this as a crop rectangle. I'm just going to click on crop. That just gives me the pace that it's going to be my rick rack pattern brush. I'll click on the brush tool here. I'm going to click new brush, patent brush, click okay. Now the corner tiles here are pretty sad actually. You can select one if you like or just ignore the corner tiles. In earlier versions of Illustrator, you don't have corner tiles anyway. This going to reduce the size of this brush, going to not give it a colorization method, and I'll click, 'Okay.' Let's zoom back out. I'm going to press the letter D to go back to my default settings here and disable anything that was a style on my brush. I'm going to click on my brush, click on my rick rack, and let's just draw a piece of rick rack. That's drawing like rick rack looks. Of course with rick rack you can also apply it to any pattern brush. You can apply it to something like a circle. Go to circle selected here. I'm just going to click here on my brush and I get a circle that has this rick rack pattern. Of course, like any of these brushes, we can just click on the recolor artwork option. Make sure that the two blues that we have in our rick rack are selected as editable colors go into edit. Lets brighten this up a little bit, and we can drag these around to create a different color rick rack. I've got my link harmony colors option here, they selected, so that these colors are going to move independently of each other. If you link it, then the colors are going to travel together. you're always going to have this stable relationship between the two colors that you're using in your rick rack. When you're done, click to add a new color group and just click okay. We've added that now as a new pattern brush so we can use it in future. It's just click away from the circle I'm working on. Let's click the pattern brush. Click on this, and we now have a second colored pattern brush for our rick rack. 7. Pt 6 - Twisted Loops: The final design that we're going to do it in this class is a sort of twisted loop. It's almost got a rope-like look to it. I'll choose File New and going back to my 500 pixel by 500 pixel document. I'm going to create a line. I'm just going to click on the line segment tool. My line is going to be just 200 pixels in length. It's got no fill and it's got a stroke. I'm going to choose effective Stuart and transform and then zig-zag and click Preview. In this instance, I want a single loop. I'm going to click Smooth and I'm going to bring this down to just one because I want this loop. Now I'm going to increase the size so I get a nice twist to my loop. I'm thinking something around about 45 is probably a pretty good value here. I'll click Okay. I'm going to choose object expand appearance so that we get just a single loop. I'm going to rotate this around so that it's standing upright and it's a little bit easier to see what the effect is going to look like. I'm going to set this to a color. Again, we can change these colors later on, we just want something to work with for now. I'm going to set its stroke to a really large value I think something like about 30 for now. I'll choose object, transform, reflect, and I'm just going to reflect this over the vertical and I need a copy, so I'll click Copy. I'll select one of these shapes and I'm going to give it a different color. Now my stroke's I've grossly underestimated how thick they need to be, I'm just going to click in here and hold the shift key as I up arrow because I want the strikes to be really quite thick, about this thickness. I'll select over these shapes and choose object expand. Now, these shapes have got a stroke but they have no fill. I'm going to turn off fill because I only want to expand the stroke that I have and I'll click Okay. I'll select over these shapes and choose object ungroup until ungroup is no longer an option. Now if you watched the earlier videos, you're probably going to get a sense of what we're going to do next. I'll select over these two shapes and go to the Pathfinder, if you don't see Pathfinder choose Window, and then Pathfinder. I'm going to use divide. Again I'll select over the shapes and I'm going to ungroup these until ungroup is no longer an option. Now I have a series of shapes and what we need to do is to just create this under overlook. I'm going to select just this shape and I'm going to the eyedropper, I'm just going to sample this yellow color and that's giving me this sort of a twist that is going to be integral to my pattern brush. Now at this stage, I'm going to put this together, if you're working in an earlier version of Illustrator, you're going to select over all of these shapes here that need to belong together and just go to the Unite command here. In a later version of Illustrator, you can select on a shape, make sure that this option here set to fill color and click on it and that's going to select everything that has the same fill color. You can now use the shape builder tool to drag over these three pieces to join them together. We now have everything that we need for our pattern brush except that it's going the wrong way. Again, I'm going to hold the shift key as I just rotate this to go in this direction. Select Diver everything I don't need to create a bounding box because this is a perfect pattern-base. I'll click the Brush tool. This time I'm going to click the Flyout menu, New Brush, pattern brushes, no matter how you get to this dialog, that's just another way of getting there. You can see this nice little rope effect. The corner tiles are pretty awful. You can choose a corner tile or not, as you wish in earlier versions of illustrator you're not just not going to get a choice because they don't do corner tiles. We don't want to set a colorization method, but I think this brush is going to be really, really big. So before we start, why don't we just sort of wind it down to about 20 percent and click Okay. I'll move it out of the way, I'm going to press the letter D to get back to our default values here, click on the Brush, and I'm going to click on my Brush here and just paint it out. It's painting with a nice little twist to it and of course, like all these other brushes, we can just select on it and click the re-color artwork tool. Make sure that these two colors are able to be changed. Click Edit, either select or deselect the link harmony colors, and then just drag these around to a different position to get the colors that you want in your rope or twisted element here. When you're done, click to add a new color group, click Okay and you'll see you'll get a second brush in your brushes dialogue. You now have both brushes that are going to paint when you select on them in Illustrator. 8. Pt 7 Project and Wrap up: Your project for this class will be to create one or more of the designs that I've shown you in the class. If you came here to learn how to make rickrack, then do a rickrack. If you like the braids, go and do a braid. If you want to do them all, that's fine with me too. That's wonderful. Post an image of your completed design in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class, and that you've learned things about working in Illustrator that you weren't aware of before. As you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asked you if you would have recommended this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learned from it, do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend the class. Secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed it. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. 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, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.