Circle Based Patterns in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch Circle based patterns - Intro: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of graphic design for lunch. Today we're looking at creating three circle based or parts circle based patterns in Illustrator. We're going to create them using tools available in most versions of Illustrator, including Pro CS6 versions. As you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you, want to learn more about Illustrator. If you would like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started creating patterns based on circles or parts of a circle in Illustrator. 2. Circle Based Patterns - Part 1: For our first pattern, we're going to create a new document. It's going to be 300 pixels by 200 pixels in size. I'm working in RGB color mode, and I have disabled Align New Objects to pixel grid. I'll click "Okay." We're going to create a pattern of quarter circles and we could go to the Ellipse tool to create it, make circles, and then remove the pieces that we don't want. But we can do it more effectively with the Arc tool. The Arc tool up here shares a toolbar position with the Line Segment tool. I'm going to click on the "Arc tool" and click once on my document. I want the length of the x and y axes to both be 100 to create an arc that's going to be half of this document's height. I want the type to be closed, so it's going to be a closed shape. Base along the x axis is just fine. I want the slope to be 50, so it's going to be a nice, smooth quarter circle, and I'll click "Okay". I'm going to flip my stroke and fill colors here, so I've got a filled shape and I'm going to select a color for this. Then I'm going to position this shape along the bottom edge of the document. I'm going to duplicate this by Alt dragging a duplicate away, re-color the duplicate, and then continue to do so until I fill the document with six quarter circles. Before I continue, I'm just going to make sure that these are all perfectly aligned, so what I'm looking at up here in the Tool Options panel is the positioning for this indicator here, this reference point here, and it's set to zero and 50 so that's nice and even. I'm just looking at the reference point and just checking that each of these values is a nice round number like a 100 and 50, those are the values I'm looking for here at 200 and 50. That means that that's aligned perfectly. Down here, just double checking to make sure that they're all perfectly aligned. Now that I've done this, I'm ready to go ahead and to make my pattern. If you're using Illustrator CS5, CS4, or an earlier version, you're going to have to create your pattern a little differently. So I suggest that you go ahead to the next video, where I'm going to deal with creating this pattern in earlier versions of Illustrator. If you're using Illustrator CS6 or later, then you have a pattern tool that you can use. I'm going to go ahead now and show you how to use that. To use the pattern make tool, we are first of all going to zoom out a little bit so that we can see space around this pattern, because we're going to want to see it as we develop it, then I'm going to use the Selection tool to select over all of the objects on the art board and choose "Object", "Pattern", "Make". I'll click "Okay"'. Now, I have my pattern dialogue set to tile type at grid, I want to have a 5 by 5 grid which is just going to allow me to see the pattern as I'm developing it. It's got nothing to do with the final pattern, it's just got to do with the feed back you are receiving. I've got dim copies set to 90 percent, so I can actually see the copies pretty clearly. They're almost at a 100 percent. I don't want to show my tile edge, so I'm just going to disable that. In here are the elements that go to make up my pattern. I'm going to select on each of these in turn and consider rotating them to create a slightly different pattern. If you make a mistake and grab too many shapes, or if you move them out of alignment, just press Control or Command Z to undo it and go back and start again. Now it may not be clear which shapes you can select. I'm trying to select this yellow shape up here, it's not selectable. This is the yellow shape that actually contributes to the pattern so again I'm going to rotate it. As you develop your pattern, you're going to see it live on the screen. When you've got a pattern that you like, you're ready to continue, and to do that, you're going to click "Done". What that does is it adds the edited pattern to the pattern swatches here in Illustrator, and you're taken back to your original design. So you haven't lost your pattern, it's just that it's been saved in the Swatches palette. I'm going to create a second art board. I'm going to click on the art board tool to select it. I'm just going to drag out a second art board, and I'm just going to make it the same size as the original, but it can be any size that you like. I'm going to fill it with a rectangle, so I'm going to add a rectangle that is the exact size of the art board, 300 by 200. I'm going to center it on the art board, using these two icons here to vertically and horizontally align the shape. Now, I'm opening a Swatches palette, the fill color is at the front, and I'm just going to fill it with my pattern. Let's just scale it down with object transform scale, click on "Preview disable transform objects", and let's just see it at say 50 percent. Well, I think we can go even smaller on this. So this is the pattern swatch that we've created. Now if you want to go ahead and create a second pattern swatch, you can do so. All you need to do is to repeat exactly what I've done. I'm going to speed up the video now as I do just that. Once you've made your second pattern, all you need to do is to re select the rectangle here and try out your second pattern. So there's the second of our patterns. If you're using Illustrator CS6 or later, you can skip the next video, and go onto the one after where we're going to create a very different pattern. 3. Circle Based Patterns - Part 2: If you're using Illustrator CS5 or earlier, you don't have a Pattern Make tool. We're going to have to make this pattern by hand. We're going to start by rotating some of the shapes here just to get a more interesting pattern design. You want to make sure that you rotate them 90, 180 or 270 degrees. You do that by just holding the Shift key as you rotate them. Once you've rotated your shapes into an interesting pattern you can create your rectangle. You are just going to click on the document, create a rectangle that's 300 by 200 pixels in size. It should have no fill and no stroke. You are going to align it to the art board so it's nicely aligned. In the last panel, you're going to make sure that it's positioned immediately behind all of the shapes that got to make up your pattern. These are all the shapes that got to make up my pattern, so I'm going to take this rectangle all the way down to the end here. Now I've got a rectangle over on the side, we're going to use in a minute, but I'm just going to lock that away and hide it right now so it's taken out of the work that we're doing here. Now when I click on Layer 1 in the last pallet, everything that is on this art board, including the rectangle is selected and nothing else. I'm going to open up the swatches panel, I'm just going to drag and drop this pattern swatch into position up here and our new pattern swatch is the third one here. The other one I created when I was looking at creating these patterns for Illustrator CS6 and lighter users. Now on this art board here, I've got a filled rectangle which is the size of the art board. I'm just going to select it here and instead of the black fill, I'm going to fill it with the pattern that we just made. Now we're going to resize it with Object, Transform, Scale. I'm going to not transform the object, but I'm going to transform the pattern and I'll just click OK. There's the first of our patterns. If we want to go ahead and create a second pattern, we're just going back to our original pattern swatch and now we can make some changes to this by rotating the shapes again to create a different design. To make the next pattern we'll select either everything on this art board, we know that the non-filled non striked rectangles are at the very back because that's where we put it last time, I'm just going to drag and drop everything into the swatches' panel up here. Let's go back to our pattern-filled shape here, I'm going to click on it and then click on the new pattern that we just made. We can toggle between the first and the second patterns that we made. Now these are the patterns here that I made for CS6 and lighter users, and it's working exactly the same. There's no difference in the patterns that are made using the Pattern Make tool. It's just that you don't have it in earlier versions of Illustrator so you're going to have to build these patterns by hand, just as we've done here. 4. Circle Based Patterns - Part 3: For our next pattern, we're going to start with a document that's going to be 200 pixels by 200. This is just a square document, RGB color mode,and again turn off aligned new objects to pixel grid and click "Okay" We're going to start out by creating a circle. I'm going to the ellipse tool, and I'm just going to click once on my document and I'm going to create a very small circle. It's 10 pixels by 10 pixels, and I'll click "Okay". Now I'm going to fill it with a color and I'm going to remove the stroke. I'm just going to bring the fill color to the floor because that's going to make things easier in just a minute. I'm going to create a second circle and this one's going to be a 100 by 100. Now I'm going to color these two circles. What we're going to do is we're going to make a step to blend. I'll choose two colors that are going to sort of blend together nicely. I'm going to choose a sort of dark color for the middle, and then a light color for the outside, which is going to be what a pattern is going to be in a minute. We're going to select either or both the shapes and we'll create a blend using the blend tool. I'm clicking on the blend tool, clicking on the two shapes, and I get a seamless transition from the orangey-brown color through to the yellow. Not exactly what I want, so I'm going to double-click the blend tool and I'm going to turn preview on. I want specified steps because I want to control how many steps I have here, I'm just going to type six. This gives me a series of circles, H1, which is a slightly different color between this brownie orange and this yellow. I'm just going to click "Okay". Because this is a blend, we're going to need to expand it, I'll choose object, expand, and click "Okay", and that creates just the circles and they'll also be grouped. I want to choose "Object Ungroup", to ungroup them. In the last pallet, we would expect to say, eight circles here, they start and finish in the six in the middle, and we've just got eight circular paths here. I'm going to select all of them, and then I'm going to the align option. Again to the "Fly-out" menu I'm going to choose "Show Options" and I want to align to selection at the moment. I'm just going to click these two icons, horizontal align center, vertical align center, and that aligns all the shapes over the top of each other. The problem is that the big ones at the top and the little ones at the bottom. Well, we can solve that by clicking on this path. It's not so much that you're selecting it, but that you clicking on this path, and then shift click on the bottom most one. When they're selected, we can open up this panel and just click reverse order. That just reverses the order of the paths in the last pallet, so now we've got the little one on the top. With everything still selected here, I'm going to the pathfinder, and what I want to do is I want each of these shapes to just be the shape that we're actually saying. I don't want a big circle and then a little circle and a little circle, I just want to say rings of color. I'm going to click here on divide, and then I'm going to choose object ungroup. Now what we're going to have is a whole series of rings with a circle in the middle, so that's what we needed to do for this side. I'm going re-select all these shapes so that I just pulled it apart, and I'm just going to realign them so that they look like a series of circles, but in actual fact they are shapes. Now I'm going to select either all of them you'll see in the path palate, all we've got is a path and a series of compound paths, and I'm going to group them. This is going to be the basis of our pattern. Now at this stage, if you're using Illustrator, say S6 or either you're ready to go ahead and start using the pattern make tool. If you're using an earlier version of Illustrator size 5, size 4 or earlier, then you can skip ahead now to the next video where I'm going to show you how to make this pattern piece by hand. Let's continue now for size six and later users. With the shapes selected, you're going to choose object, pattern, make, and click "okay", and let's try it, It's going to show you the basic pattern that it's created for you, which needs a little bit of tweaking. For the tile type, we're going to select brick by row because that's going to offset these circles from each other. Now at the moment, this width and height are joined together, they're linked so that if I change the width, I'm also going to change the height, I don't want to do that. I'm going to click here to break that link, so I should see those two little links of a chain with little markers beside them indicating that the link has now been broken. What I want to do is to adjust the height here, and it's going to be 50 pixels. Right now this pattern is pointing in a direction so that the shapes are sort of pointing downwards. If you want them to point the other way, you can just click here, and this will reverse the pattern. Off course later on, even if we do create the pattern this way, we can still invert it by just rotating the pattern within the shape by 180 degrees. We'll start with this one, so I'm just going to leave mine pointing upwards. I'm ready now to go ahead and create my patterns, so I'm just going to click "Done". We'll come back and we'll just say the original shape on the art board, but we've got a pattern tile up here in the swatches panel. I'm going to click on the art board tool and I'm going to Alt or option drag, I second outboard away from the first. Just going to remove the shape from that because we don't need that. We control zero to center this art board on the screen, and I'm going to fill it with a rectangle. Rectangle is going to be the exact same size as the art board, 200 by 200 pixels, and I'm going to align it to the art board. The fill is at the four here, so now I can just go and click on my pattern swatch to fill my shape with my pattern. I can now scale it down. I'm going to deselect, transform objects, but I want to transform my pattern and I've got the uniform setting here to 20 percent, and I'll click "Okay". The Pattern was designed so it would be with the loops or the curves pointing upwards. If we want to invert it, we can do it easily by choosing objects transform, rotate. In this case, I'm just going to rotate the pattern. I've got transformed pattern selected, I'm not going to rotate the object, I'm just going to rotate this a 180 degrees, and that just flips it over and click "Okay". This is the second of our circular patterns created, and this time with the pattern make tool in the illustrator say, S6 and lighter. 5. Circle Based Patterns - Part 4: If you're using Illustrator CS6 or light and you've already create this pattern, you can skip forward to the next video. However, if you're using Illustrator CS5, CS4 or earlier, going to need to build this pattern by hand, So we're going to see how to do that now. This is the shape that we already created in the last video, and it's all been grouped together, so we're ready to go. I'm going to start by dragging this shape down to the very bottom of the art board here. I'm going to line it up to the bottom of the art board. I can test it by just checking the reference point here as being the middle of these nine boxes here and I want to make sure that it's at 50 and 200 pixels. That tells me it's exactly in position. I'm going to hold the ALT key as I drag, I duplicate of this shape away, and I want to align this up so that it's lined up to the top right corner of the shape that I just created and will check its middle reference point as well. It should be at a 100 and 150. I'm going to ALT drag, I duplicate away and place it over here. Again we're going to check its middle reference point as being zero and 150. I need one more shapes, so I'm going ALT drag this shape back up here and just line it up to the top corner of the shape below and again, it's middle reference point should be 50 and a 100. If we do this, we've got all the bits that we need to make our pattern piece. The pattern piece that we're going to create is going to have the circles on the bottom. If you want the circles to be on the top, then you'll just need to reverse the order of the shapes. You would do that by selecting these two groups of shapes, click on one shift, click on the other, choose object, arrange, and then bring forward. This one at the bottom, you'll select it and choose object arrange, bring to front because you want it at the very front. Before you go, you should just double check to make sure that these haven't moved in any way because if they move at all, you're going to lose your pattern piece. Now we need to create the actual pattern rectangle. I'm going to click on the Rectangle tool here and we're going to click it to create a rectangle that has a 100 pixels by a 100 pixels, in other words, a quarter of this document. I'm just going to move this over here, so it's lined up perfectly in the bottom corner of the art board. I am also going to turn off its stroke and its fill. Again I'm just making sure that this shape that I have selected is a 100 pixels by a 100 pixels, I'm going to open the transform dialogue and just make sure that its center point with center reference point is at 50, which it's not, so I'm just going to make sure that I type in 50 and then a 150. That's its reference point in place. Going to the last pattern am going to drag the rectangle that I just created underneath everything so its at the very back. I'm going to select everything including the rectangle and now I'm just going to drag and drop this into this swatches panel to create our pattern swatch. So it's going to be the last one in the panel here. I'm going to click on the art board too and I'm just going to ALT drag, I duplicate art board out of the way so that we can work on that. I'm going to get rid of all the objects on this duplicate art board because I don't need them, I'm going to add a rectangle to the art board that is 200 pixels by 200 pixels because that's the size of this art board, and I'm going to center it, bring the fill to the foreground, and let's go and get our pattern swatch which is this one here and there is our pattern. Object transform scale, so we can see it at a smaller size. I'm just going to select Transform patterns, deselect transform objects, I've got 20 percent, I'll click Okay. Of course if we want this to be rotated, we can easily do that by choosing object transform rotate. This is already set to a 180, so we can say that this was the original pattern, and if we preview our 180 degree rotation on the pattern, not the shape, this is what we're going to get so click Okay. That is how you would create the pattern if you're using Illustrator CS5 or earlier. Of course this also works in later versions of illustrator, but you don't have the pattern make tools so this is the way you are going to make this pattern. 6. Circle Based Patterns Part 5: For our final pattern, we're again going to create a fixed size document, it just needs to be square. It doesn't matter what size it might be 200 pixels by 200 pixels. Align new objects to pixel grid is turned off. I'm in RGB color mode. I'll click "Okay". I'm going to start with a circle and I'm just going to click on the document. I'm going to make my circle 25 pixels in diameter so I've typed 25 and 25 as width and height. I'll click "Okay". Now I don't want it to have a strike, but I do want it to have a fill so I'm just going to go and give it a fill color and I want this to be aligned to the very center of the artboard. I'm going to the Align panel here, Show Options up here and I'm going to choose Align to Artboard and I'm just going to center this shape on the artboard. Well, that doesn't look very center to me so let's try that again. That looks better. Now, this multicolored dot pattern is going to require us to create a second dot. I'm just going to Alt, drag a duplicate away. I'm going to color this a different color so I'm going for a blue and I'm going to move this up here to the very top corner of the document. I'm making sure I'm looking at its center point and I'm just double-checking to make sure that these values look correct, 200 and zero is perfect. Now I'm going to Alt, drag a duplicate of this. I'm going to drop it down at the very bottom. Again, just quickly double-checking these locations, the x and the y. I'm going to click to select this shape, Shift-click on this one and then drag again a duplicate of these two shapes over to here. I'm again going to double-check that these values look correct and they do. This is going to give me my multi-colored dot pattern and I'm going to have a blue dot and a pink dot. Let's go again to my rectangle tool. My artboard is 200 by 200 so I'm going to create a rectangle that is the exact same size. I'm going to center it on the artboard. I'm going to turn off its fill and stroke and in the last palette, I'm going to make sure that it is at the very, very back of the document. Now I'm going to select everything by just clicking on this layer icon here that then selects everything in the document. I open up my Swatches panel and use the selection tool to just drag and drop this into the very top row of the Swatches panel. You hardly see much as a swatch because it's just such a small swatch. Let's go and create another artboard. I'm just going to make mine 200 by 200 pixels in size. I'm going to click on the Rectangle tool, add a rectangle that is the exact same size as the artboard and I'm just going to center that in position. I have the fill color selected over here so I'm going to my Swatches panel and I'm just going to fill it with my pattern swatch. Then I'm going to just scale it down so that we can see it, Object Transform Scale. I want to transform my pattern but not my object and I've got a slight line through my pattern so I'm just going to keep increasing the size until that line disappears and I'll click "Okay". This is giving us a pattern of multi-colored dots and this is a handy pattern style to understand and know how to use because it can be adapted for other things. Let's quickly go back to this document and let's remove our circles. This time I'm going to create an ellipse. I'm going to create an ellipse that is 50 wide and 25 tall. I'm going to center this in the middle of the document or in the middle of the artboard and I'm going to duplicate it. I'm going to take it to the four corners as I did before, and I'm going to re-color it. I'm just going to go for an orange color this time. Double-check the positioning. Alt, drag a duplicate away, double-check its positioning. I'm going to select both of these. Alt, drag a duplicate away, and double-check the positioning over here. Now before I finish up, I'm going to rotate this ellipse 90 degrees. Now I've got my rectangle at the back, so I'm going to select it and all the other objects on this particular artboard, but not the filled rectangle over here, of course. Then I'm going to drag and drop this into the Swatches panel just up in the top here. Now let's click on this shape here, and let's fill it with our new swatch and then let's go and see what we've got. What we've done this time is again chosen that multicolored option, but multicolored option also allows us to build a pattern that has shapes that are flipped. Here we've got some ellipses that are tall and some ellipses that are wider so this same basic pattern style that we've created here is adaptable to a lot of patterns in Illustrator. Your project for this class is going to be to create some of these patterns for yourself and then post the results of your pattern-making in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learnt something about creating some interesting and very different patterns in Illustrator. If you did enjoy this class and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please do so. This helps others to identify this as a class that they may want to take and if you would like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments 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.