Complex Patterns with MadPattern templates in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch MadPatterns - Intro: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch creating, rotated, reflective, repeating patterns using the MadPattern templates. Today we're looking at creating very, very complex, reflective, repeating patterns in Illustrator. These are the kind of patterns that you simply can't create with the illustrator pattern make tool, that was launched in Illustrator CS6. These are way more complex patterns than that pattern make tool will create. We're going to look at the templates, we're going to download, we're going to look at how to interpret them, and understand what we're getting, we're going to create a complex pattern, and then we'll go ahead and save it as a vector pattern swatch. Now as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're 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'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to to of your comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now if you're ready, let's get started creating these complex reflective repeating patterns in Illustrator. 2. Complex Reflected Rotated Patterns using MadPattern templates - Part 1: The patterns that we're going to be creating in this video, we're going to create using templates, which we can download. Now there is illustrated templates and you're going to find them at a site called madpatten.com. I'll give you a link to that in the class project area. Now these are free to download. I'll just say, they've been around for many years. They are compatible with Illustrator CS4 and CS5, and I've also tested them out in all later versions, so they're going to work just fine with any version of Illustrator. You're going to come to the site here and you're just going to click to download these Illustrator files. They just going to download into your downloads folder. You go to your downloads folder, you're going to double-click on your madpattern 1.0 zip file, and then on a PC, you're going to click to extract your files. On a Mac, you just going to double-click the file and they should extract automatically. Now, I've gone ahead already and extracted them into my downloads folder and here they are. What you get is a series of just very, very small Illustrator template files which right now means practically nothing to you. I suggest next you go to this website here. This is actually my website. A few years ago, I put a page up on my website which contained images of all the MadPattern repeating pattern elements. You can see how they are going to repeat and you can make some choices from these images as to which of these templates you want to use because you can learn a lot about them by just looking at these images. We're going to do just that now. I'm just going to roll down to the bottom here because we're going to start with this one here. This is pgg. When we look at the letters F, We can see how a pattern that's made in this little triangle here is going to reflect. We can learn something about the possibilities of this pattern actually being a mirror image at some point. This one is not going to mirror image and we're going to see why in just a minute. Let's swing either to Illustrator, and I have pgg, I open here. I'm just going to select a color that we can work with. I'm going to place a dot in the middle of this template. This was the area that we work with in this MadPattern template. If you click them and do something out here, nothing happens. Everything happens within this triangle here. But we're looking at the final pattern here. What you want to do when you go and open these patterns up first of all, I'm just undoing everything here, is to test where they're going to mirror because that can be really handy to know. I'm just drawing a line down here and you can see that the line is not being reflected across this line. So there is no mirroring on this axis. I'm going to undo that. Let's go down here. There's no mirror in here either on this axis. The pattern doesn't have a mirror across this axis here. Let's undo that and let's put a line in here. While here there's some some mirroring, but this pace here is not reflected right across here. It's actually turned upside down. We can prove that by just doing this. You can say that this is the shape up one way and it's down the other way here. By just puddling around at this stage with your pattern, you can get a feel for how this triangle here relates to the pattern that you are ultimately going to create. Now let's go and have a look at another one that does have some mirroring built in. Let's go back here and we're looking at p4m-rotated. This one's got mirroring across these axes here. So we're going to get something of a mini kaleidoscope effect almost with this particular template. Having looked at this panel, let's now go and see it in Illustrator. I have it here. This is pm4-rotated. Now let's just make sure I'm in the right spot here. Yeah, I am. Let's draw along this line here. You can see that we've got mirroring across this axis. Anything that we draw on this line here is going to be mirrored over the other side. That's something really important about this template and it gives us some really interesting results, you can already see with just one line, we've got an interesting pattern. Let's undo that and let's have a look and see what's happening along this line. Well, there's mirroring here too. We've got two axes that are going to mirror. Let's try the third one. This one is mirroring too. This is a really complex design and you can get some really quite complex results with this template with very little work. Let's just go and add a couple of dots to this. With just three dots, you can say that we've got a rotation point here that creates a lot of dots. One down here that creates a lot of dots too, but the one over here just creates four dots. It's a little bit less complex on this particular point, but very complex up here and down here. Now that we've looked at these templates, let's go and actually create a pattern using one of them. The pattern we're going to create, we're going to do it with p4. The reason why I chose p4 is it's got a really cute little rotation here. There's no mirroring for this one, but there is a really nice rotation that we're going to use. 3. Complex Reflected Rotated Patterns using MadPattern templates - Part 2: The first thing that we'll need to do to actually use the P4 template, is to go and open it. So I'm going to choose file, and then open. I'm just going to pick up my mad pattern templates, and then go and open P4. Now, this is what the mad pattern templates all will look like when you open them. They have a little bit of information here, which has really good reference information. But it doesn't go quite as far as we're going to go in this tutorial, because the way that this person has designed these instructions, they are going to be creating JPEG or bitmap resulting images. So their swatches are going to be bitmaps. Well, I'm going to show you how you can make this as vector patterns swatches. So this is not going to be the way we're going to save them, but we're still ways off that now. So down here in the last pallet, what you can do is, you can turn off the template elements. So this bottom layer here, is just these letters F, so you can turn them off so you don't see them. Then you can turn off the info here, by just disabling this. These are the things you need to focus on. You can ignore this art board right now, this one sitting here. This is the area in which you're going to create your pattern. You might have noticed already, that this one is based on a square, whereas the others were based on a triangle, and you'll find that some are square and some are triangular. It just varies from template-to-template. So first thing I'm going to do is press Control or Command 0, just to zoom in so I can see everything clearly. Before you start drawing on this, you need to work out where you're going to draw. So you're going to go to this layer area here. It's going to be called Clip Art Board, and it's visible. You're going to click to open it. Inside that, will be a layer, and the layer's name is going to be the template name. So we came here to use P4, so the layer name is P4. If you were using, PM4 rotated, then that's what the layer name would be. So you know you're in the right place. I'm going to click to open this. What you're looking for is this. You're looking for clipped elements. This is a layer, and in this layer is a clipping mask. Now, I have a class on clipping masks, and I will show you in that class how to create layer clipping mask. This is what we've got here, it's a layer clipping mask. Very unusual type of mask, so I'm also going to give you a link to that class in the class project area, but suffice it for today, all you need to know, is that you need to click on clipped elements, and this is where you're going to draw. I'm going to zoom in so that we can see this area more clearly, because this is where we're going to draw our pattern. Now, I have a plan for this pattern to make use of the rotation, because this shape is going to be rotated four times. I'm going to draw something with the pencil tool, just so that you can see that it can be drawn with the pencil tool. I'm just going to draw out a curl here. I've used the pencil tool for this. If I double-click on the pencil tool, you can see that I've got the fidelity setting right up here towards smooth, so I'm getting a smooth result, It's not very bumpy at all. If you're happier with the pen tool, just go ahead and use the pen tool. Now, I'm looking at this point here and just saying that it's not quite lining up the way I want it to, so I'm just going to move my path into position, so that's right down in the bottom corner of this shape, and you can see then that we are getting this nice little rotation here. Now, my line is very plain, so what I'm going to do is apply one of these brush profiles to it. I'm going to choose this one here, and then I'm going to wind up the brush size a little bit to get a wispy spiral. Now, if I think my spiral is not big enough, I can just drag out here to make it a little bit bigger. Want to keep its starting point down here, but this is looking a little bit better here. Now I'm going to just add some dots with the blob brush tool. I've got a really big blob brush here, so I'm just shrinking it down using the open square bracket to re-size it. I'm going to type one blob there and one over here. Now, I'm going to press the open square bracket once more. This time this will create a slightly smaller dot. I'm just going to place these in position, and I'm going to just continue to decrease my brush size and just add some dots. Each press of the open square bracket K, is just reducing the dot size a little bit. Now, before we go on and finish up this shape, let's have a look and see what's happening in the last pallet. You'll see that we had selected clipped elements and we started to draw with clipped elements selected. What's happening is that all these shapes are appearing in the clipped elements area, and the clipping mask is at the very back. The clipping mask is working like this. I'm going to start drawing a line just outside this box. You can see that even though the line is in the clipped elements, it's not being shown. It's not part of this repetition, because it's outside the clipping mask. The clipping mask is this area here, and it's ensuring that only things that are drawn in this area are actually going to be part of the patterns. I don't need this, and it's a little confusing, so I'm just going to get rid of it. Now, I'm going to go ahead and add a few other little elements to this pattern, and I'm going to speed up the video as I do. I'm going to come back in a minute, and save this as a vector patterns swash. 4. Graphic Design for Lunch MadPatterns Part 3: Now that I've completed my pattern, I'm ready to go ahead and save it as a pattern swatch. The first thing I'm going to do is go to the Artboard talks. I need to read off the dimensions of this artboard, so I've just clicked in the little art board that will be in the middle of your document, and it's important that you make note of these dimensions. Mine is 200 by 200 pixels in size, but if yours has a fractional measurement and many of these art boards are different sizes. If it has, say 200.05, then you need to write down the entire number and use that because that's critical to this being a success. Once you've made a note of your art board size, I'm just going to delete my art board because I don't need that any longer, and then I'm going back to the selection tool because I want to be out of artboard mode. Next up, we need to expand the elements that are our pattern piece, so I'm going over here to the last pallet and I'm going to open up my p4 layer. I'm going to scroll down here and I'm going to turn off the lock icon on the clipping mask. I'm going to roll back up here and I'm going to locate my dummy path and it has a lock on it too and I'm going to disable that. I'm going to select the entire contents of the layer that has a name that corresponds with the pattern template I'm using, and I'm using p4, so I'm clicking on the p4 layer here. Then I'm going to choose object, expand appearance. Your pattern may or may not look as confusing as this when you expand it, so some of them expand a little bit differently than others. I'm just going to click away from here. Now I'm going to the Rectangle tool, and I'm just going to click to create a rectangle. There's 200 pixels by 200 pixels in size, because that was my artboard size. It doesn't matter where I put it, so I'm just going to put it in this area here. It doesn't have to be lined up or anything, but it does have to have no fill and no stroke. I'm just going to set no fill and no stroke. If you're familiar with making repeating patterns in versions of Illustrator prior to CS6, not using the pattern make tool, you will know that this rectangle has to be behind everything. I've still got it selected, so I'm going to choose, object, arrange, send to back, and that just sends it behind all the elements that are on this p4 layer. Now I'm going to select my p4 layer again and I've got my no fill, no stroke rectangle plus my entire pattern piece here. I'm going to open up the swatches palette, and I'm just going to drag from the middle of my rectangle area and drop everything into the swatches panel here. You should see a little swatch appearing. Now I'm just going to click away from my artboard and from my pattern elements. I'm going to create a brand new layer, so I'm going to the very top of the document, I'm going to create a brand new layer. Now if you're going to forget anything, it's probably going to be this and it's not going to be really easy to see what's gone wrong if you don't do this, so just be really, really aware that you're going to need to put everything on a new layer right now. We're going to create a new artboard. I'm just going to drag out a smallish sort doesn't have to be huge at this stage. I'm just going to click on the selection tool, so I'm going back to selection mode. I'm making sure that I have targeted this new layer at the very top of the last pallet. Again, this is critical and this is probably where you're going to make a mistake. I'm going to the Rectangle Tool and I'm going to drag out a rectangle over my artboard. My fill color is at the front, so I'm just going to click on my pattern swatch to fill my rectangle with my pattern swatch, and from here I can go and resize it. Object, transform, scale. I don't want to transform my object. I do want to transform my pattern and I can just bring down the scale if I wish to. It's also possible to rotate this with, object, transform, rotate. Again, I'm going to click on preview and I'm just going to rotate this 45 degrees and click okay. There is a vector pattern swatch created using a MadPattern template. Of course, since you've gone to all the trouble of making this pattern swatch, you'll want to save it. I'm just going to click the down pointing arrow here and make sure to save your swatch library as AI so that you can have access to it in future. Your project for this class is going to be to go and download the MadPattern templates. Select the pattern to use and you can go to the website here to have a look and see what the patent images look like and see one that you might want to use and then go ahead and create a pattern using that template. Post the result of making your vector pattern in the class project area. Please, if you want to do multiple patterns, go ahead and do so. These MadPattern templates are amazing fun and you can do stuff with them that would be very difficult to do in Illustrator any other way, and this is really very, very simple. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've enjoyed working with the MadPattern templates. If you did enjoy this class and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps others to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd 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. 5. Add a background to a MadPattern Pattern Swatch: This is an additional bonus video for the mad pattern class, and I've chosen to make a video because I think that the question that I got from one of my students, Mona, is probably a little bit easier to explain visually than it is to explain in writing. So let's go and have a look and say what her question was and how we're going to solve it. So what she asked me was how she could add a background behind one of these mad patent Patton's. And what I suggested was that the first thing that she should do is to score ahead and follow the videos and get to the stage way. She has the pattern pace in her swatches panel. We're going to go all the way through to that now. I have the pattern in use here on another art board, So what I'm going to do is just get rid of that and let's say how you would get I color background behind your pattern. Well, what we're going to do is we're going to drag the new patents, watch out off the swatches panel and just dump it here where we can set Now you can say that there's a lot happening in this pattern, but all we need to do at this stage is to go to the last panel. Just ignore what's going on here and let's focus on the last panel. Here is the layer that has the pattern pace in it over here, and this is the group. It's all these bits and pieces that we were working on earlier. But what we're focusing on is this rectangle, because it's this rectangle at the very back that is a no Phil North struck rectangle, and it's marking out the component paces that are the actual pattern. And so if we fill this with a background color, we're going to get a background color for our pattern. But don't go ahead and fill it yet, because this is also marking out where our pattern that is. So if you destroy this rectangle, you're going to lose your pattern. So what we'll do is duplicate. I'll drag it onto the new icon here, so I've got two rectangles here exactly the same. Both know Phil, No strike rectangles. Well, we're going to select the one that's not at the very bottom it has to obey above the bottom because this knife il mostro rectangle here has to be at the bottom of everything or it doesn't work. So once you've got your duplicate, you're going to select the top most one of those. And with its selected now we can go on Philip, so I'm just going to add a background color to it. So let's add a sort of light orange. And once I've done that, I'm going back to this group. That was the patterns. I'm going to select the whole thing. Just ignore what's going on here. It's perfectly alright. Just ignore that. It doesn't look right. Right now. It is just perfect. So I've got my group selected. I'm going to drag and drop it into the swatches panel, and when I do, I now have a swatch that has a background color behind it so I can get rid of this lot. I'm just going to do that. Let's drag ALF a rectangle that's the size off this, our board not quite sure how big this art board waas, but that's fine. And let's fill it with our pattern and so you can say this was the original pattern, and now our pattern pace has a background color behind it, so that's as easy as it is to add a background color toe. One off these mad Patton Patton swatches. Just go ahead and get your pattern down, get it in the swatches panel and then worry about applying a background color to it. Now, having applied a background color to it, let's go and select this rectangle here that's filled with our Patton. Now let's go to the re color artwork tool. You can say that we've got the black from the pattern and also the orange from the background. Well, we could re color everything while way here. What I'm going to do is click here and add a new color, the color harmony I'm going to edit. And here is our orangey sort of color, so I can now change that to whatever color I want. But I can also change the black. I just have to work out which of these two is the Black net. Sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to work that out, so we're going to do is this brightened everything up and see which one responds appropriately and one will in one line. And so this is the one that's responding. And so I could go ahead and change the color off this design very, very simply now that I've added a background color to it. So I got lots of flexibility. And, of course, when we color a pattern or re color pattern using this re color artwork dialogue, we get a bonus. I'm just going to click. OK, here you'll say that we get a new pattern in the Patents Watchers illustrator noise that we've recovered the pattern, and so it makes automatically a brand new pattern without new color. So we've got the original. We've got the one without orange background, and now we've got out Rick colored version, and any time we re color this, we're going to end up with a brand new Pathan. And here it is in the swatches panel, so you've got lots of flexibility once you get your background in, and that's how I would do the background, just ignore it and tell you are finished with the rest of the pattern and then added later on. So I hope this is of help to you. And don't hesitate place to ask questions. If you have questions about this project 6. Troubleshooting problems with Illustrator CC 2019 & 2020 : If you're using Adobe Illustrator CC 2019, then the instructions I gave you earlier aren't going to work. Now I've created a brand new design here so that I can show you what the problem is and how to fix it. One of the solutions you have is to go back to CC 2018. If you've got that on your machine, just go and save your pattern to a file, open it up in the CC 2018 and the instructions I've given you previously are going to work perfectly. If you don't have CC 2018 still on your machine and you don't want to download it just for this purpose, then this is what you're going to do. I'm just going to step through the exact same process that I did earlier, just so that we're going all the way through for CC 2019 and later users. I'm going to the Artboard tool. I'm just going to measure out my artboard, which in this case is 300 pixels wide by 520 pixels tall. I'm going to press backspace or delay it because I don't need that artboard any longer. I'm going back to my "Selection" tool. We're going back into the last pallet, we're going to turn off the lock for the dummy path, the clipping mask, and in my case also the background. Now, in the previous video, I suggested at this point that you should select the layer that has the name of the pattern that you're using. I'm using P6M here and so I've got the P6M layer selected and you would go to "Object, "Expand Appearance" and in CC 2019, the bug is that this is no longer available, they've messed up the program. The solution that is suggested by Adobe if you don't have CC 2018 still installed, is to pick this layer up and move it out, so I am going to put it between Cell Location and Clipped Artboard. I'm not going to do anything else because everything's selected exactly as it should be. I am just going straight to "Object" and "Expand Appearance" because that is now available. Then I'm going to pick this up and put it back exactly where it came from, which is between the Clipping Artboard and the background. It's going to work perfectly at this point. The next thing I need to do is to repair this as a pattern and for this I need a rectangle, so I'm going to click somewhere in the document, doesn't matter where, I am going to make a rectangle. That is the exact size of that artboard that we just measured out. In my case, it's 300 by 520. We're going to turn off the "Fill" and the "Stroke," and at this point you're likely to encounter yet another bug in the most recent versions of Illustrator and that is that these rectangles that are supposedly no fill, no stroke rectangles actually aren't. If you just go ahead and use them, the pattern is not going to work. What you need to do is, with the rectangle selected, I've got this, what purports to be a no fill, no stroke rectangles selected, I'm going to click on the "Appearance" panel, go to the flyout menu and if you can see "Clear Appearance," then you need to click it because that means that there was an appearance there that you can't see, but which is affecting this rectangle and if you don't clear that appearance, your pattern's simply not going to work. Following along the previous instructions with this rectangle selected, we'll choose "Object," "Arrange," and "Send to Back" because we need it behind everything on this layer. I'm going to reselect P6M or you would reselect whatever it is that is the name of this layer that corresponds with the template that you're using. Then I'm going to drag and drop this into the "Swatches" panel and now my "Swatches" panel has walls, so let's choose "Window" and "Swatches." Let's just move the "Swatches" out here, go to the "Selection" tool and just drag and drop it into the "Swatches" panel. To test it, let's go and do that now. I'm going to add a new artboard, so I', going to click on the "Artboard" tool, I'm going to make an artboard that is just the 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels will be just fine. Now, mine is a little weird in terms of positioning, so let me just pull it out of the way. Now I'm going to add a new layer to the document, that's going to be critical so that my new shape here is going above everything and not underneath that all mixed up in the pattern. I'll click here on the "New Layer." I've got Layer seven here. I'll click on the "Rectangle" tool. I'll make a rectangle that is the exact size of the artboard, in this case, it's 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels. You've got this a little yellow border here it's really hard to say. I'm just going to center it up here on the artboard. I'll click it's "Fill" and then I'll go here and fill it with our pattern, and this is working just perfectly. But as I said, if you are using Illustrator CC 2019 and there's no reason to expect that it's going to be fixed by the time CC 2020 or whatever it is comes out, that's the way that you're going to create your patent "Swatch." Now in the "Swatches" panel, we have a working patent "Swatch" for this particular pattern that I've created and of course it is a vector patent "Swatch." Now I appreciate that this can be a little bit difficult to understand because there are bugs in these later versions of Illustrator. If you have any questions, please just let me know and I'll help you out.