Create a Repeating Pattern in Illustrator using Texture

1. Welcome: Hi, I'm Mel, and I'm an Illustrator and Service Pattern Designer living in the beautiful Southern Highlands in Australia. In this class, I'm going to show you a technique that I use to add texture to my patterns in Illustrator. Texture adds dimension and perspective to what might otherwise be a flat design. You're going to go outside first to photograph textures in the environment around you. Then I'll show you how to transform those photos into texture that you can apply to your pattern in Illustrator. I'll also show you a method I use for creating half drop repeats in Illustrator. This class is for service pattern designers who want to add a little dimension and perspective to their pattern. For this class, you will be using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, and you'll need a camera or you can use your smartphone to capture your textures. Please join me in this class. I can't wait to see your designs. Let's get started. 2. Materials: In this class you'll be using both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Photoshop is used to process the image you've taken on your phone or camera. Illustrator will be used to apply your process texture, and then create your pattern. You'll need a phone or camera to take photos of your textures. I just use an iPhone. 3. Project Overview: For your class project, you will be going outside and taking photos of interesting textures in your environment. In Photoshop, you'll convert your photos to text sheets. You will apply those text sheets to icons you've created in Illustrator. Finally, you will create a half drop repeat pattern using those icons. As a bonus, you can add your design to a mockup. Finally, please upload your original photos, your icons without the texture and with the texture, your pattern and your mockup to the project area. Let's get started. 4. Gathering texture: Welcome back. In this lesson, it's time to go outside with your camera or smartphone and find textures you find interesting. I recently went on a walk in a national park and captured a number of textures such as tree trunks, sandstone, and crap. Look at these amazing squiggles on the gum tree. You could find textures everywhere. Try and build up a library of the more on your computer. I use my iPhone and then use the Google Photos app to categorize them into photos and to allow me to sync them to my computer. Another quick way to get them onto your computer is to just email them to yourself. All right, now it's your turn to go out and have some fun. I can't wait to see what you find. 5. Processing texture in Photoshop: Now we're going to transform or process your images so that we can take them into Illustrator and apply them to your designs. I've got three textures open here in Photoshop. My squiggly gum, this one is just a tree trunk, and then we've got some gravel. Let's work on the squiggly gum. First thing to do is to unlock that layer. Then up to go to image mode, and then select grayscale. Just discard that if it pops up and that takes out all the color. We then need to adjust the levels to bring out the white and bring out the black. So to do that you go to your adjustments panel. If you don't see that, just go up to window and then select adjustments. Click on the levels icon and you'll see this panel pop up. Now to increase the amount of white, you adjust the right-hand triangle. So if you move it into the center, you can see that white increases. Then obviously to increase the amount of black, you move the left-hand triangle, the black one. The middle one is for gray, so you can adjust that as well to take out that gray. I want as much white and as much black as possible. It needs to be contrasting. I'm pretty happy with that. Before I do anything else, I'm just going to crop it. Don't want a little bit down here so I'm just going to bring that in a bit. I like to flatten the image so I just right-click on the layers over here and select flatten image. Then save it as a TIFF file. I know it was squiggly2. With this panel I have never really changed anything in here. Just leave it as the default. Okay, that's one. Let's try this one here. So first thing to do is remove the lock, then go up to image mode grayscale. Then the adjustments levels increase the white, increase the black. Now this one, I actually don't want too much in this one, so I'm going to get rid of quite a bit. I'm thinking this one's going to be a good brush in Illustrator. So I'm going to turn into a texture brush and in that case I'm only going to take a small portion of it. So I'm going to crop it right down to [inaudible]. Now I just want to get rid of the bits around the edge. I just want a clean file here, might just bring that in. That will get rid of that bit. Yeah, I want to get rid of the bits around this edge here. So first, I'm just going to flatten this again. Unlock it. Then I make another layer and just get my eraser tool. Need to be on the texture layer. Get rid of that. Get rid of this one here. Then I'm just going to fill in that back layer with white to merge it all, and then flatten it again. Then I'll save that as a TIFF. I'm going to call this one brush. Okay, the last one. I'm quite happy with that. I'm just going to flatten that image again. I'm going to crop this also anywhere a portion of it. Then we'll save that. I'll call that one gravel. Okay, that's it for Photoshop. In the next lesson, I will show you what to do with these in Illustrator to have them ready to apply to your designs. See you soon. 6. Processing texture in Illustrator (Live Trace): Now we're going to turn those textures into vectors. To do that, we need to image trace them. I've got my three textures I've opened here in Illustrator I'm going to start with this gravel. Just select it and then open up your image trace panel. If you don't see it, just go to window. Then select Image Trace. I just select the default, which is just the black and white, and I like to select Ignore White. Then I like to click on Preview. There it is. Then you need to click on Expand. Then you need to ungroup it. I just right click it and select Ungroup. Now, if we drag that over here, you'll see that it hasn't included the white, which is great. But if you didn't select that, ignore what button, that's fine. If you've still got the white in there, all you need to do is select it and then go to select same fill color to select all the white, and then you can hit delete and that will remove it for you. But to save you time it's better to select that ignore white in the image trace options in the advanced searching. Right now, that's all expanded. The other thing I need to do, you need to create a compound path from it. Go up to object, compound path, and that basically makes it one object as opposed to a million objects. Most of it make them a little small. There you have a nice texture. Let's have a go at this squiggly gum. Same thing again, ignore white, then preview. Now there's a few things in here that I want and I'm going to keep them as different textures. I just want these dots here, its been like sand I guess, but great achievers we need to expand it and then ungroup it. Now I'm going to just select a little bit through here, just drive it over there. I'm might do another bit in here. Great those one's. I'm hitting command G to group on the Mac. Then I'm going to keep that as is. Then my final one, this one which I will turn into a illustrator brush, and I'll show you that in the next video. So that's image trace this one first, expand and group object, compound half make. I just realized I didn't make these compound paths. [inaudible] In the next video, I will show you how to turn this one into a brush. 7. How to create an illustrator texture brush: Now we've got all the art textures that we can now use. I've got them all here on one page. I'm going to show you how to turn this one into an Illustrator brush which can come in really handy. You can create a whole lot of these and have a little library of your own Illustrator brushes. I find them extremely helpful and really cool. So to do that, all you have to do is select your image traced texture. Generally, these ones that are long are good for brushes. When you think of it as a brush, you want something that's going to go across the page, like a pen or a Brush. This one works well for that. Select that, then go to your brushes panel. I've got mine already open over here I've been over here, but if you haven't go up to window then brushes. Then in the right-hand corner select ''New Brush". Then select "Art Brush". Now, in the Options panel here, I give it a name first, I'm want to call this Streaky Brush. The width you can either give it a fixed size or if you adjust this you can make it smaller or bigger or you can use pressure if you use a stylus pen. For the moment I'm just going to leave that as fixed, sorry.In the "Brush Scale option select "Stretch to Fit/Length". In the direction option at the moment is going from top to bottom, but for this one I think it's been going from bottom to top, so I'm going to switch that around to have it pointing upwards. It's basically the way that you're brushing so I'm going from the bottom to the top and I think that's the way it looks. It would look as if it was a brush. In the colorization section, if you select "Tints" that will allow you then to change the color of it later on. Then the last one in the overlap section, make sure you've got this one selected adjust corners and falls to prevent overlaps and then click "Okay". Then if we hit "B" to get our brush tool, make sure that our new brush is selected. Here you go. You have the brush. Now, if you want to modify that even further, you can do that by just going into that brushes panel and double-clicking on the brush. Make sure you select "Preview" and then you can adjust all the settings to whatever you like. I might make it smaller or narrower like that. You can have a play around whatever you like, but basically that's what I want to do there. Then click "Okay". Now, you can select "Apply to Strokes" or "Leave Strokes", basically that means if you click on the "Apply to Strokes" it's going to update all of those strokes that you've already made. There you go. Now, the last thing you need to do is save that brush so that you can open it up in a new document. To save it, go to your brush's panel, then on the left-hand side, go to "Save Brushes" and then save that brush. I've already got one there I'm just going to save as Streaky 2 and then when you come to wanting to open that brush in a new document, you only have to go to "User Defined" and then select your brush and it will appear. There it is. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to apply those textures to your icons. I'll see you then. 8. Applying texture to icons: Now is the fun part, we're going to apply those textures to some icons. Now, over here, I've got all my textures in which I'm going to grab those ones, which I made the brush and I've got a new document over here I am just going to paste them in so that I can grab them when I need them. I'll move them on the side. I have already put my brush in here, but if you haven't got your brush, just go to the brushes panel and select the icon on the bottom left-hand corner, select "User-Defined" and then select your brush, and then click it to put it in the panel. Now I'm just going to create a few icons, I might just draw some zigzags actually, so I'm just going to draw a quick straight line, increase the strike let's give it a color [inaudible] and I'm going to make that a zigzag. The way I do that is I go to effect, distort and transform and then select "Zigzag" and in this panel click "Preview" and then just adjust the options until you find what you want. If you want, you can have jagged corners or you can have smooth I'm going to go jagged for this, and then click "Okay" and then going to go to object, expand appearance, and then object expand and here we have our zigzag just make a couple more, I'm just dragging, holding down the option shift key and then I'm going to do command for it to repeat. We'll get to these different colors. We've got some zigzag icons here and I'm going to make these look a bit more interesting with some texture, make it look a bit grungier, the way I do that is I grab my texture, am going to make a copy and then I'm going to paste it and drag it over this first one at the top and I'm going to change it to white. Now if I let go, you can see it there and I'm going to make it a bit smaller, just want to hang it off the edge there like that. At the moment, if I put a black background which I've got here, you can see it hangs over the edge of the zigzag, to fix that, we use a clipping mask and the way I do that, [inaudible] I select the zigzag command C to copy and then command F to place in front and I want it right at the front, it's in front of the texture. I'm going to hold down the command shift and right square bracket and that will send it to the very top. Then I'm going to select the texture as well. So I've got the zigzag that's on top selected and the texture. Then I'm going to right-click and select "Make Clipping Mask". You can see it has clipped itself to the zigzag and what's cool about this is if I drag it out, you can see it's just a transparent zigzag with the texture in it and you've still got the remaining zigzag there which you can go and recolor if you wanted to. You could also just go and double-click it to go in there and then you can wave around your texture, create more, hold down that option k there to copy it and drag it and it's going to put the femur along here, it's going to be smaller. See what that looks like, I need to get a bit of a textured grunge look to it. Let's try one of the others just see what it looks like, it will copy there. Therefore, want to paste it inside that clipping mask I'm just going to double-click back inside then hit "Paste" and make it smaller strike it over here and change it to white. This one probably isn't a very good one because it's a rectangle it looks a bit funny there, the jagged edge, but I'm just trying to show you how to put it in there and double-click cap and you go, let's get rid of that background. Can see the grunge effect. Now, if you wanted to change the color of it, you just go back and click it and change it to whatever color you like. I generally pick the same color as the background, I think that gives it the best effect, so let's go back and select "White". Let us try to take in a background that's my doc and just walking through the room, sorry about that. This next one, I'm going to use the squiggly one. I'm actually going to increase the size of this to take up the whole thing and copy and then paste in place, and then bring it to the front. Keep it selected and select your texture. right-click and then select "Make Clipping Mask" and let's go ahead and change that to white, that's a cool effect as well. Now the next one, I'm going to use the brush. I go over here and select my brush, hit "B" on the keyboard to bring up the brush tool and all I need to do is point over it and you can see that that's all we want at the moment, just undo that. Change it to white. I'm just going to brush over the edge a bit like that, don't want to move them just a little bit. If we turn on that background again, you'll see that it's off the edge and that's okay we know how to fix that and select the zigzag copy command F to paste in front in place, and then command shift right square bracket to bring it to the front. Select the texture, right click and make clipping mask, that background, that gives it a subtle texture is low. Now I might go back in here and use that brush again and let's make sure that the stroke is white and add a bit more this time I'm just going to do a little sections like this. You can see that it's not stretched as much as the top one. Now if I wanted to go and [inaudible] back into my brush, that's your preview is selected and we can play around with the size and you can see how it affects everything, every time you've used that brush, you can go and you can just add to whatever you think looks good. Let's select "Okay" and apply two strikes and looks like someone's thrown a paint bucket at it, it looks cool, they you go. In the next video, I'm going to show you just a sped-up version, I'm going to add these textures to some icons that I've created and I will then show you how to put them into a half drop per page and we'll see you then. 9. Create a Half Drop Repeat with pattern maker: Let's create our pattern. I'm going to use illustrations by ocean pattern maker. This is available in versions CA6 or above. If you've got an older version, don't worry, I'm going to show you in the next video how to create a half drop per page. The old-fashioned way, which sometimes is actually the better way. But in this case, I'm going to show you using the pattern tool, which is very quick and easy. I've got my icons here, they're all texturize, I'm going to select them all. Now one thing to note here, I'm not going to use the background when I'm creating this pattern I'll put that in later on. I had but on a separate layer and I've got a locked and so all I'm selecting here are the Icons. Then I'm going to go up to Object, Pattern, Make and it will add this new pattern to the swatch panel so we can use it later. Now, we've got a few options up here. The default is a grid, so it's laid out, everything inside this tile is just going across and down like a standard tile that center grid. To make it a bit interesting, we've got all these other options to make a half drop repeat. I use brick by colon and then I make sure that is one half. You can play around with these and select other ones and just see which one's the best one for your pattern, for your icons. I leave the Size Tile to add off, because I like to go and move things around and put them on the outside of the tile. This line, this box here is my tile and everything in it, and that's crossing over. It will be repeated if that's not selected. Bear with me, I'm going to play around with this and get all these fish in a position that I like and then we'll be done. I think I'm happy with that. To finish it off, I click on the "Done" button, and let's test it out. When you selects the rectangles total end just draw out a rectangle and then select the pattern and there it is. As you can see, it doesn't have a background, that's okay. I'm going to refill that with my yellow color and then I'm going to do Command C and then a Command F to paste in place. Then I'm going to select the pattern again. There you have it with the background. If you are happy, you want to rearrange your icons, what you do is double-click on that "Swatch" and it will take you back into the pattern creator and you can go in there and move them around, do what you need to do to fix them. Then click on the "Done" button and it will update the pattern for you and that's it, easy as. The next lesson I'll show you how to do half drop per page in the old fashioned way, the manual way. See you then. 10. Create a Half Drop Repeat Manually: Welcome back everyone. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how I create a half track for pitch the manual way not using illustrators pattern maker. I've got my icons, I have got a new document open here. It's a 10 by 10 inch document. Now, the first thing you need to do is create four layers. I've got one layer there already. I made three more so I'm using the Create New Layer icon to create four layers. The top layer, I'm going to name Rectangle. This will make sense soon. The third layer I'm going to name Pattern, next layer I'm going to label Background, and the bottom layer I'm going to label Square. Now I'm actually going to get rid of my sport shoes. My colors here because they're a bit distracting. I'm holding down the Shift and select "General" and then hitting the" Delete" icon. Now on the square layer, create a square, using the rectangle tool. Just click anywhere and then make a square that is 10 by 10 inches, the same size as your output Remove the fill and remove the strike. We want to align that to your output, so the way I do that is I click on the Align panel. If you can't see that just go to "Window," "Align" and I select left align and then top, and that will place it right where you want it. Then I will lock that layer, and then I will go up to the rectangle layer and click again. We're going to create a rectangle this time which is half the width, so five inches by ten inches high. This time I'm going to put a strike on it because this is going to be our guide, and then I'm going to align it to the left and then to the top, and then I'm going to lock it. I'm going to drag in my pattern, so make sure the pattern layer is selected. I'm going to go over to my icon and select all of my icons. That's good. My background as well, I'm just going to lock that and select just the fish. I want to drag them over on to my new document. Zoom out and make these a bit smaller. I'm going to place them there for the moment. Now we need our background, so make sure you've got your background layer selected. Go across and lock that one. Copy or you can just drag it in this case, I'm just copying and pasting. I'm going to resize that to 10 by 10, I'm just using the size for the rectangle, width and height, and then I'm going to align it the same way. I aligned the other ones to the left and to the top to put it right in the middle of the output. I'm going to lock that layer as well because we don't need it for the moment. The way this happens is I create a pattern just in the side here, and then we make a copy and offset it to make it have to repeat. I drop it down to about this section here, and then we can fill in the rest of the pattern. The first thing I need to do is create or fill in this rectangle. That'll do for the moment. I want everything on this side to match everything on that side. All I do is select everything on that side, on the left side, and then I'm going to go to Object, Transform, Move. Now we want them to go across five inches, which I want them to go down the room. If you select the preview you can see that they're going to across there. Then click "Copy" because we want to copy them, and I've gone across snap, I want to to fill this gap here. Let me just play a bit more. Move that one across, so let's move him on his own. Five across and zero down. Then we want everything at the top to move down to the bottom. You will copy those top; Object, Transform, Move, and we'll type in zero for horizontal and then 10 inches for vertical; that will copy them down. This one, and this one needs to move. To keep them together, I select both of them holding down the Shift key and then just adjust them to a better position. Now thinking about this two is low, I should have to do all four. Let's just move them up lightly. Maybe with that we might have to make some more, some more adjustments but for the moment, I'm happy. I'm going to delete everything on the right-hand side and everything on the bottom, and you'll see why in a minute. Then I'm going to group those ones. So Command, G control G to group. Now we are going to do our offset. To put the selection of fish down the bottom here. I select them Object, Transform, Move, and we're going to move across five inches and go down 10 inches. Sorry. We're going to move them across five inches and make sure you click on Copy. That's created a half job and I'm happy with that for the moment. So we still got to fill in these other bits so let's do this section here and select this one object transform, move and this time we're going to go zero for horizontal and -10 for vertical to move it back up. Then we need to fill in this one here so I'm going to select this one, Object, Transform, Move 0 horizontal until 10 to move it down. Then we just need to get them on to the side so everything on this edge is going to match on that edge and the same with the top it's going to match the bottom but she still have a halftone repeat happening. Let's move these ones across to here so I'm going to select that one and that one Object, Transform, Move and we are going to move them 10 by 0 Copy and there you go. Now, I like to clean this up a bit, we don't need all these extra columns that add on the PowerPoint so I'm going to Ungroup that one and delete everything that is not on the artboard, which is quite a lot, and then do this all the way around. There you have it. Now, we just need to add it to our swatch panel. I'm going to unlock the background and unlock the square and I'm going to hide the rectangle, we don't need that anymore. Before I show you how to put it into your swatches panel so that you can use it later, I think I'm going to add a bit more texture. I'm going to go over to my other clubs and I'm going to grab the squiggly gum texture and bring it back in here, I'm going to make sure it's in my background, just not that one. I'm going to place it here. I'm going to turn off the pattern for the moment and I'm going to change it to white and I'm going to lower the transparency. Looks good. I'm going to put another one here. Just going to get rid of what I was hanging over that edge because I don't want it. These need to repaint so I'm going to select the two textures and make sure that they repeat down on the bottom side so I'm going to transform, Move, and move them down 10 inches. I'm not really doing a halftone repeat with these, I'm just doing a simple repeat. Then I'm going to put another one over here, I'm just holding down the option key and dragging it, let's just put it in here and then I'm going to repeat them over this side object, transform, move ten, zero, copy, and then we need another one in the middle here. The nature of this texture is that you can't really see the edge so it kind of works quite well. Let's just make sure this one's repeating over here as well, Object, Transform, Move 10 and 0. I might just move this one across slightly, let's see what that looks like with the pattern on top. I like that. Let's create the swatch, so to do that, I want to select everything, and this includes the square at the bottom and I'm going to drag it onto my swatches panel. Now, this doesn't always work, but it worked in this case. Sometimes I find that there's some bug in an Illustrator and it won't actually create the repeat pattern there now if that's the case my workaround is to delete that square, and then in your background, I duplicate that background and then the one that sits at the back, I will take out the fill and the strike if there is one and remove this one, the square. So you basically creating another one of those. You can't copy that one, it won't work. I don't know why, but my workaround is to just duplicate the background and then remove the fill and then try and drag it all in there and it should work fine. Let's test this one out. I'm going to use the rectangle tool and I'm going to make a big square and then I'm going to select our new pattern and there you go. Now, you can also adjust the scale. So if I go right-click Transform, Scale, make sure that Transform Objects is de-selected because we don't want to change the size of the whole square, we want to just change the size of the pattern. Make sure Preview is selected and then you can increase. I'm going to go up to a 100 percent and see what that looks like and there you go. You can also re-size your square so if you go like that, it's going to go a bit wonky but don't worry, just right-click on your swatch and it will reset it and you probably have to change the scale again, but that generally works fine. That's it. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to take this repeat pattern and take it into Photoshop and apply it to a mock-up. I'll see you then. 11. Apply your design to a mockup: Hi, again. Now we're going to take out repeat pattern, and we're going to put it into Photoshop, and we're going to apply it to a mock up. To do that, we've already got a repeating tile here, so all I do is go to File Export, Export As. Make sure that this art boards checkbox is checked. Name of file,click on which pattern, repeat and then click Export. Keep it as 300, and the rest leave as default, then OK. In Photoshop, here are the two cases. This is a mock up file that I've provided for you, and we're going to apply our design to it, and we're going to end up with something like that. Let's open up that Repeat file. Here it is. Then go to Edit Defined Pattern. We call this Fish Pattern. Then in your Mock Up, let me explain how it works. It's just they're two suitcases, obviously, a large suitcase at the back, and a small one in the front. Now, to apply the pattern, we do that via Smart Objects. You could also change the color of the handles, and the rim around here, and also these parts here that are attaching the wheels. The row name site instance zipper cuts this zipper that goes all the way around. You've got the handle on the side, the handle on the top. The wheel and handle attachments, these bits here as well as these bits here that attach the handles. Then we've got the back, which is this bit here, where you can apply your pattern. Then you've got the front, which is the front obviously. Those to smart objects, whereas the others are just fill. If I was to change the pink around here on the zipper, I would go to that layer, double click on the color there, and I can select any color I want. The same with the handle, and handle attachments. Let's apply a pattern, and the pattern that you've just created to this front of this suitcase. You go to the layer within the small suitcase group called front, and it says double click to edit. Double click on this one, which is the smart object, not that one. At the moment, it's just to fill color which you can change if you like to something else. It doesn't matter. To put a pattern layer in here, just going to layer, you fill there, impression. Click OK, and then the pattern that you've just defined will appear. Then you can change the scale of that if you like, and then click OK. You can delete that back one, you don't need it. And then just close and save, there you have it. Obviously it's too big. I want to go back in, and I'm going to double click to open and edit. I'm going to change the scale to 25%. I'm going to click, this. it looks a bit better. Let's do the back. I click on the back layer, double click it. Do the same thing. Layer, new field layer, pattern, and OK. I'm going to change that to 25% as well. Then certainly clear,is it? There you go. I'm going to do the same to the back one. Make the fish a bit bigger on this one. Double click on the front. Go to layer, new field layer, pattern. Okay. Let's try a 100%. I'm just going to do Control S to save without closing it and to have a look. A bit small. Let's try 50. Command S to save. If you want to move it, you can just double click it again and drag. Control S and have a look. Yes, and let's do the back one. Thereyou go. I might change the color of the handles. Let's change this side one. You can use the eyedropper to select a color. Okay pink can do. Let's do that. Do the same to the front one. Notice if I click somewhere, and it jumps to a layer, the reason it does that is because I've got other isolate layer selected. Which means every time I click on a layer, or click on an item, it will take me to that layer. I find that very helpful. You can also select Group and it will just take you to the group. If you want to get to the back group. Insulate suitcase group, but I prefer the layer one. Just makes it easier. There you go. I've also put a smart object and therefore your logo, so if you double click on that, you can paste your logo and then just get rid of that one. We'll put it in that bottom hand corner for you. You'll end up something with, like that. 12. Wrapping up!: Thank you so much for joining me in my class. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you learned some new tricks. Please upload your designs in the project section so that we can all have a look at them. If you do have any questions, don't hesitate in starting a post in the community section. If you're going to share on social media, don't forget to tag my e-mail Armstrong skill shares so that I can say when they're wonderful designs. Thank you and see you again next time.