Create Beautiful Patterns with Illustrator's Pattern Tool

1. Intro: Illustrator's pattern tool. Surface pattern design. Creating amazing patterns is just a click away. With its ES6 version, Adobe Illustrator introduced the Pattern tool. This tool has simplified the pattern process. In this class, you will learn intricate steps on how to create your own project. This is a step-by-step class that will walk you through the pattern creation process for drawing the icons, to creating a finished pattern. We will create the icons, we will draw the icons that will make up your pattern. You will learn Illustrator tips and tricks to create easy drawings. You will then arrange your icons. We will learn the best way of arranging our objects to set up our pattern correctly. We will then create the pattern, watching a step-by-step process how to easily create a pattern with the icons we drew. We'll learn how to recolor our artwork into making our pattern to change quickly. We will then discuss the class project. Once you have completed the class, show off your new skills with a wonderful class project. You will create your very own patterns. By the end of this class, you will have gained knowledge of the tools needed to create beautiful, intricate patterns using simple steps. Create your very own pattern and post it to the class gallery. There is no such thing as an ugly design. Art is always beautiful. So make sure to share your work for us to see. Join us. 2. Drawing your icons: So to get started, I just want to explain the pattern tool that we will be using throughout this class is only available if you have Adobe Illustrator version CS6 or newer, so either CS6 or the Creative Cloud. If you do not have those versions, this pattern tool will not be present. There are really some good tips that you can still follow along with, but I do recommend that you take my other class, Simplified Pattern, and that one gives you the organic method of creating a pattern from scratch without using the automated tools that Illustrator has created. To get started, we're going to create a new art board. I have it set at 10 by 10 as my custom art board, but unlike the old method, the pattern tool method will not require a specific art board and for you to know the specific dimensions in order to create a perfect rupee. For purposes of using the pattern tool, I just like to work with a square. Don't try to work with a rectangle or any other size that'll be distracting. As long as it's a square, it'll work perfectly for you. I have it set to 10 by 10 and I'll leave the color mode at CMYK, and I'm just going to hit create. Here we have a square art board. The pattern theme that I'm going to use for this project is going to be citrus. I'm just going to start by creating some icons. I'm going to take away the stroke here. As you can see, some artists like to begin with actual fills on their icon. Let's say for instance, they like to start with the orange, they'll have another icon and it'll be yellow for the lemon. But it's not something that I like to work in that way, I find the colors to be distracting. For me, I work more, although we're working digitally, I think it's more organic in the sketching phase if we work just without a fill. I'm going to remove that for now. We'll start from scratch. So going to the Ellipse tool, I'm just going to begin by drawing a lemon. I'm just going to click and drag down to somewhat of the size that I'm looking for. An oval, like an egg shape, that's pretty good for my lemon. Then the lemon does have a little bit of definition at the bottom. I'm going to drag that out just using the Ellipse tool again, and again at the top, just a small one. By clicking and dragging, I'm going to select them all. Up here on this palette, I'm going to click horizontal align center, just to bring this all into perspective here. Everything's well aligned. I'm going to go to the Pathfinder palette, it has transform aligned and Pathfinder. If you don't have this open, you can go to Window and click on transform and it'll open up this palette for you. I'm going to select all my shapes and I'm going to go to the first Pathfinder option which is Unite. As you can see, that looks pretty good. I don't know if I like so much definition at the top, so I'm going to hit Command Z to undo the uniting. I'm just going to bring this down just to tad. Maybe this one just needs to be shaped a little differently, maybe a little smaller. Let's try and see what that looks like. Again I'm selecting all the shapes. I'm clicking Unite. That looks better for me, that looks like a lemon. Now I'm just going to create an orange the same exact way. For that, I do want to constrain the proportions, so I want to hold down Shift as I click and drag. If you don't hold down Shift you'll get this egg shape and you can move it around in any way shape, or form the Ellipse tool. But if you want a perfect circle, you'd have to hold down the Shift as you click, so click, Shift and hold down and you're just dragging to the right. For purposes of this pattern, it's not going to be anatomically correct where we have the right dimensions for the orange as opposed to the lemon, so it's not going to be to scale because I don't want the elements to compete with each other I just want them to work seamlessly together. This is going to be my orange, although it is small, let's just pretend maybe it's a tangerine. That's my orange there. I'm just going to give it a little bit of definition as well like we did to the lemon, just so we have somewhat of a definition of what's top and what's bottom. That's too much. Let's maybe go up a little bit. I'm just using the arrows. When I just want to just nudge it a little bit I use the arrows instead of manually moving it, just so it doesn't move it drastically. That's pretty good there. The next thing I'm going to work on is some leaves. I'm going to go to the Pen tool here. If you haven't mastered the Pen tool, it's okay, it is probably in my eyes, the most difficult tool to use in all of Illustrator. Like I said, I started off as a traditional artist where I would just sketch and doodle and then everything would make its way digitally. When I started to work digitally, the Pen tool just wasn't something that was organic enough for me. The Pencil tool on the other hand, I can use as if I was sketching on a pad with a pencil. But the Pen tool to me, it's just not something that works with a normal flow. It does take a little bit of figuring out and does take a little bit of mastering soul. Your best friend will be the Pen tool as long as you master it. It takes a lot of practice. Don't feel discouraged if you don't have it down pat yet, but just make sure that at some point you do dedicate the time to learn it because it is an essential asset to your drawing career. Using the Pen tool, I'm just going to click down here to create my first anchor point. Then I'm going to click up here, but the difference is I'm not going to let go of the click, I'm just going to drag now to the right and what you see that it's doing is it's giving me somewhat of a convex little shape there and I'm going to let go. Now this handle is trying to do something as well, but I don't want it to be like a teardrop. I'm just going to click on this anchor point again. Now I'm going to go straight down here to this anchor point where we started from, I'm going to click and drag to the left. That's going to give me the shape that I'm looking for and then I'll release, and that's our leaf. That's one way of creating leaves. The other way, like I said, is with the Pencil tool, I'm going to click on that and that's just drawing with the mouse. With the pencil tool, you can create more of an organic shape. It's quick. You can master this with no problem. If you have a Join tablet, Wacom tablet, a Bamboo tablet, any of those tablets, if you have the iPad Pro and you want to draw on that, you can. But as you can see, this is more of clean lines and these are more of an organic shape. It's really just a matter of preference. Just holding down Shift, I'm going to click and drag down just to make the leaves a little smaller because I think they're a little too big. Let's place one there and then holding down Option and clicking on it, I'm going to create a copy. That didn't work. Option and click, create a copy. There we go. Then by holding down O and dragging, I'm just going to reflect it there and turn it around. I just want to move it or ran again. All I'm doing is just going up here until I get this double arrow and I'm just rotating it. That looks pretty good there. I'm going to copy these leaves and do the same thing here. That's just for visual purposes for now. I just want to see where my leaves are going and how I'm going to be working on this. Follow me to the next video where we continue to add more icons. 3. Icons continued: Now we're going to continue by adding a few more elements. I'm going to take the Arc tool here, and I'm just going to click and drag. When I'm looking to create is just some leaves sprays that are going to fill the gap. If you took my last pattern class the simplified one, you'll remember that everything works alongside this square. For us to create a perfect pattern, a seamless one, we're going to have to fill a lot of the areas. We don't want any empty space. Patterns are like a slow dance. You're going to want to just fill every nook and cranny. You going to want to have movement in it. These are our main icons, the lemon and the orange. Now we're going to begin by filling in to some of the spaces and afterwards we'll be able to tweak it. But for now we just want to fill some of the gaps in. I'm just going to borrow these leaves. Let's make a copy, option click, that's one, and then I'm going to make another copy and just rotate it around here. What we're looking to do is just fill some of these spaces. It's not a perfect science. It doesn't have to be. There we go. Now I'm going to make a copy, select them both and make a copy of it. Click and drag. That'll be there. I can move these around just so they don't look exactly the same. Oops! Then I may just create yet another copy of them both. Click and drag. Maybe rotate these around, these may not fit, so I may have to take these off. Yeah, that's not going to work too well there. So we'll just leave it like that for now. What we can do is select it all and bring it in a little bit, just so we can close the gap there. Just a little rotate it around and that's all what we're really looking to do. It's just fill in some gaps with some other elements so we don't have too much of an overpowering blank space. That's what we're looking for. We're looking to fill all the spaces. Another thing I want to draw is, I'm going to go here to the Arc tool and I'm going to select the line segment. I'm going to go, let's see right here, I'm going to go and just draw straight line. Then I'm going to go here and draw another line, and perhaps another line here. That one may be too big, but we'll see how that works, bring it down a little bit. Then with the Ellipse tool, I'm just going to hold down Shift so I can make a perfect circle. I'm looking to make just some kind of Barry, it's just because we're going to add a little bit of dimension and fill. The more elements that you have that'll fill negative spaces, the better off you are. Right now that line is in the front, but you won't see that line afterwards because remember, we don't have a fill on this. This just needs to move more and there we go. I'm just going to select this all and group it, and I'm going to select these guys and group them. You can also do Command G to group. I'm just going to make a copy of this one. Then I'm going to bring it here. I'm actually going to reflect it. Do I want to reflect it? Yeah, let's reflect it. That was just holding down O, that will reflect it. I'm going to put this guy right in here. Already I don't like the look at either one of these things intersecting here, but I like the way the leaves look on this. The way it has the same shape as the orange. So that's an easy fix. I'm just going to ungroup. I'm going to shorten this guy. I'm going to ungroup here by selecting this line. I'm just clicking and dragging and shortening this guy. Now this shape we said we liked, so we're going to bring this guy and possibly put him in here and then maybe we'll drag another copy of him and put him here, and maybe we'll bring another leaf copy and put that guy right over here. This is all just preliminary. You'll see that we'll have a lot of play when it comes to the pattern tool. We won't need to fill that many areas until we get to that point where then we could fill it then. I'm just going to click "Option" again and drag another copy over here. I think that's looking pretty good for now. It's just an organic shape. It's nothing too fancy yet. In the next video we're going to add some color. Then we can always add more elements if we feel the need. But for now I think this is looking pretty good. In the next video, we'll continue. 4. Color: Now we're going to begin coloring. I've already have a preselected color palette that I chose, so I have all my colors in here and I will post them on the class information page, so you'll have the CMYK formulas for them if you want to recreate the pattern exactly the way you see it. I'm going to begin by coloring our lemon here, I'm going to select that yellow and I'll remove the stroke when I'm all done. This is going to be my orange. I chose to do all these leaves in a navy blue and not the normal green that we normally use, or that you will normally see on a depicting fruit. I'm just holding down Shift and Option so I can select them all at once and only color them once, so there we have it. Then I'm going to begin coloring these berries, and I want to do this in the same color as the the fruit that its nearest to. Some of these we had grouped, so I'm just ungrouping them. Let's make that orange, let's make this orange, and we'll make this yellow. Let's Ungroup that, they're all grouped. I'm going to select it all, and I'd have to deselect all my stems. I'm just doing this so I can select just the organic shapes that have strokes on them that I want to be able to remove the stroke from. We're going to remove this stroke from them, and there you have it. I'm going to select now all of these stems, see here I already messed one up, all the stems, I'm going to go to Select, Same, Stroke Color, and that's going to select all of these other black stems, and I just want to make those into navy. They're all set to one point, if by chance yours defaults to different something else, just remember that it's all set to one point Then the other thing I want to add is just, I don't know about these leaves floating like that, so I'm just going to go to the Arc tool and add a little bit of a stem here and another small one here, nothing too fancy just to anchor it a bit. That's starting to look really good. I'm just going to add now a few finishing elements to make it all look a bit more organic. As I said before, I'm a graphic artist so I do like these bold shapes and clean lines, but I do want to bring a little bit of whimsy to it, and a little bit of artistic value of a hand-drawn look, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in on one of these leaves here, and I'm going to go to the Pencil Tool. I'm going to set it to No Fill, and I'm going to select to this is just like a beige color that I have here, actually it's a white, that's just white that I have there, and I'm going to freehand with the Pencil Tool. I'm going to freehand just some veins inside of the leaves here, so that's one, and that's actually very thick, so I'm going to reduce that to half a point, so just 0.5 on the stroke there and I'm going to continue now. Now some of you may be thinking, why didn't she do this before she added all the leaves? Well, I don't want all the leaves to look exactly the same, so I'm going to do it this way because I want the veins to all look different, although we copied and pasted every single leaf, I want to be able to just have an organic look when it comes to my veins for my leaves. I'm just going to continue doing this, I don't want to bore you, just going to show you a few and then we'll meet up at the next video. As you can see, none of the shapes are going to be exactly the same, you saw what happened there, it just went to one continuous line, so I'm just going to move to this leaf, and go to this leaf, then I'll start here. I'll continue to add these elements, and I will meet you at the next video. 5. Design elements: Now we're going to continue by adding a few more elements. As you can see, I wasn't happy with certain things and I moved more leaves around and I curved a little bit, my berries. I've made just a few changes to make it look aesthetically pleasing. Nothing is set as stone, we can always change things around, but the beauty of it is, it's all digital, we can just move around and redo it as many times as we'd like. For now I just want to add a few more design touches just to give it a bit of realism. I'm going to go here to my paint brush tool and I'm going to select this lighter yellow, and I just want to paint just a few dimples on my lemon here, not dimples per se just a little bit of a texture I want to give it, just have a different dimension. I don't want to make it a polka dot pattern, but I just do want to give it a little bit more of a texture to it, and the same thing goes with the orange. I just want to give it a little bit of texture, I'm just dropping these little dots as you can see I'm at set at one point here. If you want to make them bigger, if that's your preference you can. If you want to make them smaller and you don't want them to be that obvious you can do that as well. Sky is the limit. That's pretty much it. Now what we'll do is, see this is what happens I just keep going and going and then I don't know when to stop. Now I think I'm done. Now what we're going to do is we're just going to add a few more elements and I'm going to zoom in just to show you guys how to do that, so the berries right now just look like perfect circles and they don't really say much. Our lemon and our orange have now their texture look, and our leaves have the organic look of the veins. I just want to do something with these berries so they're not just looking the way they do. I'm going to go in here, I'm going to select this first one and just want to show you I'm going to zoom in all the way just you can see. Here I selected the shape that I want to work on and I'm going to go right here into drawing modes, and right now we're drawing normal, I want to go to draw inside, so I'm going to select the ellipse tool. I'm going to actually click off because I don't want to change the color of that, I want to go to this lighter color. Now I go to the ellipse tool, and I'm just going to click and drag to create an ellipse. Now when I click away you can see what it's done, it's created a bit of a just a circle over it, but because I'm drawing inside you can't really notice that the rest of the circle is there, it creates a clipping mask of its own. So now I'm going to go back to draw normal, and that's what we have and I'm going to actually do that for all of these. It's a bit of a tedious task, but you'll see in the end it's going to look really pretty. Again, I won't bore you with all of this, I'll do this off camera. But I just wanted you to see just a few more times on how I do it. Select the ellipse, click and drag, click off, draw normal, that one's done. You can see what I'm doing is I'm just creating that the berries are just pointing in certain directions. If the tops of the berries have this lighter color, I want it just to give the illusion that that's the way they are facing, so let's draw inside, go here, click there, change the color, click off, back to normal. I'm going to do some of the yellow ones before we go off camera, I just want to show you here as well, draw inside, select the ellipse tool, click and drag, change the color, draw normal, there you go. I'm going to continue working on these off-camera. As I said, sky is the limit, you can add as many elements as you want, leave it as organic as you want, leave it as graphic as you want. It's really totally up to you. I'll continue to work on these and I'll see you in the next video. 6. Pattern tool explained: Before we continue on with our citrus pattern, I just wanted to show you all the workings of the pattern tool and to do that, I decided to select on a more simple icons like these two little elephants and hearts. I'm going to select them all, and I'm going to go to object pattern make. This is just a dialogue box that says that by doing so, you're adding a swatch into your swatches panel, which is exactly what you want. I'm going to click "Okay" and it automatically creates the pattern. It does default to certain types, so I'll show you here this is our patterns option panel, and the first thing we can do is rename it. We can rename that elephants kissing and then the tile type always defaults to grid, and I'll run through these real quick. Grid is just that, what it says. It's just in a perfect rows, perfect columns. Then we have brick by row, and that's just offset just a little bit. Here's brick by column so that's an offset the other way. We have Hex by column and you'll notice that the tile box here has changed in shape and that brings everything closer together, does a lot of overlap. Then we have Hex by row, and that's also bringing things in a little closer together based on this tile shape. So we're going to go back to the grid, and I just want to show you a few more things on here. I'm going to constrain the proportions by locking this here and as you can see, I don't like the way these hearts are so close together, so I'm going to space them out a bit. If I click here on the width, it's going to move these elements out further so all we have to do is click on here, and you don't have to enter any dimensions or anything, you can just hit the Up arrow and that starts to bring things apart a bit, and you can stretch that as far as you want. Then you notice, what it's doing is enlarging your tile. That looks good there, and then on the height we're going to do the same, and that brings it out, as you can see from the top there. That looks good like that. We also have size tile to art and that just means that this tile here, as you can see, it brought it right back to where we started. We would have to do our changes over again. That's a good undo button is that size tile to art. You're moving the tile with the art, and that's what we want to happen, we want this tile, so that stays checked on because we want this tile box here to move with the art. This is just the overlap of how much we want it. I usually leave it at the default of left in front and top in front. Then this is just the amount of copies so right now it's defaulting to five by five, so our elephants are repeated here five times. You can change that if you prefer to see a bigger swatch, we can zoom out and see that if you're more interested in seeing your art work that way, or it'll even do art proportion, so one by three, three by five. That's all really a matter of preference, I usually leave it at the default five by five. Dim copies is just how dim you want it. Usually, I have this set at 70 percent because I don't want all of this distracting. You can go down as low as zero percent, that wouldn't make much sense, or you can go and leave it at a 100 percent. A 100 percent is a good way to work out because you do see the colors vivid, but it does get confusing and you'll see it in the citrus pattern of why we'll not do that, so 70 percent is a good way to work because you can tell these are really the live patterns here. So if I move this heart to here, you watched it move. Now if I move it outside of this box, as you can see, not much happens because now it's no longer live here. In order for you to make any changes to the entire pattern, you have to stay within this bounding box just like that. In order for you to see what's live and what's not, I mean, this is a very simple pattern, but in the citrus pattern, you'll notice that we want to stay within this box in order for us to tell which is which so if you dim anything that's not live, it's easier to tell. Show tile edge, if we go back here to 100 percent, for example. I want to quickly just toggle off to see what my whole pattern looks like. I could shut off show tile edge, and that just gives me a better, clearer view. But remember, in order to work in it, we have to go back to this show tile edge just so we can see what our boundaries are. Let's turn that back to 70 percent and then now show swatch bounds. Show swatch bounds is going to give us just a dotted line here, which right now is not popping up for some odd reason, but show swatch bounds is just going to give us a box around here where our final swatch pattern will be living in. So once we're done with that, you click done and the swatch pattern has been saved into here. In the next video, we'll continue with our citrus pattern. 7. Build the pattern: Now we're going to continue by digging right into building our pattern. I had gone ahead after the last video, in between, I had gone in and, let me just zoom in and show you, that I went in and I finished all of my berries, and then I just added a few more elements just to fill in the gaps. I just grouped some of these elements and just added them in, I added this sprig of leaves here. Just to fill it in just a little bit more. I'm going to zoom out just to show you. I'm going to select all of our artwork, and I just want to bring it as close to the corner as possible. Holding down Shift, I'm going to drag down just to fill the space a little bit more. Although this may not be the size that I ultimately want my pattern to be, and it's just so it's easier for me to work in filling my space. Traditionally, the way patterns are built is that whatever is on this side needs to be repeated on the right side, and whatever is on the top, overlapping needs to be overlapping at the same exact coordinates at the bottom. But with the pattern tool that Illustrator has created, it has become a more simplified process. I'm going to show you now, I'm going to select our artwork. I'm going to go to "Object", "Pattern", and "Make". This is just a little pop-up that says that your pattern swatch will be applied to your swatches panel here automatically, which is exactly what we wanted to do. But any changes that we make will be made to the swatches pattern that was added. As you can see, I'm going to zoom out a little bit, here in our options for our pattern, we have a couple of options. The tile type right now is set to Grid. There's another option called Brick by Row, Brick by Column, we have Hex by Column, which is great if you like a lot of the elements to be overlapping. Then we have Hex by Row. This also overlaps the elements. I normally tend to stick with the Grid, it's what I'm used to, by working traditionally just with my square art board. I'm going to stick with that just for the purposes of this demonstration. Now, I'm just going to zoom in a little bit just to show you. As you can see, our live artwork is within this bounding box, this blue line here. Everything else that you see here, it's even dimmed out just so you can tell the difference is actually not live, we're not able to move any of these elements; were only able to move what's inside of here. For instance, if I take this leaf, well, let's first group this element here, so we're able to move it. That's a good tip actually. If you can just group all your elements when you're done creating them, it makes it easier for you to move your elements around once you're in here. Let's just group this one as well, I'm missing one here, there we go. Let's put that as well. For instance now, if I take this spray and holding down shift click and drag, and now I drag it into here, as you can see, it automatically filled it in the entire pattern. That's where we're going to do be looking to do. Normally, this would be a huge tedious task in the traditional way because we would have to start from scratch and then whatever we place here, we have to then go and move exactly at the right coordinates, mirroring it to the other side on this end. It was just a really tedious task. The fact that Illustrator was able to automate this process for us is just a huge, huge help. I think that looks good there. I'm going to take this guy here. Let me just see, we just take this guy here. Is he already grouped? Here we go. This one's already grouped. I'm going to move this guy here because I do see that I do need some orange. It's not grouped, so let's go back and group it. I'm going to click and drag, create a copy over here. I'm actually going to rotate a little bit just to fill some of this area. I may want to take this leaf here and just drag it down here maybe, let's maybe turn it a little bit just to fill it. Let me zoom out again because we just want to make sure that what we're doing is still conforming with our look that we're looking for, for this pattern. That actually looks good there. Maybe we'll bring these guys to the front over here. Now, we'll leave that there, let's see. Let's move this guy around now that we've brought that up, so it doesn't overlap too much with this. Let's bring that to the front. As you can see, it makes it much easier if you group all of your items before. This way you know when you're moving things that you don't have to do the process when you're already in here. I'm just going to fill this up there. Let's delete that one because I feel like we need another leaf sprig just over here somewhere. Let's send that to the back of the lemon. So "Object", "Arrange", "Send to Back". Let's move that out a bit. Then now, maybe we'll use this guy again. Maybe this guy goes here a little better. Let's see, it's reflecting. As you can see, this is just really a play on organizing things, filling all this negative space with the elements that you want to see. Maybe a lot of the leaves is not your thing. What you really want is to repeat the citrus a little bit more, and that's something that you can choose to do as well. It's just really sky is the limit here. You can do whatever you want, this is your pattern, it's your style. I just wanted to show you that you can just pretty much do anything that you'd like. I'm going to just make a copy of this one here as well, move it up here, there. Let's make another copy and move it here, because it didn't copy the first time. It's rotated so they don't overlap the elements, there we go, and maybe we can move a few more leaves. I'm going to just continue to fill our space here. I do have a color palette that I'm working with. I just want to make sure that I distribute my colors evenly so I don't have too much yellow on one end or too much orange on the other, and that everything is just working seamlessly. Let's put this guy here, sent him to the back. Maybe another dye here, orange one here. I do apologize for the silence. I do talk to myself sometimes while I'm working. But as you can see, we've pretty much have filled most of the space that we're looking to fill. Sorry, I did it again where I moved it and I didn't make the copy. I think that's looking pretty good. There may be a few more things that I want to do with this pattern. I may want to just enlarge some of these and just to fill in our space here so we're not leaving too much negative space. That's really just the key here. We want to fill up all the space. We don't want to have any negative space. In the next video, I will show you how we test out our pattern swatch. 8. Edit your pattern: So once we have moved everything around and we think that our pattern is complete the way we want it, we're just going to click "Done". What that does is it gives us back our original icons and artwork that we were working on and it completed our patterns swatch that was created initially as now a completed pattern. So in order to test this out, I'm just going to drag out a square. First, let's make this all white just so we can see our colors, and let's just paste in front another square, and let's fill that with our pattern. So as you can see, I really love the way this one looks, but there are certain things already that I see that I want to change. I think there's some blank space here that needs to be filled and I'm not sure that I like the way this berry is resting on top of this leaf. I want the leaves to all be on top. That's something that I just need to correct now. I'm going to just move this out of the way so I can work once again on my pattern. In order to go back in and work on my pattern, all I have to do is double-click here on the pattern. That brings up our working pattern file once again. I'm just going to zoom in and what I had said was I didn't like this negative space here, so I'm going to just make a copy and bring this to here. Let's maybe rotate it to this end, and there we go, just to fill in a little bit of the color. Once again I did the same thing where I moved it and I didn't copy it. Hold on Option. Let's move that up a little bit. Let's hold on Option and click and drag. So there we go. I think that looks good like that. Then this guy I said I want it to arrange it behind. Now let's click "Done". Let's go back to our swatch here and see what it looks like now. That looks a little better. I do have some negative space that I could get carried away and crazy, but I don't want it to be just a super cluttered pattern. I think this is good for now. There are other elements that later on in the future, if I decide to add maybe just some little tiny leaves or tiny flowers, I can do that to these negative spaces, but for now, I think this looks pretty good. 9. More editing: The first thing we're going to do is scale around our pattern so we can see if it works fully in all the applications that we have planned for it. I'm going to select both this pattern box and the white box behind it and holding down Option and clicking, I'm going to just make a copy of it right here, the bright. Now I'm going to select just the pattern box and I'm going to go here to Object, Transform, Scale. What this is going to do is let's click "Preview". If you notice we're really going to work on is on this box here. Right now it defaults to Transform Objects, which it has already done. It transformed the entire bounding box around it down 50 percent. We want to uncheck that because all we're really interested in this transforming the pattern. That is been transformed down, you can change the percentage here, so that's 80 percent. I'm going to bring it back down to that 50 just so I can get a better view zoomed out. I'm going to click "OK" and by doing that, as you can see, if I wanted to use this application on something, this would have worked well for me to some degree. But now that I zoom out, I'm noticing that the pattern is really just working all in a line because of the way I just had the lemon and the orange. It's not really the tossed pattern that I was looking for. I'm going to go back in and edit my pattern and add a little bit more of the citrus so it won't be so much in a role. I'm going to double-click on the pattern here, and the first thing I'm going to do is make a copy of this orange. Let's so like this, unselect everything else and all I'm doing is holding out Option and Shift click on the things that I don't want to select. Once again, if you have your objects individually grouped, it's just a much quicker process. One more there, and that's pretty much it there. We have this stem here still, another stem here. That's pretty much it there. Still leaving it selected, I'm going to hold down Option and click and I'm going to drag it just to this corner here. I'm actually going to scale it down a bit. Make sure you hold down, on Shift while you're dragging the corners so it does it proportionally. That looks good there. Then I'm going to do the same thing to the lemon. I'm going to add this little guy somewhere else. Let's unclick everything that we're not going to use. Again, a process that would have made much simpler had all of my elements grouped, but I wanted to show you both ways so know. Now you know, if you group all your elements separately, then you won't have this problem. I want that actually. Go jump onto this guy. This is just a little bit of you lost that guy along the way. There we go. We're going to group that, and then we're going to hold down Option click and drag. I'm going to have this guy down here somewhere. I don't want him that large, so I will scale him down as well. I'm going to turn him somewhere around here and I'm going to send him to the back as well. Let's see maybe not to the back, I'm thinking maybe he looks better in the front here. As you notice, as I'm moving down here, I'm also watching up here how it interacts up there. Maybe I'll turn him a bit. That looks pretty good there. I may want to bring this leaf forward. Maybe we'll move this guy over here. Well, that looks pretty good just like that. Maybe will fill in an area here that I see now has a little bit of a void. Let's turn this guy. Like I said, this is endless you can go on forever just moving things, arranging things, and getting things exactly the way you want them. For now I think that looks good. Let's turn this guy around. We want an equal distribution of color is really what we're looking for. We're going to click "Done" on that, and this is what our pattern looks like now. That to me works a little bit better. It has more of the citrus old tourists, and that works a little better in that aspect there. 10. Recolor: Now I'm just going to show you a quick fun way to recolor our artwork. Using this same swatch box that we have filled with our pattern, I'm going to just change the colors around. Maybe I don't like the way they are and maybe I'm looking for a variation of it. So just by selecting the pattern box here, the box that has our pattern filled with it, I'm going to select our colors again, and I'm going to see what it would look like if the colors were inverted. Now you'll notice once I click on this, just take a look down here on all our options that we have down here. So I'm going to select this color group, which is our existing color group and once I click that, you'll see that this color wheel popped up. It's editor applied color group and that's what we want to select. As you can see, it instantly starts to change some of our colors around, filling it with different colors. So what you can do at this point is you can randomly change the color order like this, or you can begin to move these around and all that is blue is now orange, all that is yellow is still yellow. So if I drag this down to here, you'll see that now all that was yellow is now this off-white, and all that is orange is blue. You can play around with the order of these to find one that you like and then once you have done that, you can actually continue to play with it, randomly selecting colors if you want, or you can stick with one of the color options that you did find. I'm going to click "Cancel". I'm going to show you now a whole new swatch pattern that I like. I'm going to select that and then go to the color wheel. As you can see, it applied that group of colors. I can do the same thing, play around with the location of these and see what works best. That looks good to me there, or you can go and randomly select the different colors and let the computer change it for you. It's a good way to see your colors without having to go individually and change the color of each icon. It's a good way to change the colors around without having to commit to anything. Let's say that I really want this watch. I'm going to click "Okay" and it's going to say, "Save changes to swatch color group 2 before closing," and I'm going to click "No". Because what it would've done is if there's a variation of color here that I would have selected, it would have changed it in my swatches here of this color group that I have. So as you can see now, this is a new pattern number 3, you can go ahead and double-click it and rename it. But this is a whole new color pattern. That's recoloring art work.