Cross-Stitch Pattern Design with Adobe Illustrator

1. Welcome!: If you've ever wanted to create your own cross-stitch patterns, either for yourself or to sell, you might be surprised by how easily you can do it and more with Adobe Illustrator. My name is Khara Plicanic and I've been a professional photographer, graphic designer, and Adobe software instructor for nearly 20 years. As someone who crochets, embroidery, does cross-stitch and more, I love being able to use my software skills to explore new design possibility. In this class, I'll teach you everything you need to know to create your own cross-stitch design from scratch in Illustrator. Even if you're a total beginner, you'll learn how to set up a new document and use a small handful of Illustrator's most simple and basic tools. Then once your design is finished, I'll show you how to match your Illustrator color swatches to actual thread numbers and create a color key complete with symbols. As a bonus, I'm including some custom markups I created specifically for this course. I'll show you how to use them so you can display and promote your finished design like a pro. For the class project, you'll use Illustrator to create your own two-by-three mini cross-stitch pattern featuring anything that inspires you. It could be a quote, a snarky meme, someone's name, a pictograph, whatever. One of my favorite things about being able to design my own cross-stitch patterns is being able to whip up small personalized gifts in a flash. Once you stitch up your new mini masterpiece, you'll find that it fits perfectly in these cute and inexpensive little frames you can find at pretty much any craft store, and you'll find a direct link to them in the class notes. If you're ready to dip your toes into Illustrator, create your own cross-stitch pattern and take your hobby or side hustle to the next level, download the class resources and if you don't already have Illustrator, go grab a free 30-day trial from adobe.com and meet me in the next video [MUSIC] 2. Project Overview: Before we dig in and start building from scratch, I just wanted to give you a bit of an overview so you can see where we are headed with this whole thing. This is what the finished design piece is going to look like, the one we'll build together anyway. I just wanted to show you how it comes together. So we have a little pictograph down here, we have a little house and then we have some block letters and we also have some back stitched lettering. So I'm going to show you how we do all of that. These, what I call square stitches, are made up of just individual squares that we can move around the canvas like this. We can easily change their color, duplicate them, group them, etc. So that's one way to work. Then for example, the little house down here is grouped, so this will move and operate as one unit. So I'm going to show you how we do all those things. I'm also going to show you how to add symbols to your designs. So here we can see that all the different colors have been assigned a symbol. Then you can output this chart with the color and the symbols, or obviously just the color or just the symbols. However, it is that you like to work or your customers like to work, Illustrator makes it pretty simple. So all of this is accomplished by using the grid here, the grid you see on the screen right now, this is the Illustrator document grid, so it does not print, but it's super great for letting us work. That's what allows us to just, I'm just using the arrow keys to move these little stitches around and they just snap right into place. It's wonderful, but it doesn't print. So we'll use another simple tool to create this grid that will print, so we can customize this and how it looks and all of that as well. Lastly, I will show you how to create a key so that your future self, when you sit down to stitch this or your customers, if you plan to sell it. So they know what color you intended to go with which symbol. That's it. Pretty straightforward and simple. We manage all the different bits over with different layers. That's really all there is to it. So join me in the next video and we'll get started. 3. Document Setup: I'm going to go ahead and close this file. This is Illustrator's home screen. Creating a new document is as simple as coming over here and clicking "New File." If for some reason your screen doesn't look like this, that is just fine. You also have the option of coming up here and choosing File, New. However you get there, that's where we're going. You can choose from several different presets. But for our little mini cross stitch, we're going to enter our own values here. I'm working in inches, so I'm going to choose a width of two. You can select different options here, but we'll go with inches and a height of three. I thought a mini cross stitch was a great place to start. We only need one artboard, so no worries there. None of this is going to be relevant. I've got mine set to RGB color, but again, it's not terribly relevant unless you plan to send this off to a commercial printer for press. Most actual at-home printers and certainly anything viewed on a screen is going to be great in RGB color mode. We're not going to be applying raster effects, so this doesn't matter terribly either, but we can go ahead and leave that set to 300 pixels per inch, and we'll click "Create." The next thing we're going to do is set up the document grid. That can be found under Illustrator's preferences. If you are on a PC, you'll find it under the Edit menu, somewhere down here, it'll say preferences, so Edit, Preferences. On a Mac, it lives under this menu here, Illustrator, Preferences. Either way, when you get to it, you're going to choose Guides and Grid. We can leave the guides set per the default. We want to draw our attention down here to the Grid. We can customize the color of our grid. Remember that this grid does not print, it's just on-screen for our benefit and for aligning things and snapping things in place. I find that the default of this gray color works really well. But if by chance you are designing something that's got a lot of gray and it's hard to see your grid, you can click right on this swatch and pick a different color if you need to. For Style, our choices are Lines or Dots, and I'm going to leave that set to Lines. We want to have a gridline every inch. Because I'm planning to work on 14 count fabric, I'm going to put a 14 in here for the number of subdivisions. If you were working on a higher or lower count fabric, then you might want to change that. Then we just click "Okay" and you'll notice nothing happens. The grid is there, but we have to turn it on because sometimes it's handy to turn it off and hide it. We can hide it or show it from the View menu. We'll come up here to View, and if we scroll down to the bottom, here it is, Show Grid. Because my grid is off, I have the option here to choose Show Grid. If my grid was on, this would say Hide Grid. You'll also notice that the keyboard shortcut is right here, so on a Mac, that's Command'. On a PC, it would be Control'. You can toggle it on and off that way if you like. Here's what it looks like. That's great, but our stitches are only going to snap to the grid if we turn on the snap to grid feature, which is also found under the View menu. So View, and here it is, Snap to Grid. There are times when we might want to turn this off, but most of the time we're going to want it on. Because there's not a check mark there, that means I do not have it active. I'm going to click to enable snap to grid. Now our grid is set, it is visible, and it is snappy. That's excellent. The next thing I want to point out is the color swatches. My swatches panel lives over here. You can move these around, by the way, if you click and drag on the little tab. You can reorder these, you can close some if you don't care for them. You can dock them and nest them by just dragging them back. You can see I have this little blue outline of where it wants to go and when I let go, it drops in place. These are the default swatches, more or less I think. Maybe yours look different, but that's okay. You can work with these swatches, you can make up your own swatches. There's a million ways to get new colors in here. But if you want to load the color swatches that are included with the course files, then what you're going to want to do is come down here where we see this little Library button. It says, Swatch Libraries menu. It looks like books on a shelf. If we click on that, you'll see there's a ton of additional color libraries that are already here that you can load. But right now, I'm going to come all the way down here to Other Library. When I click on that, once this window opens, you just navigate to wherever you saved that file. Here it is, DMC-Swatches.ase. Now, I did not create these swatches, I found them on a website, which I have a link to in the course notes, in the downloads. That particular swatch set was for some reason only working in Photoshop. I converted it to Adobe Swatch Exchange file. Now you should be able to load it into not only Illustrator but any Adobe application. It's a.ase. You just select it and then click "Open." Here, we see it opens in its own little swatch panel. You have the choice of just leaving it here and having two swatch panels if you want or you could drag it up in here if you prefer. Another thing you can do is select all of these swatches. I'm going to click this first swatch, Shift-click down here to select them all. Then if I go to the Panel menu, which is right here in the top-right corner and I say Add to Swatches, it is going to put them all here in the swatches panel. Personally, I like to keep them in a group, so I'm going to re-select them. I'm Shift-clicking all of them, and then I'm going to click right here, this little folder, to make them a new color group and we'll call them DMC Swatches, and click "Okay." Now they're grouped together in a folder right here. That just creates a little separation because I like to have some empty area up here where we can drag some new swatches we're going to be making later. Yeah, that's it. You'll notice that if you hover your cursor over any of these, it will pop up with the name and the DMC thread number. This is very convenient. We definitely want to give a shout-out to the place where this came from. I'm linking to that in the notes. What a great thing to give to the world. Excellent. So we've got our swatches, we have our document and our grid. The last thing we should do is save this puppy so that we are ready to do our work and save it as we go. I'm just going to come up here and choose File, Save As, and I'm going to call this my Mini-Cross-Stitch work in progress. For the format, we'll just leave it set to Adobe Illustrator and click "Save." We can rock with the defaults here, and click "Okay." All right, that's it. Our document is set up and we are ready to start building. I will see you in the next video, where we will do exactly that. 4. Building a Pictograph: The first way to create a stitch that I'm going to show you is to make what I'm calling a block stitch. It's just a little square. It's very simple to do. We just need one little tool, this guy right here. This is the rectangle tool. The keyboard shortcut is M, as in marquee or make a rectangle. You can press the letter M on your keyboard or you can come and find the tool right here. You'll notice if I just click and drag with it right now, it is filled with a very dark charcoal color and it actually has a black stroke around the edge, which is hard to see. Let me turn the grid off for a moment. If I zoom in on this, I'm pressing "Command" or "Control" and the "Plus sign", or "Command" or "Control minus" to scoot out. Here we can see that it has this dark charcoal fill and it has a black stroke. By default in Illustrator, if I select the shape and I press "D", I'm going to get the defaults, which is a white fill with a black stroke. A stroke meaning outline. There's actually [LAUGHTER] three places where we can change these colors. One is over here in the toolbar. This right here shows us our fill color, which is currently active. We know that because it's in front. Then we have back here this stroke color, which is black and is not active, because I can see that it's in the back here. If I wanted to change the stroke color and let's say get rid of it, I need to first activate the stroke color to bring it to the front so that now if I change the color, it will change the stroke. This is one place where we can mess with that. We also have this option up here, as long as the shape is selected, you select it with this tool right here; this is called the selection tool. The keyboard shortcut is V, see if it'll pop up for you. Which I think is a throwback to Photoshop where this is the move tool. The selection tool is the same as Photoshop's move tool. With that selected, we also have the options up here in the control panel to change the fill and the stroke. If we click these little carrots, we will see our swatches panel pop up here, or this would be the same thing for the stroke. We also can go over to our swatches panel, which if you don't see it, you can come to the Window menu and choose "Swatches", that will open it up. You can click around in here. This is another place where you can designate if you want to change the stroke or the fill. If I want to get rid of the stroke, I'll make sure it's the one in the front, and then this very first swatch with a red line through it means none. If I click on that, we see the stroke disappears. Now if I want to change the fill color, I click to bring the fill color to the front. Then I could come down here and fill it with whatever I want. That's basically all there is to it. Let me turn our grid back on so we can see. Let's build a little house here. I'm going to come over and choose a fill color, maybe something like this. You can choose from any of these. You do not have to use the little DMC swatches. You can mix up your own if you want by just double-clicking on the swatch right here. Then you can enter a hex code, RGB values, CMYK values, HSB values, or you could just click on and drag around here to select a hue and a shade. There's a number of ways you can do this. But for simplicity sake, why not just go with this a DMC swatch. Here, I've got one. Then what I'm going to do is grab that rectangle tool, which remember the keyboard shortcut is M, like make a rectangle. I'm just going to click and drag to make a little square. That's it. Then I'm going to switch away from the rectangle tool and I'm going to grab that move tool, so I'll press V on my keyboard. Here's where things get cool and super fast, is we can just build by using our arrow keys. If I use the arrow keys by themselves, you see that this little stitch just moves around. Each time I press the arrow key, it moves over one spot on the grid. Now if I hold down Alt or Option and I press the arrow key, let's say five times, so we'll go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, then we have duplicated that square and moved it all those times. If I wanted to keep building my house, I'm just going to hold down Alt or Option and I'll move over and up to start building the roof over and up, over and up, over and up. Then work my way down the other side, and we'll go across the bottom. Super. Then we could fill this in a number of ways. It is really quite fast to just keep holding Alt or Option and go around like this if you want. But we could also, for example, select this whole row of stitches. I'm doing that with the selection tool, the move tool, and I'm just clicking and dragging. This is called a marquee selection. That will select all of them. Now if I hold Alt or Option and press the down arrow, I move the whole line down in a copy. Same thing right over here. I could select these guys and Option or Alt Up arrow key and fill them like that. However, you want to work. I'm just holding this down and filling in all those spots now. We may want to move some of these later, who knows. I'm just winging it here, but that looks more or less like a house. Let's try putting a roof on this house. I'm going to grab one of these swatches. I'll hold down Alt or Option and let's see. We'll start at maybe here. I'm going to change the color. Let me find a nice gray. I'll hold Alt or Option, and that makes a copy. Then I let go of Alt or Option and I press my arrow to move it over. Now I'm going to hold Alt or Option again, press the up arrow, let go of Alt or Option, because I don't need another copy, I just went to move the one that's selected, so I'll press the arrow key. It's really that simple. It almost feels wrong because it's so simple. Then let's put a chimney here. Let's see where. If you were a chimney where would you be? Here. There we go. This is looking pretty super. I think we just need a door. We already have these stitches right here, so I'm just going to click and drag to select them all and who doesn't love a nice yellow door? That looks great. Then if we want to put in some windows, we can actually just delete the ones that are here. Or you can fill them with white if you actually want them to be stitched. But I'm going to leave them empty. I don't even want white here, because that will show up when we export this. I'm going to select some stitches here. This guy, and if I want to select another one, I'm just going to hold Shift. As I click, I'm selecting different. We might need to zoom in because this is a pretty small document. Illustrator has a hard time sometimes, clicking on tiny things from far away. Now I've got all of those selected. Then to delete them, I just hit "Delete." Look at that, we have a house. This is currently made of just individual little bricks, really, little stitches. But now if I want to move this around, because it's not in position where I want it in my composition, it would be helpful to group it. That is as simple as clicking and dragging across the whole thing to select it. Then I'm going to press Command or Control on a PC and the letter G for group. It doesn't look a whole lot like something happened, but we know that it's grouped because if we look in this top-left corner of Illustrator, it tells us that this is a group. That's great. Now we can just move it around all in one piece. I don't know where it's going to end up, but this looks good for now. I'll also point out that once you've put it in a group, you may find times where you need to get in the group and maybe you want to like, let's say we don't want the windows to be this tall. Maybe we want to take these two little squares down here and move them up. I can't just grab those squares now because this whole thing is behaving as one unit. We don't have to ungroup it. That's one way to do it, but we don't have to. Because if we ungroup it, we're going to want to regroup it later. Instead, what we can do, let me zoom in so you can see; that's again Control Plus or Minus or Command Plus and Minus to zoom in or out. What we can do to actually crack open the group just temporarily is we double-click on it. If I just use my selection tool here and I just double-click, then we have entered what's called isolation mode. In isolation mode, this behaves as if it's ungrouped. We know that we're in isolation mode because right here this little gray bar appears and it tells us that we're working on Layer 1 and that we're inside of a group. Let's say that I want to shorten our windows, so I might select these two stitches and Alt or Option Up arrow to bring them up like that. I don't know. Do we like this better? I'm clicking on one and Shift-clicking the other to get them both and Alt or Option. That's cute. That works too. Then to get out of isolation mode and return this back to the group, we can either press the Escape key or we can come up here in this little status bar and we can click this little arrow that says, let's go back, "Exit isolation mode." When I click on that, here we are back in regular mode. Now if I click on this, you see that, as is showing over here, it is still a group. We just created our first little pictograph. Join me in the next video and we're going to build some type. 5. Adding Block Lettering: Our composition is coming together. We have our cute little house and now we're ready to draw some letters. I'm going to write out the words, home, sweet home. I'm going to pick this color here. [LAUGHTER] It's 352 coral light. I'm going to grab my rectangle tool by pressing M for marquee. I'm just going to start drawing out some letters and I can tell you that in my earlier days of doing this. I was really tempted instead of drawing one little stitch and then duplicating it, I was tempted to just do this, and you can, but I find that it's a lot more of a pain to edit it later because for example, sometimes I like to do fun things with letters where crossbars change colors and things and you can't just grab one stitch here and change the color because this whole thing is one block. I have found in my experience, even though it seems like it's faster to just draw out a bar like this, I think it's actually simpler for editing to just do everything with these little squares. You'll have to decide what works for you, but that's what you're going to see me doing here. I've drawn my little square with the rectangle tool. I've switched to my move tool or selection tool. I'm going to hold down Alt or Option and let's make some letters. What is this? Five stitches tall. Now that this is here and these are individual stitches, I can just marquee select those and then hold down Alt or Option and right arrow makes a copy. I'll let go of Alt or Option and hit right arrow one more time. Now I've got my other side of my H. To put the little dot in the center, I can just click any one of these, an option or Alt arrow over. Look at that, we have an H already. Maybe, let's see if we draw an O, we're going to need room for it to come down and we'll leave one row or one column of empty stitches and we'll put the top of the O here. I'm going to switch to my move tool by pressing that V key move and again, Alt Option. Let's see, there's a lot of different kind of Os we could make. We could have just as easily made a whole blocky O, so it's totally up to you, whatever you want. We'll come over here and try an M so I hold this down. That looks good. We could go all the way up here with the M or we could sort fake a curve by doing one over and coming down like this, one up. There we go. Let's see. We'll move over here. I love when it's easy like this. There we go. We have our first word home. Obviously, it's not centered, so definitely not centered. What I'm going to do now that it's all done out, I'm going to click and drag to select the whole thing and I'll use my arrow keys to nudge it over. Let's see what we've got here. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 stitches and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. We'll just have to pick a spot because obviously, it can't be in-between. The normal things that you would do in Illustrator like center this doesn't necessarily help us in cross-stitch where things have to fit inside the grid. That's what's nice about this, is it's really easy to just count. If we want to, we could group this. Again, that would be Command or Control and the letter G for group. Now you can see over here it tells us it's a group. What did it say before? It said rectangle. [LAUGHTER] It's a bunch of little rectangles or squares. But once we group it, now it'll tell us that this is in fact a group and it will behave as such. I want to point out that as I'm trying to drag this with the mouse, it has a hard time snapping to the grid sometimes because it gets a little confused. Here you can see that it's snapping to the intersection of the grid bits. I have found that if you get it off like that, the easiest way to nudge it back is to just use those arrow keys and that will put it so that it lines up in the grid. Here we have one word for home, but I wanted to make another so if we say home, sweet home, we need a second one. I'm going to hold down Alt or option and with this whole thing selected, I can just drag the whole thing down like that. If you hold, just to point out another cool trick, if I'm dragging, so I'm holding Alt or Option to make a copy, I'm dragging down. If I also hold Shift, it will snap. You see that now it's off, but if I hold shift, it snaps into alignment. That's another great little trick. Now we can change the color. I have all these selected, I can come to my toolbar and grab my eyedropper tool. If I click on that and hover over the yellow stitches and click, it'll suck up that same yellow and it will apply it to the stitches right here. We've built our little house, we've put in some block lettering. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to create back-stitched letters. 6. Creating a Backstitched Script: We made the stitches with the rectangle tool. That is great. When we use those stitches, we apply a fill color, not a stroke. But now in the case of drawing out the lettering here that we're going to use, we are going to use a different tool. This one is called the Pen tool, and it's right over here on your keyboard or on your toolbar. If there's a lot of things that are related to the Pen tool or look like the Pen tool, so if you're not sure, you can just press P on your keyboard, that's the shortcut for the Pen tool. Now if you've ever messed around in illustrator and maybe you've dabbled with the Pen tool and felt like it took some practice. It can take practice when you're drawing curves. But luckily for us, we're not drawing any curves. This is going to be super simple and so don't let it psych you out if you've tried it before and found it a bit challenging. With the rectangle tool, we drew a closed shape. It's a square, it's closed and it had a fill color. In this case, we're going to be drawing a path, not a closed shape. We don't want a fill color, we want a stroke. In the Swatches panel over here, my fill color is active and I know that because it's in front. I'm going to get rid of it by clicking the none option right here. Then, I'm going to bring the stroke color to the front by clicking on it, and now, I just want a black stroke, so I'll click Black. Now we're ready to start with the Pen tool. We're just going to pick a spot and keep in mind that as we do this, we are only drawing straight lines. Just simple clicking, not dragging. It will be entirely editable when we are finished. I've obviously designed this ahead of time. What you're not going to see is my trial and error. You're going to see what looks like a polished process. But I want to stress that when you're really just doing this from scratch for the first time, it is a lot of trial and error. Just know that. With the Pen tool, I'm going to position it right here to get it started, and you can see that on the bottom-right corner of my cursor, there's a little asterisk and that is telling us that we are about to start a new line. I'm going to click with it. That's it. I just clicked. I'm not holding my mouse down. You'll notice that as I mouse around, it connects the original point to wherever I am with a thread or a line. I always think of this as like Spiderman's web tool or something. [LAUGHTER] But I've clicked to start it here and now I'm going to come up one block and click to set another point, then I'll move over, click to set another point, come down to this diagonal, click. We're writing out the word sweet, and I'm just putting clicks. We're going to run out of space here. That's okay. I'm just going to keep going for the moment and we'll move this around in a minute. Obviously, we're not going to leave it on top of these letters. I'm just moving around and I could click straight across here to get to the W. Maybe I'll do that. You could click at every little cross point if you want, or in this case, I'm going to just make one long line and another long line here for the W, will come up here, and will come across 4, 1, 2, 3. If you're the kind of person that it helps you to draw this out on paper first, you can totally do that. I tend to do my sketching and experimentation just right here. Here is where we're going to actually end this because what I want to do is draw the T, but I'm going to pick up my pen in order to do that. To end this long line that we've made, I need to press the Escape key. You'll notice that as I move my cursor around, it's still stretching. It's ready to make the next line segment, and I want to just end it. I'm going to press Escape, and you'll see that now I'm free of the whole thing. Then, I'm going to bring my pen up here and make this stem of the t. I'll click right here and come down to about here, and come over and up like that. Now again, I want to disconnect, so I'll press Escape. Now we're going to make the crossbar of the T. We'll come over here, click here, and we'll come across about here and then go up like this. Then again, I want to disconnect, so I'll press Escape. Let's see how that looks. We need to move some things around and make some more space for all this lettering. I'll press V to grab my move tool or my selection tool, and I'm going to select this whole thing and nudge it up with my arrow keys. I didn't group this today. I did. Good. That's why it's nice to group because otherwise, if you drag across like this, you're also going to pick this stuff up. Maybe our house needs to move down a little bit, and this needs to be moved down. Maybe not quite so far. This about here, that's looking pretty good. Yeah. I think that just about nails it, but let me show you what happens when you're doing this for the first time and you don't know exactly where you want everything to go. How do you edit it after the fact? This is made up of three line segments. We have this one, which went all the way to here. Then we made the vertical line of the t, and then we ended that and we made this cross right here. If we wanted to get in here, and let's say we decide that we want this S, for example, to reach up a little bit higher, so it's in line with the top of the t, we can't grab it with this selection tool or with this move tool because it's going to take the whole segment. If we want to adjust individual points, then we need this other selection tool over here. This guys, is the selection tool for the whole object and this is for individual points. This is called the direct selection tool. The keyboard shortcut for it, if it'll pop up, the keyboard shortcut is the letter A, and I like to think of that as if it stood for adjust. With the A selection tool active, I can click now on any of these points. Let me zoom in here. You can see whichever point I click on, becomes selected and I can see that it's selected because it gets a blue fill. All the other points are emptying. I can move one point at a time. I could do this, we could drag this this way, you can move this all around. Or I could move multiple points at once. Maybe I want to move all four of these points. I could click and shift click them all, or I can marquee select them like this, and maybe now I'll use my arrow keys to nudge it up. But I don't care for how that looks. I'm going to nudge it back down, but that's how you would do all of this. The other thing that I want to point out is that this looks angry right now, doesn't it? Because look at these sharp corners right here and this sharp turn and these hard edges. That is having to do with how our stroke settings are right now, remember that the Pen tool that we used just now, we drew just an open path. It's just a line. It's not an enclosed shape like these squares. It uses a stroke and not a fill. The stroke, it turns out we can actually change it quite a bit. I'm going to use my regular selection tool here, and I'm just going to marquee select this whole thing and I'm going to group it while I've got that going on by pressing again Command or Control G to group. To ungroup, by the way, it's a more convoluted keyboard shortcut, but both of them can be found here under object. We have group, which is grayed out right now because it's already grouped. Command or Control G. Ungroup is Shift, Command or Control G. We've got this grouped and now I just want to tweak the settings for how the stroke works. With this selected, we can come up here in the Control panel and we can change the weight of the stroke. Right now it's set to 1.5. Make it bigger, it's going to get fatter, or I can make it smaller all the way down to 0.25. It might just depend what you're doing, or how how delicate you want your stitches to look. For example, if you wanted to put like little crossbars and the windows maybe those would be really delicate and have a small stroke weight. That's just up to you. I'm going to go ahead and set this back to one, I guess so it's easy to see. But the other things that we can do, are we can round off these really sharp, angry looking edges. We do that by clicking the word right here, stroke. That's going to pull up our Stroke panel and here. We can again change the weight, or we can come right here where it says cap, and I would like a round cap. When I click on that, we see that these edges now, right here, right here, the endpoints I should say, are nice and round, and right here. It did not round this sharp dagger over here nor this one or any of the other corners. I'm going to click this again and we'll go back to that Stroke panel. This time down here for corner, we're going to choose the rounded option. That just looks a little friendlier, doesn't it? Now it's just not quite so angry looking. That is a look at how you can create back-stitch lettering in a script style. Join me in the next video to learn how to apply symbols to the different colors in your finished design. 7. Working with Symbols: In this next part, I'm going to show you how to create the symbols that you can place here for a printable version of your design that doesn't include the color, instead it will include the symbols. First thing we're going to do is in our Layers panel, if you don't have your Layers panel open, you can find it from the Window menu by choosing Window, Layers, and right now you can see we put everything on Layer 1. We can rename Layer 1 by double-clicking and typing "Design" and pressing "Enter" or whatever it is you want to call it. We're going to use a separate layer to separate the symbols from the actual color blocks themselves. We'll make a new blank layer by clicking the little "Plus" button down here at the bottom of the Layers panel to create a new layer and by default, Illustrator calls it layer 2. We're going to double-click and we'll call it Symbols and press "Enter". There's a number of ways that we can create or make the symbols that we want to use here. If you're familiar with Illustrator, you can use whatever shape drawing tools you want. You can draw your own shapes. It's wonderful. It works great in this case because there's only a few colors, so it's very easy to make a few different simple shapes. But one of the perhaps easiest ways to do this, especially if you have a lot of colors, is to use Dingbats. What does that mean? First of all, I'm going to hide the Design layer temporarily by clicking on this little eyeball next to the Design layer to hide it so it's not gone, it's just hidden for a minute. We can see what we're doing here on this empty Symbols layer. We're going to use Dingbats and Dingbats can be found in a lot of different fonts. One popular font that is accessible and probably already on your computer, of course, is Wingdings. How do we turn Wingdings into symbols here? We're going to grab the Type tool. The keyboard shortcut is T for type and I'm going to set my color to black. I'm going to just click with my Type tool to enter my cursor somewhere and start a line of type. Don't worry about what the font is or any of these settings up here. Just click with the Type tool to get an active cursor. What we are going to do is look through the available Dingbats in the Wingdings fonts by opening Illustrator's Glyphs panel. That's found under the Type menu, Type and then Glyphs. If you're not familiar, glyphs are just what we call all the different symbols or shapes and letters, punctuation, whatever is included in a font. Here, for example, I'm looking at Myriad Pro and we can scroll through all the different glyphs for Myriad Pro. But we want to use Wingdings, so to get there, I'm going to click to put my cursor in this spot right here, and I'll just start typing Wingdings and then I'll press "Enter". Now, we're looking at all the different symbols in Wingdings. You can see there's all these great little arrows. You see those things a lot in cross stitch charts. We've got stars, sunburst, these fun little symbols. I love this guy, the circle with the star inside of it, here's the Mac command symbol, there's a little skull and cross bones, there's just so many things. This is what I thought might be the easiest way to find a bunch of symbols quickly and easily and we don't have to actually draw them. At least in my design, I have four colors, so I'm going to type out or select four Wingdings to represent those colors. I might do one that is this circle with a dot. All I need to do is double-click and you can see it pops out here. Just like texts, this is basically texts, but instead of getting a letter, we're getting a dingbat. There's one symbol. What else might be fun? I like this guy, this little diamond shape thing. I love the circle with the star in it. I'm trying to pick ones that are very different from each other so they're easy to recognize when you're stitching. Maybe this guy. These four little symbols and you just choose whatever you want. When we're happy with how this looks and you want maybe instead of that, I'll do this diamond or a star. We have two stars, a star-like type thing and this circle. When we're happy with this, we can close the Glyphs panel by just clicking the little "X" here to get rid of it. Right now, like I said, this is type, but we don't want to use this as texts because we are ultimately going to create a swatch for each of these symbols and then we'll be putting them into the chart or the key for the chart later. What we're going to do is convert these glyphs from text as they are, so for example, with my cursor in here, if I press the "Spacebar", it behaves like text. If I highlight it and I change the font size, it behaves as if it's text. What we want to do is convert it from text to vector shapes that we can manipulate and move around just like our little stitch squares. To do that, I need to get rid of my flashing cursor by pressing the "Escape" key. Now, I'm going to convert these to what Illustrator calls outlines. It's very simple. We're just going to go to the Type menu and choose Create Outlines. Once we do that, we see that now we just have shapes and as we notice, if we look up here in the top left, Illustrator has grouped them because, oh my goodness, Illustrator loves groups. But we're going to need to ungroup them, so I'm going to press "Shift Command" or "Control G", and now you'll see that it says compound path and that is perfect. Compound path just means that Illustrator sees this shape as a single object and the fact that it's got a circle on the outside and a circle on the inside and it's formed into a compound path, that just means Illustrator thinks of it as one thing, so that's perfect. Now, we are ready to turn these little symbols into something that we can just apply to our stitches. I'm going to turn my grid back on by pressing "Command" or "Control Apostrophe" so we can see the grid and I'm going to start with this shape here. I'm selecting it with the selection tool and I need to make it fit in the box. I'm going to select it and if I nudge over with my arrow key, we can see that I've got this one corner aligned so that's a great start. Now, I'm going to hold down the Shift key while I drag inwards from this corner and that will keep it proportional while it snaps into this very little square. Perfect. Let's do the same thing with this guy. Nudge it over with my Arrow key, Shift, drag from the corner. Bingo. Now, we get this guy, nudge it over, Shift, drag down. Very good. Now, you might be wondering why these things when we click on them are red and the other stuff of our design when we clicked on it was blue and that's because we're working on a separate layer now and in InDesign, the layers are all color-coded. Did I say InDesign? I meant Illustrator. This is a way for Illustrator to convey to us visually what layer these things are on. Star, so we'll nudge this somewhere, get a corner somewhere lined up and again, Shift, drag till it snaps to a square. You could work with the symbols the same size as a full stitch. If for some reason it works better for you to make them slightly smaller, then we have to do a couple of things. One is, we'll need to turn off the Snap To Grid because otherwise we're going to have a hard time dragging it away from the grid lines. We'll turn that off by going back to View and finding where it says Snap To Grid and removing that check-mark. Now, let me zoom back in here and I'm going to select this again, and I'm going to scale from both sides this time by holding Alt or Option and I'll hold Shift to keep it square. Shift keeps it square and Alt or Option scales all sides equally, so it's nice and centered. Let's do that to all of them. Again, I'm holding Alt or Option to scale all four sides at once and Shift to keep it proportional. It might just be nice to not have it be huge. That's going to be up to you but I think I want mine a little smaller like that. Now, here's the catch because we scaled them, they will no longer snap to grid in the center like this. If we go back and we turn on Snap to Grid, right here, now, you'll notice if I use my Arrow keys and I just try and nudge it, it snaps over but you see how it's not centered anymore, and if I use the next Arrow key, it's just out of alignment uncentered on the other side. What we need to do before we try moving them around is we're going to draw an invisible box around them, and that way, even though they are smaller than the actual little frame here, the cell, if you will, of our grid, they're are actually a little bit smaller, but this empty invisible box is going to basically fill the space. Here's how we'll do that. We'll switch back to our Marquee Tool and we don't want a fill or a stroke. Right now I've got this black fill, so I'll click the little "None" option so I have no stroke, no fill. Now, I'll just click and draw a box around that guy, a box around this one, this one, and this one. Now, we need to group these items so I'll switch to my Selection Tool, drag over to Highlight and select the star, the little glyph, and the box and I'll group them by pressing "Command" or "Control G". Marquee, select those two things, "Command" or "Control G". These two things "G" and these two things "G". Again, this is not necessary but if you want it to be slightly smaller than your stitch itself, then we had to turn off Snap To Grid then we scaled it down by dragging from the outer edge, holding Shift to keep it proportional and Alt or Option to scale towards the center, and then we drew the marquee around them and grouped the whole thing and then I turned Snap To Grid, back on. Snap To Grid is back on. Now all we have to do, oops, I have a runaway swatch here. Now, all we have to do to turn these into swatches is drag each one to the Swatches panel. You can see the little green plus and when I let go, we have a new swatch, and I can drop this guy, drop him in, new swatch. This one, drag and drop him, new swatch. This guy, drag and drop him. That is looking really good. I'm just going to select all our little symbols and get them out of the way. We'll move them onto the Pasteboard over here, just so they're out of the way and yeah, nice work on the symbols. In the next video, I'm going to show you how we can apply these symbols to the design. 8. Applying Symbols to Your Chart: We have created our symbols. We made them a little bit smaller than each grid cell. Using a empty invisible box and grouped them so that even though the symbol itself is smaller, the whole thing with that invisible box will fill out a cell. That just makes things a little bit easier. Now what we need to do is turn our Design layer back on. I'm going to select this first. This is one object that happens to be all the same color. Don't panic if you had a bunch of different colors all over your chart. I'll show you how easy it is to select all of them with a single click. No worries, you'll see that when we get down here to the house. But for right now I've got this selected. What I want to do is copy this from [LAUGHTER] the Design layer onto the Symbols layer. It's very simple to do. We've got this selected. You can see it's blue on the outline because it's on the Design layer. Way over here in the corner, it is so hard to see, but there's a little blue dot, that indicates the selected object. If I want to make a copy of this object and move it up here, all I do is hold down Alt or Option, and then drag that little dot up here and let go. You'll notice that it's red because this layer is color-coded for red. Now, the bounding box and all the anchor points and everything here is showing red because it's on this layer. It is still a copy on this layer. If I hide the Symbols layer, we still see this version which is on the Design layer. But what we want to do is take the symbols version. I want to make sure I've selected the one with red up here on the Symbols layer. Now, all we have to do if we want to apply these symbols to it, is click on whichever symbol we want applied. Look at that. A boom. Because it's in his own layer. We could leave it like this. I know some people like having a color chart with symbols. That's one way to do it. Or we could just hide the design and have the symbols by themselves. Next, we're going to select everything that is yellow in our document. That would include this word home. Obviously, that one's easy to select because we grouped it and it's all just one thing. But we also have this door down here and it's in part of a group. Here is how we would select everything that is this color. Even if we only had one little block here, we can click on it. Then up in the control panel up here, this little button, it says select similar objects. If I click on that, it's going to select all the other objects, which are these stitches with the same fill color. You see that? Even though this house is grouped, it still saw the yellow and selected it. That is how if you've got a really detailed floral field or something. You can just select one single stitch in the color you need and then click that little button to select similar objects and boom. Now, we can take this selection and drag it up to the Symbols layer by again Alt or Option dragging the little circle here, up here and let go. Now there is a copy of the word home and the door on the Symbols layer. If I hide the design, this is what we see, but we haven't applied a symbol yet. Let's do that. Let's give it this little star shape. There we are. Now we have one-color symbols, and the next color symbols down here. All that we have left are two more colors. These ones happened to be in that group. If you recall how we crack open the group without having to actually ungroup it is we just double-click with that selection tool. Then let's do this gray first. I'll click on just one of those. Then I'll come back up and this button moves around. Just do what depends like what you've got selected. Sometimes it's over here, sometimes it's way over here. You have to look, but here it's way over here. Now when I click it, it's going to select all the different little stitches or squares with that same color. Now we need to copy this to the other layer for the symbols. But you'll notice that when we're in isolation mode, we cannot access the other layers. If we exit out of isolation mode, we will lose our selection. This time what we're going to do is copy this by pressing Command or Control C. Then we'll get out of isolation mode. We'll click back back. Sometimes you have to hit it twice to get all the way out. Then we're going to target the Symbols layer to make it active. Now we're going to choose Edit, Paste in Place, and that will paste it in the same position on the other layer. Now we can apply our next symbol. Let's say this guy, looks good. All that's left is the blue down here. Let's go back to the Design layer. We'll select our house again, it's grouped so we need to crack it open by double-clicking. Click to select one of these blue bricks. I don't know, I feel like I should call them bricks. Then again, come find that runaway button right here. It's the little arrow and it's selecting too similar objects. We'll click on that. We've got all the blue. Again, because we're in isolation mode, we can't just do the little Alt Option Drag that we did before. We can't just back out of it because we'll lose our selection. We have to copy it first Command or Control C. Then we can hit "Escape" to get out of there. Now we'll target the Symbols layer that we want to paste it to. We'll choose Edit, not just regular pace because that'll just center it on the screen or it's not going to put it in the same spot. We want to specifically choose Paste in Place. Now we have that on the Symbols layer and we can apply our last symbol, the star. Just like that, we have our Symbols layer on top of our Design layer and we can export them together or individually, depending on what you mean. Now that we have created and applied our symbols, join me in the next video where I'm going to show you how we create the key for those symbols. 9. Color Key & Thread Conversion: To create our symbol key, we're going to start by making another new layer. I'm going to double-click on this and type key and press "Enter". Let's hide these other layers right here so we can just see what we're doing, and we're going to make this just the size of the stitches here initially, but then you can export this and scale it to whatever size you need it. I'm going to use my marquee tool, so I press "M", my rectangle tool, excuse me. If we imagine that we're drawing a table, that's what we're essentially going to do. Don't mind the fill, we'll fix that in a minute. But since we have four symbols for four colors, I want to make this thing four rows down and then however wide we think we need it to be to be able to write the words in it. The field is not need to be stars, it needs to be empty. We'll do that and let's give it a black stroke. I'll click the stroke to activate it, bring it to the front, and then we'll click black. This looks good, but it's just one rectangle. We need to have lines and everything in-between. So we can actually tell Illustrator to break this down by going to Object, Path, Split into Grid. We'll click on that and it's going to ask us how many rows we want. We know we want four, we want two columns. We can click "Preview" here. That shows us what it's going to look like, and we'll do some more editing here in a minute. But for now, all we care is that we've got the four rows and two columns. We'll click "Okay". What has Illustrator done? Let's grab our selection tool so we can see. If I click away to deselect it, what it's really done is just broken apart that rectangle that we drew into little pieces. Pretty simple. Now what we can do if we want to narrow this side down, I'm just going to highlight this whole edge and maybe we bring it in like that. This is where we'll put the symbols, and then I'll select these guys and drag them over like this. This is where we'll write the names of the colors or put the code number or whatever. So if we're looking at this and if I hide my document grid, you can see what just happened. The stroke on here is very thin and this one is so heavy. That's just a setting that I have, yours may or may not have done that. But either way, if and when that ever happens to you, it's super easy to fix and I'm just going to marquee select all of those things and remember that the stroke can be changed right up here. Normally it would say the stroke weight, but because I've got two different stroke weights, it doesn't know what to put. I can select this and I can say I want both of them to be a half point. That's it. That is all there is to it. Then if I turn my grid back on so we can see, again that's under View, Grid, hide grid or show grid. What I'm going to do is grab my marquee tool and I'm going to drag a little box right here. We'll put our first symbol in there, but we don't want to put it on the stroke. What I did just now is I clicked to apply it and then it doesn't look like it showed up. But that's because if I look over here, I applied it to the stroke. That's not what we want. We want a black stroke. You to need to click the fill color and then click right here to apply it. Then I'll switch to my move tool and I'll again press Alt or Option and the down arrow, and then we can change this one to the little diamond type star Alt or Option down arrow, this one Alt or Option down arrow, and this one. That's looking pretty good. Now to type some text in here, it's a little bit easier if we lock this whole object. For right now, I'm just going to highlight all of it and choose Object, Lock, Selection. Now we can't accidentally drag it and whatever. I'll press T for the type tool and click right here. What color was it that we had for blue? I don't know, let's look. We'll go back, turn on our design layer. Which one? What is this? This was our pink color, my bad. Let's click on the pink and let's see in the swatches here, if I hover over the one that's highlighted, it's 352 coral light. Let me go back to my key layer, get rid of this background and get my type tool, and I'm just going to click and type 352 coral light and look what's happening. I'm typing in Wingdings. I'll select all of that by pressing Command or Control A, just like you would in any other program, even Microsoft Word, and we'll come up here and change it from Wingdings to Montserrat or whatever. It doesn't matter. Something clean and simple, and I'm going to scale that size down. Now we'll scale this all backup when we're done. We don't want it really the small, but this just helps us get in place. Now, here we're having that issue where it's snapping to the grid, which means I can't position it in the middle. Now I need to turn that back off, View, turn off Snap to Grid. You can see how usually it's pretty helpful, but then sometimes no. We'll put this in here. Excellent. Now I'm going to hold down Alt or Option and Shift. Alt or Option makes the copy and Shift keeps it in alignment. I'm just going to do that two more times till I've got all of these in place, and then let's go back to our design layer and see our next color is this yellow. If we click on that, it's highlighted over here and it is 444 lemon dark. I'll come in here, press T to get my type tool. I have to be on the appropriate layer. You see this cursor right here, that's telling me I'm on the wrong layer. I got to go back to the key layer, and now I can type 444 lemon dark. Maybe what we should do, when we're all done, is we can stretch this out a little bit or we could make all of this text one point smaller, but that seems really, maybe we'll do 2.5 font size. That is biddy, but I'll show you how we scale this all up when we're done. I just like using the grid to make it initially. Then we have our star. Let's go back to our design layer, and the star was the roof. We'll target, crack open that group by double-clicking so we can see this one, and this is called 169 pewter light. Escape out of there, go back to the key layer, 169 pewter light. Very good. Back to our design layer. Crack open this one more time. This is the problem of when you have so many swatches or hurt, you don't stop to write this down first. This one was 598 turquoise light. Nudge this over. Excellent. What do you do if you have used a color in your document and you don't know what the nearest thread color is? We can try and match it using a web tool. Let's say, for example, we've got this gray right here and we want to know what is the closest match for this gray. I can select the gray and double-click right up here, and that will open the color picker. This is where we can find the color codes, all the different ways of expressing this color numerically. Here we see RGB values, for example, CMYK values, hue saturation and brightness values, or here is the hex code, and this is the easiest one because then we don't have to copy and paste three-digit different numbers. We can just do this guy. I'm going to copy it to my clipboard, click "Okay", and then I'm going to go over here to this website that I linked to in the course materials. There's a lot of different sites where you can try and do this stuff, but what I like about this one is that you can see the conversions not only in DMC but other threads as well. If we knew the color of thread we wanted, we could see over here would be the hex code for that color. But we want the reverse, we're starting actually with the RGB hex codes. We'll click on that. Now it's telling us to enter the RGB values, which is a misnomer because we're not entering RGB values, we're entering the hex code. I'll type that in and then we'll say find DMC color. So if you recall, I think this is probably the best match right here. It's showing us what it considers to be a close match. I think one of these two is pretty much right on. These look way wrong to me. Here we can see the DMC color code anchor, etc, and it also shows us the exact hex code for that shade. So if we wanted to update our document, we could. Let's say we just decide I really loved this color instead and we want to take this color and now put it into Illustrator, then we can copy this code right here. Again, they're calling it RGB, but it's a hex code that translates to RGB. We'll copy this, Command or Control C. We can go back to Illustrator, and then if we want to change a color, we can double-click to bring up the color picker. We can paste in this new color. If I hit Tab, you'll notice the old color shows down here and the new color is here. Then if I click "Okay", we now have that as our active swatch. But in order to add it to our swatches, in other words, if I change colors, I'm going to lose this. So to keep it and save it here with that new color active, we just click the little New Swatch button. Then we could name it with whatever it was called, I forgot already. Let me look. Antique violet light 3042. We could type 3042 Antique Violet Light and we'll leave global color checked and click "Okay", and now you see that swatch gets added here. That's how you can do the colors both ways. Now that we have our little color key, we can scale it up so it's not quite so small by just selecting the whole thing. We have to unlock it first. You see that? When I select it, we're just getting the texts, but we need to unlock all these objects. We do that by going back to Object, Unlock All. Now everything is selectable, so select this whole thing. Maybe we'll group it, Command or Control G, just make life a little bit easier. Then to scale it, we can hold down Shift and drag like that. It's going to scale proportionally. When we let go, then we know we have it at whatever size it is that we need it to be. This is something that you would then export as a graphic and just plop it in wherever you need it. Now that we have our symbols and our color key, we are ready to add the printable grid. So join me in the next video and I'll show you how. 10. Adding a Printable Grid: I'm going to turn off my cue layer, turn on the design, and we'll hide our document grid in a minute. That way we can just see for sure that the printable grid is going to match. So there is a tool for that specifically, and it's buried right here underneath this tool. This is the line segment tool. If you click and hold on it, you'll see a bunch of other tools, one of which is the rectangular grid tool. So I'm going to release my mouse on there. Then we need to actually tell Illustrator what settings we want to use. The way we do that is by double-clicking on the tool. That's going to bring up the options. Here we're going to tell it that we want it to fit our documents. This is going to be a width of two inches and a height of three. Down here, it's asking us how many horizontal dividers we want. That means how many horizontal lines do we want? We need 14 for each of these three inches. So if we take three times 14, we get 42. But we actually need to subtract 1 because the extra line would create 43 spaces. So we're going to subtract one. We got 41. The number of vertical dividers is again 14 running up and down for each inch. So 2 times 14 is 28, again, minus 1 is 27. Then we're going to click, Use outside rectangle as frame and we'll click "Okay". Now, that doesn't make the grid, all we did was select the tool and then set the options by double-clicking it. We're going to make a new layer for our grids. So we'll click that new layer button from the bottom of the Layers panel. I'm going to double-click and call it printable grid. Press Enter. Now, all we do with this tool is come up here to the top left corner. Click, drag down to the bottom right and you see that it fits perfectly. Look at that. This is our printable grid. It will show up if we export this. We can turn it off and export without it. But if you are planning to print this and work from it, or you just want to be able to see your grid marks, even if you use it on your iPad or something, you're going to want to see this. Now I'm going to turn off the document grid by pressing that keyboard shortcut command or control apostrophe. Now we're just seeing this printable grid. I think it looks really good. It's a bit heavy for my taste. So I'm going to select it with that selection tool by just clicking on it. Then because the grid is stroked, we can change the thickness of that stroke by coming up here in the control panel next to stroke. This is 0.5 points. It depends what works for you, but I think I'm going to drop it down to 0.25. Then it's just a little less overwhelming. You could also try choosing a lighter shade of gray maybe instead of black if you wanted thicker lines, but I think this is perfect. Now we're ready to export. Join me in the next video and I will show you how 11. Exporting Your Finished Chart: We are ready to export this. First, we want to save our file to make sure we've got the most recent version. Because we've saved it once already, we just need to update it by pressing Command or Control S. That will just update the most recent version on disk so that it looks just like this. Now, I'm going to show you how to export this a couple of different ways. We can do it, first, as a PDF. Let's say we just want a version that looks like this, maybe not with the grid because I'm going to show you how to make a mockup of this when we're finished. Let's export a version to use for the mockup. I don't want the grid, I don't need the key, I'm just going to do it like this. Then we would come over here and choose "File", "Save As", and we would just choose "Adobe PDF", click "Save". We're going to get some options here. You can go through and change anything if you need to, but I think I'm good with just the defaults. There are presets up here. For example, if I was going to make this for someone to be inside a PDF or inside a [NOISE] pattern booklet or something like that, then I might choose High Quality Print. Press Quality is for like if you are having it professionally printed on a offset for color press. I would just stick with High Quality Print. If you think you might print it at home, that's plenty good. Then we'll go ahead and click "Save PDF". It's going to launch it for me here in Acrobat. Here's what the finished PDF would look like. Now, let me show you how you could export this as a graphic. Maybe you work with InDesign and you want to be able to drop this into an InDesign layout. Maybe you're building your pattern tutorial booklet or something like that. Then you can obviously also just place this as an Illustrator file, InDesign can do that. But let me show you how to make it a graphic as well. In that case, we would choose "File", "Export", "Export As". Here, we can choose all kinds of different options. JPEG is fine, but JPEG cannot have transparency. If you are needing transparency for whatever your end-use is going to be, then you're going to want to go with PNG. I'm going to choose PNG. I want to tell it to use the art boards. Otherwise, if I have any art just out in the edges of just tidbits that I saved for later or scraps, it's going to include those, and I don't want it to, so I'm going to tell it stick to the art board. We only have one, and then I'll hit "Export". Here, it's going to ask me what resolution I want. Now, because this is vector, we can enter any resolution that we want here. It will give it to us and it will be crisp and lovely and perfect. We could go with a high resolution. For the particular mockup that I made, I think 200 was almost spot on. I'm just going to do that, but you can do whatever you want. I do want the transparency, so I will leave that set to transparent, and we'll click "Okay". Now, if you wanted to also export the key write here, then we could turn off everything else., and you would repeat that process for either a PDF or if you want to make this into a PNG or a JPEG, you can. Basically, this is a separate file, but it's related, so we just have it in the same document on its own layer, so that it lives here along with everything else. If you wanted to make that printable chart version maybe with symbols and the design and the printable grid, we would turn all that stuff on and repeat the process, File, Export, Export As, and we'd probably still keep it a PNG. Again, stick to the art boards so that none of these little guys get in there. We'll click "Export", but let me rename this like printable grid. We can have it be transparent, that's fine. We'll click "Okay". Here's the one that we exported with the printable grid. It's a little bit hard to see in the preview, but it's there. Here is the one without it, and that's the PDF, I think. Yeah. This is a PDF, and this is the Illustrator file. Join me in the next video, and I'm going to show you how you can drop this exported PNG into one of the mockup files that I have included. 12. Mocking Up Your Design: To show you how cool these mockups are, I've opened up a couple of them in Photoshop. This one looks very plain, but what's great is that it's very flexible and I'll show you what I mean in a minute. This is another example where it's not quite as flexible, but it has some cool props and stuff. There's a number of different examples but this one has a few more bells and whistles, so I thought I would just demonstrate with this one. Here is our image. We're going to copy it by pressing "Command" or "Control A" to select the whole thing. You can see the matching ends around the edges. Now we're going to copy it by pressing "Command" or "Control C". Now I'll bounce back over here to this image, and you'll notice that there's a few things going on here. You'll notice right here this says Your Design Here, and what this is is a smart object. The work here has already been done for you. Even if you don't know much about Photoshop, all you have to do is double-click this layer and then paste in Command or Control V to paste in your design. If we want to scale this down we can press "Command" or "Control T", and then we Alt or Option-drag from a corner to scale it maybe like this. It's pretty good I think. I'm centering it wherever it is we feel like it looks good, and then we just save it. We don't even have to pick a place. This is a smart object, so it's actually saved within the mockup file. We're just going to save it, press "Command" or "Control S", "Command" or "Control W" to close it and then look at that like magic. It appears in place at the right size, and it's in a blend mode that makes it look like stitches. Now I didn't go crazy because I didn't want to make everyone install a bunch of patterns, or actions, or anything. It's not meant to really look like a stitch, but I think you get the idea. If you want to take it a little bit further and make it a little bit more sticky without having to do a bunch of other things, here's what you can do. You just double-click to get back into that smart object. Here we are, and you'll notice that I've got some layer styles here. They are already set and they're not visible right now, but you can change that by just clicking right here to apply those effects. What that does if we zoom in, it adds a little bevel and emboss and it adds this pattern overlay which is this texture. You can see that, and then it added a very subtle drop shadow. If you want to tweak any of this, if it's too much; now I'm looking at that texture going,. What was I thinking? That is huge. Then the texture is part of the pattern here. We could just double-click on those words, and these are the settings. We could scale it down if maybe the scale is part of the problem, maybe we scale it down. I just wanted it to look like threads a little bit, and then we could adjust the opacity or play with the blend mode, and when we're happy with it we click "Okay". When we're happy with how this all looks, we save it by pressing "Command" or "Control S". How do we close it by pressing "Command" or "Control W"? Now look at that. It looks even a little bit more stitchy. Just a little, but you know what? That's perfect for an Etsy listing or something so that you can make these designs, but you don't necessarily have to stitch up each and every one or each and every version in order to just communicate what the finished design would look like. Let me show you what else is going on in here. This is the frame itself, so if you for some reason wanted to move it we would need to select the design layer and Shift-click the frame and then you can move them separately. This is a layered PSD which is very nice. There's a drop shadow applied to the frame. If you want to tweak the shadow, change the direction, whatever, you can do that. I've also got some background elements here. If you want to do anything [LAUGHTER] with this gray background, so if I zoom in you can see that I've applied a stucco texture so that it looks like a wall. That's this pattern overlay, you could mess with that if you know what you're doing in Photoshop. If you wanted to change the color I've made it very easy too, you can just enable this hue saturation adjustment layer by clicking the little eyeball right here. I've currently got it set to pink, but you don't have [LAUGHTER] to live with that. You can change it by just double-clicking this little thumbnail. If we double-click it's going to bring up the hue saturation properties, and you could just take this hue slider and drag it anywhere to change the hue. I wanted to make this as simple as possible. I know not everyone is a total Photoshop nerd like I'm, so I try to really simplify this. Hopefully I struck a balance between actually something that provides value, but isn't complicated to use if you are possibly totally new to Photoshop. Then this layer right up here just adds some lighting to give it a little bit more of a realistic look. This is the plane mockup with no numbering, and then mockup 1 is pretty much the same. You would just double-click right here, plop your design. You can just put it in like this, and we'll save it. Here we see it now in place right here. I hope you enjoy all this stuff and you can post your work with these on Etsy, or your blog, or Instagram, or whatever, and then tag me so I can check it out and cheer on all of your work. These little frames by the way are those just little Michaels' frames. I just photographed them to create these little mockups for you. I hope that you find them useful. 13. You Did It! What's Next?: [MUSIC] That's it, folks. You survived, you did it. Thank you so much for joining me today. I can't wait to see your finished projects. Post it down below so we can all cheer you on and I hope to see you again soon in one of my other design and craft classes here on Skillshare.