Custom Organic Patterns in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Making Custom Organic Patterns in Illustrator - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class, custom organic patterns in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're making organic style patterns of the type that the new pattern make tool in Illustrator isn't particularly good at doing. We're going to make a pattern of uneven lines and we're going to make a skyline pattern. Now, both of these require careful but not particularly difficult preparation to make sure that they'll repeat correctly. As you're working through these videos, you may say a prompt which let you recommend this class to others, please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write just two or three words to explain why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Illustrator. And if you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started making organic style patterns in Illustrator. 2. Making Custom Organic Patterns - Part 1: Before we start, let's have a look quickly at the two patterns we're going to make. This first one is a organic line. Here, the difficulty is in making sure that the lines are going to line up in the pattern. Then what we're going to do is this skyline pattern. What we need to do here is to make sure that the buildings align up at either side of the pattern pace. So there the challenges that we're faced with, these won't be solved by the pattern make tool in illustrator. We're going to need to go back to first principles and design the patterns from scratch. But it's really quite easy once you understand how to do it. So I now have illustrator open, so let's get started. We're going to start with a new document and it's going to be 250 pixels wide and we're just going to make it 400 pixels tall. This is going to be the size of my pattern's swatch. So I need a dimension here that I know because I'm going to need it in a minute. RGB color mode and turn off Align New Objects Pixel Grid, just click Okay. So this is our 250 by 400 pixel document. We're going to draw our lines with the pencil tool. I'm going to the pencil tool, I'm going to turn off the fill, so I just have the stroke here. I'm going to double-click on the pencil tool. At this stage, I'm going to turn off all my check marks. I want to set my fidelity to a low value because I want wiggly lines. So in earlier versions of the illustrator, if you're looking at the options for your pencil tool, choose something that is towards accurate and away from smooth. I'll click Okay. Now, I'm just going to draw some wiggly lines down the document. They're going to be smoothed out a little bit by the pencil tool, but that's fine. We want wiggles, but not really big wiggles. So if you find yours is too wiggly or not wiggly enough, just make adjustments to the pencil tool setting. If you make a line that you don't like, press control Z or command Z on the Mac to undo it. If the lines are not spaced out the way you want them to be spaced out, that's fine. We can fix that in a minute. I think I have enough lines, but there are a couple of things I need to attend to here. Firstly, I'm just going to adjust the spacing. What I'm concerned with here is this distance and this distance because this is going to be the wrap around. So I want these lines to be evenly spaced. I'm looking at the space here and trying to make this space roughly equal to it. It's an organic shape, so it doesn't matter if it's not exactly equal, it just needs to be reasonably so because what we're looking for is an uneven pattern look. Also concerned with what happened down here and I'm just going to go to the scissors tool and I'm just going to cut off the end of this shape because it bent round, rather unattractively. Control or command 0 just to zoom back out. If you've got bumps in your lines that you don't like, go to the select tool, click on the line with the bumps that you don't like and go to the smooth tool. With the smooth tool, you can just draw over the bumps that you don't like and just smooth them out. Once you've got lines that you like and they're spaced out across the document, you're ready to go to the next step. In the next step, we're just going to draw a line across the middle of the document. Now, I'm going to aim for around the middle. It doesn't have to be the middle. I'm holding the Shift key as I drag it across because I want it to be a horizontal line. It has no fill, it has a strike, it's just a one pixel stroke. This line is not going to be part of the pattern, we're just borrowing it right now. Let's go to the layers palette. I'm going to bring this out because it will help us to be able to see what's happening here. The line is the last thing I drew so it's at the very top of the layer here. So I'm going to lock it down. I don't want anything to happen to the line. I don't want to be able to touch the line. I just want to use it as a cutting guide. So I'm going to the zoom tool. I'm going to zoom into the middle of the document here, hold the space bar as I just move the image across. Now, I'm going back to the scissors tool. Scissors tool is really good for cutting things. I'm going to place my mouse pointer over the intersection between the horizontal and vertical line and click once. What that does is it cuts the line in two. If you've got your smart guides turned on, you're actually going to see a little intersect would appear when you do this, making it really clear that you're in the right position. Let's just zoom in a bit closer on this last one so that you can see what I'm doing. The word intersect appears click once and I'm just cutting these vertical lines in two. Can't touch the horizontal line because it's locked down. Control or command 0 to zoom back out. I don't need this line any longer, so I'm going to unlock it and trash it. What's happened now is that every single one of these lines has been cut into pieces. The benefit of cutting it into pieces is that we know that these two lines join up perfectly, because we can see it on the screen, there's perfect joins. So we're going to use that perfect join as part of our pattern. So I'm going to select over the top part, which is the top half of every one of these lines. I'm going to the align palette. If you don't see it, choose Window and Align. From the align to drop-down list I need to make sure that align to art board is selected because what we're going to do is drop all of these to the very bottom of the art board. We're going to do it with just one click, this one here, vertical align bottom. They're going to shoot to the bottom of the art board. Now, this was every second one of the shapes. Sometimes you might find that you can actually easily select the second set of shapes. Sometimes you can't do it easily, but we know that if we start by selecting the second one here and select every second one, we're going to be right. I'm holding the Control key as I select every second shape. This is critical. You need to make sure that you get the other half of the lines. Now, we're just going to click on this one for vertical align top. The result is that these two lines are going to join up perfectly when they're made into a pattern swatch. It's the middle now that's causing us the problem. Well, not for very long. So let's get the zoom tool and zoom in here, use the space bar to move out. Now, I'm going back to the pencil tool and I'm going to double-click on it. I'm going to click Edit selected paths and click Okay. Now, I'm going to the selection tool. I'm just going to select over these two paths, which are a line that we now want to join up. We can use the pencil tool to join them. When you hover over the end of this top line, you'll see the pencil tool has a little forward slash beside it. That's telling you that illustrator is picking up that line. You're just going to run it down to the starting point of the bottom line and it's going to join up. Again, selection, pencil tool, draw the intervening line. You're going to continue that all the way across, at which point it would really help to learn two key strokes. The letter V for the selection tool and the letter N for the pencil tool. V and select N for the pencil. Join these two lines. I'm not worried about the fact that some of these look a little bit wonky at this stage, because we know that we have the smooth tool in a minute, which will smooth them all out. If you make a mistake, don't like what you've done, just press control or command Z to undo it, control 0 to zoom back out. Going to select over this shape. I'm going this time to the smooth tool that's going to smooth the middle of the line here. You can smooth any part of these lines, just don't touch the ends. The top and bottom ends have been created so that they will be a seamless transition. These lines are going to join up perfectly, so you want to stay well away from them when you are doing your smoothing. That's part of the reason why I chose to make a document that was so long. The document is 400 pixels long, while we've got plenty of room in the middle to work out these joins and to get this join to look good without impacting what's happening at the top or bottom of these lines because that is the critical area for making sure this thing is actually going to work as a pattern. So I'm just removing effectively some of the excess pixels here using the smooth tool. Anywhere you see lots of pixels, lots of anchor points, we're just removing them and just smoothing the lines out. So once I'm happy with that, I'm ready to go to the next step to create the pattern. We're basically pretty near there. 3. Making Custom Organic Patterns - Part 2: In this next step, we're going to select either all of the lines and we're actually going to choose some colors for our pattern. I want to color the lines a brown color, so I've just done that. I also want to make sure that the stroke on these lines is set up the way I need it to be set up. I'm selecting all the lines, I'm going to open up the stroke panel. What I want to do is to make sure that I have projecting cap enabled. That means that the cap of these lines is extending a little way beyond the top of this art board. It's only a tiny bit at this stage, but this is going to help us when we create a pattern from these lines. You want to make sure that your caps, are extending beyond the art board. I'm going to select either all of the lines and I want to make a duplicate of them. I'm going to choose edit copy and then edit paste in place. In other words, this duplicate set is right on top of the original set. Having done that, the duplicates are now on top and they're all still selected, so it's easier to work with them right now. I'm going to choose a color to work with. I'm going to do this with a pale orange and I'm going to increase the stroke. In a minute, what's going to happen is, I'm going to put the brown small stroke on the top. This is the pattern we're looking at effectively. What I want to be really careful I don't do is extend beyond the art board here. I need to be really protective of this line here, that I don't make it too big and this too over here, I don't want to extend beyond the edge of the art board, otherwise the pattern's not going to work. But I have a 13 point line and say here this time, it's very easy to see the overlap over the edge of the art board exactly what we want to say. Now, we need to put the shapes behind the other one. I'm going to click on H in turn holding the Shift case are they're all selected and now just drag them down and put them behind the brown strokes. There is our pattern swatch. We just need to make a pattern swatch out of it. To do that, we need a rectangular of size of the art boards. I'm clicking on the Rectangle Tool, then click once on the document, our art board was 250 pixels by 400 pixels, so that's the size of my rectangle. I don't want it to have any fill or any stroke. We've already set the realign options, so they're set to align to the art board. I want to center this on the art board. I'm going to click these two icons, horizontal and vertical aligned center. My rectangle right now is at the top of everything, it needs to be at the bottom. I'm just going to drag it down below all the other paths, and I'm going to select everything on this layer, because everything on this layer is my pattern. Going to the selection tool, I have my swatches palette open. If you've got a swatches palette that looks like this, mine actually only has color swatches, not pattern swatches, so I need to drop it up here. If you've got some pattern swatches visible in your palette, then you can drop it in next to the patterns. Just be aware that it won't go into some places in the palette. Holding the left mouse button with the selection tool, I'm just going to drag and drop this up into the swatches palette. I click away from the shape, and let's go and test it. Going to add another art board. I'll make this a bit bigger. This one now is going to be 500 pixels wide, 400 pixels tall. I'm going to add a rectangle for this art board to fill it, 500 wide, 400 tall. This can be any value. It doesn't matter, I'm just letting you know when I'm using. I'm going to center this on this art board. I have now a rectangle that is the exact size of this art board. I'm going to fill it with my pattern. I'm going to bring fill to the fore and then open up my swatches panel, click on my pattern. I now have a seamless repeating pattern that has an organic look to it. Let's just resize the pattern object transform scale. I'm going to turn preview on. I don't want to transform the object, which is this rectangle, I just want to transform the pattern. I'm just going to decrease it. Now occasionally you will see fracture lines through your patterns in illustrator, it's a little difficult to trust illustrator, if you do see fracture lines, I suggest that you adjust your scaling by one or two percent to try and get rid of them. If you can get rid of them, that's a reasonable chance that they won't appear in your final product. I've got a fracture line across here right now I can see just a white line across my pattern. I'm going to increase the size until that fracture line disappears and then visually check to make sure that there are no others. If your fracture lines move around, that tells you that the illustrator's fault, not yours. If a fracture line stays in place, then it's probably your problem, not illustrator's, so just be aware of that, then click Okay, because I didn't create a color background to my pattern when I created my pattern, we can now add a color behind it. I've got my rectangle still selected, I'm going to the appearance panel. I've got one fill which is my pattern. I'm going to add a second fill, so you click Add New Fill. Now I've got two fills, the pattern on top and the pattern underneath. Well, I'm going to the underneath one and I'm going to choose a different color so I can put in behind it, I solid fill. I'm going to choose a whitish green. Well, maybe not. Let's go for a cream color. One of the reasons why I will quite often create a pattern that has transparency behind it is because that enables me to add another pattern behind it or a solid color or something. It just gives me more mileage out of a pattern. But here we have the pattern that would be very difficult to make with the pattern make tool in illustrated quite considerably more difficult than it is to make by hand this way it is an organic style pattern. Next up, we're going to create a pattern that is a skyline pattern using a similar technique. 4. Making Custom Organic Patterns - Part 3: For our second pattern, we're going to get a little bit of starter help. You could draw your own skylines, but it's going to be easier because what we're really focusing on here is how to make the patterns if we get a bit of help with some skylines that we can use. Now I'm going to give you the download link for this set inside the zip file. Three or four files, there's an AI file, so you'll just want to double-click the AI file to open it. I've opened the urban skylines document now, and I'm just going to pick out the pieces that I want to use. I'm just going for some shapes of skylines that should work pretty well together. I just want some simple ones, so I'm going to select over all of these. I'm going to copy them, edit, copy. I'm going to create a new document and it's going to be 250 pixels by 300 pixels in size, RGB color mode, and I have align new objects to pixel grid disabled, so I'll click Okay. I'm just going to paste these in, edit, paste. We're going to move them out of the way for now so that we can work on them one at a time. Let's start with this one here. You're going to need to open up your last panel, that's going to be critical. You probably want it visible. Now, compound paths won't cut, so you need to be very careful about breaking these shapes out of compound path. Go to object, compound path, release, and then it will cut up in a minute. Resize this one so it's a little bit smaller than the artboard. Because we would like bases that are going to be a bit longer, I'm actually going to select over the base and hold Shift as I just drag down to make a longer baseline for this. That will help fill in gaps a bit later on. Not too worried about the wonky sides at this point, but what I need is a cutting line. I'm going to drag out a line, make sure it has a stroke but no fill, and we're going to lock it down because we're just using it as a cutting line. I'm going to zoom into my shape here, and I'm going to get my scissors which is here, and you can press the letter C to get your scissors. I'm just going to cut the points at which this shape intersect the line that I've created. You should see as a result that you get two parts. Just double-check before you finish. If you don't, just undo it, make sure that you don't have a compound path that you just try to cut in half and just try again. Select this side. I'm going to the align tools just to make sure that I have align to artboard selected, which I do. That's going to be critical. I'm selecting the right-hand side of this shape, and I'm going to click here to horizontally align it left. Because of the way I cut it, which I'm going to show you again in just a minute, I'm actually going to push it across an extra couple of pixels. Now I'm going to select the second shape, and I'm going to horizontally align it right, and I'm also going to push it across a couple of pixels just for safety. Now we're going to zoom into the middle here, and we're just going to join these two pieces together. What we have to do to make some shapes that's just going to make sense in the skyline. I'm just going to drag over, create the shape, select all these shapes here and join everything together using Unite in the Pathfinder. Now I'm going to zoom back out with Control or Command 0. This is the first of the shapes that I need for my skyline, so I'm going to lock it down and turn it off. Let's just find out where it is in the last pallet, lock it down, turn it off. Now I'm going to continue with the other shapes. I'm going to speed up the recording. I'm just going to slow it down when there's something that is important to tell you. With this shape here, we've got a compound path that has little windows in it. When I choose object, compound path, release; you'll see that we release too a series of shapes including the window shapes. Well, rather than just deleting all the windows shapes, it's actually easier just to unite them into a single path. I'm going to do that, make sure I'm working with a path and then continue. Because these are skylines, nobody is going to know what they're supposed to look like. You can stretch them in unusual ways. This one is going to cause a bit of problem later on because we've got some deep gouges here. I'm actually going to create a couple of rectangles that's going to fill in these problem areas. I'm going to select over everything and just unite them at this point before I cut them. The other thing I'm a little concerned about is that the cutting line here is over something that's not straight, so I'm going to select these points at the very top of this shape, and I'm going to align them so they're all horizontal with object, path, average and choose horizontal to make them all in a single horizontal line, and click Okay. We're going to take this to one side, knock it over a couple of pixels, and then go and get the second piece, take it to the opposite side and knock it over a couple of pixels just by nudging it. This one has a very uneven base, so it will be a bit helpful and a lot less distracting if we just clean up the base of it. The easiest way to clean up the base of this is just to add a rectangle over it. I'm just going to make it the same size pretty much as the skyline, and I'm just going to unite these shapes together. That solves some of the problem with the shape. You want to make sure that when you're cutting the shapes that you don't cut through an angled piece or something that's going to be a little bit difficult because you are going to knock it over a couple of extra pixels. You're going to lose a couple of pixels from this joint, so you want to make sure that you're cutting it at a place where you can afford to lose a couple of pixels of space. Checked, I've got two shapes. Make sure that I've got it selected, align it to the left, and knock it over a couple of extra pixels, and then take the other one, align it to the right, knock it over a couple of pixels, and then join up the gap. You can be as creative as you like when you're building in these extra little pieces of the skyline. I've now completed all of the shapes, and they've all been knocked out a couple of pixels over the edge just for safety. I don't need the line any longer, so I'm just going to delete it. When I'm moving these shapes around, I want to be really careful that I don't move them out of alignment. I'm holding the Shift key as I just drag them down. I'm also going to recolor them as I go because I want to create blue-green colors in my shapes. I'm just going to start moving them down, holding the Shift key, and just arranging them in layers, making sure that where possible, I'm filling in those gaps because I was pretty careful about making sure that the shapes were pretty long. I probably won't have too much in the way of problems with this. Now I've got all the pieces that I need for my pattern and they've all extended slightly over the artboard. I need to resize my artboard, so I'm going to the artboard tool. I'm going to drag the top of the artboard so it's behind these shapes so that I don't have any white area here. I want to be lopping off the top of some of the shapes. Now its lopping off the top of two shapes, so that's just perfect. The bottom here, I'm just going to bring it up so it lines on to the base of the front shape. Then I'm just going to check my dimensions. Well, that's 250 pixels by 146. It would be easier if it was 250 by 150, that's just easier to remember. I'm going to make it just a smidgen larger, and then click back on the selection tool. Now I'm going to this front piece, which is this piece down here, which is not quite long enough and either I can move it or I can just go and get the direct selection tool select over the base of the shape and holding Shift, just pull it down so that it's well over the base here. Next up, we're going to have to duplicate two shapes. We're going to have to bring a duplicate of this down to the bottom and a duplicate of this because they overlap the top of the artboard. We're just looking at what's outside the top of the artboard and they are the shapes we have to duplicate. Let's select the back one first, object, transform, move, going to zero off these settings because it's a bit difficult to focus when your pieces take off on you. You just want to zero everything, and then think about what you're doing. What we need to do is to make a copy of this and we need to move it to the end of the artboard. We just made the artboard, and it was 150 pixels tall, so we need to move this 150 pixels in a vertical direction. But we don't want to lose this copy, we just want an additional copy, so we're going to click copy. There's our second version, and it's at the very bottom here of the last stack, well it's second to bottom so we're just going to move it back up so it's at the top of this last, that's in front of everything. Then we're going to this second piece here, select it, object, transform, move. If you're lucky, your settings are still going to be in place because they're the exact same settings you need to use. Move at 150 pixels, but make a duplicate of it. Then go and find it in the last stack where it appeared and drag it up and put it in front of everything else. Now we have the pieces we need for our pattern. If you need to move something, there are three shapes here that you could move and they're the three shapes we didn't duplicate. It's this one, this one, and this one; the three in the middle. You could move those around a little bit if you want to. But you can't move the others because they're part of the pattern and you're going to break the pattern pieces if you do. If you need to move either the pieces that we just duplicated, what you'll need to do is to get rid of the pieces you just made, move these around, and then recopy them because otherwise, the pattern is not going to work. Now we've got the pattern ready to go, so I'm going to add my pattern bounding box which is a rectangle, so let's click on the rectangle tool, make a rectangular the size of the artboard, which is 250 by 150 pixels in size. It's to have no stroke and no fill, and we're just going to center it on the artboard. We're going to move the rectangle behind everything because that's the way patterns are made. Select everything on this layer with the selection tool, just drag and drop it into the top of the swatches panel and we've made our pattern piece. In the next video, we'll come back and apply our pattern piece to a shape and just have a look and see how it's working. 5. Making Custom Organic Patterns part 4: We're now ready to test our new pattern swatch. I'm going to create a new artboard by just clicking on the Artboard tool. That's going to drag out a reasonable size artboard here. I'm going to set it to a known size because that would make it easier for me to fill it with a rectangle shortly. I'm making it 330 pixels by 250, that's an arbitrary size. I'm going to click on the Rectangle tool and add a rectangle, the size of the artboard, my 330 by 250 pixels in size. I want it right now to have no fill and no stroke but I'm going to bring fill to the foreground. I'm going to align it to the artboard. Having done that, I'm going to the Swatches panel and I'm just going to click on our pattern swatch. The pattern swatch is now filling the rectangle and we can size it. I'm going to choose "Object", "Transform", "Scale". Again, I'm going to disable transform objects. I'm going to click on "Preview", and I'm just going to decrease the size so that we can see the pattern. As I do that, you may see fracture lines appearing in your pattern and I've seen some fracture lines in this one, and they're not sticky. They just come and go quite a bit. Even though it's really quite apparent here that there is a fracture line, if I go and save that as a JPEG image, I'm not finding the fracture lines in it. It's not actually in the pattern swatch, it's just in the way that Illustrator is displaying it. You should have no problems when you go and choose "File" and then "Export", "Save for Web Legacy", go and save this as a JPEG image and even scale it up to quite a large size, you won't have fracture lines in it. I'm just going to choose fit on screen. You can see here that the fracture lines are just not appearing in this exported version. It is really annoying, those fracture lines in Illustrator, but there's very little we can do about it except just be really aware of them and just make sure that they are not in the pattern pace and if they're not in the pattern pace, go and save it to make sure that your saved version or your exported version doesn't have those fracture lines in it. I'm just going to cancel out of here right now. One of the reasons why we pushed the shapes over the edge of the artboard just by a couple of pixels. I wanted to look at the situation where you may want to put a line around these shapes. I'm just going to lock down and turn off this rectangle over here so that what's available here are the shapes on this artboard. I'm also going to lock down and turn off the border rectangle that is creating the path. The only things that are selectable here are the shapes that go to make up this pattern. For each of those shapes, not surprisingly, we've got no stroke because we didn't ever add a stroke to them, so we're going to add a stroke this time and you can make your stroke whatever color you like. I'm actually going to add a white stroke to this. At the moment it's one pixel, I'm just going to take it down a little bit to 0.75 of a pixel. But what is critical is that you make sure that the stroke is on the outside of the shape. I'm going to the Stroke panel here. I'm going to click this option, "Align Stroke to Outside". What that does is it's going to force the stroke outside the shapes. In doing so, it's going to ensure that the strokes are outside the artboard. This is going to be critical. This is the artboard line here. Let's just go and click on the Artboard tool. This is the line of the artboard here, and this is the edge of a shape and this is the strokes. We want all of this to be outside the artboard. Otherwise, we're going to have problems in that we're going to be building a stroke into our pattern. We don't want to stroke down the side, we just want it across the shapes. Things are pretty good here now, so let's just zoom out. With Control or Command 0, I'm going to select everything. But before I do that, I need to make my rectangle visible and I need to select it as well. That's the no stroke, no fill rectangle, that is the size of the artboard that is behind absolutely everything. We're just going to drag and drop this lot into the Swatches panel. Let's go back over to our second artboard. I'm going to unlock and read the shape here. I'm going to select the shape. I'm going to bring the fill to the foreground and I'm going to add my second pattern swatch. This is just giving us a different look to our piece of art. Again, we've got this really, really nasty fracturing through the image. But if I choose "File", "Export", "Save for Web", go to JPEG, fit it on the screen. Well, let's actually make it much bigger so we have a higher quality version of our image. You'll see we don't have any fracture lines in here at all. Those fracture lines were only showing in the Illustrator document, they're not showing in the exported version. Again, I'm just going to click "Cancel". Your project for this class is going to be to go and create one or both of the patterns that I've shown you how to create here. You'll find the download link for the skylines in the class project area, so you're free to use those skylines or you can make your own. Post an image of your completed pattern in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about creating patterns in Illustrator that you really can't create the same way in the pattern make tool and that really need to be built by hand. If you did enjoy this class, can I ask you to do two things for me? Firstly, when you're asked to recommend this class to others, give it a thumbs up and then write just a few words about why you enjoy the class. These recommendations help other people to find my classes. It indicates that it's a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and all of your questions and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon. 6. Line Join Alternative for Illustrator CS5 and earlier - Part 5 : This is an add on video for this class and it's going to be particularly relevant to anyone who is using Illustrator CS5 and earlier. Because the pencil tool doesn't work in quite the same way in that application. What I have for you is a much easier way of joining these lines once you get to this point in the video. What you're going to do is go and get the selection tool and drag over the two lines that you want to join and then click here on the pen tool. It's really important that you click on the pen tool at this point because you're going to now choose object, path, join. What Illustrator is going to do is just create a straight-line joint between these two points. Now, you can go to the smooth tool because the line is still selected and you can just go ahead and smooth this out. This is not going to affect the point further down the document. Again, go to the selection tool and just select over the two lines that you want to join. Click the pen tool, then choose object, path, join, Go to the smooth tool, and then just go and smooth out the joints so that you get a nice smooth join. Pen tool, object, path, join. Once it's joined, you can just smooth it out. I hope that helps you if you're using Illustrator CS5 and earlier, as being an alternative way of joining these lines to using the pencil tool.