Design a Half-Drop Repeat Animal Pattern in Adobe Illustrator

1. Intro: Hello, my name is Sarah Rain and I'm a surface patch and designer living in Japan. In this class, I'm going to show you how I make a half-drop repeating animal pattern. I'm going to take you through my entire process from start to finish, from gathering ideas and making mood boards. Taking those ideas and developing them into sketches putting those sketches into Adobe Illustrator. I'll talk you through some of my favorite motif making tools in Adobe Illustrator. Then of course, we'll go over how to make a technical repeating half-drop pattern. By the end of this class, you're going to have your own half-drop repeating animal pattern. These designs are really fun to make, and although they look quite impressive, they're actually fairly simple. This class is for anyone who has some pattern designing experience, and a basic working knowledge of Adobe Illustrator is certainly useful. Of course, even if you're a seasoned pattern pro, you're welcome to join in in the class. This could be a style that's new for you. Whatever your level, I'm sure you're going to make a really exciting design. 2. Class Project: For the class project, I'd like you to create your own half-drop repeating animal pattern. Please post your work in the class project section as you go. I'd love to see your moodboards, sketches, and of course, your final pattern, and some alternative color options. I can't wait to see what you come up with. 3. Tools: For this class, you're going to need some paper and a pencil, a camera or scanner, a computer with Adobe Illustrator, and preferably a drawing tablet. I use my old trusted woerkom that I've been using for years. Okay, let's get started. 4. Making a Moodboard: Where do we start? I suggest by first choosing your animal and it's best to choose an animal that you're quite familiar with so that you have a solid starting point for your research. Maybe you're fanatical about dolphins and you have an idea for a marine themed pattern. That gives you a really good starting point because you know that you can research things like sea weed and fish and of course dolphins and there are lots of ideas there to work with or maybe you have a pet cat that you absolutely adore. You can take photos of your cat, sketch your cat. Maybe you could go outside and see what local flowers there are in your area, or you can Google what flowers there are in your country and again, that gives you a good starting point. Also you could incorporate things like folk art elements or traditional art designs that are prominent in the country where your animal is from if that thing interests you as well. I'm going to talk you through a couple of my designs to give you some more ideas on how to get started. This pattern was inspired by a trip to Mexico where I saw the sweetest donkeys in a little tank or the [inaudible]. The times full of gorgeous traditional embroidery, which is where I got my flower motifs from as well. The colors of the pasture and were inspired by the multicolored houses that were everywhere there. Everything in Mexico was so sunny and happy looking. I really wanted that come through in this pattern. I added the arts as well purely because I like arts and I seem to add them to a lot of my work. I knew this pattern was going to be a Christmas pattern. I already had reindeer in mind as my main motif. When I was putting a Moodboard together, I knew I wanted the design to have a little bit of a vintage field to it. I researched vintage Christmas cards and also Scandinavian Christmas designs because I love the simplicity of Scandinavian art. I also wanted the pattern to be classically Christmas themed. So included traditional motifs like mistletoe, candy canes, Christmas trees, and the bell. What I didn't have in mind was having depths in the pattern. That came up when I was making the Moodboard and I happen to fit in perfectly. Through building the Moodboard, I was able to refine my idea of a vintage themed Christmas pattern and that gave me lots of material to work with. We're going to begin by opening adobe illustrator and hitting ''Create New'', to create a new document. Any sizes fine, I'll just stick with A4 and hit ''Create''. It'll come up with this art board, but I don't usually use the board, so I'm just going to go to View and then Hide Artboards. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to save this somewhere, that makes sense. So go File, Save As. For now, I'll just put it on my desktop here and I will create a new folder. I'm going to name this folder, Skillshare pattern. If you know that your pattern is going to be badgers or lions or whatever, you can write lion pattern or badger pattern here so that you can search for it easily later. Within this pattern folder, you can make a new folder and name this one Moodboard hit ''Create". Then of course up here as well we can write Moodboard or lie in Moodboard or whatever you're making and hit "Save". For my pattern, I've decided to go with the Japanese crane because I'm quite familiar with Japanese culture and I know that I'll have a good starting point. First we want to go over into Google, I'm just going to type in Japanese cranes, here we go and I will go over into the image section there. This is pretty much exactly the kind of thing I was looking for which is good. Think I like the look of this one, look at the wings there, it's a lovely shape. I can move this window over and just simply drag the image from Google into Illustrator and there it is. That's pretty much all I'm going to do to build up my Moodboard. I'm just going to Google things and drag them in and of course you can add your own photos that you've taken as while if you like. Let's go back to Google and see what else we have. This one's nice, look at the shape of the neck there, it's almost art like, I really like that. Again, I'm going to drag that one in to Google as well, sorry, into Illustrator back to google. What else is there? Well, this one's lovely. I really like the atmosphere of this one. You're not just looking at the farm and the shapes, but you're also looking for the mood and the colors as well, you might get some color inspiration by doing this. Going to add that over here, zoom a little bit. When you're drawing from your Moodboard and from your images, it's important to draw from a few and not just one. If you draw just from this one, we are going to be copying it and that's never good. Maybe you want to take the wings from this one, the neck from this one and the legs from this one and you can put it all together to make an original image. Let's go back to Google and now I want to see some traditional art, I think and how cranes are depicted in Japanese art. You can see these are really lovely, a lot like the wing in that one, that one's really nice. We'll drag that over, see what else we have. See this one, how it has some plum. I was going to go with winter theme and plums are actually blossom in winter right before the cherry blossom in spring. This is perfect around this one. I also want to look more cherry blossom actually. So maybe I'll type in Japanese, sorry, plum not cherry blossom, Japanese plum art. See what we get for that, that's pretty. This is actually a really famous screen. I like the shape of this one as well. I'm going to drag that one over, don't worry if it's watermarked. This is simply for your reference, so it doesn't matter at all. That one is nice in winter your looking, drag though over. Now, I think I want some other Japanese motifs. I'm not sure what, so I'm just going to type in Japanese motifs and see what I get. These are looking a bit more modern, but I quite like that. These colors are nice currently. But I think I like the look of this one, these simple shapes, so drag that one over there. Actually I like the fan here so I want some more fans. Japanese fans, let's see what we get. I want to keep my shapes quite simple, so maybe this one. I know the pattern on it is not so simple, but the shape is relatively simple. You get the idea, I'm just going to keep going with this relative a bit longer and then I'll show you my final Moodboard when it's ready. Of course, you can rearrange these so that they're a little bit nicer as well. Of course, Google isn't the only place that you can go to for inspiration. My friend lent me this absolutely beautiful book called kimono design as absolutely full of gorgeous kimono patterns, which is perfect for my idea. The way I used this was by taking visual notes, which means that I just chose the elements I like and sketch those rather than copying the full thing. That way you can make your own. Of course, you can always go out and take your own photos and put them in your Moodboard as well. This is my Moodboard and I'd like to talk you through what I have here. If we zoom in a little, you can see that I have my cranes here because cranes are going to be my main motif. I knew that the wings might be a little bit challenging for me, so I wanted to see how other artists have tackled them. I included some other artists work here, some traditional art, just to see how they've done the wings. These are actually quite complex and because we're working in vector, I wanted something a little bit more simple. This was a little bit more like what I had in mind. But then when I saw this graphic looking one, I thought that was really the direction that I wanted to go in and so I've included this one over here. You can see in these ones that there is some plum in the art and plum is something that I knew I wanted to include. I researched some plum, here's some plum art. I liked the simplified and stylized plum designs on these cups here and the colors as well. I like how the buds are represented just by little circles, I thought that was really pretty. It also included some plumb reference because it's always good to have some photographs to draw from. This is a plum design as well. Across here we have some rids and actually, I liked these shapes of the flowers and these swirls, I was particularly drawn to those. We have some bamboo and some pine and some bows here. I was quite interested in these Japanese knots. These three are here mainly for color. I liked the sort of blue and white of this one and the muted colors of this one and the snow scene I thought was really pretty. I thought I could have two color options, more muted version and modern version with brighter colors. I also like the swells that are in here. I thought these sort of ribbon shapes are really nice. Across here we have the fans. I'm not sure if I'll use those yet, but I thought they might be nice. We have the motifs that I was looking at earlier and that's it really. Now, we're ready to draw. 5. Sketching: Now we're ready to sketch, and all I'm going to use is a pencil and some paper. At this stage, I normally just use scrap paper that's got stuff on the back of it, because we're just doing some really rough sketches. What you want to do, is look at your mood board and just start sketching out the shapes that you're drawn to. This stage can be really rough. It's also a space where you can explore how you draw things. For example, I don't actually have much experience drawing plum. Never really drawn it before, so I can figure out how I draw plum. Maybe I want it to be quite loose, or maybe I want it to be really simplified. Lookup the defining characteristics. I think the defining characteristics in plum are these dots and lines. Maybe I want more dots, and that is just from my imagination, or maybe I want to try drawing these petals a little bit more defined. I'm not sure yet, so this is my space to explore. Maybe I want my bamboo to all fall one way. Just look at your mood boards and take the shapes that interest you, and you can embellish them, change them, make them your own. You can combine elements together, and do a couple of pages of this just to see what happens. I'm going to continue filling out my sheet and then I'll show you what I have when I'm finished. So these are my sketches, and you can see my plum here and over here. I've got my bows, some pine here and here, and I've also got my fans and a couple of traditional Japanese motifs. These flowers here were actually in one of the paintings in my mood board. They weren't very noticeable but I like the shapes, so I've made my own version here, and some reeds as well. On a separate sheet, I was sketching my cranes and this took a little bit of figuring out because for one, I realized that I don't really know what a crane looks like. I'm not very familiar with them. I've never drawn one before really, and so it took some time and a few attempts to get this right. Also because I was drawing from three different images, it was tricky and took a few attempts to get the bird to actually look natural. For it to still look like a bird, even though I've just mashed up three sources of inspiration. Now, we are ready to refine these sketches. So these are my refined sketches. You can see I've taken some time to figure out my bird, and I've also just taken the shapes and motifs that I liked from my rough sketches and refine them, and I've only taken the ones forward that I would like to take into illustrator and use in the pattern. I still have my plum, and my reeds, some bamboo, my fan, and I've just figured out the shape of them. Now, my tip to you is that you want to do most of your working out on paper. The more accurate your sketches are on paper, the easier it's going to be in Illustrator to get them how you want them to be. Now, we're ready to transfer these sketches across into Illustrator. 6. Transferring to Illustrator: To take this into Illustrator, I normally just take photo with my iPhone and then AirDrop it into the computer, or you can email it as well if you don't have AirDrop, or you can scan it into computer and take it into Illustrator from there, either way, I'll see across on the computer for the next step. I have sent the photo I took of my sketch across to my laptop using AirDrop. If I go down to Finder and then downloads, it should be in here. I have mine sorted by date added, so it should be right at the top. I can check that by hitting space bar. Then I can drag this over into my Skillshare_Pattern folder. It didn't go in. One more time, there we go. Now I'm going to open this folder and create a new folder by clicking, right-click "New folder", and I'll name this one, "Sketches". Now I'm going to drag my image into my sketches folder and rename this one, sketch 1. It's a good idea to have a sketches folder, especially if you have multiple sketches to make sure everything's together all the time. Now I'm going to open Illustrator, create a new document. Again, it doesn't really matter what size it is and hit "Create". I'm going to go view and hide my art boards. Now I want the photo of my sketch to be in here, so I'm going to go "File", "Place". It already opened this for me, but if it hasn't, you can find your folder. My case is desktop, Skillshare_Pattern, sketches, sketch 1, and you know exactly where it is, and hit "Place". You can drag it out to the size that you would like it. Now here, I am going to rotate it. You can hit R for rotate and hold shift and rotate it to the left. Holding shift is just going to make sure that it rotates an exact 90-degree angle. Now, we want to go over to the layers panel, which is this little one here. If it's not visible, you can look for up here in window layers. Then next to the little eye here, we're going to click this little box, and that's going to lock the layer. Now we're going to create a new layer. This is where we're going to build up our motifs. Now before we get started, we're just going to save this file, so I'm going to go to "File", "Save as". I don't want it in my sketches, I want it in my Skillshare_Pattern folder. I'm just going to call this "Skillshare_Pattern_Dev". I usually call them Dev for development. You can hit "Save", "Okay". Now we're ready to build our motifs. 7. Blob Brush and Shape Builder: Over the next few videos, I'm going to talk you through how I digitize my sketches for this type of pattern and show you the tools I use. We'll go over the Blob Brush tool, the Shape Builder tool, the Pen tool, the Reflect and Rotate tools, the Scissors tool, and combine all of the above in creating more complex shapes. I'm going to hit "Z" and zoom in here, and I think I'll start off with this bamboo and for this, I'm going to use the Blob Brush tool, which you can find over here, it might be hidden under the Paintbrush Tool, or you can just hit "Shift + B" and that will come up as well. Now the Blob Brush tool is very useful and if you draw with it and then select it, you can select by going up here to the Selection Tool or by hitting "V". You can see that it becomes a shape, it's not a line it's a shape. If you hit the "Direct Selection tool" which is "A", these points become editable, so you can change the shape afterwards and that's very useful. Another useful thing about it is if I go back to the tool by hitting "Shift + B" and draw over it, these join together and they become one big shape. Again, you can manipulate these afterwards by hitting "A" and moving the little white dots and moving these handles around as well. I often use this tool to build up my shapes. Let me get my tool out again "Shifts + B", I'm going to make it a little smaller and you can change the size with the bracket tools. I'm just going to make sure that my smoothing options are how I want them, so if you double click here, this is currently on Accurate, and I want it to be up here towards Smooth. What this does is if I draw a line that's a bit wobbly, it's going to smooth it out, and the higher this bar is, the more smoothing is going to do. I'm going to hit "Okay" here and delete these, I'll just hit "B, Select and Delete" using the delete button. Now, I'm going to make this smaller again. I'm on the brush not the Blob Brush, so I need to make sure I'm on the Blob Brush. Then I'll do the central line like that. There we go. Now I'm going to make it smaller again and I'm just going to draw these like that, and it doesn't need to be accurate at all, you can always change it later, and also leaves are quite organic so it doesn't need to be perfect. Just quickly go over these. There we go. One thing to be careful with is you want to make sure that all of these shapes are closed, because I'm about to color them and if they are not closed, they won't be colored, so I'm going to select it, hit "B" to get my Selection Tool out select it, and then I'm going to use the Shape Builder Tool, which is over here, or hit "Shift + M". Now, if this is all selected and they go over the piece like this, it's going to fill it for me. You can actually just go over all of them at onetime, and it's going to make it one shape so that's very useful. I always go back and refine these later, so don't worry if it's not perfect at the moment. I'm going to show you a little bit more about the Shape Builder Tool because it's really useful, I'll draw two big blobs to show you how this works, one blue and one, a contrasting color, I don't want a stroke, I'll make it pink. Usually I just make my motifs in two colors and then I change it again later. With these two selected, I'm going to get my Shape Builder Tool out. You can hit "Shift + M" and if I go over both of them, they're are going to become one shape. If I go back by hitting "Command + Z" or "Ctrl + Z" I can show you that it's split into three parts, the overlap and the parts that aren't overlapping. If I want to make this into one shape, I can just connect those two. Let me go back. If I want to cut out this shape as well, I can hit "Alt" and it becomes a little minus symbol underneath the arrow, hit that and it's going to remove the overlap section, so this is a really useful tool that you can use in a lot of different ways. Let me delete those. Now I'm going to draw over this little flower guys, and for this, I want to turn down my smooth settings because they're quite jaggie and I don't want the lines to smooth so much, so to do that, I'll go over here to my Blob Brush Tool and I double-clicked there, and the tool options will come up and I'm just going to move that right down to Accurate. I just wanted to mention that my size here is set to five, and also I have a pressure variation on and the variation is set to five so that I have a variation from one point to five points and I'll hit "Okay", and that just means that, well, I'll show you. If I push down, the line becomes thicker, and if I just hold down or push down lightly it's thinner, so you can get a more brush-like effect. Our variation five just means that there is a variation of five points between the thinnest and the thickest line that you can get like that. That's quite good when you're doing shapes like petals, it can be useful to have that one. I'll just get rid of that by selecting them all and hitting "Backspace" and get back to my little flower here, so "Shift + B" for the Blob Brush, make my brush smaller with the bracket keys, I'm going to zoom in and start drawing over this, my Blob Brush going to make sure this is selected, so that when I add these little lines, they're going to become part of the same stem. There we go. May be joining that one off would be better, I don't like that. This is where I'm a perfectionist. There we go. Now we'll add little flowers, but I want those to be a different color, so I'll go back to the pink that I've been using, no stroke please. There we go. Back to my Blob Brush and these aren't going to be the same shape because they [inaudible]. I want to keep them separate, so that I can change the colors independently later. I'm just coloring these in as I go just because the shapes are so small it's probably quicker that way. 8. Pen and Shape Builder: For the fan I'm going to use the Pen tool because is much more accurate, and this is quite a precise shape. So I'll go over here to my Pen Tool, or I can hit "P" on the keyboard, and the way the Pen Tool works is, you just drop the points. You drop the points where you want the lines to go like this, actually I'm just going to hop over to here, and change this from filter strokes, so that I can see my line better, and continue dropping them down. I'm not going to go into too much detail with the Pen Tool for this video, but there are lots of good ones on Skillshare that you can watch. So now here, this is a curve, so it changes a little bit, so I'm going to drop a point somewhere interior, and this time I won't let go, and I'll keep pulling, and you can see you can manipulate the line to make a curve. So just tweak this to where you want it to go up around here. This is going to continue that line with this curve there, so I can drop the next one around here somewhere, that's nice, and this time it's curved but I want this to be sharp. I'm just going to click on this point again, and that's going to give me an angle, and now I can close this shape by clicking on the first point, and you can see the little circle comes up by the Pen icon, which indicates that the shape is going to close. There we are, so there are a couple of parts here that I want to manipulate, so I am going to go up here this is the Direct Selection Tool, or I can hit "A" to access that, and I'm just going to pull a couple of these points up. This Direct Selection Tool you can use to manipulate the points, that looks a little bit more uniform. Now I want to smooth this line a little bit, do you see is little bit off? For that I'm going to use the Smooth Tool, and I have a shortcut setup for this mine is S because I use it often, but you can find it over here in the panel as well. It might be beneath the Shaper Tool if it's not already appearing up here, and so you can use the Smooth Tool to smooth things out, and that's just making the shape a little bit nicer. Although in this case it's actually working this, and I don't want that, so I'm going to hit "Command Z ", or "Control Z" to undo that. Because actually I think it was better before. Maybe I need to do some manual tweaking, so go back to A hit this one middle point, and move it over a little bit, and then I can use these handles here to change the curve, so I can get it to have a like it. Now looks better. Now I want to hit "V" to select i and make sure it's selected, and I'm going to lock this object by going Object, Lock Selection, and that means that it's not going to move. If we go over to the layers panel, you can see that there's a padlock next to it now, and that just indicates that is locked object. Now I want to do these alternate sections in a different color, so I'm going to go up here, and select navy, and then get my Pen Tool out by hitting "P", and I'm going to just go over each shape. But because I want this to be really precise, I'm going to go just above each section you'll see what I mean. I'm going to use the Shape Tool, or the Shape Builder Tool later this one to trim the edges, so I'm going to go over the edge for now, just like this. I want this central line to be precise, so it's just the ends. I want to hang out, that one wasn't quite joined there we go. I want this line to be exactly on the line, and ends to poke out, and you'll see why in a sec. It's not quite accurate. So maybe fix that, and also that. The Pen Tool does take a little bit of getting used to but really you just need a few hours, a few hours of playing around, and you can get the hang of it pretty quickly. Maybe about here. First, I'm just going to select all of these, have my selection tool on just now I hit "P" the for that, and then I'm going to just change this line into the stroke inter-fill, so I can see my spacing. Now see this spacing here is little bit off, so I'm going to hit "A" to move that over a bit, so I want it to be even, or evenish. I'm looking at the gaps here, it's negative space I'm looking at, so I want this to come over a little bit. This is where it helps to have a really accurate drawing to start with, and perhaps my sketch was an accurate enough. Because if your sketches accurate you can just draw on top of it exactly, and it's going to look good. But mine was a little bit vague, so it takes a little bit more time to tweak in Illustrator. That looks fine. Now I'm going to unlock the pink one by going over to my Layer's panel, and just unchecking that little padlock, I'll select it, and I'm going to make that one a shape also just by not a Shape Fill by hitting this arrow. Now I am going to select all of it, and come over here to Shape Builder Tool, and you can see that is now being divided. I can use my Minus Tool now by hitting "Alt", and just trim off all the parts that I don't want, and you can just draw over them like this as well makes it quicker. This means that it's absolutely exact, like this is really neat. That looks pretty good. So now I'm going to do the little spokes here of the fan, so first I'm going to select all of this, and lock it again, go to Object, Lock Selection, and then I want my Pen Tool, So I'm going to hit "P", and then switch to this to align, I'll zoom in a little bit with Z ectopy, and I'm basically just going to draw lines down here. But what I'm going to do is first just draw this line. That is not what I wanted to do, delete. You don't want to hold, and pull you just want to click, release, and drag. There we go, and you'll see I'm not following this line, but I'll show you why in a sec, so I want to release this line. I want this to stop here, and so I'm going to hit "Command " or "Control", and just tap another place on the screen, and that will release that line, and another one from here, release here, release, not released there we go, and I'm just going to keep these loose for the moment. There we are. Then I'm going to manually drag these to the center point. So hit "A" to get my Direct Selection Tool, and then when I hover over it I can manipulate this point, and I'll move it to where I want it to be. Now the reason I did that is I'll show you over here. If I just have my Pen Tool like this, draw a line, release it, draw another line. See how it meets here, and it becomes one shape, and I get this point here, and I don't want that point, and if I release it, and do another one is just going to keep happening, and I'm going get all these points, and so I just find it a little bit cleaner to do them separately, and join them myself, and then you can clean up this as well of course. So hit "A" again, just line them all up where you want them. I'm going to move these behind in a second, there we go, almost there. Now I'll zoom out, and I'm going to unlock these, so come over here. We can see these are all the ones that are locked, and you can just go straight down like that to release them all. I want to select them again, and I'm going to bring them to front, so to do that you go Object, Arrange, I always use the shortcuts, I don't know where this is bringing to front. All you can see the shortcut here is Shift Command right bracket or Shift Control open bracket. That is just going to push these layers behind it so that they're not poking out, so we just have one little bit left here, so get my Pen Tool back out I'm going to start here, because I don't really want to connect my shape here, so I'll start over here. See, I didn't hit this point here, and that's why it made that funny shape. I want to break the curve, there we go, and I'm going to make that fill over here, and again you can tweak the shape if you like. I'll probably do that later, and there's the fan, and I'm just going to grip this altogether. So I'm go select all of it, and hit "Command", or "Control G" there we go, or you can go to Object, Group, this says Group. I just grouped those places on Group I know this is Group, and you can do up there. 9. Rotate and Reflect: Next I'm going to show you the rotate and reflect tools. I have a shape here that's far from perfect, but we can make it perfect very easily. I will get my pen tool out. First I'm going to draw one-half of one of these petals. I'm going to hold Shift and make sure this line is straight up and down like this. Bring it out and close the shape. This is half of one petal. I'm going to select that. I want to make a duplicate here. I want to reflect it. I'm going to hit O, which is the shortcut for the reflection tool, or you can access it over here as well. Do you see where this little icon is here? That point is the reflection point. That is where it's going to flip it. But I wanted to flip it along this line, so I can hold down Alt and click exactly where I wanted to flip. When I let go, this reflect window comes up. We can select whether we want to draw flanked horizontally. I'll just preview this like that, or vertically, which is what we want. We can just hit coping, that has made a perfect coping. Now I'm going to go back to my selection tool by hitting V. I'm going to select them both. I'll go over to my Shape Builder Tool, and just join those together, there we are. Now, I want a few more on each side. I wanted to rotate perfectly. This time with this selected, I'm going to hit the r key. That will bring up my Rotate tool, or you can go over here and find it there. This time, my rotation pivot point is here. That means it will rotate from the center. But I want my rotation point to be down here. Again, I'm going to hold down Alt and click here. That will change my rotation point and open up the rotate window. It's currently set to minus 270. That's why it's moved so drastically. But I think I wanted to add about 15. I'll just uncheck and check the preview to see what that looks like, or maybe about 17. I'll hit Copy because I want a copy of it and see how that looks. There we are. Now, to duplicate the last action, you can just hit Command or Control-D. That is going to repeat the last action. There we go 1, 2, 3, 4. I'm just going to put the outlines on so you can see that better. I'll make it white. I want to copy these over onto this side. I can select these four, hit O for my Reflect tool. Again, select the reflecting point by holding down Alt and clicking where I want it to reflect. I wanted to reflect exactly in the center. I'm going to choose this point here, and there we go. It's reflected it vertically exactly, so hit copy. I just want to bring this one to the front. I can go Object, Arrange, Bring to Front. Or the shortcut is Shift Command and close bracket, there we are. I'll select these all and group them, and move them to the side just for a moment. We can make this flower, the second flower part in a similar way. But again, I'm going to get my pen tool out. I don't want to stroke this time, so get rid of that. I'm going to hit the Shift key to go up, straight. This needs to be straight, or is not going to merge properly when you flip the two sides over. Make sure this is nice and straight. Could join that there and pull the shape out into a petal shape, like that. Again, I'll hit O for my Reflect tool. Hit Alt, and select the mirroring point, copy it. Select them both, hit Shift-M to get my Shape Builder Tool or you can find it over here, there we go. I think I want this to be slightly thinner, so I'm just going to do that. I want to round this curve out a little, so I'm just going to smooth it. I have S set as my Smoothing tool. There, that looks better, so now I want this to rotate this way. Again, I'll select it, hit R for my Rotation tool. Bring the rotation point down to here by hitting Alt, and clicking here. This time I probably want about 45 degree angle. Let's see how that looks. That's probably all right, I'll hit copy. Looks good to me. Again, I'll select the middle one, hit O. I'll select my point. This time I'm going to make this minus 45. Hit Copy, and that will move it to the same degree the other way. Now I am going to put on my outline, so I can see that. Group them again, Command or Control G to group. This will go on top of here. Now I just have my last little bit here, which I'm going to attach onto my main piece, so bring that over. I'm going to lock this. If you just go Object, Lock, Selection. I'm going to get rid of my white for now. Get my pen tool, and just go over my sketch here. Again, you could make this perfect by using the reflect tool. But I've just eyeballed it to see how it will go. You can alter the points, of course. But you can see it isn't perfect this time. It's up to you. You can gauge when you want to use it and when it doesn't need to be perfect. Let's see how this looks put together. I'll just bring these flower shapes over. I'm going to bring this to the front. Shift Command close bracket or Shift Control close bracket on a PC. I'm going to send this shape to the back. That's Shift Command open bracket or Shift Control open bracket, and that looks good to me. 10. Complex Shapes: Pen and Shape Builder: In this section, we're going to look at more complex techniques as I digitize my crane motif. Although I've done this a lot, I still make errors all the time. I've intentionally left in my mistakes so that you can see how to correct them if you make the same mistakes as well and hopefully to save you some time in troubleshooting. I had a little thing about how I'm going to tackle this bird. There are many ways to go about it. But I think I'm going to begin with going around the edge of the body with the pen tool, then I'm going to cut out these shapes here, using the shape builder tool. Then finally, use the pen tool again to draw in these lines on top. First I'll start with the pen tool. So I'll hit "P", change this fill over to stroke and I'll go around the bird. Let me zoom in first. Use "Z" for that, "P" for the pen tool and I'm just going to go around the edge. The curve tool does tend to show you where to go but I tend to click on the last point and have full control of where I put the next point and the curve that I make with it. There we are. I'm pretty happy with the drawing of the bird. So I want to follow the lines as accurately as possible. It always makes it easier if your sketch is how you want it to be. I'm going to tweak these points slightly to make sure they follow the lines. I'll hit "A" to get this tool up here at the direct selection tool, and I'm just going to move these slightly so that they follow my sketch. Looks fine down here. Then I'm going to get my smooth tool out. I have it set to "S" or you can go over here and find it under the shaper tool, and just smooth out a couple of the bits, maybe a little bit here. There we are. Next, I'm going to cut out these shapes. To do that, I want to change this stroke to a color that I can see against the blue. So I'll make it pink. Get my pen tool out, and I'm just going to go over this line here because that's the part that I want to cut out. It doesn't matter what shape I do up here. So first, I need to hit "V" from my selection tool, select them both. Then hit "Shift" "M" for the shape builder tool, then hit "Alt", hold "Alt", and now I can cut out the shape here. There we are. Now I'm going to change the stroke to a fill and just go over this shape here and that will fill it in. Okay. Now I'm going to do the same for these other pieces, but first I want to change the color. I'm just going to deselect these and I'm going to change this to something I can see, maybe a yellow. Zoom in slightly and I'm going to tackle this shape here. Again, I'll get my pen tool out and follow this line here. This is the part that I want to cut out. I'm going to smooth it a little. There we go. I'm not going to my shape builder tool, I'm going to select them all, then go over to my shape builder tool. Hit "Alt" for the minus key. Get rid of this extra bit. I'm going to just go over this part here to make that yellow. It's made it blue. Try again. Okay. It's because this was a stroke, not a fill. This time, I'm just going to hit "V" so that this is deselected. Select only this object and fill it. There we go. That's easier. Now I'm going to do this shape here. The biggest shape. I'll zoom out a little. Choose a different color, maybe I'll go for white this time. I only want the stroke so I can see why I'm doing. Hit "P". Maybe I'll start up here to get a nice curve in like that, and I want a nice curve here. There we go. So hit "V" for the selection tool, select them all. Next go to the shape builder tool. Hit "Alt" and remove the excess parts, then hit "V", just to select this object and then fill it. There we are. We can see we have this little issue up here. I'm just going to hit "A" to get my direct selection tool up and I'm going to move this anchor point in and over. There we go. Let's see how this looks. Maybe I'll make this blue and make the crane white and see how it looks. There we go. That's looking pretty good. This part's a little off but I can tweak that later. Now, I want these lines here. So I'm going to change this back to a blue stroke so that I can see it. I'm going to get rid of the fill so that I can see the drawing underneath. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. Get my pen tool and start from this side and just join up these dots. These lines. So I'll start here and connect them and then hit "Command" or "Control" and click somewhere else to release the line and I'm just going to go over all of these. 11. Complex Shapes: Scissors, Pen and Blob Brush: Okay. So now I will try filling my bird in again. Let's make it white. I'm thinking that I want the definition here, but I don't really like this outline. What happens if I get rid of this outline or if I make it white? I want the blue line over here, but not over here. So how to do that? I'm going to duplicate this. I'm going to hit Command or ctrl C to copy and Command or Ctrl P to paste behind. You can also go to object, arrange, send to back, just to push that back after you paste it. Then that means I have a copy C. On this top one, I want to get rid of the color of the body, get rid of the fill, so it's just the outline. So now it looks like that. Then I want to get rid of this part so I only have the wings. To do that, I'm going to find my scissors tool, which is underneath the eraser tool. You can cut objects or paths in half. I'm going to cut on this anchor point, and on this anchor point here. There we go. So now, I can just delete this part, select the one underneath it, and make this one white. Now I only have the blue on this part. I'm wondering if I want this bag actually. Let's see what it looks like without this part. Maybe I do on that, do I? Maybe I don't. I'm going to leave it like that. Next, I am going to work on the legs. I think can go into local of this, so I don't move anything. I'll just go V for my selection tool. Select all and go to object, lock selection. Going to go up here, get my pen tool and just drawing the legs like that one leg. Let's do the other leg. Or wherever this part is called, I guess it's called the leg. I can change this stroke into a fill, and I'm going to send those to the back. So select them and then hit Shift, Command or Control and open bracket, and that'll send it to the back. Or you can go to object, arrange, sent back. If you like, you could outline this. Maybe I want this to have a white outline. Here, let's see white outline looks like. You could do that, although I want this one behind. So again, I'm going to select it and do Shift, Command, open bracket, send it to the back. Then I just need to do these parts here and my bird is done. I'm just going to use the pen tool again. But I think I'll make it a bit thicker this time. Let's see what three looks like. Whoops, too thick. Maybe 1.5. Here we go, that's look so right. To another one here, it's called fill, let's get rid of the fill. There we are. Then I'm just going to use my blog brush tool, which is under here, to add these blobs in, make this joint a bit thicker and feet. Tweak this here. So a and then I can move the anchor point. So it joins up better. There we go. I think I want those to be navy actually. That happened because these lines they're not shapes their strokes. I want to select the leg and get rid of the white and then move the fill over. To the same here, I'm going to move the fill over to the stroke and get rid of the white. Then I can make these other parts navy as well. There we go. I'm just going to finish off making these motifs, and then I'll show you what I have when I'm finished. 12. Cleaning up Elements: Now I finished going over all of my sketches. If you've been following along and made it this far, then congratulations, you've done a lot of the hard work. Next comes the fun part of putting the motifs together. But right before we do that, we want to make sure that everything is nice and tidy. If you haven't done so already, I would suggest you go back to your shapes and just clean them up a little bit. See how these little ends aren't so nice, and maybe I'm a perfectionist, but I don't really like having these things there. I am going to get my pen tool, and hit the minus key. That brings up the minus icon, and this is going to remove points. Here, I'm just going to remove that point, and this point, and this point, maybe this one, and it just smoothed out. I can also use my smooth tool, which you can find over here. Going to actually make this full screen, because I'm hanging off the edge. There we go. That's just a bit nicer. On to the next one, p minus. Get rid of some of these points. Smooth. There we go. You can also group these as you go, to make sure that all your elements stay together. I'm going to zoom out. Click V to get my selection tool out, select them all, and hit command or Control G to group. That one is good to go. Once you are ready, attempt to move them over. You can just go through all of your elements and tidy them up. In the next clip, we're going to start building them. Building all the motifs into your main motif that's going to make up your pattern. 13. Building the Motif: I've tidied up all my elements and now I'm ready to build my main motif. But before I do that, I'm just going to change the colors into something a little bit nicer. I'm going to begin by selecting them all and going up here to the re-color art torque tool. Now if you haven't seen this before, it can be a little bit daunting, but actually, it's quite simple once you get your head around it. I want to adjust all the blues here together. I'm just going to click on the blue and you can move the sliders here to change the color, or you can click there, on the little square and change the color up here as well. That changes it live, I could like that color actually. But for now, I want it to be a bit darker. More saturation may be. The pink is a bit bright as well. I'm going to make that a little bit more pleasing on the eye. You can also go up to this edit button here and here, you can move things around. If you move it around like this, you can move each one independently. You can have fun just moving it all around the color, we'll see what goes, or if you have some nicely contrast and colors already, you can click this button here which says link harmony colors and now when you move one of these, the rest of them are going to move with it. There are a lot of different ways to alter your colors with the re-color artwork tool and we'll work on this a little bit more later. But for now, I just want some colors that are nice and easy enough to see. I think we go back to my blues, point to unlock them so I can move them independently and that will do for now. I say as I move the pink. That'll do for now. Now we are going to build the motifs. I'm going to zoom out a little and I'm just going to put down a background color. Maybe we'll make this a nice blue. It can be anything really because we can change it again later. I'm just going to come over to the rectangle tool up here and draw a nice big rectangle. That's a bit flashy. I'm going change the that. More of a blue, I think, that's better. I'm going to start by just sending this right to the back. I want to go object, arrange, send to back and then I'll bring my crane over because I know that I want the crane. Make it a little bigger, and I want another one on the other side. I'm just going to hit of for the reflect tool and then I want to reflect to over here. Pivot point will be somewhere around here. I'll just hold down alt and click here. There we are. Hit previews, see what happens. Yes, that's why I want and I'll just hit copy. There we are. Now, I think I want something in the middle. Maybe this little will [inaudible] dye here. I'll make that a bit bigger. There we go. This is literally a matter of playing around and seeing what you think looks nice. I have to be honest, at this stage when I was practicing this pattern, I was like, no, it's terrible. I don't have any motifs. I don't have enough motifs, is not going to work and I was just having all these dyes. But I can tell you that with pretty much every project I ever do, I go through that phase, so don't worry. All you need to do is push through and hopefully you'll get something nice and if not, you can always add motifs as well. I wanted some reeds by the feat because I thought that might look natural. I'm going to flip this over here. You don't always have to use the reflect tool. You can hold down alt and that's going to drag it. Drag out a copy and then, you can press O and just flip it there as well. In the end we're going to refine this and make the symmetrical bub. When you're just playing around, it doesn't need to be perfect. Once more I'll just drag this holding alt and then hit O. You can press shift if you like, so that it turns exactly without M can moving around its exact reflection and put that over there. That looks quite nice. Next, what would we like? What do we have? Maybe a Boque. Boque could look nice, like there. It brings it together a little. What can I do with my cherry blossom? You do want to play around here and just see what happens. That might look quite nice. Like I said, I have actually practiced this, so it will probably take you much longer. I know the first time I did it, it took me much longer. Just to figure out where I want all of these elements to go. It takes some trial and error. Maybe this one can go here. I'm going to rotate it. See how this is moving, I'm going to lock that because I'm now in Lock Selection. There we go, and now that won't move. What do I want next? Maybe a swirly guy, or maybe this swirly guy. Somewhere like that. In my mood board, I don't know if you remember, but there were these swirly things in the background of an image, and I thought I added some depth but it was a much more subtle colors, so I'm going to change this color. Another tip for you is, I think I want this to be in this light blue color, just to keep things cohesive. I don't want too many colors darting around just now. So, I'm just going to select all of this, get my swatches panel up, and hit this little icon, which is New Color Group, and just hit Okay, and that will just put all the colors that you've used as swatches over here. So if I want this to be the same blue, I can just do that really easily. There you go, that looks better. Maybe this one can be the lighter color too, because I don't want those to stand out so much. So, I'm just going to continue with this, and I'll show you what I have, and then we can move on to the next stage together after that. So remember at this point, we're not refining, we're just playing to get a general shape for your main motif. I like what I have here. The next stage is to try it out as a repeat. That's quite exciting, isn't? We're still going to play with this, but we need to see how it looks as a repeat so that we can see what changes we need to make. I'm going to select all of this and group it, semi a bit, and move it over, and this is hard to see against the white, so I'm just going to make big squaring to go behind it. There we go, I'll just make that the same color as this. I can hit eye to get my eye dropper tool out and click here, and it will make it the same color. I want to send this to the back. So go Object, Arrange, Send to Back, and I'm going to lock that as well. So now, we are going to see how this looks when it repeats. So you want to hold Alt and drag this down, and that's going to copy it, and do it again. You can see that we have a bit of a gap here, and to create the half-drop part, we're going to select all of these, hold Alt again, drag it over, and drop it by half the repeat like that, and it should fit in quite nicely. There we go. We'll take the first three again and move them over again to here, and again, this doesn't need to be totally precise for the minute, because we're just going to look at the gaps and see what we need to work on to fill out our motif. As I said, we need to put something in these gaps, and also, I'm not too keen on these bows. I think when there's so many of them, it makes it look a bit prim, so I'm going to get rid of those. Now, I'm just going to work here because that way I can see how it looks within the repeat as I work. I think I'll choose this one to work on and I'm just going to ungroup it. So that's Shift, Command or Control and G to ungroup, or you can go up to Object, and there's ungroup there as well. I'm going to get rid of my bows. Oh, I did ungroup twice, so let me just go back. There we go. Get rid of my bows. But then, if I get rid of my bows, it looks a bit empty, so I need something else here. But I do think I like it better without the bows, so we'll go with that. Let's see what we have to work with. I'm going to move this away, and bring my remaining motifs over, so that I can see. Now, I'm not sure. There's nothing obvious here. We'll just need to try them out and see. Maybe I can use this as a sort of fan shape like that. Probably it look better without the stem, so I can get rid of that stem. So this is a grouped item. So if you want to just manipulate one individual element of a locked, grouped even object, you just double-click, and then that will access the group, and then you can select each one. So I want to get rid of this one, delete. Here we are. I think if I am to use this, I wanted to make it a bit more symmetrical. But, I'll leave that for later. We don't want spends time on something that we might not use. It still kind a bit sparse, so we need something else. Something else up here. Oh, I left my little friends behind. That one wasn't grouped. Bring that over, and you can play around with your gaps. Now, I'm just going to go ahead, play with this, fill my gaps, and then I'll meet you after that. So this is where I'm at now with my motif, and you can see it's changed a little bit from before. I'm just going to delete all the other ones just nicely I can see what I'm working with. So delete the rest, and this piece. This is what I have now as the base motif. So I'm going to group this and then I'll try putting this into repeat to see how I like it. So, it's the same thing again. Just hold Alt to make copies and will go downwards first. Select all three. Hold Alt again to go along and then done the half-drop, and then, whoops, it's like the first three again and drag them along, and that is fitting much more nicely now. I think maybe, I just need something else for this little gap, and that's me just about done. I might try one of these flowers. This tiny flowers, let's see how that looks. Turn around, make it a little bit bigger. I think I like that, except, it looks a little bit too childlike. The rest of it is become a lot more sophisticated. So I think when I'm refining this, I'm just going to redraw these so that they'll look less childish. 14. Refining the Motif: Now we're ready to refine our original motif. Again, I'm going to delete the others and just keep the one that I want to work on. Now is the time to make it accurate. I have changed my flowers. Now I redrew them and I'm ready to refine the rest of it. I want to ungroup it so you can hit ''Shift Command'' or ''Control'' and ''G'' to ungroup and just make any modifications that you want to make. I think this needs to be a little bit smaller. This is the time to be a perfectionist or nerd but if you are one then you can spend a little bit of time just getting it exactly how you want it. Maybe the bone needs be bigger, okay? Maybe this can be a little bit bigger so that it fits in to this circular shape, nicer. I'll copy that over. It didn't copy. Hold Alt O and Shift and drag to reflect it. Maybe these can move out just a little bit so you get what I mean. Maybe I'll make this a little smidge bigger. Once you've done that, you want to start making sure is properly symmetrical. I'm going to begin with this. Everything that hits the center, I want those to be slap bang in the middle. This one, this and this. I'm going to select all of those. Go up to my aligning tools and hit this one here, horizontal align center. Now, will just make sure they're all properly aligned. I want to make sure these are all centered as well so I'm going to group the two birds together. Group these together. Make sure these are the same height actually. First, I'll do vertical align bottom and then I'll group those. I want to make these slightly taller I think. Then group those. These ones as well. I'll make sure they are both aligned and group. Same with these ones, align and group and same again. Now, if we select them all, although I didn't do these ones. Let's group those too. If we select everything and here align center, it will all center up. There we are. Now everything is completely symmetrical. It's also an option when you do this like everything, there are many ways to do it. You can also just delete half and use the reflect tool to reflect it over as well. Okay, so now if you want to change colors, now is the time. Well, actually, you could change colors a lot of different times but I'm going to look at it now. How do I go about doing colors? I do colors in a few different ways. Sometimes I get a photo of colors that I like together and sample from that. But actually the majority of the time I just go with my gut. I'm going to just select everything. Go to the recolor artwork tool again. Actually this time I'm going to cancel that because I want the background as well. Let me just unlock the background. I'll go object unlock all. Because I do want to include that in my colors. Also, I think when we go up to the recolor object tool here, it will change just the blues or just the pinks or just the yellows. I think I want these pink leaves to be in the dark blue group rather than the pink group. I'm just going to go in and change those now, so double-click to enter the group. Double-click again and you can just select each one while holding Shift and I'll change it to my blue here. There we go. I'll do the same with this side. You can also have this selected, go up to the re-color artwork tool and say, ''I want to change the pinks.'' You'll double-click there on this pink swatch and then go to color swatches. If you hit that, the swatches that appear over in your swatch panel will appear down here. I want to change the pinks to the blue I've saved. I'll hit Okay and you can change it that way as well. Okay, so now I'm going to select all of it. Go back up to the recolor artwork tool. I quite like this blue color but I don't want my white to be completely white. You can see here that Illustrator automatically makes it so that you can't edit the white. But if you double-click this space here, it says, ''Do you want to add a new color to the harmony?'' I want to click ''Yes'' because I want to edit this white color. I think I want to make it more of a light cream because I always find that a really subtle cream is nicer than a harsh white. You can barely see that. Let me see. Has that changed? We can do it up here and we can see better. Yeah, it has changed. There we go. A little off white. Then I'm just going to move the colors around here to see what I like. It's bit vibration. It depends on what you're going for really. That's quite nice. But then I want to change my background, I think. I quite like the turquoise color too. You can also click down here to change them definitely too black so you can have a play around and change your colors. Orange is interesting. Maybe this is too bright so you can really have a lot of fun with this. See that instantly made a lot more adult, when it was saturated, it was more modern but when is desaturated, it makes it a little bit more sophisticated and I quite like that. Another thing you can do is, for one, I quite like this option so I'm going to just hit Okay to save that. I think that there's a nice balance of this pinky orange coral color up here, but it needs a little bit more down here so I think I want to change this center part to the coral color. I'm just going to edit this part here, double-click and then here, I'm just going to go eye from my eye dropper and hit this little flower here. There we go. That looks a bit better. Now I'm going to put this into my actual repeat. 15. Making the Repeat: Now it's show time. We're finally ready to make our actual repeat and I'm excited. First we want to select everything and then hold down shift and de-select the background. Let's group our motif together with command or control G. We wanted to move our motif over here. I'm just going to zoom out. Let's make a copy by holding alt and dragging down. Here we go and again. Now we want to align these perfectly, so I'm just going to select them all and come up to my align tools up here. If you can't see them up here, they are also under window and you can just go window align and this will pop up here. Here we want to use the horizontal align center button and that just make sure they're all centered up perfectly. We also want to make sure the spacing in between them is exactly the same. We can use this one here, which is the vertical distribute center tool and that just made that even as well. Now with this selected, we want to group them together and then duplicate this again by holding down alt, dragging out and dropping it by a half drop. That can be eyeballed. We're going to do the same again. Select the one on the left, hold down alt, and drag it over. It looks about even. Let go and again, we're just going to make sure everything is aligned perfectly. First we want to select the two on the outside and make sure they're at the same height. You can select either this one vertical line top or a vertical line bottom, to do that. Now we want to make sure that this space here is also equal, that this is exactly centered. We'll select them all and choose this one horizontal distribute center. That just nudged it over a little bit to make sure it's aligned perfectly. Now it's in perfect alignment, we are going to define the repeat. We want to make, we're going to get the square tool here. I'll just go up, yep, make sure that color is selected. Our repeat is going to go from here to here, to here to here. That's where it repeats from here to here to here to here. I'm just going to draw out a rectangle as accurately as I can. I wasn't quite on it. I'm going to zoom in a little bit further. Back to my rectangle try and get right on this dot. Here to here, to here. There we are. This is going to be the size of our repeat. We're going to need to know the dimensions, because we're going to use some later. We're just going to go up to this transform button up here. If you click that, you can see that the width is 934.467 and the height is 480.872. We're just going to round these numbers. I'll make this one 934 and this one can be 480. I'm just going to take note of that, so in 934 by 480, I'll write it over here, 934 by 480. You can write that on a piece of paper if it's easier for you, I'm just going to put it here. Now I'm just going to ungroup these so that's shift command G or shift control G to ungroup. We'll get rid of the motifs that we don't need. Our pattern repeat is this square, so anything that doesn't touch the square, we don't need to because it's not going to be in the repeat, so I'll get rid of this one, this one, and this one. These are the only ones we need. Now I just eyeballed the square but for the pattern to be absolutely seamless, it needs to be completely precise. Whatever crosses this line, needs to cross this line at the exact same points so that it repeats seamlessly. The same with the top and the bottom. Now we're just going to do that. I'm going to send this shape to the back. We can just go object, arrange send to back or use the shortcut and I'm going to lock that as well. Object lock selection because we absolutely do not want that to move. Now I'm going to first make sure that the top and the bottom are exactly the same. I'm going to delete everything on the bottom. Then I'm going to select everything on top here and go up to object, transform, move. I want everything up here, to move down here by 480 pixels. In the horizontal box I'm just going to put in zero and then in the vertical, I'm going to put in 480. We can preview this to see what happens by clicking this box here and yes that's exactly what I want and I want to hit copy so that it makes a copy of it, just like that. Now I'm going to do the exact same on the other side, so I'll get rid of the motifs on one of the sides. It doesn't really matter which. Select the two on the other side and go object, transform, move. This time, we want it to move horizontally by 934 pixels. I'll type 934 in there and then zero in the vertical box. We can preview that, that's exactly where we want it and hit copy again. Now this is perfectly aligned and we don't want to touch it. The next step is to create another rectangle behind this rectangle. But we don't want to touch anything here. I'm just going to open my layers panel and I wanted to duplicate this rectangle. My rectangle is down here right at the bottom. I'm just going to unlock it by just clicking that box with the padlock. I'm going to select it by clicking on the little square next to the circle just here. That selects it without touching it, which is really important. With that selected, I'm going to make a copy by hitting command or control C. Then I'm going to hit command or control B to paste behind. You can see another one, a copy is pasted behind it, exactly. Right behind the first one, so we can't see it. Now you can see this second one is selected and with that selected, we're going to go up here to our swatches panel and just remove the fill. It's really, really important that this box has no fill and no stroke because otherwise your pattern isn't going to work and so please just make sure that there's no stroke and no fill. Now this is the exciting part. We are going to select all and we are going to drag it into our swatches panel. Hopefully we're going to have a beautiful repeating seamless animal pattern. Let's see if it worked, because sometimes it doesn't work. I'm just going to come over here and create rectangles select the rectangle tool, make a big rectangle and fill it with my new pattern and yes, it's worked. Sometimes it doesn't work like I said, and you have small white lines. Or sometimes if you haven't got your stroke and your fill removed, you can get these weird boxes. If you do have any trouble, if it doesn't work the first time, just repeat this last step of making sure everything's perfectly aligned and that should sort it out, but yeah it's worked and I think it looks pretty good. In the next video we are going to recolor this and make some alternative color options. But there you are, you have your very own repeating animal, half-drop pattern. 16. Re-colouring: Now we have our beautiful pattern. I've just clean things up a bit and I have actually deleted everything off of this document because we don't actually need anything other than the pattern itself. In fact, we don't even need this anymore. We can delete that. Because if you come up to your swatches panel, you can find the patterns watch here and if you drag it out, you can access the original tile. Si if you need to make changes is always going to be there. I've also deleted my sketch and everything else because we have a copy of the sketch. The motifs that you didn't use are the only thing that you might want to keep. But I didn't have very many, so I've deleted those as well just to keep this page really clean. Because when I open this in future, I just want to have the patterns and nothing else. This is when I actually want my art boards. I'm just going to go up to view and show art boards right here. Where is it? Is it there it is. Any shape has fine because this is just for presentation purposes. But I tend to like to look at mine in a portrait view. I'm just going to make a new rectangle, and I'm going to make it Instagram sized because I know I'm going to put a version onto Instagram, but I generally do with my patterns anyway. But again, your patterns are going to be used in so many different things but this doesn't really matter, it's just a preference of how you like to view your patterns. I'm just going to hit hold and click, and that will bring up this window here where you can type in the dimensions for your box. I want the width to be 900 and the height to be 1200 pixels, and I'll hit okay. There we are. Then I want this to become my art board, so with this selected, I'm going to go Object, Artboards, Fit to Selected Art. You can see that art board there disappeared, and this is now my new art board. Now I'm just going to create a couple more for my new color options. We'll come over here to where the layers are and a couple of tabs along from layers you can find art boards. I'm just going to click down here a couple of times on the new art board icon to create some more. Now I'm just going to tweak the scale and alignment of my pattern. Here, the scale is not looking too bad actually. But with it selected, you can come over here. This is the scale tool and if you double-click this window opens, and you can adjust the scale. Now you want to make sure transform objects is unchecked because otherwise this happens. I'll just show you if I change this to 50 and this is checked. It's going to change the size of the object as well as the pattern. If you uncheck this, it still just affect the pattern. That's way too small. Let's see what 80 percent looks like. That looks about right, maybe 85. I'll just hit "Okay". Then next I want to change the placement of the pattern within the shape. First you want to select it, and then you want to hold down the tilde key, which is the little squiggly icon, right next to the Shift key, that's the tilde key. You want to hold that down. You can just move the pattern within the object with the tilde key helped down. I'm just going to center this up a bit. That looks nice. If you want to tweak the colors of your original one, then of course you can do that. I would zoom in a bit. Make sure you select it and then come up to the recolor artwork tool again. Here you can completely change the colors or you can just refine them. I'm quite happy here with my colors, so I don't really want to change them too much, but maybe you just want the background to be a bit darker. Make just a little change here and there. Now's the time to do it. I'm just going to come up here and click on this little button here, and that's just going to reset the colors to heavy the wire because I'm happy with them. One thing though, I would like to see what this looks like. If this white color on the flowers was the same color as the background so that it looks like there's no outline if you know I mean. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to create some swatches using these colors. I'm going to come over to my swatches panel and just hit this little icon that says new color group. Click "Okay", and that will create a new color group within my swatches with all the colors that are included in my pattern. Next, I need to access the original pattern tile, because I just want to change the flowers. I don't want to change anything else, and so I can't use the recolor artwork tool on the pattern itself. So I'm just going to drag out the pattern from the swatches panel to access the tile. I need to ungroup it a couple of times so that I can manipulate just the flowers. I only need to change the things that are actually within the blue repeating tile. I'm just going to select each one that is in here. Be sure you don't accidentally nudge anything out of place because if you knock something out of alignment, it'll mean that your pattern isn't going to be seamless anymore and you have to repeat the step of aligning it again. There we are. I think that's everything. Now I'm going to go up to my recolor artwork tool. Click on my white here because it's the white outline that I want to change. Double-click. Go across to color swatches here. Then the color swatches that you have saved in your swatches panel are in here for you to access. I'll just select the teal color of my background and hit "Okay", and click "Okay" here. There we go, that's changed them. I've actually missed this one, so I'll just quickly do that now. Then once that's done, we just need to redraft the pattern tile across into the swatches panel. That's going to make a new updated patterns swatch there. If I drag a copy of this across holding Alt, and then fill it with our new pattern which is up here, you'll see that this time there's no stroke on the flowers. Actually, I'm not sure if that's what I want. Maybe in this case, you actually would like the contrast of the white to make the red standout a little bit more against the background. But that's the technique anyway. Now I'm just going to copy this across and make another color option. I'll zoom in to my recolor artwork tool, and I want to see how this looks with a dark background. I'm just going to take my teal and then pull it into the blue area. Quite like the deep blue as well. I'm going to change the brightness here, make it much darker. I quite like how that navy is lighter there. The original navy I use as lighter in the new background so you can see it. But I'm just going to lighten up the original navy a little bit more and see how that looks. Now that the backgrounds darker, I'm going to change the red as well to something a bit brighter, more contrasting. Gold is quite nice, isn't it? I like that. You can see how you can just play around and just see what you come up with really. Another thing you can try is if you come back up here, you can find the harmony rules, that was just along the top. There are different color options here that you can try with. With the yellow selected, has come up with the harmony colors that go with that yellow, let's try choosing this color combination, for example. Wow, that's bright. You can try changing the order of those colors around and see if there's something you like. See I quite like that. Then you can go back into edit and tweak things like maybe that dark green can be a bit darker. Maybe the yellow can be a bit lighter. That changed everything seen. This bid at the moment was in the harmony colors section, that's why it all changed. But if you uncheck that, you can move each one independently. Have a play around is really fun and see what you come up with, and I'll show you my final colors as well once I finish them off. 17. My Final Patterns: These are my final color options. I'll zoom in so you can have a better look. This one here is the one that you saw me working on. I haven't really changed that much from then. I really liked having a darker background when I was playing in the recolor artwork tool. I really wanted one to have the navy background, and then I thought it was nice to have a contrasting white background as well. This one is little bit different to the others, in that the color palette is a little bit more modern. I think it has a very different feel to it. This pattern here at a glance is actually quite similar looking. But if you put them side-by-side, I think they actually have quite a different feel to them. This one feels quite traditional, quite subdued, quite grown up. Whereas this one feels more playful and light and modern. So I've kept both those options in there. Now, if you're struggling with your pattern, if it doesn't look quite right, I actually have another Skillshare class called Pattern Design Toolkit: 6 tips to improve your patterns. In that class I talk about contrast, depth, flow, and other things that can help improve your patterns when they're not quite there yet. If you like you can go over and have a look at that as well. There we go. I would consider this pattern complete and I'm pretty happy with the result. 18. Thank You: Thank you so much for taking my class and I hope you had fun making your half-drop repeat animal pattern, and that you learned a thing or two along the way. Now I really want to see your patterns, so be sure you post them in the class project section, and if you post them on social media, please be sure to tag me @sararaindesign. Thank you so much.