Design in Black and White in Adobe Illustrator - Create Positive/negative images

1. Introduction to Design in Black and White in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class: Hello and welcome to this class on Design in Black and White, creating positive and negative images. My name is Helen Bradley, and I've taught thousands of students to design in Illustrator. I have over 82,000 enrollments here in my classes on Skills Share and over 200 classes. Now, in this class, we're going to be exploring creating with black and white in such a way that the two colors are equal partners in the design. In these designs that will create the negative space, which is typically white, instead of being a minor player is a partner to the black or positive space. Now, there are a lot of terms given to these designs, including the Japanese term Notan, which translates roughly to strengthen and weakness, light and shade, such as you might see in the classical yin-yang design. The designs we're going to create will include some inverted designs where the designs are created as black elements and then across half the design, these colors are reversed. As we work through our examples, you'll learn the special requirements for designing these black elements so that they can be easily reversed. We'll also create some designs using text, both inverting the color of the text and intertwining two letter forms to create a logo. As well as designing objects, we'll look at a couple of patterns, one of which will be colored so that you can see how you can take any of these designs we've created in black and white and recreate them in color. Now, this class is suitable for both beginner and intermediate Illustrator users. Some of the designs use the Shape Builder tool first introduced in Illustrator CS5 and of course, which is also available in CS6 and CC. Some require the Pattern Make tool which first appeared in Illustrator CS6 and is also in CC. I'll be using Illustrator CC for my examples. The design that you'll learn to create in this class can be used in a variety of ways, including for creative assets and scrapbook papers for sale online. You can also create them as designs for print on-demand sites such as Spoonflower. If you're ready, let's get started creating illustrations in black and white. 2. Reverse color effect using Text: One way that you can utilize this reverse effect where white and black are given equal importance is with text. I'm going to the Type Tool. I'll click in the document and I'll type my word. I'm using all capitals because I have on font that looks really nice in all capitals. I'm just going to enlarge the type here. This font is designed so that the letters run into each other. If you want your letters to be bottled up a little more closely, select your word and go to the Character panel. You can adjust the tracking and the kerning, for example. Kerning is between two individual letters and tracking is between a number of letters. So you can tighten things up should you wish to do so. Just going to leave mine at zero here because it looks pretty good anyway. Now we're going to create a reverse text effect. We'll select over the Rectangle Tool and drag out a rectangle. I'm going to start with a rectangle. You can decide how far over the edge of the letters you want to go. It's filled with black. It has no stroke at all. Selecting over both the type and the rectangle, go to the Pathfinder palette. If you don't see it there, you can choose Window and then Pathfinder. You're going to use this Exclude option, but you'll hold Alt or Option on a Mac before you click it. Then you get this reverse effect and everything is still editable. When we go to the Layers pallet and check and see what we've got. We've got a compound shape. Here is the rectangle, and here is the type. So you could select the type and you could go back into the Type Tool and you can edit the type. So it's fully adjustable. You can also adjust the placement of your rectangle target. The rectangle, go to the Selection Tool and you can drag it into a different position. Now, that's one way of applying the effect. But I want to show you something else because I want to show you how you can get a slightly more interesting result. Over everything, let's go to the Layers panel which I've just lost and let's break the type out of the effect. I'm just going to trash my rectangle for now. I'm going to create a wavy line that will go through this type. To do that, I'm going to the Rectangle Tool and I'll drag a long rectangle into the document, fill it with the black. With the rectangle selected, effect, distort, and transform and then zigzag. Turn preview on and you'll select smooth. We want quite a few ridges per segment, so let's increase the number of ridges per segment. If you use an odd number of ridges, you will find that the bumps go up the top and the bottom. If you want it to look a little bit more like rickrack, then you'll use a even number of ridges per segment and you get this more rickrack look. If you increase the size, then you're going to get bumpier bumps if you like. That's looking pretty good to me, so I'll click "Okay". Now we have a shape with an effect applied to it. If we want to get the actual shape out with it selected object, expand appearance. I want to add a box to the bottom. So let's go back to the Rectangle Tool. Going to add a rectangle to this shape. Select over both objects, the rickrack and the rectangle, go to the Pathfinder and click "Unite". Now, getting rid of these little end bits can be a little bit tricky. This is what I'd suggest that you do. Scroll over my type out of the way for a minute. I'll go to the Rectangle Tool. Let me just deselect the type. I'm going to fill my rectangle with a different color so you can see it a bit more easily. I'm going to drag it over the shapes. This is going to be my cutting guide. Wherever the pink rectangle is, we're going to keep that part off the shape. So let me just move it across a little bit so I get even sides. Now, select over both shapes. The cutting rectangle and the original shape go to the Pathfinder palette yet again, and click "Crop". Only the bit that was covered by the pink rectangle is retained. But you can see that there's something down here that is still there. Let's go to the Layers pallet. Lets again have a look and see what we've got. This is the shape that we actually want. So I'm going to drag it out of this group and the rest of the group we don't actually want, so I'll just trash it. It is really important that you keep an eye on your Layers palette, particularly when you're working with shapes like this. Because it's so easy for things to go a bit haywire and for you to have things layered and grouped in there that just really don't need to be layered and grouped and things that you don't actually even need. Let's go and get our type. Let's put it back in here, making sure that the type is on the bottom and this path that is the wavy path is on top. Select over everything back to the Pathfinder palette, Alt or Option. Click on the "Exclude" button and here we have our reverse type effect. But this time we've got a wavy line instead of a straight line. Same thing here, we can go and select the type and select the wave, and we can adjust them should we need to do so. So we can position them wherever we want them to be for this effect. 3. Create a Logo with intertwined letters: Another way is that you can utilize this reverse effect is in creating a logo that's made up of characters. We're going to use the characters as this reverse effect rather than a shape per se. I'm going to the type tool, I'm going to select my font now. I'm using a font called Before the Rain. This is a free font that you will be able to get online. I'm just selecting Before the Rain. Let's set the font size to start off with to about 240 points. Click in the document and type the first letter. You're just going to use your initials. I chose this font because it's just got some really beautiful shape characters. You want to choose a font where the character that you're using looks good. Some fonts may look better depending on what letter you're using. I'm using a flourishing shape for the first letter. The second letter is going to be comparatively quite plain. Let me just get the character down. I'm using an uppercase B. I'm going to use the font called Bauhaus. The font size is obviously way too small so I'm just holding the Shift key to enlarge the character so that it's bigger, and so it suits the logo a little bit better. I'm just going to place it in position. Not sure quite how these two characters are going to interact until we actually apply the effects. I'll select over both shapes, go to the Pathfinder palette, Alt or Option. If you're using a Mac, click on the Exclude option, and then you can see how these two characters are interacting. Back in the last panel, you can make some adjustments. You're going to find that you have a compound path. You've got your letter B here and then your letter H or whatever letters you happen to be using. I'm going to target the H and just move it a little bit. Now, I'm using the keyboard to nudge. I've found that it can be a little bit tricky to move these characters. I'm finding that the keyboard nudge is probably a little bit better. I'm just looking at an interesting way of having these two characters intersect with each other. Here, the B and then the black color is obviously way more powerful than the white, but we're still getting the impact of the white through the letter H. You can use this effect to quite easily and quite quickly create a logo that's based on letters, somebody's initials for example. 4. Create a Pop Art Heart: You can use this black and white effect to create things that are a bit reminiscent of pop art too. We're going to create a new document this time I'm going to create a square document, 1200 by 1200 pixels in size. Yours can be any size you like, but we just need to keep in mind how big it is for the next step. The next step is to go to the rectangular grid tall and it shares a toolbar position with the line segment tool. Click on the rectangular grid tool and click once in your document. Now I've already set this up a previously. Let see what I've done. I've set the width to just short of the size of the art board. My art board was 1200 by 1200 here the width is 1000 by 1000. I've set it to six horizontal dividers, but you could do more. I've set vertical dividers to six again, you could use more if you want more squares, you'll see those in just a minute. I'll just click "Okay". This is our grid. If we have a look inside the layers panel, if you've never used this grid tool before, you'll be able to say what the grid actually is comprised of. It looks like it might be a magical thing that's appeared, but in actual fact, it's just a series of intersecting lines. We're going to take this entire grid and we're going to choose object that live paint make and that will allow us to use the live paint bucket tool to color the squares. We'll go here to the live paint bucket. Double-click on a live paint back and make sure that you're painting fills and that you've disabled paint strokes. You do want cursor swatch preview and it always helps to have your highlight turned on. Click "Okay" I to make sure that I have black as my color, so you'll need to open up the swatches panel and make sure that that little middle swatch there is black. Then you can just click on every other box. Now there are lots of ways that we could have made this checkerboard pattern, but sometimes it's really nice to have a look at a tool that you maybe don't know is even there and certainly that you don't use a lot just to see how it could be put to use. Now that we've got our squares all created using the Live Paint tool, we need to expand this object. I'll choose object and Live Paint and then expand. Again, keep an eye on the last pallet because you want to know what's happening here, because there are bits here that we don't need. For example, we don't need this group which is the lines, so I'm just going to turn its visibility off. You can say that we've got the grid that we need without the line. So I'll drag and drop that group of lines into the trash cans, we get rid of those. Now, here in this last group, we've just got our little squares, which is fine. We just want to ungroup everything so that we don't have everything tied up in nested groups. Let's go to object Ungroup. Now I have just one group in this layer and it contains all my little squares. If I want to, I can center that on the art board. Let me go up here, make sure aligned to art board is selected, my group of objects selected. We've just centered that neatly on the art board. For now, we're going to lock it down because we need to create a shape that we're going to use as our pop art effect. I'll make sure that I have a different color selected here. It's going to make life a little bit easier in a second. I'm going to draw a very simple heart. Even if you're not familiar with or happy with using the pen tool, I suggest that you try it for this shape because it's very easy to do. We're just going to find the middle of the art board, in the middle of this grid where using the smart guides to line that up and I'll click and drag in a upwards direction here. Will it come out here to pretty much opposite where I started and then just click and drag downwards. That's creating the loop of the heart. Then come back down to immediately underneath where you started. Pick up that smart guide and click once, and that's all you need. Press "Escape". At this point, if you think any of your little anchor points need adjusting, you can do that. You're just looking for a nice half of your heart. Let me just go and say this one doesn't have very good handles here. Let me just go and reshape the handle so you can just tweak that to make half of a heart. Now if you do tweak it and also if you're a little unsure as to whether you've got these two anchor points directly in line. Here's how you're going to solve that problem. Go to the direct selection tool and then select either just these two anchor points, so you have those selected. This one should be quite filled. So that tells you that it's not selected. Choose object path and then average. You want these two points to be on the same vertical alignment. Choose vertical and click "Okay" and if they're out of alignment, that's going to make them back in alignment. The next step is to flip this heart. But right now we've only got these two anchor points selected, not the whole shape. This is where you're going to make a mistake. If you're going to make a mistake anywhere, what you need to do is to go back to the selection tool and make sure that you actually have a selection around this half of the heart because this next step won't work if you don't. Choose objects, transform, and then reflect. Turn preview on so you can see what you're doing and you should see the half heart has been reflected in this case over the vertical. If you have points that are going all haywire, that means that you didn't have that entire shape selected. We need the original as well of this duplicate, so you click "Copy". Now you can move the half of the heart out so it's lined up with the original. If you hold the Shift key as you do it, you'll be dragging in a perfectly horizontal direction. Make sure that these two shapes are butted up against each other. If you think they may not be select both shapes, go to the align options. They're also available here and you can get to them by choosing window and align. Make sure this time you have aligned to key objects selected. It doesn't matter which of these two halves of the heart are the key object for key object has this blue line around it. Either will do, and let's just go to the align panel because this is the option I want here. I want to distribute the spacing between these two objects. I want zero spacing between them, so I'll just click here. Now that means that both of these shapes are buttered nicely up against each other so that we can now put them together to a single shape. One way you can do that is using the shape builder tool. Let's go and find the shape builder tool. It shares a toolbar position with the Live Paint bucket tool that we use just a minute ago. With the shape builder tool selected, just drag over these two halves of the heart and that will make an entire heart. Let's go back and select our heart. Let's make sure it is filled with black. If you want to adjust its size, you could do so at this point, unlock your group because you need to have that group unlocked for everything to work, select either both of the shapes and go to the Pathfinder palette, Alt or option click on the exclude button. Now we have this pop art illustration where we've got the heart-shaped reversed over a grid of squares. As I said earlier, you could make your grid of squares in a number of ways. This is just one way to do it. Of course, your squares could be smaller if you wanted a more detailed effect. But there is a pop art heart shape where both white and black are contributing to this illustration. 5. Create a Reverse Color Flower Sshape: The next shape we're going to create is this floral shape. While it looks like a really simple shape, actually creating it is a little bit tricky. So let's have a look and see how we're going to do it. We'll start with the Ellipse Tool. We'll select a black fill and no stroke at all, and drag out a tall, narrow ellipse. With the Direct Selection Tool, click the topmost anchor point and make it a pointy point and do the same thing with the bottom most anchor points. Select here to convert the selected anchor points to corner, and that just makes them pointy. Select over the shape. To create half of the flower, choose "Effect, Distort & Transform" and then "Transform". Turn Preview on. You want to rotate around this middle bottom point, which means you'll select the middle bottom of these nine little boxes. You want two leaves, so we'll choose two copies because that will give us an original plus two copies. You'll rotate around something like about 23-25 degrees. It's not set in concrete, you can use any value for the rotation that you want. To have these leaves get smaller as they go, you'll set the horizontal and vertical scale to something like about 80 percent. Again, not set in concrete, you can make that as big or as small a value as you like. When you're happy with the look of half of your flower, click "Okay". Right now this is a shape with a transformation on it. To break out the individual shapes choose "Object", "Expand Appearance", and then you'll have three individual shapes. Choose "Object", "Ungroup" to ungroup them. Check in the Layers palette to make sure that you've got them all away ungrouped, and we haven't. So we're going to keep doing that until ungroup is no longer an option. Still with these three objects selected to create the other half of the flower, choose "Object", "Transform "Reflect". Turn Preview on so you can see what you're doing. Select "Vertical" and because you want the original plus this reflected version, click "Copy". The copy that you just created should be still selected. Start dragging it across so that you can place these two larger shapes over the top of each other. If you add the Shift key, you will move in a perfectly horizontal direction. Where you've got everything lined up, just let go. You have two versions of this middle leaf. You want to grab the one that is further towards the middle of the layer stack here, select it and press "Delete" because you only want five leaves. We would like this one here to be at the very top. If it's not at the top, then you'll need to drag it there. I'll select either all of the layers, bring back the Stroke panel. Although, we want ultimately this to be the white of the background, for now we're going to apply a colored stroke. It's going to make it easier to see what's going on. I'll just increase the stroke weight. You can set your stroke to align with the center or the inside or the outside. Right now mine is aligned to the center, so that's what you're seeing on the screen right now. Choose "Object" and then "Expand". Expand both the Fill and the Stroke and click "Okay". This gives you a whole series of groups, so you'll choose "Object", "Ungroup", and continue to do that until ungroup is no longer an option. So you've got a whole series of compound paths which will be the pink things, and paths which will be the black things. With everything still selected, swing across to the Pathfinder palette which of course you can get to by choosing "Window" and then "Pathfinder", and click here on "Divide". With everything still selected, choose "Object", "Ungroup". You'll end up with a whole series of pink objects and some black objects. Well, we want to select all the pink ones. In the last pallet, go and locate the first pink object. It doesn't matter which one it is, just grab hold of it. Then choose "Select" and then "Same" and "Fill & Stroke". That selects here in the last panel every single pink object, but it doesn't select any of the black ones and that's really important. With all the pink ones selected just press "Delete", and you'll delete all of them. What you're left with is what looks like to be our floral shape. But in actual fact, these black objects has lots and lots of them. So we want to join them altogether. We can probably pick off these two, because these two should be intact. So I'm just going to select that one, lock it down, and hide it. I'm going to do the same with this one because chances are that yours is going to be the same as mine and that they will be individual shapes, but these are not. Let's zoom into this area. Let's select over everything with the Selection Tool, and then we'll go to the Shape Builder Tool. The Shape Builder Tool allows us to join these objects together, so I'll just drag over everything that makes up this leaf over here and then do the same over here. Now that's nailed those two leaves. Let's just get back out of the Shape Builder Tool. Let's locate this leaf here, lock it down and turn it off and do the same to this one. Lock it down and turn it off. Whatever is left belongs to this middle leaf, so let's just select over everything. We could use the Shape Builder Tool, but there's a lot of shapes here that we need to stick together. It's probably easier. Just click on "Unite" in the Pathfinder palette, and that unites everything into the one shape. In the last pallet we're left with five individual shapes. What we're ellipses that had pointy ends have now been cut down to individual shapes. These can be created as that reverse effect. With them created now we'll go to the Rectangle Tool. I'm just using my smart guides here to draw my rectangle over half of the flower. It's filled with black, it has no stroke on it at all. The rectangle is at the top of the layers palette. Select over everything, Alt or Option, click on "Exclude", and we get our reverse image effect. We couldn't have done that successfully without creating these leaves as distinct shapes. That looks like a very simple flower, but as an actual fact a little bit more complex to create than it looks at first instance. That technique that you just learned in creating that flower is obviously going to be applicable to doing other designs in Illustrator. So it's useful for more than just creating these inverse effects. 6. Create a Rotated Snowflake leaf: To create a shape like this, rotated leaf for snowflake shape we're going to start with an object that we've drawn ourselves. We're going to draw the leaf. To do this, we'll choose "View" and then "Rulers", and I'll choose "Show rulers" and drag a ruler into the center of this document. My document is 1,200 by 1,200 in size so 600 is a good position halfway across the document to place this guide. Guides are just lines in Illustrator, so you'll find your guide in the layers palette here. I'm going to lock mine so it doesn't move. We're going to draw the leaf using the pencil tool and we're going to draw it not to scale so that we can re-size it in a minute. We'll just use the entire work area to draw it. To draw it, I'll choose the pencil tool. Double click on the pencil tool. You'll want to have smooth set to a fairly high value so that illustrator will smooth out your bumpy lines. This is particularly the case if you're drawing with a mouse and I'm drawing with a mouse just to prove that it can be done that way. I have disabled fill new pencil strokes and keep selected. The other options are enabled, doesn't really matter too much since this is just a very simple shape. I'm going to make sure that I'm drawing with black so I can see things as I'm working. I'm going to start on the line itself and we're just going to draw half the leaf. You come down here and then draw three little bubbly bits and then come back down and in back onto the line. This is our leaf shape. If you see a part of this leaf shape that you don't like, you can edit it, select over the shape, go back to the pencil tool, and then you can just redraw it, so picking up from this point here, I'm going to redraw just this last one and come back in onto the line and Illustrator just redraws it for you. If you don't like the exact shape you created first-time, it is editable, just make sure you select it and then redraw over it with the pencil tool. I'm going to flip the fill and stroke so that I have a filled shape so we can see what we've got here. I want to make sure that these two anchor points, there's one here and one here, are directly in alignment with each other. Let's just go and grab these two anchor points just making that very narrow selection, object, path, average. We're going to make sure that they're averaged on a vertical and click "Okay". That should align them both vertically. Now let's select over the shape and we're going to reflect it to make the other half object transform reflect. We're going to reflect over the vertical term preview on so you can see what you're doing, click "Copy", and then move the duplicate across so it lines up perfectly with the original shape. You can select either both shapes, go to the shape builder tool and drag over both shapes to make a single shape. We can double-check that in the last pallet. Well, we didn't get what we wanted, so let's make sure that we do that again. It doesn't look like we're having any success here at all. I think it's because my two shapes are not butted up against each other. Let's select either both of them, I'll select to align to key object, doesn't matter which one is my key object, I'm going to set the spacing to 0 and click here and that will but these two shapes up against each other. Now we should have no space between them. We can go back to the shape builder tool and this time we're successful in creating a single shape. Of course, the last palette is going to tell us that. Now I want the lines for the leaf itself. I'm going to do those again with the pencil tool. I'll choose a different color so that we can see as we work what's happening. I'm just going choose a pinky color doesn't really matter too much what it is. I'll draw a line down the center of the leaf. At the moment I've got a fill, I actually just want a stroke. I would like my stroke to be of a reasonable thickness. Let's try out nine pixels. I don't think that's quite thick enough, so I'll thicken it up a little bit more. I'll make it 11 pixels, go to the stroke options and then we'll round it ends on the strokes. There's the first of our lines. It might help at this point if I locked down the path underneath so that it won't move. Let's go back and add the veins into the leaf. These are inheriting the settings that we used previously, so we don't have to make any adjustments here. If you don't like what you're drawing as you're drawing it, press Control or Command Z, if you're using a Mac to undo it and then just re-draw it. Let's have a look at the shapes. I'm relatively happy with them for now. You might want to put a bit more work into yours. I'm just going to increase the line width because I want the lines to be a bit larger. Let's select either just these lines and we're going to expand them with object expand. We only have a stroke, we don't have any fill, so we'll just expand the stroke and click "Okay". That makes these into shapes that are now filled shapes. What we want to do is unite everything. Let's go to the Unite option and unite them into a single shape. We've got a path for these lines and then a path for the leaf. Let's unlock the leaf so that we have both these shapes. I'm just going to position this line exactly where I want it to be. Thinking something like that is pretty good. I need to punch a hole in the leaf that is the shape of these lines so what I'll do is select both the lines and the leaf, go to the Pathfinder palette and click "Minus front". What that will do is punch a hole in this leaf. The leaf now has a hole in it for these veins, and we'll end up with a compound path. You can always test your knowledge as you do this, we punched a hole in this shape and shapes that have holes in them are compound paths. That's what we expect to see in the layers palette. Leaf is way too big, so let's just shrink it down. You can hold the Shift key to shrink it in proportion. If you don't want it shrunk in proportion then don't hold the Shift key because that will give you this look. Let me turn my guide back on. I'm going to line my shape up to my guide. I need another anchor point down here. I'll go to the Pen tool and literally we're only going to make a point with this so if you don't like the pen tool, that's fine. You're only going to click with it once. You don't want any fill or any stroke and come just below the leaf about to this point here and click once. When you've made the point press "Escape". In the layers pallet you should have a path here. It's a no fill, no stroke path and it's just a single anchor point. I will select the leaf and this one anchor point and group those. The reason we do this is we want to rotate the leaf around. Right now, it would only be able to be rotated around a point, for example, up here or down here, or in either of the corners. I want to rotate it around this point here so I have to create the point to use this tool. Select over the leaf and choose Effect, Distort and Transform and then transform. For us no fake shape, we're going to rotate around this bottom point that we just created. I'll click here at the bottom of the nine boxes, the bottom middle box. We want six leaves around the shape. We have a circle that is 360 degrees and we want six rotations, so we'll just divide by six and let Illustrator do the math, and that is a 60 degree rotation. We want six shapes five plus the original so I'll type in five, and that gives us this rotation. I'll click "Okay". At this point, if you want slightly bigger or slightly fatter leaves, you can increase the size of this leaf because what you've got right now is just a leaf with a rotation effect applied to it so you can adjust the dimensions of the leaf before we go any further. We don't need this guide any longer, so I'm just going to remove it to get it out of the way. What we've got here is a group that is rotated around. The group is the leaf plus the anchor point and it's rotated around. Once we've got everything where we want it to be we'll select over the shape and choose Object, Expand, Appearance. That expands into individual shapes. Again, we've got a group and in this case, each of these groups just contains the compound path. The reason why that anchor point has disappeared was because it had no fill and no stroke. Provided you make that rotation anchor point having no fill and no stroke once you expand this shape, it just disappears. We're cleaning up the layers palette as we go. Let's select this group and let's ungroup everything. We just neaten everything up, Object, Ungroup. I've now got six individual objects and I'll just regroup those. I've got a group with six individual objects in it. I want to fill up this middle here, I'm just going to use a circle for it. I'll go to the Ellipse tool and drag out a small circle holding the Shift key as I do, so that it is a perfect circle. If you want to move it as you go, hold down the spacebar while you're still drawing it and you can move it. The reason why I wanted these leaves to be grouped is I want to align this circle up with the leaves. If you don't group them then you're going to align all the leaves up and the circle at the same time. We just want to treat the leaves as a group of objects and we want to center the circle in relation to those. Selecting everything we'll choose horizontal line center and vertical aligned center. This circle is now centered inside this shape so we can just drop it into the group. It will now move with the other group objects. Having done this we're now in a position where we can create our reverse effect. If you want to at this stage, you could increase the size of this object to fill the document up a little better. To make sure it's centered, select the object, go to the Align panel, make sure you have aligned to art board selected and then you can click horizontal line center and vertical align center to make sure that this object is centered perfectly over the art board. We want a rectangle. I know my art board is 1,200 by 1,200 so the rectangle I want is 600 wide, so it's going to fill up half of the art board, 1,200 high so that it stretches the full height of the art board. I'll click "Okay" to create it. Once we've done that, I'll position it over the right-hand edge of the art board. If I want to make sure that it's centered over the art board, I'll go here and select "Horizontal Align Right", and "Vertical Align Top" that just make sure that it's perfectly positioned over the right-hand side of the art board. Select everything, make sure that everything is unlocked, which it is, go to our pathfinder palette and Alt or option click on the exclude icon. Then we have this reverse snowflake effect using a leaf that we drew ourselves. 7. Create a Reversed Color Tree: When you're creating a shape like this tree, again, you're going to have to make some special considerations if you want to create it as this reverse black and white. Let's create the tree and see how are we going to do it. I'll start with the trunk of the tree. For that, I need the rectangle tool. I'll drag out a tall rectangle with the base about the thickness of the base that I want for my tree. I'll fill it with black and remove the stroke from it. Selecting over both the top anchor points only will go to the scale tool and it shares a toolbar position here with the shear and reshape tools. With the scale tool selected, you can drag on one of these anchor points and the other one will scale inwards so that you create this tree like trunk. Let's Alt or Option, drag a copy of this away and shrink it down to make the branches. I have one branch here and let's Alt or Option drag. A second one away, will position these branches in place. Now, we can adjust them in a minute if they're not the perfect size. At this stage, I don't want to join these shapes together because I want to be able to edit them if I need to. I'll just lock them all down so that they can't move. Let's go back now and create the top of the tree and for this we're going to drag out a nice long ellipse. Again, this is going to be filled with black and we'll place that over the top of the tree. Now, I want it behind everything else ultimately, but not quite yet. Let's go and create a second ellipse. It will help a little bit if we make this a different color just so we can set using pink for now. I'll drag out an ellipse that's going to be the inside of the trace. I'll just place that in position. At this stage, I can also reshape it either by just squashing it down or I can go to the direct selection tool and pick up any of these anchor points and just adjust the shape that way. Once I'm happy with the positioning and shape of these two elements, we're going to cut this front one out of the back one. I'll click on the front shape and shift click on the main part of the trace, I've got both these shapes selected. In the Pathfinder palette because I want to cut this out of this one. I'll choose minus front, and that will create a compound path of this shape. When we go to the Layers palette, we would expect to say a compound path. Everything's always set up as a compound path if it's got a hole in it. That's just what a compound path is. It allows you to maintain this hole in the structure. Now, let's unlock the tree trunk and I'm just going to position it in place. I want to make sure that the tree trunk goes well into the top of the tree. Everything looks good here. Once I'm happy with that, I can select all these tree trunk pieces, all three of these. Now, these are all filled rectangle so we can unite them very easily by going to the Pathfinder and click "Unite". Then we'll do it one step further and unite everything here into a single compound path. When we look in the last pallet, we should have a compound path. The white here is not actually white. We're just seeing they are both through the shape. What we've got is a compound path, which is this black shape a line. Now, once we've got the black shape, then we can create our reverse effect. Going to the rectangle tool, we're going to drag out a rectangle. I'm just going to fill up the remainder of the art board with this. It's got a black fill. It has no stroke at all. Will select everything by just dragging over it or you can also press "Control" or "Command A" will select everything on the artboard. Go back to the Pathfinder palette, Alt or Option, click on the "Exclude" button. Then we have this reverse black and white effect, this time done with a tree that is designed as a compound path. 8. Three Black and White patterns from one shape: Another application for strong black and white graphics is in pattern making. So we're going to create a couple of patterns based on a single shape. I'll select the "Line Tool" and just draw out a line. It doesn't have to be very long, it just has to be black. We're not going to do anything more than about a one pixel stroke at this point. I'll select the over the line and go to effect, distort and transform, and then zigzag, because what I want is half of the shape of my pattern. So let's turn preview on and let's do smooth. We're going to wind down the ridges per segment to just one. So just make that one and you'll get this loop, and then we'll increase the size, because we want to see the full expanse of the shape we're going to create. Now the shape will create is this up here as well. So this is going to be a most circular shape, but not quite because it's going to have pointy end. So you don't want to make it really really deep, because that's going to be a really deep pattern. So I'm thinking that here probably around about 75 on the size will be quite sufficient. So I'll click "Okay." You just want something that looks pretty much like this. Right now, this is a line that has a effect applied to it with it selected, will choose Object, Expand, Appearance, to make it a single line. Now we want two of these, so Object, Transform, Reflect time preview on, so you can see what you're doing. You're reflecting over the horizontal. You want the original and the copy. So click "Copy" and then move the duplicate that you just created up, so that it intersects with the shape. If you hold "Shift" it will go up in a perfectly vertical direction. If you're not sure that these are aligned perfectly, you can select them and choose horizontal aligned center. You can also just double-check over here to make sure that they look like they joined up. They are not joined, but they are in a position where they can be effectively joined. To join them, select both shapes and choose "Object Path" and then "Join." Now we can just flip this over so that we have a filled shape and if we go to the Layers palette, we're expecting to see just a single path, and that's exactly what we've got. At this point, we can shrink the shape should we wish to do so, select over it and to make a pattern from it, we'll choose Object, Pattern, Make. Click "Okay." Now I think my pattern pacers are a little big to be able to see it clearly, so I'm going to shrink it down. Now we'll decrease the width, so we bring these pieces closer in, so that they're nice and tight. Then we'll shrink the height, making sure that this option here is not selected, so we can adjust height and width independently of each other. So this is one of the patterns we can create, where these paces are just touching each other. So I'm just going to work here and see if they're close enough or not too close. I think 147.5 might be a better value here. So that's my pattern piece and I'm happy with that, I can click "Done." That saves it as a pattern piece, but I think there's more mileage still we can get out of this piece so of with it selected, let's go out and make a second pattern. This time I'm going to choose "Brick by Row" so that the shapes are offset from each other. Again, my starting shape is a bit on the big size, so let's just size the tile to the art and shrink it down. Now I'll close up the vertical height. This is giving us a different style of pattern here we've got white lines running through the artwork, so we might want to save that as a patent. I'll just click "Save copy" and I'll name this wavy shapes. Now we can go a little bit further and decrease the height a little bit, and also decrease the width, so we're bringing the shapes a little bit closer together, and we're getting a uneven white area, so the white is actually becoming a little bit more interesting still. You might want to adjust that to sewed. Obviously, I've only got a small number of copies showing, but I could increase that. So you could see the result of this pattern, this beautiful wavy pattern. I`m liking that as well, so I'll save a copy there too. When you're finished, you can just click "Done." Let's get rid of the shape because we don't need that any longer, let's test out our patterns. Now, my documents size is 1920 by 1080. I'll just adjust this rectangle center over the top of the art board and let's test the patterns we've created. This was the first one we created. Here is our wave two pattern, and here is the other wavy shapes pattern. These are nice strong black and white patterns where white is doing a lot of work in this pattern, although the black areas are quite large, white is still a really important color, if you like in this pattern creating, these interesting shapes. So you have the ability to use black and white and the strength of this color combination, to create some really interesting patterns from very simple shapes here in Illustrator. 9. Create a Colored Pop Art Pattern: In addition to using black and white, you can of course use a color. I'm going to show you how to create this pattern and also how to color it. Now, we need some quarter circles for this, so, I'm going to the arc tool and click once in the document. Now, I want my arc to be 100 by 100, so I'll select that. It's going to be closed and the base will be along the x axis is going to have a 50 percent convex. If I click Okay, then I'll create this filled arc. Now, it's filled at the moment with white, we're going to flip the stroke and they fill and turn off the stroke. This is a quarter circle. Now, we need some more of this, so I'll Alt drag, another three away. Now, we need to rotate each of them 90 degrees. I'll choose object transform, rotate, this is 90 degrees, I'll click Okay. This one needs to be that original 90 degrees plus another 90 degrees object transform rotate. This is 180 and the next one is that plus 90, so it will be 270, object transform rotate. Let's make this 270 and click okay. Now, we need to position these and what I want them to do is to look a little bit like a windmill. We're going to place them like this and just make sure that their centers are all in the exact same place. Now, we can do that using the align options or we can just test it using the transform tools. What I'm going to do is check this bottom point here, and it's at 640, 506, which means the top point of this one should also be at 640, 506. The bottom-left point of this one should be at the exact same position which it is. The top left of this one should be at the exact same position. That just lets us know that everything is in the exact right place. Now, I'll go to the ellipse tool and I'll drag out a circle. I want my circle to be just a little bit smaller than this shape. Let's position it in the center here and check its position by clicking the middle of these points. This should be 640 and 506, the exact same position as we've been using all along. Now, we're going to create our black and white reverse effect by holding the Alt or Option key and clicking on the exclude option. That gives us this effect. Let's just zoom back out to make my shape just a little bit smaller, holding the Shift key to make sure everything is constrained to a perfect shape. Now, if we want to color this so it's not black and white, but it's a color and white will select all over the shape. Now, in the last panel, as we've seen before, we've got this compound shape that has all these other little shapes in it. Every one of these has a fill color, but actually changing the fill color on any of these shapes has absolutely no effects. I'm going to try and change this to pink. While it looks like it's changed a pink, it's not having any effect on the shape itself. If you want to recolor these, you have to select the compound shape and then apply your color to the compound shape. Every single one of these objects has to be the exact same color. I'm going to Alt or Option drag a duplicate of this away because I want a different color. I'm going to alternate these colors in a pop art effect. This is the other shape and I'm going to make sure that I have it targeted. This one we're going to make an orange color. Now, I have two elements that I can create my pattern from. I'll select both these elements, object, pattern, and then make. Now, the pattern by default is a grid pattern, so everything is lined up. If we want something a bit more interesting, we'll choose brick by row and then a half offset. This offsets stores shapes from each other creating this checkerboard pattern. Because there are lots of other options that you could choose. You could try brick by column. You could also do hex by column and hex by row, but you'll need to move the shapes out of the way of each other to get them to show up as full shapes. I like brick by row with a half brick offsets. I'll click done. You don't need the shapes any longer. Let's go and make a rectangle the size of the art board. In my case, that's 1,200 by 1,200. I'll align it to the art board so that it's centered immediately over the art board. I select the shape, make sure the fill is to the fore. Let's go and select the pattern that we created, and that's this one here. It is possible to recolor the shapes. Just be aware that the entire shape has to be recolored and you can't recolor little bits of it. 10. Project and wrapup: Now that we've completed all of video learning in this class, it's over to you and it's time for your project. Your project is going to be to take two of the designs that we've done in this class that appeal to you and reproduce them in Illustrator. Now you can do exactly what I have shown you to do or you might want to choose your own design and create it yourself. Post an image of your two completed designs as your class project. Now as we were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asked if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learned from it, would you do something for me? Would you complete the review of the class and write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations really help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you see the follow link on the screen, click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, 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. I'm Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this Illustrator class and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming class soon.