Transcripts
1. Introduction to Designing with Lines in Adobe Illustrator: Hello and welcome to
this class on designing salable patterns and designs based on lines in
Adobe Illustrator. My name's Helen Bradley, and I'm a Skillshare
top teacher. I have over 260 courses
here on Skillshare and over 160,000
student enrollments. In this class, we'll
look at how to make shapes which incorporate lines, some of which are strong
vertical or horizontals, and others of which are
more whimsical and uneven. We'll make a range
of base shapes and then turn some of them
into repeating patterns. I'm going to show you three very different ways
to make those patterns too. This is like a
pattern design and a line-based shapes
design class all in one. By the time you've
finished this course, you'll have a grab
bag of new shapes and pattern designs and some new Illustrator
knowledge and skills too. Without further ado,
let's get started making salable patterns
and designs based on lines in Adobe Illustrator.
2. Pt 1 - Heart with Lines Shape: The first of the shapes
that we're going to draw is this heart here. I'm going to click on "Create New" and I'm going
to create a document that's 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels in size, RGB color mode. I'm going to draw
half of the heart and for this I'm going
to use the pen tool. Now, if you hate the pen tool, I totally understand, but
this is really easy to do. We're going to click
in the middle of the document and head up towards the top left
of the document. I've still got my finger
on the left mouse button, so it definitely is a
click and drag process. Once you've got to about here, you can let go the
left mouse button and then you're going
to swing around and you're going to put down a point immediately below this point. If you've got smart guides on, you're going to be told that
you are in the right place. Now, if you miss it, I'm going to miss it just
in case you miss it, let's just draw out the other side of the heart
and I've lost everything. I'm going to press
"Control" or "Command 0" to square everything
back up in the screen. I'm going to press
"Escape" to stop drawing. Now I can go to the direct selection tool here and just finesse my curves. I'm just going to
make it a little bit curvier here at the top and
you can just adjust it. If you really hate using
the Pen Tool them, this is a perfect time to get a little bit of practice
with it because you can't do any damage
at all to this shape. Now I'm going to
again go back to direct selection tool and select over these
two anchor points. There's an anchor point at
the beginning of the heart and one at the bottom down here. Now we want to align
them because we missed aligning them when
we were drawing them. We're going to object
path and then average. This allows us to average the
position of these points. Either we can put them
both in the same place, which would destroy our heart. We can do horizontal, which is not what we want,
but we do want vertical. We want them both
to be lined up in the same vertical position. I'll just click "Okay". They are now perfectly aligned. If you hit the wrong one, if you just horizontal
instead of vertical, just undo it and try again. It's just easy to do. We're going to create the
other half of this heart. I'm going to select over it, but do that with
the selection tool, not the direct selection tool or things can go really haywire. We'll choose object
and then transform and reflect and we'll
choose vertical. I'm going to click "Copy". Now we've got two half
hearts on top of each other. We're not seeing the rest
of this line through this heart because this
one's got a fill on it. We're going to sort
that out in a minute. I'm going to hold the Shift
key as I drag across and let's just position this so that they're perfectly lined up. Going to select over both of
these and remove the fill. Now if I try to draw
a vertical line between these two
lines right now with, for example, the pen tool, the chances are that I'm going to attach to one
of these shapes. I don't want to do that. This is what you're going to do. You're going to open up
the last panel and you can get to that by choosing
Window and then Layers. You're going to lock down
these two half-heart shapes. Just click in here in
this column to lock them. That means that when
you go to the pen tool, you can position
yourself immediately above where these
two shapes join, but without selecting
either of them. If you want it to be
perfectly vertical, just hold the "Shift"
key as you draw it, press "Escape" when you're done. At that point, you
can undo the locks because you do need to
continue to work with them, but locking them just make
sure that you won't be joining things together because
that would be not good. I'm going to select
over these two pieces. This is this half of the heart and the
line in the middle. Just select both of those
and we're going to make a blend out of that object, blend and then make, now your blend may not look like this at this point, don't worry, it can look, however it looks because we're going to
change the settings anyway. We're going to double-click
on the blend tool here and we're going to set it
to specified steps. Then we're just going to
increase the steps until we have a number of lines
that we're happy with. I'm using 12, 13, 14, something like that. I'll click, "Okay". In the last pallet, you'll see that
you've got a blend, so you've got a line
and half a heart, but you can't do a lot of things with this while
it's still a blend. I suggest that you expand it. Now however you're used to expanding things in Illustrator, going to expand a
blender different way. You're going to choose
Object and then Blend and then Expand. That breaks it out into a
series of lines inside a group. Now we've got the other half
of the heart available here, I'm just going to
select over it. Well, it doesn't have a
fill and it also doesn't have a line down this
side, that's just fine. If I select it and flip it, we've now got black filled on one side and our
lines on the other. To make it easier to
work with all of this, I would select this lot
and group them again. I'd leave these
shapes in a group by themselves and then just
double group them if you like, because that makes sense. If you ever need to edit these, it's going to work a lot better. I think I would
like my heart to be a slightly different shape here. I'm going to shrink it. Now they've got its
proportions right, holding the Shift key as I do. Having created this heart, it's been very easy for us to
create a pattern for that, and we're going to look at
that in the next video.
3. Pt 2 - Make a Pattern from the Heart shape: In the last video, we saw how to create
this heart shape, in this video we're
going to create it as a pattern and
then invert it, so that's white on black. I'm going to select
this shape and choose object and then pattern make. I'm going to use the brick by row option and I'm going to
use it with a half offset, so I get this
nice-looking design. I'm going to make sure that this little button
here looks like this, so that the width and height are unconstrained so I can
adjust them individually. One thing I never
liked with patterns, if I can possibly help it is
to have fractional numbers because that seems to be an
invitation to illustrate it, to put fracture lines
through the patterns, so I like to make sure
that these numbers are whole numbers
and if possible, that they're also even numbers. Of course with this
pattern, that's fine, we've got plenty of flexibility to adjust it to our needs. This is what the pattern
is going to look like, I'm going to click ''Done''. I'll move this heart
out of the way and go ahead and add
a rectangle that is 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels into the middle
of the artboard, and I will just square
it up on the artboard. Now, this one I'm
going to fill with white for now because
I want to come back a bit later and change the color of it so that we
can invert our pattern. But let's just go and make
a duplicate of this shape. So we've got a white
fill underneath and on top is going to be
our pattern filled object. I have the rectangle
on top selected, I've got this fill selected, let's go to swatches and
click on our pattern swatch. Everything is working
perfectly at this point, but I also want to make a pattern here that
is the inverse, so it would be white on black. What I'm going to
do first of all, is go to this rectangle here, I'm going to change
its color now. It's going to be
black eventually, but it's not going to help
me right now if I make it black because I'm not going
to be able to see anything. So let's just set it to
something dark, but not black. I've got dark red here. Now I'm going to target
the pattern itself, the pattern-filled object here, and we're going to the
recolor artwork dialogue. We're going to select
advanced options. Now the problem with colors
like black and white is that they can't be remapped
without doing something, and what you're going to
need to do here is to click this little icon to make
sure it's an arrow. Because until it's an arrow
you can't change the color. Now we'll just double-click
on this and make it white. White, of course, is 255, 255, 255 in red, green, and blue channels, and there is our white pattern. I'm just going to
click ''Okay'' here. If you're used to working
with patterns in Illustrator, you will know that the result
of this is to give you the original black pattern but also a white version of it. Illustrator duplicates
your pattern when you use the recolor artwork dialogue
to change its color. Now for us to say the true black on white experience here, let's just go and make that
background rectangle black. There we've created
our heart with its really attractive lines created using the blend tool and we've created
a pattern from it. Next up we're going to
fruit and vegetables, we're going to make a pair.
4. Pt 3 - Pear with Lines Shape: The next shape we're
going to create a pair and a different
set of lines. I'm going to lick "Create New", we're going back to our
1,000 pixels square document and we're going
to draw some circles. Now these are going
to be filled circles with no stroke on them. It's probably a little bit
easier to see the pear shape as you work if you work
with filled circles. I'm doing this for everybody
who hates the pen tool, so we're going to create our
pair not using the pen tool. Here is the first
of our circles. I'm going to drag a
duplicate of our way. With the selection tool, I'm holding the
Alt or Option key as I drag a duplicate away. I;m making sure that
this is positioned directly underneath
the first circle. You can do that by just adding
the Shift key as you drag because that will
constrain it to a perfectly vertical direction. This needs to be bigger, but it needs to be
bigger from the center. If you hold the Alt key just
after you start dragging, it's going to be bigger
from the center. If you add the Shift key, it's going to be
a perfect circle. I'm just looking for something
for the bottom of my pair. I'm thinking that's
looking pretty good. Will go to the direct
selection tool and click on the top circle and then click again on this bottom
anchor point. You'll see that these
other anchor points are white and this one's filled. The filled one if we press the Delete key is now
going to be deleted. I'm going to again select over this time these
two anchor points, but you can see that this
one is not being selected. I'm just going to drag down. If I add the Shift key, I'm going to drag down in a
perfectly vertical direction. These two anchor points
are still selected, leave them selected
and go over here to find the scale tool. When you have the scale
tool selected it's going to operate as if it's
on a line of symmetry, so if I move this
handle out this one's going to go out in the
opposite direction. Nice little tool for
doing things like this. For having done
that I'm going to turn off the scale tool, go back to just working with these two anchor points and just drag them down a bit further. To finish off the
top of our pair, I'm going to select
just this anchor point. I'm just going to
stretch this out a little bit to make it a
little bit rounder at the top. At this point if you want to
adjust your circle you can, so you're just looking
for overall pear shape because we're about
to stick this altogether and then
just smooth it off. To stick it together we're going to select over both shapes, go to the Pathfinder palette
and click on "Unite". That's given us a
single pair shape. With it still selected
I want to get rid of these bumps in here, that's easily done
with the smooth tool. It shares a toolbar position
with the shaper tool. Grab the smooth tool
and then just drag over these anchor
points here just to smooth everything
out and we've got a pretty good
approximation of a pair. If you use the Shift key and tried to line things
up as you went, you'll find that this is
pretty near symmetrical. What I want to do next is to
divide this pear in half, so I'm going to align tool and
I'm just going to drag out a vertical line holding the Shift key so it's
perfectly vertical. I'm going to give it
a colored stroke. Just so we can see it
clearly on top of the pair, I'm going to select over both of these and I'm going to use the horizontal align
center to make sure that this line is over
the center of my pair. Now there's a command in
Illustrator that allows you you use a line to divide
things underneath. The trick is that
you have to have a line that's going to
do to the dividing. It has to be on top and it has to be the only
thing selected, so you're going to select
the line but do not select the pair or it's
not going to work. We'll go to Object, and then Path, and then Divide Objects Below. As you can see the line's been sacrificed in this process, but we've got two
halves of a pair. We've got a left half
and a right half. We're halfway to our pair
that has lines over here, but we don't have the
lines over here bit yet. Well, we're going to do that again using the line tool., so I'm just going to
grab the line tool. I'm going to hold the Shift
key and I want to drag out some lines that are
going to easily cover this side of the pear, so they need to be
reasonably long. I'm thinking about
that long we'll do. Let me just move my
pair out of the way. I'm going to grab my line again, make sure that it has a black stroke because I want
to use black for my lines, and I'm going to make it about
the width I want to use. I want this to be a
reasonably thick line. I'm just going to make this a little bit wider while I'm here. You can make these
additional lines in a number of ways and one of the ways that I like
because you can actually see what you're
getting before you get it, is to use the distort
and transform. I'm selecting the line,
I'm going to a Path, Distort & Transform,
and then Transform. I'm going to use probably
about 30 lines., so I'm going to
bump this up to 30. Right now you will see no change because there's no movement, but you will need to
have Preview turned on. I'm going to increase the
vertical value and I want to increase it to get the spacing between
the lines that I like. Now if I like something
like this decreased spacing then I'll just need to
increase the number of copies because I
can gauge how many I'm going to need to cover
this side of the pear. I actually like mine
spaced out a little bit, so I'm going to
reduce the number of copies but
increase the spacing. Again, I'm just looking
for something that's easily going to cover my pair. I'll click "Okay". Right now this is
a line that has an appearance attached to it
and affect attached to it. If we have a look in
the Appearance panel, this is my line that
I've got selected. In the newer versions
of Illustrator, you will see only
the line selected. In older versions of
Illustrator when you select the line with an effect applied to it everything gets selected, but you see here that there's
this transform appearance. It's not actually yet
a series of lines, it's just a single line
with an effect applied. We need to expand that to
get our lines out if you like with the selected Object
and then Expand Appearance. Here in the last palette
you can see that we now have groups and inside
the groups are lines. Well, we're going
to ungroup these. I'm just trying to do Object
Ungroup and Object Ungroup again until we just
get a series of path. Now we've got our set of lines and we've got
our half pear shape, I'm going to move my half pear shape over
the top of my lines. The thing I'm looking
for here is just to get a nice effect at
the top and the bottom, so I might want to have
the bottom missing but the top lined up perfectly on
top of one of these lines. It's the pair that
I'm moving right now, so I'm just making sure
that things are lined up nicely given that
these black lines are what I'm going to
be seeing in a minute. Now one of the ways
that you can get rid of the excess black lines is
using a shape builder tool, but there are a
couple of things you have to be really careful about. One is that you need
plenty of room to work around these shapes or your
lines need to be pretty long. They need to be much
longer than your shape. I'm going to select
either everything, the lines and the half pair, and then we're
going to the shape builder tool which shares a toolbar position with the live paint and live
paint bucket tools. Now with the shape builder
tool if you want to remove something you hold down
the Alt or the Option key, and that's exactly
what I'm doing. I'm just running over
these lines that are outside the pear shape and
when I do they disappear, but you can see
this is why we want to leave yourself plenty of room to maneuver because if you don't draw really
straight lines, you want your wiggly
lines to completely cover the lines that you
want to get rid off. Now I've got my pear shape
that is filled with lines. Let's just go and
grab the pear shape and move it out of the way. These lines have got
solid ends on them, this was the effect
that we're going to get with this process. I'm going to delete
the half a pair that I no longer need, and then I'm going to
join the two halves up. I'm just tweaking the alignment
of the top of the pair. I'm going to select over everything and I'm
going to group them because that's going to
mean they're going to move as a single object. Control or Command
0 to zoom back out. I'm going to add the
stalk for my pear, and for that I'm going
to use the pencil tool. It shares a toolbar position
with the shaper tool. Double-click on the
Pencil tool and make sure it's set to smooth, so it's going to smooth out
any wiggles that you draw. I'm just going to draw
a very simple stalk. Let's go and give
it a black stroke, and let's pick an
upstroke nicely. For the leaf we're
going to use an oval, so I'm going to select the
circle, the ellipse tool, drag out a long oval and flip the stroke and
the fill so that I've got a filled oval shape. Again, this direct
selection tool, I'm going to click on this anchor point at the very bottom. It's selected, none
of the others are. Over here is a tool
for making it a point. This converts a selected
anchor point to a corner and it just gives
it a really nice tip. I like to learn and press the V which enables this
selection tool up here. It's a tool I use
a lot and that's a shortcut key I think is
quite valuable to learn, and we're just going to
put it into position. We can add these two elements to our group by just selecting them and dropping them
into the group. Now the pair is going to
move as a single object. In the next video
we're going to look at creating this pair as
another simple pattern, but this time it's going to be upside down as well as upright.
5. Pt 4 - Make the Pear Pattern: Now we're going to create
this pear as a pattern, but some of the elements are
going to be upside down. If you want to make this for
a site like Spoonflower, then you're going to
need to be able to long term extract a
pattern swatch from it. For this, we're
actually going to build the pear pattern by hand. I'm just going to
zoom out a little bit because I want to see the
edges of my document. I'm going to grab my pear
and I'm going to drag it up and position it so its center is in the top corner
of the document. Now we're going to do
that most accurately by using the Transform panel. Go to the Transform
panel and we know this document is 1,000
by 1,000 pixels. If I select the middle of
these nine boxes here, that's going to register as
the middle of this shape, while the middle of the
shape needs to be at 00 equals this point over here. Let's just set it to 00. I'm going to drag
a duplicate away, Alt, drag a duplicate away. If I add the Shift key, I'm going to constrain
its horizontal position. I'm going to place it
over this corner here, making sure that I
have the middle of these nine boxes selected and the X value should be 1,000, the Y value should be zero. If it's not, just go
and make it that. Let's select both
of these shapes. Alt, drag away, hold the Shift key
down and position it over the very bottom
of the document. I'm trying to see
that intersect line come up and see if we've got
them in the right position. Well, we have the
middle of these is at X 500 and Y 1,000. These are perfectly positioned inside the document
and they're upright. I need one pair that
is upside down. I'm going to Alt, drag
a duplicate pear away and I'm going to rotate
it through 180 degrees. If you hold the Shift
key as you do it, it's going to be
perfectly upside down. Now, I want to align this to
the middle of the document. These are all lined
perfectly and I want to make sure that this
one is in the middle. I'm going to the Align
panel and I'm going to make sure that I have just the shapes selected
that I want to move. I'm going to select
align to art board, so it's selected here. Then I'm just going
to make sure that this one is perfectly
aligned to the art board. I like to click these
options a couple of times because
sometimes it doesn't seem to work the first time. To make this into a pattern, we need to create our
own bounding box. I'm going to click on
the rectangle tool, click in the document
and make a rectangle, 1,000 by 1,000 pixels. I'm going to square
it up so that it's aligned to the art board. It needs to be behind everything
so I'll choose object, arrange and then send back
and making sure it's still selected because this has to be a no fill, no stroke rectangle. It's got no stroke. I'm going to target
its fill and make sure it has no fill at all. Now, again, the lighter
versions of Illustrator have a problem here in that
sometimes a no fill, no stroke rectangle
isn't really a no fill, no stroke rectangle and
your pattern won't work. To make sure that this is
not going to happen to you, you're going to click on
the Appearance panel. You still got that
rectangle selected. Go to the flyout panel and make sure that you click
"Clear Appearance". Now when you click
Clear Appearance, it seems to turn it from
something that wasn't into something that now is a no
fill, no stroke rectangle. Now you're going to
go back and select absolutely everything
all your pears. Go to the swatches
panel and drag and drop this pear collection into the top part of your
swatches panel. You can't add it
to a color group, so don't try because it
just won't go in there. But you can add it to
this top area here, which is what can take patterns. Let's go and see how
our pattern works. I'm just going to drag
out a shape here, and let's fill it
with our pattern. It's too big to say
really how it works. I'm going to choose object
transform and then scale. I'm going to use uniform
scale and I'm going to make sure that I don't have
transform objects selected, but Transform Patterns is selected.Now I can
just reduce it to, for example, something like 40 percent of its original size. You can see now that this pattern is
repeating really nicely. It's got upright and
upside down pears in it. It's just a different way of creating patterns in
Adobe Illustrator, you can always create patterns by hand if you want to do so.
6. Pt 5 - Donut with Lines Shapes: For the next shape,
we're going to create a doughnut shape
filled with our lines. I'm not going to make
a pattern this time, but I'm starting with this same one by 1,000 pixel artboard. I'm going to the Ellipse Tool. I'll hold the Shift
key as I drag out a nice large ellipse. I'm going to Alt or Option drag a duplicate away and
then just re-size it. I'm going to line
these two up and just test and see how they look. That's a nice shape. There's plenty of room
to fill with our line. I'm pretty happy with that. With these two shapes selected. I'm going to turn the
fill off though so that they are just lines
and not filled. I want to divide this so I'm
going back to my Line Tool. I'm going to drag out a
line, re-select everything, and again, just adjust it so that everything
is nicely lined up. Because we know that we can use this line to divide the circles. I'm going to select just
the line and choose Object, Path, and then Divide
Objects Below. This gives me a lot of objects. I've got two half-circles here, and these are half
circles as well so let me just stick everything
back together again. With this one here, I want just this
shape minus this. I'm going to select
over these pieces. I can do that using the
Shape Builder Tool because there's a feature of
the Shape Builder Tool that I want to show you. I'm going to click on the
Shape Builder Tool to select. I've got these two
shapes selected. But if I go over here to the Swatches panel and
select black as my color, in addition to joining this to make it a shape
using a Shape Builder Tool, I can also fill it with color. I'm just going to drag over it and it's filled with color. Now this bit here, I don't want at all so
I'm just going to Alt or Option drag over
it to remove it. Go back to the Selection Tool and we've got our shape
nicely filled out. Now with this one,
we're going to use a different process. This circle I created second
so it's going to be on top and this one I created first so it's
going to be on the bottom. If you are unsure, just check in the Layers palette
and select this one. You can see it's on top and
this one's on the bottom. I'm going to select
over both of them. There is a tool in the
Pathfinder palette that you can use to remove the top object from the bottom object and
that's this one here. It's minus front. If they were the
other way round, you could use minus back. There is a minus back over here. Just knowing that the order of the two shapes then you can decide which of
the two you want, but we want minus front. I click on that
and now we've got a shape that is the other
half of the doughnut. The other half of the doughnut
I want to fill with lines. I'm going to draw this a little bit differently this time. I'm going to drag out a
line that is going to be long enough to easily
cover this half circle shape. I just want to make
sure that there's plenty of room here to move. Let's just move those chaps
out of the way for a minute. I'm going to make my
line a little bit wider. I'm just going to
eyeball this one. I'm going to Alt or Option
drag a duplicate line away. Now if I'm happy
with that spacing, I can go ahead and
press Control D to make a whole series of additional lines with which
to fill my half circle. Here is my half circle shape. I'm going to put it on
top by choosing Object, Arrange, and Bring to Front so it's on the
top of my lines. I want to show you a couple of different methods of doing
this because the results are very different so let's
make a duplicate of this set. The first one is the
shape builder method, which we've been
using previously. Again select Shape
Builder and just Alt or Option drag over the lines
that you don't want, leaving behind the
lines that you do want. Now with this one, we've got this
little outside edge, but it is just an
outside edge shape so it is possible to remove it. You can see it here in
the Layers palette. That's going to turn
it off for now. Now let's have a look
at this set of objects. If I select it, I can use a pathfinder option to use this half circle
shape as a cookie cutter. Effectively, what
we're going to do is use it to cut out
the lines below. But we're going to need to have this half circle shape on
top and right now it's not. Let me just see if I can go and select it and move
it to the top. Object, Arrange, Bring to Front. It's at the top here. Select everything and go to the Pathfinder palette
and click Divide. Now, the result
here is different. You can see that we've lost some of the widths of our lines. But in addition to that, the shapes that we've got at the other end of this
process are very different. Over here, we've got
individual lines. Over here, we've got shapes
that look very different. Let me just find one
of these shapes here. See here it is. Here's one here. You can see that the shape
actually incorporates part of the circle and it incorporates part of the circle
on both sides. You can see here it's got
this part of the circle. The next one here, part of the circle is gone, part of the circle is gone. We've actually got shapes
that can be filled. Any one of these could
be filled with a color or it could be filled with
black or whatever you like. But the shape is very different this time to what
we had over here. Depending on what you
want as a result, you could choose either
this option of using this shape as a cookie
cutter to cut out the lines, but knowing that you're
going to lose the width of the lines and you're also going to end up with this line around the edge of the shape which
you can't get rid of. Or you can go with this
option where you've got lines that really
actually are aligned. Just going to select these. They're all individual lines in the Layers palette
so I'm going to group them because that would be a really
nice thing to do. As their a group then we
can stick the other half of the circle to
them very easily. I want to create
both these shapes. Let me just grab this lot
and move them out of the way and let's go and find them half a circle to
make up that shape. Again, I could go through
and turn that read off or make some alternate lines or do something different there. But there are two
different results from using lines but using different
tools to cut them off. One of the tools changes the nature of the lines
quite significantly. The Shape Builder doesn't
change them really much at all.
7. Pt 6 - Parallel Lines Shape: For this next design, we're going to create
some lines that travel parallel with each other, but they loop around. Now because this one's
pretty sensitive in terms of spacing and
getting things lined up, I suggest that you use
the same values as I'm. I've got the Ellipse
Tool selected. I've clicked here so that these values are
going to be the same. I'm making one circle
that's 200 pixels, and making one
that's 150 pixels, one that's 100, and one that's 50. Basically these are nice
even sized circles. I'm going to align them up
so that they're centered on top of each other
and I'm going to make sure that there is no fill. So nice, evenly spaced circles. I'm going to the
direct selection tool. I'm just going to drag
upwards here because I want to capture just these
anchor points here, just the bottom anchor
point of all four circles. I'm pressing "Delete",
so I remove it. I want these lines
to be a bit thicker, so I'm going to increase
them to four points. I need a line, so I'm going to the line tool, I'm going to click
once in the document, I'm making a line of
100 pixels in length and a 90-degree angle,
I'll click "Okay". Make sure yourself that yours is the same four points that you
are using for the circle, or at least match whatever
you're using for the circle. Now I'm going to select
over all of these shapes. I'm going to use the Transform
Panel because I want to make sure that things
are lining up. What I'm going to do is target
this bottom corner here. I'm just going to click here on the bottom corner
and I'm making sure that the x and y value here of this bottom corner
of this set of shapes is 400 and 500 pixels. That's nice, even value. I'm going to move my
line into position. I'm going to target the
topmost portion of my line and make sure it's
positioned at the exact same 400 and 500. If it isn't, I'm going to
make it position there. That's telling me that
this line is directly lined up with the bottom
part of this curve. Now I want to move it
at a precise value, and I don't want to be out by even a fraction of pixels
so I'm selecting this, I'm going to Object
Transform and then Move. I want to move this 25 pixels so I'm zeroing out everything. Don't get afraid
of this dialogue. It usually opens up with
really silly figures in it. So just zero everything
out and start over. I want 25 pixels of
movement on this shape. That's going to
move it perfectly into align with this
part of the loop. I need a copy because I need
my original plus one copy. The copy is still selected so if I press "Control D" a few times, I'm going to duplicate
it all the way across and everything's
going to line up perfectly. I don't want this middle line, so I'm just going to delete it. Next up, I'm going to zoom in and I'm going
to join everything together because what
I've got here is a line, a half circle and a line. I've got that for everything. I'm going to click
on this line first. I'm going to hold the Shift key down and click on this line, because that means that
you get a visual of the fact that you've selected what you thought you selected. Then with still the
Shift key selected, I'm going to select the top one, and I'm going to
choose object and path and because we're going
to use this a lot, I'm going to remember this
shortcut key, it's Control J. It will be Command J on a Mac. What that's done is it's joined those three lines into one. Click here to select this one, Shift-click on this one. We can see visually we've got
the right thing selected, click here on this
one and Control or Command J. Click away and then
do that for the next set. It is a little time-consuming, but if you do it in order
and do it step-by-step, you're not going to have
any problems at all. Now we've got this shape. What I want to do is add it
to the bottom of itself. I'm going to drag a duplicate away holding
the Alt or Option key. I'm going to rotate it
holding the Shift key, so it rotates in a perfectly
180 degree direction. Going to select over this, I'm going to pick
this bottom point. Let's go and select
this bottom point here, and let's make sure it's
at a nice position. It's in fractional points and we definitely don't want to
be playing around with that. I'm going to make
it 250 pixels and then let's make this 500 pixels. We know exactly where
this bottom corner is. What we're going
to do next is take this combined set of shapes
and move them over here. If everything's lined
up on pixel values, it's going to have a better chance of being
in the correct position. The y position for
this shape here is 500 pixels so that means that the y position for
the top corner of this should be 500
pixels, which it is. So everything looks
really neatly lined up. We have to go and
do a join again. So I'm going to select over
this inner set of lines. I know that the
joint is going to be at this point so I'm just selecting over
where the join will be and then press "Control J". Then I'm going to select in here because that's where
this next join needs to be and then in here, Control J, making sure that
you only select the lines that you actually want
to impact and Control J. If we check in the last pallet, we should have only
four shapes here, which we've got just
those four shapes. Now we're going to
do that once more. So with all of these
shapes, I'm going to Alt, drag a duplicate away
and just position it right where it needs to be. I can double-check by selecting this group of objects
and make sure that their baseline y
position is at 700. If I check the baseline y position of this
set of objects, it's at 700 too. Everything looks
nice and lined up. Again, I know the joins
are in this middle area here so I'm just going
to join these together, Selecting and Control
or Command J. The end result should
be just for shapes, and that's exactly
what I've got. I'm going to select over
these and group them because their spacing is again really critical so I'm choosing
Object and then Group. Now I can scale
them down holding the Shift key as I scale them to make them a
whole lot smaller. Now if I'm not happy with
that four-point line, I could change that,
but I actually quite like the
thickness of that line. So I'm pretty happy
with that shape. Having created the shape,
in the next video, we're going to make
it into a pattern.
8. Pt 7 - Parallel Lines Pattern: Now, in this particular case, I'm going to make a
pattern out of the shapes, but let's change the
colors before we do that. I'm going to select the group selection tool
because that allows me to get inside the group to select a single object and
I'm going to color it. But I'm going to color the
stroke and have no fill. Let's just be careful
about what I'm doing here. Again, making sure I'm
coloring the stroke. I have got some colors
that I want to use here. The group selection tool allows you to get
inside a group. We're not breaking
up that group, but we are able to get
access to its contents. Now I've got my
elements colored. I'm just going to clean up everything and I'm going
to turn off the artboard with view and hide
artboards that makes it a little bit easier to
make a pattern like this. To create our pattern, I'm going to select over the
shape and choose object, and then pattern make. I'm going to use brick by row. I'm selecting Brick by
Row with a half offset. I'm going to zoom
in so I can see things more clearly
in particular, when I'm trying to
line things up. I'm going to make sure
that this option has a line through it so that we can individually set these values. Now the width is what's going
to bring these together. I'm just going to
decrease the width until everything looks lined up. Now, it's off by half a pixel. Instead of 163 or 162, I'm going to have
to use 162 and 1/2. That's going to type that in
by hand because otherwise, this is not going to line up. Now it is lining up. The height is going to push the lines away from each other. I'm just going to look
for a nice value there that gives me some nice
spacing arrangement. I think I want the spacing to be more like the spacing
here, this one here. All whole numbers, that's good news there. I can't change this
to be whole numbers because of the design itself. It's just not going to
lend itself to that. Now that I'm happy with that, I could go and
choose nine by nine, so I could see the pattern at a larger size or larger
scale if you like. None of that's going to
change the pattern itself. I'm just going to click Done and we're finished with that. Let me go and show the
artboards back again. Let's move these shapes out
of the way and just test our design with a rectangle that is 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels, lined up, centered
on the artboard. I'm going to target the fill, remove the stroke, and just
apply our design to it. Now as we could do with the previous design
that we looked at, if we want to work
with the colors, we can go to the Recolor
Artwork dialogue here, and these colors
can all be edited. I'm going to the Edit option. I'm going to lock or link these harmony colors together
so that if I drag around, I'm going to keep the
same relationship between these colors if I liked that relationship of
having complimentary colors, colors that are opposite each
other on the color wheel. If I want to break that, I can unlink them, and then I can take these colors to wherever I want them to be. Of course, because this
is a new color scheme, then we're going to
save a pattern out of here with this
color scheme in it, as well as the original pattern. Let me just click Okay, here in the swatches panel is
our original color scheme, and here is an edited version. We could make
multiple versions of this pattern just using
different colors, using the recolor artwork
dialogue to recolor it.
9. Pt 8 - Shape with Uneven Lines: The next two designs that
we're going to create involve lines that don't
look like they're regular. We're going to create
something with irregular lines that
looks a bit like this. I'm going to click Create new, go back to my 1,000 by 1,000
pixel square document. Now, I want some
lines to work with, so I'm going to the line tool, I'm going to drag
out a vertical line. I'm holding the
Shift key as I do so to make perfectly
vertical alignment. It has no fill and it
does have a stroke. Just going to
increase the stroke, at least at this
point to two points. I'm going to use the
selection tool and just Alt or Option-drag
a duplicate away. I'm going to leave it pretty
close to the original line. Then I'm going to
press Control D repeatedly until I get a
whole series of lines. To make these lines look
a little bit uneven in terms of their spacing and positioning because
these are just lines, we can check that
in the last panel because we copied the
line and then moved up. We've actually got a series
of lines in the layers so they're able to be dealt
with individually right now. I'm going to select
all of them and use Object Transform
and then Transform H. This dialog allows you to
randomly transform objects. We're going to make
sure first of all, that we've got random enabled. I'm going to increase
the angle and you just want to do this
by a few degrees, maybe three, maybe four. At the moment my rotation point is down in this
bottom right corner. For this one, I'm
just going to give it some central setting. Baselines are going to
rotate from the middle. You'll see that the middle of the document looks pretty even, but we can clean
that up in a minute, but the tops and bottoms of the line are just
kicking over slightly. I'm also going to
move them a couple of pixels or so horizontally. Just looking at something
here that sort of suits me. I'm thinking about five pixels. The spacing is
going to be uneven, the rotation angle
is going to be uneven because we have
this random setting. If we don't do random, we just get everything rotated and move the
exact same amount, so random that's going
to help us a lot here. I'm going to click Okay, I'm going back into
that dialogue again. The settings are sticky, so the last set of
settings is visible here. What I want to do now
is just to change the position that
they're rotating from to something
along the outsides of these nine little boxes here, the top row or the bottom
row so that things become a little bit more
interesting yet again. If I'm happy with that,
I'll just click Okay. I'm going to squeeze this
up a little bit so that I've got lines that are still
a lot closer to each other. Because these are lines, we can also adjust
the line weight down to 1.0 or 1.5
points, whatever. You can see that now we've got some lines that
look a little bit more interesting than straight up and down vertical lines. Let's use them to fill
out boomerang shape. To this, I'm going
to the pencil tool. I'm going to double-click on it. Make sure that you've got
this setting to smooth, particularly if
you're using a mouse, and we're going to
draw two curves. We're going to draw
a fairly high curve, and then we'll draw a
much smoother curve. If you keep these curves
away from each other, they're not going to join up. We don't want them to join up. We can place them
over each other. What we're looking
for is this bit in the middle, not anything else. We can merge this
into a single shape, get rid of the extra bits by using the Pathfinder palette. I'm going to the
Pathfinder palette here. We could use Divide
that would do that, or we can choose Minus Front. Now, in this case,
Minus Front has left some little bits
down the bottom here. If that's the best
solution that you can get for any state of
lines that you draw, go to the lasso
tool here and just lasso around the shape that
you don't want and delete it. Sometimes these
options will give different results depending
on the lines that you use, so you just need to
be aware of that. We have a look inside the
group in our layers palette, you can see that we've
got a group with our path this sort of shape
that we just created. I'm going to drag it out so
it's no longer in a group. What we want to do is to fill this shape with
this set of lines. I'm going to the selection tool, I'm going to select
over our shape, maybe shrink it a little bit, and then position
it over the line so we can measure out and make sure everything's
going to fit, which it is going to fit nicely. Having done that, we can select either both
of these shapes, and we already know that the shape builder tool will
allow us to cut lines. I'm going back to my
shape builder tool, hold down the Alt key on a PC option on a Mac and
just draw around it. Not everything is going to
disappear the first time, but that's just fine
because I'm going to show you how to deal with that. You're just going to
go over the lines until you remove everything
you want to remove. There's some stray
bits left behind. I'm going back to the
lasso tool up here, grab these pieces because
I don't want them. Re-select everything. Go back to the lasso tool and you can see any
stray pixels here. These are stray as well. Let's zoom in because I've got a line that's still
sticking up here. But if I re-select
everything and because all I'm working on
right now is this shape, I can press Control or Command
A to re-select everything. Go back to the
shape builder tool, and now that I can see
things more closely, I can just knock off that
extra little bit of a line. We now have our shape. You can have the shape with or without that line around it. That's your choice to make. I'm going to leave it
with the line around it, but I am going to reduce the weight of this
line a little bit. I'm going to make sure I target it and I'll just knock it down to about 0.75 of a point. I'm going to select
everything and just group it. We can make a
pattern out of this, but lets this time use a
different pattern tool. This is the new pattern repeat
tool in Adobe Illustrator. I'm going to select
over my shape, I'm going to object
and then repeat, and go to grid. I'm also going back to
object and repeat and go to options because I want to change the way that this
repeat is working. What I want to do
is to flip some of these shapes so we can
select here to flip rows, and we can also flip columns. You can also go and select a different grid types
so you have brick by row and you have
brick by column. We're getting a lot of
mileage out of one shape. We haven't had to do anything in terms of
repeating the shape. Illustrator is taking care
of all of this for us. I'm just going to click
Okay to get out of here. I do have a class
on this tool which I'll link in the description because it is a
really useful tool, but it does have
some limitations. One of those limitations
is it's really difficult, if not impossible, to get a pattern swatch out of here
for a site like spoonflower. But it is good for
pattern-filled objects. I'm just going to
bring in the side here and bring in the
bottom of this design. We can shrink it and if we
shrink from the corners, we're going to make
the repeat smaller, the little design smaller
and then we can just drag out to reveal the design. One thing you can't
do here which you can do with patterns
using the pattern make tool in
Illustrator is there's no re-color artwork
dialogue here. The spacing between these
objects is controlled here. You can close up the
horizontal spacing here and close up or increase the
vertical spacing here. I'm looking for
something I quite like. If I do want to change
the color of this object, I can double-click
on it to go into isolation mode where the
object itself is now selected. I can go and select a
different color for it. This is going to affect every single other
object in this design. Changing one element is going to change all of those
elements in the design. But let me just close down that dialogue and
let's press escape to get out of that isolation mode. There is a design that's
made with uneven lines. The uneven lines are created by creating a set of
lines and then using Object Transform and
then transform each with random selected to change each of those lines
in different ways. You get this sort of
more uneven appearance.
10. Pt 9 - More Shapes with Uneven Lines and a Pattern: The second uneven line design is going to be creating
a different way. I'm going back to my 1000 by
1000 pixels square document. I'm going to make a circle so I'm going to
the Ellipse tool, I'm going to drag out a circle. Now I want to fill my
circle with black color, but I don't want to stroke
and that's really important. If you have a stroke
on this shape, things are going to look a
little bit haywire and it's really easy not to
understand what's happening, particularly if your
stroke was white. I'm going to make sure
that we're turning the stroke off on this shape. I'm going to the layers palette, which I seem to have lost. Let me just go and get
my layers palette. I'm going to open up this
layer we're working on. I'm going to make a duplicate
of this circle shape. This duplicate I'm going to
turn off the topmost one. Let's go to the
one at the bottom, which is the duplicate. I'm just going to
flip the stroke and fill so it has a stroke
and no I fill and then I'm going to
lock it down and hide it for now and then just reveal again this topmost shape because we're going
to work on this one. We're going to target
it so it's selected, and there is a different
way of making uneven lines for this shape and that is
using the scribble effect. So with your shape selected, you're going to choose
effect and then stylize and come across
here to scribble. Now this is the default setting, but we're going to set it up ourselves so we're
going to do it in 90 degree angle so our
lines are up and down. I'm going to increase the
overlap to the outside. The reason for this
is it's going to be easier for me to again cut those lines later on
using the Shape Builder tool. I'm going to make
sure I push my lines outside this basic circle shape. Of course, we're
keeping a copy of the circle shape down here that we can use to cut with
the Shape Builder tool. The stroke width is set
to three by default, I'm going to bring
that down to one, or even a little bit smaller. As soon as you go from one
and press the down arrow key, you get 0.01, which is
a lot of difference. I'm just going to type in 0.5. It's a half pixel line
instead of a 0.01 pixel line. Curviness, you do want to
probably increase that, but maybe increase the spacing a little bit first so that you can get to see what you're
going to end up with. I like to add a little
bit of curviness. I like to add a little
bit of variation on the curviness and a bit of variation on the
spacing as well. Because what we're looking for here is something that again, looks a little bit
more hand-drawn. I'm going to increase the
spacing a little bit. You can just tweak these values, what you're looking at is what you're seeing in the middle because that's what
you're going to get. When you're happy, you
can just click, "Okay." Now this again is a circle with an appearance on it so we have a look at it in the
appearance panel. You can see it's got a fill and a scribble effect and the scribble effect is actually
controlled by that fill. Fill has a lot to do with
the actual scribble effect, but so too does the
stroke that's why we've avoided using any stroke at all. We can actually start
cutting this away with the Shape Builder tool because it's still a removable effect. We need to bake it into
that shape and of course, baking it in just
involves going to the Object menu and
choosing Expand Appearance. Now it's not a circle with
an appearance applied to it, it's actually a series of lines. Let's go back to
the last pallet. This is our group
of objects in here. Let's just open this up. You can say that this
is a path that has this loopy set of lines in it. I'm going to unlock this and bring it now back
into visibility. This ellipse is going to move
it above everything else. I can now select over everything and we can go to work with
our Shape Builder tool. We're going to have similar
problems potentially with the Shape Builder
tool here in that some of these lines
may not be cut. But we're just going
to start by cutting them and then go back
and clean up later on. That's why you want to
push your lines well outside your circle so
that you've got plenty of room to maneuver
when you don't have too many of these lines that are
going to need needling up. Again, before we
finish off here, we're going to get the
Lasso tool and get rid of some of these anchor
points that we don't need. Re-select everything with
Control or Command A because it's the only
thing in the document, so it's very easy to re-select. Now we're going to zoom in
because we need to see more clearly the areas where we need to still do a bit of work. Control or Command A go back to the Shape
Builder tool and just knock off these little bits that's still need a
bit of tidying up. Now I've got a couple of anchor
points here that need to go and there's an anchor
point over here as well. Now, in addition to using the Shape Builder
tool at this point, if you zoom in quite a ways, you could use something
like the Eraser tool. Let's just go to the
Eraser tool here. I've got mine very small. It responds to the open and
closed square bracket case, so you can use those to adjust
its size and so you can just very easily delete the bits that you don't
need using the Eraser tool. Just be careful that
you don't run into that outside circle and
destroy that in the process. If there are lines over
here that you don't want, you'll find that these
are actually selectable. Let's go back to
the selection tool. I'm going to need the Group
Selection tool to get it in here and you may find that individual lines like
this can be selected and deleted just to
neaten up the edges. I'm going to take this line out to just select it and delete it. Now we have our shape, I'm thinking that
this top circle has quite a large value
on the stroke width, so I'm going to bring it down to 0.75 so that's going
to be a little bit closer to the values that are used for the actual
lines in the middle here. Now I'm going to
make this a two tone circle so I'm going to this path and I'm going
to cut it in half. Doing that, I'm going
to lock down and just hide that lined group
underneath for a minute. I want to cut it in
half across the middle. Now, you could use
the Rectangle tool, but it's really hard to line up with the middle of a shape and the Line tool is
actually much easier. I'm drawing a line all
the way across here, and then I'm going to select both these objects or
circle and a line. We know that the circle
is lined up with this group underneath so
we don't want it to move. We're going to
click on it again, so it now becomes
the key object. Now we can go to Window and Align to get the Align options. We can use this option here, the vertical align center, to make sure that this line is immediately over the
center of the circle. If it wasn't correct, then it would have moved
using that option. We've got a line over a circle and the line is on
top of the circle, we can see up here. If we select the line, we should be able
to do object path and then divide objects below. That means we now
have two halves of our circle if we
turn our lines back on, you'll see everything is
just filling up nicely. I'm going to select the
bottom line of this and I'm going to fill
it with a fill color. We now have our shape
that's half and half, it's half lines and
it's half fill color. We didn't need to wipe out
the lines underneath here, although you could
if you wanted to, we just needed to cover
them up with something. I want to select all of this, but I need to be careful
here because I've got that group locked and that's not going to
select everything. Let's re-select everything,
make a group out of it. I'm going to size it down
a little bit smaller. I'm going to drag
a duplicate away. I'm going to use the Group
Selection tool to get inside this group because I want this particular shape here. It's got bumpy lines
around the edge here because we use that Shape
Builder tool on it. Now I have two differently
colored circles. There are any number
of ways that we could make a pattern out
of these circles, but I think since
the last time we used the new repeat
that feature. Let's use that this
time object repeat and we'll choose Grid. Just a quick warning here. As I was editing this
part of the video, I noticed that the
screen is flickering quite a lot because
of the way that this new pattern make
tool works and because of the colors and the lines in
this particular pattern. If you're sensitive to
flickering screens, you may want to avoid
the rest of this video. I'm going to bring in the sides, try and move this so it's better positioned over the top
corner of the document, shrink it down, and
then reveal the object. At this point, I'm
looking at these shapes. I'm thinking I would like
to turn one of them upside down so I'm just selecting this one and I'm
going to rotate it. By selecting one of these
shapes, the blue one, you'll see that every
other blue shape has been rotated in the same way. We're going to press,
"Escape" to get out of here. When I size down my shapes
you'll see that the line stayed the same width
and that's because of a setting inside Illustrator. I'm going to edit preferences,
and then general, you can go to Illustrator
preferences general, if you're on a Mac. This is the option
here that's turned off scale strokes & effects. If I'd had scale strokes
& effects turned on, then those lines would
have got considerably smaller as I've scaled that object so that's
just an aside. If you didn't want them to scale the way I've scaled them, then you can come
in here and turn scale strokes & effects
on and then they're going to scale so
that the lines get finer if you shrink
them down in size. That's just a heads up there.
11. Class Project and Wrap Up: We've now completed the video training
portion of this course. It's over to you. Your project for this
class will be to create one or more
of the shapes that you've seen created in the
class and to turn them into a repeating pattern
using whichever the method you prefer to use. Post an image of your
completed design as your class project. I hope that you've
enjoyed this course and that you've
learned lots about working in Adobe
Illustrator both in pattern-making and also with working with lines and shapes. If you did enjoy this course, and when you see a
prompt that asks if you would recommend
this class to others, please would you do
two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you do recommend
this class. Secondly, write, even
in just a few words, why you enjoyed the class. Your recommendations will
help other students to say that this is a course that
they might want to take. If you'd like to leave
me a comment, please do. I read all your comments
and look at and review all your class projects. If you see the Follow
link on the screen, click it to follow
me so you'll be alerted when I
release new courses. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much
for joining me for this episode of Graphic
Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in another class here
on Skillshare soon.