Diamond, Harlequin & Argyle Patterns in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch Diamond, Harlequin and Argyle Patterns intro: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design course create Diamond Harlequin and Argyle patents in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator Photoshop and Procreate. Today we're looking at creating Diamond Harlequin and Argyle patterns in Illustrator. As you're watching these videos, you'll see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying this class. I ask this because these recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too may enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, 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. Now, let's get started making Diamond Harlequin and Argyle patterns in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 - Basic Diamond Pattern: The first pattern we're going to make is just a basic diamond pattern. I'm going to choose File, New. I'm using a document 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels. It's in RGB color mode, and I have a line new objects to pixel grid disabled. I'll click "OK". I'm going to start by just creating a square here. I'm just going to hold the shift key down as I draw out a square. At this stage, it doesn't matter too much what this square looks like. I'm turning off the stroke and I'm just making sure it has a fill. I'm going to the selection tool and I'm just going to hover outside one of the corners of this square and hold shift as I rotate this around. This reads 315 degrees. It's exactly the same as rotating at 45 degrees. Next up, I want to make this into an actual diamond. I'm going to select it and I'm going to the transform options up here. You can also get to this by choosing window and then transform. This is the width and height of my shape currently. Well, I want to make it a known width and height, and I want it to be a width of 300 and a height of 500. It doesn't much matter what these dimensions are. What it matters is that they're round values and that you know what they are. It's just going to make it a little bit easier to work with this pattern by setting it to known values. You can see that the bounding box is now not all around the shape or you can reset it by choosing object transform, reset bounding box. This makes the bounding box look a little bit neater. For our diamond pattern, we're going to drag a duplicate of this away. I'll hold the alt option key on the Mac and just drag a duplicate shape away and I'm just going to have it intersect the bottom of the existing shape. I'm using smart guides here to line everything up. If you're not sure that they are perfectly aligned, select both shapes and just click the "Center Option" to make sure they're centered. Then you can zoom into the middle of them and just make sure that your alignment is looking good. You can see it in even more detail by choosing "View" and then pixel preview and this will show you the pixel level alignment of these two objects so you can make sure that they are just touching perfectly as they are. I'll choose "View Pixel Preview" to exit that and control or command zero to just exit back to full screen. We have all the elements we need here to create a basic diamond pattern. I'm going to leave these other diamonds transparent so that I could later fill them with whatever color I like. To make my pattern, I need a no fill, no stroke rectangle and it needs to go from this point here to this point, down to here, and across to here. That's half the height of this overall combined shape and its exact width. Well, we know what the height of each diamond is and its width, so we can very easily create that rectangle. I'm going to click here and create a rectangle 300 pixels wide and 500 pixels tall. I'm going to switch the fill and the stroke and I'm just going to position it here in over this shape. Again, I'm using smart guides to line it up. But while this is perfectly aligned, it's not technically required that this be aligned perfectly. You will need to align it horizontally, which you can do by selecting all three objects and click the horizontal align center option. But it's vertical placement actually doesn't matter. What does matter, that is, at this point that we move this rectangle behind everything else because it has to be at the back. It also has to be a no fill, no stroke rectangle. We're just going to turn off the stroke. We've got these three shapes here with the no fill, no stroke rectangle at the back of everything. We'll select over this and then just take it to the swatches panel. I'm going to move the pattern pays out to one side, and let's create a rectangle. Let's fill it with our pattern. We can re-size the pattern object transform scale. I'm not going to transform the object. I am going to transform the pattern itself. I'll just make it a smaller size and click "Ok". There is the first of our patterns. It is a very simple diamond pattern. If we wanted at some later stage to use a different color behind this, all we would do is open the appearance panel, click here and add a second fill to this object and the fill at the very back, the one at the bottom of the appearance panel, we can just fill that with a color and that will then become the second color in our pattern. 3. Pt 2 - Harlequin Pattern: The second pattern we're going to make is a harlequin pattern. We're going to do it by adapting the first one. I'm holding a space bar as I drag the artboard to one side, and I'm going to quickly add a second artboard that I can use to work on. I'm going to borrow two pieces from this first pattern. Click on one, diamond shift, click on the second one and just "Alt" or "Option" drag them into the artboard. I haven't lost my first pattern, I've just created a second one to use. Now for this, I want to add a circle in-between these shapes. I'm going to click to select the ellipse tool. I'm going to make a circle that's 40 pixels by 40 pixels, and I'll click "Okay". I'm going to zoom in here so I can see things a little more clearly. I'm going to move these shapes apart so I can put this shape in the middle of each of them. I'm going to use this smart guides to just line everything up. Then I'll just select over all three shapes and double-check that they are aligned properly by clicking horizontal aligned center. I can check the positioning of these again by zooming in and using the pixel preview. That's just telling me that these are touching exactly top and bottom. I've got a really neat pattern here. I'll choose "View", "Pixel Preview" to turn everything off, and then "Control zero", "Command zero" on a Mac and just to put the artboard back centrally on the screen. When we created this pattern here, we made a no film, no stroke rectangle that was 300 pixels wide and 500 pixels tall. We need the same thing here, but this time we need to account for an extra 40 pixels. My rectangle is going to be 300 by 540. Have the rectangle tool selected. I'll click once and I'll just type in 300 by 540 if it's not already there, and click "Okay". I'm going to make this a no fill, no stroke rectangle, I'm just going to move it into position so it's right over the top of this shape. Now the critical thing about this no fill, no stroke rectangle is that it's centered over all of these shapes. Again, I can select all the shapes including the no fill, no stroke rectangle, and just click "Horizontal Align Center" to make sure that they are perfectly aligned centrally. That's the only alignment that is really critical here. I need to move this no fill, no stroke rectangle behind everything else. I'll just select it and choose "Object", "Arrange", "Send to Back". Its probably the quickest way of getting it to the back. Now select all these shapes. I open up the swatches panel and drag my new pattern in next to the one I created previously. I'll hold the space bar as I move everything across and just click on the object on the first artboard. Now when I press "Control or Command zero", I'll see this artboard in the middle of my work area. With this shape selected here you can see here that I have targeted the green fill. Let's just go to the appearance panel and let's get rid of the green fill here. Let's just re-select the entire path and we'll apply the pattern to this. I've got a pattern fracture line, which is something that we're quite often happen when you're working with patterns in Illustrator, it's extremely annoying. I'm going to select "Object", "Transform", "Scale", and I'm going to try and increase or decrease my object size by a small amount to say if I can remove that fracture line. If the fraction line moves around your pattern, then it's not a problem in the pattern itself. It's a problem with Illustrator. If your fracture line stays where it is, then it's most likely to be a problem in your pattern, but there was nothing wrong with the pattern of fracture line moves around a bit. I've been able to increase my pattern by a small amount to get rid of the fraction line. There is my harlequin pattern created in Illustrator. In the next video, we're going to take our diamonds and we're going to make an argyle pattern from them. 4. Pt 3 Argyle Pattern: We're now ready to create our Argyle pattern. I'm just going to take this harlequin pattern out of the way and I'm going to take a duplicate of this original pattern that we created because I can base my Argyle on it. I'm going to alt or option drag it into the artboard here. This overall shape here is 300 by 1000. I want my next diamond that I'm about to create to be double the width so that would be 600 by the same height as the overall element here, which is 1000. I'm going to do that by borrowing this diamond. I'm going to alt or option, drag a copy of it out of the way and I'm going to set its width to 600 and its height to 1000. Now it's going to be my dashes. I'm going to flip here between the fill and stroke color so it has a stroke but no fill and I'm going to apply a orange stroke to it so we can see it and also going to increase the stroke value because I want you to be able to see this pretty clearly. We're going to click here on stroke and we're going to create a dashed stroke. Now at the moment, I have a dash of 15, a gap of 11, and a weight of 12 pixels. The 12 pixels is the thickness of this dash. The 15 pixels is the length of the dash, and the 11 pixels is the gap and you can make any selection there that you like. You'll also want to choose this option because that will balance the little dashes around your shape. They're adjusted very slightly in length so that they just balance really nicely. Having done that, I'm going to bring this shape over here and I want to align it to the very edge of these diamonds and I've done a pretty poor job of that. Let's just go and select all these shapes including the no fill, no stroke rectangle, and let's just click here to horizontally align them to the left and now they're all nicely aligned. I want to make sure that this is aligned perfectly to the bottom of this. I know it will be at the top if I can just adjust the bottom. I'm going to select this diamond and I'm going to select this diamond in here by shift-clicking on it. I have this one and the one with the dashes selected and now I'm going to click again on the one that is just black filled because that is now my key object. What's going to happen now is if I align these to the bottom. If I choose this option here which is vertical align bottom, what I'm saying to Illustrator's, align both of these to the same bottom point, but don't move this one, leave it there. That's really important because I've got my pattern pace all based on where these two black diamonds are. I don't want to move it, but do want to move this one if I need to, I'm just going to click here? Well, it didn't move, so that's fine. It was in the correct place, in the first place. You can see that this dash diamond is now in front of this one, but behind this one. Well, let's just bring it into the front of everything. Object arrange, bring to front, that's better and I want to make a duplicate of this, and I want to move it over 300 pixels. Let's see how we're going to do that. I'm going to choose object, transform, move. I'm going to zero out everything in this dialogue because it's really annoying when this dialogue just takes off on you like that, it's best to just zero out everything so you can actually look at what's happening and make some decisions about it. What I want to do is to move this entire dash edge diamond 300 pixels in a direction to the left. That's in a minus horizontal direction. I'm just going to type minus 300 and tab away and I've got this visual check now which lets me see that this diamond is going to be in the correct position. But of course, I wanted the one I had before as well as this one. I'm just going to click here on copy and so there are my diamond paces that are going to create my Argyle pattern. All I need to do is select over everything. Because my no fill, no stroke rectangle should be at the back of everything. Nothing else should have moved in. I can now drag and drop this into the swatches panel. If I want to make 100 percent sure I'm going to open up the layers panel and just make sure that my no fill, no stroke rectangle is the last of the selected objects. If it wasn't, I could just move it, but it's fine. It's exactly as I expect it to be. Let's open the swatches panel and let's drag my brand new Argyle pattern into the swatches panel. Now let's go back to artboard one. I have my selection tool select. I'm going to click on the shape that is on artboard one and press Control or Command zero to bring that into the center of my work area with the shapes selected, with the fill at the four. Let's just go and fill it now with my Argyle pattern. There's a very simple way of creating a basic diamond pattern that can be extended to create a Harlequin pattern or an Argyle pattern and this is done so that it can be done in any version of Illustrator. Your project for this class will be to create one of these three patterns, whichever you like most. Just go and create that pattern and post an image of the pattern in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned a lot about creating diamond patterns in Illustrator and some tips and tricks for aligning things as well. As you were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed this class. These recommendations really help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, 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. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.