Digitize Your Paintings in Illustrator: Exploring Style

1. Class Introduction: Hi, I'm Kelley Reese. I'm an artist in surface pattern divider. In this class, I'll teach you how to transform a physical painting into digital artwork using Adobe Illustrator with a focus on experimenting with different styles. Through this class, I hope you'll learn some new and fun ways to turn your paintings into beautiful digital works of art. My goal is to demystify the process of digitizing artwork and to share some tips I've learned through my own artistic journey. There are many ways to digitize your physical artwork. This class we'll focus on using Illustrators Image Trace tool in three different ways to produce three different illustrative styles from low to high detail. We'll talk about the benefits and limitation of each style. As a bonus, I'll show you how to use the motifs you create to make the seamless repeating pattern. One of my favorite things about painting is the beautiful imperfection that can be created by design and sometimes by accident. This class will help you to create digital work which maintains those unique qualities and even enhances them. The emphasis of this class is learning how to use digital means to experiment with the style of your work. Through experimentation, you can learn which styles speak to you and highlight your paintings in the best possible ways. By the end of this class, you will have learned tips for painting with the intention of digitizing, how to scan a painting, three ways to digitize a painting in Illustrator, and how to create a pattern from a digitized painting. This is an intermediate class and it will help you to have a basic knowledge of Adobe Illustrator. I'll demonstrate my entire process in Illustrator throughout the class. If you'd like to dive deeper, Skillshare is a goldmine of resources. I've linked to some of my favorite classes in the class resources. If you don't already have Adobe Illustrator, you can download a free trial through the link I provided. I'm so happy that you're here and I'd love to stay in touch. Click the follow button and I'll keep you in the loop whenever I add a new class. I can't wait to share more with you. Let's dive in. 2. Your Project: For your project, I'd like you to create a painting or choose a painting you've already done and digitize it by experimenting with each of the styles I'll be walking you through. You can upload an example of each style or you can choose the one you like best. Sometimes a painting doesn't lend itself as well to a particular style and sometimes one of them stands out as just what you wanted. Go with what works and what you feel highlights your art work and what you've learned the best. Upload your progress as you go. I'd love to walk along with you as you learn. You can use whatever paint and supplies you like or have lying around for your project. In the next video, I'll walk through exactly what supplies I'm using, but they're by no means the only ones that will work for this class. Before we move on, I want to mention one important thing that I've learned through my self-taught journey. I've watched a lot of tutorials and classes from other artists and have sometimes fallen into the trap of thinking that their exact process or workflow is the key to success, but what I've learned is that there are usually at least 10 ways to accomplish the same thing, from how you use mediums and techniques to supplies and technology. The golden nugget I've learned through trial and error is to take what works for me, what makes me better, what inspires me to keep practicing, and just to leave the rest. That doesn't mean that another artist's process isn't as good. It just means that it's not yours. One of the greatest things about art is that it's always a journey. Trying new things and experimenting will only ever make you better. 3. Why Digitize in Illustrator?: Before we dive into painting, I wanted to take a moment to talk about why this class is focused on digitizing in Illustrator rather than Photoshop. There are a lot of ways to turn a physical painting into digital artwork, and it's important to know some of the technical details about image types when deciding how you'd like to digitize your work. There are two different ways which digital images are rendered. Raster images and vector images. Raster images are created with pixels which are tiny squares of pure color that when put together, create a larger image, just like pointillism. Photoshop is typically used to create raster images. Raster images can have fine detail because pixels are so small, but they have limited ability to scale. The dimensions of the original image file determine the largest the image can be displayed without getting pixelated or grainy. Raster images are good for photographs and very detailed artwork, but they're trickier to work with if you want to use the image at multiple sizes. Vector images use not mathematical equations to form shapes which when put together, create a larger image. Illustrator is typically used to create vector images. Vector images are infinitely scalable, meaning they would have the same level of detail on a billboard as they would on your computer screen. However, when vector images have a lot of detail, large amount of colors, for example, the file sizes can get really large. Both raster and vector images have benefits and shortcomings. Ultimately, the final product you'd like to create should determine which type of file you work with. For me, the products I'm designing for are often varying sizes in materials like home and paper goods, ranging from different textures of fabric to smooth surfaces and anywhere from an envelope to wallpaper. The files I am creating benefit from the flexibility I can achieve with vectors. Since I enjoy painting and often want to preserve those painterly details, it helps to explore ways to achieve those effects in Illustrator. Now that we've covered the why of digitizing with Illustrator, let's get into the how. 4. Painting Tips: Let's talk about painting. In this video, I'll walk through the supplies I'm using and then I'm going to demonstrate my basic process for painting motifs that I intend to digitize. We'll talk about why I used that process and some tips along the way. For this class, use whatever art supplies you're comfortable with or you have lying around. You don't have to have fancy supplies to make beautiful artwork, the most important thing is always just getting started and trying things out. For my project, I'm going to be using Dr. PH Martin's Hydrus liquid watercolors. I have two sets of these, they are really pigment and really beautiful colors, but since they are so pigment it, I usually add a little extra water to them. I've got a palette here with deeper wells. This is just a glass eye dropper I got on Amazon that I keep with these paints so that I can add extra water. I'm going to be using a 10 inch round watercolor brush from the pigeon letters. Peggy Dean created these brushes. They have a really great price point, they have really nice tips on them and I have a set of five of those. I also have my water for rinsing my brushes and just a cotton dish towel, which is what I like to use to plot my brushes. I'm going to be using Strathmore Watercolor, 140 pound press paper. If you're doing watercolors, especially you want to have at least a 140 pound because anything less than that and it'll buckle under the water. If you're interested in other supplies that I use, I put a list of my favorites and the class notes and have it when I was first starting out in watercolor, especially it was really frustrating because there is so many great tools out there, but I didn't know which ones would work best for watercolors and which ones I would end up liking the best, so over time I have discovered what works best for me and I've shared that with you. Now I'll demonstrate my typical painting process when I'm going to digitize a painting. For this class, we're going to be talking about three different styles, once we're in Illustrator and they're going to go from least amount of colors in detail to greatest amount of colors in detail. For all three of those styles, I find that it really helps to separate the pieces of my painting as I'm going and then I can put them together in Illustrator. As an example, I'm going to be painting flowers for my project, so I'm going to paint the petals separately from the stems. That way I can get the detail that I want in each of those pieces and I can put them together once we're in Illustrator. I have the petals of my first flower done and you can see that since I'm using watercolors, I have some really deep reds here and it goes to some lighter reds. Those tonal differences are going to look really nice in some of the styles that we're exploring an Illustrator. Also one thing that I love about creating a painting and then digitizing it is that you get all of these really beautiful imperfections that come from just the brushstrokes, a lot of times they might be accidents, but they look really nice because it gives a digital piece of artwork that imperfect quality that you sometimes don't see. I'm going to go ahead and paint the rest of my petals, and I will see you in a minute. I've painted all the petals for my flowers and since we're going to be painting the stem separately, it's okay that they're all over the page and not in a very pleasing configuration. Once we're in Illustrator, we'll put them together and we can move them around to however we want. To just speed up this process a little bit, I'm going to go ahead and blow-dry this paints so that I don't get it on my hand when I start the stands. My flowers are all painted and ready to be digitized. In the next step we're going to be talking about scanning or photographing your painting. I can't wait to see what you've painted. You can upload a photo to your project before we move on to the next step, if you'd like. I'll see you there. 5. Scanning: The first step towards digitizing is getting an initial image file of your artwork. Most often that means scanning, but with high-resolution photos as accessible as your phone, taking a photo can work just as well if you don't have a scanner. I've even taken a photo when my scanner wasn't big enough to scan a particular painting. If you want to take a photo, make sure to place your painting in an area with natural light and hold your phone or camera directly above the painting, so that you get a proportional image that isn't skewed. Try to avoid having any shadows on the painting. Then AirDrop or send your photo to your computer and if necessary, change the file type to JPEG. For example, my iPhone is set to save photos as HEIC files, which I can't open in illustrator. I open them and export them as JPEG first if I want to use them in illustrator. Once you have your photo saved as a JPEG, try to crop out as much of the image as you don't need. For me, I'm in "Preview", so I'm going to grab just the painted flowers area. Then I'll go to Tools and crop. This ensures that when I bring it into illustrator, I don't have to deal with getting rid of all of that wood grain texture that was from the table. If that happens, if you can't avoid bringing in some of that stuff in illustrator, you can just use the Eraser tool or use the Lasso tool and does delete anything that's outside of that area. If you're going to be scanning your painting, one of the most important things is to make sure that it's completely dry first. You can use a hairdryer or you can wait till it's air-dried. Also, whenever I opened my scanner bed to place artwork on it, the first thing I do is to wipe it down with a microfiber cloth. I just use one that came with a pair of my old glasses. That just makes sure that you will have dust specks on your artwork. I have a Canon CanoScan Lide 220, that I used to scan my artwork, but I used to just use the one that was on top of my printer. It was a super cheap printer. Really to get a file that you can use with an illustrator, a lot of scanners are going to work for you. Just try out what you have first before you feel like you need to buy anything fancy. Place your painting on the scanner and open the scanner tool on your computer. I access mine through the Mac system preferences, but you might have a separate program that came with yours. Once your overview scan is complete and you can see a preview of your artwork, we can come in and look at the settings. You want to make sure you have color set 300 dpi at least. I usually check Use Custom Size because that means I can come in here and click and drag the artwork that I want to scan. I typically try to paint away from the edges of the paper, so that I can do this and not bring in these little shadows that you see here. If you do have to bring those into illustrator, we can certainly remove them. It's just a lot easier from the beginning if I don't have to bring those in at all. Want to choose where to scan my photo to and give it a name. I use a JPEG format and you can mess with its image correction if you like. Usually, I find that it has represented the colors well enough. If I need to adjust them in the illustrator, I can do that as well. Now, that we have are scanned image, the next step is to jump into Illustrator. I'll see you there. 6. Style One: Basic Shapes: Let's get into Illustrator. First of all, I'm using Adobe Creative Cloud, which means that Illustrator will automatically stay up to date. This current version is Illustrator 2020, but everything I'll be discussing today should be available in past versions as well. In this lesson, we'll talk about digitizing a painting by simplifying it down to its basic shapes. This is one of my favorite ways to use my paintings because it gives me imperfect details and a modern minimalist style at the same time. First, let's create a new file. I almost always use the print preset because 612 pixels by 792 pixels is an 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper. That's something I can easily visualize in my mind when I'm thinking about the scale of my artwork. I can always add art boards or modify my board after. But I like to start with this size. Once my file is opened, the first thing I want to do is place the file that I scanned. I'm on a Mac and I can use the keyboard shortcut Shift Command P to place a file. Or if I want to use the toolbar is File Place. I'll choose my flowers. I can just click and drag to place this file then I'll go ahead and rotate it and holding Shift down, so that it's going straight up. For all three of the styles I'd like to explore in this class, we'll be using Illustrators Image Trace Tool, to access that, you go to Window and Image Trace. You'll click on the image you'd like to trace. In this preset for the First Style, I'd like to just choose six colors because we're doing just basic shapes. You always get this dialogue box that it will be slow. It is indeed slow, so just sit back and relax. You can see that our colors have been drastically reduced through this process. Another thing I usually do is open up this advanced area and choose or ignore white, which just takes white out of the running as a color. What this is really doing, is taking your bitmap image and creating an effect over it. Once this effect has been created in Illustrator, we need to expand it, which is this button up here. Once this has been finished with a boundary filing paths moving all of the stuff, we're going to choose this Expand option. That just creates paths of everything that you see here. Now that we have our image trace result, we can see that this is all in one group. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select it. I'm going to do command shift G to ungroup it. I'll click first on this white background, and just delete that. Now we're just working with the colors of our flowers. For this basic shapes style, I'd really like the pedals to be one-color, the standards to be one color and the centers to be one color, so that we only have three colors. To achieve that, I'm going to take my lasso tool and grab one of the stems. I'm going to go to Window and Pathfinder and choose this option to unite. What that does is it unites all of the shapes that I had selected into one color. I'm going to do the same for all the other stems. Now that all of our stems are one color, I'd like them all to be the same color, so I'm going to choose all of them, by just holding down Shift as I select them. I'm going to use the Eyedropper tool to grab one of the colors, now that they're all the same color. I'm working with the tops of the flowers, it's a little trickier because we have this yellow area in the middle that we'd like to maintain. There are a few different ways that I can unite all of these colors into the same color. Firstly, I'll use the same tool that I had just using the Pathfinder. I'll show you how to do that. I'll select the entire top of this flower, zoom in. Then I'll do the direct selection tool and actually press Shift to unselect this middle area. I'll also choose these white areas because I think they've actually become a really light color of white that is a separate color from the background, so that I'll choose the Unite tool. You can see that I do have all of the pedal is the same color of this flower. Another way I can do this is by using the shape builder tool. It's going to be a little trickier because there's so many little tiny areas here, but we can lasso this in order to select everything, and then choose shape builder. What we'll do is just drag around, and that unites all of these areas. But you have to drag every single tiny area that you want to be the same color. This is a little bit more tedious and time consuming. The final method I'd like to talk about is using the recolor artwork tool. What I'll do first is actually grab a portion of this so that we can get the colors. I'm going to come over here and click on this little folder that says new color group, so that I have the colors that are represented in my picture, in my color swatches. Then what I'll do is I'll lasso the top of this flower. Then I'll come up here to this icon that says recolor artwork. You can see that it's showing me what colors are currently in my picture. What I can do is I can grab one of the colors and drop it on top of the other. You can see that that has created, does it all into the same color and press Okay. Now that we're back on our flower images, you can see that this is actually still multiple shapes, but they're all the same color. This isn't the most efficient way to deal with your file, but it does create them all the same color. I think the method that I use that I like the best was the Unite tool. I'm just going to go ahead and do the rest of the tops of my flowers. Now that I have my flowers simplified down to three colors, all work on uniting them. I'll take the lasso tool again and grab the top of this flower. I'm going to do command G to group that. Then I'll take my Direct Selection Tool and pull it down so that it sits on top of the stem. Then I can grab everything and group it again until one flower will pull it aside for now. I'll do the same thing for the rest of the flowers. Now I have five complete flowers. I like that each of them has slightly different where some of them are sitting exactly on top of the stem, some of them are a little farther away. We've completed the first style, which is basic shapes. You can see that we've maintained these painterly details and the imperfections that we got from our painting. But we have a really simplified color palette, which will look really nice. I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll talk about a semi realistic style. 7. Style Two: Semi-Realistic: In this lesson, we'll talk about digitizing a painting by simplifying the colors while keeping some of the tonal differences that are unique to painting. The style is great when you don't want too much detail, but you still want to convey a hand painted look. I'm going to stay in the same Illustrator file so we can compare as we go. I don't typically worry too much about art boards until I'm ready to export an illustration or a pattern so I'll just place my scan photo again, the same one that we used last time. For this style, we're going to be exploring, again a style that's a little bit more minimalist, but has a few more colors than just three. When I open image trace this time, I'm going to choose 16 colors from the preset drop down. Now that that's done, I see that I have more than just the three colors. I have my orange center still. Sometimes if you don't see one color that you're specifically looking for, you can bump this number up a little bit in order to get that color to come back. I'm just going to choose ignore white here. Now again, remember that every time you use image trace, you need to expand when you're done. Again, it has this all grouped as one so if I do command shift G, that will ungroup it and since this time we have more than just a white background, you can see that there's all these little colors in here. I'm going to use my magic wand in order to get rid of that white background. That's this tool over here. If I click once, it should grab everything that's within a few shades of that same color and select it. I'm just going to press delete and that's all gone. Now let's talk about the colors that are actually going on here. When you look with your naked eye, they look very similar and it looks like maybe you only have six or seven colors here but when I select this entire area and add a color group, you can see that I actually have this many colors. That's really more than I think that I need for this style of illustration because if my eye is perceiving these all as similar colors, they don't need to be different, they can all be the same. I'm going to show you a method of taking the tops of your flowers and maybe making them into three or four different colors rather than this six or eight. First of all, we're going to move this stems away from the body of the flower. I'm going to take my lasso tool and just group all these stems together and move them down. You can use your keyboard shortcuts. You can use Q for lasso, and then toggle to V for your drag select tool. That's a nice, easy way to not have to be clicking around in your toolbar all the time. I'm just going back between Q to lasso and then V to select. I'm just getting these out of the way so that it's easier for me to grab all the tops of the flowers. In the last lesson, we talked a little bit about the re-color artwork tool. We're going to be using that again right now. I'm going to select all of the tops of my flowers. Come up here to the re-color artwork tool and you can see exactly which colors are happening here. If you have re-color art selected, you can see live the changes that you're making. Again, the way that the re-color artwork tool works is that these are the colors that you have currently, and these are the colors that you can change. You can drop colors to change them. What I'm going to do is I'm going to work with the colors we already have here and just drag them over to combine them. For these three colors of this orangey-red, I really probably only need one of these, so I'm going to choose this one and I'm going to drag it down into this spot and also into this spot. Then we'll move into our mid tones. We probably only need one of these, which is this one, and drag it over here and again with these pinks, I'll grab this one and drag it here. I might even, you can always drag back. If I made that change and I didn't like it, I can take the original color again and push it back. I might leave it here and see what that looks like. I'm going to leave by set ours as this orange color so I'll press okay. Then if I click that re-color artwork tool again, you can see that it's reduced the number of colors I'm working with here. Again, for these darker colors, I think I probably don't need both of them, so I'm going to try to use this one that's a little less dark. You can barely see what's happening there. You can barely see that it's changed. I'm going to drag this one here and press okay again and go back. Now I really only have three colors of pink in my flower but they still look nice. They still have that watercolor of color effect that I was going for where the total differences, it's darker here and then it's lighter here. Let's do the same thing for the stems. I'll grab all of my stems. I only have four colors here, which is really good but I think these two are close enough to the same color that I can use the same one. I'll play around with using either the darker one of the lighter one and I think I like this a little bit better so I'm going to change that. Now you see we only have three colors of green in the stems. We've reduced the total number of colors in this illustration now by half. Now what we can do is we can group these tops together again using our lasso tool and we can combine them with the stems and I'll meet you back. Now that we have our flowers combined in the second style, we can compare between the first style and the second style. The difference we're looking at here is three colors versus seven colors, I believe. You can see that they're the same flowers, but they have a little bit of a different style. They have a little bit of a different tone that they're giving off that you might want to use them in different ways. We have a very minimalistic look here, and this is a little bit more painterly and watercolor. When you do a watercolor painting, you have hundreds of colors, but this just gives you that same effect, even though it only has seven colors. This is a really great way to get that style across that you're going for with the watercolors without having a huge file that you're working with and without having to print a ton of colors. Now that we've explored digitizing our painting in two different more minimalist styles. Let's see how it will look with even more detail. 8. Style Three: Photorealistic: In this lesson, we'll talk about digitizing a painting in a very realistic looking way. You'll see differences from your actual painting up close, but the general impression will be of a full detail painting. The style is best when you want tons of detail, but you also want to work with vector files. We're starting out in the same Illustrator file where you can see the first two styles that we explored. I'm going to go ahead and place my painting that we've been using. This time when I go into image trace, I'm going to choose high fidelity photo. Now that our image trace is complete, I'm going to expand this, ungroup it, and use my magic wand to remove the background. You can already see that this image result is a lot more realistic. You're not seeing these lines where there's just blocks of color, it's really looking a lot more grainy, but when you zoom in, you can see that this is still made up of mathematical shapes. For this style, I'm not going to adjust the colors at all because the objective is to have this look as photo-realistic as possible. You can see that this is how many colors we ended up with in the last style. I will make a new color group to show you how many we have now. Depending on what the end result is of your illustrations, you want to be careful using a style like this. When you have this many colors, some printing processes can't handle that. For example, some fabric producers have a limit of 18 colors. If you are intending to use this for fabric, you need to make sure that you're using a style that results in less colors. I'm going to go ahead and assemble my flowers so that we can look at them even closer in comparison to the other two styles. Now we can take a look at each of the styles we've gone through in this course and compare them. In this first row we have our basic shapes which resulted in three colors. The second row is our semi realistic, which resulted in seven colors, and the third row is photo-realistic, which I didn't even count the number of colors that are in it. Another thing to make sure you realize is that this is a pretty simple painting. It's a lot of reds, it's a lot of greens. If your painting has a lot more colors than mine does, or if you're painting a lot more motifs, you're going to end up with a vastly bigger number of colors. You want to just really take that into consideration when you're thinking about how to use your illustrations. Another thing I want to point out is these second two rows. If you sit back and look at them, they really don't look that different. When you're thinking about how you're going to use your artwork, if it looks the same to your eye and you can simplify it down a little bit, that's really going to help you out. Thinking about how you're going to use your artwork and illustrations, if you can simplify the number of colors, it's never going to be a bad thing. Since these two styles look so similar from far away, if the end result that you're going for is something small , even if it's an art print, you can a lot of times get away with a lot less detail, which will give you a smaller file size and an easier printing process. Make sure to upload a screenshot or image file of your digitized paintings to your class project. Also let us know which style you feel works the best for your painting. I'd love to hear the ways that you want to see your paintings in the world. Are you creating digital media, art prints, surface design? Let us now. Next, I'm so excited to give you a bonus lesson on turning your digitized paintings into a repeating, seamless pattern. 9. Bonus: Creating a Pattern: Here's where things get really fun. In this lesson, I'll show you how to take the beautiful illustrations you've created from your paintings and turn them into a seamless pattern. When I say seamless, I mean that you can take the block we'll end up with today, and tile it together without seeing any break in the pattern. You can use patterns to create mockups, make your own products, work with the company, or upload them to print on demand sites like Society6 and Redbubble. The possibilities go on and on. Patterns are everywhere you look and they're so fun to create. To create your pattern, you can use any of the three styles we've worked with in this class. For my demonstration, I'm going to choose the first one because this minimalistic style is one of my favorite things right now. I'm going to copy this whole line and create a new file. I'll go with the "Print" "PRESET" and give it a name. Then I'll go ahead and paste my illustrations onto my art board. For the purposes of demonstrating how to create a pattern, I'm going to go really simple with my actual patterns so that you can take more notice of the technical process then of my actual design. I'm actually just going to choose this one flower. I'm going to pull the option down and drag it over to duplicate that. I'm going to work with just this flower. I'll take it down in scale a little bit. I'm going to hold "Shift" to keep the proportions the same. Again, as we're working, remember that this art board is the size of an 8.5 by 11 sheet of printer paper. So when we're thinking about scale, we can use that as a reference. I'm just going to select this flower, hold down "Option" to duplicate and "Shift" to keep it in the same line, and pull it down. Then I'm going to press "Command D" a few times to keep duplicating it. Then I'll take this entire row and hold down option again and shift to duplicate it and keep it in line, drag it over here. I think what I'm going to do is keep that selected, hold down "Shift" as I rotate and turn this whole line upside down. This is going to be the basic idea of my pattern. I'll take this again, hold down "Option" "Shift" to drag it apart. You can see that the little arrows at the bottom are telling you that the space in between my rows is the same at the second row as it was in the first row. So I'm going to drop it there. This is the design I'd like to work from for my pattern. To create the actual pattern tile, I'm going to take a rectangle. I'll zoom in a little bit. The idea is that you want to take your rectangle from one particular spot, in your pattern, to the exact same spot to the right, and then the exact same spot down. Now, I have a rectangle in my basic pattern area. I'm just going to give it a background of gray for now. I'm going to press "Command" "Shift" "Left bracket" to push that behind so that I can see what I'm doing. Now that I have my pattern area defined, I can delete anything that doesn't fall on that rectangle. I'll zoom in a little bit more. Now we're going to make sure that our pattern tile is technically accurate. To do that, I want to click on this rectangle, go up here and press "Transform." You can see that right now it's 214.764 pixels wide and 144.789 pixels tall. To make this a little easier, I'm just going to make these even numbers. I'm going to make it 214 pixels wide. I'm going to write that down. We'll say, "144 pixels tall." You want to write that down because you're going to need to use that later. You can see that that hasn't really changed how it looks, but it has changed how big this rectangle is. If you go back to "Transform" you can see that these are even numbers now. Now what we're going to do is, anything that falls off to the right hand side of the pattern, we'll delete, and anything that falls off the bottom we'll delete. We're really just duplicating these two flowers. Now what we want to do is we want to select anything that falls off the left-hand side of our square. For your pattern, if it's more complicated than mine and you have more falling off the left-hand side, you want to select everything that's falling off the left-hand side but not falling off the bottom. Now I'll "Right-click," go to "Transform" and "Move." Under horizontal we'll enter 214 pixels and vertical we're going to leave as zero, then we're going to press "Copy." What this is going to do is it's going to duplicate this flower 214 pixels to the right. Now for everything that falls off the top of our square, we'll highlight, "Right-click" "Transform" "Move." Now, for horizontal, we're going to leave that as zero. But for vertical, we're going to go down 144 pixels and press "Copy." What this has done, is it's duplicated our motifs in the exact width and height of the square, which should make the technical repeat accurate. Now that the technical repeat for our pattern tile is set, I want to make sure that I like the colors. So I'm going to come in and take this gray color that I had just chosen from the defaults here. I'm going to double-click the swatch. I had found a color of gray-black that I liked better, that has this hex code, so I'm just going to change it to that. The final step in creating a pattern tile is to select your background square. "Command C" "Command B", which duplicates your rectangle and repeats it behind. As it's still selected, you'll come up here to the swatches and choose "None." You want to make sure that your background rectangle has no fill and no stroke. Right now, you have your motifs, you have your background rectangle with a color, and then there's a rectangle behind that that has no fill and no stroke. We'll highlight everything. As it's highlighted, drag it over here to the right of this little bullseye. That is our pattern tile. If we zoom out now and create a new rectangle, we should be able to fill it with our pattern. If you zoom in, you can see that it seamlessly repeats, that it's technically accurate. You can scroll all around and you won't see any breaks in the pattern. When I'm creating a pattern, I usually try to work out the basic design before I pay too much attention to the colors, which is what I've done here so that I like the design of this pattern, but I'm not crazy about the colors. Now that we have it worked out with the technical repeat, I can pay more attention to the colors. What I'm going to do is grab this entire pattern tile, press "Option" to duplicate it, and drag it down here. Then I'll zoom in and I can play with the colors a little bit more. I think what I'd like to do is make the petals of this flower a white color to see how that looks. So I'll highlight the whole thing, come up here to "Recolor Artwork." We've worked with the Recolor Artwork a few times during this class, and I've mentioned that you can drag these colors from the left into the right-hand column to change colors. But if you don't want to use the color that was already existing and you want to change one of the colors to something completely different, you can also do that. What I would like to do is take this red color for the petals, and I'm going to double-click on the right-hand side, and I can enter in a new color. I found a white color that I'd like to use, which has this hex code. You can also drag your color picker around. You can see now everything that was red is this white color. I'll press "Okay." I'm going to highlight the entire pattern tile again, and drag it up next to the bullseye. Now I have a new pattern tile. I'll duplicate the square where I tested it and choose the new tile. Now you can see that this pattern is just a little bit softer without the bright red. Now we've experimented with two different versions of this pattern. I'd like to show you one more way to simplify this even more, which is something I've enjoyed doing lately. I'll duplicate this tile again and zoom in. I'll go to the Recolor Artwork tool, and I'd like to make my entire flour white and the background green. So I'll take the green and pull it onto the background, and the white into the center and the stems, and I'll press "Okay." Now I'm going to make another sample square by duplicating that. I'll choose the width. You can see that that's just another way to play with this pattern where you still get the idea of the flower, but it's a lot more minimalistic. From my original painting, I've created a pattern in three different color ways, and I still only use one of the flowers. When you digitize your paintings, the ways in which you can use your motifs are endless. I'll stop here for this lesson, but you can also add lots of other textures and details to give your patterns even more life. I've linked to some gray classes on creating patterns in the class notes, if you want to learn more about patterns. I'd absolutely love to see if you've made a pattern from your painting. Upload your pattern tiles or a screenshot to your class project. 10. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for spending some of your valuable time with me. I hope you've learned something that inspires you to keep creating and experimenting. Be sure to post your progress in the class project area. Please let me know if you have any questions by posting a discussion. If you'd like to stay up to date with me, click the "Follow" button and you'll be the first to hear about any new classes or opportunities. Have a great day. I'll see you next time.