Doodle Flower Design & Pattern in Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Doodle Flower Design and Pattern in Adobe Illustrator - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Doodle flower design and pattern 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. In this class, I'll step you through creating a floral design in Illustrator, based on a drawing that's doing the rounds on Pinterest. I'll explain the thought processes for converting this hand-drawn design into vector art, all done with minimal actual Illustrator work. Basically, this design is built from one line and one blob drawn using the blob brush. I choose this design as the class topic because there are so many learning opportunities in it which will build your Illustrator skills. Without further ado, let's get started turning this design into a vector design and pattern in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 The Inspiration: Before we start this class, I want to show you the inspiration for the element that we're going to draw. This is from one of my Pinterest boards. It's a link to an image on Flickr. But it's also here in an Instagram post. I think that the image itself has been kicking around for awhile and various people have just reproduced it. We are not going to do it in pen and paper. We're going to take it to Illustrator. Quite often when I'm looking through my Pinterest board for something to draw on the weekend because I just wanted to do something relaxing. I'll actually take another look at what I found and think about other ways of using it. This weekend I came across this and I saw it and thought, you know what? We could do that in Illustrator. The challenge is how do we reproduce this in Illustrator effectively? Obviously, we don't want to draw all of these lines. But also, instead of just drawing a single flower, how can we make sure that we could turn that single flower into a seamless repeating pattern. That's what we're going to do. Typically it will take me two or three iterations of drawing an object like this to get out all the kinks, so that we can actually end up with something that we can use. Let's go ahead and say how I solve the problem of not only drawing this image in Illustrator without doing a whole lot of work, but also doing it in such a way that we can create a pattern from it. 3. Pt 2 Create the Rotation and Roughen Effects: To create a design, we're going to start with a brand new document. I'm going to create a square document. It's a little easier to work with a square document. Mine's going to be 1200 pixels by 1200 pixels, and I am working in RGB color mode. If you want to check, you can just click "Advanced Options", make sure that you select RGB color, click "Create". Now we're going to use the pen tool, but seriously, if you can click a mouse, you can do this. So I'm going to click on the pen tool. We're going to make sure that we have no fill at all. That's really important because that's going mess things up later on if you have a fill. I decided to have a black stroke. I'm going to click approximately in the center of the document. I have my smart guides turned on, so I can say the center of the document, so I'm just going to click once to start my line. Now I've got the rubber band selected here, but it doesn't matter if you don't see it. We're just going to click a second time to create a straight line. About that length is pretty good. We still have the cursor attached to my topmost anchor points. So to stop that happening, I'll just press "Escape", and that finishes off the line. So we have a single line. I'm going to zoom into the top of it because we're going to attach something to the top of this line. We'll use the blob brush, which shares a toolbar position with the paintbrush tool. Just click on the "Blob Brush Tool" to select it. You'll have it set to stroke, but as soon as you start drawing with it, you'll see that it switches is to fill in. It does that for a really good reason because the blob brush actually creates filled shapes, and that's why we're using it. Now my blob brush is a really good size. Yours may not be. If it isn't, double-click on the blob brush to get access to its tool options. You can adjust its size here, but you can also adjust its size using the exact same keyboard shortcuts as you would use in Photoshop. That is the open and closed square brackets. So the closed square bracket makes it gets bigger. The open square bracket makes it gets smaller. I find that a really handy shortcut to learn. I'm going to draw a tear drop shape at the top here, and still got my finger on the mouth, I'm just going to fill it in. So it's almost like a match head if you like. Now we'll just zoom back out. We've got our starting point. I think that the top is a little bit big. So let me just zoom in, select this top shape and just size it down a little bit. I'm going to use Shift and Alt on the pay say, that just sizes it in proportion and from the middle, that would be Shift Option on a Mac. Quite liking the look of this. I think my stem is a little bit too small, so I'm going to increase the stroke weight. I'm going to increase it to two, but you could make it one-and-a-half if you prefer. Now we're going to group this together using Object Group. The reason why we're going to do that is that the next step is to rotate this around to create a circle of these. If you don't group them together, they won't travel as a single object, and it's going to be a disaster. So we're grouping for a really good reason. Let's just bring up the last palette because we're going to need to keep an eye on what's happening here as we go. So let me just make my layers palette thumbnails pretty big. Go to group. It's got two objects in it. We're going to select over this group. As I said, we're going to rotate it around to create our floral shape or a circular shape. We'll do that with the Transform Effect. So we'll choose "Effect" and then "Distort and Transform", and then "Transform". We'll turn preview on, and we're going to transform it around this bottom point here, not the middle, which is what it's set to at the moment because that would just rotate it around the central point. We want to rotate it around this bottom edge. For this, we'll say like the middle bottom, one of these nine little boxes. That sets the rotation point to immediately at the bottom of this shape. Now we need a number of copies. I want a 120 in total, so that means I need a 119 copies and one original, and I need to rotate them evenly. If you're not happy with doing math at this stage, this is what you'll do. Firstly, you'll come in and type 360, because that's the number of degrees in a circle. Then you'll type the division sign, which is this forward slash. Then we've got 119 copies plus one original, that's 120. So I'll just type a 120 and hit the Tab key. Illustrators is going, "Oh, you want to do three degrees." It will be evenly spread if you do three degrees. Now I'm looking at this and thinking that top is way too big, but that doesn't matter at this stage. We just want the transformation, so I'll just click "Okay". You'll see over here that we still only have a group and add two paths. We don't have a 120 shapes. If we have a look in the appearance panel for this group, you'll see that there is a transform here. It's just an effect, and it's just applied to the shape. It can be removed at any time. What that allows us to do, is before we actually expand it, is to do something with this end point, which is still too big. So I'm selecting it, I'm using the last palette just to make that a little bit easier. Again, I'm going to use Shift and Alt. That would be Shift Option on the Mac, just to make it a little bit smaller. I can move it a little bit into position. Let's test that. I think it's looking a bit better. If you think it's not right yet, go back in, choose your selection tool, make sure you click on the path in the last palette because that shows you which of these knobs at the end, if you like, is the one that's actually going to do something if you select it, let's just make it a bit smaller, move it into position, check the result. I'm happy with that now. We have a group with a transform effect applied to it. What we're going to do is expand this out because we need our 120 shapes. So we'll choose "Object" and then "Expand Appearance". Now if we check the last palette, what we've got is a group, and inside that, is a whole series of groups. Now we don't want to expand it any further because we still need these sticks to behave as single objects. So the stick and the knob on the end have to behave as a single object or the whole thing's going to break apart. But we do want to ungroup it. So I'm going to select this group and I'm just going to choose "Object ungroup", and just do that once. Here in the last palette, I've got a 120 groups, each one of those is one stick. For this project, keeping track of what's going on in the last palette and the order, is going to be critical. I'm going to show you why in just a minute. Let's get back to this shape. We're going to select over everything, so that's selecting all of the groups. We need to make it a little bit more uneven because right now it's very even, the image that we saw earlier was very uneven. The tool that we're going to use to do that is this transform tool. So we'd go to "Object" and then "Transform", and "Transform Each". Now this was a dialog that I never used. For years, I used Illustrator and never touched this dialogue. Then I started working with it, and I found so many opportunities to use it. So I'm really glad that this particular technique uses this dialogue, and we're going to learn a little bit about it as we do. I'm going to click on "Preview" so that we can see what's happening. I'm going to scale this shape. So I'm going to make them a little bit smaller. I'm going to choose 70 percent. You can see that the result is that every single one of these shapes is now 70 percent of the original size. But I want this to be more random. Well, this dialogue has a feature for random, so let's just click "Random". What that does is it says to Illustrator, "We want you to take every one of these groups, and we want you to size up between 70 percent and 100 percent of what it was, and do that on a random basis. You choose which one's going to be 70 and which one's going to be a 100, and which one's going to be 80, and 90, and 95, and 75. But scale them equally, so each of them is going to be scaled either 70 percent horizontal and vertical, or a 100 percent horizontal and vertical, or 85 percent horizontal and vertical." So these are going to be kept in the same proportion. That's pretty important. But you can see that we're getting something more like the flower that we were looking at creating. Now the other thing that's a problem about this is that these are very evenly spaced around. They are spaced three degrees, every single one of them. Well, if you were hand drawing this, that wouldn't be the case because you wouldn't be that accurate, or you wouldn't want to be that accurate because part of the charm of this is its inaccuracy. So let's go to the angle, and let's start adjusting that. I'm going to adjust that to three degrees. What that does is, it's rotating each one of these shapes somewhere between zero and three degrees, some value in there at random. So we're getting, some shapes are going closer to each other and some are further apart. Again, it's giving it that more hand-drawn look. So I'm happy with that. I'll click "Okay". Now you can probably see the issue that we have, and that is that the center of this is all broken up. So what we're going to do in the next video is stick it all back together again. 4. Pt 3 Create the Organic look: The next step in this project is to put the middle of the flower back again. We've got some uneven length objects here, and the reason for that is that we use that transform command. But the flower that we were basing this illustration on had a more solid center. So the next step is to put the center back together again. For this, we're going to use the lasso tool. It's up here. It's not a tool that you'll use very often, but it works particularly well in this instance. But what we want to do is to just select the anchor points in the very middle of the shape. I'm just going to draw a shape around here, making sure that inside that shape are all the end anchor points of the shapes here. You can see that they're all selected, they're all colored blue because this layer is blue colored and the ones at the end are not selected. So next thing we need to do is to just put these all in the exact same position. You can do this one of two ways. You could use the align options. So you could come up here and choose horizontal align center, and then vertical align center, and because we've got an illustration that was pretty much based on the center of the document, this has worked just perfectly. But let me just undo that because there's another tool that you can use and that is on the object menu. So I'll go to object and we'll go to path and we'll go to average. What this allows us to do is to average the location here we're going to choose both, because we want these anchor points to be lined up to each other. So we want to average the position of them both horizontally and vertically. So I just click okay, and that ends up with the exact same effect. So now we've got a flower with a solid middle and all of the ends of the flower are in this position. Now, the next step is to roughen it. I promised you that I would show you some reasoning behind the order here and so I have a second version of the flower. What I did earlier was I just copied the one that we were working on, but before I stuck the middle together, I roughened it and that's the feature that we're going to use is roughening. Now, this is going to file and for this reason. When I go to the lasso tool and try to lasso the centers here, you'll see that because these lines have been roughened and they actually have multiple points along the line. So it's not possible to very easily select just the midpoints, and worse than that is if you select just the midpoint of one of these shapes and try and adjust it, let's see what happens. We're going to go and just select the midpoint of this shape and we're trying to align it. Well, this is going to happen. Now that won't happen when you've got a single line. So let's just go and make a line, and it only has two points. So if we select this point and then do something with it, the whole line goes, not just the bottom bid. So we don't end up with this happening, we end up with the line actually being re-positioned or the anchor point being re-positioned, but the line still maintains its integrity. That's going to be the same for this grouped object, provided it's still a straight line. As soon as you roughen it, all bits are off. So now that we've got our lines looking perfect, it's time to do the roughen effect, and for this, we'll choose the selection tool. We're going to select over all of these objects and to roughen them, we will choose effect and then distort and transform and roughen. This is a really good feature for adding a little bit of an organic field to things because it does just what it says it does and roughens them Let's turn preview on and try not to freak out because obviously this is way too much of a ruffling effect. It's not what we came here for. We're going to choose smooth because if we were drawing this, we would probably recreating smooth lines, they just wouldn't be perfectly straight. We're going to reduce the detail. I'm going to take it down to one-inch, tab away and see what the result is. Well, that's a whole lot better. What I'm going to do next is to change the size and from five percent, I'm going to bring it down to one and tab away and this is a pretty good result. I just think it's not enough roughening. So I'm going to drop this back up to 1.5 and you can just type in 1.5 and get something between one and two percent by manually entering it. I'm happy with that. I'll click okay. So now we have something a whole lot more like the flower shape that we were looking at creating. If you want to be a perfectionist, you might have a look at a couple of this and say that the end has moved a little bit. You may want to adjust that and I'll show in just a second how to do it. But we do need to have a look at these groups right now. Let's have a look at this group. Let's have a look at the appearance panel, and here you'll see that this group has got a roughen effect applied to it. In fact, every single one of these groups has a roughen effect applied to it. Well, we need to expand that. So let's select over everything. Let's choose object and expand appearance. What that does is it bakes in the affect. So we've now got a group that has this little path attached to it as well as the wiggly line path. Now the fact that they are inside groups is a little bit inconvenient. But you know what? I don't want to have to expand a 120 of those individually, so we're going to leave them as they are. The reason for this is, let me just show you what happens if I try to ungroup them. Object, ungroup. Well, immediately they're broken out of the little groups that they're in and so we've ended up with individual objects, probably not something that we want to have happen, but it does show us that ungrouping works at the top level, not at the bottom level. So that's going to be from the top down, we're going to ungroup things. I don't want them to be ungrouped, so let's just choose Edit, Undo, and leave them the way that they were. 5. Pt 4 Quickly Align the Tips A workflow: Just an aside, if you do decide that some of these need to be aligned a little bit better, there is a really quick way of doing it using just this group selection tool. So you select the group selection tool, click on the "Shape" and then just use the keyboard arrows to nudge it into position. You usually only have to nudge it in one direction, so you're just pressing an arrow okay just to move it. You don't have to go back between the group selection tool and the selection tool, you can just do it all from the group selection tool and just nudge these into position. It is really a very quick process to just realign should you wish to do that. You don't want to align them perfectly because the whole idea of this was to have an organic look to it, but you may want to make sure that the little ends are actually attached to the sticks. You won't have to do this to all of them, you'll just need to do it to a few. To move the art board, just hold down the spacebar and that turns it into a hand tool. You can still stay with this group selection tool, but just use the hand tool to move the art board around. As soon as you let go the spacebar, you're returning to the group selection tool. They're all stuck back really nicely. Let's just zoom out, and see the affect. Next up, we're going to create the circles for the middle of the flower. 6. Pt 5 Create the middle of the flower: The next thing we need to do is to create the center of the circle and for this, I'm going to create a stroked ellipse, so I'm going to make it a black stroke. I'm going to turn off the fill. I'm going to make the stroke width just 0.5 because I want it to be pretty skinny as if we had drawn this and let's go to the ellipse tool and just drag out an ellipse. I'm not doing this over the top of the flower because there's too much going on that we really need to look at as we do it. I've got a circle, I'm going to apply a rough and effect to it, with effect to distort and transform and then rough on. Obviously, the defaults are going to be too much, I'm going to set it to smooth. It's going to adjust the size to about 2 percent and say what that does, it's pretty good. I think maybe just a little bit less on the per inches and maybe a little bit less on the size, may be 1.5 percent. I'm happy with that, I'll click okay. This could be something that we have drawn. I want to make a whole series of this, so with it selected, I'll choose effect distort and transform and then transform. We're going to turn on preview, we'll make, say 29 copies so that we have 30 in total. I'm going to rotate this around a little bit so that they create something that is a little bit more organic. I'm thinking maybe one degree. I'll click okay. Now, we have a solid looking object but it's made up of 30 smaller objects but the problem is that this is not broken out yet, it's just a single object with the effects applied to it, you can say here, it's an ellipse and it's got a rough in and a transform applied to it. Let's break it out with object expand appearance. That's going to break it out at the level that then gives us a series of groups that have objects in them. Let's just ungroup it. We'll choose object ungroup and then object ungroup again. We've got a series of compound path, each one of them has this effect applied to it, so you can see that there is no stroke any longer. It's just a fill so we've expanded out, not only the rough and effect but also the transform effects. We've got heaps and heaps of compound paths but we want this to be a little bit more erratic so let's select it again, choose object transform and we'll go back to our transform H. Back in this dialogue, we know what we need to do to make things look a little bit uneven. We're going to adjust the scale of it. We're going to turn it onto random so that we've got a random effect, I think the scale is probably a bit much, so let's make it 85 and 85 and we might increase the rotation as well. All we're looking at, is getting a effect as if we had drawn this with a whole heap of circles, on reflection, I think I'm going to make this a bit smaller. I'll just click okay. Now we've got something that looks like it's been sketched. Let's just go back to selecting over this, let's break it out of any further groups. We're just going to compound paths and let's group it again. We've just got this one object that this circular shape. Now, in the original, this had a white fill. The problem we're going to have is right now, is actually filling up with white. This is what we're going to do. This is a technique which is really handy to understand and what it's going to allow you to do, is to create an outline around a complex shape. Let's go and make a duplicate of this. Now we know inside this group are lots and lots of compound paths. We're going to select the group and we're going to merge everything together. Just go here to unite in the pathfinder pallet, so that gives us one single compound path because it's got lots of little holes in it where they see through areas are as if we had sketched it. Well, we want to break that out. Here's the trick. You going to replace this compound paths. With this shape selected, we'll choose object, compound path, and release and it fills in everything. Now, we've got a shape that is exactly the same shape as this, only it's black. It's also made up of lots of little pieces. You can see here in the last panel that there's lots and lots of pieces here, well, let's go back to our pathfinder and stick them all back together again. Here is our single shape, it looks like we missed a few, so let's go and grab the rest. Here is our single shape. It's the exact shape of this on the outside and so if we fill it with white and put it behind, we're going to get a perfect white area. Let's just select it. Let's fill it with white, actually let's fill it with red for now so that we can see it a little more easily. Let's select either both of these. This is a grouped object and this is just a single object and we're going to align them to each other. Now the color is on top, so I'm just going to move it behind. This gives us the effect of a hand-drawn line with some paper color if you like behind it. Let's go and grab these two objects. I'm going to group them because it's going to make it easier to move them into position and just put them in the center of the flower. I think they are a pretty good size. I'm pretty happy with the size, maybe a little bit smaller. If it needs to be a little bit smaller, select it and make it a bit smaller, it's a group, it's all going to travel together. Of course, now we can make this paper white, so let's go back and select this path, double-click on the color, make it all white and click okay. Now we have the beginnings of the middle of the flower, we still got something else to put in there but we've got the starting point and its re-sizable, very easily re-sizable if we think it's too big. 7. Pt 6 Add the pencil drawn middle: The final element we're going to create for this shape is the center of the circle here. What it is is a series of pale gray lines. They look almost like pencil lines just around the inside edge of this circle. Let's go and create then we'll go to the Ellipse Tool, just drag out an ellipse and we're going to do this pretty much the same way as we did the outside flower. We're going to give it a stroke but no fill. We're going to add a light gray for this pencil color. I'm thinking this will probably do. Again, I want it to be fairly thin, so I'm going to make it. This time I'll use 0.75 of a pixel. We'll go and roughen this with effect, distort and transform and then we'll choose roughen. I'll use about two percent here and nine per inch. I'll click okay. We're going to rotate this to create a few of these, we'll choose "Effect," "Distort & Transform" and then "Transform." We're going to transform it around the center point, we'll turn "Preview on," let's do say 40 this time and let's just rotate them slightly. Because that will ensure that we actually get our 40 elements. Let me just show you something here. I'm going to do it at a rotation angle of zero. I've got 40 of these purportedly, I'll click okay. Let's go and expand this. I'll choose "Object," "Expand Appearance." Now you would expect to get 40 of those or 41 because you've got the original plus the 40 copies and you're not getting those, you're just getting a single one. There's no effect associated with this line. It's all been expanded, but it's just expanded down to one. The reason for this is that all our shots were on top of each other. Illustrator reads that as you probably having made a mistake, you didn't really want 41 of those, you just really want to one because you didn't move them in any way, shape or form. Let me just undo that. We'll go back to the shape, will go back to the transformation and this time we're going to actually put an angle of rotation on this. When we do that, Illustrator goes, oh, you, so you really do know what you're doing because you've actually created some additional shapes here. Just be warned that if things look like they haven't changed in your image, when you expand it, that will be exactly the case. It won't have created the shapes that you wanted. We're just rotating it a little bit just so we can force Illustrator to give us the shapes that we asked for. Now when we go and expand it with "Object", "Expand Appearance" we go into here, you'll see that we actually have those shapes that we asked for. We've got lots and lots of shapes. Let's just ungroup them for a minute but there's still selected. Let's ungroup them again. Okay. We've got the individual paths. We want to create this element that has a little more dimension to it. Let's choose "Object," "Transform" and Transform Each." We've got Preview turned on and we've got the same settings as last time. I'm going to bring them down, perhaps even a little bit more this time, and I'll just click "Okay". This is our pale gray, almost as if it's been drawn with a pencil. Let's select those and group them. Because we want them to travel as a single object. Let's placed in the middle of the shape. They need to be smaller, but let's zoom in and do just that. I'm holding Shift and Alt, that would be Shift and Option on a Mac. Just saw at scaling out from the middle. Because I want this to be behind the original shape, I'm going to place it inside this group. Let's just go and grab this group, place it inside the group, which is the black and the white. Let's open up that group and let's sandwich it in between. This is the black outside edge here. This is the white background. You can't actually see it here because it's white, but it is the white background. If we just select that, you'll say that it is that selection that we're making. If we want the gray be tucked in behind the black but in front of the white, we'd need to place it in position there. Going to leave these in their groups that makes more sense than ungrouping them. So this is basically our finished flower shape. Now, I designed this for two reasons. Not only to create it as a flat shape, but I've designed it in such a way that we can actually make a pattern out of it. We're going to look at that in the next video. 8. Pt 7 Make the repeating Pattern: Now we're ready to create this as a pattern, but I've made another document that I just want to use to explain a couple of things to you. This is the exact same flower as I created here. I've just copied and pasted it. But I've done something through this flower. What I have done is I've taken all of these stems and I've expanded them. So instead of them being a line here with a blob on the end, it's no longer a line. It's actually a filled shapes. If I go in here with the group selection tool, just click on this line, you'll see it's a filled shape. Now this is what you don't want and I want to explain why. Let's just select this and let's make a duplicate of it. Now when we create our pattern, what I want to do is to have some small flowers and some larger ones. Let's select this one and let's go and scale it down. This is the problem that I foresaw, and this is the problem that in the design that we've made, I've avoided. Let's just zoom in here. You'll see over here that these lines are thinner than this, because we scaled this shape back in size, then the lines themselves, because they aren't lines, they're actually filled shapes, they scale down. You can't stop that from happening. As soon as you make something a filled shape, you can't stop it from becoming smaller when you make the flowers smaller. If we were to look at this drawing and say that somebody had drawn this with a pen, for example, a 0.5 micron pen. When they came to draw this one, the pen line should be the same width and here they're not. If you were to at any stage, expand these lines so that they become filled shapes rather than lines, when you scale it down in size, you're going to get a smaller line and it's going to be relatively obvious at that stage, but that's what you've done, that you've done this digitally because things are not scaling correctly. Now, in designing this project, I've been really careful that at no point did we expand these lines. If we go with the group selection tool and just click on one of these lines, you'll see it's got a stroke, and it's got a true pixel stroke. What we're going to look out for as we scale these down is that we still end up with a two pixel strokes. Let's make a duplicate, just selecting an Alt or Option dragging a copy of it away. Now we need to go and check a Illustrator settings. I'm choosing edit and then preferences on a Mac, you'll use Illustrator and then preferences and you'll go to general, and this is the setting that you want to have disabled, scale strokes and effect. Now we're going to enable it. That's not the way it should be just because I want to show you what's going to happen. If you're scaling strokes and effects, then effectively you're going to get the exact same thing happening when we scale down this flower as we saw on the other one. The lines are going to get thinner and that's not what you want to happen. We're going to turn off that setting. When you turn off scale strokes and effects, then the stroke isn't going to change width even though you're making the shapes smaller. I'm going to select it and make the shapes smaller. Now when we line these two up next to each other and zoom in, we're going to see that we've got something that could conceivably have been drawn because the lines are the same weight in the smaller flower as well as the larger flower. That was part of the design process, was thinking about how we could make this realistically into a repeating pattern given that we wanted to make it look as if it had been hand-drawn. Now this point what I would do is obviously grab everything and make them into a group. I'm going to choose object, and then group so that this flower is a group. It's been resized. I'm going to rotate it because rotating it around is going to break the look of this one being a smaller version of this. We've got the spikes in a different rotation and so the two flowers look a little bit different. Now, you could if you wanted to come in and remove a few of these elements, if you thought that this was too tight. I'm not going to bother doing it, but it would be easy enough to do. Let's just quickly look at how you might do that. You're going to zoom in so you can see what's going on. You'll go to the group selection tool. You'll select the line, delete it, and then click on the blob and delete that. As I said, I'm not going to bother with it because I think it looks just fine. But if you're a little bit concerned, you could remove some of those elements. Let's see now how we go about making this into a repeating pattern. What I'm going to start by doing is turning off the artboard. I'm going to go to view and we're going to choose Hide artboards. That's going to just make everything white which just going to make the pattern-making process just a little bit easier. I'm going to zoom out a little bit, so I can say more of the document. I'll select my two shapes and I'll choose Object, Pattern make, I'll click Ok if I see this dialogue and let's go and get the pattern options dialog. Now at the moment what we've got is just a pattern with two elements in it. I want to use more than two elements, so what I want to do is I want to size the pattern outline a little bit bigger. I've got these two elements here, the width and height, they're linked. That's fine because I just want to make them bigger right now. I'm just going to start increasing them. I'm thinking I'll make this like a square. Let's actually just type in these values. I am going to unlink them now, just going to make it 1300 and 1300. Now we've got two elements in our pattern, but our tile is much bigger. Instead of grid, I'm also going to change the style of tile that I'm working with. I'm going to choose brick by column. That offsets everything nicely. It's a more interesting design. Now, I haven't grouped this flower together, let me just do that. Select over this flower and choose Object group. Now I should have both flowers as groups. Thinking this one isn't so. Let's try and make that a group as well. Now they're both grouped. I'm going to put this one up here, and I'm going to Alt drag a duplicate of it away. I'll place this one up here, and I'll Alt, or Option drag a duplicate away. Let's do that again. Now we have some elements that we can use for our pattern, and I will be just a case of placing these in position so that we get our repeating pattern. I am thinking I need another smaller flower, so I'm going to Alt or Option drag another flower away. I'm going to make this one a bit smaller still, and I could probably enlarge this one a little bit. I'm getting a little bit of variety in size of my flowers, and that would be consistent with doing a hand drawing. You're not going to draw the exact same size flower every time. We're going to get a more organic look to our pattern by doing that. Going to just enlarge this one a little bit. Because we've made that setting choice that we've asked not to scale strokes and effects, each one of these enlarging and shrinking or flowers is going to result in a flower that is drawn with the exact same thickness of lines as the original. We're not going to get any variety in our line. Which is exactly what we didn't want to have happen. Now, if you're stuck with not being able to select the flower, like I can select this one here, that's because it's elsewhere in the pattern. This is the one that's actually controlling that element there. If I want to move this one, I'm going to move this one. Just be aware that some of these around the edge won't be selectable because they'd been controlled by other flowers in the pattern. Because this is a brick by column, you're going to have this unusual arrangement where is this one and this one are the exact same flower. You move this one and you are going to affect this one as well. You just might need to hunt around to work out which one is controlling the pattern. Right now, I've opted to say three by three of my pattern. It doesn't matter what you select in here. You can choose any settings, so that you can see more or less of the elements in your design. This is just a way of previewing your design, has no effect on the final pattern. If you don't want to say this blue tile edge, if you want to be able to see things more clearly still, you can turn off the tile edge. You can also whilst you're in this pattern design mode, you can zoom. You can certainly zoom out and in to take a really good look at your pattern. Now, I'm really happy with this. I like the way it looks, I'm going back to show my tile edge because that's the tile that we are going to be creating. When I'm done, I'll just click Done. I'm going to be left with just my two flowers. Let's go and ratio the art boards I'm going to choose, Show Artboards. Here are my flowers. I'm just going to tuck them over the edge, so I don't need them right now. Let's zoom in and create a rectangle that is the size of the artboard. My artboard is 1200 by 1200. We'll just square this up on the artboard. Target the fill and let's fill it with in our pattern. Now we can scale our pattern by choosing Object transform scale. We'll make sure to disable transform objects so you don't want to transform the rectangle. We just want to transform the pattern. I am going to bring it down to say 40 percent, so we can get a good look at our pattern. There's the process of turning the hand-drawn design that we saw earlier into a digital design. We've actually created it as a vector object. Then we've been able to take that single design and make it into a seamless repeating pattern in Illustrator. 9. Project and Wrapup: We've now finished the video learning part of this course. I really hope that you've enjoyed seeing the workflow of working from a hand-drawn image to Illustrator, and seen how you can use the illustrator tools and techniques that you have at hand, to create things like a hand-drawn looking Illustrator, and one that you could also create a seamless repeating pattern from as we've done here. Now, your project for this class is going to be to create this object yourself. Go and make this floral element, and do it in such a way that you can use a single version of it, copy it a few times, to create a seamless repeating pattern. Post an image of your pattern as your final class project. If you don't make the pattern, then just show a completed image of the floral design itself. I hope that you've enjoyed this course, I hope that you've learnt heaps about Illustrator. If you did enjoy the course, when you see the prompt to recommend the class to others, would you please complete that process? This really helps other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now, if you see the Follow link on the screen, click it to follow me and you'll be notified when new classes are released. As always, if you have a question, please ask that question because I'm only too happy to help you, particularly if you run into difficulties or if you have general illustrator questions. My name is 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. 10. Illustrator How I Set Up My Screen: Hello and welcome to this video tutorial. Today I'll show you how I set up my screen in case you want to set up your screen in a similar way. This is the screen layout that I use for illustrator for lunch classes at Skillshare as well as for my YouTube videos. Over here is my toolbar, and you'll see that I've got a double row. We're going to look at that in a minute. I've got a control bar across the top here, and that just shows the basic options and sometimes when you go to tool selected, this will change, and so that's really handy to have. Of course, I've got this narrow row of icons down the side of the screen. I took a screenshot of them here and I've expanded them so it's a little bit easier to see what they are, and we're going to reassemble it if you like. To start off with, I'm going up here to my illustrator for lunch workspace, which is the one I'm using. That's what it looks like. I'm going to Essentials, so that's going to zero everything out. Let's see how we would build up a new illustrator for lunch workspace. The first thing we need is the toolbar. So I'm going to Window and then Toolbars. Now they're two, they're basic and advanced and I use advanced. I'm going to tap on advanced and you'll see that we get a double row of tools here. Now, you can control that using this little fly out, this little double chevron thing. What I'm going to do is, break it out so that it is a double-space toolbar because I just find that a whole lot easier to use. So I'm going to position it just right in underneath the Control bar or where the Control bar is going to be when we go and get it. The Control bar is also on the Windows menu. Let's go and click on Control. In that instance we don't have a choice, it's either turned on or turned off. I'm just going to nudge my toolbar back into position. Just make sure that it's nice and snug where it is. Now let's have a look at the panel over the side here because it's not looking the way we want it to look. I don't want properties at all. So I'm going to grab that panel. I'm going to click it's little close icon so it's closed up and put away. I need to split Libraries and Layers. You'll see that Layers appears down the bottom here, and Libraries is up here and they're in separate groups. What I'm going to do is drag Layers out of the way and that's just now a single little box. I'm going to grab the Libraries and I'm going to put it above Layers. What I'm trying to do is position it so it is above Layers. You can see that there's that Layers tab and I'm getting that big blue mark. Well, I'm just going to let go when I get to that position. It seems like I was a bit spectacularly unsuccessful with that. Let's try that again. Now when we close up this dialog, you'll see we've got Libraries at the top and Layers both in separate groups, and that's exactly what we want things to look like. I'm going to start building this up. But above Libraries is Swatches, Brushes and Symbols. So let's go and get one of them. We'll get Swatches. You'll see that Swatches, Brushes, and Symbols are all in a little group altogether. So that means that when we close them up, they're all going to be in order in this little group that matches exactly what it's supposed to look like over here. I'm going to grab them by their little top bar and place them above Libraries. So we've got the first set and we've got that little separate a bar. Now we need to go and get Stroke, Gradient and Transparency. Let's go and get Stroke and it brings Transparency with it but not Gradient. I need to sandwich Gradient in the middle of these two. Let's go and get Gradient. Sometimes things like Gradient might come with others in the same stack and you just want the one that you want. Here it's not come with any others in the stack, so I'm just going to grab it and position it here just in-between or try and drop it in between Stroke and Transparency. Well, I didn't get it in-between, but I did get it in the same group, so now I can just move it over. Stroke, Gradient, Transparency matches the order here. Stroke, Gradient, Transparency. I'll close them up. Just drag them out. You can say the words are matching exactly what we're trying to build, grab it and put it in position here. We've got Libraries. Now we need to get Graphic Styles, and it's in a group all by itself that's fine. Let's just stretch it out and let's go and drop it into position. It goes after Libraries. Let's just put it after Libraries, just checking our separators are there. Then Transform, Align and Pathfinder. Transform, they're all in a group together. They're all in the right order. Let's just shrink them up. Let's grab them, and they're going in after Graphic Styles. Again, looking for that little blue bar to be in position and just drop them in, check that it all work which it did. Artboards is next. Now Artboards comes with Asset Export and I'm not going to use Asset Export, I don't use that. So I'm going to drag it away from Artboards and just close it down. Now we've got Artboards all by itself. It's in a group all by itself, that's exactly where it should be. It needs to go in after Pathfinder, so let's just pop it into position. Next thing is Color Guide. Now it comes with Color. We don't want Color, so we're just going to drag Color away and close it up. Here's Color Guide. We're just going to drop it into position under the Artboards and above Layers. We've got Color Guidelines. We only need Appearance and Color. Well we do need Color, I didn't look far enough ahead, but let's go and get Appearance first. Now, here we've got a slight problem in that Appearance and Graphic Styles are together and we want to split them. What I'm going to do is just leave Graphic Styles behind but I'm going to drag Appearance away and then close up Graphic Styles, because it was already in the list and in the position that I wanted it in. Let's close up Appearance and it's going in after Layers. We'll pop that into position. Now as you might expect, we're probably going to have a few problems when we go and select Color because it was in a toolbar with something else. Let's go to Window and then Color. No, it's coming in by itself. That's perfect. That's gone, grab it and just move it into position underneath Appearance. Now this arrangement looks exactly like my arrangement. That's how I have things organized. I like to use just the icons themselves. I just drag this over until it snaps in as a row of icons. If you want to see the words, that's possible too. Just drag it out a little bit. It doesn't have to come all the way out. Just see enough of the words that helps you understand which of the icons you're selecting, but just set it up the way you want it to look. Now I don't need that any longer. Let's just close that and let's enlarge the screen so I can just check that this looks all right on a full screen and it doesn't. So let's just put everything into position. That's sitting up there nicely. You can see it snapped into position there. Let's go and grab this one, and let's make sure we get the whole thing and take it with us over here. Now because it's so narrow, I'm having a bit of trouble dragging it with me. It's going to be easier to take it with the words and just snap it into position. Just make sure it's snapping properly, for which it's not. Now it's snapping. You want to look for that blue area that's going to tell you whether you've got your snap right or not. Now once it snapped, I can make it just the row of icons or if I want words, I can just drag it out to be words. Now I've got a full screen. Because that's all I use all the time is full screen. I'm really happy with the way everything is looking. The only problem is that, I'm like about 20 seconds away from demolishing it. As soon as I do something, chances are what I typically do is grab my Layers palette, move it somewhere and then close it and that's going to lose all this layout. What we want to do at the point of which we've got the screen organize the way we want it to look is go and save it. Let's go down here to Essentials, drop this down, and go to New Workspace. What that does is it's going to save this workspace that we've got as a brand new workspace. I'm calling this Helen's Neat and Tidy Screen. I'll click "Okay. " Now that's saved. Let's go back to Essentials. Well, Essentials looks exactly the same. The reason for that is because we've mixed up Essentials, we've destroyed Essentials. If you want Essentials back the way it was, go to Essentials and choose Reset Essentials. This is the Essentials layout that we built ours from. Let's go now and select Helen's Neat and Tidy Screen. When I select that, you'll see that it goes back to this nice, neat and tidy arrangement that we had. Now, if I go and grab the the Layers pallet and do what I do all the time and just drag it out of the way. Then I've destroyed this layout and if I close it from here, you'll see it's no longer where it should be over here. If I want to get back to my Helen's Neat and Tidy Screen the way I just planned it to look, I'll select here and choose Reset. You'll see here that Layers has popped back into position. If you want your screen to look like mine particularly when you're doing my classes say on Skillshare or trying to follow me on YouTube, that's the way my screen is setup and so you can set up your screen to match. I hope this video has been of help to you in understanding how I set up my screen so that you can set up yours to suit yourself or to mirror mine if that makes more sense to you.