Dotted Line Patterns in Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Illustrator Dot Lines Patterns Introduction: Hello, and welcome to this class on dotted line patterns in Adobe Illustrator. My name is Helen Bradley and I'm a Skillshare top teacher. I have over 280 courses here on Skillshare and over 176,000 student enrollments. In this class, we'll create four different seamless repeating patterns using dots in Adobe Illustrator. These patterns include dots on bendy lines, dots on hand-drawn lines, and dots created using the blend tool brushes and stroke blinds. I'll take you through these patterns step-by-step so that you can follow along with me. So by the end of the class, you'll have a range of different designs finished and ready to use. Along the way, you'll also have learned some handy tips and techniques for working in Illustrator every day. So without further ado, let's get started making dotted line patterns. 2. Pt 1 Create the Dotted Objects: To make this pattern of wandering dots, I suggest that you settle for my dimensions as we build this up, because it's just going to make things a little bit easier, at least until you can see the principles of what we're doing. I'm going to click here on New File, and I'm going to make a document 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels in size. I'm going to create a line, so I'm going to the line segment tool. I'm just going to drag out a horizontal line. I have my hand on the Shift key, so it is perfectly horizontal. I'm going to make sure that this has a bit of a stroke weight at this point. I'm going to choose effect Distort & Transform , and then zig-zag. The zig-zag line is going to give us the wavy line for our dots, we just need to do a bit of work to get it there. I'm going to click on "Smooth" here, and I'm going to increase the size here to 60. That's giving us a nice loopy line. I'll click "Okay". I'm going to expand this so that the line is no longer a horizontal line with an effect applied to it, but we'll actually get this line as a line. I'm going to choose Object, and then Expand Appearance. You can see now it's got little anchor points along its length. Now we're going to make a circle, so I'm going to select a different color for this, it's only temporary, so don't worry too much about it. We're going to the Ellipse Tool. I'm going to click once in the document to make my circle, and I'm going to make its width and height the exact same value, because that makes it a circle, and it's going to be 180. Now this circle should fit perfectly in here. This is not rocket science, we're probably going to be a pixel or two off in creating this design. But honestly you're just not going to see it when you get to make this pattern, so don't stress too much about it. But what I am doing is putting this circle just inside this loop. The reason for that is that I want the center point of this circle, because that's going to be a rotation point. I'm going to the pen tool, I'm making sure I don't have anything selected here. I'm going to hover over the middle of this circle, and when I do, there's a little tooltip that appears that says Center. I've got the pen tool in my hand, I'm just going to click once. Now I have rubber band turned on, so I'm still attached to that point. I'm going to press the Escape key, because I don't want to be attached to it. What I want is just a single anchor point there. I'm going to click away from everything. I'm going to target the circle, I'm just going to delete it. But there is still an anchor point here, and that's really important, we're going to use that in a minute. Let's go back to our line and focus on that. I'm just going to target its color and I'm going to make it a pinky-red color for now. I'm also going to increase the stroke weight quite a bit. I need to get to the stroke tool, so I'm going to choose Window, and then Stroke, because it just makes life a bit easier. I'm going to click here until the entire panel appears. I'm going to click on Cap, which means that whatever I'm about to do now, which is an actual fact, make a set of dots, is going to have round caps on it. I'm going to Dashed Line, and I'm going to select this option here. There's two options, we're going for the second one. You're going to set your dash to zero, and what that does is it makes dots. Then the gap is going to be 39. If you're going to create this yourself later on, what we're looking for is a dot pretty much at the bottom of this loop and another one up here. We should see them in that position, because we're going to need those in a minute. Now there's a trick to getting the dots out of this line, because it doesn't work the way you might think it does. Let's just open up the Layers panel. This is our little anchor point, I'm just going to lock it down for now. It doesn't show up in the document really, all we can say right now is this line that has an appearance applied to it. I'm going to choose Object and Expand Appearance. Now, you might think that that gets you your dots, it doesn't. What it does is it gets to the dots at either end and you've still got a path. We're going to target this path here and we're going to choose Object, and then Expand. Now we only have a stroke on this, so we don't need the fill, I'm going to turn off Fill, I'm going to leave Stroke turned on. I'm going to click "Okay". We're getting there, [LAUGHTER] but it's a very slow progress. What we've got now is a compound path. What we have to do is release this, Object, Compound Path, Release. Now we get our dots out, but it would be really nice if we ungroup them from now. Let's choose Object, and then Ungroup. Let's just check and see what we've got. We've got a group now that has only individual dots in it. The next thing is we're going to make our blend of dots. I'm going to zoom in here. I'm going to the group selection tool, because that will allow me to select this particular dot. Remember that there's an anchor point sitting in here that we're going to get hold of in just a minute. I want to make a copy of this dot and I want it to go exactly where it is. I'm going to choose Edit, Copy, and then just Edit, Paste in Place. That means that this dot is immediately on top of the previous one. I'm going to change its color because that's going to allow us to track where it is. Let's just make sure that it has a fill but not a stroke. Now I'm going to take this dot and I'm going to make a copy of it and move it. I'm going to hold down the Alt or Option key, as I drag a copy immediately above it. I'm going to hold the Shift and Alt keys, as I just enlarge it. What I have now is two dots that are reasonably well aligned. I think that they're not perfectly aligned I keep putting strokes on these instead of fills. Just make sure that it only has a fill and no stroke. I'm going to click on this object and Shift-click on this object. I will check in the layers palette to make sure that only those two are selected. I want to align them up, so I want to make sure that this is perfectly above this one. But I don't want to move this one because it is in position on this loop, so I'm going to click it again. You can see it gets a thicker edge around it, that means that when I do my align options, this one won't move, this one will if it's necessary. Then you choose Window, and then Align. We can see our Align options. I just want to align this to the center, did move just a little bit. This one won't have moved, this one did. Now I'm going back to selecting these two again, because I want to make a blend out of them. I'll choose Object, and then Blend, and then Make. I'm going to click here on the blend tool, in fact I'm going to double-click on it, to open this Blend Options dialog. I want specified steps, and I want something like three or four steps. Truly let's make it two, that's a better number here. I'm just going to click "Okay". Now at this point if you want to make any changes to the circles, you can do so. Let's go to the layers panel, let's select our blend here. When we open up the group, you can see that we can get access to the dark blue dot. Now if we make changes to it, being careful not to move it. I'm just holding Shift and Alt, to just make a change to its size, then the whole blend is readjusting. I think that's better sizing here. Now I no longer want these objects in the blend, so I'm going to expand it. I do that by choosing Object, and then Blend, and then Expand. It's a better option than the Expand option on the menu. Just be aware of that, I think you get better results with this. Now I'd really like these objects to be spaced evenly, and they're never going to be spaced evenly with a blend where you have different size objects. Because the only option you have is to make the midpoints equal distances, and that's not this distance being equal distances. With that in mind, let's go back and select over all of these objects and select on this one again. Now that's not working for me, so let's just go and make sure that it is going to work correctly. I think it's because it's in a group, so I'm just going to break those out of the group for now. Let's choose Object, Ungroup, and see. Yes, now we can select this middle point. This is the one we don't want to move because remember it's an exact place relative to the dots on this loop. With this selected, I can now use the align options to change the spacing. I'm going to choose Window and Align again. With this selected I'm going to click here on Align to Key Object, which I can't get to, so I'm just going to re-select those again and see if by re-selecting them I can get to it, which I can. That's just Illustrator being annoying. I'm going to set this value to something like 8 or 10, we can experiment. I'm going to click on Vertical Distribute Space, and you can see that the space between these objects has been adjusted. If you want it a little bit more, you can crank up this number and just click again. If you wanted a bit less, just reduce the number and click again. Now we've got things in position ready to do our transformations, and we're going to do that in the next video. 3. Pt 2 Create the Dotted Objects Pattern: Now that we have all these objects created, we're ready to do our transformation. I'm going to unlock my anchor point there, that's this one in here. I'm going to click on it and then hold the Shift key as I select each of these objects in the Layers palette, I like to do it in the last palette because it means I'm not selecting anything l don't mean to select. It's also meaning I don't move anything while I do so. Now we're about to do a transformation and we want this whole group of objects to be transformed together, so we have to group them or this won't work. I'll choose Object and then Group. We're going to rotate this so that lines up over here. The reason why we had to make this anchor point is that we need something to rotate around. I'm going to choose Effect distort and Transform and then Transform. We need one copy of this. I'm going to just make it one, and then I'm going to rotate it. But you'll see right now that it's rotating around the midpoint and not around here. We need to click here on the bottom middle of these nine boxes. That will rotate it around this anchor point. What we want is a rotation that is about -25 degrees. Now you might be very slightly off here. You can see that this blue dot is not lining up perfectly with the red one. But honestly, you're not going to see that in the final production and we are going to get rid of that red dot and a little later. So click Okay. I want to do the same transformation in this direction, so I'm going to grab this entire group of objects, drop it onto the plus sign at the bottom of the Layers palette. Let me just make sure that you can see it. I'm going to grab this group of objects, drop it onto the plus sign. I'm going to turn one of these off and lock it down and I'm going to transform the other ones. I'm going to select this, go back to the Appearance panel because we need to change the appearance. We need to make sure that we have the appearance selected. Click on Transform, and then this time I'm going in a positive 25 degree direction. Now things are a little bit tricky here because I have done the correct rotation, but I don't want this object. I'm going to take my copies down to zero. What that does, as you can see, it turns off this one and just gives me this one because I already had this one and this one in the previous rotation. I don't need a second set and having it would probably be a bit embarrassing because it might not line up 100% perfectly. All I want is this one, I'm just going to click Okay. Now when we go back to the last palette and turn on the one one I just locked down and turned off. You can see that we've got all three objects, and we've only got those three objects has not doubled sets here at all. Now the next transformation that we need to make involves all three of these objects. You can see that they're sitting here in two distinct groups. Well, I'm going to click on one group, Shift-click on the other. I'm going to make a group out of those. I'm going to choose Object Group. That means that this time when I do a transformation, it's going to affect everything inside that group which is all three objects are going to be treated as one if you like. Effect, distort and Transform and then Transform. Now this time I do want a copy. This time I'm okay with transforming them from the middle and this time I want to move them across to here. All I'm going to do is start cranking up the horizontal value. Now, this is limited to 100 pixels on the slide, or you need to go a whole lot more than that so just click in this box, hold down the Shift key and press the up arrow key, and that will take you where you're going. You just want to arrange this so it's lined up as well as you can get it, but do opt for whole numbers if you possibly can. I'm just going to click Okay. For this next transformation we'll choose Effect, distort and Transform and then Transform. Yes, we do want to apply a new effect that's really important. Now we want to flip these over so we're going to click on Reflect Y and we want a copy. I'm going to make that one copy. We want to take this copy down here. We need to increase the vertical to get it out of the way and then we need to reduce the horizontal because we're headed to this area over here. Again, we're just going to line it up in the best we can using whole numbers here. I'm pretty happy with that. I think that's a pretty good setting. I might be able to get the vertical a little bit later. I'll just click, Okay. We have everything now that we need for our pattern, but we've also got a few bits that we don't need. You can see that we've got these overlapping little red dots here and we were just using those for alignment to make sure that we got things pretty near aligned. What I'm going to do is lock down all those blue objects. The only thing I can select are the red objects. I'm going to the Group Selection Tool. It shows a toolbar position with the direct selection tool. It lets you select things in groups and as you can see down here, all those pink dots are inside a group. I'm just going to drag over those dots there and you can see that they're pink because the fill color is showing as pink. I'm just going to press Delete. That's going to get rid of these double sets of dots, leaving the blue ones behind because they're locked down. I'm going to do that for all of the pink ones that are doubled up with blue ones. The other thing I need to do is to make sure I don't have too many dots here. What I need to do is to line this up ultimately with this dot over here. These two are going to be placed in the same position, which means I don't need any of these. I'm going to grab them and delete them. You can see that each set of blue objects has three dots between it and so here's 1,2,3. This is needing to line up in a minute with this one over here. That's going to be perfect. Actually, I ended up with one more sitting there that I didn't see, so I'm just going to get rid of it. Now we're ready to make our pattern. If you tried to select everything, you'll see the blue dots are left out because you had them locked down. Make sure they're unlocked so you can select absolutely everything. It may not look like a lot is selected, but everything is because this is just a transformation. Object Pattern Make. Click Okay. At this point, I like to turn my art board off with View Hide art board because that just gives me a white background to work with. I'm also going to hide my tile edge. I'm going to focus here where I see four dots because that's the bit that's not lined up. This has to line up with this. I'm going to make sure that this has a line through it, so we're not maintaining width and height proportion. That's really important. I'm going to knock this value down for height to a whole number because it's never good to have heights or widths that are fractional numbers. Then I'm going to start adjusting the width and I'm just going to reduce it because I need to bring the blue dot here over the top of the red dot. Well, it's either going to go on top of it or underneath it. It's going behind it. But that's fine. It doesn't matter whether it goes behind or in front. It just needs to be in the exact same position. The in front or behind option is this one here, so you can flip them around if you need to. I'm actually going to leave them flipped this way because I don't need that pink one. In fact, I don't want it in my patterns. I'm going to the Group Selection tool. I'm just going to target it makes sure that it is selected and delete it. Because I only need three pink dots before I hit a set of blue dots. I don't want those extra dots. I only wanted them there while I'm making up the pattern to make sure that everything aligns properly. Once it's aligned and I'm happy with it being aligned, it's fine. At this point we wouldn't change the width because the width is perfect. We can change the height, however. You can do what you like with the height. You can spread them apart, or you can bring them closer together. That's entirely up to you. Now if you want a background for your pattern, just make a note of the current width and height. Mine is 765 and 310. I'm going to select the Rectangle tool click once in the document and create a rectangle exactly that size, 765 by 310. It's hidden everything. That's exactly what it should do. Let's go to object, arrange, send to back, so that sends the pink shape to the back. It's still selected, so I'm going to click on the Selection tool. I need to pick it up. A little bit tricky here because the layer outline here is pink and my shape is pink too. Let's just go and change the color of a box a little bit easier for us to see. We're just ignoring the color at the moment because we can change that permanently in a minute. But what we need to do is see this outline because we have to see where we're dragging. You're just going to drag it to a position where everything appears in the pattern. Now, I'm not finding it very easily let's turn on my tile edge and see if I can line it up to the tile edge a bit better. Now in lining it up, it may not sit exactly over the tile edge. Mine doesn't. That's just fine. What's important is that you can see all your dots and that the dots are whole and not fractional. You can see I'm having to drag mine a little bit over the edge of the tile to make sure that I can see everything. If I turn off the tile edge and click away from the shape, I should be able to say that every single one of these dots is a whole dot. It's either not for example being cut in half and it certainly appearing so it's not missing so that they're the things that you're looking for here. Right now, this pattern looks great to me, so I'm just going to click done and ignore the fact that I really don't like that background color. Let's choose View Show Art boards to get our art board back again. Let's select over all of these shapes and let's just move them out of the way. We don't need them for the moment. A document that is 1,000 by 1,000 can be covered up by a rectangle that is 1,000 by 1,000 with the fill color selected here. Let's go and click on our pattern. Let's size our pattern a little bit better object transform scale. I'm going to reduce it to 70%, but I'm going to turn off transform objects and click, Okay, and now to change the colors with the rectangle selected, I'm going to re-color artwork, Advanced Options, Edit. What I'm interested in is this yellow. I'm going to make sure that the harmony colors are unlinked so I can go and get this color and place it wherever I want it. This is a nice tool to use because you can determine exactly what color you want for your background. You don't have to just pick a single color and go, oh, well that didn't work, so I'm going to go and select something different. I'll just click Okay. As usual, that's going to give us our original pattern color as well as a pattern with these new colors in our swatches panel. Remember, of course, that you need to save those swatches if you want to be able to use them again in future. 4. Pt 3 Box Dots Pattern: This pattern of squares and dots, we're going to start with a new file. It doesn't matter what size your file is. I'm making one that's 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels. I'm going to start with the rectangle tool. I'm going to turn off the Stroke and I'm going to set it to have a Fill. Now, right now the fill colors you use simply don't matter. We're just using these as a guide and we can change them later on really easily. We click once in the document and I'm going to create a rectangle or a square that is 200 by 200 pixels in size. I'm going to the Selection Tool, I'm going to click on it and hold down the Alt key as I drag a duplicate of it away. In this one, I want to align just perfectly to the edge of this. I'm going to grab both of these, Alt drag them away. I'm going to with them both still selected, choose Object Transform and then Reflect so that they're reflected across the vertical. I'm just choosing Vertical here and click "OK". Then I'm going to take those and line them up here. Now, this is going to be the background for our pattern, again, fully editable later on. I'm opening up the last pallet. I'm going to locate all these shapes and just lock them down because I don't want them to move and I do want to use them as a guide for my circles. I'm just going to zoom in and we're going to focus on this top box up here. I'm going to select the Ellipse tool and I'm going to make the Fill color black and no stroke at all. I'm going to click up here and I'm going to create an ellipse that is 20 by 20 pixels. In other words, it's a 20-pixel circle. I'm going to move that up into the top corner of this shape but I don't want it to sit exactly over the edges just really close to it. I'm going to hold the Alt key as I drag a duplicate of this away. I think I'm going to take this down to probably about eight pixels in size. I'm using the Transform tool so you can get to those also by choosing Window and then Transform. I'm just going to make it 8 pixels by 8 pixels. I'm going to grab both of these and I'm going to click on this topmost one. That makes up what's called a key object. When I align things to each other, this one's going to move and this one will not. If you don't see the aligned tools, you can get to them by choosing Window and Align. I'm just going to click here on Horizontal Align Center. That means that both shapes are aligned vertically. That's going to be important because we do want our blend to go in a nice vertical direction, just selecting that data and using the arrow keys, just move it downwards. I know it's an imperfect alignment because I only moved in a downwards direction. Select over both these objects, choose Object and then Blend and then Make. What you see here might be quite different to what I've got. It doesn't matter. Double-click on the Blend tool here, go to Specified Steps and you're going to reduce the steps to something like about 10 or nine. What you want to do later on is to put all of these dots at an even amount of spacing. It's going to be on an even amount of spacing between each of them. We've obviously got some space here and some space here and space here that we could reduce to use to spread these apart, but you're going to have to make a judgment there as to whether nine or 10 is going to be a better setting. I think nine might give me a bit more breathing room between these spaces so I'm going to choose that. I'm going to expand my blend, which I do by choosing Object and then Blend and then Expand. These objects are going to be in a group right now. I'm going to choose Object, Ungroup. That will allow me to select and align them. I'm just going to double-check in the Layers palette and we do have each of these circles as a separate object. They're not inside a group or anything. Let's select over them. Let's click on the topmost one so that this becomes our key object. Again, back to the Align panel you can get to it by choosing Window and Align. Here's mine. I'm going to click here on Align To Key Object and what I want to do is experiment with values of the spacing that is going to space this set of objects out neatly. At the moment I've got 4.5. I think that's something I inherited from the last time I was in this dialogue. I'm just going to click here on Vertical Distribute centers. That's a pretty good setting but I think it's a bit much, so let's take it down to four pixels and try again. The nice thing about this is that you've got the objects selected, you've got the one selected, it's not going to move and you can just experiment with these values. You can see what two, three, and two looks like and maybe that's not enough. Four looks fine. Just click away when you've got it right. Now we want these objects to be dealt with as a group. We're going to put them back in a group now that we spaced them out neatly, Object and then Group. Obviously what we were looking for with those align options is to make sure that everything fits within this square and that there's a little bit of breathing room. These objects are now in a group. We'll select them, Effect, Distort & Transform, and then Transform. We need a few copies of this, I think something about seven or eight copies. Not sure I'm just going to start with seven. We can adjust it in a minute. I'm going to start moving it horizontally. All I'm looking for is to fill the square with my shapes. Between the horizontal movement and the number of copies, I should be able to fill it with something that looks pretty good. I'm really happy with that. I'm going to click OK. Now we're going to apply another transform to this to fill in this square. With it still selected, choose Effect, Distort & Transform, and then Transform. You do want to Apply A New Effect. Click "YES." In this instance, what we want to do is we want to rotate this and move it. Let's do the rotation first. Let's rotate it 90 degrees and then we'll move it. Now you're going to run out of movement at 100 pixels. You won't be able to move it any further using the slider, but you can click in here and just press the Up arrow key Shift + Up arrow takes a 10 pixels at a time, 200 should work just fine since our rectangles or our squares here we're 200 by 200 anyway. I obviously need a copy. There's my original and one copy. Let's click OK and let's go back and do one more transformation. In this case, we're going to fill those bottom bits, Effect, Distort & Transform, and then Transform. This is why we're using transformations just makes life so much easier. I am going to need a copy plus the original. I'm going to need to move this vertically. Let's just go and start moving it vertically. My guess is 200 is going to be pretty good here. Now we'll Reflect it in the X and Y or both just depending on what you think looks good. I've got these now upside down and these two are now inverted. I think I'm going to choose X and Y for this one, I'll just click OK. Now we have everything that we need for our pattern. I'm going to zoom out and because I want to bring my colored backgrounds into my pattern, I must unlock those. If you don't unlock them, let me just show you what's going to happen. We'll select everything and make the pattern with Object, Pattern, Make and you only get the black and white bits. I'm going to cancel out of there, make sure that I unlock my background so that they can come with the pattern, and then choose Object, Pattern, Make. Now, this is a really simple pattern. The width and the height are going to be 400 pixels which was the combined width and height of those squares that we made. You don't need to do anything else just select Grid as your option. I'm just going to click Done because that pattern is now made. I'm going to move everything out of the way. Let's add a 1,000 by 1,000-pixel rectangle to our document. That is the size of my document. I'm going to square it up in the document. With the Fill selected, I'm going to click on my pattern. Now I'm not really happy with the colors in this at all, but that's just fine. We just needed something to create the pattern with the first-off. Now let's go and edit it. Click the Recolor Artwork tool. Obviously, you have to have this rectangle selected to do that. Click "Advanced Options." If you had nothing here if there was just the black here and nothing here, click and click to add the color and make sure that this is an arrow because that will allow you to change the colors. Let's go into Edit. I'm just going to close this panel. I don't need that visible. I'm going to click here to unlock the colors and now I can take them wherever I want. I'm going to go for purples and this is my central color, which is the black. You can see it here. We're not able to not find another position for it here, but with it selected, I can make adjustments down here. I'm going to brighten it up and that will allow me to make black into white. Of course, I could make it any color that I like by then dragging it around. I actually quite like the white, but I would like to darken these colors up a bit if I can't get them dark enough. With it selected, I'm going to come in here and adjust down the brightness. Click "OK" Of course, that's going to give us the original pattern colors and the new ones. You can just keep coming in every time you find a color combination that you like. Exit out of this Recolor Artwork dialogue so that you can actually keep that as a set of pattern colors and then come back in a bit later and make another set. Of course, you can unlock these colors if you wish by clicking on this icon that allows you to separate the colors and take them wherever you want them to be. Make sure of course, that you save this file so that the patterns will be saved in the file if you want to have them available for use later on. Make sure to save them out as a separate file. 5. Pt 4 Box Dots Extra Design Opportunity: Before we finish up with this box pattern or what I'm calling a box dot pattern I want to show you how I achieved this look because it was really quite simple, but it is also quite effective. This was the pattern that I'd built it on. It was a pattern similar to the one that we created in the previous video but in this case, I use different color boxes behind every set of dots. Instead of having a pink and green in it, the same pink and green, these were all different color boxes. Let's just edit up this pattern and convert it into the one that you saw earlier. I'm going to double-click on the pattern swatch because that opens it back up in the pattern options dialog. I'm going to open up my layers palette. I'm just pressing F7 to display my layers palette. These are the dots themselves. I'm going to temporarily lock them down. These other boxes, I want to select every one of these. I'm just going to click on each one in turn holding down the Shift key. What I'm going to do is just rotate this. I'm just grabbing hold of them. I'm rotating them holding the Shift key, which gives me a rotation of 45 degrees. I'm going to unlock my lines at this point. Now you can get a slightly different effect by changing the overlaps here. Changing the overlaps just changes the colors that you're seeing here. In this case, we're saying the purple and the lighter pink. But if I flip this over, then we'll say red and red. Here we would see bright pink and bright pink. You can just decide what combination of colors you want to work with. When you're happy with that, all you're going to do is click Done, and that is another pattern that you have available to you. I really liked this. I thought it added a really, really smart dimension to this pattern. Of course, like every single one of these patterns, as soon as you've achieved it, you can go to the Recolor Artwork dialogue and you can make changes to it. We could for example drag all these colors around the color wheel to get a different effect. You can drag them out or drag them in. Let's just reset those colors because they're just not working for me but you could also unlink the harmony colors, which lets you take the colors wherever you want to put them. You should be able to achieve some really interesting effects with this design. I really like that rotated background on it. 6. Pt 5 Whimsical Dotted Line Pattern: This pattern of whimsical dotted lines is easier to make than it looks. Let's start with a new file, 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels. It doesn't really matter what size your document is. I'm going to set this up with a black fill and no stroke. I'm going to the Ellipse tool, which, of course, shares a toolbar position with the Rectangle tool. I'm going to drag out a really small circle holding the Shift key as I do. This is going to be part of what I'm going to make a brush out of, so I'm going to select it and go to the Brushes panel. Again, you can get to that by choosing Window and then Brushes. I'm going to click on the plus sign here and make a scatter brush. Now, the settings for the scatter brush are a little haphazard, but we can change it if we don't like it later on. The settings I'm using are not fixed in concrete, so be approximate, but I will warn you when you do need to be a little bit more careful. With random, I'm going to make my smallest shape about 50% of the shape size. I think this size is pretty good, so I'm going to leave 100% for the rest. Spacing. Well, where is our spacing? Absolutely, no clue right now. Let's adjust it to a little bit less than 100% and leave the top value at 100% because it's 100% of, I don't know what anyway. In terms of scatter, we want to be a little bit careful because you don't want to throw it well away from the line, it's going to be a little bit too hard to control. I'm thinking about minus 15% is pretty good for scattering, so that's all I'm going to add. Rotation. Well, rotation on a circular shape is a nonsense anyway, because rotating a circle just gives you a circle. I'm going to set my colorization method to tints in case I want to recolor this, so I'm going to click ''Okay''. I can delete the shape because I don't need it any longer. I'm going to the Brush tool. I'm going to make sure I click on my scatter brush and I need to draw some almost, but not quite, vertical lines. I'm going to choose View and then Rulers so I can drag a ruler off the edge, so View Rulers Show Rulers. I'm going to drag a ruler line in because I need to start and finish my line at approximately the same place, but I need to wiggle it in the middle. I'm going to click on my brush, I'm going to start up here. I'm going to try and draw down this line, I'm not very good at it, that's just fine, and try and finish the same place as I started. I'm going to do that for a few lines. I'm just going to bring in a guide for every single one of them. If you make a total mess of it, just undo it with Control or Command Z and try again. You don't want it to be too wiggly, so do try and make your line as straight as you can, especially if you tend to draw really wiggly lines at the best of times which I think is me today. It's either too much coffee or not enough because my lines are very, very wiggly. We don't need our guides any longer, so I'm going to choose View Guides and then Clear Guides. Each one of these lines I want to cut into, so I'm going to the Scissors tool, which shares a toolbar position with the Eraser tool. With the scissors tool selected, you can just hover over this line and when you see the word path appear, just click once. You're going to draw that once for every single one of these lines. I don't generally do it in the same place, so I want this to be a bit uneven. You are going to need your Layers palette, so make it visible. If you don't have nice big thumbnails, go to the Flyout menu, choose Panel Options. I like to set my row size to over 50 pixels, that gives me a nice large thumbnail to see what's going on. I'm selecting over the bottom half of these lines. This is going to be just the bottom pixels of these lines. I'm going to change their color, remember we set it so that we could change the color, I'm just going to make them red for now. I want to send these to the top of the document. With them selected, I'm going to the Align options. You can get to those by choosing Window and then Align. I'm going to click on ''Vertical Align Top''. Now, if yours don't jump to the top, let me just show you what might happen. If yours just align themselves to each other, it's because you've got Align To Selection selected. If you choose Align to Artboard and then choose the same option, they're going to shoot to the top of the artboard, that's exactly what we want. Now let's go and have a look in the Layers palette. We can see clearly the red lines. Let's click away from this and let's go and select the black one. Click on the first one, hold down the Control or Command key and click on each subsequent black one. We want to do the same to these. We want to align them to the very bottom of the artboard, so we're going to click Vertical Align Bottom. Now, the important thing about using that tool is that we haven't moved the horizontals as we've done that. This bit and this bit are going to line up perfectly in our pattern and this bit, and this bit are going to line up perfectly. The problem is in the middle, but that's fine because that's what we came here to fix. I'm going to select over this part of the line. Now, I can make it a bit shorter, in the hopes of getting it to line up a bit better, or I could just leave it with some overlap. You'll see that there are some overlaps in this design, so that's not going to be a real problem. This one looks fine, this one looks a little bit off. I could just come in here and locate the end of this particular line. This is the anchor point at the end of this line. I could just bring it over, so it lines a little bit better with the other end of the line and detour here. I can pick up the anchor point at the very end here, I could perhaps just make the join a little bit better. This is the area that we have to join, this should join just perfectly. Before we leave this, we're going to need to put our colors back again. I'm going to make them black, so I'm going to select all these and go back to black for this color. Here are my swatches, let's go back to black. I'm also going to select over all of these, and I'm going to hold the Alt Option key as I drag a duplicate set away. These, I'm going to rotate. They're still selected, let's go and get the Selection tool, and I'm going to hold the Shift key as I rotate them around. Let's just line them up a bit neatly. If I'm happy with all the spacing here, which I am, I think it's looking pretty good. I'm ready to make my pattern. I'm going to select over all of these shapes, I'm going to choose Object, Pattern, Make, and click ''Okay''. My Pattern Options dialog, I'm just going to drag that back into the picture. I'm going to choose View and then Hide Artboards because I find it a bit disconcerting to have an artboard half over everything. I'm going to zoom back out a bit so I can see things a bit more clearly, that will help me as I'm designing this pattern. I'm going to make sure that this icon here has this line through it and that will allow me to adjust the height. I'm taking it back to 102 and the width, I need to adjust the width because I need to adjust this space here. I'm just going to take it out until it looks like those lines are working better with each other. I'm going to turn on the Tile Edge because I need to see where the edges are just to make sure that I do not have any obvious sames, and I'm not seeing any. This is really, really good. If you did have an obvious same and you needed to fill in a gap, let me just see where the gap is going to be, just here for example. You will notice something that is very strange, about what happens when you have a brush-painted line in a pattern. What happens is that Illustrator actually breaks them out into dots. Every one of these dots is selectable and it's adjustable, so you can pick it up and move it. If you didn't like the alignment of any of these, just go to the direct selection tool and you should be able to select the shape and then just move it. You can close up gaps or you can separate things, or if you've got a break over this line here that needs fixing, then you can fix it. We could for example, grab this shape and just nudge it down a little ways. It's more over the line, we're not going to see a visible line through our pattern, but I don't think we're going to see it anyway, because I think this pattern has ended up looking pretty good. Let's just zoom out. Before we leave this, we can add a background to it and it's probably not a bad idea to do just that. My width and height of my pattern are 1,002 by 1,002, so I'm going to the Rectangle tool. I'm going to set a fill color which is different to my dots, and I'm going to make a rectangle 1,002 by 1,002. In other words, the size of my pattern pace. It has to be the size of the pattern piece. With it selected, I'm choosing Object, Arrange, and then Send to Back. At this point, things become just a little bit tricky. What we need to do is go to the Selection tool. We need to make sure that we still just have this rectangle selected and nothing else. You may want to be watching in your Layers panel to make sure that nothing jumps into the selection because it has a really nasty habit of doing so. You're just going to move this. Now, if you find that you move it and you take other things with it by mistake, try and move it with just the keystrokes, so maybe the Up and Down Arrow Key. What I'm doing is I'm just moving it into a position, that doesn't really matter where that position is, as long as when I arrive there, I'm not seeing any cutoff circles. I'm just going to click away from this and look into my design and make sure that I'm not seeing anything that is cut off. I'm just holding down the Space bar as I drag this around to make sure that it looks like everything is intact and I think it is, so I'm happy, I'll click ''Done''. Let's bring our artboards back with View and then Show Artboards. Control or Command 0 to square up the artboard in the visible area. I'm going to move these shapes out of the way for now, let's add a rectangle that is the size of our artboard, and that's 1,000 by 1,000 pixels for me. Let's square it up on the artboard, let's make sure that we have the fill targeted, and go to the Swatches panel and just add our pattern. At this stage, I'm going to scale it down with Object, Transform, and then Scale. I'm going to turn off Transform Objects. I'm just going to uniform scale this, 60% is a pretty good value. I'll click ''Okay''. Now the fun starts. If you're happy with your pattern, you can go and re-color it. With this rectangle selected, I'm going to click on ''Recolor Artwork'' and click ''Advanced Options''. If you don't see a box here, click and you'll be offered the opportunity to add a box and just click ''Okay''. Make sure this is an arrow too because that means you can then go into the edit area and change your pattern. Now this is the black. Now you can see when I'm dragging on this, everything's moving. What we need to do is click here to unlink those colors. This is the background color and this is the line color. But as you can see, nothing's happening when I drag it around. That's because it is set to black, but I can adjust it. I could actually make it white by just dragging on it here. Now I get control of it and I can do other things with it. I can also change the background color, so we're in fact inverting this. What was black is now white, and we're getting a totally different pattern. When you get what you like, just click ''Okay''. You still got your original design, you still got the edited design. They're are two separate patterns, so you can come in and select this and go back to Advanced Options and go back to Edit and make some further changes to this. Just making sure that you unlink the colors if you don't want them to travel together and I'm not thinking that they should be traveling together here for this. Click ''Okay''. That's a super cute pattern, super interesting, and way easier than you might at first expected this to make. 7. Pt 6 Flipped Half Circles Pattern: For this next pattern, we're going to use a different way of creating the dots and the rotations. Let's see how we're going to do that. I'm going to click New File. I'm going to create a document 1,000 by 1,000 pixels in size, but again, it doesn't matter what size your document is. I'm going to set just a fill color no stroke. I'm going to the Ellipse Tool and I'm going to make a circle which is 25 pixels in size, so 25 horizontal and vertical, I'll click Okay. I'm going to zoom in here so we can see a bit closer what we're going to be doing. I'm going to the Selection Tool. I'm just going to select on this shape. I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key, and drag a shape away. I'm not worried about alignment right now. I'm going to press Control or Command D that makes a duplicate of this shape, and I'm going to do it twice. This last one, I'm going to change its size. I'm going to come into transform options, which you can also get to by choosing Window and then Transform. I'm going to set these to 18 pixels. We'll click Away again, holding down the Alt or Option key, I'm going to drag a duplicate away, press Control or Command D and add another two. This last one, I'm going to re-size down to eight pixels. Might need to zoom in a little bit closer because it can be difficult to actually select and move this one the first time. I'm going to again hold down the Alt or Option key and drag a duplicate away. Now I need a lot more of these, so I'm going to press Control D another five times. You should end up with three large circles, three medium circles, and seven small ones. You're going to select over all of these and click here on this option which is vertical align center. Of course, you can also get to that align option via the align panel. It's going to have a look at that here. It would be here. Now, I'm going to select one of the shapes. It doesn't matter out of all of these which shape I select, but you need one with a thicker border around it, and you need to be selecting here, Align to key object. You're just going to experiment here with the distance. I've got it set to 20. I'm going to actually use this figure. I'm clicking here on Horizontal Distribute Space. What that does is it adds 20 pixels of space between every single one of these dots. We get a really nice even line. I'm going to press Control or Command zero to zoom back out, I'm going to select over all of these shapes and choose Object Group. Then I'm going to hold the Alt or Option Key and drag a duplicate away. Now, this topmost one, I'm going to select the group selection tool. I need to knock a couple of the shapes out of here, so I need to get rid of this one at the end. With the group selection tool, I can click over it and just press Delete. I also want to get the second, what is now the second to last one out. I'm just going to select over it and press Delete. I've still got my groups, it's just they're a little bit different this time. We're going to focus on this one. I'm again going to zoom in. We're going to use the rotation tool for this. I'm going to select my group. I'm going to click once on the Rotation Tool. This is the one here, rotate tool. I'm going to hover here over the very center of this shape. I'm looking for the tool tip, that tells me I'm in the center. When I'm there, I'm going to hold down the Alt key on a PC option on a Mac and just click now that doesn't kick open this rotate dialog for you. You're just going to de-select everything and start that again. You're going to set the angle to 30 degrees and we want the original set of objects as well as this group, so I'm just going to click Copy. Then I'm going to use that same Control D, Command D option, just going to press it until I get a set of shapes in perfect alignment. I want all of these they are looking absolutely perfect right now. I'm going to select over them. I'm going to make a group out of those with Object Group, so they're going to travel nicely together. I'm going to take this set and I'm actually going to make them a different color right now. I'm just going to make them red because that will make it easier for me to see if I've got them lined up and I'm just going to drag them down until they're positioned over the top of this other set. Now in the last panel, I can see that they're behind everything, I'm just going to drag them above everything, just might make life a bit easier. It also might make life a bit easier if you open up the transform panel and just make sure that the center top reference point of this shape is in a position which is a whole number. I'm just pressing the Down Arrow key so I can align this to a value that is a whole number. That might make aligning this shape a little bit easier. I'm going to zoom in to see what I'm doing here. Again, just try and make sure that I can get this center dot right in the correct position. There it is. It's in the right place now. Now I'm going to lock down the already rotated objects so that they won't move. I'm going to target the ones I'm working on and I am going to make it back to black now. Although if you wanted a multicolor version of this pattern, you could leave it at that color. Now, this set, I need to rotate into this position first of all. What I'm do, is you're going to turn that bottom rotation off because it just might be a little bit confusing to say. I'm going to the Rotate Tool, I'm going to do exactly what I did previously is hover over the center of this shape until I see the centered tool-tip appear, Alt, click on it. Again, that should kick open this rotate dialogue. This time the very first rotation we need to do is a 15 degree one. We don't want the original, we just want to move this starting position. I'm just going to click, Okay. If I turn on the invisible panel, you can see that what I'm doing is filling up these spaces. That's the idea is to fill up these spaces. This next rotation is going to be a full 30 degrees and we're going to make a copy. Again, the Rotate Tool, again hover over this position, Alt click. Make sure the Rotate dialog appears. Make it 30 degrees. This time we want the original that we had over here plus this copy, so we're just going to choose Copy. Since we've already done that, we can now use our Control or Command D, just going to take that until we fill in all the gaps. If you're not sure, you can just turn back on the bottom group so you can make sure that all those gaps are nice and filled up which they are. Let's just zoom out. This is going to be our base shape. But there's a whole lot of dots all stacked on top of each other here. Let's select over all of these shapes. Actually, I've got a set locked down, so let's just unlock that and select over everything. I'm going to choose Object Ungroup, until ungroup is no longer an option. I'm going to target this shape here and it should be the topmost one here. If I just click on it, I will select this one. This is the one I'm going to lock down. But we know that this dot appears on this line, this line so there's about 12 or 13 there, but I've locked one of them down. That's all I need to do because now I can come back and select just over that dot and now all the other ones are selected. If we have a look down here, you'll see there's a little blue selections appearing here. Would be really tricky to try and find all of those because we've locked down one of them, we can now just press delete and get rid of all of the rest so we don't have multiple shapes. Every one of these is just a single shape in this position. Let's select over everything before they start moving and let's group them with object group. Going to transform panel I'm just going to make sure that everything is a nice positions. While I'm happy with the position for this, let me just unlock that shape because I don't want to reshape things and miss out on my little dot. But I do want to adjust the height here. The width is fine I just like the height to be a whole number. We're only knocking half a pixel of something that's 400 pixels tall so you're not going to notice that at all. Let's just pop that loose dot into this group as well. Now, this group, we're going to apply a transformation to it so I'm going to select it, effect distort and transform, and then transform. I'm going to flip it so I'm going to choose reflect Y and I need one copy, and now I need to start moving it horizontally. Then I'm going to move it in a negative vertical direction so it's going back up the document. What I'm looking for, is I want these three dots here to go over the top of these three dots here. You might find it easier to try and align them horizontally before you align them vertically. I've got them aligned pretty well horizontally. Let's now have a look at the vertical. I think they're off a little bit. I think that's pretty good. I'll press Okay. I'm going to zoom in and make sure that we don't have eggs where we should have circles. Well, we've got a slide egg thing happening here. Now that I'm really close in, I can see that it's just marginally out of alignment. With this group still selected, I'm going to the appearance panel. You absolutely have to do this because you need to change this transformation, not add a new one. I'm just going to click on the Transform panel option there and just adjust this. I was just out by one pixel. I'll click Okay, so I've now edited that. Let's zoom back out and this is the shape that's going to be our pattern so I'm going to select over it and choose Object, Pattern, Make. I'm going to turn off the art board with view hide art boards because it's going to make it a little bit easier. I'm going to zoom out just a little bit. Here is my issue and you're going to have an issue. This is not going to pop directly into the exact correct position. If I show the tile edge, this is the tile edge. These three dots, and these three dots should be lined up. The vertical is just fine, in fact, the vertical only controls the distance between these sets of shapes, so vertical is not having any effect on the pattern lining up or not lining up. It's all to do with this width. I need to decrease the width to get these three dots to all sit over the top of each other. The idea is, I've got three small dots, three big dots, three small dots. I'm going to zoom in a little bit closer just to make sure that I've got circles and not eggs. From having done this before with these measurements, I'm pretty sure that 1454 is the measurement l'm looking forward to have these overlapping perfectly. Let's just zoom back out. We can see what our pattern is looking like. I'm going to set the copies to nine by nine. Has no effect on the pattern at all just has an effect on what I see on the screen. l've also turned off my tile edge so I can see that my pattern is looking absolutely wonderful. I'm going to turn my tile edge back on and I'm going to make the background for my pattern, which is going to be a rectangle, 1454 by 846. Let's just choose a color for it. Rectangle Tool, place it behind everything with Object, Arrange, Send to Bank. Then with the selection tool, pick up the rectangle that we just made and drag it into position so that nothing is cut off and you will need to just look at your dots and make sure nothing is cut off. The easiest thing is to work back until something is cut off and then you can have a look and see what you're doing. I'm looking over here, something is cut off. Everything looks reasonably good over here. I think this side is looking just fine. This is not looking good at all so I'm just going to drag upwards until I can see everything. This is looking perfect. Really happy with that. I'll just click Done. We'll turn our art boards back on again, drag our shapes out of the way, add a rectangle and fill it with our pattern. We'll scale it down because it's absolutely huge, and of course we can now re-color it so I'm going to the re-color artwork dialogue, click on Advanced Options. This time I don't have a black to map onto and sometimes you might find this is the situation because I have used pure black. Then I click in here and say yes, I do want to add another color. I'm checking to make sure I have an arrow there. I'm going to edit and I'm going to see where my colors are. Let's just unlock those and I've got three colors. One of these blacks is actually going to be the black in use. That's this one here. This one is not in use, so I'm just going to right-click it and remove it, and the purple is of course now the background. You can experiment with different settings for your background. I want to put this on a darkish purple. Click Okay. That adds, of course, another pattern and you can keep on making pattern after pattern after pattern. 8. Illustrator Dot Lines Patterns Project and Wrapup: We've now completed the video training portion of this course, so it's over to you. Your project for this class is to create one or more of these dotted line patterns in Adobe Illustrator. Post an image of your completed design as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and you've learned lots about making dots using blends, brushes, strokes, and more in Adobe Illustrator. Now, if you did enjoy this course and when you see a prompt that asks if you would recommend this class to others, please would you do two things for me, firstly, answer yes, that you do recommend this class, and secondly, write even in just a few words why you enjoyed it. Your recommendation will help other students to say that this is a course that they might like to take. If you see the follow link on the screen, click it and you'll be alerted when new classes are released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your questions and comments, and I look at and review all of your class projects. Thank you for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I'll look forward to seeing you in another class here on Skillshare soon.