Draw Safari patterns in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. On Safari! Draw Safari Patterns - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design For Lunch class Draw Safari Patterns 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. What we're going to do in this lesson is learn how to make patterns in Illustrator. You're going to make all four of the pattern shown here, the leopard skin, the dots, the zebra skin, and also that interesting sort pattern at the top of this image. We're going to borrow an online vector of the giraffe silhouette. That's going to be done automatically, but everything else is all about patterns today. Now there is one tricky pattern to make and that is the zebra skin. If you want to skip that, if it's a little bit too much for you, feel free to do so, you just put a few less layers in your document later on. But the rest of them are all very achievable, fun and interesting to do and I'll show different techniques in Illustrator. Thank you for joining me for lunch. Let's get started on our project and head to Africa. 2. On safari Part 1 Polka Dots Pattern: To start, we're going to create the document we'll be using and we'll create our polka dot pattern. I'll choose File and then New. You'll probably want to be using a square document, so I suggest you use something like 1000 points by 1000 points and it will want to be RGB. I'll click "Okay". The polka dot pattern is a really good place to start if you've never made a pattern before because it's very simple to do. You'll click here and select the ellipse tool. I'm going to make sure that black is my fill color and that I don't have any stroke at all. What I want to do is to just draw out a polka dot, a dot, so I'm going to hold the Shift key as I just drag out a small dot. With the dot selected, I'll choose object and then pattern make. This opens up the Illustrator Pattern Maker. At this dialogue, you'll just click "Okay". Let's try it, it will show you your pattern. Now we want to make our polka dots further apart, and we also want to offset them slightly. From this drop-down list here, you choose brick by row, and that just offsets the dots. Now to make the dots move further apart, look here for the width and height settings. Click this icon here if it's not locked, you want it to be locked, so you want it to be selected and look like a lock symbol. This means that both these settings are going to be adjusted when I start to move these numbers. I'm just clicking in the numbers here and I'm pressing the up arrow key to increase by one point at a time, shift up arrow to increase at a larger value. What you want to do is just say that the pattern of dots is looking like you want them to look the spacing and size of the dots. Now we're going to shrink this later on, so don't worry that it's not really quite the right size, it's the spatial consideration that you're looking at here. Do I have small enough dots and a big enough background? Is this one I want? I think this is pretty good. What I'm going to do next is to locate the done check mark up here at the top of the screen, and I'll just click that. What that does is it adds my new pattern to the pattern swatch, so I'm done with creating my polka dot pattern. I don't need this dot any longer, so I'm just going to select it and delete it because it would be easy enough to re-create that later on. Now if you just want to have a quick look and see how this is going to look, just create a rectangle on the screen here. Target the fill color, and go here into your swatches and just click on your new polka dot swatch, and you can say that this is how your polka dot swatch is going to work. Now we're going to put all this together later on, but now you've seen that it's all working and you're ready to go ahead and create the very next of your patterns. Before you do, let's just delete this rectangle because we don't need it any longer. 3. On safari Part 2 Leopard Skin Pattern: The second pattern that we'll be making is a really fun one. It's the faux leopard skin pattern. We're going to start out by selecting brown as the color that we'll be working in. I don't want to fill color, I'm actually going to be looking for the stroke color. I'm locating my stroke here, and I'm going to choose a brown that will be suitable for the leopard skin. I'm looking for something that's about a mid-brown here. I'm just selecting it from the palette, you could mix your own colors should you like. Interesting that that's probably not dark enough, so I'm going for this one here. Now we're going to use the blob brush, so you're going to click here on the Paintbrush tool and select the blob brush. We need to make some settings to the blob brush, so just double-click on that icon to open the Blob Brush tool options. You want to make sure that you've got a reasonable size for this and then adjust the setting between fidelity and smooth. We don't want us to be too smooth, so I'm going to drop down my fidelity towards the accurate. That means the brushes going to draw a little bit more like I'm drawing and not smoothing it out to make a totally smooth result. When I'm happy with that, I'll just click Okay. Now I'm just looking and saying that my brush size is way, way too small. The square bracket case on the cable work is exactly the same way in Illustrator as I do in Photoshop and other Adobe applications. Use the close square bracket K to increase the brush size and the open one to decrease it. Now I'm going to just start drawing. If you're familiar with leopard skin, you'll know that it's dots with black areas around them, so we're drawing the brown dots at this stage. All you want to do is draw something that looks reasonably like a dot, but it doesn't need to be perfect. In fact, it shouldn't be perfect because leopard skin is not perfect. You want to make sure that your dots look like imperfect shapes and you don't want to line them all up exactly right, you want them to fill in a pattern. In a minute, we're going to add the black and then we're going to make a repeating pattern for it. This is one of the lovely things about the blob brushes that makes it really easy to draw shapes in Illustrator and you can get some really interesting results using it. I'm thinking that that's pretty good for my blobs. Now let's go and get the black color that we're going to be using. Again, I'm going to target black here. When you're creating leopard skin, the idea is to create little half moons either side of the shapes that you've just created, and you can add a few extra dots as well, just in sort spots here. We don't want to make them all perfect dots because they're not going to be perfect dots if they're on a leopard. I'm just going to go around here and complete these, and then we're going to distress them a little bit as well. One of the other things about leopard skin is in these areas that are blank, you'll also have some little black areas. I made a mistake that is press Control or Command Z to undo it. I just want to fill in a couple of these areas with some black. I'm trying to draw this pattern as a square shape because I want it to be a repeating pattern later on and that is critical. Next thing is I'm going to choose the move tool and select over all of the pattern paces. It's going to move them a little bit more central here because they were walking off the edge there. Now we'll go to the width tool, this area of the toolbar, the moment it's showing the width tool, which is the topmost tool, but what we're aiming for here is the wrinkle tool. So you click on the wrinkle tool. Then I want you to double-click on the wrinkle tool icon because that opens its options, and you want to reset the options to their defaults if you don't already have that set. Now, the default is 100 points high and wide, so that just means I'm working with a circular brush. The intensity here is 50 percent, that means when I hit the shapes, it's going to work at 50 percent of its usual intensity. Whatever that happens to be, because we haven't used the wrinkle brush before, we really have no idea what it's going to do. I do, and I think that that's possibly going to be a bit much. Let's just take it down to 35 percent for now. Now, the wrinkle is zero horizontal, that means it's not going to wrinkle in a horizontal direction, and since animal fur flows in a single direction, this is exactly what we want, zero horizontal, everything vertical. Leave the other settings as they are and just click Okay. Now you're going to just hit the shapes and when you do, just click on them, you're wrinkling them. You can pull the wrinkle tool a little bit as you do so, you want to pull in a vertical direction and all you're doing is distressing the very edges of the shapes. It's going to click away from here. You can see how you are distressing the edges of the shapes here, and the result is that it looks a little bit more like animal fur than it did before. That's exactly what we're here to do. I'm just going to re-select my shapes and I'm going to continue with the wrinkle tool, target the wrinkle tool and just continue to distress around the edges of the shapes just a little bit to make it look a little bit more organic and a little bit less like it was painted with the blob brush tool. Don't need to do much, and that's why we dial down the intensity from 50 percent to 35 percent to give you a little bit more flexibility in it. Let's just click away from it and have a look and this is looking really good. Eventually, this is going to have a color behind it but we're going to put the color in later on. I'm going to select all these paces and let's just zoom out because we want to create a pattern, so we're going to need to see what the pattern is going to look like. When this happens to you, just press Control or Command zero and that just squares everything up. Nice little K stroke to use. Object, Pattern, Make, and again click Okay. That's exactly what we expect to happen. Here is our fur leopard skin pattern. That's not perfect, but you're probably going, wow, at this stage, did you realize how easy it would be to create a leopard skin pattern. This is awesome fun. Let's have a look in here. We need to squeeze up the width, perhaps a little bit, and we do need to squeeze out the height. I'm going to unlink this because with this pattern, we need to manage just a little bit more manually. Let's grab the width and I'm just going to start down or decreasing this value. I'm just looking at how my pattern is lining up. Now I see a pace of the pattern is running into itself here, but that's okay because that's actually making it look like a pattern. Once you've got that down, let's go and deal with the height. Again, I'm just going to bring the height in because I want to close things up to make it look like a repeating pattern. Now, if anything is looking wrong when you look out to the rest of the pattern, this is how it's going to look eventually, you can move them. The things that are inside this box that's marked out here can be moved, so if I want to move this piece I can. You can say that at most within the entire pattern when I do that. Any one of these elements can be shifted around, moved entirely from one place to another. You can rotate them, you can shrink them, you can do whatever you like with them, if you need to fill in the pattern a little bit more. Because we drew these as organic shapes, it doesn't matter if you stretch them. So you can easily stretch them to make them longer. Just be aware that because we use the wrinkle tool in a up-down direction, you won't want to rotate this around 90 degrees. That's not going to work because the fur is going to be going in the opposite direction. But you can certainly move it around, say 180 degrees, and you can certainly resize it. This one I want to make a duplicate off, so I'm going to click on it, and I'm going to hold down the Alt or Option key to drag a duplicate away. I'm going to rotate it to 180 degrees, so the first still looks like it's going in the right direction, but now I'm going to stretch it out. It doesn't look like the piece that it was a minute ago. I'm going to use it just to fill in that area. As soon as I'm happy with the pattern that I have created, I'm just going to click done and the pattern is now created for us. As we've finished with this, we can then just select it and delete it. The pattern is in here. Now at this point, at any point if you want to finish up and come back to this another day, you will need to save this document because otherwise you're going to lose your patterns. I'm just going to do File Save, and I'm going to save this as an AI document because we need to save it with only illustrated components in it so that we can continue. 4. On safari Part 3 Zebra Skin Pattern: The next pattern we'll make is a zebra skin and this one's going to be a little bit more complex. I suggest that you probably draw it with the blob tool again. I'm going to just increase the blob brush size to a reasonable size and I'm going to use black. I'm going to start by just drawing in some lines. Zebra skin is lines, so we're going to draw some lines here and we're going to thicken them a little bit and make them thin at the other end. Sometimes they're going to be in a Y shape. I'm going to draw this one. You can see that I'm working in a square because this is going to be my pattern shape later on and I want to be able to pull it all in together. There's another piece. Leopard skin often doesn't have a lot of white or color between the black lines so you want to bring the black lines fairly close together. This one is not actually going to reach all the way up to the top here. In a minute, I'm going to have a talk to you about how we're going to put this all together and what are some of the important things that you need to be looking for when you're drawing these lines. One of them is that you have the same number of finished elements here that you do up here. I've got 1, 2, 3, 4 and up here I've got 1, 2, 3, 4. I want to make sure that I keep that because I'm going to stick these together later on and I'm going to need to have something at the bottom here to stick to the top. If that's not making sense to you right now, just trust me that you're going to need the same number. Here I've got five. Up the top here, I've got six. So I'm going to need to double up here and add some more in just a minute. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I need some extras happening down here. I'm going to make this a short one. I don't really want to run into that line so I just pressed Control Z to undo it and just go back and make sure that I don't run into that line. Now let's finish with one more. Again, we're looking at filling in a rectangular shape here. You'll see in a minute why. The next thing to do is to select over all of these shapes and we're just going to simplify this a little bit. We'll choose Object and then Path and choose Simplify. What we want is a little bit less than the terms of these anchor points. I'm going to click on Preview and this is going to show us what it will look like if we select those options. I want to be a little bit more precise. I'm just going to increase the curve precision and until I get something that looks like this, it's pretty good at this point. I'm going to click Okay. I can see a couple of issues here. I've got I think a couple of holes in my shapes. I'm just going to zoom in here. You can see here that there's a hole in this shape, so I'm just going to paint over it, and I've also got a hole up here that I saw, so just going to paint over that as well. Now that we're done with that, we're going to create a pattern from it and this is where things get a little bit tricky. I'm going to select all my shapes, Object, Pattern, Make. Again, click Okay. This is our pattern and right now it's not looking a lot like zebra skin but it's going to. I suggest you try something like Brick by Row and then you can try different offsets here because what we're trying to do is to make sure that these things do not attach to themselves but things are offset a little bit. Something like a half, two-thirds, three-quarters, something is going to work for you. I'm unlocking these here and I'm bringing down the height because I want to start pulling these closer together. I'm going to see how they might join because in a minute what I have to do is join these pieces together. I want to make sure that they are going to join and you know what, this is looking pretty good. I'm actually really happy with how this is going to join up right now. I might bring the width in a little bit. Let's just test it. Not very much. I don't want too much overlap on the width, but I do want them to be running into each other height-wise because I'm going to do a little bit more work with that shortly. This one is causing me a little bit of stress so I'm going to move it down a little bit and just try and fill in that space a little bit better. This one too might be better over just a little bit. Again, trying to fill in that space. Now comes the tricky part. What we have to do is we have to join those pieces up so that they form consistent lines. We're still in the pattern maker, we're going to grab the Zoom tool and we're going to zoom over the top part here because this is where we need to start to work. We're going to select the direct selection tool because that allows us to adjust points. I'm clicking on this shape and clicking on this point here. I'm going to add another point so I'm going to the Add Anchor Point tool. I'm going to need a second point here at least and possibly one over here. Back to the Direct Selection tool. What I want to do is to start shaping this so that it runs into this line up here and joins pretty much seamlessly. This is going to take a little bit of work but it's a really good way to learn the Pen tool because that's what you're going to be using as anchor points, you're creating and adjusting anchor points here. All you're looking to do is to create something that looks like a smooth transition between these two shapes. I haven't quite got it here yet, but I'm going to continue to work on it. Click away just to test it and say how it's looking. Then go back in and fix it up. If you need to get a bit closer, just do that, just drag over it. Again, go back in and select your anchor point and just adjust this up to whatever you need to do to line these up and to try and do it seamlessly. Anytime you drag the entire path by accident, just press Control or Command Z to undo it and then just continue to work on it. I'm thinking I might get better mileage here if I just adjust this to try and make it work more smoothly. That's a pretty smooth transition there. You're not going to see that in the final pattern. I'm going to zoom back out a little bit. Go over here and see if I can see the connection, which I can, so I'm just going to select over it again with the Direct Selection tool. I'm going to come in here. I'm holding down the space bar to move things as I work. I'm looking for my anchor point which is down here by the looks of it, and then I'm just going to adjust it. Let's just zoom out a little bit. Here is its anchor point here. I'm just going to select it. I'm actually going to move the entire anchor point up, which I can legitimately do as long as I've got this seamless result and that's looking pretty good right now so let's just zoom back out a little bit and see how we're going. This is the first joint that I've managed to do. You can see this joined through here. What I'm going to do, and I'm going to speed the video up as I do it, is I'm going to join all of these pieces together at the top. This is going to take a little while and it is a little bit fiddly but by the end of it, we should have our zebra skin. I've just been checking the time as I've been working and this has taken me about six minutes to do even though I sped the video up for you. You can see that by joining everything at the very top edge, everything at the bottom has automatically been joined. The only thing that's concerning me right now is this shape here and this space. I think that I can build it out a little bit better. I'm just going to zoom in here, I'm going to look at this shape and I'm going to add a couple of anchor points. I've already got the anchor point tool here now selected, I'm just going to add at least one anchor point. Let's just see how this one's going here, and I'm just going to drag it out to fill up this space. Because I noticed that in the pattern, it really ended up being quite white. Let's click away from here, press Control or Command 0 just to check it. You can see that's nicely filled that space up. I could continue working on this, but for now let's just call that good for our zebra pattern. We're still working here in the pattern maker so we will need to finish by clicking done. That will save that pattern again as another pattern in Illustrator. Again, I can just select and delete this because my pattern has been made but what I will want to do, of course, is to resave my document because I want to save these patterns in here. 5. On safari Part 4 Overlapping Ovals Pattern: The final pattern that we're going to create is a relatively simple one. Again, I'm going to make sure that I have black as my foreground color. But because I want this one to bring color with it, this time I'm actually going to create a fill color. I'm actually going to make it white. White will give me a little bit of flexibility later on. I'm going to the "Ellipse" tool. I'm going to drag out an ellipse. I want this stroke to be quite a bit wider so I'm going to make it sort of this width and I'm going to create a pattern from this. I'm thinking it's looking a little bit too wide. Let's just go down, I've got a 12-point stroke here. I'm going to select the shape and I'm going to choose "Object", "Pattern", "Make". Again, click "Okay." Now with this pattern, I want the paces to overlap, but I want them to overlap vertically. I'm going to make sure that this is unlocked so that I can bring the height down. I'm going to start reducing the height and you can see that these paces are now overlapping each other. If I want them to overlap the other way, I just click here and then they overlap so that they're pointing upwards. That's a way that you can test and reverse your patterns because sometimes you will need to do just that. Now for the width, I want them a little bit closer, so I'm going to bring the width down independently. There's also a feature for the width that allows you to flip them here but because our shapes are automatically overlapping, they're going to actually look exactly the same whether we flip them or not in this situation. In other situations, that may not be the case. Once you're happy with the pattern, just click "Done". Again, that will be saved in your pattern collection so you can delete the shape, but you will want to choose "File" and then "Save" and make sure that you save your document because you do want to save that pattern. Now that we've created all the patterns that we're going to need, we're ready to go ahead and create the actual document itself. 6. On safari Part 5 Put it all Together: Now that we've gone to all the effort to create the patterns, we're ready to create our final image using those patterns. We're going to start by selecting the Rectangle tool here and drag out a rectangle that is the size of the artboard. Into this, we're going to put the overlapping pattern. I'm just going to open up my swatches palette here. I'm going to click on the last pattern that we made, which is the overlapping pattern. Now it's come into this document too big, but we can re-scale it. To do that with the rectangle selected, we'll choose Object, Transform, Scale. Now I don't want to transform the object itself because it's a good size. It's the pattern I want to transform. I'll deselect, Transform Objects and leave Transform Pattern selected. I'll click ''Preview''. Now all I need to do is to find a scaling for this pattern. I'm thinking something like about 60 percent is probably going to be pretty good. Now I'm seeing some small lines across the pattern. I'm actually going to click here on the 60 percent and just press the down arrow in the hopes that those small lines will disappear. That's a problem in Adobe Illustrator that nobody's ever really come up with a definitive solution for. If you see those little lines, you might want to just adjust the size of the pattern until they disappear. I'll just click ''Okay''. I also want to rotate this pattern. Again with the rectangle or the square selected, I'll choose Object, Transform. This time we're going to rotate it. Again with preview turned on, I don't want to transform the objects. I don't want to turn this square into a diamond shape. I have that de-selected. I do want to transform the pattern. Now I'm just going to drag it until I get the transformation that I want. About 320 degrees looks fine to me, so I'll click ''Okay''. Now that first shape is complete. I'm going to click on the Move tool. I'm going to deselect that shape. That's pretty important because I want to erase that my fill and stroke colors right now, but I don't want to do them for the shape that I've already created. I just want to do it for the next shape I'm going to create. What I want to do it is to just select a fill color at this stage. It doesn't really matter what it is, but I do want to see it as I work. I'm going to click on the Pen tool because we're going to draw using the Pen tool. If you've not used the Pen tool very much before, don't worry, because this is really pretty simple. I'm going to just hover over the edge of this artboard and I'm just going to click and drag. I'm going to do that in an upwards direction. Because I'm going to create a series of simple curves. I'm going to let go the ''Mouse'' button and then I'm going to click and drag here in a downwards direction. Then about halfway across the document, I'm going to click and drag upwards again, looking at the curve as I draw it, about 3/4 of the way across the document, click and drag again. Then finally I'm just going to click on the very edge of the document. I'm going to click again in the very bottom corner, click again in this bottom corner, and click again back where I started. That creates a closed shape. Now that I've created the shape, I'm going to select the Selection Tool and just click on the shapes so it is selected. We're going to fill it with a solid color. I'm going here, I'm going to select the sort color for that. It is possible to change this later on, but you will need to commit to a color at this stage just so that you can see how it's going to all fit together. Now I want a duplicate of this shape. With it selected, I'll choose Edit, Copy and then Edit, Paste in Place. That adds a duplicate of this shape immediately on top of the original. All I need to do now is to just size it down a little bit. Because this is going to be filled with my next pattern. With the shape still selected, I'm going back to my swatches palette. I'm going to fill it with the zebra skin pattern. I'll just click on it here. Now you can see that the zebra skin pattern has come in with a brown filled. Brown fill is inherited from the shape behind it because this pattern was designed as a black pattern with no fill at all. We need to put a fill behind it if we want it to look like black on white. Now that's easily done. I still have my shape selected, so I'm going to the Appearance panel. You can see here that the fill is here. What I need is a second fill. I'm going to click here to add a new fill. You can see that it's coming with exactly the same fill as previously. I'm actually going to leave this one on top. I'm going back to the original one I created. What I want to do is to put some white coloring behind it. I'm going to just click the drop down here and select White. That's added a solid white fill behind my zebra skin. Now if this pattern is too large for you, you can scale it down. What we'll need to do is to make sure that we select the fill that we want to scale, which is this one here. Now we'll choose Object, Transform, Scale. Now it's defaulted to the settings I used previously, 52 percent scale on this pattern. We have Transform Objects deselected and Transform Patterns selected. I think I want this just a little bit bigger, so I'm just going to take this up a little bit and click ''Okay''. Now we're ready to create the next pattern piece. Again, I'm going to click outside this to deselect the shapes so that any selections I make now are not going to affect the shapes that I've already created. I'm going to select the color, just any old color to fill this with while I draw it. I'm going back to the Pen tool. I'm going to click on the very edge here, the very edge of the artboard and drag in a direction. Actually I think I'll come down this time. Then I'm going to click and drag, click and drag, click and drag. Then just click on the very edge here to finish the shape at this point. I'm going to click at all the corners here. Click back where I started. Then I'm selecting the Selection tool. We have this shape selected. Again, we're going to fill it with a color because this is going to be the separation between the zebra skin and the polka dots that we're going to add next. For now I'm just going to select the brown color and see how that looks. Probably that one. I need to duplicate this shape. Again, with the shapes selected, I'll choose Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste in Place. Still with the Selection tool selected, I'm just going to drag down a little bit to make the differentiation between the pattern I'm about to add and the line that's separating the pattern from the pattern above. I have fill color selected here. I'm going back into my Swatches panel and this time I'm going to select my polka dots. Now you can see a couple of things here. The polka dots again have inherited the color from the shape behind. If we wanted to have a different color, then we're going to need to change that color. Also, the polka dots are really way too big right now. Let's go and scale them first. Object, Transform Scale. Again, same thing as before. Transform Objects turned off, Transform Patterns turned on. I want this to be a whole lot smaller. I'm thinking something like this. I'll click ''Okay''. Now I'm going to the Appearance panel. I'm going to add another fill. I'm going to select the fill behind the fill I just added because this is the one behind the top-up layer of polka dots. I'm just going to fill this with the color I want behind my dots. For this it's going to be a rich red. Now we've finished that, we're on to the last shape. Again, deselect everything so that you can start working independently of these shapes. I'm going to choose a different color so we can see it as we draw. Grab the Pen tool. Again, click and drag on the edge of the artboard here to set off in a direction that you're headed in. Just continue to click and drag until you get to the very edge of the artboard where you just going to click once and then click at each of the corners and click back on your starting point. Select the Selection tool. Again, we're going to fill this with a color, remembering that directly below this, the last pattern that we're going to use is our faux leopard skin. I'm going to choose probably a black at this stage. Now I think this one's a little bit small. I'm now just going to drag it up before I finish so I can actually make it take up a little bit more room here. If you ever need to alter these, all you're going to do is go and select the Direct Selection tool and click on the point that you want to adjust and then just drag it in the direction you want it to go. Any one of these points can be adjusted very easily, just the way you would adjust any point in Illustrator. I'm pretty happy with that now, again, I'm going to make a copy of it. I have it selected. I'll choose Edit, Copy and then Edit, Paste in Place. Again, we're going to make it just a little bit smaller. Again, we're going to fill this front piece with the last of our patterns, which is our faux leopard skin. Again, it's too big, but that's fine because we know exactly how to deal with that. Object, Transform, Scale. I'm just going to look for a good scaling on this particular pattern and click ''Okay''. Before we finish at this point, I'm looking here and I'm just a little concerned because I think it would look better if there was a color behind this particular pattern. If you remember when we designed this pattern, it was black edges and a white fill. It's not going to be as easy to add a color to this because it already has a fill. It's not a transparent pattern. Let's go to the Appearance tab here, and I'm going to add another fill. Just going to select this back one, and I'm going to replace it with a color. You can see that this had no effect at all. But it is there because if I drag it above the first fill, you can see that it's a solid color. But the two fills can't interact because they're both solid, there's no transparency in either of them. One thing you can do with fills like this is that you can blend them together. I have this orange one on top. I'm just going to click on the Opacity option here, and I'm going to change it from normal blend mode to multiply. You can see that now we can see the colors through. I could have done this with either of these last just provided I selected the one that was at the top. If the patent fill had been on the top, I could have just selected it and turn its opacity into multiply, and the result would have been identical. We're getting some color in behind the pattern, even though the pattern itself didn't have any transparency built into it. The final step here is going to be to add our giraffes. On the next video, you'll see how to find the giraffe and add it to your final project. 7. On safari Part 6 Finishing touches: To finish off the project, I found a vector giraffe that you can download and use. I've given you the URL and you'll just come here and click "Free Download". Once you've downloaded it, you can just open it up in its folder. I'm just going to extract all the files from this zip file. Inside here, you'll find that there is a vector AI file. I'm just going to double-click it to open it inside Illustrator. With the Select tool selected, you'll just click on the giraffe and copy it, edit copy. I'm going to just close this file because we don't need it any longer. I'm going to paste it into our design, choosing edit paste. Now it's quite a bit smaller than it needs to be so I'm just going to position it, hold the Shift key down so that it's constrained to its original proportions. I'm just going to size it up large enough to fit in my project. Then press Control or Command 0 just to square everything up. Now you can, if you wish to, change the color of your giraffe by selecting it and then just select another color, but I think I'll leave mine as brown. I'm going to add a drop shadow to it to raise it off its background. With the giraffe selected, I'll choose effect, stylize, drop shadow. I'm going to click on the preview so I can see what the drop shadow is going to look like. It's looking pretty good, so I'll just click "Okay", and then click away from it. Before you finish with this project, if you want to be able to use the patterns that you have created, you're going to need to save them. I'm going to click to open the swatches panel here, and I'm going to get rid of everything except the swatches that I created, those pattern swatches. I select the first shift clicked on the left, and then just dropping everything else into the trash can here. Again, I'm going to take these as well. What I'm left with is just my four pattern pieces. I'm going to save this as a file by clicking here on the down arrow and choose Save Swatch Library as AI. I'm going to call this Safari 2 because I already have a Safari 1, and then just click "Save". Now the beauty of this is that when you create a new document in the future, I'm going to choose File New and just open a new document here. You'll see that your pattern swatches are not in the swatches library here, but you can add them by clicking the down pointing arrow. Choose Open Swatch Library, User Defined, and then go and select the one that you just saved. In my case, it's Safari 2. Now, we get a little panel with my safari patterns in it. With the swatches open, I'm going to click on the first one and shift click on the last. I'm going to drag and drop them into my swatches panel. Before we finish up, let's just have a recap of what we've done here. We've learned how to create four different patterns using the pattern maker tool in Illustrator. You've learned how to scale patterns and how to rotate them, as well as how to fill patterns with a fill behind them for those patterns that you create as transparent patterns. You've seen the process for finding and downloading a vector graphic and adding a shadow to it to complete your illustration. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design For Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon. 8. On Safari - Additional Information for Illustrator CS5, CS5.5, CS4 users: The pattern making tool that I used in these videos is only available in Illustrator CS6 and lighter. So if you're using Illustrator CS5, 5.5 or CS4, you won't have access to this tool. In this additional video, I'm going to show you very quickly how to make patterns in earlier versions of Illustrator. You're still going to need to watch the video to see how to make the zebra pattern in detail, and also how to make the leopard skin pattern in detail. I'm just going to make smaller versions of those just to show you the basics of the patterns. We're going to start with a polka dot pattern. So I'll choose "File" and then "New", and I'm going to make a new document that's 100 points by 100 points in size, RGB color mode. I'll click "Okay". In the middle of this document, I'm going to create a filled circle. So I'm choosing "Ellipse tool", I'm going to drag out a circle holding the Shift key as I do so. I want this to be filled with black and have no stroke at all. I'm going to select this shape and I want to center it in the art board. For this, I need to see the align tool, so I'll choose Window and Align. I'm going to click here on the flat menu and choose "Show Options", because I want to make sure that I'm aligning everything to the art board. That's critical. So I'm going to click here on "Horizontal align center" and "Vertical align center." Now that I've created one polka dot, I need to copy and duplicate it into all four corners of the art board. To do this, I'll select it. I know that my document is 100 points by 100 points, so I'm going to have to move it 50 points each time. So I'm going to choose Object, Transform, and then Move. To move the shape up to this corner, I'm going to need to type minus 50 points into the horizontal, minus 50 points into the vertical. You can see that it's moved it up there. But I don't want to lose this version, so I'm going to click "Copy". Now I'm going back to this version and I'm going to move it down here, object, transform, move. I still want to go minus 50 in a horizontal direction, but I want to go plus 50 in a vertical direction, and I want to again make a copy. If I tab away from this, you'll see that the shape just goes down to where it's going to be. So I can confirm that this is where I want to copy it to. So I'll click "Copy". We'll go back to the central shape here, object, transform, move. This time I'm going up to this corner, which is vertically minus 50, but horizontally plus 50. I'm going to tab away from here, so I can check it's going in the right position and I'll click "Copy". Finally down here, object, transform, move, we're going in a horizontal plus 50 direction, we're going in vertical plus 50 direction and remove the minus here, click away from it, check if it's going in the right place, click "Copy". Now we need a rectangle, the size of the art board. We know the art board is 100 by 100, so we need a rectangle. It is 100 by 100. I'll click here on the "Rectangle tool." I'm just going to click once on my document, make sure that the width and height are set to 100 each. I'll click "Okay". I'm going to the selection tool, I'm going to select my shape. Again, I'm still working with this align to art board options set. So I'm going to center my shape on the art board. I'm going to remove the fill from it, so it has no fill and no stroke. It's still selected, so I'll choose "Object", "Arrange", "Send to back". We need a shape, the size of our pattern piece, which is this 100 points by 100 points, and we need it to be behind absolutely everything. I'm going to zoom out just a little bit. So I can see everything. I'm going to my selection tool and I'm going to select absolutely everything here, five dots and that rectangle that is at the very, very back. I'm going to the swatches panel. I'm going to drag and drop everything into the swatches panel up here, and that makes a pattern swatch. I can now delete all of these shapes. I'm going to create another rectangle that is the size of the art board and I'm going to center it in place, and now I'm going to apply my pattern to it. The pattern comes in at full size, so it looks exactly like the shape that we just created. Let's re-size it. I'll choose "Object", "Transform", "Scale". I want my object to be left the same size it was. I just want to scale down the patterns, so l can see how it looks. I'll click "Okay". You can see that we have now created our polka dot pattern. Now let's move on and create the four leopard skin pattern. I'm just going to delete this shape, we don't need it any longer. For the four leopard skin pattern, I'm going to use the blob brush as I did in the video. I'm going to make sure that I have selected a brown color here, and I'm going to make it the stroke color, because I'm using the blob brush. I'm just going to make a couple of shapes. I'm not going to go into all the detail of this four leopard skin. I'm just going to make a couple of shapes that we can work with. Now I'm going to change and use black. I'm going to make the extra shapes around my four leopard skin. Probably, I can have other little small shape up here. Now we're going to the wrinkle tool. It's a little bit on the big side, so I'm going to double-click on it and just shrink it in size. I'll use 50 points width and height. Now I'm just going to wrinkle these shapes to create something that will be my four leopard skin. When I'm happy with that, I'm going to move these shapes around there. When you're creating free-form patterns like this in Illustrator, you're going to move things over two sides of the art board. The two sides that you do this to have to be adjacent to each other. So we can use this side here and we can use the bottom. We're going to use two sides that are adjacent to each other. We could not do this, because that would be the paces of the pattern of a three sides and that's not going to work. So we only need them to overlap two sides, and we can size them a little bit bigger if we need to. Now, any of these shapes that are over a side or two sides of the document needs to be copied. So this one is over this side, so I'm going to select it, everything that is over that side. Now, I need to take this shape and copy it over here. I'm going to do that with object, transform, move. As I did with the polka dot, I'm going to move this 100 points in a positive direction. I'm going to click on "Preview", so that we can see where it's going. The fact that it's overlapping this shape doesn't matter right now, and I'm going to click "Copy", because I want a duplicate. I do however, want to move this piece. I don't want to move anything that I have duplicated over the edge because otherwise, that's going to cause my pattern of fail. So these two shapes need to stay exactly where they are right now. This shape needs to be copied up here, so I'm going to select it. I'm going to choose "Object, "Transform", "Move". I'm going to zero the settings out, so I'm not confused about what's happening here. That's its original position. So this is where I'm going to start from and I'm looking at where I need to put this shape. Well, I need to move it minus 100 points in a vertical direction. So I'll type minus 100. I'll tab away, check that it's going to be moved exactly where I want it to, which is correct, and I'll click "Copy". These two shapes are now in position. We cannot move them, if we move them, we're going to destroy the pattern. We can move this piece and we can re-size it. What we can't do with it is we can't put it over any of the edges without also duplicating it. So I'm just going to leave it where it is right now, and this is going to be a perfect pattern piece as soon as we created as a pattern, and to do that, I'm going to need another one of these rectangles, the size of the art board. On clicking on the "Rectangle Tool", I'm clicking once on a document. The art board is 100 points by 100 points, I'll click "Okay". I'm going to select this shape, and I'm going to make sure that it's centered over the top of the art board. Now I'm going to set it to no fill, no stroke. It's still selected. We now put it behind everything. Object, arrange, send to back, has to be at the back of everything. Now I'm going to select all the shapes, the ones that are over the age of the art board, the ones that are in the art board, and the rectangle that is the size of the art board. We're going to open up the swatches panel on. I'm going to drag and drop this whole lot into the swatches panel. Now I can just delete everything, because I don't need it any longer. To test this, I'll click the "Rectangle Tool" and click once in the document. I'm going to create a rectangle 100 points by 100 points, the size of the outboard, click "Okay". I'm going to center this, and I'm going to fill it with my path, which is coming in at 100 percent size. Well, let's re-size the pattern, object, transform, scale. We don't want to scale the object, we do want to transform the pattern. I'll click "Okay". You can see that we have a sameness pattern. It's not a very sophisticated one. If you follow the initial video in creating the four leopard skin pattern, you'll create a better pattern than this, but the basics are identical. Anything that is either one of the sides of this document needs to be duplicated to the other side, so that you can create your repeating pattern. 9. On Safari - Additional video 2: For the zebras skin pattern, I'm just going to make two pieces of it. I have the same document, a 100 points buy a 100 points in size. I'm going to blow brush. I'm going to set it so that it has a black color. I'm going to create my zebra stripes. I'm going to go over the top of this art board and I'm going to try and come across the bottom of the art board in pretty much the same position as I went over the top. That's going to be fairly critical. If I want to add sum extra bits into my pattern, I can do so. I just want to make sure that in this case I don't go over the edge up here. I'm going to make one more piece of this pattern. I'm just going to drag it down to here, crossing the art board at about the same place as I crossed it before. To create our pattern, we need to crop all of this to the size of the art board. I'm going to create a rectangle the size of the board and I'm going to center it over the art board. I'm going to make sure it has no fill and no stroke. Because I created it last it's on the very top. I'm going to select everything, the rectangle, the size of the art board and these two paces of the zebra pattern. I'm going to the Pathfinder. I'm going to choose Window and then Pathfinder. Down here is an option called Crop. I'm just going to click once to crop this to size. I'm going to check my last part to seen what I've got here. It looks like I've got a couple of paces of the original pattern for the leopard skin there, which I don't want. I'll just trash those. It also looks like I've got a lot of paths here, more paths than I thought I was going to have. I'm going to select this group and choose object Ungroup. I'm going to do that again until Ungroup is no longer an option. Now let's checked here and see what we've got. Well, that pace here is this path here. This pace hear is that path, which means that all of these other paces are nothing at all. I'm going to select all of them and drag them onto the trash can because I don't want to over confuse the issue here. I just want these two paths. I'm going to select them remembering that my art board is a 100 points by a 100 points. I'm going to copy these and move them up the top here. Object Transform, Move. I want to move them negative 100 points in a vertical direction, but I don't want to move them horizontally, so leave horizontal at zero and I'll type in minus 100 points here. Tab away. Double-check that they're going into the right position and click "Copy." Now we're going to work in this area here. I'm going to zoom into it. What we need to do is to move the anchor points that control these two shapes so that they align perfectly with the shape above. To do this, we're going to need the direct selection tool. If you start moving these and they move the whole shape, you need to undo it. Otherwise, as soon as you move that hole shape, the whole thing is going to fall apart later on. You need to be a 100 percent sure that you're on the anchor point and not the whole shape. You're just going to move it and shape it so that it looks smooth here. That anchor point looks really good. I'm going to select this one now. Make sure I'm on the anchor point and just move it into position. Make sure that it looks pretty smooth. If the transitions not really smooth, I need to come in here, make sure that I've got the write anchor point and just re-shape it. You can't reshape the anchor point for this top shape. It's got to be this one that's actually on the art board. Let's come in here. I've got this anchor point here. I'm going to move it across here so that it forms a nice smooth transition here. Let's go on and select this one. I've got it wrong so I'm going to undo it. Make sure I get just the anchor point and move it across a nice smooth transition. I am going to zoom back out by pressing "Control" or command zero. You can probably now understand that the reason why we try to draw these stripes so that we would start and finish in about the same position, was that ultimately we were going to have to join these together. I'm just going to now get rid of these top ones. I'm going to the selection tool, I'm going to select over these two shapes which I now no longer need and just remove them. These shapes are now perfectly aligned for my pattern. Now of course, you're going to need a lot more shapes than this and you do not want a zebra stripe that looks like this. But I'm going to leave you to follow the instructions from the earlier videos about how to make good-looking zebra's stripes. We're just concerned right now on how to make a pattern from them. I'm going to the rectangle tool again, I'm going to click here, I'm going to make a rectangle, a 100 points by a 100 points. Click. I'm going to center it. I'm going to the selection tool. I'm going to make sure that it is centered. My align tools are just here as well, so I can use those. I'm going to remove the fill so it has no stroke, no fill. It still selected. I'm going two send it to the back. Object Arrange, send to back. Now of course my pattern is missing all stripes, but you known what, I could just make a duplicate of one of these. Let's just go and add an extra stripe in here. I'm going to Alt+Shift drag just to put that into position. I could rotate it to. Let's just rotate it around a 180 degrees. That'll give us an extra stripe for our zebra pattern. These shapes, I'm just going to check and make sure that the filled paths all on top of my rectangle, which they are. I'm going to select over everything and I'm just going to display the swatches panel and drag and drop this into the swatches panel. I don't need this any longer, so I'll delete it. I'll make a rectangle the size of the art board and just square it up with the art board. I'm going to fill it with my new pattern and this is going in at a 100 percent. Let's see what it looks like when we shrink it. Object Transform, Scale. I don't want to scale my objects, so I'm just going to deselect that and let's take this up to about 40 percent. If you say those little white lines through your pattern, just increase or decrease the scale by one or two percent and you'll get rid of them. I've just dropped this down, 40 percent. I've got rid of it. I'm just going to click, "Okay." Those are the basics of creating the zebra pattern for your safari pattern set. The last pattern we're going to create is an actual fact the most difficult to do this way. Let's see how we would go ahead and do it. We're going to start with a white fill and a black stroke. We're going to create an ellipse using the ellipse tool. I'm going to drag it out. I'm approximating about a third of the way across this shape. I'm going to increase the stroke width quite a bit. I'm going to the selection tool, I'm just going to line this up here. What I want to have happen is, I want this marker here on the path to line up perfectly with the edge of the artboards, so, I'm just going to move that into position and just test it at this point. Now I want to test it stretched across the documents. I'm going to choose Effect, Distort and Transform, Transform. I want two copies here. I want to turn Preview on, and I want to just start moving them. I want to increase this horizontal value, and I want to make sure that when this shape here is pretty much over the edge here, it's not perfect, but it's near enough right now, to make sure that I've got overlaps but not to much of an overlap. I think this is going to work pretty well. I'm just going to cancel out of here because I just wanted to test the size of my shape. Now I'm going to move this shape downward. I'm going to hold the Shift key as I move it, because I don't want to lose its position relative to third of the artboard here, but I just do want to move it a fare way down the document. Having done that, I want to duplicate it. I'm going to choose Object, Transform, Move. I want to move one so that it is not minus 100 points in a vertical direction, and I want to make a copy of it. Now I've got my two shapes. I want to create a blend between them. I'm going to my Blend tool, I'm going to click on one shape, and then click on the second one to make my blend. Now I need more overlaps than this, so I'm going to double click on my Blend tool. I'm going to select Specified Steps, and I'm going to add another couple of shapes in here. Have Preview turned on so I can see what's happening here. Now this is not quite the look of the pattern that we want because here the overlaps are all wrong. I'm going to click Okay though, and I'm going to change the way they overlap. To do this, I'll choose Object and then Blend, and I'm going to reverse front to back, and this will give me the loops the way I want them to look. I'm just going to zoom out hear so I can see what's going on and just make sure that everything is looking reassembly okay. With this blend, I want to make sure that I'm going to have all the loops that I need. I'm just going to start moving this up. It just intersects, it just touches here. I'm looking to make sure that I'm going to have the write number of circles that I'm going to need. Well, I think I'm pretty good here. Now what I want to do is, I want to take this blend and move it across to make those extra shapes that we already planned for. Before I do this, however, I want to expand my blend. I'll choose Object, Blend, Expand. If we have a look in the last pallet, we're going to have a group with all of these shapes in it. I'm going to take this and I'm going to break it out of the group. Object, Ungroup. I want everything neat and tidy at this point. Now, I'm going to do my distort and transform. Effect, Distort and Transform, Transform. I need two copies. I need to be able to see what I'm doing, I'm going to start increasing this horizontal value until I move this across so that they are aligned neatly. Now we tried 34 points earlier, and I think it's just not quite right. I think it needs to be 33.5. So I'm going to type 33.5, and just click Okay. Now we can go in and check this. Now I'm looking at a transform, so all of these shapes are just based on these shapes over here. I'm going to need to select all the shapes here that we have from our original blend, and I need to expand them. Object, Expand, Appearance. Double check over here as to what's happening, Object, Ungroup. I want to break this out into just individual objects. I don't want lots of groups sitting here. Let's just click away and let's zoom out just a little bit. I want to check this set of shapes here, and it looks like they're pretty much over the edge of the artboard in exactly the position that I wanted them to be. I think I'm pretty good with this pattern. I'm now going to make my rectangle the size of the artboard. I'm going to click the rectangle tool, click once 100 points by a 100 points, make sure it is centered on the artboard, no fill, no stroke, object, arrange, send to back, and now I'm going to select everything, and I'm going to drop it into the swatches panel here. Now, just in case I need to make changes to this because it is the most difficult of the patterns to make, I'm going to leave this pattern pace in place, and I'm not going to delete it at this stage because I don't want to lose it in case I just need to alter things very slightly. I'm going to create a second artboard just to test it. I'll click on the Artboard tool, and I'm going to create another artboard that's 100 points by 100 points. I have not got the right size, but I can just type that in up here. One hundred by 100. Going back to my Selection tool, going back to my Rectangle tool, I'm going to make 100 by 100 point rectangle, and I'm going to line it up to the artboard, I'm going to fill it with my pattern, I'm going to test it and then choose Object Transform, Scale. I don't want to scale the shape itself, I just want to scale a pattern and I'll click Okay. Yes, this looks really good, this pattern is repeating really nicely. Now that I known it's going to repeat it correctly, I can do two things. Firstly, I can get rid of this because I don't need it any longer, and I can get rid of this second artboard. I'm going to get rid of everything that's on that second artboard, go to the Artboard tool, click on this Artboard's close button, and that just deletes it. Go back to the Regular tool. Now I've got all the patterns in place that I need to go ahead and to finish my Safari pattern project. I hope that this has been of help to you if you're using Illustrator CS5 5.54 or earlier, that you'll now be able to make the patterns that you need to complete the pattern making Safari. I'm Helen Bradley, thank you for joining me for this Illustrator for launch on Safari course.