Drawing to Pattern in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Create Patterns from Drawings in Adobe Illustrator - Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Drawing to Pattern in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. In this class, we'll take drawings from your sketchbook into Illustrator and turn them into seamless repeating patterns. You'll learn how to choose the best images to use, how to trace the images, color them, and make a pattern from them. I'll also show you how to build a small pattern collection from the drawing so that you get multiple patterns from a single set of drawings. Once you've completed the course, you'll be ready to sift through your sketchbook and start making fantastic original surface pattern designs. Without further ado, let's get started. 2. Pt 1 Choose images to use and open them in Illustrator: Before we start into making the pattern, let's have a look at the illustrations that would make good illustrations to use for this class. I've just got some pages that were scanned from my sketchbook so it's going to run through a few of those. This one's pretty good. All the shapes are encapsulate and so it's very easy to drop color into these areas. If I've got a complaint about these drawings, it's probably that the lines are a little bit thick. Let's have a look down here. There's some interesting little illustrations we could use here, but not a lot to color. You can see that I've inked in a lot of these designs. There's not going to be an easy place to drop color into them. There's already some gray in here, so that might be a little bit difficult to knock out, probably not the best option to use. We're actually going to use something that looks like this set here. I've redrawn them for the purposes of this class, but line weights like this are pretty good and there's no color in these down here. The color in here would be a little bit tricky to knock out and there's probably not a lot of options for dropping color in here, but they would be fine to use. I just think that this set is probably better. You'll want to have a look through your sketchbook and just see what you've already got in your sketchbook that you could use. If you want to, you can go ahead and obviously draw some images to use. I'm going to give you the sketches that we're working with in this class. If you don't have anything to work with, don't worry, you're going to get my set of beach houses. Now in Australia we call these bathing boxes. While I've called them beach houses in the file name, I'm going to call them bathing boxes from now on because that's what they're. Let's just open this file up in Illustrator. Now I'm opening up the JPEG image and it's huge. Let's have a look. I've just gone to the selection tool. The size of it up here is over 3,000 pixels wide and over 4,000 pixels tall wall. That's just really huge to be working with. What I'm going to do is click this link here to constrain the width and height. I'm just going to make it 2,000 tall. If I make it 2,000 tall, the width is going to change appropriately. Now, having done that, I'm going to select my bitmap image because the shape of my artboard isn't matching my image and it would really help me if it did. With my image selected, I'm going here to the artboard tool. I'm going to click it once to target it and then double-click it to open the artboard options. I'm going to the preset list and I'm just going to scroll to the very top. I'm going to choose fit to selected art because I've selected my artwork and this is going to make the artboard the exact same size as my artwork. Just a nice handy way of operating, I'll click 'Okay'. Now what I can do, I'm going back to the selection tool here, is if I press my favorite keyboard shortcut, which is Control Zero on the PC , and Command Zero on the Mac, then I just size up my Illustrator screen to match the artboard. Now we're seeing the full page of images. This is the set of images you're going to get. In the next video, we're going ahead and we're going to start tracing them. 3. Pt 2 Convert the drawings to vectors using Live Trace: Now you'll notice that this image hasn't been particularly well captured and that's just fine, this is not a photographic assignment, we just want the line work out of this. Now we're going to start by cropping it, just for convenience so we get rid of this garbage down the side. If you're working with a version of Illustrator that has the crop tool for bitmap images, this is what you're going to do. You'll select over the image and you'll see crop image appear up here. You'll click on that to get the crop handles and you're just going to drag them around the area that we want to clip. we're going to trace all these bathing boxes in one step. You want to knock out most of the sort of paper texture around the images and just get in close to the artwork. But don't be too careful it doesn't need to be exact. I'm going to click apply and that will just size this down so that we've removed the black, we're not going to try that. And so we've just got selected here now the content that we're actually going to trace. Now not everybody's going to have that tool so I'm going to press Ctrl or Command Z to zoom back out. The tool you're going to use if you don't have that crop is a marquee. So you're going to drag out a rectangle over the top of this shape that you are going to use as a sort of clipping guide. We're just going to create that, I'm going to select both the rectangle and my artwork, right-click and choose make clipping mask. That's going to do the same thing, It's going to remove the edge off this image. But it is a clipping mask so when we progress to the next step, we're going to do it slightly differently, if we're using a clipping mask. If you are able to crop your image, you're just going to select your cropped image. If you had to use the clipping mask process, you're going to the last pallet of I am going. You'll find as a clipping group there, you've got your clipping mask rectangle on top and you've got your image underneath where you're just going to target the image. So you just want that to be selected. If you do that, then you're going to see the image trace options. If you don't do that, you're not going to see image trace. And if you go to object and image trace, it's not going to be available. You have to select the thing that you're going to trace before you can trace it. Just make sure if it's not appearing up here, you've done something wrong in select what you actually do need. We're going to click Image trace, and that's the same whether you crop the image or you using this clipping mask process so we're going to click that. Now, we're warned that it's going to proceed slowly, just ignore that, just click okay, it's pretty fast really. An illustrator does what's called a preliminary trace. Now, usually this is the point at which you look at the image Trace tool and go, "Oh, well, that's pretty awful." In actual fact, that's done a reasonably good job here, but I think it's not the best jobs so let's see if we can improve on it. What it's done is, it's sort of a smooth out the line so they've got a sort of different look to the original. They're not looking quite so inky and I would like it to look a little bit more hand-drawn, so we're going up here to the image trace panel. If your panel doesn't look this big, it's because you've got the advanced options hidden, so you're just going to click to open those up. Now we need to make some choices, but we're going to turn preview off because this is the only dialogue that I'm familiar with in Illustrator, that has preview turned on by default, and it's the only one that you don't want preview turned on by default. Because if you make any adjustments here, as soon as you make an adjustment, illustrator is going to go and retrace it and you're going, "Well, wait a minute, I wanted to make more than one adjustment, well, that's just too bad." What we're going to do is, we're going to increase the paths and corners. Typically, these two will go in the same direction and what they do is that they give you a trace that's closer to the original and that's what I wanted. I wanted something a bit more like what I had created. Now let's turn preview on and let's see what this trace now looks like. You can see we've gone back to something a little bit more inky not, quite perhaps as inky as I would like. There's another feature here that we can use, which is called threshold. And what threshold does is, it tells Illustrator at which point a pixel is to be called white and a pixel is to be called black. You'll remember that I didn't have a really good starting image, It was sort of gray yellow in the background and so illustrator right now is trading that sort of gray yellow background as being white and the line work as being black. Well, we might be able to get a better result by saying to illustrator, "Treat a bit more of the image as being black. " So let's see what that looks like. Here you can see the lines are thickening up they are way more like what I had in the original artwork. Let's try a bit further, still going well, we're still getting it. At this point, I might say maybe the lines are little bit thick. I just want to take it too far to show you what too far looks like. This is too far. All of a sudden that tipping point between what's white and what's to be treated as black has brought in, all that garbage in the back of the photograph or the scan of this work, that is obviously too far. But somewhere between where we started, which was in the midpoint here, of a scale that goes from 0 to 255, and the point at which it became a disaster is what we actually want. Now, this tool is really handy because you can use the zoom tool with the image trace. So I'm just holding the space-bar down so I can go and have a look at these other traces and just make sure they're okay, and they're not, this is now my problem. You see these little bits here, they sort of little dots, well, they're technically noise. They're some pixels that have been picked up as being black, they might've been little ink dots or they just might be texture in the paper and it's destroying this particular little bathing box. What I'm going to do is adjust the noise slider and this is going to tell illustrating, you know what, "Those little bits, ignore those." A combination of increasing noise and backing off on this threshold a little bit. Just be aware that what works on one of your little traced images, may not work on the others and you may need to come in and finesse it. Because ideally we would probably be tracing all of these bathing boxes individually so that we could get a fix that was appropriate for each of them. But since we're trying to do them all at once, we're going to have some compromises. Again, I'm looking at this one, and this one's a bit of a problem to us and we really are going to need to back off on this threshold to get the results that we want. They're looking pretty good right now. I'm going to press Ctrl or Command 0 just to look at the overall, I'm pretty happy with that. Once you get a result that you're happy with, we're going to click on ignore white so that we are not tracing white. That will really help us a little bit. Since we're now happy with what we're seeing on the screen, we're going to go up here and click expand, because right now what we're seeing is the trace, but expand will actually expand this into vector shapes and that's exactly what's happened. We can get rid of the image trace dialogue there, let's just click out of the way and this is our trace. In the next video, we're going to have a look and see what the scan gave us and clean up the elements we don't want and group together the bits that we do want. 4. Pt 3 Organize the vector shapes into groups: Now that we've completed our trace, we're going to the last panel because we need to work out what we've got here. Let's just open up the last panel and open up everything that is in here. You can see we've got this clipping mask still, and we've got a group of objects which are now vectorized objects. What we're going to do in this case, because we started off with that clipping mask, is we're going to get rid of it. What we'll do is select this Clip Group and we'll go to the Pathfinder palette and just click Merge. What that does is it applies that clipping mask permanently to the shapes. So you can see our selection has actually decreased in size. Let me just undo that. You can see that the selection right now is around a whole heap of objects and there's obviously other things here that are being selected. When I go and select the Clipping Group and go to the Pathfinder and select Merge, watch this selection jump, and now it's tightly around our artworks. That's got rid of a whole lot of bits and paces. Now, if you were working with a more recent version of Illustrator and use the Crop, you won't need to have done that step. Now we've got our objects here and we're just going to have a look at these and we're going down to the very, very bottom, because at the bottom typically you will find if they exist. This is a no-fill, no-stroke shape. It's got no fill, it's got no stroke, its a shape and it is a path in this document and there are a lot of them. What we're going to do is we're going get rid of them. With one of them selected, and they're always at the bottom, which is a handy way of finding them. With one selected we're going to Select, and Same, and Fill & Stroke, and that's saying to Illustrator, "You know what? I have a no-fill, no-stroke shape selected, go and select for me all the others." There are a lots, a lots, a lots, a lots of them. With them selected, we are now just going to press the Delete key and that will get rid of them. Everything in our last panel is now much, much neater. Now we're going to the Lasso tool, and we're going to lasso each of these bathing boxes in turns. I'll just lasso around this one, so all of its objects are selected and go and choose Object and Group. While you're there, learn this keystroke at least for today, Control or Command G, that's just going to speed things up. So there is our first bathing box. Let's go and select the next one. Object, Group, or Control, or Command G. Once you finish that step inside the Layers palette you should just have groups for the bathing boxes, there should be no paces left out. If you've got everything inside a group, you're just going to expand it. So select this group and choose Object and Ungroup, just once, because what you want is the individual bathing boxes. Each one of them is a group and inside that group are all the objects that go together to make that particular bathing box. Now we've got our bathing boxes nice and clean, every single one of them is in a group, there's nothing in the group that we don't need. Everything in the group that we do need, we're ready to go ahead and start coloring them. 5. Pt 4 Color the art: Now we're ready to color our bathing boxes. But if you have a look in the swatches panel for this document, you'll see that there's nothing there. That's because we opened a JPEG image. So I just opened up the JPEG, I didn't actually imported into an existing Illustrator document. So let's go and add a color. I'm going to double-click here, I'm going to find turquoise blue because if you follow me you know that I really like turquoise blue. So I'll just click "Okay". Over here you can see that that has not been successful, so you might be wondering what's going on. The problem is that Illustrator right now is not going to color anything until I do something about the color situation. So if this happens to you, what you're going to do is go and select everything on the art board, and you'll choose Edit and then Edit Colors, and you're going to choose Convert to RGB, and that will convert the image into RGB so that colors are going to stick to it if you like. Let's double-click and go back and find a nice turquoise. This time you can see that the turquoise color is appearing, and so that's going to be sticky for the rest of this document. I'll go to the swatches panel, I can just click here on the news swatch to add that color to my swatches panel. But this would be a slow process. So let's go and find some help along the way. I'm going to choose Window and then Color Themes to get access to Adobe Color Themes. But before we do that, let's have a quick look and see what bathing boxes actually look like. So these are some of the bathing boxes from Brighton Beach in Victoria, Australia. These are the ones that I modeled my drawings on because I'm from Victoria or Australia. So you can see that the colors they use are pretty bright. There's lots of blues and turquoise, yellow, these oranges and reds. So that's the look as to what the bathing boxes typically in real life would be colored. But of course we can do whatever we like. So I'm going to Explore panel here in Adobe Color Themes and I'm going to search for a word. So the obvious starting point is probably beach hut. Because I know people call these beach huts in other places in the world. So these are some colors not perhaps as inspiring as they might be, but if you see a color theme here that you like, you're going to click here on the three dots and choose Add to swatches, and it gets added to your swatches panel. I think we can do better than this. Let's just try the word beach. Again, perhaps not as inspiring as they might be, but you can add any of these that you like. Now, we're not going to use these as color things. I'm just going to use individual colors out of them. I'm trying the word seaside, and if anything, we're going backwards at this point. So because I want some bright colors, let's just look at brights. Anytime I see a color that I like, I'm just going to take the entire color theme into my swatches panel just so they're going to be there to use later on. That's what I encourage you to do, is just go and find some colors of the colors that you want to use to color your bathing boxes. Once you've done that, you're ready to get coloring. So let's choose this one to begin with. I'm going to select over it and then I'll choose object, and I'll choose Live Paint make that makes this into a Live Paint object. Over here in the top panel, I'm going to select the tool collection that will probably in your case, show the shape builder tool. You go underneath there to pick up the Live Paint bucket and then go back and double-click on it because you want to make sure that you're about to paint what you think you're going to paint. We're going to paint fills and we're going to use a red highlight, that'll just show us what we're about to fill. We do want cursor swatch preview. So I'll click "Okay". I'm going to zoom in. So I'm going to target the zoom tool and just zoom in and then go back to my live paint bucket tool. So as I hover over this shape, anything that is colored red is about to be painted. So these lines are actually fills, there are shapes that are filled. So we can paint the lines or we could live them black, and we can also paint these inner bits. Well, it's the inner bits I'm interested in painting. So I'm going to select a color to use, hover over here and then just click to fill that area with color. If you don't like the first set of colors you use, you can just dump another color on top. So this one's going to be in the reds and oranges. So I'm going to add to the roof line. Let's go back and add in here. If you're having trouble getting into these really small areas and you can't quite see what you're about to click on, just zoom in and that should make it a bit easier. Once you've finished, just click on the selection tool and click away so you can have a look at your handiwork. Here in the last pallet, we've got a group, but this is a live paint group. So if we're happy with the way that this bathing box looks, we're going to need to expand it, so I'm going to select the Live Paint object. I'll choose object, and then I'll choose Live Paint and expand. That will expand it into its component pieces. There are the black bits here, and there are the other bits as well. Now as I'm looking at this, I'm actually really liking this effect, so I'm seeing a potential already for a couple of patterns. One will use these colors just pretty much as they are, and the other one will use it with the black line work. So I'm just looking at potentials here, but I did want to show you that because I think it is a really good potential solution here. Now, while I'm at it, what I'm going to do is grab these two paths, the ones that are the black lines. I'm going to drop them onto the new icon and I'm going to recolor them. So I'm just going to grab this set here, and I'm going to color them to a very, very pale color. I'm thinking this color would be pretty good. So that's going to work really well with the lighter theme. If I think that it's probably not light enough, then I'll just re-select them and make it even a little bit lighter. But I do want something there, but I may not want the black. Now that I've built that in, I'm just going to turn those off and I'm going to leave the black because all the others are going to be using a black. But I've made the attempt to also make those green colors available for later on. Now, because I created my own crane color, let's just go and make that a color swatch so we can use it for the other shapes as well. So having completed my first bathing box, I'm going to go ahead now and complete a second one. We're going to select this object, we'll choose object Live Paint make, and then we'll go to the Live Paint bucket tool. I'm going to zoom in so I can see where I'm working, and then I'm going to apply colors to this bathing box. This one's going to be blueish. I'm just being careful that anytime that I create a special color, that I'm adding it to the Swatches panels so it will be available later on. Having completed this bathing box, you will see that in the last panel it's a Live Paint object, object from Live Paint, and then we're going to expand that. I'm going to locate my black elements, which are going to be all of these here. I'm going to make a duplicate of them by just dragging and dropping them onto the new icon. Let's just turn off the bottom set, which are going to be left as black. Let's go and select this top set, and I'm going to color them with that color that I had created for this outside line work. So this is my alternative, if you like, coloring for my bathing boxes. Now that we've finished with that, we can just close up the group. I would continue on and re-color all of these bathing boxes. I'm going to do that, and in the next video we're going to come back and start putting our pattern together. 6. Pt 5 Set up the document to make your pattern: I've now gone ahead and I've completed coloring this artwork. But there are a few things that I just wanted to explain to you before we went any further. One of them is organization in the layers palette. Now, if you follow my videos, you'll know that I'm really fussy about what my layers palettes look like because it just make things so much easier when you come to make changes. Let's have a look at one of these bathing boxes, this one down here. When I open it up in the last palette, you'll see that I've got all my colored objects towards the bottom of this group. In here, I've got a set of lighter lines and a set of darker lines. So what I did was I grouped all the black line work within a group. That was the dark lines. I made a duplicate of it by just dragging it onto the new icon. Then what I did was I took this group and I colored them with that lighter color. By just selecting the group and just by clicking here on this, I automatically get a set of lighter lines. If I turn off this set of darker lines, what we're seeing is this shape with just the lighter line. I decided that actually stacking these two effects is the easier way of doing it. Now I've got a duplicate there, so let me just delete that, and then I named them. So these are actually both visible, it's just that the lighter lines are behind the darker ones, so they're not showing up until we turn the dark ones off. By placing the darker and lighter lines at the very top of the group, I just made it easy for myself to be able to very quickly come and change these objects. So I can just open up a group, turn off the dark lines and I've got an illustration with the lighter lines in it. I did that for every single one of those groups, darker lines, lighter lines, both visible, turn one off and you've got the second effect, and also just made sure that these dark lines were dragged up to the very top of this group, again, so it's easier to find them, so I didn't have to scroll to the very end of the group to locate them. Now, the other thing that you might be seeing as a bit funky is this blue bead here and the blue bead here. What I wanted was for my white to be filled in because later on, if I put, say, a darker background behind it, I wanted this Life Boy and these stripes to be white and so I needed to fill them with white. The trouble is that when you're working with the live paint bucket tool and you're working with white on a white background, it's a bit hard to see what you're doing. So this is what I did. I created a new color, which is this blue-green, and I used that to fill all these objects. But because it's a global color, this little triangle in the bottom corner tells us that it's been set up as a global color, all I can do is having used it to fill everything that I want to be white, I'll just double-click on it to open it up and now I'm going to make it white, and white is 255, 255, 255. That is changing this global color. When I click on preview, watch what happens inside the document. Everything that is colored with that global color is now white. But I used the blue to be able to tell myself that I got all the pieces colored, because of I missed out on a pace here when I'm coloring it with white, it would be really hard to see, but if it's blue, it's really obvious that I messed up. So I can make sure everything I want to be white it's filled with this single global color that is now been made white. If you want to see how to create a global color, let's just go and make a global color, we'll make a pink. I've selected my pink. Now I'm going to click on the new icon here, and when we create a new swatch, having the check mark here against global will ensure that it's created as a global swatch. It's too late after you've used it to color something to convert it into a global swatch, so just make sure that you're thinking ahead on that one, and you're creating your global color swatch, so that you can easily recolor things later on. Of course, this recoloring, notice that I don't have anything selected here, if I just double-click on this and then go and change the color, everything that's colored with that color is automatically changed, whether or not it is selected, so that's one of the powerful things about global colors. That is why those objects were that funky blue and then now white and we're ready to go. Now, if you've got everything nice and organized like this, this is where I suggest you save everything, because you may want to use these elements later on for something completely different, and having them saved as a separate set of elements is always a good idea. I'll choose File and then Save As, and I'm going to call is bathing box elements, and they're now saved away. If I'm going to create a bathing box pattern, then I'm going to do that all over again, File and then Save As, I'm going to call this bathing box pattern. I've got the elements in a separate file that they can be reused later on. This is going to be my pattern file. 7. Pt 6 Create the Pattern: To create our pattern, I'm going to start by turning this art board off. I've found that it's much easier to work with if we do turn the art board off. I'll choose view and I'm going to choose hide art boards and that just makes everything white, much easier to build a pattern against that. I'm going to close down my layers palette, I don't need it, I'm going to close my swatches palette. I don't need that either. I'm thinking my bathing boxes are probably a little bit big, so I'm going to select everything, hold the shift key and just scale them down until they're a smaller size. I'll select them and let's make our pattern. I'm going to choose object and then pattern, make. I'll click, okay. I'm going to increase the number of copies that are visible on the screen. Because that only has to do with what I'm seeing on the screen and doesn't affect the pattern at all. I'm going to create what is called a half drop repeat. From the tile types, I'm going to select brick by column. I'm going to set this to a one-half offset. That means that this shape here, this bathing box here, appears down here, and then again up here. It's in this V shape all the way across and this is a larger and more sophisticated pattern. Now I just need to move things around and break up this very obvious grid-like structure. I'm going to also move the bathing boxes that have got blue in them around a little bit to break up the very large preponderance of orange and yellow and red in this design, it can be a little bit tricky. Moving objects around when you're creating a large pattern like this. Because moving this is going to affect this one and it may not be apparent at first glance that that's what you're about to do. Just be aware that it can have some erratic behaviors. You'll also need to be aware which shapes you can move so I can move this one, but I can't select or move this one. There's only one of each of these bathing boxes that you can actually move. It's not always apparent which one that is. Now, if you want to have a look at it without these tiles around, you'll just disable show tile edge. You can also use the zoom tool. I'm just going to zoom out a little bit so I can have a better look at the design. Just work out If this is working for me. If I'm happy with it, then I can go ahead and click done. Then a new pattern is added to the swatches panel for this particular design. 8. Pt 7 Trial and recolor your pattern: Now that we've created our pattern, it's time to put it to use. What I'm going to do is delete all of these elements and I'm going to redisplay my art boards. I'll click here on Show Art Boards. Now I prefer to work in landscape dimensions. Let's go to the art board and let's just change its size. I'm going to disable this option here, so I am not constraining the width and height, and I'm going to make it 1920 by 1080, which is my preferred scale for an art board. Now press Control or Command zero to zoom into it. I'll create a rectangle that is that size 1920 by 1080. I'm going to square it up on the art board using the aligned tools. If you can't see the aligned tools, of course, you're going to choose window and then a line. I have the fill selected. I'm going to my swatches panel and let's just fill it with pattern. We can, of course scale by choosing object transform and then scale. We're going to turn preview on and we're going to turn transform objects off. We don't want to change the shape or size of the rectangle, but we do want to change the patterns. I've got transformed pattern selected. Let's just knock this down to about 75 percent of its size. That'll give us a better look at our pattern. Now one of the nice things about working with pattern in Illustrator is that it's very easy to create color variations of this pattern. What we'll do is select our rectangle that contains the pattern and go to the recolor artwork tool. These are the colors in our artwork, so we can go to the edit panel here and we can start changing them. For example, we may want to bring some of these oranges a bit closer to blue. With this unlocked here, we can just go and drag some of these oranges into a different color area. We could end up with a slightly more monochromatic pattern, for example. Now, if you don't like what you've come up with, you can click here to get colors from selected art and that will zero out everything. But at this point, what I suggest you might do if you get anything that you think you like is just click Okay. Because one of the benefits of working with pattern in Illustrator is when you use the recolor artwork dialogue, you actually end up with two patterns. You end up with the original and you end up with your recolored version. You haven't lost anything in the process. It's not like you're going to lose your original coloring, you just going to get a second coloring. Just be aware of that when it comes to recoloring your artwork. Other ways that you can recolor your artwork is to again, go back to the recolor artwork tool, but have a look at these colors and say, "Well, I want to change a particular color, so we may want to make this a dark green instead." Well, you can double-click on it and go and pick up a darker green and click "Okay," and now that darker green is being applied throughout your pattern. When you click okay, well, it's going to result in another pattern being created. You can also rotate your colors around. Stay you like the colors that you've got here, but you'd like to try them in different places in the illustration. Well, this is the way you're going to do it, and unfortunately, this is something that you have to do in exactly the right order or it's not going to work. What you're going to do is in the recolor artwork dialogue, you're going to come down here to the very bottom where you've got black and you've got white, and you're going to disable these colors. You're going to click here on these little bars, so you make sure that black and white are disabled. Now, if they have boxes here, let me just show you what they might look like. If they've got arrows and boxes, what you're going to do is disable the arrows or click it bar, right click on this box and click "Remove Color." Then make sure that the bars are turned to nothing at all. You have to do that in the right order or what's going to happen is that black and white are going to appear up here as replacements for these colors. Let's just test it and see if I've got it right. If not, I'm going to have to undo it and start again. Yeah, it looks like it's working perfectly and I can check by just rolling up here and making sure that neither black nor white appear in this line here of colors. Now, this is not white, this is a different color. It's a off-white. That's fine. It's working just fine. What we're doing now is just clicking on this icon which is randomly changing the color order. We're taking the colors that we already have chosen to use, but applying them in different places in the illustration. Now, if you see something you like, you want to stop right immediately now and then go and save it, and of course you do that by clicking Okay, because getting back to this set of colors is going to be nigh on impossible. I like this one. I'll click "Okay." That's added now as another patents watch. Let me go back to my original art, back for recolor artwork tool. Going to try that again. I'm going to disable this and remove the color and just make sure the white is dealt with before black is dealt with. Because if you mix them up, it tends to be just erratic. Let's try again. I'm just making this dialogue a little bit smaller, just a bit easier for me to say what's going on, and as soon as I say something I like, I'm going to save it. I'm liking that. I'll click "Okay." Now we've got our original pace of art plus our recolored versions. Now if you say a recolored version that you don't like so much. I'm not really fond of this one. Then you can just drag it onto the trashcan here to remove it from the Swatches palette. I'm going to leave mine there for now. There are some ideas for recoloring the artwork once you've created the pattern in various ways, just simply using the recolor artwork dialogue. 9. Pt 8 Make a second pattern: Now we're going to make a second pattern, and with the second pattern, we're going to use the elements that had those lighter drawn lines. I'm going to start by opening that file that we saved, which was the bathing box elements. I'm going to save that as a new file. So I'll choose file and then save as. I'm going to call this bathing box pattern 2. Now I'm being really careful, as you can see, not to be working in the original document with the original art because any changes I make now are only going to affect this document. So I am going to display my last panel which has disappeared, and for every single one of these designs, I'm going to come in and disable the dark lines, so we've just got light lines in our pattern. Now, if you set this document up really neatly with the layers palette really neatly organized and everything arranged neatly, it shouldn't take you very long to do this at all. So now our bathing boxes are very light in color. I'm going to select over them all, and I'm going to hold the shift key. Just scale them down to a smaller size. I'm going to choose view and hide art boards. I'm going to select either my shapes, and make my pattern with object, and then pattern and make. I'm going to display more of these. Again, from the copies drop-down list, I'm going to select something like nine by nine, so I can see plenty of my objects. Now, I can create a different type of pattern should I wish to do so this time. I'm going to try brick by row, and I'll set it to just a regular half offset. So right now I can't see my tile edges, and I've lost my dialogue. So let's just go to show options, and let's go down here to show tile edge, because that's going to show me the designs of the elements that I can actually move, because I can only move ones that are inside this tile edge. Now I'm thinking I've probably got one-to-many bathing boxes for this particular design. So I'm just going to remove one. I'm just going to select this one and delete it. It's just deleted from this design, but of course, it's still in the original elements file, so we haven't lost it. We've just got rid of it for this particular project. I'll hide the tile edges just so I can have a look at the general design. I'm pretty happy with that. I'll click done. Now I'm going to delete all of my elements so that I can trial my pattern again. I'm going to make sure that my art board is visible. I'm going to resize my art board to something that suits me better. So now I've filled a rectangle that is the size of my art board with my pattern, and I'm pretty happy with it. But there is something that I want to show you, and that is how you're actually going to color the background for a pattern. It's a little bit troublesome trying to do it from the pattern make tools, so let me tell you why. I am just going to double-click on this to reopen our pattern. I'm going to show the tile edge, and here we can read off the width and height of our tile edge. Now it would help me if this was whole number, so I'm actually just going to round them up. So this one was 643 and a bit extra, so I'm going to make it 643, and this was 969 and a bit extra, so I'm just going to make it 969. So now my tile edges are just slightly smaller. My tile is marginally smaller, but that's going to help me in terms of creating a rectangle that is this size 643 by 969. We're going to fill that with a solid color. Right now because it's in front of everything, it's blocking out my entire pattern. So I'll choose object, arrange, and then send to back. That will send it behind everything. But you're probably already seeing that there is a problem. Not only is it not lined up with the tile edge, but it's also covering up most of my pattern. First of all, I'm going to try and line it up to my tile edge. So I'm just going to zoom in so that I can see my rectangle and the tile edge and just try and line them up exactly. I think that's looking pretty good. I'll zoom back out, and now another problem becomes immediately apparent. This little bathing box here is being cut off. You can see it's missing over here. Well there are some options here that we can use. We could click here on this option and that would re-display it. That would be well and good, but look what happens if we move this one over here, it's going to get cut off. We don't have an option if we've got pieces along either edge here. Neither of these options is going to be perfect. It's going to cut off this bathing box or it's going to cut off this one here. The same thing's going to happen on the top or the bottom. Right now we've only got one piece overlapping. But if we had another piece overlapping, then that's going to be an issue. You can see that the top's missing from here. If I click this to reverse the way the pattern's put together, that one's now fine. It's working perfectly, but it's a bit missing off the bottom here. So what I'm going to do is go to the very back of the pattern here, find that blue box, and delete it. To do that I need my layer's palette. Let's go and get window and then layers. Let's open up my layers palette, and I need to go and get this rectangle and delete it. I'm going to go back and save my patterns. I'll just click done. So now I've got the pattern safe that potentially has an overlap problem. It's going to be hard to put a colored box behind the pattern in the pattern making tool, but we can do it outside of it. What I'm going to do is just drag this pattern out of the pattern swatches. We're going to the last palette window, and then layers. We're going to locate at the very bottom of this pattern, there is a no fill, no stroke rectangle. When I select it, you can see no fill, no stroke. Every single pattern has a no fill, no stroke rectangle at the very back of it or the very bottom of it. We're going to grab this and drag it onto the new icon. So now we've got two. We've got a no fill, no stroke rectangle here and one here. Well we're going to the one that's not at the bottom, and that's crucial. It cannot be the one at the bottom. Otherwise it's going to fail. We're going to fill it with our blue color. Then we're going to grab everything. So we're going to choose select all. We're going to drag this back into the pattern swatches. So let's drag it in as a second pattern. Then I'm just going to delete everything. Again, I'll go to select all, and I'll delete everything. Now let's go and test the result. This is our original pattern. Let me just scale it up. Now let's look at the pattern that we added a background color to. Well this is now a perfect pattern. None of these little bathing boxes have got sides or tops cut off them. But they would have if we tried to put out colored background in to this particular design in the pattern make tool. It's just a problem with Illustrator, it doesn't make it particularly easy for you to create more complex patterns and have colored backgrounds in them. But if you wait and add your colored background at the very end, once you've created your pattern, do it the way I just showed you, then it's going to work perfectly and you don't come up with those overlapping issues. Of course, because this is a pattern, if we don't like the background color, it's going to be really easy to change. We'll select the rectangle that's got the pattern in it. Let's go to the red color artwork dialogue. What we're going to do is to locate where this color is in use. When I click on the little icon here, it will show me where it's in use. Well it is in use in a couple of the little bathing boxes, but of course it's also in use in the background. So we can just change its color. We are going to change it wherever it appears, so that will be a slight disadvantage in this case, but I'm going to make it a recolor so that you can see what happens. If we colored the background with a color that was either one or two color numbers away, say the RG or B channel was one or two digits away from any of the colors that were in the artwork, then we would have been able to isolate the background and not affect any of the bathing boxes. So just be aware of that if you're creating a background, it might be better to choose one that's just a color number or two away from anything that's in your artwork so that you could conceivably change it later on in the recolor artwork dialogue. Of course, because we recolored the pattern using the recolor artwork dialogue, we end up with three patterns. So we've got the original, we've got our version with the blue background, and we've got a version now with a red background that does have some red in the other elements in the art where the blue was previously. 10. Pt 9 Adding additional elements to your design: When you're looking at ways that you can get a lot more artwork out of a single set of designs, one of the things that you could do is to add some objects that would be likely to be found in the location of the other art. On the beach, you might find things like little boats, seagulls, umbrellas, and so on. I've created some of these objects and color them again using live paint, organized them really neatly in the layers palette. But there is some green in his umbrella and some green in this cloud that I need to make the same white as we used elsewhere in the illustration. Now I'm going to get into a bit of trouble here so we need to know how to get out of it. I created a second color to use and its a global color so that makes sense. If I double-click on it, I'm going to make this white. This is where I'm going to fall foul of this situation. I'm not going to be able to do that because I already have a white global swatch. I'm just going to click Okay and cancel to get out of here. What I want to do is I want to merge these two swatches together. I'm going to select on the one that I actually want to merge everything into which is this one, and then Control or Command click on this one. I'll go to the flyout menu and I'm going to click here on merge swatches. What that does is the very first swatch that I clicked on, which is the white one, has now been used to replace everything where the green one was. I've got white all the way through these objects as I wanted to, but I've also got white in these objects too and all those whites are the same white. Again, if I go to double-click on the swatch and just change the color, the color of everything that is white in the illustration is changed. That's just a handy way of being able to merge swatches when you end up with two colors that are identical. Now I also want to point out that there's a slight issue with both the seagull here and the umbrella, in that I would really like to add a little bit of color in the sand but because it's not added as a line art element, right now I can't actually put it in. Let's just zoom into this area in particular. I'm going to the pencil tool because it's a nice easy tool to use. I'll double-click on it, and I'm just going to back off on the smoothness. I want it to be not a 100 percent smooth. I'll just click Okay. I'm going to draw in the sand colors. I'm going in behind this line; well, it's going to be in front of the line to start off with but it will end up being behind the line. I'm going to just come in, and draw this out. I don't want it to have a stroke so I'm just going to remove the stroke from it here. I'm going to target its fill and I'm going to choose a color from my palette. I'm going to use this color. It's a separate object here, so I'm going to drag and drop it into the group it belongs in, open up the group and I'm going to place it behind everything. Now what I haven't done here is I have not put the black in a separate area which of course I should do, so that I can use it with a lighter color later on. But that's something I still need to do here. Let me just zoom back out and you can see that we've got that little splash of color here and I would do the same with the girl here. I'm going to just create a shape or two, fill it with the yellow sands so that the girl has something that he's actually standing on. With this, we've got some additional elements that we can add to our patterns. 11. Pt 10 Make a larger pattern: Let's look at another way that you can get mileage out of your artwork in addition to adding some extra elements. I'm going to grab all of these little bathing boxes and I'm going to make a duplicate of them. I'm just holding the Alt option K as I drag a duplicate set away. Now I'm going to make sure that I have the colors that are in this artwork, the actual colors that we've used. I'm selecting all these shapes. I'm going to the swatches panel, I'm going to click here on New Color Group. This is going to be creating from the selected artwork. Only the colors actually in use are going to be included here. I'm just clicking to create that color group. What I want to do is I want to get a bit heftier on the blues and a little bit lighter on the yellows. What I'm going to do is come into this color group and get rid of some of the colors that I don't want. I'm also going to remove black and white here so that they can't be used to recolor this artwork. I'm going to select just half of these objects that duplicates. I'm going to the recolor artwork dialogue. We'll scroll down to the end of the recolor artwork dialogue. We're just going to turn these colors off and remove them. They are not going to be affected. Now we've got this color group that contains the colors that we would prefer to use for our art. I'm just going to click here on this color group. You can see it's now being applied to the artwork. At this point we've got less colors than we had previously. We can take colors such as the red here and we can map it onto a different color. If we wanted to map the red for example, onto the orange here, we can grab the red and just drag it up and drop it on top of the orange. Well, the color that's remapped onto the orange. We're just going to make it share this color position and everywhere where this white or this red was, is now this orange color but it's probably a tint of that color. Let's click this "Drop Down" here. You can see that it's tinting. If we don't want it to tint, if we want it to be an exact replacement, we'll just select Exact. Now the white and the red are exactly this color here and we can go and get some of these other colors. Let's go and get this green and let's make it double up on a blue. Perhaps this blue. Let's go and see what target color we're going to use for it. Well, again, I'd like it to be this yellow color. I'm looking at this one, it's probably the only one that still needs a bit of work. I think it's this one here. No, that's not the color. I think it is actually this color here. I think I'll drag this color up and have it go up to another color instead. In fact, probably up to this lighter color. You can create subset color groups and then move your colors around to rearrange everything to make it look the way you want it to look. What I'm looking for here is a second set of bathing boxes. This bathing box and this bathing box are the exact same bathing box but because they recolored a bit differently, I'm getting a different look to my artwork. If I still see things that I'm not really happy with here for example this color, then I can go in here with the group selection tool. Just select this object here and go and find a different color for it. You can individually recolor things but you can also do big bulk group recolors to speed up the process of creating enough artwork so that you can then go and create even larger patterns. Let's go and see how this is going to work. I'm going to save this of course. I was calling this bathing box elements extended but in actual fact, it's extended by having some extra artwork in it. But this is also duplicated because it's a larger collection this time. I'm just going to select over everything and just scale it down a little bit because it's pretty big. I'm going to close up the gaps here. I'm just going to move some of these interposition. They're not going to stay in these positions but it will help me to start by making a smaller pattern, go and select everything object pattern make. I'm going to turn off my artboard, which thankfully you can do from within the pattern make tool, it just makes life a little bit easier. Now for simplicity sake, this time I'm just going make a grid pattern that's going to make it a little bit easier to line everything up. But you could make a more complex one. For example, your half drop or paint. It's going to bring these elements into the middle because they are additional elements, packing elements rather than being basic design elements. Let's take that one out of the way for now. I think I've got two elements that I don't actually need. I'm just going to work out which ones I'm going to remove. I think I'll remove this one and replace it with this. I need to get rid of one more. Well, these two are really close to each other in look so I'm going to just remove that one. Now I can use my filler elements just to fill in the areas around these little bathing boxes. If I've got an element like this bird that I want to reuse a different way, I can choose Object, Transform, Reflect and just reflect them across the vertical. That will create a second bird. I can make duplicates of all of these shapes. You're going to make the duplicate by Alt dragging a copy away and then you flip them if you want to make a different version of it. Just flip the copy that you've made. Anything that's got a distinct direction that it goes in can easily be flipped. This little design elements are really handy for filling in gaps and filling out your patterns so it just looks a bit more generous. I think these are a little bit small. I don't want to enlarge them a lot. I don't want to skew the data that I have in and make their lines too thick. That's going to be a problem with scaling them up too much. But I do think that they can be scaled a little bit. When I'm ready to look at my pattern, I'm going to disable Show Tile Edges. Just have a quick look and make sure that everything looks okay. I think I need some elements along the bottom here. Again, turn it back on again, work out what we can use to fill these gaps and go and fill those gaps. Again, turn Show Tile Edges off so that you can just have a look at the pattern. Just make sure it's looking the way you want it to look. I'm pretty happy with that. I'll just click "Done." Now I can just go and delete everything but I'm just being really aware that I'm working on my original file. If I delete things from here, I'm going to make sure that I do File, Save As and save this as bathing box pattern 3. Just be super careful. It's really easy to end up working with and deleting things from your original file. You just want to be super careful. Let's go back and show the artboards. Again, let's go and make a rectangle that is the size of our artboard and place it over the artboard. I've lost my align options. Let's just go to them here. They're not aligning to the artboard. Let's make sure that they do align to the artboard. Let's go and get a new pattern. If we have a look at the pattern and decide there's something that we need to alter and I'm not really happy with the sun here, it's just a little bit too small in the area, then we can just go back to the Swatches dialogue, double-click on the pattern to re-open the pattern editor. You want to turn your tile edge on so you can see what you're doing. Then I'm going to bring in another element in here. I think I'll bring in another sailing boat. Click "Done." That will just replace the first pattern with this new pattern. You're making live edits and they're just going to result in a single pattern in your swatches palette not multiples of those patterns. The one thing that I'm concerned about here, I'm not going to fix it, I'm just going to explain it to you. The problem with this is that I tried to scale it up because I think I drew it a bit small. But when I scale it up, its lines become thicker and so it runs the risk of looking thicker than these lines here. You want to be really careful when you're drawing these drawings to create as this vector artwork is, try and use the same line weight for all of your illustrations. Also try to draw them to scale because if you come in later and try to change the scale of an object, then it's going to get thicker lines if you enlarge it. It's not looking really as good in this pattern as it might. If I had my chance again, I'd probably go back and draw that element and remake it. But that's just a heads up. When you're planning this, just try to plan it as well as you can to get the best results so that you don't have to go and re-draw things if they don't look quite right. 12. Pt 11 Making a simpler pattern from the art: In addition to creating really complex patterns, you can also create really simple ones. I'm going to look at taking just four of these bathing boxes. So I'm just going to select the ones that I think are going to go together best of all. I'm liking those four I'm going to delete these. Now I'm working with an original elements fall. So before I go any further, I'm going to choose File Save As I'm going to call this bathing box pattern 4. Just to make sure that I'm not going to have deleted elements from my original set of art. Again, I'm going to hide the art boards, I'm going to select these shapes and going to choose object and then pattern make. Now this is going to be a really simple pattern. Let's just make it a nine by nine. Now, I'm going to turn it from a grid into a brick by row and I'm going to use an offset such as about a third on this one. So its got a slightly unusual offset. Now I'm going to start moving things around, I think I would like a little bit more space between these. I'm going to line them up just a little bit better. Now, at this stage, if you think that you want a little bit more spacing, you can increase the tile size. So what I'm going to do is unlock this so that I can change the height and I'm just going to increase the height a little bit. As I increased the height, the tiles are pushing away from each other. So this line of bathing boxes is pushing away from this one, I just think it is a little bit more spacious, going to increase the width a little bit too, that will give me a bit of space just to rearrange these very slightly. I'm going to use the zoom tool because I can inside this pattern make tool, it's going to help me have a better look at my design. I'm going to turn my tile edge off so again, I can have a look at it. This is a very simple pattern, extremely simple, but no less effective for being simple. I'm going to click done and now I've got another pattern again using these elements but in a very different way. So let's just go and re-display the art board. Let's go and make this document a little bit more of a comfortable shape for me. Add a rectangle that is the size of the art board and just square it up on the art board. Let's just fill it with our pattern object transform scale that allow us to scale down the pattern itself so that we can look at it at a smaller size, a bit more like what it would look like in use. There is a simpler, very different style of pattern than the one that we've been creating so far, of course it can be easily edited. You're just going to double-click on it in the swatches panel on that will allow you to make changes to it, if you think that any of these elements need, for example, re-positioning within the file when you're done, click "Done", of course we can re-color it. Selecting the rectangle, going to the re-color artwork tool, making sure that we lock away any colors that we don't want to have illustrator go and do anything with. So that includes our black and white and then for example, we can just do the randomly change color to see if we can get a different color way for this particular design and something that we like. As soon as you see something that you like, click "Okay", because you don't want to lose it. But then you can use that as a starting point for going ahead and trying something a bit different, of course you know how to add a background to your art because we covered that in a previous video If you want to actually create your swatches with a background associated with them. 13. Project and wrapup: We've now finished the video content for this course, so it's over to you. It's time for you to take some drawings from your sketchbook, trace them in Illustrator, color them, and create a pattern from them. Post an image of your completed pattern as your class project. As you were watching these videos, you would have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learned from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you do recommend the class, and secondly, write even just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now, if you see the follow link on the screen, click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and your questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.