From One Design Make Many Variations in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. One Design Concept Many Variations - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, from One design, make many variations 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. Today we're looking at taking a single concept for a pattern design and we're going to make multiple variations from it using various illustrated techniques. I'm going to show you how I can do this in all versions of Illustrators, so regardless of what version you're using, you can follow along with this class all the way through. Now, as you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and I respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and I respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started at taking a single concept for a pattern design and creating multiple variations of it. 2. Pt 1 - Create the Foundation Pattern: To get started with our design, we're going to create a new document. So I'll choose "File" and then "New". I'm using a document that's 400 pixels by 400 pixels in size, RGB color mode. I have aligned new objects to pixel grid disabled. I'll click "Okay". Now, I want to use white as a foundation color in my pattern. The problem with that is it's going to be really difficult for us to see what's going on, if we're working on a white art board. So before I start, I'm going to make a rectangle, the exact size of this art board, which is 400 pixels by 400 pixels, and I'm going to fill it with something other than white. So I'm going to turn its stroke off, going to target its fill color, and I'm just going to select a light gray for it. That will make it obvious that this is the background. I need to align it to the art board, and I'm going to need to align a few things to the art board. So I'm going to the align options. If you don't see yours, choose window and then align to view them. Click the drop-down list here to click "Show Options". From the align to drop down list, you want to select "Align to art board". I'm going to center this shape on the art board. Now, because I'm just using it as a background color, I want to lock it down. So I'm going to open up this layer in the layers palette here. You can get the layers palette by choosing window layers, and I'm just going to click to lock it down. That means it can't move. Since it's a background layer, I think I'm going to work on a brand new layer. Just keep everything separate from this. So I'm going to click here to create a new layer. So we're now working on layer two with a gray background just to help us see when we working with white in our pattern. Sometimes it's worth going to the effort to make things a little bit easy for yourself in this way. So our pattern is going to be based on circles. So I'm going to the ellipse tool and I want my circles to have a stroke but no fill at this stage. I want the stroke to be able to be seen, so I'm going make it black. We have no fill and we have a stroke, we have the ellipse tool select. I'm going to click once in a document, and I'm going to make an ellipse that is a 100 pixels by a 100 pixels in size. I'll click "Okay". Now, I want to move this sorts up in the very top corner of the document. That's just going to make all our math so much easier. So I'm going to select the selection tool, and I'm going to move it so that its top corner is at zero, zero. Now, you might see this little indicators here, this nine little boxes. If you click the one in the top left corner, you're telling illustrator you want to base all your measurements on this little box up here, and you want this box to be up here and its position is zero, zero. So you're just going to make sure it's X is at zero, and it's Y is at zero. It's just going to pop up into that top corner automatically for you. The other thing that you could have used is the align option. So we could go the Align panel, we could have used horizontal align left, and vertical align right. I just want you to see that there are some other options for placing objects and it really helps to learn how to use these transform panel options. Of course, if you don't see these options up here, you're going to be able to see them if you click the transform panel. They're exactly the same here. Now that we've got our shape, we need some more copies of it. I need four copies, all in a box shape here. So I'm going to hold the ALT key as I just drag a duplicate away. Now if this shape is a 100 pixels tall, because it was an ellipse of a 100 pixels, then this point here should be at 100 pixels. So we can just double-check that. I'm going to make sure that the top center point of this circle is at a 100 pixels down from the top of the document, and it's going to be 50 pixels in because that's half the width of the circle. You could also use the alignment tools here to align it to the side of the document here with horizontal align left. You can't use one of these alignment tools here to align the top of it because you haven't got anything to align it to. But here's a trick. If you select both of these objects and click "Align to key object", and if you make this the key object, then you can set zero as the spacing and click on this vertical distribute space. What you're doing there is you're saying to illustrator, I want you to align this object relative to this one because it's the key object, but I don't want you to move this. When I'm talking about distribute spacing, I want you to align these two objects so there's zero space space between them. So it's another way of getting to the same result. Now, I want another set of these shapes right next door. One method of doing that is to group these two shapes together with object group. Now they're going to travel as a pair. I'm going to hold the ALT key as I drag a duplicate away. Now because they're a pair, if I select to align them to the top, they are going to align as a group. When I have them selected, I can check their middle point here because it should be a 100 pixels in from this side of the document because all of these circles are a 100 pixels wide. I'm checking their x and y value and it's perfect. So I know these are in exactly the right position. Now I need a circle in the middle here. Again, there are millions of ways of creating this circle. Right now, because all of these are in groups, I'm just going to draw it. So it's a 100 pixels by 100 pixels in size. It needs to be right over the middle of these shapes. I'm going to the move tool, just going to put it into position. Now its center point should be a 100 pixels in from the side and the top of the document. So I'm going to click here on the middle of these nine boxes here to target the center point of the shape as being the point at which I'm trying to align to a certain position. I'm going to type in a 100 for the x and a 100 for the y. Now it's exactly in position. So we have the foundation shapes for our pattern. I'm going to select either of them. I'm just going to choose object ungroup at this stage because I want to ungroup everything. So all I have is a set of circles. Press "Control" or "Command Zero" if my art board moves because that just puts it back in the middle of the document. I'm going to select over all of the shapes and I'm going to flip my stroke and my fill. Because what I want is the shapes to be filled and not to have any stroke. So it looks on the face of it like we have this four-leaved flower shape here. But what we're going to do is to divide these shapes up so we can get all the component pieces of this set of overlapping shapes. So we're going to the Pathfinder Palette. If you don't see the Pathfinder Palette here, window pathfinder. We're going to select this option which is divide. What that does is it divides these shapes into all the little component pieces that make them up. If we choose object ungroup and then go to our last pallet, we're going to see what we get. So here is the last palette. What we've got is a series of little leaf shapes here. We've got a diamond in the middle, and then we've got all of these pieces on the outside. So all of these pieces on the outside, we're going to color white. So we have fill targeted here. I'm just going to select them. I can easily select them here in the last palette because it's very easy to see which ones they are. So you can just control, click on the icon here in the last pallet to select all of them. So I've just got this four shapes selected, going to fill them with white. You can see now the advantage of working on a gray background because this would be really hard to see otherwise. I also want to fill this middle shape here with white. So I have a set of black leaves and white around it. This is going to be the first pattern and its our foundation pattern. So we need to now create a rectangle that is going to be the size of our pattern swatch. So going to the rectangle tool. This circle is a 100 pixels in diameter. So we want our rectangle to be exactly the same size. It's actually going to be a square that's a 100 by a 100. Click once on a document, I'm going to make it a 100 by a 100, and click "Okay". I'm going to move it over the circle. I want to make sure that it's center is at 100, 100, exactly the same position as the center of the circle was. I'm just checking it here and its center is at a 100,100. So I know it's in the exactly the correct position. The problem is if I'm going to use it as a bounding box for my pattern swatch, it has to be two things. Firstly, it has to be no stroke, no fill. So there is my no stroke no fill. Then it has to be underneath everything else. So here it is, up here. I'm going to drag it to the very bottom of this layer. You could also do that by selecting it and choose object arrange, send to back. Now I can select everything on this list, I'm just going to click on the layer itself. I'm going to drag and drop this into the swatches panel. But in my swatches panel, I just want to point out that I have show all swatches selected. So I'm just looking at where the patterns are in my swatches panel and they're here. So I'm going to drag and drop it right in next door to the patterns. You can't put patterns in color groups, so that's not going to work, just be aware of that. So now it is a pattern in my illustrator swatch, so I'm just going to move everything out of the way. Just going to draw a rectangle, and to make life a little bit easier, I'm going to put it on its own layer so that I can turn it off easily in a minute. I'm just drawing out a rectangle. I have it's field targeted and I'm just going to click on my pattern swatch. That is the first of our patterns. We're going to use that as a foundation to develop different varieties of this pattern. 3. Pt 2 - Add Some Lines: Let's return now to the original shapes and let's see how we could add something to this pattern to give it a different look. Now to remove confusion, I'm going to disable the visibility of the layer that has that object on it, and I'm going to lock it down. I'm going to make sure that I'm working on the layer that has all these elements on it, that's really important. Otherwise, things can go wrong really quickly. So this layer here, layer two, is everything to do with our pattern swatch, and so we're going to bee working on it. I want to make a line, so I'm going to click the line tool. I'm going to make sure that the line has a white stroke. I'm just going to click on White Stroke here. I'm going to click once in the document because I want to control the line as I create it. I want it to be pretty long, so I'm going to make it a 150 pixels long on an angle of 45 degrees. What we're going to do is we're going to run it through this circle here, so I'll click Okay. I'm going to the selection tool, I'm going to select over this line, and I'm going to move it into the approximate position that I want it to be in. I'm going to look at its midpoint, so up here, when I have it selected, I'm saying its midpoint here. Because I've got it nearly in position, we can guess at exactly where it's supposed to be, because it's x and y values are pretty close to 75, and 75 is one of those numbers that's a fraction of a 100. So 25, 50, 75, they are all sorts of fractions of a 100, and so what we want is this midpoint to be at 75, 75. It's already at 75 on x, I'm going to make it 75 on y. That's putting it in exactly the correct position. So I'm going to select it, and now I'm going to move it. This time I'm going to use the Move feature, so I'll choose Object, Transform, Move. This tool allows me two move this shape. So it's taken off on me here, so I'm just going to zero out all these settings to put it back where it came from. I want to move it over here. I want to move it in the x-direction, 50 pixels, and I want to move it also in the vertical direction, 50 pixels, so I'm just going to type in 50, 50 here. I have Preview turned on so I can do a visual check hear. I can make sure that it's in the right position. Again, we're just using values that are fractions of 100. So if it's in the write position, I'm just going to click copy because I want my original and I want my duplicate. Now I'm going up here, and I'm going to select both of those lines. So the two lines that I just added, what I want to do is to make a copy of these two lines and then rotate it so it lies here and here. I'm going to choose Object, Transform, Rotate. I have the rotation set to 90 degrees. That's the exact rotation I need. I have Preview turned on, so again, I can do a visual checked to make sure that everything's working as it should, and it is, so I'm just going to click Copy. Now my pattern has lines through it. Because all my pattern pastes are on this layer two, I can just click to select this layer. That's selecting all the elements that go towards making the pattern, including the no fill, no stroke rectangle at the very bottom of the pattern, which is really important because that's what marks out the edge of the pattern paste. I'm going to open my Swatches panel up, I'm just going to drag and drop this hole thing into the Swatches panel. I'm going to close down my pattern layer, I'm going to make visible this rectangle over here and unlock it. I'm going to click it to target it, make sure its fill is targeted, and then just go and try out my new pattern paste. I'll click on my pattern, and let's go and have a look at that. Now, it's got some minor fracture lines through it, that's Illustrator, not the pattern paste itself. That's looking really nice, and you can seen that just with the addition of a couple of lines, we've created a different looking pattern. This is the first one we made. This is the second one. 4. Pt 3 - Recolor the Design: Now let's return to our original pattern piece.I'm going to do the exact same thing with this rectangle over here. I'm going to lock it down. I'm going to turn it off just to get it out of the way. I'm going to open up the panel of the layer that we're working in here. This is the layer that has all of these objects on it. The first thing I'm going to do is go and identify where these four lines are and they're up here. I'm going to control or command click on each of these four lines because I want to make a duplicate of them. I'm going to choose edit copy, edit paste implies I don't want them to move, but I do want to make a second copy of them. For now, I'm going to put them in a group. I've got four lines select, I've got the copy selected. This is the copy, these are the originals. I'm going to put this in a group with object group. I'm going to turn off the visibility of my group and I'm going to lock them down, just temporarily. The lines am seeing now align so that I can actually edit. What I'm going to do is I'm also going to lock down my no field, no strike rectangles because I do not want to do anything with it either. But I'm going to select everything else on this layer. That is one set of lines and all of these shapes. I'm going back to the pathfinder. I'm going to open up the pathfinder and I'm going to click again on Divide. That gives me a group here and I'm going to ungroup everything object, ungroup. Now let's look and see what we've got in this pattern. Instead of having a leaf shape here that is a single shape. We've now got two pieces because we used the line to divide it in two. Let me just color this and you'll seen what's going on here. I'm just going to color this grain, you can see that I've only selected half the circle because the other half is up here. I'm going to go round and re-color each of these pieces. Now I have different colors in my circle. Let's go back to the last palette. What we need to do if we want to make this into a pattern is to unlock this, no fill, no strike rectangle because it's really important, because it marks out the edge of our pattern. I'm leaving this group of lines locked down just for a minute, going to select this entire layer. I'm going to drag and drop this pattern into the swatches palette. Just jumped somewhere, it wasn't supposed to jump, that's fine. Now let's go back to our rectangle, unlock it. I'm going to target my rectangle. I'm going to make sure my fill is selected. I'm going to click on my new pattern. This is a pattern that we've developed from the basic pattern that we started off with. But we've got another iteration of it still sitting there. Because remember we kept the lines separate. I'm just going to lock this down for a minute so it doesn't take any part in what we're about to do. Let's go back to layer two, let's unlock this group and let's make it visible because this is yet another iteration of this design, because we kept a second set of outlines we can use the lines in our pattern. Everything here on this layer can now be part of this pattern. I'm going to click to select everything. I'm going to drag and drop this into my swatches panel. Let's go back to our filled rectangle. I'm going to unlock it. I'm going to select the rectangle, going to make sure fill is at the four and let's try out a new pattern. Let's just scale this so that we can get some ideas to what it's going to look like at a smaller size. I want to disable transform objects and I'm going to set it to about 50 percent here. These are the patterns we've created so far. A plane black version, a black version with white lines on it, a recolored version, and then a recolored version with white lines over it and each of these is a different iteration of the same basic pattern. 5. Pt 4 - Gradient Fills: Let's look at yet another way that we can take this basic pattern design and do something a little bit different with it. Let me click here on this orange object here you can say that it's selected here in the past palette, and instead of filling it with a solid color, I'm going to use a gradient, and I'm just going to click here on the Gradient option. But in fact, what I want to do is I want to fill it with fading sky, which is a default gradient that is shipped with Illustrator. The reason why I want this is that it's a very simple gradient. It's now open here, I've got blue at one end, I'm going to click on the other end, I'm going to click on the other end, and I'm going to make this white, so it's a blue to white gradient. Right now, the opacity of this stop here is zero percent, well, I'm going to set it to 100. Now, I have a gradient goes from blue all the way to white. But I started off with orange here, so I'm going to double-click on this and just select the original orange color. Here is now a gradient, goes from orange to white. I'm going to add this to my swatches palette just in case I need it later on, so I'm going to drag and drop it in here. I'm going to build up some gradient watches as I go. Now, I'm going to the red one here, and I'm going to click on my orange gradient swatch. I'm going to open up my gradient and this time instead of orange, I'm going to make it red. Because this is dark to light, I'm going to reverse this gradient by clicking here, so I'm going from dark to light here, now from dark to light here. I'm going to add this gradient to my swatch as well, just in case I need it later on, it's going to be a whole lot easier to just grab it from there. I'm going to the blue object here, I'm going to apply a gradient to it. Again, I'm going to double-click on the red here, and I'm going to make it that blue. I'm going to save that gradient. Then I'm going to replace this shape with a gradient as well. I'm going to work round both sides of this object, replacing each of these colored panels with a gradient. In each case, I've tried to make the gradients go in different directions for each of these paces. No, I didn't save all of these as swatches, but I probably could or should have done so. Now, let's go to this lab which contains all the objects that we want for our pattern. We can decide whether or not we want that the lines with it, and if we don't want the lines for one iteration, then we're just going to turn off their visibility, lock them down. We're going to select this entire object and drag and drop it into this swatches panel, and that's one pattern swatch. Now, I'm going to go back, unlock the lines, add them to the image, reselect everything to make sure that I've got the lines included and drag and drop it into the pattern swatches. Now, let's go back to Rectangle, I'm going to make sure I have it targeted, which it is here I've got the fill targeted and let's try our two new patterns. This is the one without the lines over the top but with the gradient fills, and this is the one that has the gradient fills and the lines. Now, you would also get an interesting result by leaving some of these as solid colors and just adding gradients to perhaps one in every pair. But you can now see how easy it is to take one fundamental idea for a pattern and find different ways of interpreting it. Now, in the next video, I'm going to show you a few different iterations, I'm not going to step through them, but I'm going to show you how they were created so that you can seen what the possibilities are. 6. Pt 5 - Other Options Project and Wrap Up: Now I've gone ahead and made a few other iterations to this pattern. Let's just look and see what I've done. This is the last pattern that we made in the last video with the gradient fills and the white lines. Well, then I went and added a black spot in the middle. What I did was I took this shape here, that is this pulled in rectangle, I use to edit copy, edit paste in place to paste it in on top of the original one, and then I held Shift and Alt, that would be option Shift on the Mac just to size it down so it would size into the middle. Let me just undo that. Then I took the middle shape and I made it black. Later on when I looked at the black and used it in another pattern, I actually thought it would look better if it was filled with a gradient. In the instance that you're seeing here, it's been filled with a radial gradient with dark on the outside and light on the inside. But this was one of the pattern iterations that I made with this smaller shape in the middle. Then I did what I suggested to you that you could do is leave some of these leaves solid colors and just use gradients on alternate leaves. This is a combination of the earlier patterns that we made with some solid leaves and some gradient filled ones. This pattern here, again, some solid leaves, some gradient ones, and with that little start in the middle, but this time a different color. Here we have a different iteration of the same basic design. This time, instead of having circles, I've used a rounded rectangle. I'm just going to click here on the rounded rectangle tool. I'm just going to fill it with a solid color and click once on the document. I used a rounded rectangle that was a 100 pixels by a 100 pixels in size, the exact same size as the circle I was using with a corner radius of 40 pixels. Now the upshot of using a rounded rectangle that was the same size as the circle, is that all these lines are created using the exact same dimensions and the exact same positioning as we used with the circle but instead of a circle this time we've got overlapping rounded rectangles and it just gives the pattern a different look. Now in this case, I created my shapes here as red filled shapes, and I gave them a stroke so they'd have a black stroke around them, and of course the lines. Let's just click on this pattern pace and let's see some other iterations of the same basic look. In this case, I used the same red leaf shapes that I had in the previous pattern, but this time instead of black lines, I made them white. Then I divided up the leaf shapes and I started working with some gradients and solid fills. I've got gradients and solid fills all the way around that shape. Then having created that, I just bought the lines back. This one has finer white lines over the top. You can see that this basic concept of overlapping circles can be adapted to a whole heap of patterns in a whole lot of different looks. Really the sky's the limit in terms of what you can do with this basic design. Your project for this class will be to create this pattern, whether you do it as a circle or a rounded rectangle. Then either divide the leaves up or not and fill them with solid colors or gradient or whatever you want to do. Post your finished pattern design in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned some techniques for adapting a basic pattern design to make it your own, to customize it in varying ways. Now as you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly write in just a few words why you're enjoying this class. There's recommendation to help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question, please do so. I read and I respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look out 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.