How to Make Patterns Faster with Actions in Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction: Surface Pattern Design has exploded in the last five years. So many artists are turning their art into repeating patterns and building a side hustle and even getting a full-time income from their work. Having a good understanding of the software using such as Adobe Illustrator is really important to getting efficient workflow and then getting your work out there. Foster keyboard shortcuts is super-important. But I'm here to tell you about the actions panel in Adobe Illustrator. The actions panel is a tool that I think is a little bit overlooked. It allows you to record a sequence of commands which you can activate over and over again. If activity trimming down your workflow substantially are Mel, I'm a surface pattern designer and artist living in Cape Town, South Africa, where I live with my family are picked up Judah and for chickens. I started designing five years ago when I had a business making pianos. And so saying, I've seen my work on leggings and most recently fabric for home decor. Also, my designs on Spoonflower. I'm a busy mom of two and I lovemaking passengers, But I'm short on time. So I went on a mission to speed up my workflow. And I discovered that there's this tool called the actions panel. This course is about how to use the actions panel. And more specifically, how to use the actions panel to speedup workflow when creating repeating patterns. This class is for anyone who has a basic understanding of repeating patterns in Adobe Illustrator. Whether you're a surface pattern designer or a graphic designer who creates patterns on the daily, or even someone who just loves making patterns for fun. This class is we, you, I'll be going over how I cultivate inspiration, the basics of repeating pattern, the actions panel, and way to find it. And then I'll be going step-by-step in creating an action for three kinds of repeats. A tossed repeat, a half drop repeat, and ascribe repeat. Your class project will be to create your own action and repeating pattern. To help you along. Apa puts a bunch of motifs and a keyboard shortcut cheat sheet in the resources section of this course for you to download. By the end of this class, you will know how to create an action and how to use it to help you speed up your workflow in creating a repeating pattern. It'll also give you ideas on how to use the actions panel or other design projects. Ultimately, it will speed up your workflow. And who doesn't want to save time? I can't wait to get started with US. So brace play on the next video and let's get into action. 2. Class Project: So let's talk about the class project. Your class project is to create your own action and your own repeating pepsin. I will provide some motifs if you want to jump brought in, but you're more than welcome to create your own and create your own actions and then repeating pattern. Take a screenshot effect and post it in the projects gallery. It not the inspires other people, but it also reinforces what do you learn and it also gets your work seen, which is an added bonus. I can't wait to see what you make. 3. Cultivate Inspiration: Let's chat about finding inspiration. I believe it was Frida Kahlo who once said, I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality. And for me, this describes how I cultivate my inspiration. I like to draw inspiration from my immediate environment. Let's say it. I don't mind trying out to train or to my favorite online sources or Pinterest and unsplash.com. But most of the time I source my photo references from our own photo library in the cloud. I'm very lucky to live in a part of the world that is renowned for its biodiversity. And I snap photos every chance I get, every opportunity I gauge whether it's a weekend morning at the beach, snorkeling with my family or a spatial African bush holiday. I snap away with my phone camera, and squirrel the voters away, where there'll be used for future pet and collections. That way, I know always have a resource to draw from. And I avoid the murky waters of copyright infringement. Look around you and see the beauty in your own environment. You'll unique perspective will not only be a source of inspiration, but will inform the development of your unique style. Take your own photos and store them for future reference. It's okay to follow a trend. Put a twist on it and make it your own. Up next, the basics of pattern repeats. 4. Basic Repeat Pattern Workflow: I'm going to go over the basics of making repeats in Adobe Illustrator. If you're really new to this, then I really recommend Bonnie, Christine, or myofibers Skillshare classes. They're both really comprehensive and excellent. But for now, I'm just gonna go over some basics. I haven't art board that's 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels. I'm going to create two squeeze. I'm going to press M for my rectangle tool. And from the top left-hand corner, just drag and stop there and that'll create my first square. The square has a full, It's the off-white color. I'm going to take the full out so that it's completely blank. There's no full or stroke. Then I'm going to create another square, pressing M again and just create a new square. So I have two squares now on top of each other. I'm going to fold the top square with a color, and that's going to be this off-white color. And then I'm going to add some motifs to this. I'm just going to use a simple circle and that's L on my keyboard shortcuts. And I'm going to draw a circle and we're going to fill it with a screen green color. And then I'm going to press my option key and click on it and drag it. And now I've created a duplicate, and I'm going to put this one over here. So I'm going to lock my squares so that they don't move. And then I'm going to select this top-left circle. And I'm going to call up my move tool, which is Command Shift M. Now remember that my I squares are 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels. But one way we can check that is just to select him and that's slightly off sermons going to make them a 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels and just align them to the board and the same for the bottom square, they need to be exactly the same. Otherwise your pattern is going to have a problem and they need to be directly underneath each other. So just make sure that they are aligned to each other. Luck there's again, and now I'm going to bring up my move tool, which is Command Shift M in the horizontal field, I'm going to put in a 1000 pixels. And in the vertical field, I'm going to put in 0 pixel and press Copy. So it's copy that across. Now I also want to copy it down. So the rule of pattern-making is that whatever is on the left-hand axis must get copied to the right-hand axis. And whatever's on the top axis must get copy to the bottom axis. And that is the basic rule of making a pattern. Anything can happen in the middle, but whatever touches this line or this line must be identical on this line and on the slide. So Command Shift M to bring up the Move tool again. This time we're not moving across, we're moving down. So 0 pixels horizontally, we're going to move down and that's a positive 100 pixels and net. And then you just press Copy and there is everything that we need in order to make this a pattern. So I'm going to unlock my rectangles on the bottom layers and select everything by dragging and going over everything. And now I can just drag that into my swatches panel. I'm going to move this art board by pressing the space bar and just dragging with my mouse across. And I'm going to press M for the rectangle tool again and just create a rectangle. And then I'm going to click on my swatch and there is my repeat. So I wanted to see if there are any glitches in it. So I'm going to press S for the scale tool landmark crosshairs onto the top right-hand corner of my rectangle and drag inwards towards the center. Then I'm going to press a toll, the key and the shift. And at the same time while still dragging and it will scale my motif Stan, but we'll leave the size of my rectangle that I drew initially the same size. For some reason, it does bring up the Pen tool afterwards, which you can just click on V to get back to your selection tool. So there, that's the basic of a repeat. You essentially need to have two rectangles. Either a square or rectangle is activity whatever you made king. And the bottom rectangle must be empty, absolutely empty with no Bowl or stroke. And then the top will be on background color. And then you need to arrange your motifs so that they are repeated. What's on the left must be on the right and what's on the top must be on the bottom. If you have any shifting in your layers of squares, that will cause the pets in hiccup. So ensuring those basics are there, you will have a perfectly working pattern and that's the basics. In the next class, we are going to be going over what's in the Actions panel. See you there. 5. The Actions Panel: Before we take a look at the actions panel, we need to just make sure that our keyboard settings have been saved to allow functions to be used in Adobe Illustrator. So go down to your System Preferences and open that up and then go to keyboard and where you'll see this dialog box opener. And all you need to do is just toggle, use F1, F2, etc, keys. And this will allow Adobe Illustrator to access the function keys for use in the Actions panel. When you're not using the actions panel, then you need to uncheck this box. Otherwise you won't be able to put up your volume and do all the things that you usually do with your function keys when you're working on your Mac, Let's have a look at the actions panel. To access your actions panel, you can go to window and come down to actions. It will launch the panel, or you can access it on your sidebar where you will see a little icon, the play button on it. Adobe Illustrator does come with default actions which you can explore, and then you can create your own actions, which we will go into in the next class. The reason why this tool is so useful is because it automates so many commands sequences. You can virtually automate any command sequence and store it within this tool, making your workflow a much simpler and much easier. In this class, I'm just going to focus on recording a command sequence which will allow for at Foster workflow in pattern-making. And we will just be recording the command sequence of the move tool. You can record any kind of command sequence that you wish. So that's where the actions panel is and it can give you so much versatility and speed up your workflow on any project. But in this course we're going to just look at how to create a pattern using the actions panel. And I'll see you in the next lesson for that. 6. Tossed Repeat Action: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at how to use the actions panel to create a tossed repeating pattern. Tossed repeating pattern is a scattered motif over an area while he created, we will record and save a set of actions and the actions panel, this said can be used over and over again or deleted when the project is complete. Well, this repeat, we will record two sequences of commands using the Move tool to copy and move a motif across the bounding rectangle, as well as to copy and move a motif down the bounding rectangle. Follow along, and then pause the video to create your own action and pattern. Please do share it in the class project gallery. Let's jump right in. Welcome to the first lesson. I have a 1000 pixel by 100 pixel art board that I fold with a brown background. I'll open my layers panel so you can see better what my layout is. So if you look at my Layers panel here on the layer, you just need to be aware of what size your background is. I have two squares wide. It is a length squared that has no full Austro. And the other one is this filled square, which has this brown color. I'm going to lock those two because I preferred not to move my SQL queries or are they in it to help with any pets and hiccups that might happen. I have also on my workspace a few flower motifs. These are available to download from the project and resources section of the class. You can access that through the website version of Skillshare on your browser upper range, some of the motifs on the top axis of my square and on the left-hand axis. And I'm going to be moving them around my art board. We're going to now create an action. You can access actions panel at the menu Window. And then Actions. A panel will be launched. And in this panel you can see they are default actions that already come with Illustrator and these are quiet and they might be useful to you. You can explore those. You can also then create your own actions. I have for my workspace, my own set of actions, but I'm going to now show you how to create a new seat for yourself. So go down to this icon, which looks like a little folder. And it's called create new set. Click on it. Name your seat. I'm going to call this tossed. Repeat click. Okay, and to create a new action, you need to click on this icon, which is a square with a plus sign in the middle. And the new action dialog box will open. You can name it. I'm going to create an action to move my motifs on the left-hand side of my square, to the right-hand side of my square by 1000 pixels because that's the size of my bounding square. And I'm going to call this action copy, move across 100 and then going to assign a function key. And here I'm going to assign a F1. Illustrator has already toggled the shift key for me with F1, because I am already using if one as a function key for an action. So I'm not able to just use F1 in this instance. I will need to press Shift and F1 simultaneously to affect this action. That's not a problem. This just gives me more options. And if you creating actions fit for the first time, you will just be able to use all your IF function keys. And then you'll be able to assign a shift alongside that, and then Command alongside that, we click record. And now we can just minimize this menu. Select all the motifs on the left-hand side, and then press Command Shift M for the move tool, we're going to give the coordinates for 100000 pixels vertically, praise copy and our motifs have now been copied and moved to the right-hand side of the art board. Let's taste whether that function has now worked. So I'm going to delete those objects and I'm going to select them again. Remember that you need to stop your recording. So that's not a problem. If you carry on recording and you forget to stop your recording, you can just delete the extra movements that you've made. So in this case, I press Clear and it has recorded clear. So I'm just going to stop my recording and I can just click on that unwanted command and deleted. And if I click down, you'll see that Illustrator has recorded the, the commands that I want it to do. So let's test this. I'm going to select my flowers on the left-hand side and I'm going to press Shift F1. And you can see that those motifs seminar copied across. Let's do it for the next motifs on the top of the box. It's Select All, I'm going to press Create New Action. This one's going to be called copy, move down 10000. I'm going to assign F2 and shift and record. I'm going to bring up my move tool Command Shift M. And I'm gonna put in my coordinates as 0 pixels horizontally and 100 pixels vertically and press Copy. I'm going to stop the recording and then I'm going to check that my recording worked. So you don't have to check it every time. But this is just for demonstration purposes and I'm going to press F2 shift and it worked. So now my motifs are copied from the top to the bottom and from the left to right, as it is, this pattern should work, but I want to fill the center of the pet of the box. So let me do that. I'm going to speed up the video here. Okay, I'm pretty happy with that. Let's taste the patent. I'm going to unlock our background oxygens and select everything on my art board and drag it into my swatches panel. In pressing the space bar on the hand tool, I'm going to move over and press M to bring up my rectangle tool, create a new rectangle, and click on my swatches panel. So far everything looks fine. I'm going to press S for the scale tool now and put the crosses on the top right-hand corner of my box and just drag diagonally to make it as small as possible. It looks pretty okay. There is a bit of a line running down which I want to eliminate. So I might have to move around a few motifs. So let's delete that, bring back our swatch. And I think that line is occurring over here because these look pretty much in a straight line. This one looks fine me. Let's move this one slightly. Make it bigger. It looks a bit better to me. So I'm pretty happy with that. And I thought I would make my pattern at the scale. But it just gives me an idea of way the spacing is and how I wanted to to look overall, but I'm pretty happy with that. I'm OK, move it around a little bit. But as you can see, that is making an action for a tossed repeat. Here are the takeaways. Remember to stop recording when you've completed the sequence of commands you wish to record. If you forget like I do sometimes simply delete the unwanted moves. You will need to record a new action for every new command sequence. If the input information changes, that is, the bounding rectangle size changes, or you need to move a motif in a new direction. In the next lesson, we're going to look at how to create an action for a half drop. Repeat. See you there. 7. Half-Drop Repeat Action: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to create a half drop repeating pattern. A half drop repeat is when a group of motifs is copied and moved across the full width of the bounding rectangle and up and down half the length of the bounding rectangle. We will record for commands sequences of the Copy Move tool in the actions panel to automate this process, then we will resize the bounding rectangle to define the pattern. It sounds more complicated than it is. So stick with me, follow along and then pause the video to create your own action and pattern. Please do share it in the class project gallery. On my workspace, I have a square that's one hundred ten hundred pixels by one hundred ten hundred pixels. And I have an art board, but I'm going to hide it for the time being. And you'll see in a minute why I have a group of doodles that you are welcome to download from the resources section of the class. I'm going to arrange my motifs on the left-hand side and the upper axis of my square. And I'm going to speed up the video cam. Pretty happy with that. I'd like to now group these motifs. Me to open the actions panel. And now I'm going to create a new action to move this group of motifs around my art board. I'm going to create a new set. And I'm going to call this half drop repeat. And now going to create a new action. We're going to move across one hundred, ten hundred pixels and app 500 pixels. I'm going to assign the E3 function key to that and press Record. I'm now going to call up my move tool. And that's Command Shift M. But it hasn't called that because I haven't selected my object. So select your objects. Then press Command Shift M to bring up the Move tool. In the horizontal field, it's one hundred, ten hundred pixels. And the vertical field, it's minus 500. And press Copy, as you can see, it's moved it and copied those, that group. I'm now going to copy and move my original group across 100 pixels and down 500 pixels, I'm going to create a new action. This one's going to be copy, move across 100 down 500. When you design a four and record launch Shift M to 1000 pixels across. And positive for our 100 pixels and press Copy. So everything looks good day so far. Now I want to copy and move this original group of motifs down 100 pixels. I have already created an action for that. When I created it for the tossed repeat, all I need to do is press F2 and a Tez copied and move those objects down. I also want to create another copy and move it up. And I don't have a, an action for that. So I will need to create an action. Now, I'm going to create a new action. This one's going to be called. If the court and we're not moving horizontally where we are going to move negative 10 and copy. Stop your recording. Now I want to copy and move app for half a 100 and across to the left. So that's negative 1, 0, 0, 0, 0 pixels. And I don't have an action for that, so I will need to create new action name. So I'm going to create a new action. Copy, move. Negative 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 6 function for that record command shift M. You just need to select jaw original front Shift M, and it's negative 1 thousand pixels, negative 500 pixels and copy. And in this one, I can just press F2. And now I have a complete set of grouped motifs that I can just group again. And I'm ready to put in the bounding box of my repeat here. What I'm going to do is select my background box and I need to increase the width of this square by 1000 pixels. What I'm doing is I'm just dabbling it. So whatever your width of your and in square is, you can just double the width. And then I'm going to go to my art board and for my Artboard tool or you can just press Shift and choose the artboard options. And I'm also going to increase the width of 2000 pixels and showing your art board and just checking that everything is aligned so your background box should be centered on your art board and then select your motifs and align them to the art board and sent to them to the art board. Let's taste to see whether this pattern has worked. So we're going to select all and drag it into our swatches panel. Now press M to bring up my rectangle tool and full that and yes, it has worked. Can just scale it by pressing on my keyboard and aligning my cross hairs on the top right corner of my rectangle and start dragging inwards while pressing the Tilde key will scale it down. And in pressing the shift key will keep it uniform. And there is my repeating pattern. Here are the takeaways. I have used the method of moving and copying the motifs first and then creating a bounding box to define the pattern. Repeat, decide on a specific size bounding box which I resize when I define the pattern at the end. There are other methods of creating a half drop, repeat, create yours in which ever way you feel most comfortable. I encourage you to explore how you can use the actions panel to speed up your workflow. In the next lesson, we're going to create a struct, repeat. See you there. 8. Striped Repeat Action: In this lesson, we're going to create a striped repeating pattern and use the actions panel to create it. We will use the action we created for the tossed repeat to automate the copy and move command sequence we will be using takes two stripes and I will show you how to use the warp tool to hide the joins. It's easier than you may think. Follow along, and then pause the video to create your own action and Patton, please do share it in the class project gallery. I have an art board that's one hundred, ten hundred pixels by 1000. And I have a group of stripes that I created in Procreate and vectorized. You can access these motifs in the resources section of this class so that you can follow along with me or you can create join. This group needs to be tidied up a bit. So I'm going to call up my lesser tool, which is Q. And I'm just going to group each straps so that all the vectors, points are grouped into one locked. I'm going to speed up the video here. Okay? And now have them each on a separate group. And what I'm gonna do now is quickly color them. Now we're going to create some guides and I'm going to drag the gods down. I'm going to space them 200 pixels apart. Let's just helps me to space them evenly. I'm going to put my gods onto a new layer and lock that layer. And then I'm going to place my stripes on that, guides my gods or have moved. So I'm just going to drag them down a bit. So what we're gonna do is we're going to move the straps one hundred, ten hundred pixels across. And that's a F1 from the previous actions that we've recorded in the tossed repeating Mason. We now have the small gap here that we want to fill. So just going to move this across and it's easy enough to fill that gap. We can just use our last new tool. And then I'm going to turn my guides off. And he's my lesser tool was if just Q and just select a portion of the end of one of these stripes and Command X, which is to cut. And then press Command V, which is paste. And then I'm going to press V to select that piece and place it over on the end of my first stripe on the top. And then just stretch it out a bit to see. So let's just zoom in here. See what we think. This is going to cause a bit of a blip, but we can sort that out. I'm going to select all of those. And then I'm going to go to my Pathfinder tool and unite those. I want to fix this little blip at because I think it's going to cause a bit of an obvious blip in my pattern. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to press Shift R. And that's going to bring up my Warp tool. If you double-click on the Warp tool. And it'll bring up walk to Options. And I'm going to make the width and the height of my brush 20 pixels. I'm also going to bring down the simplification so that it doesn't simplify my edges to match. And I'm going to press OK and need to select my stripe. And in a musical a chain CLI, push art. You can hide your edges, which is Command H. So you can see what's happening. And then I'm just going to gently push those and lead to them in a bit and just change it so that it's not that obvious. A blip, but it still leaves the roughness of the texturize stripe. I'm also gonna do it over here. And that looks pretty good to me for now. March, just bring these down. Okay. So now let's have a look at the rest of the stripes. I'm going to bring up my lesser tool again. And I'm going to copy the ends of my stripes and just lay them in the middle of these gaps. And I'll meet you on the other side. So this dark pink line might have a problem for me. So I'm going to try and fix up this little yeah. He turned want to go over them access at all. Otherwise, it will cause a problem in your patterns. So that's why you need to steer clear of the axes, the axes of any Bounding Box. Now it's time to taste this pattern. And I'm going to check that I have a bounding box on the bottom. I need to clean up my layers panel quite a bit. So that's probably from my warp tool. So I'm going to bring up my, my tool and just select all of those and then just press Command G to group them. As well as this dark pink. And press Command G. And they're back to normal again. So let's unlock our background boxes and just checking that they are aligned, selecting all, and dragging it into the swatches panel. Now we can just move that over and press M to bring up the rectangle tool, draw a rectangle and fill it. And we have got a problem because the this strap is on the top of our bounding box and it needs to repeat on the bottom, so therefore it's cut it off. And so what we can do is I'm just going to select that and press F2 to copy and move it down 10000. And then I'm going to select my swatch again and drag it into my swatches panel. And then an a you can see it has repeated. So these are rough texturize stripe. Let's just press S for scale tool to scale it down. And you can see, sometimes my Scale Tool works, sometimes it doesn't. That's a little quirk of Illustrator. Meaning it shows the preview and it hasn't shown in the previous time. So, but it could be that my it's because my agents have been hiddens and let me just bring that back up. And preschool. And there we go. So there's the repeated strap. And there are three ways of using the actions panel to create different repeating patterns. See you in the next video. Making a stripe repeat is quite simple, but attention just needs to be paid to the ages of the bounding rectangle. That is, changes of the axes of the bounding rectangle equals pet and hiccups sections of the stripe motif cut and pasted to join the stripe seamlessly. The warp tool Shift R is a useful tool to make adjustments to the stripe in order to camouflage the joins, this method will work for the vertical repeat as well. You can stop the video now and take a screenshot of your action and posted in the project gallery. 9. Thank You!: Thank you so much for joining me in streamline your pets and making workflow with actions in Adobe Illustrator. I hope that this course has helped to demystify the actions panel for you. And that this will equip you with a foster and more efficient workflow. It takes a little bit of planning. That's in the long run. It will save you time. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them in the discussions panel on this cost, I want to encourage you to post your class project and share it with the class. If you enjoyed this class, it would mean the world to me. If you would leave a positive review and send me any feedback that she had, meet me on the gram and lates B frames. We can connect. Yeah. Thank you so much and see you soon.