Ikat Inspired Pattern in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch Ikat Pattern Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design class, create Ikat Patterns in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today, we're going to look at creating Ikat patterns in Illustrator. You're going to learn what Ikat is and then learn a technique for creating that pattern in Illustrator. Now, we're going to start with the object that's going to be our pattern, and we're going to apply the Ikat effect to it, and that'll be applicable to all versions of Illustrator. Then we'll take Illustrator CS6 and CC, and look at creating a pattern from the object in those applications. Finally, if you're using Illustrator CS5 or earlier, I have a separate video for you that shows you how you can turn the Ikat element into a pattern pace in earlier versions of Illustrator. 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 this class. These recommendations help other students to see 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, I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now if you're ready, let's get started creating Ikat patterns in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 - What is Ikat: Before we look at creating our own ikat effect, let's just have a look and see what an ikat effect even is. Well, it has its traditions in weaving. This is a piece of ikat woven fabric. Now when you weave, you have some long threads that are permanently attached to the loom. Then you weave in and out of it with these horizontal threads. The long ones here are called warp and the ones across are called the weft. Now in ikat, it's the warp threads that show this movement. You can see that it looks like these threads have been misaligned, if you like, and that's the ikat look. So when we're trying to recreate this in Illustrator, basically what we want is a fairly simple pattern. Then we want to move it in the vertical, but not in the horizontal. So this is a very typical ikat look and this is what we're going to create and it has its history in weaving. 3. Pt 2 - Understand the Wrinkle Tool Options: When we're creating our Ikat effect, we're going to use a tool in Illustrator called the Wrinkle tool and it will behave as before we go and get the Wrinkle tool to just have a look and see how it's going to behave. I'm just going to create a brand new document here. It doesn't matter how big it is, because all we're doing is to have a look at some of the aspects of the Wrinkle tool that we're going to harness in this tutorial. I've just made a line here, I'm going to alt drag a duplicate of it away, and then I'm going to choose object transform transform again. I'm going to continue to do this using Control or Command D until I create a few lines down my document. I'm going to open up the Layers panel and I'm just going to hide most of these lines, so just going to work with one at the moment. We're looking at this line here. The Wrinkle tool shares a toolbar position with the width tool, and it's down here at the very bottom. You'll want to select it, and then double-click on the tool to open the wrinkle tool options. Now, you don't need to do this, but you'll probably want to watch this just so you can see how the wrinkle tool works. These are its default settings, I've already clicked "Reset", so this is how it operates by default. Just going click "OK" and let's just go and see what it does. I'm just going to click and hold my mouse pointer, and then I'll just let go. That's what we get when we use the wrinkle tool set at its default settings. It's uninspiring to say the least. Going to lock that down and let's display the next line. Now, let's go back to the Wrinkle tool and start working with it. Well, one of the things that's happening with the wrinkle tool right now is that the wrinkles are round, they're not particularly pointy, this one is, but all the others around. Well, if we flip these three settings here to their opposites, we're going to solve that. We're going to disable the two options that are set by default and enable this one. I'll click "OK" and let's try this now. Again, what I'm doing is just holding the mouse pointer and then letting go. Now, you can see that we've got more pointy ends. Again, not a particularly inspiring result, but we are going one step further towards what we want. Let's get another line and let's go back to the wrinkle tool options. We're going to have a look at complexity now. Complexity can be set to one of 15 values. So let's go to about five and see what happens then. Well, we're starting to get more wrinkles, so we're heading in the right direction there with complexity. We're going to take complexity up to about nine, because that's ultimately where we want it to be. Let's click "OK" and let's just see how that goes. It's a little bit better. We're also going to increase detail, I'm going to take that up to about seven. Let's go and get another line, and let's see how are we going with this now. While we're starting to get some really big results, we've had a major transition from this line to this line, and it was all to do with the details setting. Now we could wind that up even further and see how we go. That's a lot of detail, it might be a little bit too much detail. One of the problems with the wrinkle tool is that it's actually creating anchor points. I'm just going to select this line. Let's just knock it down to 0.25 of a pixel line weight. We're getting a lot of action here, very much the action that we saw in that Ikat pattern. This is going to help us along the way, but perhaps too much because we have a risk of bugging down our machine, because each one of these is an anchor point. I'm actually going to dial back detail just a little bit to perhaps about eight. Intensity is another setting that we can play around with and we may not need the intensity to be as high as it is, I'm actually going to take it down to 40 percent. Let's go and find ourselves another line to experiment with. I'm just going to hit the middle of this line. Let's go back and let's also make this point to five points. There's another option for intensity. It might help you to play around with the Wrinkle tool settings to say what variation you can get in your lines before you start attacking an actual pattern pace. Because you can see that the default settings for the Wrinkle tool are really not going to help us at all. This is a much better setting. Now, just be aware that when you're in the wrinkle tool, by default, it's set to only work in the vertical. You can see here that vertical set to a 100 percent. That's going to help us with the Ikat. But just be aware that if you ever need to move in a horizontal direction, you're going to have to change this default value because it only works in the vertical by default. I'm just going to click "OK" because I'm pretty happy with this and we're ready now. Now that we know what we want the Wrinkle tool to be set at to go and create our Ikat pattern. 4. Pt 3 - Create the Ikat Shape: So far, everything that we've done it can be done with all versions of illustrator and four two can this next step. It's only when we go to actually create the pattern that we're going to need to split up between CS6 and lighter versions and CS5 and earlier. So in all versions you're going to choose File and then New. I'm just creating a document that's 400 pixels by 400 pixels in size. I'm using RGB color mode. I have disabled align new objects to pixel grid. In Illustrator CC 2017, that align new objects to pixel grid option is going to be found up in the top corner here, but it's here in earlier versions or just click "Okay." Now I'm going to create the diamond shape for my Ikat pattern. I'm going to do that with a square. I'm going to a Rectangle Tool and I'm just going to drag out a square. Doesn't matter how big it is. I'm going to fill it with a color. Its going to make this a bluish green. I don't want any strokes on any of these shapes, that's really important. I'm going to rotate this around 45 degrees. I'm just going to hold my mouse pointer here with the selection tool enabled, then add the Shift key so that it rotates around a multiple of 45 degrees, 315 is perfect. Just click away. Now I'm going to the direct selection tool. I'm going to select over these two middle points. There's two points here on either side of the square. Then I'm going to the scale tool, with the direct selection tool selected are now going to just drag inwards, that turns my square from a rotated square into a nice diamond shape. I'm just going to click away from that. Now you can say that when I select this shape, the bounding box doesn't match up the diamond shape where we can get it to do that by choosing object transform and then reset bounding box, now the bounding boxes the way we would expect it to be. I need to make a duplicate of this shape, so I'm going to choose Edit, Copy and then Edit, Paste in Place. I have another copy on top of the original one, and I'm going to color this a different color. Right now I'm not at all concerned about the colors except this, I want every single one of these diamonds to be a different color so that I can multiply my options for recoloring my pattern later on. I'm going to the selection tool and I'm going to drag inwards on this corner, I'm going to add the Shift key and the Alt or Option key, just to size this so that it's going to be sized in from the middle of the shape. We're going to do that again. Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste in Place. Again, recoloring the shape using a different color, so I'm going to use this sort of orange here. Then Shift Option or Shift Alt, just drag in. This is the shape that's going to be the foundation of my Ikat pattern and we're going to have another panel of color around this, but that's going to be built in using the pattern-making process. Now that I've created my basic shape, I'm going to my wrinkle tool. Now, because this is going to be an overhead on your computer, you may want to make sure that you have closed any applications that you don't need, particularly if you don't have a really new computer and a really fast computer. You may also want to restart your computer before you start working with the wrinkle tool just to help your computer be able to cope with the complexity of the design that you're about to make. Now I'm just going to hit this shape with the wrinkle tool. Because I've already got the settings that we said in the last video, we already know this is going to work, we know that it's pretty good because we went to all the trouble of experimenting with the wrinkle tool. The only thing that I may want to change is the width and height of the brush and may want to make it say 50 and 50, if I want to get into little corners in my pattern for example. I'm just looking for a really nice fuzzy effect on my overall shapes. Now, if you go too far, you're going to get an error message like this that the plugin can't continue because the object contains too many points. Well, I've obviously maxed out on a number of points that I can create. So I'm going back now to the selection tool. I'm going to select over all of these shapes and I'm going to group them with object group. I can resize it at this point if I want a smallest starting object for my pattern. Now we have the basic element that's going to be the basis of our pattern. In the next video, I'm going to show you how you can create this as a pattern in Illustrator CS6 and CC in the video. After that, we're going to look at it in Illustrator CS5 and earlier. 5. Pt 4 - Make the Pattern CS6 and CC: At this point, before I create my pattern, I've gone ahead and saved to my image. That just means that I've got this element saved in case something were to happen and my machine were to crash, for example. I'm going to select over this grouped shape with the selection tool. I'm going to choose Object, Pattern, Make. Now, if you don't have this option on your toolbar, then you're probably using an earlier version of Illustrator so skip ahead to the next video because if you don't have this tool, you can't make the pattern this way and you'll have to make it a different way. But if you do have it available, just select Object, Pattern, Make and click Okay if you see this dialogue. This is a pattern options dialog. Right now this is our default pattern. It's not quite what we want. I'm going to go here to the Tile Type. I'm going to drop this down and choose Brick by Row. Then from the Brick Offset, I'm just going to select half. What that does is it just offsets this pattern paces. In a minute, this diamond shape is going to move down here. Now, I've got dim copies set to 70 percent, which is why this copy in the middle of the working copy is darker than the others, but it doesn't matter. None of these settings here in this area of the dialogue have any effect whatsoever on the pattern you are about to make. They just control the visuals on the screen. Now, what we do want to do is unlock this option here. If it's locked like this, you're going to want to unlock it. What I want to do is I want to decrease the height. If you just start arrowing down here, you'll probably find that your machine's going to slow down quite a bit. My height at the moment is set to about 217 pixels. I'm just going to type in 150 which is a bit less and I'm just going to test that. Well, it's not quite closed up enough for me. I'd like it a little bit more, so I'm going to reduce the height to 140. That's just closing up this vertical distance because I'm working with the height and I'm pretty happy with that, but what I want to do is to now increase the horizontal distance. So I'll set at about a 121 right now. I'm going to type 140 and see what that looks like. Well, that's a little bit too much, so I'm just going to bring it down to 135. Working with absolute values when you've got a pattern as complex as this will probably help your computer to be able to handle the complexity of the pattern that you are creating just simply because there's so many anchor points in this shape. Once you're happy with the pattern that you've designed, you can just click Done. The pattern pace is added to the Swatches Panel. Now, I'm just going to take this out of the way for now and let's test the pattern we've just created. I'm going to create a rectangle the size of the art board. I'm just going to drag this out. I have the fill selected here, it's targeted, so I'm just going to click on my new pattern swatch. There is my pattern, and I can resize it with object transform scale. I'm going to turn transform objects off. I'm going to turn preview on. I want to transform in a uniform amount and at the moment it's set to 78 point something, I'm just going to set down to 75 percent, which is just scaling down that pattern a little bit and giving me a good look at what's going to look like. Now, in the next video, I'm going to show CS5 and earlier uses how to create the pattern. Now, you can do it the same way in later versions of Illustrator. If you want to see how patterns used to be made or a technique for custom making patterns, you can watch the next video. But in the last video, we're going to wrap up with some color changes. I'm going to show you how you can change the color of this white as well, because it's not actually a color and we're going to need to make it a color so we can change it. 6. Pt 5 - Make the Pattern CS5 and Earlier: We're now going to look at creating this pattern in Illustrator CS5 and earlier, the applications that don't have available pattern make tool. Now I've gone ahead and saved this pattern space just in case something happens to my computer. I'm just going to open up the last pallet and this object is now a group. I grouped it so that all these component spaces would move as one. I'm going to size it down a little bit holding the "Shift" key just to create a slightly smaller version of the pattern space. Now, we're going to need to fill in this space up here and this space and this one and this one. So I'm going to take this shape and I'll drag a duplicate out of the way. I'm going to take this one and I'll drag a duplicate across here. I want to place these two shapes pretty much where I want them to be relative to this space here. I'm going to group the two of them. So I'm going to select over both of them and press "Control" or "Command G". Or you could select object and group and that tool just group these two paces. I'm going to take these to and Alt or Option drag a duplicate away and place that pretty much in position down the bottom here. These are not perfectly positioned, but I have one group here, one group here, and the object in the middle is a separate group of objects. I'm going to select over all of these and I'm going to the Align panel. Now if you don't see the Align panel here, choose window and then align. When you get this little dialogue, you want to click on "Show options" and you want to open up the aligned to, and you want to make sure it says aligned to selection. You don't want to align to art-board here. So we've got align to selection selected. Firstly, I'm going to make sure that this group and this group and this object are all centered. So I'm going to click here on "Horizontal align center". It looks like they were well centered. They didn't seem to move at all. The other thing I wanted to do is make sure that they're evenly spaced so that this space here and this space here are the same. I can do it with this tool here, Vertical Distribute Center. I'm just going to click once on this. Again they didn't move, but that's fine because it looks like I got them in a pretty good position before I started. Now I can move the whole lot down if I want to adjust so that I can get a bit more breathing room on my workspace. Now I've got the shapes that I need for my pattern. What I need to do is to create the actual pattern itself. We do that with what's called a no fill, no stroke rectangle. So we're going to select the Rectangle tool. We're going to set it to no fill and no stroke. I'm going to go here for the center of the shapes. I'm just looking for Illustrator to come up with the word center when I hover over this shape. I'm going to drag across and pick up the center of this shape here and then drag down and pick up the same point in these bottom shapes. Now, that should give me my repeating pattern. If you want to, you can just zoom in here. So just enlarge this so that you can see where you're going and just drag here and just make sure that it's snapping to those places. If you have a look at your view menu, you'll need to make sure that you have smart guides turned on and snap to point. That should make sure that you're going to snap into position here. Just look out for those little smart guides and I'm going to roll this down here, zoom out a little bit and again, just make sure that this vertical line is also in the correct position and then check this one here. Seems to be snapping really well. If I'm happy with this, I need to move this no fill, no stroke rectangle behind everything. So I'm going to the last pallet and I'm going to drag this rectangle below all the other objects because that's the way that you create patterns in earlier versions of Illustrator. You do it by defining the pattern space using a no fill, no stroke rectangle that is positioned behind all the other objects. If it's in front or somewhere in the middle, it's just not going to work. So I'm going to select everything here. I'm going to open up my swatches panel and just going to drag and drop my pattern in here. Now, I'm going to take all of these objects and just move them to one side because I want to test my pattern before I discard these pieces just in case there's a problem with it. I've created a no fill, no stroke rectangle over my art board. I have my fill targeted here. I'm just going to click on my "Pattern pace" and there is my pattern in place and I'm just going to check the places where it would be off if it were often, it's looking just fine to me. We can resize it by choosing object transform scale. You want to disable transform objects and you want to enable preview. Now I've just scaled mine down to 75 percent so I'll select that and click "OK". Therefore I got pattern created in illustrator CS5 and earlier. Of course, the same process still works in Illustrator CS6 and later. It's just that if you've got those later versions, you have an additional pattern making tool that you can use. But this process will work in fact, in any version of Illustrator. In the next video, we're going to have a look at recoloring this pattern, including building white into the patterns so that we can recolor it. We're also going to talk briefly about fracture lines in our patterns and how we can solve the problem. 7. Pt 6 Recolor Fracture Lines and Wrap Up: We're now going to have a look at recoloring this pattern. The process is identical in all versions of Illustrator. The fact that I'm using the pattern that I made for Illustrator CS6 and CC users is immaterial. You would work this exactly the same way in earlier versions of Illustrator. What you're going to do is start out by selecting your rectangle that is filled with your pattern. Now, the pattern itself, we know it only had three colors, and the white is not actually white, it's actually just the artboard. If we want to be able to recolor this white, we're actually going to have to add white into our pattern because otherwise, white isn't going to be available because this pattern isn't really white. You'll see if I move it across over the edge of the artboard, the white disappears because it's not really a color. Given that, I'm going to open up the appearance panel, I have my rectangle selected, I have my fill, you can see it's pattern fill is here. Here, I'm going to add another fill. I'm going to click here on "Add New Fill." By default, Illustrator adds the exact same fill as we used previously, but we don't want that to be the case. I want to fill this with white. I'm just going to click on white and you can see that the whole document changes to be white. That's because my white fill is on top of my pattern that has some transparency in it. Or I can just drag this down and put it underneath the other one. Now, this is the pattern with transparency, and behind it is a white fill, and this is a true fill. If I drop this over the edge of the artboard, you'll see that brings white with it because it's actually got white in this shape. That's pretty important because you can't recolor transparency, but you can recolor white. Now, we have our object that's been recolored. Let's go to our recolor tool. I'm going to click here, Recolor Artwork. We have four colors here, the four colors in our pattern. Now, if this one doesn't look like this, if there's just a dash, you can turn it into an arrow by just clicking on it. You want all four of these colors to be mapped using an arrow pointing to the exact same color. We're going to click here on "Edit." These are our four colors; white, orange, green, and the blue color. Now, we can start dragging around the colors, and we can recolor all of the colors in our pattern. When you see a color combination that you like, click here to add a new color group for that color scheme, and click "Okay." If you look up here in the Swatches panel, you'll find that you still have the original pattern. This was the original pattern. Now, the pinky color is being inherited from the shape that has the fill behind it, and here's the other pattern with this new coloring. Now, you can continue to recolor this pattern as you like. I've got it selected. Again, I'm going to Recolor Artwork. I'm again going to edit. I'm going to lock my colors this time and then just drag them around. Every point that I drag them to, I'm going to get the same relationship of colors in my pattern pace. When I see a color combination I like, if I want to keep the color scheme, I can click here on Create New Color Group, and then just click "Okay" in the patterns here in the pattern panel. Now, I can switch between any of these patterns, but you can see that the recoloring is affecting the color here, this color fill behind the shape. If you go to a different pattern color, say this one, you may need to come into the appearance panel and change this fill because the color is not actually part of the pattern itself. Now, if you've been working with Illustrator for awhile, and particularly making patterns in Illustrator, you may be wondering why I don't have any fracture lines in my pattern. Well, that's because I looked ahead and realized I was going to probably have fracture lines, so I solved the problem before I began. I chose Edit and then Preferences and General. On a Mac, that would be Illustrator, Preferences, General. I disable this option Anti-aliased Art work. When you disable Anti-aliased Artwork, you get a slightly rougher look to your pattern, but you'll find that fracture lines pretty much disappear. I'm going to turn this back on, which is the opposite of what I suggest that you do, just going to click "Okay." Not unsurprisingly, the result is that I have a fracture line through this pattern. Now, these fracture lines, if they move around your pattern as you re-size it inside the shape, are considered to be a problem with Illustrator's display of the pattern. It's not a fundamental issue with the pattern swatch, it's a problem with the Illustrator interface. The difficulty there is that if you see lines through your pattern like this, these fracture lines, and you save your pattern pace, they're also going to appear in that. Turning anti-aliasing off will help you get rid of those lines. You can also get rid of them or try to by choosing Object Transform Scale, make sure to enable Preview, disable Transform Objects, but leave Transform Patterns set, and then you can adjust the scale of your pattern. Now, I'm having a lot of problem with this functioning with my screen capture device. But what would happen is typically that the pattern would decrease in size because I've scaled it down to 90 percent. Then if this fracture line moved around, I could be sure that it is an Illustrator issue. What I'd look to do by reducing the scale of my pattern maybe one or two percent at a time is to get rid of all the fracture lines so that I have a clean element that I could then save. But as I said, it's an issue with Illustrator. It's well-known as an issue with Illustrator and that is a big fracture line through this design. But because this was built in Illustrator CC, it's not actually in the pattern swatch, it's in Illustrator's display of this pattern paste, but we do need to be very concerned about it. I'm going to turn that anti-aliasing back off again so I have a much cleaner piece of art here. Your project for this class is going to be to create your own iCat pattern, create your pattern swatch and use it in a document and post an image of your completed pattern in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about creating iCat style patterns in Illustrator and also about the wrinkle tool. 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 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. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and 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.