Intro to Surface Pattern Design: Learn Adobe Illustrator

1. Intro to Surface Pattern Design: Hi. My name is Bonnie Christine and I'm the surface pattern designer working in this course forest on Caroline's. Surface pattern design is creating patterns to use on products like wallpaper, fabric, and stationery. Several years ago, I had a dream to become a designer but no formal training. In this course, I'm going to help you get started in surface pattern design by sharing with you what it took me years to learn. Technically speaking, you will leave knowing and understanding Adobe Illustrator as it pertains to surface pattern design. Creatively speaking, you'll learn how to gather inspiration, sketch, illustrate, and construct repeat patterns. Spiritually speaking, I hope that this course will inspire your very soul. My hope is that you leave this course feeling inspired and empowered and equipped with the essential tools and knowledge you need to become successful designer. If you get just as excited about surface pattern design as I do, be sure to join me and my next course where we'll be discussing how to take your love for patterns and share it with the world. 2. The World of Surface Pattern Design: Hey everyone. This is Bonnie and I just wanted to welcome you to class and tell you how happy I am that you've decided to join us. I want to start with an overview of what we're going to cover in this course. We're going to talk about what exactly is surface pattern design. Touch on my own creative story, and we're really going to get into Illustrator so that you're comfortable with the program. We'll discuss sketching practices, how to gather inspiration. We're going to have a little bit of homework and also a design challenge for the end of the course. Finally in illustrator, we're going to learn how to illustrate from our sketches, from photographs that we've taken, and also natively directly from within illustrator. Of course, at the end of the class, we're going to learn how to make a repeating pattern. In this course, you are going to gain the technical skills that you need in order to navigate illustrator for surface pattern design with ease. You're going to develop your creative skills as well. You're going to learn best practices for sketching, how to really gather inspiration, and bring your illustrations to life. Of course, we're going to make a repeating pattern in illustrator. But I also hope that this course really inspires your very essence and your creative side. I hope that you come away feeling really fulfilled and excited to start making artwork. Some of you may be asking, what is surface pattern design? In a nutshell, surface pattern design are the patterns that are printed on the products around us. If you take a moment to look around, you may see curtains, a piece of fabric, and notebook, a bookmark, pillows on your couch. Anything like that that has a pattern on it, also has a designer who designed that pattern behind it. That's what we do as surface pattern designers. We make repeating patterns and then we apply them to products. Surface pattern design can take two different directions and we're going to discuss both during this course. First, you can take this in a professional direction. If you want to pursue a career as a surface pattern designer, this is where you'll begin. You can also just do this for personal reasons though. This is going to enhance your illustrator skills and allow you to make repeating patterns for personal uses if you want to have your own fabric printed. Say somewhere like spoon flour or society six. You can also use this in digital scrapbooking or just to make gifts for the people that you love. I don't want to spend too much time on my story, but I do want to at least cover it, so you know where I came from. Five years ago, I had this big, massive, creative dream, and after tons of hard work, it came true. If I can do it, I truly believe that you can too, and this is how we're going to do it. The things you're passionate about are not random, they're your calling. I really believe this. The things that I found myself enjoying most are what I wanted to make my entire life evolve around, and what I wanted my career to evolve around. Another important thing that I want you to all realize early on in this course is that the world needs your artwork. When I was just starting out as a blogger, I remember emailing someone to introduce myself and she wrote me back and told me how thankful she was that I was starting a blog and that she wanted me to know that there was room for me. This meant so much to me because she was very successful and I was nothing, and her telling me that there was room for me really gave me the added inspiration I needed in order to make a go at this career. I want to tell you the same thing. It's easy to get overwhelmed when you look around at all the people who were making beautiful artwork and beautiful patterns. But the world needs you and there's room for you. I hope that this will encourage you to really start making your work come to life. We're going to just run through my timeline really quick. I started my blog going home to Roost in 2009, quickly after started an Etsy shop, and then in the same year, was able to quit my day job. My first Etsy shop, I opened selling handmade aprons and tea towels. It has sense evolves, but that's how I got my start. In 2010, I decided that I wanted to be a designer. I had already graduated college and I had gone to business school, not design school. I knew that this was going to be a big task that I would have to undergo by myself. Six months passed, and I remember thinking I still want to be a designer, but nothing had been done in order to accomplish this dream. My husband and I had to move to Colorado for a business move, and over the next year, I set out to learn illustrator by myself. At this time in early 2011, there was not a lot of information about surface pattern design on the web. I learned illustrator taking online courses, and it took me a full year to learn the program. Somewhere in the middle there, I managed to make my very first repeating pattern, and though I'm not proud of it, this is a picture of it. Of course, I was just happy to make it repeat. I spend about the next six months making as many patterns as I could possibly produce. I made hundreds over the next several months, and this was a really important time in my career because I really found my signature style and took time to really develop my skills as a surface patterns designer. Later on in 2012, the Roost Tribe was born, and this is a premium membership to my blog that I basically created. Because everything that I had just gone through, I wanted to make easier for people to learn. This is where I share all my secrets and tell everything that I've learned. If you're interested, you can find out more on my website, goinghometoroost.com. Late in 2012, I managed to sign my first contract. I had made a portfolio and contacted some companies, and signed my first contract with a fabric company to produce my very first fabric line. The ball really got rolling at this point. I added a line of wall stencils with accompany. My first fabric line came out. Then my second. I had a baby in there, and then I've just keep adding contracts. I have a beautiful Aurifil thread line. I have a line of ribbons that just debute with renaissance ribbons. My third fabric line came out. I have some more paper coming out and thought for creative lives this past year and 2015 is not looking like it's going to slow down either. I just wanted to show you this timelines so that you could see where I came from, which was not knowing anything and really having huge dream to following my dream throughout a course of several years, and where it's led me today. We're going to get more and more into how this was actually accomplished and how you can do the same thing through this course and the follow-up course. Is surface pattern design for you? First, I want you to know that you don't have to be an artist. You don't have to be a painter or an amazing artist. In fact, a lot of surface pattern designers can't sketch at all. They work directly from within an illustrator. I typically do work from sketches, but there are not works of arts. They're not something that I always tell outright. They're just ideas and sketches on paper, which I'll show you later on in the course. I want you to know that you shouldn't be intimidated if you don't consider yourself a really established artist. However, if you are, this is just going to be easier for you. It is so fun to see your artwork in the world. There's nothing like seeing a product with your work on it for the first time. The other interesting part about surface pattern design is there's no ceiling to your success. Once you've made one pattern, you can theoretically license that same pattern over and over again in different industries for years to come. You generally also get a percentage of sales. Your success is really deemed by how well your pattern goes in the market. This is a big difference from say, selling a physical product that you have to make, where you can only make as much money as your hands can actually produce, and then finally, if this is your creative dream, I find that there's nothing more fulfilling than being able to actually do what you love. If you fall in love with surface patterns design, I hope that it becomes a new career for you. I always go by the motto, ''The secret to getting ahead is getting started,'' so why don't we get started? 3. Essential Tools - Setting up a New Workspace: Before we get started creating artwork, I'm going to take you through learning Adobe Illustrator. We're going to start from the very beginning of opening up the program and going through step-by-step all the essential tools for surface pattern design. If you consider yourself a pro at Illustrator, you can go ahead and skip forward to sketches in inspiration. But I encourage even the most seasoned Illustrator to watch these next few segments because there are always new tricks that we can learn. I'm going to start by just opening up Adobe Illustrator. First off, you just get this toolbar. I want to open a new document by hitting ''Command N.'' I'll title this document Intro. I'll just walk you through these steps really quick. First, I usually want to leave the number of artboards as one, but you can choose whatever you like right there. The size is also set to letter, which is 8.5 inches by 11 inches. But you can change this width and height to whatever you prefer. You can also change it from inches to pixels, which are the two most common that I use. Down here under advanced, if you click on the ''Flyout menu,'' you can either select the color mode as CMYK or RGB. You should work in CMYK for all of your print objects and RGB if you're going to be working for the web. This all looks good to me and I'll hit ''Okay'' to open a new document. First, I want to just take you through setting up a workspace and how to save it so that all of our workspaces look the same as we go throughout this course. First, you might notice that I have a white on white background. Oftentimes Illustrator has a dark gray background and I prefer white on white because a lot of times I'll hide my artboards and it just gives me a really nice clean space to work. If you want to do the same thing or just change the hue of your background, you can come up to Illustrator, go to ''Preferences,'' and come down to ''User Interface.'' This is where you can change the brightness from dark to light. Also change your Canvas color from either the match, the user face brightness or just to white. You can change it here to just whatever you prefer. I'm going to leave mine white on white, but you can choose whatever you like and select ''Okay.''Next I want to build out my workspace. So under Window, I'm just going to walk you through my favorite user interface. I want to make sure that I have color. I'm just going to start building this over in the right-hand corner. Next I want swatches. If you notice, I can just grab this whole toolbar and as I come and hover close to the bottom of this one, it snaps to it just like that. Next I want to layer my Stroke panel. I'll do the same thing with it and just hover it right down here. Next, I want to choose a line and this is how we're going to align our objects. I like to build just a small sidebar just to the left of my color palettes where I'll be adding several of the tools that I use most often. I'll start with align, then I'll add artboards. You see how when I get close to that, it turns blue. If I drop it, then it's creating one column for me right there. Next I want to select ''Image trace.'' We'll bring image trace right under here. Next, I want to select ''Layers'' and drop that down into the menu. Next is Pathfinder, we'll drop that into the menu. Finally, I want to come down to type and select ''Character.'' Just so that we can keep the character dialogue box handy over here. Now that I have all of these in one column, you can hover over one of the edges and take it out to the left. So you can read what these all are. As you get comfortable with the names of each of them, I like to reduce them to their smallest size to so I already know what these are and I can grab them, and it doesn't take up too much screen space. When you're happy with your artboard, you can save it by going up to ''Window,'' Workspace,'' New Workspace.'' I'm going to title this Skillshare and select ''Okay''. Then if you're opening up a new document or your workspace gets off or messed up somehow, you can always come under ''Window,'' go to ''Workspace,'' and then select the one that you want to work with. In our next tutorial, we're going to get into working with all these tools and better learning how to use them. 4. Essential Tools - Zoom in & Zoom out: For this tutorial, I just want to quickly introduce to you, zoom out and zoom in in Illustrator. Something that you'll definitely find that you use constantly while you're working and I will too sometimes without explaining what I'm doing. So I wanted to give a dedicated section to help you learn zooming in and zooming out in Illustrator. There are a couple of ways to do this, as there are almost everything in Illustrator. My favorite way is to use Command Space bar. If you hold Command Space bar down, you can see that I have a plus sign and I can just draw a marquee over what I want to zoom into, and it'll zoom into that for me. Now if I want to zoom out, I can hold Option Command Space bar and that'll give me a minus magnifying glass. Then I can either draw a marquee or just start clicking and it will zoom out to the center of where I've been clicking. If you're on a PC that is, Option Control Space bar, but on a Mac it's Option Command Space bar. Another useful keyboard shortcut is Command zero, which is going to take you to where your artboard fills your workspace. If I Command Space bar, zoom in on this big butterfly and then I want to jump back out to my artboard, I can hit Command zero. Another way to do this is Command Minus to zoom out and Command Plus to zoom in, though that's not working for me because I think my keyboard shortcuts might have changed, but it should work for you, Command Plus and Command Minus. Now if you're working on a Mac, sometimes Command Space bar will bring up spotlight. That can be really annoying if you're trying to zoom in or out and your spotlight is coming up. If that's not happening for you, you're done with this video, you can move on, but if that is happening for you I'm going to show you how to make it stop really quick. If you come down to your System Preferences, you want to go into keyboard, then you'll scroll over to shortcuts and under spotlight, you can see that show spotlight window has the same keyboard shortcut, which is Option Command Space bar. I have mine not selected, which is why the zoom in is working for me in Illustrator, but if yours looks like this you should check it off and then exit. As you come back, Command Option Space bar should now work for you and Command Space bar. In a nutshell that is how to navigate around Illustrator and I'll see you next time. Bye. 5. Essential Tools - Direct & Indirect Selection Tools, Lasso Tool: We're going to start learning the tools and illustrator that directly apply it to surface patterns design one-by-one. We're going to learn how to make artwork that's similar to what's on my board right now, later on, but I just needed a little bit to get started so that I can show you a couple of the tools. First, the most common tool that we use is called the Selection tool. The keyboard shortcut for that is V. I'm going to use keyboard shortcuts a lot throughout this entire course, and I'll say them as I use them so you can learn them. But you should also know that in the course downloads I've provided to you a illustrated guide to the keyboard shortcuts that I'll be using for this class. You can download that and print it and keep it by your workstation to better help learn these shortcuts as we go. The selection tool allows you to grab entire items and move them around your art board as solid objects. The Direct Selection tool, which is also called the White Arrow tool and the keyboard shortcut for that is A, allows you to come in and move individual anchor points. If I zoom in here, you can see that I can select maybe one point at a time and move it just a little bit. You can also, when you select one point you'll see that these curvature handles show, and you can grab those curvature handles and change the curve of the lines. If I zoom back out, if you select a whole item, say right in the middle, you can still move the entire object. But the Direct Selection tool is especially useful for just grabbing one point at a time. Next, I want to show you the Lasso tool. It's another selection tool that we use a lot, and the keyboard shortcut for that is Q. With these birds down here, I've made them using little droplets. They're not grouped together at this time. As you can see, it will be really hard for me to select just one bird without selecting bits of another bird. That's when we use the Lasso tool. I'll go ahead and hit "Q" on my keyboard and I can just start drawing around one item. Once I release that, everything that I've drawn my line around is selected. I can then hit command G to group that item. Now, when I go in, these are all grouped together and I can move them nicely around one-by-one. I will want to go ahead and do that to all four of these so that I get them grouped together. Now, if you've grouped something and you don't want it grouped anymore, all you have to do is right-click and select "Ungroup", which will ungroup all these items. But I want them grouped. I'm going to go ahead and do this for the other two as well. That's going to make these much easier to work with. 6. Essential Tools - Drawing Tools: pencil, pen and blob brush tools: For the next part of the essential tools in Illustrator, I want to go over all of our drawing tools that we have available to us in illustrator. This is just a pen and paper sketch that I did, and scanned in, which we'll get into later in this course. But I just want to use it for this lesson to illustrate the different drawing tools that we have. The first one that appears in our toolbar is called the pen tool and the keyboard shortcut for that is P. A pen tool is really useful and it just takes a little bit of getting used to learn how to do it. First if I just want to draw a straight line, all I have to do is drop one point and then drop the second point where I want it. Now, that's a blank line because you can see over in my color palette that I have no fill and no stroke. I want to select stroke by clicking on it, and change it to black so that we have a black line now. You can also draw curves with the pen tool. If I drop one point, and come over to drop a second point, but instead of releasing my mouse, I can begin to drag this line and you'll see a preview of the line that it's going to drop before I let go of my mouse. If I want it to go up, then I'll drop that line and then it usually follows an S curve patterns. So I know that this next curve is going to go down. I'm going to try to follow my line down here, and I'm going to change my stroke color to red so we can make sure to see what my new color is. This is what I would suggest you doing at home, is trying to draw a wavy line and then these other lines as we go along. That looks pretty good. You can also just do a sharp line, and to do that, we'll just drop points, there's no dragging or dropping. To create curved lines would just drop points and we can make a line like that. Now, it gets a little trickier if you want to draw a line like this, like ocean waves or something that doesn't necessarily follow that natural S curve. In order to do that, I'll select P for the pen tool, and I'll start here and just start drawing this S curve that's going to come naturally. But as you can see, if I try to come up here, it's not going to be possible. In order to do that, what I need to do is click back on the last point that I dropped, which is going to give me a brand new starting point. The line is still going to be connected. To do that again, I need to click back on the last point that I dropped, which will give me a new starting point and then I can make a point like this. We can't see my line because it's clear again, but if I change it to red, you can see what I've just drawn. Another important thing to remember about the pen tool is that you can close shapes with it. If I were to draw a square, once I get back close to the beginning point that I dropped, you can see that to the bottom right of my cursor, you can see a circle. That means I'm about to enclose the shape, which means it's no longer line, it's the shape and I could add a filter to it. Of course you can make any size, shape that you want and then close it at the end. So you have shapes to move around like that. I'm going to delete everything except for my scan here and go on to show you the pencil tool. The Pencil tools keyboard shortcut is N. This basically allows you to just draw, you don't drop points, you just draw like you would with a pencil. This is going to be extremely useful if you have a Wacom tablet. It's a little harder to do with a mouse, but you can see that you can just start drawing and tracing over things. It works pretty well. But you can see that it's really hard to get very precise and I'm just using my mouse here, not my a Wacom tablets. If I move over my sketch, you can see these are pretty rough, but there's one very useful tool. If you select one line, you can come out to the pencil flyout menu and select the smooth tool. Now the smooth tool works by just, let me zoom out a little bit, works by just smoothing out the lines. If you just haphazardly go over it in the direction that you want it smooth. This is going to reduce the number of anchor points that are dropped and also significantly smooth out that line. I use the smooth tool all the time. You can also use it on shapes that you've drawn with the pen tool, and can see that it just quickly gives your illustrations a much smoother look. Next, I want to show you the blob brush tool, which is one of my favorite tools I use most often. I especially like to use it with a Wacom, it's over here in your toolbar and the keyboard shortcut for that is shift B. You can see that it gives me a circle and allows me to just draw shapes and lines. I'm going to draw over these with a red blob brush. You can see now that circle is going to be the size of the line that I draw. You want to increase or decrease that size. You can use the left and right bracket tools to increase and decrease the size of that. This allows you to draw and trace over. It's similar to the pencil tool, but instead of having one line, this is like a filled shape. I have two sides to this. If I were to use the smooth tool, I would only be smoothing out like the bottom side of the line at one time. We're going to use the blob brush to a lot during this course. You're going to get to feel a lot more comfortable as you go. If you have a Wacom tablet, I'll also show you how to change the width of the line depending on how hard you press down on your tablet. Another essential tool to use in Adobe Illustrator is the rectangle tool. The rectangle tool has a flyout menu, this is where you can easily draw a rounded rectangles, ellipses, polygons, stars, and more. The keyboard shortcut for the rectangle tool is N, and you can simply just start drawing boxes of any shape that you like. If you want to draw a perfect square, all you need to do is hold down the shift key, and that will constrain the proportions to make sure that it's a perfect square. The keyboard shortcut for the ellipse tool is L, and you can draw ovals and circles. The same thing applies here, if you want it to be a perfect circle, you hold down the shift key and will constrain the proportions. Don't need this anymore, so I'm going to delete it. The only other thing, let's see under the rounded rectangle tool, you can start drawing the rectangle, and if you want to change the curvature of the corners, you can go up and down with your arrow tools to change that. Now I'm using Adobe CS6. If you're in creative Cloud, then this is a little different but even easier, so I know you'll be able to figure it out. Finally, the star tool, you can use the same up and down arrow tools to add or decrease the number of points that you are using, which is also how you draw triangles. There are two more things I want to show in this video. One is the eraser tool, it's over here in the toolbar, the keyboard shortcut for that is shift E. This is going to give you a similar circle to the blob brush tool, which you can decrease and increase its size again by using the left and right bracket tools. This allows you to just erase parts of things that you've drawn. It works pretty straightforward and you can create all shapes by using that as well. Under the file menu for the eraser tool is something called the scissors tool. If I zoom in on this circle and select it, you can see that I have 1, 2, 3, 4 anchor points. Say I wanted a half circle, I just wanted to cut this in half, I could use the scissors tool to click on the two anchor points that I wanted to dissect, and then this has become two pieces. That is basically chopping an anchor point to where you can disconnect it. That's all for the essential drawing tools. Next up we're going to be talking about some more functional tools like rotating and reflecting objects. 7. Essential Tools - Functional Tools: Rotate, Reflect: Next we're going to talk about some of the more functional tools that are often used in Illustrator. These can be super helpful and they're really fun to learn. I've listed them here on the upper left-hand corner so you can follow along as we go. First, I want to discuss the rotate tool. In order to show this illustration, I am going to grab the pen tool by hitting P on my keyboard. I'm just going to come in here and draw a little petal shape. Something like this is fine. I might try the to just even that out a little bit and also change its color to something a little nicer. If I wanted to rotate this, the rotate tool is over in our tool panel. But I always use the keyboard shortcut, which is R. If I select R, you can see this little marquee comes up, which is the point of a round where I'm going to rotate. I can just start dragging my mouse. Without letting it go, I can drag it and it'll show me where this is going to land. If I wanted to move this marquee say I wanted to rotate it around this point down here, then I can do something like that. You can place this marquee anywhere you want depending on how you want to rotate your item. The next tool is called reflect, it's also under here, in the toolbar, but it's under the rotate tool fly out menu. The keyboard shortcut for that is O, which is easy to remember because an O is perfectly reflected in all directions. It's going to look similar to the rotate tool. It drops a marquee. I'm going to put that over here and then start dragging my illustration like this. If I drop it, then it's going to be perfectly reflected on the other side. It's hard to tell because my shape is almost perfectly symmetrical anyways. But in fact, it is reflecting it around that point. If I wanted to duplicate this, say I wanted to reflect it over here, but instead of just dropping it, I actually wanted to make a copy of it, all I have to do is hold down my option key. You can see that on my mouse and I have two arrows. If I hold down the option key and drop, let go of my mouse, then I've created two of the same shapes. You can do this as many times as you want. You can also use the option key to just make duplicates as many times as you want. If I just hold it down on my keyboard, I can drag and drop this as many times as I want to make duplicates. If I want to make this larger, I'm going to use the scale tool, the keyboard shortcut for that is S. Once again, it gives me a marquee just like the rotate and reflect tool. I can start making this bigger or smaller depending on what I want. Now, if I want to make it proportionally bigger or smaller, I have to hold down the shift key, which will keep the proportions in line. If I don't hold down the shift key, then I can skew it however I want to. I'm going to show you a couple of more thing, I'm going to keep one of these on my art board. I'm going to show you a couple of other useful tips with the rotate and the reflect tool. If I select my item and go back to the rotate tool, which is R, I'm going to place my marquee down here. If you hover over it and press the option key and click once, I still have the option key held down on my keyboard. You can see this new icon come up with the four dots at the bottom right-hand corner with the option key still down, I can click once, which will bring up the rotate panel tool. If I hit "Preview," this is going to show me where I'm going to rotate this item around. If I wanted to 10 degrees you can even just scroll with your mouse to see where you want to do that. Another really useful trick is say, I'm want to make a flower and I want an equal amount of petals going around the center. I don't have to constantly do math, Illustrator will do it for me. I can say 360 divided by how many ever petals I want, let's say eight. Instead of hitting ''OK'', I'm going to hit ''Copy'' so that I make two. Now comes the fun part. Instead of doing that again, you can duplicate the last item. To duplicate the last item, you can hit "Command D" on your keyboard, which will duplicate the last item that you've done as many times as you want. Now, I have a perfectly symmetrical daisy with eight petals in it, and I only had to rotate it once. The reflect tool is especially useful for when you're drawing something and you want it to be symmetrical. You only have to draw one side. A really great example of this would be something like a butterfly, which I can draw for you really quickly. Just maybe two little wings. I can draw this in, color this in, and I'm using the blob brush tool. Now, I'm not going to take too much time to make this too beautiful, but I can just add maybe just a couple of little accents here. This is, again the blob brush tool and I'm just increasing and decreasing the size of my marker here as I go using the left and right bracket tools. Then finally, if I just draw a body, this is not going to be the most beautiful butterfly, but it's going to illustrate the reflect tool perfectly. Again, I'm using the blob brush tool. Might want to just bring this over here. Say I want these wings to be identical on the other side. All I have to do is select everything. Hit O for the reflect tool. My marquee is here, and I don't want to reflect it around that point. I want to reflect it around this body. I'm going to drop it somewhere in the middle right here, and drag this over to the left. Hold my shift key down to keep it exactly in the same place as the wings on the right and the option tool to drop it. Then if I zoom out, I have a perfectly symmetrical butterfly. I'll delete that and I want to show you the rotate tool for one other purpose. You can really start to make some fun shapes using these tools. If I grab my pen tool and just start drawing really any shape at all. Let's see. I'm going to zoom in and I want this curve to call out. I'm going to click back on my last point and start going out with this one. I have this funny shape. I want to replicate it exactly on the other side. I'm going to select it, hit O for the reflect tool. Then I can select one, either the top or the bottom anchor point in order to do this exactly on the other side. I'm holding my shift key and my option key down to make sure that it's identical on both sides. Now, I have this shape. What if I want to rotate it around itself? I'm going to select both of these. There are two there which we could make one, but for this purpose, it's fine. I'll just select both of them. Hit R for the rotate tool and I'm just going to drop the marquee right here down at the bottom of this point. Holding my option key down, I'll click here once that brings me up the four little dots, if I select again, then I get the rotate panel tool. Say I want to do this 360 degrees by something a lot larger, like maybe 30. Let's do it even more than that, 360 divided by 35 because I really want them to overlap. Let's do 360 divided by 42. I'll hit copy so that they're overlapping. If I just want to keep doing this around and around, I can select "Command D" on my keyboard and come all the way around here. This has really created like almost a doyle effect. Now, if I select all that, one thing I'm going to probably do a lot during this course is hit "Command H" on my keyboard, which hides my edges. Everything is still selected but it's hidden so you can see what I'm doing here. I'm just going to change the opacity here to 50 percent. That allows all those colors to show through, which creates a pretty cool effect. If I wanted to take this back up to 100 percent, this is right now a lot of little bitty shapes. If I wanted to make this one shape. There's a couple of ways to do that, but bring my edges back. For this application, show you the shape builder tool. The shape builder tool is over here in your toolbar keyboard shortcut for that is shift M. It just allows you to come draw through the shapes that you want to combine. I can't undo this once you're done. You want to be sure that you're happy with everything that you're doing. This is basically just making this one big shape. I've even taken out some of these holes, which I didn't have to do, but it gives a cool effect. Now, I just have one shape rather than all those little bitty tiny shapes. The shape builder tool can come in handy to connect all those shapes at once. That's all for the function tools in Illustrator. Next step we're going to be covering color and the swatches panel and how to make custom color palettes. I'll see you in a little bit. Bye. 8. Essential Tools - Swatches Panel, Eyedropper Tool, Custom Colors and Palettes: Next on our list to cover for essential tools in Illustrator, is everything about color. We're going to talk about the color palettes, Swatches panel, how to create custom color palettes and save them in our documents. First, I just want to introduce to you the Swatches panel. The color panel and the Swatches panel is what we added in the very first video of this Skillshare class. Illustrator automatically opens with this primal color palette, so you have your basic colors that you can start working with. If I were to draw a rectangle, you can see it's black now, I can change the color to anything over here in my Swatches panel and though I've mentioned this briefly before, this is your fill color and this is your stroke color. If you want to change the stroke color, you can select it. It's nothing right now. You can change it to black or what have you. If I had my edges, you can see it now has a black outline. If you wanted the fill to have no color, then you just select the fill and change it to none. X on your keyboard will toggle in between these two, so if you're working using X very quickly is the easy way to change the fill and the stroke as you work. One of my favorite ways to create custom colors and custom color palettes in Illustrator is to use photographs. These are two photographs that I've taken myself and I love the colors from them. One of the best ways to grab a color from a photograph is the eyedropper tool. It's over here in your tool panel and the keyboard shortcut for that is I. With my rectangle selected, I can come down here and just start grabbing some different colors from these photographs that I like. Automatically that gives us some nice custom colors. Now, if I wanted to create an entire custom color palette from these two photographs, I can do so very quickly and easily. What I like to do is grab the rectangle tool and start drawing a couple of rectangles down here. I'm going to select the first one and drag it over to the right holding the Shift key to keep it in line and the Option key to duplicate it, then I can hit Command+D to duplicate it several more times. With all those selected, I can reduce its size a little bit with the scale tool. I'm just going to come up here and start grabbing some colors that I like. Now, you might notice that I'm switching back and forth in between the eyedropper tool and the black selection tool very quickly. I want to tell you how I'm doing that. One useful thing in Illustrator is that if you have a tool selected like I do now, the eyedropper tool, and you hit Command on your keyboard, it's going to take you back to the last arrow tool that you used, either the black arrow tool or the white arrow tool. I have Command selected on my keyboard right now, which is why you can see the black arrow tool and when I release it, it goes back to the eyedropper tool. This works with all of the tools in Adobe Illustrator and is a really useful tip to learn. I have seven colors that I really like and I can add these to my Swatches panel, so I've selected all of them. Over here there's a little folder called new color group. I can select that. You don't have to, but you can name your color group. I'll name this flower and select "Okay." Now I have this new folder of colors that is in my Swatches panel that I can use throughout my work. Another thing I like to do is just delete all these others except for the black and white because I use those, but you can just select those by holding the Shift key down, and drag and drop them to the trash. That way, all I have is just this nice color palette that I just created. I can delete these now and this one. Now, if you want to save this, say to use in future Illustrator documents, all you have to do is come to the flyout menu on the right and select Save Swatch Library. Now I can save this as skillshare flower, hit "Save," go ahead and select "Okay." Now, say I open a new document, Illustrator has put its standard colors in here, but if I go to the flyout menu, come down to Open swatch library, user-defined, I can find skillshare flower right there. All you have to do is click on this little folder, add it to your Swatches panel. There you have it. That's how you save a custom color palette. Now, how do we use this custom color palette? I'm going to delete these photographs that we use to create the color palette and I've just saved our little butterfly that we made in the last segment. I'm just going to paste it here for us to use so that I can show you how to use the live paint bucket tool. If I select this butterfly, we have only two colors now, but say I want to make these dots some different colors and things like that. I can use the live paint bucket tool. It's over here in the flyout menu of the shape builder tool. It's right here and the keyboard shortcut for that is K. I'm going to zoom in and you can see above the paint bucket tool, there are three icons. Right now, the biggest one in the middle is white. I can come over here and grab another color, and now you can see it's yellow, light green, and dark green. The one in the middle is the one that you're going to be using to color in certain shapes here. Well, it's a little shapes. Now you can use the arrows on your keyboard to just toggle in between these colors. Now I'm in dark green. If I come over here, I have this light pink and a darker pink, darker yellow and a light yellow. I'm just going about this pretty haphazardly. But if I select off, you can see that now we have a bunch of different colors for these circles. Another way to recolor this butterfly now is that if I have it selected, we can use the recolor artwork tool, which is always in the top toolbar of Illustrator. If I go ahead and select that, you can see the colors that I have are here in the toolbar and the swatches that I've added to the toolbar are over here on the right too. If I had several color groups, then they would all show up here. I can select that and then underneath here you can randomly change the color order. I can just start randomly going through color options for this butterfly one at a time. You can tell that this quickly gives me lots of options to look at and gives you a real sense of how your color pattern is working together. Once you found something that you like, you can stop on it and select "Okay." Now you have saved that new butterfly colored in a new way. That is it for colors right now, we'll be using colors more and more throughout this course. Next step, we are going to be talking about some of the more advanced features that Illustrator has for us. See you next time. 9. Essential Tools - Groups & Isolation Mode: Here we're going to cover a few of the more advanced tools the Illustrator has for us to use. I want to first start off by illustrating the groups and isolation mode to you. So in order to show you this, I already have made this document, with some of my pre-existing artwork in it, just to illustrate groups and isolation mode a little bit better. As you can see, these two pieces of artwork look like they are almost identical or they are identical, but if I start clicking around you'll be able to see that they are built very differently. Over here on the right, I have nothing grouped. They're all individual bits of illustrations, and then over here on the left, I have the birds grouped, clouds grouped, and rain droplets grouped, which is going to make working through this illustration so much easier, and this is why it's important to group as you work. As you can see over here, if I just want to work on this bird, I can't really select just the bird without selecting a bunch of stuff behind it, and also a couple of little bits and pieces from the surrounding birds, and this whole document is just going to be a bit of a nightmare, because if I wanted to get all of the orange droplets I would have to come in and hold down the Shift key to select each one of them one at a time, which is doable but time-consuming and just not necessary. I'm just going to delete this entire artboard over here, and zoom in on the one that I have grouped. As you can see, if I click on the birds, all of these little droplets are grouped together into one. Now, if I want to go and edit just one of them, I need to enter isolation mode. If I double-click on this group, you can now see that everything in this background is faded out, and I cannot select it anymore. I have though also grouped these in layers. So at this point, I now have each individual bird grouped. So you can have groups within groups. This is going to allow me to just move one entire bird at a time. If I wanted to come in one step further and just start moving around the little droplets of say, this bird, I can double-click again, which is going to fade out everything except this one bird, and if I zoom in, I can just select one droplet at a time and do some really minute changes using the rotate tool and the scale tool on these little droplets. If I zoom back out to my artboard, you can exit isolation mode a couple of ways. If you want to just get back to your starting point, you can just double-click off of your artboard, and you've exited everything. But say, let me get back to that point, say I didn't want to go back to my starting point, I just wanted to go back to the group of birds, up here beneath your tool bar, you can see I have layer 1, group, and group. So that's how far in isolation mode I've come. So I can just hit the back arrow which says back one level, and that'll take me back to all the gray birds, and of course, if I hit it again, it'll take me back to my starting point. So that's another way to navigate isolation mode. Another thing I want to show you while I have this illustration open is using clipping masks, and how to use isolation mode to your benefit and with clipping masks as well. Say, for instance, that I just wanted this to be a square illustration. I can select this background which is a square and make a copy of it, by hitting Cmd+C and then Cmd+F is a keyboard shortcut for copying in front. You can also hit Cmd+B to copy behind. So though it doesn't look like it I now have two copies of this. If I want to bring this to the front, I can right-click, go down to Arrange, and select Bring to Front. Now I have this square in front of all my other illustrations and if I select it, and everything that's hanging off the artboard, which I have grouped so I just have to select one go of it, I can make a clipping mask. I use keyboard shortcut Cmd+7. You can also find clipping mask under Object, Clipping Mask, Make, and there's your keyboard shortcut of Cmd+7. So that's going to put everything inside this clipping mask. Now, it's still there and editable if you need it to be, and it also is not including my background, because I didn't select that when I made the clipping mask. If I want to get access to the things inside this clipping mask, I can just double-click on it, and that gives me access to move these things around that are grouped. So you can see what's falling off the edge of the clipping mask. Now, if I wanted to get access to individual birds, I'll do the same thing by double-clicking again, which gives me access to these individual birds, and then if I click again, I can enter isolation mode to just move one little droplet out of time. So that's one way to use clipping masks and isolation mode to your benefit. I'm going to hop back over to my original document here, and go over a couple of other tools here as well. I want to introduce to you the Align tools which are over here at the top of how we built our workspace. So if I just draw a couple of squares, I'm going to hold my Shift key down so that they're all perfect squares. Say, I want these to be aligned. So I can select all of them and come over here to my Align panel, and I have several options. First of all, if you want to make sure that you have these options available down here, if you don't, yours probably might look like this, and you can come out to your fly out menu and select Show Options. This is going to allow you to choose whether you want to align these objects to themselves, to the [inaudible] of what you have selected, or to the artboard. So if I have to the artboard selected and I choose Horizontal Alignment, it's going to align them all to the center of my artboard. If I undo that and select Align to my Selection, and center them, then it's going to take the medium of all of the items I have selected. If I were to rotate this like so, it would make sense to use vertical align center, and make them all aligned to the center horizontally. So you can just play with these, just about any option that you want is available to you, and we'll be using these more and more throughout the course. There are a couple of other tools that we can use in order to build shapes in Illustrator. These are just if you're using either artwork that you've made from sketches, or in my case, I'm just going to draw some shapes here. Let's say I wanted to make an arrow, I can draw a rectangle, and then using my Star tool or the Polygon tool, I can draw a triangle. Rotate it here, and then I have my smart guides on which allows me to, my pixels just snap into place when they're aligned perfectly. If you want to make sure that's on for you too, you can just make sure under View that your smart guides has a check by it. This looks a pretty nice arrow, but as you can see, it's two shapes. If I want these two shapes to be one shape, I can use my Pathfinder tools. So over here, in our toolbar, and the very first one is Unite. So that's going to unite those two shapes and make them one big shape, and you can just use this for just a ton of different applications as you're working. You can also minus front. Let's say, what if I grab the Pen tool and build another teardrop shape here. I'll just reflect this around, and this is two shapes. But if I select both of them, I can unite them to where now they're just one shape. I'm going to draw another triangle, and say I want to bring this to the center right here, and this one is layered on top. I'll change its colors just so you can see for sure that it's layered on top of this teardrop shape. If I select both of them, I can go to the next option which is minus front, which is going to literally delete the top item from the item beneath it. So this is a really quick way to make some shapes that would have otherwise been possible, but a little trickier to make with something like the Pen tool. Two other quick tools that we'll be using a lot is Transform and Arrange. If I want to transform this item, I can select an item, right-click, come down to transform, and you can move the item, and you can also access rotate, reflect, and scale from here as well. Move is the most often way that I use the Transform function, and that if you have preview selected, that's just a way for you to see where you're moving this item. So if I wanted to move it a 100 pixels to the right, and zero up and down, you can see if I preview, preview, that it's going to jump it a 100 pixels to the right. We're going to use this all the time as we get into building our patterns, and I'll just select Okay, and then finally, I used this once already but, if I have this layered and say I wanted this one in the back, you can right click and come to Arrange, and this is where you either bring something to the front, to the back, send it backwards or send it forward. So if I wanted to send it to the back, I'll just select that and I've sent it to the back of my artboard now. Those are just a few of the more technical tools that Illustrator has. In the next video, we're going to go over even more of the in-depth tools that we can use to illustrate. I'll see you there. 10. Essential Tools - Join, Trim Tool, Adding Effects: Here we're going to be covering even a few more essential tools in Illustrator. First, I want to show you the join command. I'll do so by illustrating just simple heart. I'm going to grab the pen tool by hitting P on my keyboard, and just come in here and draw a half of a heart as best I can. My smart guides let me know that that's the center. I can smooth this out if I want to a little bit under the pencil flyout menu. I can grab the smooth tool and just smooth this out a little bit. I think that's good. I want to replicate this exactly on the other side. With this selected, I'll hit O on my keyboard, move my reflect point to either the top or bottom anchor point, and then just start dragging this over here. Then with shift key will put it exactly in the same placement, and the option key will drop it from me. Now, we've learned a couple of ways to combine the shape into one. We've learned how to use the shape builder tool. I can just drag a line across the two to make them one. Fire and do that. I can use the shape mode of Unite and make it one, and then there's one other way that you may find useful as you work on your illustrations, is that if I zoom in to these two points here at the bottom, grab my white arrow tool by selecting A on my keyboard and just draw marquee over these two bottom points, or I could have also chosen these two, it doesn't matter which one. I can hit command J on my keyboard, and that has combine these two objects to make them one. Command J is for join. So you can join any two anchor points that you want by hitting command J on keyboard. Next, I want to illustrate something called the trim tool, which also is incredibly useful in Illustrator, and it's something that I just recently learned so I've been using it all the time. Down here is a butterfly that I've already illustrated, but I want to add some texture down here to these bottom wings. I'm going to zoom in further once more and I'm just going to grab the blob brush tool by hitting shift B and the gray color over here that I already have used in this illustration. I'm just going to start. I'm going to draw off of this line right here and just start drawing some bits and pieces across the bottom here. So let's see, I'm going to come off the edge again right there, and then I'll grab one other color, maybe this cream, reduce my size with the left bracket tool and then just come in here. I'm coming off the side but I just want to create this really rugged looking accident here. I can increase my size to color it in a little bit. So this is where the trim tool really is helpful, because I wanted to draw some things that come off of the edge right here, but I want it to be perfect and be really hard to come in and draw something perfectly in line with the edge right there. I can instead use a clipping mask and then the trim tool. I'm going to select this blue background, make a copy of it by hitting command C and command F for in front. I'm going to right-click and go to arrange and bring to front. Now I can select this new blue shape and also holding down my shift key, everything that has come off of the edge, which are those three things right there. Now I can make a clipping mask by hitting command 7, which has in fact accomplished what I was going for. It gives us clean edges, but typically especially in repeating designs, I don't like to work with a lot of clipping masks. For one, I know that I don't need access to these leftover bits anymore and clipping mask just make your document a little bit sludgier as they get larger and larger. So instead, under the pathfinder toolbar, I can use the second one here called trim. After you've made a clipping mask, you can select trim, and that is going to go ahead and use that clipping mask to basically cut where the line was, of the clipping mask. Now these are native Illustrator shapes but they are perfectly cut off right there where the clipping mask was. The clipping mask no longer exists, which also means that I no longer have access to these bits that were hanging off. They are in fact deleted, but that's what I wanted. If I wanted to replicate this on the other side, I might go ahead and just delete these two layers, that way I can just select all of this, de-select the yellow background, and then reflect it across. There's not an exact center but across the center here that I find. That looks pretty good and I'll hold down the option key to duplicate it. Then I just need to take it back. To do that, you can either right-click, come down to arrange and start sending it backwards, or the keyboard shortcut for that is command left bracket tool. So that command left bracket tool, that'll start taking it back in my document. So now I have those two sides that are perfectly symmetrical and bits that fall off the edges that are nice and clean. In order to show you to store and transform, I'm just going to draw a simple circle. Sometimes in Illustrator, it's nice to have perfect illustrations, but sometimes you want it to look a little more authentic, a little more hand-drawn. So that is when something under the effect menu called distort and transform comes into play. You can just play with all of these, do something a little bit different but zigzag and roughen I use a lot. So if I roughen when my circle is selected, I can hit preview. I'm going to zoom in and do this again for you. So distort and transform, roughen, and select preview. You can see that that has given me a bunch of jagged edges. Depending on what you're going for, you can choose whether you want those edges to be smooth or corner, and then you can change the amount of detail and the size of the detail as you go. So if you wanted something really jagged, or just maybe a little off, something like that might be nice. Of cause you can change the size, make something really pointy or just maybe a little off, which is what I'm going for. I'm going to hit okay. One thing that you need to know about this though, is that it's called an effect in Illustrator, which is why it's found under the effect menu. But this means that it's an effect applied to a circle. I always recommend that once you're happy with an effect, you go ahead and expand that effect so that you don't have all of these shapes that have effects applied to them. If you're working with a big document that's just going to slow your document up and make it larger. If you go ahead and expand it, then it is what it is and you'll be able to work on it that way and it's going to simplify your document. So in order to do that, I have it selected, I'll just come up to object and select expand appearance. So what that has done is expand it. I don't have access to that perfect circle anymore, but I don't need access to it. This roughened circle is perfect for what I was going for. If you wanted to do something like a polka dot that wasn't so perfect, then this gives a really nice effect. Something like that. Next, I want to show you something called offset path. This is how I've added these perfect outlines down here. I'm just going to delete them so that I can show you again, how I did them. As you can see, I didn't really like these two colors butted up right against each other because the hue doesn't really have enough contrast in it, so I wanted to add an outline. If I have this shape selected and I want to make a perfect outline of it, or a perfect duplicate of it in a different size, I can copy it and paste it behind by hitting command C, command B. Now you can't tell, but there are two there. I'm going to change the color of the one on bottom to this cream color, and I'm going to hide my edges by hitting command H just so we can see what I'm doing. Come up to effect, path, and offset path. Now if you select preview, you'll be able to see a preview of what you're doing down here. I'm going to go ahead and hit my round instead of miter and reduce this offset to something like two pixels. I think that looks good. So if I hit okay, then I have this perfect outline that's also shape. But again, the same theory applies here. That this has been an effect applied to a shape. I want to expand it to simplify my document. So with it still selected, I'll come up to object and expand appearance. So now I have this perfect shape back here that is an exact offset path of the first shape. I use that all the time and we'll use it more and more throughout this course as well. There are two more things for this tutorial. The next is called simplify. I have this thank you that I have made from a sketch. As you can see, there are just tons of anchor points. What I want to do is simplify this illustration to reduce the number of anchor points that I have, which is also going to help keep your documents working really smoothly. This most often happens when you scan something in and a lot of times there are just more anchor points than necessary. I can come up to object, path, and come down to simplify, which brings up the simplified dialog box. If I go ahead and hit preview, of cause, this is nowhere near what I want it to be, but it's at 50 percent. You can see that I started with 490 points and I currently have 59. Clearly I need more than that, so I'm going to bring my curve precision up to maybe 95 percent, maybe even closer to 97 percent, and I think that looks pretty good if I uncheck preview. You can see that really it's almost identical. It just has many less anchor points it has. Started with 490 and I'm down to 189 now. I'll hit okay and I've really accomplished the same look and effect, but with a lot less anchor points. Finally, if I wanted to add a drop shadow to what I'm working on, say this thank you, I'll zoom in and I'm going to hide my edges again. This drop shadow is under effect again, and you can just come to stylize and add a drop shadow. If you hit preview, you can go ahead and see what it's going to look like. I would reduce this significantly and reduce the offset significantly too just so it's a little less obvious. I might even change the opacity down to 30 percent or something like that. But this is just something that you can play with and change depending on what you're working on, but it's a nice way to give a subtle effect. You'll use this less in surface pattern design, but it's still really helpful to use in Illustrator overall so I wanted to show it to you. Next, we have one more video for some more tools in Illustrator, and then we're going to move right into sketching and gathering inspiration for our patterns. 11. Essential Tools - Select Same, Hide Edges & Art Boards, Using Layers: Okay, this is the last video tutorial we have on essential tools, and in the next segment we get to start righting on talking about sketching and gathering inspiration for our pattern work. To get started, I have brought the same bird illustration that we've been using back into my document, and this is the ugly one where nothing is grouped and it's a mess. But inevitably sometimes you find yourself in this situation because of the way a document was built or something, and it's just a nightmare. I want to show you an easy way to get these items grouped, by using something in Illustrator called Select Same. If I have something selected on my Artboard say this cloud, I can come up to Select, go down to Same, and choose either Appearance, Fill Color, Stroke Color, Opacity, and usually it's Fill Color for me. I use this so much that I've created my own keyboard shortcut for it which is Command R but that's not going to be the case for you so just ignore that unless you want to create your own. You'll just come up to Select, Same, Fill color, and that's going to select everything in my Artboard that is Fill Color. Now I can hit Command G to group those. I can do the same thing with this orange droplet, Select, Same, Fill Color and group those. Now I can do the same thing for the birds, Select, Same, Fill color. Which is still going to, if I go into isolation mode, is still not going to have group the individual birds but at least you're one step closer to getting there, and you can always use the lasso tool to come in and group these for one more layer. One at a time that way. That is one very quick way to get your items grouped. Hide edges, I've already introduced this to you but if you're working and you want to of course keep something selected but you just need to see its finer details, you can hit Command H which will hide the edges and command H will also bring them back. Now sometimes I also want to hide my Artboards. Occasionally if I'm working on a document these black lines just get in my way, you can always go up to View, and select Hide Artboards. That just gives you a nice clean space to work on, which is another reason why I like to work white on white, so that it's just nice and clean. The next thing is that if you're familiar with Photoshop, I'm sure you're familiar with working in layers. However, Illustrator does allow you to work in layers, however you're going to work with them a lot less than illustrator than you do in Photoshop. But they can still come in Haiti, so I'm going to introduce them to you. We have layers over here in our toolbar that we created at the beginning of class, and right now you can see that I have everything on one layer. But at the bottom I can create a new layer, and just drag and drop it to the bottom. I'm going to double-click on it and name this background, and select Okay. I'm going to come in and select the background, come out to the layer one fly out menu, and you can scroll down until you see what you have selected has this blue dot around it. You can also see that it's that pink path. I can just grab this and drag and drop it down to my background, which is going to take it all the way to the bottom. Now, there's a couple of other things you should know about the layers panel, this eyeball will toggle between you seeing what you have selected and not. When you have the eyeball off, you cannot select what you cannot see. I'll bring that back, and then another option you have is to lock a layer. If I choose the Lock button, then if I come over here and select, I cannot select this background, I've locked it. Which also comes in use when you're working with a big document. All of those options are also available to you from one particular object, you don't have to work in layers, but you can work with individual objects as well. If I wanted to lock all these birds so that I could come in and select the clouds or whatever just the birds don't get in my way. That's how the layers panel works. That is all for our essential tools of Adobe Illustrator, please join me in our next segment where we're going to discuss sketches and inspiration. I'll see you there. Bye. 12. Sketching & Inspiration: For this next segment, we get two discuss sketching techniques and tools and inspiration. Before I show you my sketches and we really get into designing for my sketches, I want to cover a couple of the basic principles and techniques behind sketching and how you can gather inspiration for your work. First, I want to discuss a couple of my favorite tools. Though, it's not necessary that you have a Wacom tablet, I can't express to you [inaudible] makes designing and it is truly an invaluable tool. If you're looking to purchase a Wacom tablet, I just suggest purchasing the largest one that you can afford. I believe, I use the large one and I've had the same one for four years now, and it works really good. If you're not familiar with the Wacom tablet, it's basically a large tablet where you'll be able to take a pen and draw, which immediately turns your work into vector. Uni pens are my favorite pens to either draw with or trace with. They have a really nice black ink mark. I'll link to these below so that you can found where to purchase them. Of course, you need a journal to sketch in, and I'd just like to use a plane white journal. Mole skins are great for this or sheet paper, whatever you prefer. A lightbox is also not completely necessary but, I generally like to sketch in pencil because it feels a little more free to me and then use a lightbox to go over my pencil sketches with a dark ink pen. A scanner will also be really important in order to scan in the sketches that you've bean working on and I will go over best practices for scanning in the next segment. Camera is also going to be an invaluable resource to you. Doesn't have to be a nice one, it can be your iPhone camera or whatever, but we're going to talk a lot about taking pictures and drawing inspiration from those. Let's talk about best practices for sketching. I like to use a really bright white paper that doesn't have a texture to it. This is going to mean scanning in will produce a really nice clean result. Like I mentioned, I also like a dark, smooth pen line. This is going to mean that sometimes we can get away with not having to copy our work once for an Illustrator if we have a really nice line that we can follow. Then you should also draw at a scale that is going to provide a nice scan for you. It doesn't have to be huge, but something that's not very tiny is going to be best. For like a general floral element, I would suggest drawing it between two and five inches, at least wide, something about like that. Something around like the size of the palm of your hand is going to be at least big enough to give us a really nice scan. Next, I just want to take you through a couple of my sketches and finish works of art so that you can see what my work starts with and how ends. These on the left are couple of sketches that I have made and on the right is the finish pattern that resulted from the sketches. You'll be able to see in a lot of these that my sketches are sometimes really rough, they're rough drafts, they're just ideas, and we can manipulate them once we get an Illustrator. This next one is a piece that I made from some photographs. I have this flock of birds flying over my house one day and I literally ran out with my camera and shot pictures of them and use these pictures to create the flying bird print on the right. These are a couple of more sketches I used to make a couple of prints. These are butterflies. As you can see, I only drew half of the butterfly because I new that I wanted all of them to have replicated sides, so, of course, we went over how to do that in our previous lessons. This one is just a nice floral print and you can see on the left that some of these elements didn't make it into the pattern, but most of the ones at the bottom, I used to create the pattern on the right. These are some bear faces that I drew and this is a good example of just a really rough draft jotting down what I think I wanted to follow as an outline and then really perfected at once I got on the computer. Here's a fox that goes with the same line. These illustrations were made from actual photographs by actually tracing the photographs. I made the ones on the left by tracing them with my Wacom tablet and the one on the write by using the Live Trace tool. We're going to cover how to do all of these in the next segment. We're going to learn how to illustrate from our sketches, from photographs, and from directly within Illustrator. Generally, I always design in a cycle. I began with conceptualizing an idea, I create an inspiration board, and I begin sketching. Next, I like to illustrate all of the motifs that I think I'm going to have in a pattern or pattern line and then I'll add color to them. Finally, I develop the repeating patterns. This is not necessarily how you have to work, but how I find myself working all the time is sketching, illustrating, and then repeating and starting over again. Let's talk about inspiration a little bit. I highly suggest making an inspiration board and these can be either digital or physical. Next is an example of a digital inspiration board that I made for a pattern line of mine called sweet as honey. You can see some of the photographs that I had taken on the left and where I was drawing inspiration from. Another great example of a digital inspiration board would be like a Pinterest board or secret Pinterest board where you keep ideas for things that you like. Then, of course, I'll put an example below of the physical inspiration board. This is when you will gather bits and pieces of things, maybe that you found in nature or swatches or color cards that you pull together and keep near your workspace to refer to as you go along the design process. Now, I want to talk about the importance of sourcing your own inspiration. It can be really easy when you have an idea to just start Googling or searching images online and using that as our inspiration, but I want to encourage us all to really create our own inspiration. What I mean by that is, if you want to draw a horse, then maybe visit a horse farm and take your camera and take as many photographs as you can, rather than say, tag a bunch of horse pictures online. When you do this, when you sauce your own inspiration, you can feel so good about your work that the entire thing generated from your own sources and from your own inspiration. This is also a great way to get out from behind the computer and go exploring the world. Next, I'll show you a couple of examples of photographs that I've taken, that I've personally used for inspiration for some of my design projects and I've made patterns from each of these photographs. I want you to remember that it doesn't matter what others are doing, it only matters what you are doing. As an artist that can be really easy to look around online and just really get overwhelmed at what everybody else is producing. There's so much beautiful work in the world and it can leave me quickly feeling like there's no place for me or I'm not good enough and things like that. I want to encourage you to maybe turn off the computer or just stop looking around and to start looking within and creating what's close to your heart and the end result will be unique and really special. Next, I want to discuss how important it is to create your own signature style. A signature style is important. If you are looking to make a career out of surface patterns design, ideally you would want anyone who's familiar with your work to be able to recognize it instantly if they see it out in the world. I will put a couple of examples of some people that I think really showcase an excellent signature style in the links below this video. I remember when I was early on that creating a signature style is something that really haunted me because I didn't known what my signature style was and it wasn't until I started creating pattern after pattern after pattern that I feel like my signature style began to show through. I'm talking maybe 50 to 100 patterns in when I really had the techniques down and I was starting to design from my heart, is when my signature style showed through and it wasn't even something that I knew what it was going to be at the beginning. If that's how you feel right now that you don't really know what your signature style is, I just encourage you to stop thinking about it and just start designing, start sketching and I promise that as you develop your skills and create more and more patterns that your signature style is really going to show through. This is another really important reason to take your time in the early stages to make tons of patterns and don't be too quick to want to start licensing write away or get ahead of yourself to really nurture the time that you have to design before you have input from maybe art directors and people like that to just design intuitively, and I promise your signature style will show through. Be yourself, everyone else is taken. Again, this is really easy to start looking around to other people for signature styles and ideas, but like I said, if you just look inside and start designing intuitively then your own signature style is going to show through. One book that I've recently red that just hits on this point really hard and really well is Austin Kleon's: Steal Like An Artist. He says nothing is original. The thing that have been, it is that which shall be and that which is done is that which shall be done and there's no new thing under the sun. He talks about the fact that everything has been done before. It's just a remix. Everything is a remix. So a bad artist copies and a good artist steals. So what he means by that is that if you take inspiration from several places, your end result is going to be something completely unique and personal to you. Where you can get in trouble is if you start pulling inspiration from only one source or too few sources and then your final result is going to look like it was copied from somebody else's work. Fake it until you make it. I love this. Nothing of me is original. I'm the combined effort of everyone I've ever known. So inevitably, our work is going to be a bit of a combined effort from the other things that we've seen that we love. But if you take this inspiration lightly and go back to what truly inspires you and draw intuitively. Then, like I said, your end result is really going to be unique. So I highly suggest grabbing Steal Like An Artist, it's going to really do your career and your artist's soul a lot of good. It won't be easy, but it will be worth it. I remember feeling really daunted about learning everything that there is two learn about surface pattern design when I wanted to be a designer and it wasn't easy. It took a very long time. It took months of hard work, but it is possible and I just can't even begin to tell you how worth it it is. So I want to encourage you to really dive in and put fourth your best effort in this class and work really hard and I promise it will be worth it. Something that is really near and deer to my heart is taking the extra time needed to nourish my creativity. What I mean by that is that a lot of times, especially when your career or your work depends on your creativity, it can get pretty easy to get burned out pretty quickly. So there are a couple of things that I like to do in order to nourish my creativity and some of them are kind of silly, but they work for me, so I wanted to share them with you. Keep style files. These have changed over the years, but right now for me, they look like usually secret Pinterest boards and this is where I can upload my own photos or pin things that I have seen that I like, but I keep style files for future ideas or just things that I like in general. So when I feel like I'm a dry well, I can refer back to my style files to get some inspiration. I cannot express how important it is for me personally to work in a bright space. I have tried to work in dark places and I've lived in a couple of dark homes before, but my work is always so much better when I have natural sunlight surrounding me and I keep my space nice and bright. So that's what I encourage you to do is try to work in natural daylight. Stepping away from the computer can be really hard when it seems like all of your work pertains to a computer but, this is another reason why it's so good to source your own inspiration. Just get up from the computer and go outside or do something else that really nourishes your creativity. Keep something pretty in site. For me, this is usually a vase of flowers. I keep it next to my desk and it just gives me kind of a breath of fresh heir. Keep your workspace clean. There's nothing like trying to work in a really untidy space. I find that if my spaces untidy than my brain is untidy too so clean up your workspace and keep it really organized and that will clear your head-space. Okay, get ready. You probably didn't assume that I was going to talk to you about getting ready in the mornings, but if you work from home, and if you've worked from home for very long, you probably know how easy it is to stay in your PJ's all day, and so a long time ago I started getting ready first thing in the morning and getting dressed for the day and I can't begin to tell you what kind of impact this had on my work. I get my teeth brushed, I get my clothes on, and I get the house clean so that I'm not bugged all day by personal keeping or housekeeping tasks. This makes me feel like even though I work from home, I am on a mission and I'm a professional. Stay energized. People stay energized through lots of different ways, whether it be like coffee or lots of sleep or exercise, tea, cracking a window, there are lots of things you can do to stay energized but if you find yourself being sluggish, then I suggest getting up and doing something to re-energize yourself. Energy equals creativity. So before we wrap up this segment and move on, I have a little bit of homework for you. In order to continue in this course, there are a couple of things that you'll need. I suggest doing 10 to 15 sketches and I will show you mine at the beginning of the next segment. This is going to be surrounded by something in nature that you love. For this particular course, I'm making a floral pattern. You definitely don't have to use flowers though. Absolutely anything in nature that inspires you. I just want you to make 10 to 15 simple to medium complex sketches that we can use in your pattern. One colorful photograph to make a color palette from. So find one of your favorite photographs that you really like the colors from and we'll use this to grab a color palette from later on in this course. Next, I want you to find three to five photographs that you've taken that you would like to draw from. These should also be centered around your theme of your favorite thing in nature. So if you need to go take a couple of pictures then you can do that, or maybe you have some already. But come to class with three to five photographs that you are ready to draw from. I also want you to written a word or a very small phrase. In one of the segments, I am going to cover how to turn your handwriting into a vector. A simple handwritten word, we're not going to necessarily use this in the repeating pattern unless you want to. I do think it would be fun to learn for everybody how to take there handwriting and turn it into vector. So nothing to long, just something simple. This can either be pencil, pen, paintbrush, marker, whatever you like. In this course, I want to encourage you to really open your mind. Don't worry about how much you have to learn. Don't worry about what everybody else is doing. Just really focus on yourself and open your mind because I know what's inside is truly beautiful. So in the next segment we're going to start right in with our sketches and I know that amazing things are going to happen. 13. Working from Sketches - Best Practices for Scanning & Importing Photos: Now that we've discussed surface pattern design and learned all the essential tools in Adobe Illustrator, it's time to start creating artwork. You should come to the segment with 10-15 sketches, but you're ready to work in Illustrator for your pattern. We're going to start by going over best techniques for scanning in your artwork, and also a couple of other ways that you can get your work into Illustrator in case you don't have a scanner. These are the sketches that I've made for my pattern for this course, they're just pencil and paper sketches. I am going to be making a floral repeating pattern. I'm going to open my scanner here, and you can see my first page start to load here. For this scan, I am going to leave it just plain pencil and paper, I'm going to trace over this in illustrator, I just need to use this as a guideline. I'm going to leave it just like it is except that I want to crop it down a little bit. You should be able to draw a box around this section that you would like to scan in and this is just going to help me get rid of some of this shadows and just focus on the artwork. This looks good to me, I'm going to scan in and black and white. You should always scan in at at least 300 dpi and you can go higher if you like. I'm going to scan into a folder that I've already created for Skillshare scans, and I'm going to leave that as JPEG and I'm going to leave everything else just the way it is. I'm going to go ahead and hit "Scan". Now if I go to my folder, we can see there it is skillshare scan right here. I'm going to show you a couple of other techniques, while we're at it. This next scan is a sketch of mine that I did with pencil and paper, just like the previous one. But then using my light box, I have gone back over it on a new piece of paper with a really black ink pen and a smooth line. I'm hoping that with this sketch, I am not going to have to trace over in Illustrator and instead, I'll be able to use the live trace function and use these illustrations just as they are. I'm going to do the same thing and move my box down here. Anytime that you plan to use live trace, which we're going to get into in the following segments, it's really important to not have any shadows on your scan. You can tell that it gets a little darker over here, sometimes they're worse than others, but I definitely want to get rid of these lines up here because that's going to affect the live trace. Now, I am going to play with some of these settings over here. I still want to do block and white 300 dpi, I might take this up to 600 dpi since we're going to use live trace, I still want to save it in the same place with the same format. But under image correction, I'm going to go to manual, and I'm going to bump up the brightness that already looks much better, bump up the brightness and contrast all the way. This is just going to really take back that paper texture and give me a pure white and black illustration. This looks good to me and I'll hit "Scan". Just like last time, I can go make sure that it came into my document fine, and it looks good. The next scan I'm bringing in is going to be similar to the last, but it's a little different in the way that I constructed it, I still wanted to show it to you. I have played with the word nectar. That's what I'm going to name my pattern, and I did this with a paintbrush in black ink, which I will also link to below this video. I'm going to go with this one down here, and I'm going to want to use live trace on this. Again, I'm going to crop out everything other than just this one word, that I'm going to use down here. Again, it's going to be really important, this is my notebook, it's going to be really important to crop out these shadows that's created by the scan. This is already set up from my last scan, but if it was on none, this is what the original scan look like, and if I go down to manual than I'm going to bump up the brightness and the contrast scan and at 600 dpi and black and white, and go ahead and scan this in as well. I'm done with my scanner, I'll close this. The other thing I wanted to show you was in case you don't have a scanner, some options that you have available to you. This is another one of my sketches. I just took a picture of this with my iPhone and I have it connected to Dropbox, so automatically uploaded to my computer, and I actually tend to work like this a lot, especially if I don't want to use live trace, I'm going to be able to come in. I just wanted these two elements right here and I'm going to be able to come in and trace over these in Illustrator, this is going to work just fine from my iPhone photo. You can also bump up the contrast and brightness with this using an app, maybe like Afterlight on your phone, before uploading it. You could also try to use a scanning app. There are several scanning apps that could give you really nice black and white results, similar to this if you wanted to try to use live trace. But it's definitely not going to be quite as good as an original scan, but anyways for tracing photos work great. Next, I just want to open up Illustrator and open up a new document, I'll name it skillshare sketches, and I just want one art board, all of this is fine, I'm going to hit "Okay". The easiest way to get these into my document is simply to select them and drag and drop him over to the document. Now, they're going to be huge, but they are highlighted right now. You can see that they're blue, I'm just going to leave them selected, hit "S" on my keyboard for the scale tool and holding the "Shift" key down, just bring these down to a more manageable size. Now these are smaller because they are the scans, can bring those up. This one's upside down, I'll rotate that. Now we have all these sketches to work from, which we're going to get into in the next segment. I'll see you there. 14. Working from Sketches - Using the Blob Brush & Pen Tool: I've got my new document open with all of my scans in here and I'm going to start going over these to make illustrations from them. I'm going to start with this one right here and just increase its sides with the scale tool. I want to lock this in place so that I can draw a ride over it and not worry about grabbing it while I'm working. I'm going to go over here to my layers and I can see that this is the one I have selected, so I'm just going to lock that layer so now I cannot select it. Now, for this segment, I'm going to be using my Wacom tablet and pen. You can absolutely do this with your mouse, it's just not going to be as smooth or feel quite as natural to you but you can absolutely do the same thing with your mouse. If you have a Wacom tablet, I want to show you really quick some options that you have available to you. I am going to use the blob brush tool for this first scan and so under the blob brush tool, if I double-click I get the blob brush tools panel come up. I have a couple of options here but I want to change the size of my brush depending on how hard I press down on my tablet. I'm going to increase the size here and also increase the variation, and this is going to be depending on how hard I press down. You can also change the angle and the roundness but this is what I find that I use the most and it just gives it a little bit more of a painterly effect to it, so I'm going to select ''Okay.'' Now you can see that as I draw, if I start lightly and start pushing harder and harder my stroke gets bigger and bigger. I am going to just zoom in on this illustration right here and go ahead and get started. I'll take the blob brush size down using the left bracket tool and I'm just going to start with this right there, and just start basically just tracing over it with the blob brush tool. I'm going to come back and fill these in a little later or in just a second but I'll whiz through tracing over this really fast. Now, one thing I like to be careful with are these little blurbs right here. To me as an illustrator, that makes it look like I've done Herson illustrator with the blob brush tool and I like it to look a little more hand-drawn. One easy way to take those away really quick is just to grab the smooth tool and come in and just smooth them out. That way it's not so obvious that we used the blob brush tool. I'm going to select this and I just want to fill in these leaves. The quickest way to do that is with the shape builder tool and I can just draw over them and make one shape. I'm going to do the same with this one here. You can see that as I vary the pressure on my Wacom tablet, then my lines are getting different weights to them which I really like. With that selected, I will fill these in as well. This is just going to be some axis and foliage and I'm going to hide my edges. I can see that I need to smooth just a couple of little things out right here. Sometimes I don't follow my sketches exactly, they're just ideas and I can really expand on them once I get in here and do whatever I feel like doing. I'm going to zoom out and see how much progress I'm making. I think I'll come in and do this flower next. One thing that you want to be conscious about as you use the blob brush tool, and this will become more natural to you later down as you illustrate more and more, but it's how you're going to color this later that depends how you might want to illustrate it now. Because I know that I am going to fill these shapes in and this differently, I'm going to just hop over to a different color because I want these to be two objects and I want it to be one solid object. I'm going to just change my stroke color. I'll use something different like maybe this blue color and that way I can zoom in here a little bit, come in and almost draw right on top of the black. I also want to come back and fill in the shading that I had done with my pencil to just give it a little more depth even though I'm doing some of that with the pressure of my pen. I'm just going to thicken just a couple of these lines so that it replicates my sketch a little better. After we get everything drawn is when I like to come in and really give color to all of the motifs at once. That's going to come a little later in this segment. I'm going to zoom out and you can always take off the sketch with the eyeball over here just to see how you're going. I know that I want to make this solid, so I will do that with this. I think I'll work on this next, and I'm going to want to do the same thing. I want to illustrate the leaves and the stems in one color and then the flowers in another color. I will grab this blue color again maybe and just come in and do these circles in the middle, and yet another color for the petals. We're going to send this to the back so that the center really shows through. These guys down here are just fun and wild. I know I want to grab these and bring them to the front and I'm going to color the petals later but I'll go ahead and make these one shape. I'll work on this next, and I think I'm going to keep this all one color, so I'm going to just illustrate it all in black. Let's see what's next. I can use the pen tool to make these little leaves, so I'll hit "P" on my keyboard and I actually like to use the mouse better for the pen tool. I can just quickly make these little leaves with the pen tool. As we learned earlier, after I drop this first curve, I need to click back on it to give me a fresh starting points so that I can take the second curve in the opposite direction that is of which it wants to go in. That's one way to quickly make some leaves with the pen tool. See what else I want of this illustration. Probably do this guy really quick because it's just a nice little axin and won't take me very long to make. I'll zip through this to color it in. Of course you could color this in with the blob brush but it's just so much quicker to use that tool. I also want to do this flower here, working upside down. I could have rotated my sketch here but this is going to be fine. Because of the way that I know I'm going to want to color this, I want to do the stem in a different color. I might even do a little thicker up here. I think I want to do this flower right here and then I'll be done with this particular scan. I'm going to trace over these so that we can color them in with a different color in a minute. I'm not going to right now color in these little darts that I have on the petals because I think I'm going to come in with the eraser tool after we fill these in and erase those bits. That's all I want of of this sheet. I can unlock it and maybe just hide it, I don't necessarily want to delete it just yet. But I'm going to do the same technique for this scan right here and then meet you back to show you a couple of new ways to illustrate. I'm going to go ahead and do these and I'll meet you back in just a minute. 15. Working from Sketches - Using the Live Trace Tool: Okay, I am back now. I just illustrated this other sketch the same identical way that I did this over here using the Blob Brush tool and so I don't need this scan anymore but rather than delete it, I'm just going to hide it using my eyeball over here in my Layers panel. This don't look like very much yet but I am going to just select them all and bring them over here for later use. Next, we're going to color them up in just a few segments. But next I want to show you a little bit about using the Live Trace tool. I'm going to bring over the scan that I traced over using my Lightbox and this really black ink pen. Then we up the contrast and brightness as we scanned it in so you can see it looks really good. With this selected, I'm going to open the Image Trace dialog box. It's over here in our toolbar, if you built mine the same way, if you didn't, then you can just come up to Window and make sure that Image Trace is checked. I almost always use the same preset every time I do this. There are several different ones you can choose from so you can play with them but I personally always use the black and white logo. It's pretty much always going to tell you that this may proceed slowly, just said, okay. As you can see this already looks pretty good. This is vectorized, it's no longer a JPEG, but I can see that I'm losing a little bit of the black line here. To change that I'm going to up my threshold. The lower your threshold, the less contrast and the higher the threshold, the more contrast. I need to bring it up some more but you can see that the lines are getting more solid and more black, like a little thicker. Now it looks like I've got solid lines everywhere. I think this looks good. Now, if you come under Advanced, you have the option of whether to ignore white or not, so you can't tell right now because my art board as white, but this all has a white background beneath it. If I check Ignore White, then this is going to have translucent see-through background to it. Now, if you noticed when I hit that, all the lines got little blacker or a little thicker so I'm going to take down my threshold just a little bit, to get back to the same look that we had. I think that's good. In order to finish this image trace, you need to expand it. Expand this up here in your toolbar and you can see that has turned it all into vectors for me. Now the next thing I need to do is right-click and ungroup everything, so now it's ungrouped. But one funny thing the Illustrator does is even though this background we checked Ignore White, it's not white you can see that it has no stroke and no fill but it's still there. It's also in all these little bits and pieces here. See this has no stroke and no fill so I want to get rid of those. I'm going to select one of them, come up to select "Same", "Fill Color", and then just hit the "Delete" key to delete those. Now we have just really clean illustrations. I am going to be able to use these just as they are when we begin coloring. This is a great option if you don't want to spend your time using the Blob Brush tool to trace over stuff. I'm just going to select it all and bring it over here. This is generally how I work. I end up with several motifs and then I trace them all at once, and then I color them all at once, and then I start building patterns. Definitely you don't have to work that way if you don't want to but I'm just showing you what I do. I want to do the same thing for this nectar, which I painted, and I think it's going to be pretty cool because you can see the paint brush stroke texture and I really like that. I'm going to come down and hit "Black and White" again. I think this actually looks pretty good but I'm going to reduce my threshold and see what happens. Because if I got a little bit of white showing through, that would be cool. I don't think it's going to happen, I'm going to take it back up to about right there and it still has this painterly stroke, which I like. I'm going to hit "Ignore White" and expand it, ungroup it, then select just the background and come up to the same fill color and hit "Delete" on my keyboard. This is ungrouped right now, which means these little bits are included and I do want to make sure that they all stay together. I'm going to select it all and group it back together and I need to rotate it to a little bit. A couple of things I just want to clean up here with the Smooth tool is just this little blip right there. Definitely I want it to look like it's been painted but maybe just not quite as many little blips. I think this looks good. I'm not going to use this in my pattern per say but I am going to use it to at least title my drawing with. But I wanted to show you how to turn your handwriting into a vector and so you could overlay this onto a photograph. Say if you're a blogger and you want to write on top of your photographs or something like that, this is how you make that happen and definitely you did not have to use a paint brush, you could have used a black ink pen just like we did for the last sketch. The last thing I want to show you is just using the Blob Brush tool in a little bit of a different way. For these guys, I want to come in and draw just these two elements here, but I'm going to layer my Blob Brush strokes as I draw to create these. I am going to lock this scan so that I don't have to worry about grabbing it. Then just zoom in really close on this one. Grab my Blob Brush tool by hitting "Shift" "B", and I'm going to start drawing just this first segment here. I'll just color this in with the Blob Brush tool because it's going to be pretty quick. Okay, so next I want to grab another color, let's say this pink color. Just come in and do this circle right here. I can color these and if I really quickly if I just increase the size of my blob brush. I want to take those back behind the stem, so I'm going to select all three and using Command left bracket tool, I just have to hit it once to take it back. Then with yet one more color, I want to come in and draw just these little, it's too big, just these little accents right here. Can't really see but I think it was something like this down there. You can move it to the side and look. Yeah, I think that's pretty close. I am not going to have to come back and color these later because I'm doing it right now. I might start with these this time so that I can really see what I'm doing. Then I'll grab the steel color for the stem. When you use the Blob Brush tool, the reason I'm doing this in different colors is that if I were to come over here and draw this circle now, because I use the same color, I just made this one big shape, and so you have to change colors in order to keep your shapes separate illustrations, which is what I wanted. Now I can grab this peach ones and using Shift left bracket tool, take them all the way behind all the other accents. I want to come in and just smooth a couple of these out because I think it looks like clearly I used the Blob Brush tool. Okay, and now I want to select it all and group it together so that I don't have to worry about keeping all these little bits and pieces together. I can zoom out and I don't need these to be so big, I'll just reduce their size and bring them over here, so those are done. Now we're going to move on to coloring all of our illustrations and we're going to start by creating a custom color palette. So I'll meet you in the next segment with one photograph that we chose that we want to pull colors from. I'll see you there. 16. Working from Sketches - Creating Custom Color Palettes: I'm back with my same document, but I have brought in three photographs that I have taken that I want to pull colors from. This is a succulent, this is just me and my husband on a road trip but I love, the green and blue hues throughout the whole photograph, and then this is a Rose catalog I was looking at recently. So this is where I'm going to pull my color story from. The first thing I want do is just go ahead and delete all the colors that come in Illustrator and this palette that I was using earlier. So I just select the first one and holding the Shift key down, I'll come up here, I'll leave black and white and just drag and drop all these to the trash. The next thing is that I want to grab just a rectangle tool and start drawing a square or maybe a rectangle down here, and I'll just change it to black for now. I want to make 10 of these. So I'm going to drag this over holding the shift key and drop the option key to duplicate, and then hit "Command D" to replicate the last action. So I'll take this size down just a little bit and I'm just going to start pulling colors from here. I'll hit I for the eyedropper tool, and just start grabbing a couple of different hues from these photographs, like that one better. So this can get a little time consuming depending on how close you want to get to exactly what you're looking for, but you can always edit your color palettes later down the road. This is just something nice to get us started. So one thing you want to think about when you're creating a color palette is, you want to make sure that you vary the contrast that you have quite a bit. So an illustration, it is going to need some contrasts, so a lighter and some darker, as well as some neutral. So maybe a nice skin color, and I think I'll come over and start grabbing some pinks out of these roses. Then it's always nice to just have real neutral color that you work with. So I always work with a beige or off-white. That one looks pretty good to me. So for a color palette, for a pattern, especially for a pattern collection, I like to keep it around 12-18 colors, I have 10 here, and I cheated a little bit because I went ahead and pulled some colors that I wanted to also use from my Paint-on color book. So I'll talk about paint-on for just a second. You definitely don't have to have a Paint-on color book. But if this is something that you want to make into a career, then having a Paint-on color book is going to be really beneficial, they make one for every different industry. So I didn't really use the one for fabric, fashion and home, it's called. They also make one for paper and stationary goods, and this is just the industry standard for colors. So this is the way that you communicate a particular color to a mill, or some producer, or maybe your art director. This is a standardized way to pull colors, you can also illustrate with Paint-on colors in Illustrator, and it's a great way to just flip the colors and pick out some that you like. So I've come pretty close to a couple of these, but I think I want to add this neutral brown and this orange, and I might just change this tilde of this greener teal and this lime green to this mustard, and then add in this dark Gray. So I can delete those, and this will give me 13 colors to work with, which I think is plenty for a pattern. So to turn this into a color palette, and I'm going to select all of these. Come over to new color group. I'll name this skill share pattern and hit "Okay" and now you can see that I have this really nice color palette over here. I can go ahead and delete what's on my art board as well as my photographs. If I want to save this in order to use in future documents, it's come out to the flyout menu, come down to save swatch library, and then you can save this as whatever you like, and I'll hit save, go ahead and select Okay, and then if I were to open up a new document, all I have to do is go to Open Swatch Library, user-defined skill share pattern, and one thing I didn't show you earlier is that say you're going to be working with the same color palette for a long time, say a week or more at a time. Then you can make this what's called persistent, and so it opens up with your document every time you open a new document. So you don't have to go through and open and every time. So to make this color palette persistent, you come out to the flyout menu and just check persistent. That way if I open a new document, you can see that it's already here and all you have to do is hit the folder to add it to your swatches panel. So I'll go ahead and delete these extra documents that I just created. In the next segment, we're going to get right into coloring our motifs. 17. Working from Sketches - Adding Color to Illustrations: Now that we have all of our sketches illustrated in our custom color palette loaded into Adobe Illustrator, we are ready to start coloring our motifs. There's a couple of ways to do this of course, as there is almost everything in Illustrator. I'm just going to take you through coloring means and the different ways along the way. I'm going to grab this flower to begin with and increase it's size a little bit. I'm going to hit Command H to hide my edges, even though it's still selected and come over and grab the paint bucket tool, it's called Live Paint Bucket and the keyboard shortcut for that is K. I'm going to start with green for the base down hear and just start coloring in the leaves and different elements that I want to be this pink color. I'll do the middle with a different color and maybe this very center part, cream. Then here is where you get to decide whether you want your illustration have an outline, say this dark gray or something, or if you want it to have no outline, which is an option if you select none. You can come in and just grab the outline and let it have no stroke. I can do the same for this right there. I think I like that, that's what I'm going to go for. If I select this, you can see that because we use the Live Paint Bucket Tool it is all grouped together. I want to expand this so that it's not an effect anymore and it's also going to delete this blank stroke. As I have it selected, I'll come up to Object, Expand, go ahead and hit OK and that has expanded this full illustration. It's still grouped together, so if I double-click on it, I can just grab one of these black elements and because I'm in isolation mode, these are not selectable anymore. I can select one of these black ones and come up to Select, Same, Fill Color and change all of those black bits to cream or whatever color that you choose. It's really important to get all of the black out of your illustration. I chose to do it this weigh because there are some really tiny bits that were black that came through. If you don't get the blackout of your illustration when we go to recolor our work later on, it's going to have black as an option to scroll through. Unless you want black in your final document, it's best to go ahead and get it all out now. If I double-click, this is not grouped together, so I'll select it all and group it back together. I'm just going to move the motifs over to the left side once I am done coloring them. This first stage is really just applying colors to our illustrations in the way that we want them to be colored but I can always go back and actually change these color, it's really simply later. But at least it's not a black and white outline anymore, it's fully illustrated and colored and it'll make it easier later on. I'm going to do these leaves in bulk next. Grab the Live Paint Bucket tool and hide my edges. I'm going to make all of them to screen for now. I think I want to go ahead and color in the main part of the leaves. I'm going to lose some of my accent's here if they were attached, but the ones that were not attached are black and I can change their color in just a moment. I zoom in for this one. If I have these selected, they're all grouped together because we use the Live Paint Bucket tool. If I deselect, you can see these fine lines and it just makes for a messy illustration. If I go ahead and double-click on these to inter isolation mode and select just part of green, I can come up to Select, Same, Fill Color and using Shape Mode unite, make all the green just really nice, simple green objects. Then I can use the same technique to grab black and select the Same, Fill Color and change all of the black to a different color. I lost a couple of these accents, like I said, because they were connected and so I'm just going to grab the blob brush tool and just add them back in, so just something really quick here, just so they look all the same. Now, they are still grouped together, but they're oddly grouped because these are included and all of the green is grouped together. I'm going to ungroup them all and then group them back together the way that I want them to be so that when I start working on my pattern, they all make sense. I'll just put them all together here and move them to the left. Next I'm going to work on this flower, these little accents. I'll just grab all of the solid accents that I have over here, we can do those at the same time. This one, probably this one, and this one. These are already finished, so I'll add those over here to the left. I can color these all at one time, so I'll select them and grab the Paint Bucket tool. I'm just going to start adding some random color to these guys just to get some color on them. You can also drag when you're using the Live Paint Bucket tool. If you don't want to individually click on all these, you can click on one and hold and drag and round and it'll do them all at once, so that's nice, except I want these to be different, so I'm going to do that. I will hide my edges and come into the center flower and just start, I'm going to drag these, which is going to change my outline too. But that's fine because I can undo it in just a second. Then I'm going to take away the stroke on all of these. Perfect. If I have everything selected, I want to expand them. Hit "OK" and then everything's grouped. That's going to allow me to say, come into this one and apply the unite shape mode. This one I think, just because I took away that stroke, I need to smooth out just a couple of these corners, so I'm going to grab the Smooth Tool and just come in here and smooth things out just a little bit. Right here you can tell that that was a blob brush stroke and this one right here, so I think this looks pretty good. I'm going to move them over here to the left and group things together that makes sense to group together like this little illustration. These stars don't need to be grouped together. This is fine. These should be grouped together and I can seen that I need to smooth this out a little bit. Then of coarse I want my flower to be grouped together. We are getting close. I'm going to move on to this flower next. I can just change this to the color I want it to be, so I only need to use Live Paint Bucket tool maybe on the top. I can just come in and quickly fill it in. I think for now I'm going to leave the green outline because I think that looks pretty nice. If I expand this, I'm not going to unite these two greens just in case later I decided to change that to no stroke, but I will group them together and move it over to the left. I'll work on this guy next and I think I can go ahead and bring over these to work on at the same time. I just selected all and begin with the Live Paint Bucket tool again and hide my edges. You're probably tired of hearing me say that, but I just want you to known why they're going away. The Live Paint Bucket tool basically chops things where the strokes intersect, which is why you sometimes get these little bits of pieces, which is why it's important to expand them and then unite them back together later on, it's just one of the funny things that happens with the Live Paint Bucket tool. I can tell I need to come back and smooth that out a little bit later. Then, let's see, I'll color this one the same that I did the other little tulip because I think it turned out pretty nice. Then for these guys, I think I'm going to color in the the petals and then just make sure I want to leave the outline. I could take that outline away. I like the way it looks with no outline just on these top too. You can see I have some leftover bits here and I want to color those in green to match the stem. I think we're done with this, so I'll bring my edges back and go ahead and expand it. We're going to have just a little bit of work to do on these guys. I'm going to select all of this green and unite those. This is one nice shape. Then I'm going to do the same thing with all of this green. I known that I had to add in a couple of green bits here at the end. So I want to unite those to just one nice shape here. This can tell I mist one right there. Then of course, this black center got all chopped to bits so I want to unite that and this one too, and all these pink bits. Definitely a sense of a little bit of cleaning up to do once you're done with the live paint bucket tool. But I found that it really is the best way to get things colored. It just takes some added housekeeping afterwards. That one looks good. I need to smooth out just a couple of things here. Think that's good, and then I need to smooth out a couple of things over here. In order to use the smooth tool, you have to have your object selected. As you can see, I'm using handy trick. That Illustrator has where if you hold down the Option quay and click, it'll take you back to the last arrow key that you're using. You can seen it if I hold down Command, it takes me back to the black arrow and I can select this Next Pebble and then start smoothing that one out. If I just go write over here and start trying to smooth, it's not happening because I don't have this one selected, so I need to select it and then start smoothing it out. I think all of this looks pretty good. Going to ungroup these solid objects and then go back and group them in the way that I want them grouped, and can make them a little smaller and move them over here to the left. The last thing that I have to do is color this set of flowers here, and I'm going to color them all the same. It's going to go by pretty fast. I'll grab the live paint bucket tool and hide my edges and just start in changing all of the black to green. Then I'm going to change all of these floral elements to orange. I can see I still have some black bits where these intersected, so I'm going to go back in and make sure I get all of those colored in. Then I believe that I'm going to make my outlines clear. I want to change everything that's black to a different color, but I can do that in one far swoop after we expand this illustration, so I'm going to leave them blank for now. I can see I need to clean up a couple of other things. This little black piece needs to be green. I think since I made my outlines clear, I got to go back and change this to green now. Then I'm not even really sure why some of this is peach, just that overlay has messed me up. I want them to be black so that I can change the color in just a second. I think that looks pretty clean. I'm going to go ahead and expand it, double-click to inter isolation mode. Then I can just select everything that's green because I know I've got several green bits right here. I'll just unite them all using the shape mode. Then I can select all of the black bits and color them, maybe this teal color. I can see that I've got an outline here that I wanted to leave, I should unite those. I think this looks pretty good. One other thing that I want to do is add an accent two these leaves. I don't want it to be color, I just want to basically erase it. I'm going to grab the eraser tool by hitting Shift E and come in and just take some of this away. Just like I did before, I can double-click here and change the size to a pressure sensitive, up the size and up the variation here. That way, all my stroke's won't be the same width the whole way through. This is just going to add a little bit of character to these leaves here. Whenever I choose a background for my pattern, it's going to show through. Finally, I want to come in and smooth out anything that needs to be smoothed. I want to smooth this. Awesome. Right here, we want to smooth that little blip out. I can see me didn't unite that. Let me see what's going on with this one right here. Those need to unite to make one shape. Then I can smooth this out a little bit. I think this looks pretty good. I need to ungroup them and then group them back in the weigh that I want, so all the flowers I want to be grouped together. I'm just hitting Command G on my keyboard to group these. Now I can move all of them over the left as well. I have a really good start on illustrations to start building a pattern width. Before we build our pattern in the next two segments, I want to show you how to illustrate from photographs and how to illustrate from directly with an Illustrator. Then we will finally put together our repeating pattern. 18. Working from Photographs - Tracing & Using Live Trace: Now that we've learned how to illustrate from our sketches and this next segment, I want to show you how to illustrate from photographs. This is where we left off with our sketched illustrations. I want to open up a new document by hitting command in. I'll title this working from photographs. Everything else here is okay, and I'll hit Okay. I have a couple of photographs already I've just saved to my desktop and I'll just grab both of those and drag them and drop them onto my document. There are pretty big, so I'm going to scale them down. There are two ways you can work from photographs. You can literally trace over them as if they were a pen and paper sketch. Then you can also use the live trace tool in order to illustrate them as well. I'm going to start with this one and use the live trace tool. I also want to just reiterate. We've talked about this a little bit already, but reiterate the importance of using your own photographs for these two projects. If you ever illustrate from a photograph, you should really be sure that it's one that you've taken yourself. You don't want to copy anybody else's work or trace over anybody else's photographs. This is a great opportunity to grab your camera at and get outside. This one I just took with my iPhone of a flower. You'll see in a moment why this is so important. But if you are going to use the live trace feature, it's really important to photograph your object on a solid blank background. Why tends to work best for me. But this photograph wouldn't live trace very well because it's going to pick up all of these extra colors for the finished result. When you're photographing an object, just make sure that you hold it up against something that's really contrasted and solid color. With this flower photo selected, I'm going to come over and open up my live trace dialog box. Now, I'm not going to use the black and white preset for this. Instead, I'm going to choose either 3, 6 or 16 colors. It really depends on your mission with this live trace. If you're putting it into, say like a card illustration, and it doesn't really matter how many colors you use then you 16 colors or maybe even more. But if you're going to be putting it into a repeating pattern, where you're going to need to use a smaller number of colors for the entire illustration. You want to pick something that's less, say three are in between three or six. So I'm going to start with three and hit Okay and just see what kind of result this gives us. This result is actually pretty cool and I like it. This third color, the flower is only illustrated in two colors. Then the third one is taken up by the background, which is why you can see a photo like this wouldn't produce a very good result because it would take up lots of colors for the background. I am going to go ahead and change this to five colors. I'll just hit five and tab, and it'll redo this illustration with five colors. Already I think that looks much better. It's really colored beautifully. I'm going to stick with this. I'll hit expand, which turns this into vectors. I can go ahead and delete the background, I select the same, fill color, and delete that background. Actually want to leave that, so I'll just leave this. We're going to bring this in with our other illustrations and play with its colors a little bit later. But for now, I just I'm going to select it, group it, and bring it over to the side. Next, I want to show you how to use a photograph to trace over. Sometimes this can give you a really unique opportunity. If you can't quite figure out how to draw something, you can find it in nature, take a photograph of it and end trace over it. I'm going to make this a little larger, bring it over to the center. I want to lock it so I won't be grabbing it as I go over it. I'm going to zoom way in to the center of this rows here and start tracing over using the blob brush tool. I'm using my way cam, I'll grab the blob brush tool by hitting shift B and just start, I think I want to do it in black so that it's really easy to see and just start going over the finer details of this rose. I usually want to make sure that all of my paths connect. If you can see, I want to also make sure that I bring the blob brush stroke far enough in to where it makes a nice corner right there. I'll show you what I mean with this one. If I just let go right here, then you can see this just doesn't look like a really great point right there. It doesn't happen all the time, but I tried to be conscious about bringing it all the way in, but not too far in that pokes out the other side. This is a really interesting way to start looking at nature too, because if I sat down to draw a rose, I probably wouldn't start with this very intricate and obscure center. But in fact, they grow this way. I don't know, it's just an interesting way to take a break from your pen and paper sketches and look at things with a fresh pair of eyes. I'm going to zoom out and just keep going around these larger petals. Now of course, you don't have to trace anything exactly unless you want to. If you want to add petals or change the direction of some things, then you can absolutely do that. This is another instance where we're using a webcam tablet just really makes your work really fun and quick because I don't have to worry about trying to drag my mouse over these areas so perfectly. I think I also want to just maybe grab this leaf right here and add it in. I'm going to try to leave the stem so that when I color it, I can keep my outlines vacant. Maybe add this one too. If I hide my photograph, can see what we have here and I know that I'm going to want to come in and smooth out a couple of these areas like right here, I went too far. Just to make this illustration a little smoother. Take out some of these bumps that were obviously created by the way that I drew it. I don't think I've mentioned this, but to move around your document, you can see I have the hand tool right here, you just access that by holding down the space bar on your keyboard. Then you can use the hand to move around your document and inspect it when you're zoomed in. It's especially helpful. I think we're looking pretty good. I'll zoom out and I'm going to take both of these illustrations over to our previous document, where our sketches are. I'll put this guy over here for now. I want to color this rose in the same way I did my sketches by using the live paint bucket tool. I think I'm going to start with a lighter color and then radiated out with these pinks. Something like this. I can hold this down for the rest of them. Grab green for the leaves. Then I want to change all of my outlines to no fill. I'm not sure if I like the radiated, but we'll leave it right there for now. I'm going to select it and make sure that I expand everything. That's going to give me just a really nice illustration. I want to come in and make sure that I unite all of the green pads or actually let's see. Yeah, I think I'm going to unite all of the green pads. That way we have this nice rose. I'm going to bring over our live trace flower really quick and I just want to see how it's going to work with our color palette. With it's selected, I'm going to hide its edges and come up to the re-color artwork tool. I just want to go through some of our color options over here. I select the first group and if I had multiple color swatches, they would all show up here, but I just have the one. I will randomly change the color order of these just to see what this is going to look like once we get it converted over into our color palette. I think it's going to look really good. I love what's going on there. I might even leave it colored like that for now. I'll hit Okay. That is it for illustrating from photographs. Next, I want to discuss illustrating from directly within the illustrator. Then we will start building patterns. 19. Working from Illustrator - Using Effects & the Symbol Sprayer Tool: Occasionally, you want to work on patterns are illustrations directly with an illustrator without having to sketch first or use your webcam tablet to trace or anything like that. I'm showing you now a couple of examples of patterns that I have built directly from within illustrator, so you can get a better idea of when and why you would want to do this. There are a couple of things that Illustrator provides that make it a little bit easier and that's what I want to show you in this segment. Of course, the easiest way to start drawing, with an illustrator is with the geometric tools over here under this Rectangle tool fly-out menu, so I'm going to start with an ellipse tool and holding my Shift key down. I'm just going to start to draw a circle. Now, I want our color palette to be in here, and I don't believe I've made it persistent yet, so I will come down and pull it in, that way we can start using it for these illustrations too. I believe I've showed you this in a previous lesson, but I just want to go back over some effects that we can do, say to a circle. If you come under the effect menu, you can go to the store and transform and choose from any one of these, to start playing around. But my favorite is Ruffin, so if I hit, "Preview" I can just take this down a little bit to where it's just not a perfect circle. You can choose whether you want it to be corner or smooth and hit "Okay" once you're happy. Now just like before, I want to make sure to expand this illustration, so that it's just one shape. This makes, making like [inaudible] dots or accents just a little nice, you didn't have to come in here with the Pen Tool the whole way, and it just looks a little more hand-drawn, and so if I were to make a row of these, I would come in and rotate some of them, so that they don't look like exact replicas, and then you can quickly build something that looks just a little more hand-drawn. I'm going to delete these and draw another circle the same way and show you something called the Warp Tool. The Warp Tool is over here under the Width tool, and you can find it right here. The keyboard shortcut for that is shift to R, and this is just going to allow you to come draw, I'm holding my mouse down, and drawing in. This is just going to allow you to warp things just a little bit at a time, so that they are not so perfect. Of course this is, I have to be to a circle, it could be to your own illustration, or what have you. Next I want to introduce to you something called the Symbol Sprayer Tool. The Symbol Sprayer Tool is over here on your toolbar and the keyboard shortcut for that is S. In order to use the Symbol Sprayer Tool, you need to have a symbol that you want to use. In order to get to that window, we need to come up to window and make sure there's a checkbox side symbols. Illustrator comes with some standard symbols already in here, but I think that I want to make my own symbol, so I'm going to show you that really quick. I'm going to grab the Polygon tool and make a triangle, and then I want to use the Warp Tool to just make it not so perfect. Like maybe I did draw this with a pen and paper and then scan it again something like that. Then in order to add this, all you have to do is drag and drop it up to the symbols panel, it'll give you the option to name it. You want to make sure the type is graphic and everything else is okay, so I'll hit "Okay." Then I can delete this and I don't need the circle, also bring this over here, and now when I grab the Symbol Sprayer Tool, I can just hold down my mouse and start spraying triangles around. If I delete this and double-click on the Symbol Sprayer Tool panel. I contains the diameter, maybe smaller, and change the intensity too, so that was a lot. I want to change the intensity down to maybe three, and I can leave all this though, you can play with it if you want. Now, when I spray, you can see there are a lot further out from each other. I think I want to make this symbol little smaller, so I'm going to bring it out of the panel, make it smaller, and then drag and drop it back in, I'll just hit "Okay." Then when I grab the Symbol Sprayer TOOL, I can draw several of these around. The next tool is going to be called the symbol Shifter Tool, I can just come in and start moving these around just a little bit at a time. The Symbol Sizer Tool is going to allow you to resize some of them, so if I just click barely on some of them are if I make this smaller, I can have a little more control, if you hold the option key, does the opposite effect that makes them smaller, this is a really quick way to get a lot of different sizes going on at the same time. The Symbol Sprayer Tool is going to allow you to just point these in different directions, which could give a nice effect, like confetti or something like that, and that is usually all I use out of the Symbol Sprayer Tool menu. You can see that very quickly we took a standard triangle and made some fun effects with it. One last thing that I want to harp on is that this is an effect, so after you're happy with it, you want to expand it, and I like to expand it once more, so I just get the triangles with their with their shapes, of course they're grouped. You can ungroup them if you want to move them around now independently of each other. That's a fun way to start making graphics that way as well. Next, I'm going to show you a couple of textures via brushes and texture files. I will show you that in the next segment. 20. Working from Illustrator - Adding Textures and Using Brushes: Another great way to add character to your illustrations directly with an Illustrator, is to use pre-made textures and texture brushes. You can make these yourself, but I always find it easiest to let somebody else do that part for me. So I'm going to show you couple of my favorites. This one is called a vexture kit number 1, it's on Creative Market and it's by Gerren Lamson. It's only $4, once you download it, you get the.AI files and the.EPS files delivered directly to you. So I'm going to be using this one today, as well as Ryan-Clark's RVC Vector Brushpack Bundle. This is a brush pack that's also delivered right to you and it's $10. You can find both of these on Creative Market and I'll also link to them beneath this video. I'm going to hop over to my finder here and I already have the vector kit pulled up. I'm going to grab the AI versions of these and just double-click on them to open them up. This is what the textures are going to look like. You can see we've got several different ones to choose from. I've just found that these are just really high quality handmade textures. I'm going to start with this one. All I'm going to do is copy and paste it over to our illustrations. I hide my edges so that we can see what I'm doing. By changing its colors, you can see that it might just start to add some nice texture to our overall pattern and you could send it to the back or layer it on front. Let me grab another one here. One thing we could do with an all over texture, maybe I'll just grab a few of these copy and paste them over here. I'll just place it right on top of my little leaf element here and change its color. Remove this blue one. One way to work with this is to make a clipping mask and then use the trim tool to delete all these outlying one. So I'm going to make a copy of this by hitting command C, command F to bring it in front and then arrange it and bring it all the way to the front. Now, if I select it and the texture behind it, I can hit command 7 to make a clipping mask. Under our pathfinder tools, use the trim button to trim everything away that was laying over the edges here. So that's going to delete my clipping mask and delete all of these outlying edges, and that just gives a nice texture to the leaf that we have going on here. So that's it and I'll show you how to use textures. I also want to show you how to use texture brushes. To get the brushes panel up, come to Window and make sure there's a check mark beside brushes. Illustrator comes with a few standard ones but if you come to the flower menu and go to Open brush library, you'll be able to see all of your saved brushes. I have the RVC brushpack 01 saved right here. That's going to bring up the brush pack that I purchased from Creative Market. Now, we haven't used the paintbrush tool in Illustrator yet, the keyboard shortcut for that is B. If I just use it by itself, it creates something similar to the blob brush, but if I select one of my brushes from over here and start drawing, then it's going to start using the brush from the pack that we installed. These are really nice textures that you can play with in your illustrations. I think I want to use this one. So I'm going to grab this one and just come down here and just start drawing down here on top of this leaf here. Now, if you want to make this bigger or smaller, it's just a stroke, and you can change the weight of the stroke over here in the strokes panel. If you take it up it's going to make it larger, and if you take it down it's going to make it much smaller. I'm going to try maybe 0.5. This just gives some added texture to the side of this leaf here. Once you've drawn your stroke, you can go through the options here just like they were my colors in your swatches panel. I actually like this one, but I think I like the one that we started with. So I'm going to take this up to maybe 0.8. I want to do the same thing that I did with this one but first, I need to expand this so it's no longer a stroke and it gives me all access to all of these little illustrations. I come up to object expand appearance. Let's see, ungroup this. I just want this one part down here. I can make a copy of it and bring it to the front and use it to make a clipping mask of these. Once again, use the trim tool to delete everything that was laying off the edges. That just has given us some really nice added texture to the leaf. It's a really fun way to play around with textures and brushes, which there are an endless supply of online and you can also find out how to make your own, which is also fun. So that's it and I'll show just a quick glance of textures and brushes in Illustrator. Next, we are ready to make our repeating patterns. So I'll meet you back here in just a few minutes. 21. Building Patterns! Build a Simple Repeating Pattern: We're back now in the final segment of this skill share class, and we are ready to start learning how to build technical repeating patterns in Adobe Illustrator. I want to first preface this with just telling you that this entire course is based on how I personally design and build patterns. Everybody does it a little differently and you'll probably find yourself doing it a little differently too. There are lots of ways to build patterns and Illustrator even has a pattern building function built right into it. But I'm going to show you my favorite way to build patterns. Hopefully, you'll really enjoy it as well. I have first taken my illustrations and just recolored them a little bit to give me a more neutral color palette. You can do the same thing. I just selected all of them and came up to the recolor work tool, and started going through some options that I had by scrolling through this way and I just landed on one that I liked a little better. It'll probably keep changing as I go out. Before I start building the pattern that I'm going to build for this course, I just want to introduce to you the idea of a simple repeating pattern. Just using these three simple illustrations right here. Just so you get the idea of how you go about building a technical repeating pattern. I'm going to change the color of these to this lime green. I'm going to start with a rectangle. It doesn't have to be square. It can be any rectangle or square, but I'm going to make mine 400 pixels wide by 400 pixels tall. Yours can be the same or it can be wider than it is taller or vice versa. I'm going to send it to the back and change its color to cream. Basically, when you build a pattern, the simple idea is that everything on the left hand axis needs to match everything on the right axis and everything on the top has to match the bottom. Everything in the middle can be however you want it to be. I'm going to show you how I go about doing that. I'm going to make these a little bigger so that we can do this pretty quickly. Just by dragging and dropping with the opt and key down. I'm going to quickly fill these in and rotate them too so that they don't all look the same. I want to first start by having some overlap at the left-hand corner and then I'm also going to go ahead and build in some that overlap this top as well. This is going to be just a really simple pattern, but it's going to just introduce the idea to you of how to go about building pattern. Now I have some across the left axis and across the top. What I want to do is select everything that crosses over the left-hand, but not the square itself. I'm going to make a copy of it by hitting command C and command F to paste it in front. There are two copies there now. I'm going to right-click and come down to Transform Move. Now, I know that my square, it's 400 pixels wide by 400 pixels tall. I want to move this exactly 400 pixels to the right and zero up and down and I'll select Okay. I want to do the same thing with everything that crosses the top. Copy and paste it, come down to Transform and Move. I wanted to move at zero across this time. Vertical is a little backwards in what you would think. Negative moves the illustrations up and positive moves it down. So 400 positive, we'll move it down to the bottom. Now all of my edges are the same. I can work on just filling in some illustrations here in the middle. I can even make some smaller and bigger. You just can't change anything that's crossing an axis and if you do, you say I wanted to move this one, I need to make sure that I also select this one so that I move them together, which will keep them exactly 400 pixels across, which is fine. But they have to come together. I'm going to go with this and let's go ahead and make a pattern from this. The key to making repeating pattern is that you have to have a box behind your illustration that is identical to the repeat. This is what defines the boundary for the repeat. The easiest way to do this is to select your background and copy and paste it to the back by hitting command C, command B and it has to have no stroke and no fill. So give that no stroke and no fill. Now, don't move either of them at this point. If they even become one pixel off, you're going to have a line in your pattern. But as long as they're right on top of each other, you'll be fine. Select everything that you want in your pattern. All you have to do is drag and drop it over to your swatches panel. Now I can draw a square or a rectangle and fill it with the pattern that we just created. As you can see, it repeat seamlessly. Now I can reduce the size. If I right-click and come down to transform and scale, I can uncheck transfer objects and this is only going to transform the pattern. I can transform the scale down to maybe 50 percent. I can really see the repeat and make sure that there is indeed no gaps. Now if you see a hair line just like this right here, tiny, tiny, tiny, this is not a line that actually exists, it's just the way the illustrator renders patterns. This is just really tiny. If you have a one pixel line, then you're going to be able to see it much clearer than this. But if you zoom in and out, you'll see that it's really tiny and sometimes it'll go away completely. That's how you know that it's not really there and anything that you print with this is not going to print with a line in it. At this point you can recolor this using the recolor artwork tool and just flip through some options that you have here and then if you come across one that you really like, then you can just hit Okay and select No. It's going to go ahead and save the new pattern for you and the new color that you chose. Now you have both of these available. That is the simplicity of building repeating pattern. Next, I want to work on building out the motifs that I'm going to use in my pattern and we'll do that in the next video lesson. 22. Building Patterns! Illustrate Motifs for a Patterns: Now that I have all my illustrations colored, I'm ready to build motifs in order to build my repeating pattern. This is typically how I work like I've mentioned before, I sketch, scan, illustrate color, and then start building my patterns. But for this particular pattern, I know that I want it to have clusters of flowers going in and out from each other. That's what I'm going to build right now before I get too far ahead of myself with the pattern building. I'm going to primarily keep my edges hidden here, and I just want to let you see what it looks for me to build some motifs. I'm going to be changing a couple of the colors along the way, once the entire pattern gets built, then we can start changing its colors one final time. I'm just going to be grabbing elements one at a time and bringing them over a resizing them nestlings them together so that they create a seamless look. I will be using the rotate and reflect tools, the scale tool. I don't want to go too fast in order to lose you. But I've already taught you all of the keyboard shortcuts that I'm using, and so I think you should be able to follow along as I build these different clusters of motifs. I'm just going intuitively here to see what's going to work with each other, what might not work. Maybe try this back here. Another important thing is to work with your layers. So if I want to create a drop shadow effect or something like that, this is the time to do it. In my opinion, this is just the most fun part of building patterns is really saying how all of your motifs come together and start working together. I'm going to change this color so I don't have too much green going on right there, and maybe bring this over here too. I think I like how that looks. I think I'll use this flower next to build up an idea with them. Maybe this flower. A lot of this is just manual placing. Little bits of it may change later on, but this is going give us just a really nice starting point for our pattern building. I'm going to drop these guys in here. That doesn't quite look right, so maybe I'll do this, something like that. I like how that looks. I'm going to work with this flower that we made using the live trace tool next and add some leaves. I erase the stem, I don't know if you remember, I had a stem that was coming out here and I just didn't really feel like it worked very well with what our look and feel was going for so I just took the eraser tool and deleted it really quickly. I think I like the direction that this is all going and I think I'll build one more using this little flower element right here. I don't think I'm going to end up using all of these, but I'd like to use some of them. I already used this once, but maybe I can just bring it down here as another little accent. I think that I really like the direction this is going, and I'm ready to start at building a pattern with this and see where it takes us. All of these look good to me, except a couple of things going on with this one that I want to address and show you how to remedy. Because these illustrations have no stroke, you can see that my floor elements behind are peeking through whether there's no stroke. To me it's just distracting to the eye and it also could be problematic when we get into printing with color bleeds and things like that. I want to show you just the quick and easy way that I have found to remedy that. I'm going to select just this main flower here, let me ungroup it. I'm going to make a copy of it and paste it behind by hitting "command B." Now there are two copies there, and I'm going to change the back copy to this off-white color and hide my edges. I'm going to come up to effect paths and offset path. Now if I hit preview, you can see what we're looking for here. I'm going to select minor rather than round and take this down to maybe two pixels. This just gives us a really nice outline around. Let me see what two and a half looks like. I think this is a little better. I'll hit "okay," bring my edges back. Now you can see this was an effect that was applied to the back image, so what I want to do is expand it. Now you can see that it is full shapes in illustrator, but there are a bunch of them and they're overlapping and I really only need them to be one. So I'm going to use the pathfinder unite to just make one nice outline here. If I bring this over here, you can see that it's just one solid outline for this flower. I am planning on using this cream as my background. So you're not even going to see the outline. It's just going to prevent these from draping over behind and peeking through. That's one of my favorite tricks to outline things. I don't think I need to do it anywhere else, but you may need to do it too even all of your motifs at times. I may give us more as we get into pattern building. I'm going to end this video segment and start the next one with our pattern. I'll see you there. 23. Building Patterns! Build a More Complex Repeating Pattern - Part 1: Now that I've colored all of my motifs and clustered them in a way that I want to use in my pattern, I'm going to start building my repeating pattern for the class. I think I've decided that I'm going to make two, just so that I can show you a couple of different ways that I could construct this pattern. But the first one I want to make is just a cluster of these flower elements that just have a lot of movement to them and go from one direction to another. The first thing I want to do is create my background. This might change later but I think I want to start with something maybe 800 pixels wide by 400 pixels tall. I'm going to go ahead and hide my art board, just so that I have a really nice clean working space. The name of this pattern is nectar, so I'll keep that up here so I can see it. These are too large to start working with. So I'm going to take their size down quite a bit. I'm just going to start layering these organically across the left border here. I'm going to rotate this one and bring it in like this. You can see now that I have the background, the same color as the outline that we made here, that it just disappears but it gives it a really nice clean look. I think I want that to be in the back. Since I know this one is going to play a part in where I need to place this one, I'm going to go ahead and bring it down here. I am just going to go to transform, move and I'm going to say 400. I didn't copy and paste it first, so at this point I need to just say copy and it'll make a copy for me. That way I know where to place this other element right here. Something like this is going to work pretty well, I think. Then am going to work on building out the top of my pattern. I think I'm going to break this illustration out because I feel like having something that's so tall, it's going to make the repeat really obvious and make it a stripe pattern and that's not really what I'm going for. I want this to be a cluster of flowers that are going all different directions. But I'll still use these bits throughout the pattern here. At this point, I'm going to start duplicating my work but instead of just duplicating it exactly, I want to rotate it and reflect it and maybe increase it's scale, so that it really gives it a more organic feel. I'm going to leave holes like this throughout my pattern and I'm going to come back in and fill those in with smaller elements, once I get the big motifs placed. I know this one is going to cross over here, so I will go ahead and just copy all of these that crossed the border. I know I need to move them 800 and I'll hit "Copy". That way I can place one right here. I think it needs to be pretty small. Maybe something like that. Now I'm going to grab everything that crosses over at the top portion but I don't need to grab this one because I already copied it. I'll just do those, transform and move those to the bottom, which is 400. Again, I'll hit "Copy". Now I'm going to start building in the blank space in the middle. I don't really want anything to be right beside each other. I want some of them to go upside down, so that it can really be a non-directional print. Meaning, if it ends up on fabric or something like that, then somebody wouldn't have to worry about which way they cut the fabric in order to make a garment, say or something like that. Not sure if I can sneak another one of these in or not but I think it ended up being my favorite. So I'm going to try to put one right there and then disguise it a little bit by bringing in some more these. Might be able to fit this one in right here, especially if I double-click and start moving some of these around a little bit. I'm not attached to keeping the motifs exactly how they are, especially at this point when I really just need to start filling in some negative space. I don't really want them overlapping, so I can come in and just move them around a little bit like this and I think I need to move just this one like that. I think it's coming together pretty nicely. I've got some holes that I want to fill in but I don't think that I have room to fill them in completely with large illustrations, so I'm going to start breaking these apart and just adding little bits and pieces all over. I'll start with this one. If I just double-click, it'll get me to the group here and I can just start making copies of little illustrations to bring over and start filling in this negative space. Just anything goes when you build patterns, you'll constantly find yourself surprised at what you do and what you come up with. These little guys would be really nice to toss around because they're so small. They can just add movement around. I need to fill in this space. Maybe something like this can bring this over and add the leaf to it. A lot of this just is arranging and using your tools that you already know in order to really bring your illustrations to life. This blue color does not have enough contrast but I'm going to work on that once I get to coloring this pattern one final time. I'm safe doing this like I am, as long as I don't cross over any of these borders. If I do crossover a border, then all I need to do is make sure to replicate it on the opposite side. Let's see. Let's zoom out. We are getting close. I need to add something here and here. Let's see. This looks like it's misplaced, so I'll just move it. Maybe grab this little guy and bring it up here. Make it bigger. This one is nice too is just small and adds some movement, so sprinkle it around to. Maybe I need some over here to even it out. I think we're at a good stopping point. I'm going to build this pattern and see what else it might need. I'm going to take the background, copy and paste it to the back, give it no stroke and no fill, grab the full pattern and drag and drop it over to my swatches panel. I can come over and draw a large square to see how it's looking. Another way I like to test the pattern is just to scroll through some different color options. This is just going to allow me to see how my color palette is working with each other and if there's anything that really sticks out to me, that's a sore thumb that I need to go back and edit. I really just like the way this is looking. That's pretty. I think I've shown you this but say, I really like all these colors but I don't really like how this brown and green are playing up next to each other, so you can drag and drop these colors any way you like. So instead of brown, maybe the white would look better right there. I can just drag and drop those and they've switched places. I do think that looks a lot better. You can just test things one at a time like that if you want. I'm going to play with color options and finalize two of these to share with you for the end of the class. I want to show you one other way that I want to make a pattern out of this cluster of flowers and I'll do that in the next video. 24. Build Patterns! Build a More Complex Pattern Part 2: The final way I thought about making a pattern from this particular set of illustrations is like a repeating bouquet. I have taken the motifs that I made previously. You can see how they're grouped together here. They're the same. But instead of scattering them haphazardly, I built this bouquet out of them. I want to make a pattern out of this repeating bouquet tile, and I'll show you how to do that right now. I'm going to go ahead and hide my artboards and reduce the size of this significantly. I'm going to start with this pattern a little differently, rather than set my boundary box first, I'm going to do that last. I'm going to hide my edges and just take this illustration and start duplicating it. I'm holding down the Shift key and Option key to duplicate that, and I'm going to hit "Command D" to replicate that action. Next, I'm going to select all three and drag and drop them over to the right. I think I want to nestle them in like a half drop. But rather than this, I want the center to be reflected around itself, so I'm going to select "O" on my keyboard and hold down the Shift key to reflect that perfectly. I think they're nestling really well, so the next thing I need to do is just bring over this last one over here to nestle it and drag and drop it. You can already see a repeating pattern, you don't need to do this more than just with a tile of three. I am going to eyeball now my repeating box and then perfect it. I'm going to grab the Rectangle tool and I'm going to eyeball the center of this flower, from there to this one, and back down to this one because I know that that is my repeat or that will become my repeat. If I drop this, I'll go ahead and give it this color and send it to the back. Now these pixels are going to be pretty specific with decimals and I just want to round them up. I'm going to click off of this key chain which constrains the width and height, so that I can enter whatever I want. I'm going to make this 325 by 210. That's my new repeating box, which means that these are not perfect anymore, but I can easily make them. All I need to do is delete everything that crosses over this border and recopy it over there. I'm going to copy and paste it in front, transform, and move it 325 pixels to the right. As you can see, I don't even need these down here because they're not touching the repeating bounding box at all, and now, I just need to delete either one of these and copy it again too. I'll copy this one and move it, let's see, up 200, which is negative 210 and copy that. Now I've got all that perfect and I can copy and paste my background to the back, give it no stroke and no fill. Let's go ahead and grab. I want to grab everything. Drag it over to my swatches panel. Now I can see what this pattern is going to look like, which I think I like very much. I'll play with the colors a little bit. That's so pretty. I'm going to stay on that one and then keep playing a little bit too. You can see how using the recolor artwork tool is really fun and can just take you hours going through different color options. That's just really fun and fun to see how your illustrations come to life with color. That is how to build repeating patterns. 25. Building Patterns! Adjust patterns & Save as .JPEG or .PNGs: Now that we've created some patterns, I want to show you quickly how to adjust the patterns and save them for the web. I've landed on two different colors that I'm happy with for the two patterns that I made. I have just made squares and filled them with them here. What I want to do is go ahead and select both of them, copy them by hitting "Command C" and open a new document by hitting "Command N". I want this to be the standard size of a piece of paper, so it's already set for that, which is letter that's 8.5 inches by 11 inches tall. I'm going to leave all my settings like they are in hit "Okay". I'm going to paste these over by hitting "Command B". I want to fill the square in with my pattern, so I can either drag and drop a rectangle here, or I can simply click in the right-hand corner and type in 8.5 inches by 11 inches. I'll just grab the eyedropper tool by hitting "I" on my keyboard and fill the first one with this pattern. I want to show you how to make some adjustments, particularly for when you are uploading your coursework to the student project page. When you upload your work, I want you to upload images that are big enough for us to see your artwork, but small enough for us to see the repeat. I think that this is too small, so I'm going to right-click with it selected, go down to Transform and hit "Scale". Now if I deselect transform objects, then I'll just start transforming the pattern inside. I'm going to take this up to 200 percent and maybe just a little bit more 210 percent. I think this looks pretty good. I'm going to select, Okay, and save this as a JPEG using the save for web feature. I use this so much that I use the keyboard shortcut for it, but it's pretty long. Its' Command Shift Option S. If I cancel out of this, you can also go to file, save for web and there is your keyboard shortcut, Command Shift Option S. This is going to bring up this dialog box and you can see that it's set to save by 612 by 792 pixels, which is the standard size of a piece of paper, and you've got some options here. First of all, you can see this hairline line that Illustrator renders using the pattern, so it's set to type optimized right now. I'm going to change that to art optimized and you'll see that it disappears. Next, you can choose whether you save it as a JPEG or a PNG. You can save it as either. If you save it as a JPEG, I would up the quality to 90 or a 100 percent. I'm going to take mine up to a 100 percent for this. Everything else looks good, so I'm going to hit "Save". Now I'll save this under skill share as pattern number 1. I want to do the same thing for this blue version by hitting "I" on my keyboard and selecting it. Now, I want to make it larger, so I'll go Transform in Scale. This looks pretty good, but with this one, it's more obvious that it's off centered. To center it, I'm going to go to Transform and then Move. Now it jumps to a random number here, so I'm going to set it back to zero. With my mouse in the horizontal view, I can just scroll with my mouse until I get that center column in line with the center. Then I can scroll in the vertical to do the same thing and center things. You don't have to do this, but it just makes it look a little nicer. The other thing I want to show you is that if you want to place your name on here as a watermark, you can do that as well. I have mine already copied, so I'm going to paste it over here and reduce its size. You have a couple of options here, let me hide my edges. You can hide it in your illustration like I might put mine right here for this one, and then you zoom out and make a copy of this. For this one that we just worked on, there's not a great place for me to sneak it in, so I probably would put it over here in the corner, and then using the rounded rectangle tool or something like that, just bring in a little blip for it here. Of course this is the same color, so I need to change its color. Then if I want to make this an art board, I can just select the rectangle, copy and paste it to the front and come up to object artboards convert to artboards. You can do that using any square or rectangle and that just created another art board. If I hit the keyboard shortcut for, save for web, you can see that I now have my name on this pattern. That's a good idea when you're sharing your work on the web. Of course, you don't have to and the only thing I would say about that is to try to make it as least distracting as possible. Just because if you have a watermark, all of your illustration, it's really distracting, and people like me who are bloggers have a hard time using images like that, and you do want to promote sharing, you just want to also make sure that due credit is given. I need to save this one really quick. I'm going to select it and hit "Command Shift Option S". It's already saved to art optimized and all my settings are remembered, so I'm going to hit "Save" and save this as pattern 2. That way, if I go down to my Finder and pull these up, I can just open them and you can see they're nice JPEGs, saved for the web so you can instantly upload them. For your student projects, I would either take a screenshot or save your images, like this. Join me in the next and final segment where we talk about the next steps for surface pattern design and your project for this course. 26. Surface Pattern Design: Final Pattern + Next Steps: In this very last segment, I just want to go over a few key thoughts, show you my finalized pattern collection and talk about the next steps. First this is my finalized patterns. I named my pattern nectar. These are just a few of the color ways that I came up with for this particular pattern. Of course, I did two versions, but you definitely don't have to do that. I just got a little carried away. I'm really happy with the finished result and I can't wait to use them. Next, I want to talk about your student project. For this class, I hope everyone will participate and upload student projects. Of course, your assignment is to create one repeating pattern that is inspired by your favorite thing or things in nature. A finished student project should include your inspirations from nature. This can be photographs that you've taken or whatever it is that you have decided to build your pattern around. A moodboard or an inspiration board. This can either be a screenshot of a digital inspiration board or it can be a photograph of a physical inspiration board. You should also upload your sketches just so that we can see what you're working from and how your sketches look. You should also upload a picture of your color palette. Screenshots work really nice for this and you don't have to use a photograph to gather your color palette from. But if you do make sure to include the photograph too. Next, after you illustrate your sketches, upload photo of the motifs that you have illustrated and colored, but you haven't put into a repeating pattern yet. Finally, you want to upload your final repeating pattern. Next, I just want to let you know that there is going to be a design challenge for this course. I'm going to announce this in the next week, so keep your eye out in student announcements. This is going to be a really fun way for us to all to get involved in making patterns. I also want to let you know that I'll be debuting a follow-up course to this one called Surface Pen design 2.0 sometime in March 2015. In this follow-up course, we're going to learn how to create repeating patterns for a collection. We're going to design an entire collection of repeating patterns and talk about how to start your career as a surface pattern designer. We're going to go over why it's important to have a portfolio, how to apply our patterns to products and really start to get noticed in the industry. If this is something that you've fallen in love with and would like to know more about starting a career as a surface pattern designer, keep your eye out for the announcement of this next course, and I hope to see you there. A couple of final thoughts before we end class. I'm not sure if you remember during the very beginning of this course in the very first segment, I showed you the timeline. There was about a six month segment where I had decided I wanted to be a surface pattern designer. Then six months passed by and I had in fact done nothing in order to get closer to my dream. I love this quote by Vincent van Gogh that says, "great things are done by a series of small things brought together." At the end of that six months where I had realized that I had done nothing, I decided that I needed to do one thing every single day, moving towards the direction of my goals, no matter how small or how big that thing was. I spent over a year doing this. Sure enough, at the end of the year, I had made huge strides towards my goal of being a designer. Some days it was taking an Adobe Illustrator course. If you've watched this video today, you can cross off your to do of doing one small thing. Other days it was signing. Other days it was contacting companies, making follow-up phone calls, building a page in my portfolio. I just want to encourage you to start doing, no matter what your creative dream is, start doing one thing every single day in efforts to go there. I still practice this to this day. My dreams are ever evolving, but I still try to do one thing towards my next big goal. Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will. Please don't forget this. Try not to doubt yourself. If you really put forth your best effort, then I know that you're not going to fail. A lot of times, it's so scary to just begin working on a dream that we never do it in the first place. I want to encourage you to just forget your doubt and follow your dream. Finally, It always seems impossible until it's done. I promise if you start doing one thing every single day, soon you'll wake up and we'll have accomplished massive things that before didn't seem like they are even possible. I'm so happy that you took this course. I cannot wait to see what you create. If you want to keep in touch and get more digital goodness, I hope you'll consider joining the Roost Tribe membership, it's a premium membership to my blog. I'm offering everyone who takes this course one free month. If you go to goinghometoroost.com/first-month-free. You can get one month free. Included in the membership are weekly newsletters that contain Adobe Illustrator tutorials, printables, exclusive articles from industry experts, illustrations and clip art, repeating patterns, and digital papers, recipes, and a lot more. The community is a really fun thing to be a part of. We all connect with each other. It's a really supportive creative group to be a part of. You can learn more at my website and how to keep in touch with me on social media over on my blog, goinghometoroost.com. I'll see you there. Bye.