Large Scale Repeating Patterns in Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Create Large Scale Repeating Patterns in Illustrator and Photoshop: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class, large-scale repeating patterns in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. In this course I'll show you how to create large-scale repeating patterns in Illustrator. Now I'm teaching this class using Illustrator, but the concepts are equally applicable to programs such as Photoshop and Procreate. I developed this course because so many of my students have asked me questions around this general topic and it can be really confusing when you realize that a repeating pattern doesn't repeat when added to just any size rectangle. I'll explain first why pattern filled shapes aren't themselves a repeating pattern swatch. Then we'll move on to how to make them repaid. I have a couple of processes that you can use to make pattern filled objects that will seamlessly repeat so that you can use them for designs that you've already made. If you're wanting to make these patterns from scratch, then we'll have a look at how to do this using the pattern make tool in Illustrator. Of these solutions and techniques, all but the one that uses the Illustrator pattern make tool will translate to working in both Photoshop and Procreate. Enough from me, we've got a lot of work ahead of us, so let's get started. 2. Pt 1 Understand the problem: Before we look at how to create seamless repeating large-scale patterns, it's time for us to have a look and see what the problem even is to begin with. Now, I have two rectangles on the screen here. This is a rectangle that's 400 pixels by 400 pixels in size and I filled it with my pattern and over here is the actual pattern swatch itself. Now, what I did in here was I just scaled the pattern down. But scaling it down is not the problem. The problems are way more fundamental than that. Let's have a look at this and what it is is of course, a 400 by 400 pixel rectangle. If I hold the alt or option key and drag a duplicate of it away and then line it up, so that it's perfectly lined up with the other document. When I click away, you'll say that this is not repeating. There is a partial circle here and a whole circle here. It doesn't look like what it's supposed to look like. If I alt drag this combination of squares down, again, it's not creating a seamless repeat. But over here is the original pattern swatch. I just grabbed it out of the swatches panel. I just dragged it into my document. Now this swatch is a repeat. If I alt or option drag a duplicate of it away, it's just going to line up perfectly and if I select over both of these, alt or option drag a duplicate away, everything creates this beautiful repeating pattern and if I took the whole lot of this and duplicated it and lined it up, it would continue to do that over again. It could get as big as you would like. Now, this itself over here is where the problem is arising and it was probably really well described to me by one of my students who was making plaid patterns and she was creating 12 by 12 scrapbook paper from these plaid patterns and selling it and she had a problem because one of her purchasers then took the piece of 12 by 12 scrapbook paper and tried to print it on a site that would tile that as a repeating pattern and the problem was, just as we're seeing on the screen here, if you've got something like a 12 by 12 sheet of scrapbook paper that's filled with a plaid design, it's not necessarily going to be a seamless repeating pattern itself. In fact, chances are 99.9 percent of the time, it's not going to repeat seamlessly. This person was stuck selling something that didn't meet the buyer's specifications or expectations. Now, you might look at that and say the buyer has unreasonable expectations. When you buy a sheet of scrapbook paper that is filled with a pattern, there should be no expectation that that itself is a seamless repeating pattern. That's not the way generally things are done. But if we look at it from a customer service and a learning point of view, there's no reason why we couldn't have made that plaid pattern itself a seamless repeating pattern when used to fill a sheet of scrapbook paper and that's what we're going to do in this class. We're going to learn how to make an existing pattern work inside a fixed shape object as a seamless repeat and we're going to learn how to do it from scratch. But this is the issue. Whenever we fill a shape of a rectangle or square, whatever it happens to be with a seamless repeating pattern like over here, it's not of itself going to necessarily be a repeating pattern and it probably in 99.9 percent of cases will not seamlessly repeat and so what we're going to do is learn how we can make it a seamless repeat, so that we can sell things that look like scrapbook paper, but which of themselves could also be used as a pattern. Hopefully you're clear now as to what the issue is and you're ready to look at what the first of our solutions are. 3. Pt 2 The first solution for existing patterns: For the first solution to creating a larger document that has lots of elements in it and which is itself a seamless repeating pattern, is going to focus on where we don't mind what the size of the finished document is. We just don't care about that. We just want to create a document that we like the look of, that we can then save and sell or give away so that the user could use that as a seamless repeating pattern, but where the final size doesn't matter. If you're concerned about creating, for example, scrapbook size repeating patterns, then go to the next video because we're going to focus on that in that video. But if you don't mind, then let's see how we do it. Now I've got a pattern already in my swatches panel here. The first thing I will do is drag the pattern out of the swatches panel into the document. Then I'm going to size that, because right now it's way too small for me. I'm going to hold the Shift and Alt key on a PC, that shift option on a Mac, it's going to scale it up. This is a better size, I can see things a bit more clearly here. Now if you're familiar with patterns in illustrator, you will know that every pattern comes with this bounding box here. It's a no fill, no stroke rectangle, and everything inside that no fill, no stroke rectangle belongs to the pattern. Everything on the outside these little fragments here are not needed, but part of the shapes are native, which is why they are there. You can see that just the tips of these shapes here are native for the pattern, but these elements here are not and that's why they're sort of these fractured paces all the way around the outside. Well, the first thing we are going to do to create this any size document that is itself a seamless repeating pattern, is we are going to use that no fill, no stroke rectangle to crop away or at least visually crop away the elements that are outside. All we can see then is out pattern itself. Now there are technically two ways you can do this, but only one that's going to work every time. You could use the no fill, no stroke rectangle to crop away, permanently removed these elements. The trouble is that if any of these are shapes that have strokes around the edge, it's going to fail and it's going to wreck your pattern. I don't recommend that you consider the crop option. Instead, what I want to do is to use this no fill, no stroke rectangle to create what we call a clipping mask. Let's go through the last panel where we've got our pattern. It's the only thing in the document, so that's what we're seeing here. There is a group. At the very bottom of every single pattern that you make in illustrator is this. It is a no fill, no stroke rectangle, we can see it over here. No fill, no stroke, I've got it selected. What you're going to do is locate that and it's going to be at the very end, and it's always going to be there. Then you're going to drag it out. You're going to just drag that all the way above everything else. We can close down that group visually right now. All we've got here is a no fill, no strike rectangle and the pattern elements themselves. Well, we're going to select everything, and you need to make sure that you have everything selected and you need this no fill, no stroke rectangle to be at the top of everything. Because that's how you make a clipping mask effect. We will choose object clipping mask, make. Now you could also right-click and choose make clipping mask. The end result is exactly the same. What happens is that that no fill, no stroke rectangle is used to block out everything that is outside that no fill, no strike rectangle from view. The elements are still there. You can see as I'm just pulling my mouse along the bottom edge of this shape, that there are shapes there. There's all that content that was outside that no fill, no stroke rectangle is still there. It's just, it's hidden from view and that's going to work perfectly for us. I'm just going to close the last panel because I don't need that anymore. I'm going to move this up so its roughly in a position. It's not going to fill the document exactly, I'm not concerned for it to do that. We're going to do that in the next video. What we're going to do now is to repeat these elements through this document to create something that we like. But before we do that, I'm a little bit concerned up here if you have a look, the width and height of this element here include fractional values, and that's just a nuisance. What I'm going do is make sure that this looks like it's got a bar through it. You don't want it to be locked, you want it to be unlocked. Then we're just going to round these values off to the nearest, whatever. Well, this is 1485.661, I'm just going to make it 1485. I'm just going to delete those values of the end. I'll tap across to this at 742.583, we'll make it just 742. The shape has changed marginally not so that it's going to be noticeable, but their whole values, which is going make life a bit easier. To repeat this to fill the document, we're going to use a transform effect because it really is the simplest method, and all sorts going to work really well in upcoming videos. With the shape selected will choose effect, and then distort and transform, and transform. I'm going to turn preview on so I can see what's happening. I want one copy because I'm going to move this horizontally, and one copy will be fine for me. But you may want more if you want to repeat this element more time, so just use whatever value makes sense to you. We'll take the width of this element which has 1485, and that's going to be our horizontal movement. Just type it in and tab away. You'll see that the shape is then repeated and down here is a seamless repeat. It's been moved across exactly far enough for this to be a seamless join. When everything looks all right, click okay. Then you are going to leave this shape selected and do that all over again, effect, distort, and transform, transform. You will click here to apply a new effect if you see this dialog. You will turn preview on because you want to see what's happening. This time we're going to move it in a vertical direction and we're going to use this value, the height of this shape here, which is 742. I just selected and type it in, and tab away, and then start increasing your copies right now minds one, so I'm just going to increase it. I'm just pressing the up arrow key. I think three copies will be plenty. That's one original and three copies, I will click okay. Now you will use as many copies as you need to make an element or a design that you like. Now this design itself is a famous repeating pattern. Have a look over here, we've got part of a flower, we've got about a quarter of it. Well directly across here is the other three quarters of that flower. If you look down the edges of everything, you'll see that for every shape here there is a matching piece over here. Now the question becomes, how do we export these? Before we export it, what we need to do is to expand this transformation effect. Because if have a look in the appearance panel with this shape selected, you will see that you've got two transform effects here. When you click the eyeball, they just disappear. What we want to do is we want to break this out, we want to split this into the component pieces. With this object here selected, we'll choose object and then expand appearance. If we then look up in the layers panel, which I've just managed to loose. Let's go and have a look. You will see we've got lots of different objects here, so it's been broken out. Instead of just one object with a transformation effect, we've now got each of these as an individual object. At this point we're going to select everything. I'm just going to shrink my document a little bit so I can see everything. I'm going to select over absolutely everything. What I want to do is make this art board here the same size as all the art that I have selected. I'll click here on the art board tool and then I'll double-click, and we'll go to the preset drop-down list here and we're going to choose fit to selected art. We selected all our artwork and we are trying to illustrate, make the art board the same size as our selected art and click okay. Now our art board is the exact same size as the element that we have created, which itself is a seamless repeating pattern. It's of course filled with a seamless repeating pattern. At this point we can just save it, and you are going to do that however you save these documents, typically. One method that I like to use is to use the save web legacy option, file, export, save for web legacy. I like this because I get control of the final size of the document. I don't want to skew it out. I don't want to make it wider, or stretch it wider, or stretch at taller. But what I may want to do is to make sure that I have a document size that suits me. I could, for example, change these values here. I'm actually going to leave them in place. What I'll do is click save, and then I can name my file. I'm just going to leave it as doodle flower pattern, but you can name it whatever you like, and click save. That document is now saved. It's whatever size it needed to be. It's not a fixed size, it's not scrapbook paper size, but it is something that is a seamless repeating pattern and could be used as such. 4. Pt 3 How Illustrator Creates and Saves Files: Before we go ahead and have a look at the second solution, which is one where we would take an existing pattern that we've created in Illustrator and size it so that it would be a known size, for example, scrapbook paper size, we need to deal with something that is an ongoing problem with Illustrator. That is, how does illustrate a create and save files are in terms of physical dimensions, the width and height, and also the resolution? I'm going to show you something. Don't follow along because this is going to be spectacularly unsuccessful. It's just important that we cover this right now. I'm going to create a brand-new document. I'm going to assume that we're going to create scrapbook paper, which is 3,600 by 3,600 pixels in size at 300 DPI. Now, we can't specify the 300 and DPI part right now, but we can on export, just be aware that whatever you're seeing down here has got nothing to do with DPI. This is raster effects that something completely different. So just ignore that. What we're concerned about is creating a document 3,600 pixels wide, 3.600 pixels tall, that is 300 DPI. Let's go and see how this is not going to work. So we've got our fixed-size document. I'm going to fill it with a square that is the exact size of the document. We'll pretend that for now that this is a scrapbook paper pattern. Having created this rectangle size, the exact same size as the document, let's go and export this. There is a feature in Illustrator that allows you to export your files and choose the export resolution as you do so. So we're going to choose File and then Export and Export As. We're going to call this green square, and I'll click "Export". Here we get a choice of the resolution. Now we can choose 70-150 or 300, or we could set an other whatever resolution we want to use. Now for scrapbook paper, it's 300 PPI or 300 DPI. They sort of used interchangeably in this sense, they are not the same, but for our purposes, they are. I'll just click "Okay". It's not unreasonable for us to assume that what we just created in Illustrator was a document 3,600 by 3,600 at 300 DPI. That's not the case. Let's go and see what we did get. Here is our document and it's blown out to a very hefty 15,000 by 15,000 pixels. If I right-click it and choose properties so that we can go and see what the resolution is. The good news is that the resolution is what we asked for it's 300 DPI. The dimensions that pixel width and height are way in excess of what it was that we wanted. So let's see what's happening. I'm going to open a calculator. We created a document that was 3600 by 3600 pixels in size. What I didn't tell you at the time was the illustrator assumes that absolutely any document that you create is going to have a notional resolution of 72 pixels per inch. So let's divide this by 72. What we end up is a document that illustrator thought was 50 inches in dimensions, 50 inches wide and 50 inches tall. So when we said to illustrator that we want you to create a document that has a resolution of 300 pixels per inch. Illustrator said, okay, you've got a 50 inch by 50 inch document. Let's multiply that by 300 pixels per inch. I'm going to make your document 15,000 by 15,000. That's exactly of course what illustrator did. It's also exactly of course what we didn't want to have happened. Let's just clear the thought and let's see how we could calculate how big a document we need to create for Illustrator to actually export the document that the right resolution for us and end up at the exact right size. We're going to say to ourselves that we want to end up with a document that is 3,600 pixels wide and tall, our scrapbook paper size. We want it to be 300 pixels per inch. Let's divide by the 300 pixels per inch. That Illustrator is about to multiply by. Let's just do that. Illustrator saying, okay, you want a 12-inch document? We're going yep, that's exactly what we want, is a 12 inch document. But Illustrator when we create a 12-inch document is going to do that at 72 pixels per inch. Let's multiply that by our 72. This is the document size that we need. If we create a document that's 864 pixels wide and tall, and save it at 300 DPI, we're going get exactly what we want. Let's go and prove that to ourselves. I'll choose File and then New. I already have a document size set up here, 864 by 864. Again, you're ignoring this screen because it's got nothing to do with what we're doing. Click Create. We're going to make a rectangle that's 864 by 864. Of course that's a square. Let's fill it with a color. We'll use orange this time. I'm going to export that using the exact same process as we did last time. File Export, Export as Orange Square. I'm going to click "Use Artboards" because I do want to limit the size of the document that we're exporting to the artboard size, that's a prudent option to select. I'll click "Export". We're going to export it at the 300 PPI that we need for our scrapbook paper. I'll click "Okay". Let's go back to the folder where we're working in. Here's our orange square. When I click on it, the dimensions this time are as we wanted, 3,600 by 3,600. When I right-click it and go and check its properties to check its resolution, you'll see that we've got a document that's 300 DPI, could be PPI interchangeable for this purpose, but the resolution is exactly what we want. The physical size of the file is exactly what we want. If we solve that so somebody has scrapbook paper, they would be getting exactly what they would expect to get. I know that this is really confusing staff. So in the next video, I'm going to introduce you to a spreadsheet that I've created that should help you make these calculations. 5. Pt 4 A spreadsheet to help you: Because I know that it's quite difficult to make these calculations of file sizes in Illustrator, I've created a Google Doc spreadsheet for you. To get access to it, go to your browser and type in bit.ly/ILLUSTRATORFILE all in capital and it's all one word. When you press "Enter", you'll be taken to a Google Docs spreadsheet. Now this spreadsheet has been locked down. The only cells that you can change are these turquoise ones. You'll see here that we've got the calculations for a document that we want the output dimension to be 6,000 pixels. We want it to be a document that is a 150 pixels per inch. If we're going to create that in Illustrator, then we need to start with a document that is 2880 pixels in dimension. Let's go and double-check our scrapbook paper example. Now for scrapbook paper, we know that we need paper that is 3,600 pixels wide and it needs to be at 300 DPI. You'll see here that the required dimension of the Illustrator document is 864 pixels. That's consistent with this second calculation, which is where you need to create an output document with dimensions that are measured in inches rather than pixels up here. Again, if you want a 12 inch sheet of scrapbook paper, you'll just type 12 in here and then you'll be told what the dimensions of the Illustrator document are. This spreadsheet is freely available for anybody to use and I encourage you to use it if you're at all concerned about making those calculations. I know they're a little bit confusing, so hopefully this will help. 6. Pt 5 The Second Solution for Existing Patterns: Now we've gone a long way round trying to get to this second solution, but we've got all the tools that we need to actually get this pattern to work. So let's assume that we want to make a fixed size document. In this case it's going to be scrapbook paper. We know that we need to end up with something that's 3,600 by 3,600 pixels in size at 300 DPI. We also know that creating a document that's 3,600 by 3,600 pixels in size in Illustrator and saving it out at 300 DPI is a recipe for disaster. We need something that's 864 by 864. So let's go and create our document. I'll choose File and then New. I already have one created that those dimensions are selected and click "Create". We know that if we save this out using file export as a 300 DPI, we're going to get exactly what we want in terms of file size. Let's go and get a pattern to fill this with. Now I have a Moroccan trellis pattern that I'm going to use. I'm going to drag the pattern out of the Swatches palette and we know that there is an awful, no stroke rectangle at the very bottom of this pattern. We need to make a clipping mask, so I'm going to take this rectangle, put it above absolutely everything, select the entire object, choose Object, Clipping Mask, and then Make. Now that will reduce the size of this shape a little bit because it's clipping it. In some instances, of course, your pattern might reduce quite significantly when all the other bits and pieces around the edge have been removed for this particular pattern, that's a marginal decrease in size. I'm going to select this object and I'm going to take it to my brand new document. You're going to copy and paste it however you copy and paste things. Now I'm looking at this shape that I've brought in, and its dimensions have values after the decimal point. We know that that's going to be troublesome when we come to work with it, so we need to make these whole numbers. First of all, I'm going to disable this option, so I'm not constraining the width and height, and I'm going to round it up, so I'm going to make it 85 and 103. Again, that slightly altered the proportions of this, but not in any way that's going to be highly visible. I'm going to place it in the very top corner of the document, which is at x and y as 00. Then we're going to go ahead and do our transformation, so I'll select my shape, choose "Effect", "Distort & Transform" and then Transform. I'll turn preview on. I'm going to do the horizontal transformation first. So I'm going to move this shape by the value of its width, which is 85, so I'll type 85 in as the horizontal movement. You can see it's moved perfectly. Now let's go and increase our copies so that we feel our document. Now, you're going to fill or overfill a document depending on which gets you the closest to this edge, under filling gets me closer. If I increase this by one, you'll see that I'm going grossly over the edge, you just got to make a decision do underfill or overfill, but you want to get as close as you can to the edge either way. I'll click "Okay", then we're going to do the same thing vertically. Effect, Distort & Transform, and then Transform. We'll turn preview on. We're going to move it vertically so we're interested in what the height of this object is, it's 103. I'll type 103 pixels as the vertical movement, and then I'll go and increase the number of copies until I again do one of two things. I go close to the edge by going over it, or close to the edge by not quite reaching it. In this case, for this particular shape, I don't want to go over the edge because I'm going too far, but your pattern might be different. It's fine, just choose whatever gets you the closest. I'll click "Okay". Now we're going to expand this, because right now it is a shape that's got two transformations in it. We want to break these out so that they're individual elements, so with it selected, will choose Object and Expand Appearance. If we have a look inside the layers palette here, we'll say that we've got a layer that has a group in it, and inside the group are lots of other groups. The fact that this is a group is going to work for us, because it's very easy for us to change the size of the entire group of objects. With the group of objects selected, we're going up here, and again with this option disabled, so it's got the line visible because that's what we want to do. We're going to make this collection of shapes the exact same size as our document, which is 864 by 864. Now it's stretched it a little bit, but for most patterns you're not going to notice that it's been stretched out of proportions. If your pattern was larger, you're going to be more likely to see some distortion. The smaller the pattern is relative to the sheet of paper that you're creating, then the less distortion will be visible. Now that we've created this, we're going to export it. File, Export, Export As. I'm going to use art boards so I'll click "Export". We know that we created this at 864 by 864, so that when we saved it at 300 pixels per inch, we would end up with a document exact to the correct size. We do want it to be high resolution here at 300 pixels per inch. This is the qualities, so at the moment I've got medium quality scrapbook paper, I would not be selling that, I would be making sure that my quality was maximum. Most of the sites that I work on require that the document be saved at the maximum possible quality. So just be aware that this will give us quality. Again, it's got nothing to do with the physical dimensions, it's just got to do with how many JPEG artifacts are going to be in the final result. I'll click "Okay". Having saved our document, let's now go to our folder. Here is the Moroccan trellis pattern we just created. The document is 3,600 by 3,600 pixels in size. I'll right-click and choose "Properties" and I'll go to Details. Here we see that the file dimensions and the resolution at 300 DPI is exactly what we want. Now before we finish here, there's one thing that I want to talk to you about, and that is the order in which we have done things here. I've created a document 864 by 864, and I've squeezed my pattern in to fit. It won't work as reliably if you create any size document, just a large square document, fill it with your pattern and then expect to scale down your document and your pattern to the 864 by 864. I've tried that, I thought it was a really good idea and it's being saved out by one pixel. So I end up with a document that's 3,601 pixel by 3,601 pixels, and it's happened repeatedly doing that. So I have chosen this method of showing you how to do it, because I have never saved a document out at the wrong dimensions. It's always worked perfectly this way, and it's most of the time worked imperfectly the other way. So just be aware that I've already done all the testing for you and I've had success this way. It's never failed this way, with predetermining the size of the file that you're going to need and setting things up to that size, and then just squeezing your pattern to fit that size before you go ahead and save it. I know this stuff is really, really tricky. I've tried to make this class as streamlined as possible, so that you are doing the minimum possible amount of mathematics to get a successful result. 7. Pt 6 Make a Pattern from Scratch a Fixed Size: We're now at the stage where we can look at creating a document that is a fixed size from scratch and so this document is going to be a seamless repeating pattern, and of course, it's going to contain a pattern. We're going to make our scrapbook sized document, so I'll click Create New. We're going to use 864 pixels by 864 pixels because we already established why we need that size document. I'll click Create and now we need to create our pattern and it needs to fit evenly across and down this document. Now I am going to assume to start off with, we're going to work with a square, and so we need a square shape that is going to repeat across this document five times, 10 times or whatever and unfortunately, the calculations on a document that's 864 pixels wide and tall is a little bit confusing, so this is what we're going to do. I'm going to give you the link to this website, and it's a website called factor calculator. Now we're going to type in 864 here and click Calculate and then I'll explain to you what's happening. What we get is the factors of 864. In other words, the numbers that you can divide into 864 and you're going to get a whole number result. There's not going to be anything after the decimal point, it's not going to be 0.5 or 0.25 or anything like that. It's going to divide evenly, and so these are all the numbers that will divide into 864 evenly and then they're broken them out into what are called factor pairs. In other words, you can have one shape that is 864 by 864 in our document, or you could have two shapes that are 432. That would be a pattern piece in the top quarter here, pattern piece here, pattern piece here, and a pattern piece here. That's what this is telling us. We'll get three pattern pieces across our document if we make our pattern 288 pixels wide, and we will get four if there were 216. Now, if we have a look at this four and 216, this will tell us a little bit about the actual physical size of the pattern element because we're saying we're going to get four shapes across our document, which we know is going to end up 12 inches wide. So if we place four of them across this document, each one of them is going to be three inches wide. At this point you could pick up a ruler and have a look at three inches and determine, is that the kind of size pattern element that you want? If you want it to be a bit smaller, then you might go to, for example, six. This would give you a pattern element that's two inches wide because you can fit six of them across your sheet of paper, and if that's the case, then they're going to be a 144 pixels wide and here eight. Well, eight goes into 12, 1.5 times so that would give us an element that's 1.5 inches wide and if we wanted that, then our pattern piece is going to be 108 pixels wide. That's what you are to understand here when you have a look at your factor pairs. It's telling you a lot about how this document's going to look. Now, I am going to settle for nine and 96. Nine goes into 12, one and a third times, so each of my pattern elements is going to be one and a third inches wide and for that, I need to create a pattern piece that's 96 pixels. Again, we're going to work on a square pattern to start off with. Inside Illustrator, I'm going to choose Object, Pattern, Make. I'll click Okay. You can see that we don't actually have to have an object to be able to make a pattern, we can just make a pattern at anytime and our width and height is going to be 96, so let me just make that 96. This is going to be our tile, we don't want to size the tile to art, we don't necessarily need to move the tile with the art, we just want to see the tile edge. That's all we need here. We can zoom in so we can see things a bit more clearly. This is the area in which we're going to build our pattern. Now, I've already pre-created some elements that we can use, so I'm just going to open my fruit assets file here. Now I'm going to the last pallet and I want to ungroup these objects and I just learned something today about ungrouping, which I'm going to share with you because this is really important. You can see here, I've just selected my group and I'm about to ungroup it, so I'll choose Object, Ungroup and what happens is, everything ungroups into just one big mess of shapes, so I'm going to undo that with Edit, Undo. If I go and unlock this path that's at the bottom, which is the background for this shape, and then go and re-select my group and then go and ungroup it, this time it ungroups into the various objects. I still don't have a really good explanation for what's happening there, I just know how to make it work. Just make sure that everything is accessible within your group if you want to be able to ungroup it into its component groups. The first of the pattern elements I'm going to use is this one here. I'm just going to option-drag it out of the way because I want to leave this in place, but I'm going to focus on this particular shape. But because, if we have a look up here in the top panel, we can look at it in the transform panel, you'll see that it's huge, it's 222 pixels wide. Well, our pattern element piece is only 96 pixels wide, so this needs to be much smaller. I'm thinking I'm probably going to make it about 50 pixels, so I am making sure that this icon here is pressed in, so we are constraining the width and height. If I make it 50 wide, Illustrator is going to make it however tall it has to be to maintain its proportions, you can see it's tiny. I'm going to choose Edit, Cut because I don't need it in this document any longer, so already got a spare copy of it. Let's go into our document and let's choose Edit, Paste. Of course we could press Control or Command V and it's a perfect size here for our pattern. I'm going to go back and I'll grab my kiwifruit, so let's just go and do the exact same thing to the kiwifruit. I think I'll make it 45 this time. I'll choose Edit, Cut, go back to our document and just Paste it in. Now I think I'll make my pattern out of just these two shapes. I'm just going to zoom out so I can see, pretty much how it's going to look and I'm pretty happy with that pattern. I've got it sized appropriately, I'll click Done. Now everything's going to disappear. That is exactly as it should be because the pattern has just been built in the pattern make dialogue, the elements didn't exist in the document before we started. Now we can create our 864 by 864 pixels square to go in our document. I'm going to target the fill, up here in the swatches panel is our new pattern. I'm going to click in it and it's filling this document. Now it's filling this document, and because of the way that it was sized, it is going to be a seamless repeat. Now we could do it the other way, let's just get rid of that. Let's drag the pattern element out of the swatches panel, let's go and target the no-fill-no-stroke rectangle that is at the bottom of everything. I'm going to make a duplicate of that and just drag it above everything. Select everything, and make our clipping mask. Now we're going to place this object up in the very top corner of our document, I'm just checking, its top corner should be at 0, 0. It's not yet, but let's just put it there and now we can do our transformations. Effect, Distort and Transform and then Transform. I'll turn Preview on. We need eight copies because we already determined that this was one-ninth of the document width, so we need our original plus eight copies, and it needs to be moved horizontally, the size of the pattern, which is 96 pixels. So I'll just press the Tab key to move past here, you can see it's fitting perfectly. I'll click Okay. Effect, Distort and Transform, Transform. We're doing the second transformation, moving down the document. Exactly the same thing, we need eight copies, we need to move it vertically, 96 pixels. I'll turn Preview on and it's filling the document perfectly. I'll click Okay. At this point you can expand this or not as you please because if we go to File and Export, Export As, I'm going to call this fruit one, I'm going to use my art board, I'll click Export. Of course we're going to set it to 300 pixels per inch, click Okay and then let's go and check that file in that location. Here is our fruit file, it's 3600 by 3600 pixels in size. If we check the resolution, it is as we expect, 300 dpi, so it's exactly what we want in our document, and each one of our pattern elements is one and a third inches wide. That's how you can create a square pattern element. In the next video, we're going to have a look at a rectangular element. 8. Pt 7 Make a Larger Pattern: I've left my fruit assets open here so that we can use those in the next pattern, and this pattern is going to use a rectangle instead of a square. I'll create a new document and we're again going to create this fixed scrapbook size document. I'll click Create. Now, we need to work out some measurements for our design. I'd like to have four elements across the screen and six down so that's going to give me a rectangle. Let's go to our factors. If we want four elements, it's going to need to be 216 pixels wide, and if I wanted to fit six down, then it's going to need to be a 144 pixels tall. I've written 216 and 144 on a sheet of paper. Let's swing back to Illustrator. I'll choose object, pattern, make, and we're going to make our patterned tile. I'll make sure that this option is disabled so that I can type in two different amounts, 216 for the width and 144 for the height. That's my pattern tile, but this time instead of a simple grid, I want something more sophisticated so I'm going to choose brick by column, and I'm going to do the brick offset at one half. That's going to give me something that's going to look like a half drop repaid. I'm just going to drop a circle in here for just now, let's just fill it with a color and remove the stroke from it. You can say that this is a more sophisticated pattern because our element here is not repeated on this level until over here, it is repeated up here and down here though. Now, because we're creating a pattern that is a different shape this time let's just click "Done" because I want to show you something that is perhaps a little unexpected. Just be aware that we started off with a patent element that's supposed to notionally be 216 by 144. Now, I keep getting this error message at this point, I'm just clicking "Okay" I'm just ignoring it because everything seems to be working just fine. I'm going to drag our pattern out of the swatches panel and you can say that it's grown quite considerably. Let's go and pick up this no fill, no stroke rectangle and when I select it and read it's dimensions of here, you'll see that it's grown to 432 by 432. That's the size pattern element we need to create the pattern that we were looking at creating. Now, because it's grown, we need to make sure that we are going to be able to fit this across our document. It is 432 by 432. Let's go back to our factors and check that. Well, 432 is a factor and so our pattern element is going to fit nicely on as shade of scrapbook paper. Just a little bit differently to what we thought, but we're going to get the exact size elements that we asked for, it's just that our patent element of finished pattern is going to be much bigger because I'm using something more sophisticated, that column with a half drop on it. Just be aware that if you're using some of these unusual pattern designs, the ones that are not just straight out grids, that you will need to double check and double-check before you go too far in it's development, to make sure that the pattern with that is this size on a brick by column with a half brick offset is still going to work in the document that you're working in, mind does so I'm good to go. Let's go and get some of the shapes here that we're going to use for our design. I'm again just sizing them down, cutting them and pasting them. I'm just making copies so I don't change my original document. When I'm resizing them, I'm holding Shift and Alt that would be Shift and Option on a Mac so that they're sizing from the middle, and so that their scaling in proportion. Now, with this design, I wanted to show you something else that you can do and just prove that you can create quite complex designs this way. I'm going to put some dots through this patterns so I'm going to the pencil tool. It's colored red at the moment, doesn't really matter what color it is, but I'm going to start drawing a line through my pattern. I'm going to flip it's stroke and fill so that we can actually see this as a line. Having done that, I'm now going to join the pieces together, so I'm going to click away from this shape, so it's not selected so that when I draw with my pencil, I can join things up. I'm going to join this up here. It's not joined up correctly, but I'm not worried about that right now and I'm going to bring this one down. It's just important because of the way that I've got my pencil tool set up, that I make sure that nothing is selected before I start drawing, otherwise, I'm going to lose my shapes. This is a set of dotted lines I'm looking at creating, what I need to do now is to join things up a bit better. Let's go to this area up here. Let me just select my line because it is just a line and it has handles on it, but it is a bit annoying right now because the selection is red as is the color of this line so I'm going to change the color of the line. If I make it black, it's going to be a little bit easier for me to see. Now, I'm having trouble with this handle and that is because this icon is selected, I'm on an align art to pixel grids so I'm just turning that off. When I do that, everything's going to move a whole lot more easily. Now, because I'm going to be doing dashed lines, I'm not going to need to be really finicky about how these join up, because they're going to join up perfectly with the dashed lines. If you were trying to actually have solid lines, then you would need to be a bit more careful and I am being. Let's go and get this line and make it black and this one belongs somewhere else so I'm not able to edit it, but can just bring this one in to join up and I'm going to just reposition this one a bit. We're just going to inspect everywhere where these lines are joining just to make sure that the joins look pretty good which they do. Let's go and select this last line and make it black as well. We're able to get some lines that criss-cross our pattern, I'm going to select all of my lines and just turn them into dashes. With them selected, I'm going to the Stroke panel, I'm going to click on dashed line, and this will give me an eight-point dash so if I want it to be smaller, I'm going to just reduce the number of points and that will give me more dashes along my line. I can also come up here and increase the dash weight and then I can change the tips on my line, if I want them to have circular tips, then I can select that too. I'm going to use a different color. I'm actually going to use the same blue as I'm using in my shapes, the blue is already over here in my swatches panel so let me just go and pick it up. Here it is. Let's just zoom into the pattern here, let's turn off the tile age so that we can see if there are any issues with it. I think everything's looking pretty good here, I'm pretty happy with this pattern. If I am happy, I can click "Done" just go again going to ignore this dialogue because it seems like everything is perfect with it. It's just started to appear today, it wasn't appearing a few hours ago it's appearing now, so I'm just ignoring it for now. Let's go and drag our pattern out of the swatches panel, we're going to the layers and we're just going to say what it is that we've got here. This is the path at the bottom of the pattern, I'll drag it onto the new icon and take a copy of it up above everything. I'll select everything and create my clipping mask, right-click and choose make clipping mask. This shape is 432 by 432 pixels, we already knew what was going to be that because we tested it earlier. I'm just going to place it in position at the top of the document, and we're going to need two repeats across here, effect, distort, and transform. Transform, turn preview on, I need one copy because I've got an original, I just need a copy and I'm going to move it the width of the shapes, so the shape is 432, I'm going to move it horizontally 432. When I hit the Tab key to move over, you'll see that everything's lining up perfectly. Click "Okay," effect, it's distort and transform, transform, where applying a new effect, we need one copy, we need to move vertically the same height as the pattern element is 432 pixels, I'll Tab away and turn preview on, Click. "Okay." This is our sheet of scrapbook paper. It is a perfect repeat itself. Every element that is over here, the other half of it is over here and these little lines are going to join up perfectly over here. We're ready to save it at Scrapbook Paper, File, Export, Export As, I'm going to call it fruit 2, I'm going to use my art boards and I'll click "Export." The resolution is 300 pixels per inch, that's going to give us a scrapbook paper size document, I'll click "Okay." If we go to our folder, we'll see our finished scrap of paper, 3600 by 3600, if we check its resolution, it's resolution is going to be 300 DPI, exactly what we would need it to be, to be able to sell this as scrapbook paper. Just be aware that if you're creating a larger pattern,so if you're using something like Brick by Column, or Brick by Row, or even Hex by Column, and Hex by Row that you set up your document, just dumped some shape in there to test it, and then come back out and check your shape. Check that the no fill, no stroke rectangle at the very back of your shape is the exact size that it's going to fit multiple times inside your document, and use your factor calculator to determine that you're looking to see if the value that is the width and height of your no fill, no stroke rectangle is one of these values which is a factor of whatever size document you're working with. If it is a factor you're good to go, if it's not, then you might need to go back and restart your pattern and try and work out something that is going to fit within the dimensions of this sheet of paper, so that you're getting exactly what it is that you're expecting to get. 9. Project and Wrapup: We've now finished the video content for this course, so it's over to you. Your project for this class will be to create a large scale repeating pattern as a document. You will create a document, for example, scrapbook paper size, and in that document will be a repeating pattern, but that sheet of scrapbook paper will also be a repeat. Post an image of your completed artwork as your class project. As you are watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others. Please if you enjoyed the class and learned from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you do recommend the class. Secondly, write even just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you see the follow link on the screen, click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.