Leaf Patterns in Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ class - Vectorize Drawings 3 Ways

1. Vector Leaf Patterns Introduction: Hello. Welcome to this class. Let's draw leaf patterns in Adobe Illustrator. My name is Helen Bradley and I'm a Skillshare top teacher. I have over 270 courses on Skillshare and over 177,000 student enrollments. In this class, we'll look at turning drawings of leaves into vectors, and then into seamless repeating patterns in Adobe Illustrator. You'll learn three vectorizing techniques, including redrawing the art yourself, and using live trace to create both paths and filled shapes from drawings. You'll also see how to turn each of these vector objects into seamless repeating patterns to use yourself or sell online. These techniques are taught step-by-step, and I'll give you the images so that you can follow along with these videos. As with all my courses, you're going to learn lots of illustrator skills, tips, and techniques that you can use every day in your own workflow. Without further ado, let's get started turning leaf drawings into seamless repeating patterns in Adobe Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 Image Trace Some Hand Drawn Leaves: For this leaf pattern, we're going to create some leaves that have veins running along the length of the leaf, not a typical leaf, but really nice little stylized leaf. One of the things that I discovered when I went to draw this leaf just free-hand in Illustrator was that between trying to work the pen tool and come up with a nice leaf arrangement, everything became too much. What I suggest you do is do as I did and grab a sheet of paper and a pen and draw some sketchy leaves. This is one that I drew out really quickly on a Post-it Note. I photographed it with my cell and emailed it to myself, so I could then use it inside Illustrator. Having proved my concept, I then drew some more leaves in my sketchbook. Now with these, I penciled out the basic leaf shape first of all and then drew in ink over the top. You can see that I wasn't very careful. There's some wiggly lines, it doesn't matter. Then later on once the ink had dried, I was careful to erase the pencil lines and then I've scanned this. I scanned this at 300 DPI on my scanner. Again, it's now a bitmap image ready to be opened inside Illustrator. One of the benefits of this particular design is that we could actually use this with image trace. The one that I created on the Post-it Note is not suitable for image trace. It's a bit of a mess. It would be fine to use as a guide for drawing my own vector shapes, but as an image trace, it's really not going to cut it. This one that took longer to draw and was drawn with a bit more care is a contender for image trace. We're going to approach this two ways. We're going to use it firstly as an image trace object and use it to create patterns that way and then we're going to use it as a template, a guide for drawing vector shapes. We're going to end up with a pattern that is a series of vector lines instead of shapes. by creating it as a set of vector lines, we're going to have a little bit more things that we can do with it if you like. It's going to be a slightly different approach, but let's start with image trace. We're going to hop over to Illustrator, create a new file. I'm just creating one that is 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels. We're going to place the object in here with File and then Place. You'll navigate to where you have stored your image. I have it here. Note here that it is set up as a link. I'm actually going to disable that. That means it will be embedded in my Illustrator file. Do not select template. At this stage, this is not going to be a template image. We're actually going to use image trace on it. I'm going to click Place and then we're just going to drag out a place in the image for our imported element. One thing to note with this is that as I scanned it, I've got some of the edge of the paper scanned here, so we've got some dark areas. If we're running image trace on this, they're going to be traced as well, so it would be a really good idea to get rid of those. I'm just going to select on my bitmap image and there's an option called crop image. I'm just going to click on it and drag out the crop rectangle to encompass the leaves, but nothing else. I'm just cutting in close around the leaves and avoiding the edges that were included in the scan. I'll click Apply. Now, when I click on the Image trace button to convert this bitmap image into a vector or a series of vector shapes, I'm going to get a warning that this is a pretty large image. Now you can just go ahead, but you'll find that things are going to slow down a little bit. Seriously, you don't need that good quality here, so what we're going to do is what Illustrator just suggested that we do. We're going to object and then rasterize. I scanned this at 300 PPI, so what I'm going to do is drop the resolution down to 150 PPI. That's quite sufficient. You could even go lower perhaps if you wanted to. I'm just going to select that and click Okay. Now when I go to image trace, I'm not going to see that same warning. I want my image trace panel, so I'm going to click here on image trace panel. It's jumped across to my second screen, so I'm just bringing it back so that we can see it. If you ever need to find your image trace panel, you can just do Window and then Image trace. It's just another panel in Illustrator. Now we're using the default tracing option. We're seeing the tracing result, not the original image, but what it's going to look like if we trace it and the mode is black and white. We're going to end up with one color and white, in this case, black and white in our image. If you don't see your advanced options, click the disclosure triangle to show them. Typically, when you're running image trace on an image, I suggest that you increase paths and corners and decrease noise. That gives you a pretty good result in general, but this isn't one of those images. Here we're looking for something that speaks to us. If you don't like the result that you get with rule of thumb settings, then don't use them because it doesn't really matter. You can experiment with, for example, dropping pass down really low. You'll see here that we're getting some thick, thin transitions that's probably too low, but if we took it back up a little bit, we might get some interesting results here. If they're results that you like, then that's a good option to use. It's not what I'm looking for, so I'm going to increase my paths to a high value. I suggest that if you're playing with these sliders, that you take a really big step rather than just going one or two percent. Take it all the way to one end and see if you even see a change. Now, obviously Illustrator is going to take a moment or two to catch up and to show me what the result is going to be if I use that settings. I'm going to give it a little bit of time to render the image and then I'm going to look at that and say, well, did I get close to what I want or is this not a direction I want to go in at all? There are other settings here such as noise that you can play with. These three sliders potentially are going to give you different results. Now there's also a threshold slider and that tells you, in this case, how much of the gray scale or the gray elements in this scan are going to be called black. If I take this all the way up to about 247, more of the gray edges, the things that were between the black pen that I used and the white paper are actually going to be called black. You can see that everything's a whole lot thicker. If you go all the way to 255, just everything goes to black. That means that the other end, this is what's white. If we go all the way to one, we're losing everything. Somewhere between 1-255 is the sweet spot for what is called black and what is called white in this image. This is just a slider that says, at this level, these pixels are white and these pixels are black and if you change it, then different quantities of pixels are going to be called white or black. A higher the threshold value that you use, the more pixels are going to be called black, so just find a sweet spot for what you're looking for. Now I want to ignore white because that will help me potentially, so I'm going to click on Ignore white. Having done that, I might need to adjust the settings a little bit differently. When I see on the screen something that I'm happy with, I'm going to go up here to the control panel and just click Expand. What that does is it has now vectorized this image. When I close the image trace panel and I open the layers panel, we will see what we've been given. I have a group here and inside the group, I have four compound paths. Now there's an off chance that you might have a couple of extra paths here, for example, if there was some stray pixels on your scan. You may want to select them and just get rid of them, but I've ended up with a really neat and tidy result. I've got four groups of layers here, each of which is a compound path. Now, sometimes people look at the word compound path and go, I didn't want that, I actually wanted a path. Well, the reason why it's a compound path is because when I select over it here, you'll see that these are the lines, but there's hollow areas in here. Anytime you have a hollow, think anytime you have something that's a donut and outside with a hole in the middle, then you're going to have a compound path. That's just all there is to it. If the word compound path distresses you, then this is the solution, you're going to just double-click on that and you're going to call it whatever you want. I'm just going to call this three leaves. You can see that the word compound path has disappeared and that's exactly what I've got. I've got a shape here that is three leaves. Note here that it's a filled shape. That's one of the things that you get with this image traces that we haven't got lines here. We have got filled shapes and that's going to be different to what we're going to get when we actually vectorize this by hand drawing it later on. That's going to be a totally different end result. Now that we've actually got image trace performed, we're going to save this. In the next video, we're going to clean it up a little bit and add some background color before we go ahead and create this as a pattern. 3. Pt 2 Clean and Color the Trace: I've gone ahead and saved this file. Now as I'm looking at it, there are some areas that are less than neat, if you like. You can see here that my pen line has gone over the stem and I want to clean that up, so I'm going to the eraser tool and double-click on it and just adjust its settings. You can change its angle and round this. But none of those are really necessarily going to impact what we're doing. We may just want to adjust the size. I'm bringing it down to 24 points and click "Okay". It's still way too big for me, so I'm going to use a technique that works in Adobe applications, that's the open and closed square bracket. If I press the open square bracket, the eraser brush is going to decrease in size and I'm just going to drag it over the area that I want to remove. These areas are just being removed from the vector shapes. You can clean it up a bit, but I don't really think that I'm going to do a lot of cleaning up. I'm just going to hit the things that are really totally wrong. I might want to clean up this a little bit. I definitely want to clean up the tip of this shape here. But we don't want to lose what it is that we came here to get, which was a whimsical, slightly hand-drawn style of leaves. Don't clean it up to the extent where you're actually going to lose the qualities that made it attractive in the first place. I'm just going to continue going around here and just cleaning up a few little bits and pieces. Making sure to shrink the eraser brush if I'm going into an area that is very close and you can enlarge it when you're working in a slightly larger area. Use Control 0 to zoom back out. Then you can zoom into another area if you think that needs a little bit of cleaning up. One of the benefits of using the eraser tool here is that you don't actually have to select the leaves to be able to erase on them. You can see that the changes that we're making are just being fixed into the compound paths. Now one of the other things that makes really good sense with these leaves is to add some color behind them. But before we do that, I'm actually going to select my leaves and give them a color that is a little bit more leaf-like. Just going to make them green. By selecting them and clicking on a green color, all of the leaves have been recolored. I want to add some color behind these leaves, but as you'll see, they're in a layer all by themselves and to add color is going to require me to add elements below it. In actual fact, that's probably going to be easy to create a brand new layer for this. I'm going to click here on Create New Layer. I'm going to close up Layer 1 which has my layers and move it above the new empty layer and I'm going to lock it down. Nothing I'm about to do is it going to affect this layer and everything I'm going to do is going to be on this new layer. Let's just zoom into one of these leaves here. I'm holding down the space bar as I drag the image into place. That's going to be a better position for me to work in. I'm going to double-click on the color picker and I'm going to choose a different color to go behind the leaf. I'm going to target Layer 2 because that's the layer that I'm going to be adding my color to. I'm going to use the pen tool because it's a nice, easy tool to use for this purpose because we don't have to be accurate. What I'm going to do is just draw a pen line around the approximate shape of the leaves. I'm just having a re-think on that color right now, let's choose a yellow color, it's going to be a bit more visible. I'm just going to click and drag to create my approximate leaf shape. I'm just clicking at the bottom here to make a sharp point. I'll show you in just a minute how to make a less sharp point. Coming back to my starting point. If I hold down the Alt key as I do that, I'll be able to just shape that before I let go the left mouse button. What we're looking for here is a shape that is underneath the leaf and that is almost the leaf shape but not quite. It's giving us off red just to print look. This is a really attractive look and for these layers it's a really nice way of learning to use the pen tool without needing to be very accurate. I'm just clicking and dragging, click and drag to get an approximate shape. Now at the bottom here, I want to click and drag and then turn in the opposite direction. But to do that, I'm going to need to hold down the Alt key to swing this handle around. It's breaking the connection between this handle and its other half, which is just showing up here and allowing me to create a more interesting pointed element. I'm going to come back to my starting point, hover over my starting point, and click once so that we have finished off the shape. If I wanted to click and drag, then I would have held down the Alt or Option key as I did that. Now to continue on, since I've finished this shape here, I can just click and drag down here. I don't need to do anything to stop drawing because I already did that. Hold down the Alt or Option key so I can go in a slightly different direction. If you don't click and drag or you need to undo something, just press Control or Command Z and I'm going back to my starting point. I'm going to hold down the Alt key so I can just shape this final end bit here. If you want to, you can just click away from everything and just use the selection tool to move your shape around. Because we've locked the leaves away, we're not going to move or select the leaves by accident. We can just slightly reshape this if we want to. You can also use the direct selection tool on any of these anchor points. Just make sure you just have the anchor points selected and then you can make adjustments to it using its handles or actually move the point. You would continue around underneath every single one of these leaves to add a colored element approximately the size of the leaf. But don't overthink it because it doesn't need to be accurate. In actual fact, it's going to look more attractive if it's not accurate, that's the look that we're going for here. I'm going to finish this off and we'll come back in the next video and go ahead and make our pattern. 4. Pt 3 Make the Pattern: Now that we have all the colored pieces behind the leaf structures, there's a little bit of reorganization to do before we actually go and make this into a pattern. I'm going to allow one which contains the image trace leaf elements, and I'm going to unlock it. I'm going to open up a Layer 2, and I'm going to take all of these leaves and I want to put them up with the other lines in the same layer because that's going to make things easier so I'll be able to group the leaf structures themselves together. If we group them, they'll travel together. I'm going to click on this path, roll down, and shift-click on the very last one. I'm just going to grab these and pop these up into this layer. Now they're going on top of the compound paths, but that's fine, that's a really easy fix. Let's just come down here, grab the compound paths, that's this group here. I'm just going to drag it up to the very top. Now we can break these elements out of their group by selecting the group here and choose object and then ungroup. That's important to do because what we want to do is to stick our compound path to our underlying colors. I'm just going to, with the selection tool, select over this lot here. That is the trace leaf structures and the three colored elements. I'll just choose object group. Now we have a group that is this entire series of elements. That's important because when we come to make a pattern out of this, we want to be able to pick up this group and move it altogether, not have to go search for all the little bits that together comprise this leaf structure. Let's go down here and select over these. You can see I'm not making a really big selection, I just have to select something that is big enough to encompass those four colored elements and the traced image. It's all I need to do, and I'm going to group those. Up here, just going to draw a selection that encompasses all these shapes and group them. Then what's left is this structure here. I've left something out. Obviously, something didn't go where it's supposed to. This belongs in this structure here, so you can see clearly that it's missing. If you miss something, just grab it and drop it into its group. It's easy as that. Obviously, in doing that though, I've put it above my compound path, so we're just going to rearrange it. Now I have all of these shapes put together in groups so that we're ready to make a pattern. I don't need this last, so I am going to dispose of it. Let's trash it. You don't want anything more in your layers palette than the actual objects that you're using. We'll select over all of these shapes. I'm going to choose Object, Pattern Make. Click Okay. I'm going to bring back in my pattern options dialog. I'm going to turn off my artboard with view and then hide artboards that gives us a white area to work on. Go to the zoom tool, hold the Alt key, in my case, because the zoom tool needs to be operated in reverse. I'm going to show more of these designs, so I'm going to Copies, and I'm going to set it to nine by nine. That doesn't affect the pattern at all, it just affects what I see on the screen. I'm going to the selection tool. Here in the pattern options dialog, I'm going to make these width and height different values. I want it to be a whole number and I'd like it to be a round number. It's close enough to 600, that I'm actually going to take it to 600. The height, I'm going to bring that down to 900. Even whole number is a better choice. This stage, I'm going to select these individual leaves and just place them. As I do that, I might decide that in actual fact, my pattern pace is too big and I think it probably is too big. I think the width is possibly a little bit narrow and the height is a bit too high. Let's take this down to 750 and see how that's going to look. I think I'm going to take the width up to 640 and see if that gives me a little bit of breathing room width-wise. Now the way I drew these layers, I had some that were upside down and some were the right way up. If you find that you actually draw your leaves a different way and they're all pointing in the same direction, then at this point, you will want to rotate some of them so that they're not necessarily all pointing in the same direction. We're just going to arrange these into a nice pattern. What I am concerned about though is that some of these leaves extend over the edges of this pattern tile. You can see that this is what's called a tile edge. When I turn it off and on, you can see it. You're going to get less visible lines in your pattern if you have things that go over the tile edge. That's what I'm focusing on here, is making sure that there are things that go over the tile edge. Obviously, don't want things to run into each other if you think you need to, you can always add a few pixels to the height of your pattern tile, and that might give you a bit more room to move things around and make sure that they're not running into each other. I'm going to turn off the tile edge and I'm going to zoom out a little bit further just to see what this is looking like. I'm pretty happy with that. I'm thinking it's a pretty good pattern, so I'm just going to click done. We'll bring back in our artboard. I'll go to View and then Show Artboards. I'm going to select out all of these leaves and just move them out of the way. We don't need them right now. I'm going to add a shape that is the size of my artboard, which is 1,000 by 1,000 pixels. I'll just square it up on the artboard so I can see it more clearly. I'm going to hold down the Control key and press the number 0. On a Mac that is Command and zero. I have my fill selected here, so I'm just going to click on My Pattern that is in my patterns dialogue and choose Object Transform Scale. I'm going to scale it down to 75 percent, but, of course, I don't want to scale my rectangle, my square, I just want to scale my pattern. I'm going to disable transform objects and just select uniform and click Okay. Now this is our pattern, but it doesn't have a color behind it. You can see that there is no color behind it. We can actually add a color behind it. I'm going to show you how to do that now. We're going to take this pattern here in the pattern's dialog and just drop it onto the plus symbol. That is going to give us a second copy of it. The second copy I'm going to double-click on because that will open it up in pattern view. Just going to zoom out a little bit. I'm going to turn on my tile edge so I can see it. I'm going to hide my artboards again, just makes life so much easier. To add a colored background behind this pattern, we need to make something that is the same width and height as the tile. That's one of the reasons why we use round numbers and nice even round numbers. I'm going to click on the Rectangle tool, click once in the document. I'm going to make my shape 640 by 770. Click Okay. But as you can see, it's filled with the same patterns, so that's a bit of a problem. What I'm going to do is fill it with a different color. I'm going to make colors up here. I'm just going to choose a color. It does not matter what color you choose at this stage. I'm just choosing a gray. Now my rectangle is in front of my pattern. I need it to be behind. I'm going to choose Object Arrange, send to back. Right now, it's cutting things off. It's going to do that because we had elements that went over the edge of the pattern tile. This is going to cut things off, and that's exactly as it should be. We're going to the selection tool. I'm going to make sure that I only have this path selected, and I'm going to start moving it. I'm going to move it to wherever it needs to be, that allows me to see all of my pattern elements so nothing is cut off. You can see here that things are being cut off at the top. If I move over here, I'm cutting things off at the side. I'm just going to move around until I find a sweet spot that places the background somewhere that none of these pattern elements are cut off. There is a sweet spot and, it's not going to be over the pattern tile, so just be aware of that. The tile edge is not going to help you here at all with elements that are arranged like this. But there is going to be somewhere that you can place that background and you're going to be able to see all of your pattern elements. When you find that, just click Done. We're going to bring back our artboards with a few Show Artboards. I'm going to click on our shape and we're going to apply our new pattern. I wasn't worried about the background color, it doesn't matter what the background color is because with the shape selected, we can go to the Recolor Artwork dialogue, click Advanced Options, click on Edit, and now we can make changes to our colors. I'm going to click here to unlink the harmony colors. This is our gray, and we can just take it to wherever we want it to be. We can also adjust these other colors so you can make these lighter or darker as you wish. If you can't get them as light as you want them to be, you can adjust the hue saturation and brightness here. If you prefer to work in RGB, then you can make these selectors RGB. I think for this, hue saturation and brightness just makes more sense because it will allow you to adjust brightness of a color. I'm particularly concerned about the saturation and brightness of this green. When you get a color that you like or a color combination that you like, just click Okay. You'll see in this watches panel you still have your original, but now you've got another pattern that is colored with these new colors. You can keep on doing this over and over again and create other colorways for your pattern. 5. Pt 4 Make a more Complex Pattern: Now, there are some additional ways that we can get some mileage out of this pattern. I'm going to select as a starting point, the pattern color that I actually really like, so that's this one here. I'm going to double-click on it because that opens it up in the pattern options dialogue. It can be edited separately to the original pattern that we made. That's just fine. I'm going to press Control, and A, because that's going to select every single element that is going together to make up this pattern. I'm going to press Control C, and that's just going to copy it to the clipboard. I'm going to cancel out of here, and I'm going to create a brand new document. Still going to make this 1,000 by 1,000 pixels for now, and I'm going to choose Edit Paste. Because what that gives me is all the elements that were in that pattern that we just made in the colors that they're in, and the arrangement that they're in. I'm going to actually get rid of this blue for now, but I'd like to sample that blue color. I just don't want the rectangle, so I'm just going to click the plus sign here, and add it in as a global color that I can use in a minute. All of these elements we can do something with, and we can do a couple of things. One of the things we can do is to change the color of these background elements and give them a little bit more variety. I'm going to open up each of these groups in turn, and I'm going to select one or more of these leaves, and I'm going to change their color. I've got this leaf selected here. I'm going to double-click on its color and I'm going to make it something a bit different. Now, I could make it a totally different color or I could just make it a different shade of this color. While I'm here, I'm going to add it to the swatches panel. Just click Okay, because that's going to allow me to then select it for another leaf background in one of these other groups of leaves. Let's just select this double-click on this. Let's take this in a different direction. Again, I'm just going to add it as a swatch color. Now, that that one's done, I'm going to go through each of these groups of leaves and just recolor some of the leaves in the group, and since I've got the swatches already made, I can just use the swatches panel to grab those colors. If I'm bringing the layers panel separate, then I can probably run through this a little bit more quickly. To do two leaves at the same time, you can click on one and then Control or Command click on the other one here in the layers panel, and just click on a color to use. Now, you could use just three colors or you could make each of these leaves different colors. It doesn't really matter, it's just your preference. I'm going to turn all these leaves back on again so that I can see them. At the same time I'm also going to increase the number of elements I have to work with. I'm going to select over all of these, hold the Shift key as I just drag to resize them so they're a little bit smaller, and then I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key as I drag a duplicate away. This one, I'm going to reverse. I'm going to choose Object Transform and Reflect. I'm going to reflect it over the vertical, and then I'll do Object Transform Reflect and I'll reflect it over the horizontal as well. I've got different leaf forms now you will see that this one is this one over here, but it's in a different direction. It looks a little bit different. Let's just move these all a little bit closer to each other. Let's select over all of them, and let's make a pattern out of them. Object, Pattern, Make. I'll click Okay, and I'm going to do the same things as I did previously. I'm going to hide my art boards. I'm going to shrink everything down a little bit so I can see it more clearly. I'm going to view a nine by nine arrangement so I can see more of the pattern itself. I'm going to decrease the width. I'm looking here at, probably just taking it down to 800. The height, I want it to be a little bit less tall, so maybe let's take that down to 550. I can also experiment with a different arrangement so right Right I'm using a grid, but I could use something like brick by column. Now that's going to be a lot more tricky in terms of arranging elements because they're going to be more of them, and they're going to repeat slightly differently. But it is another way of getting extra mileage out of these elements. You are going to watch when things start crashing into each other you might need to move them around and be bit more aware as to what's going on. I said it is a tricky arrangement for a pattern, but it is also really rewarding when you get a really nice one. Don't hesitate to switch things out. If you don't like this particular element, you could switch it with another one of the elements and just put that in its place. You will probably find increasing the size of your tile will work a little bit better, and will give you a bit more room to move. I'm going to add an extra 40 pixels to my pattern tile width, and a extra 20 pixels to its height. I just think it will give the individual elements a little bit more space to breathe. Just going to make actually designing the pattern just that little bit easier. Making sure of course that some of the elements go over these tile edges so that's going to give you a pattern that's going to look less like it's going to have reverse of lines running through it. There will be a little bit of leeway in these leaves, so you will be able to perhaps re-size them slightly, either make them a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller to get a little bit more mileage out of them. To test your pattern, turn off your tile edge, and just zoom back out again and have a look and make sure that you don't have any obvious vertical lines. Little bit worried about this thing that looks like it's looping around. Let's display the tile edge. Identify where the problem is, and let's zoom in here, and see if we can do something about these two leaves. I think that looks a little bit better, but it might take you a little while to get something that looks good here. Don't expect it to happen immediately particularly if you're using something like Brick by Column or Brick by Row. It is just a slightly more complex design to make. When you're happy with what you've got to click Done. Turn your art boards back on with View Show Art boards, grab all these elements, just move them to one side and test out your pattern. If you're happy with your design, then you can go ahead and create a version that has the colored background behind it. I'm going to drag the new pattern onto the plus sign, double-click on one of these, add a rectangle the same size as the pattern tile is. I'm going to fill it with my blue color, place it behind everything with object, arrange, send to back, and then pick it up with the selection tool and move it to wherever it has to go to make sure that everything is appearing correctly. For this, I'm going to have to shrink everything down a little bit because it's just too hard to see what's going on otherwise. Just making sure that everything looks visible here. It's looking pretty good to me, so I'll just click Done. Let's select back over our working document and fill it with our new pattern, and of course from here we can re-color it by just going straight to our re-color artwork dialogue. We'll go into Edit, and we're going to unlink harmony colors. At this point, you can go around and find new positions for your colors. If you're looking at this design and thinking that you would like the leaf colors to all be the same, that's possible to do too. I suggest for that you use the assign options, and you determine which color you want. I like this brighter color, so what I'm going to do is drag the two darker colors on top of the bright color. Then I'm going to click on this down pointing arrow and choose exact. What that does is it's going to re-map all of these colors, these three different colors, to the exact same color. We've reduced that color variety in this particular pattern. It hasn't changed the original pattern, the original pattern still has these multi colors in it, and we could go ahead and re-color everything differently. But if you're looking at it and thinking, I really like this color combination, but I just want to reduce it to three colors, then that's an easy way of achieving that result. 6. Pt 5 Create some Individual Leaves: There's one more thing to look at before we finish up with this pattern, and that is the ability to fill in some of these areas with just a single leaf. Now, as much as I'd like to do that inside the pattern options dialogue, it's going to be a little bit tricky because the eraser tool, which is a tool I want to use, doesn't work inside the pattern options dialogue, so this is what we're going to do. Firstly, I'm going to make a duplicate of this pattern so I don't lose the original. I'm going to double-click on this new version of the pattern, and I'm going to press Control or Command A. Control A on PC, Command A on a Mac to select all of these objects. I'm going to press Control C or Command C on a Mac to copy them. I'm going to cancel out of here because I haven't made any changes and I'm going to find an area to work in. I'm just holding down the space bar as I'm dragging on the work area. I'm going to paste these in, that's Control V or you can just click Paste. Now, as much as I don't like this blue background in particular being in the way, I'm going to need it because if I don't have it, you can see it's very difficult for me to see the stems on these leaves. It may not be the case for you, but it certainly is the case for me. I'm just going to click on this background piece located in the layers panel here and lock it down so it's not going to move. It's not going to get in my way, but it is going to give me the ability to look more clearly at these leaves and do something with them. I'm going to zoom in here and I'm going to grab my eraser tool. I'm going to make it a bit bigger using the close square bracket key. I want this leaf here, and so I'm going to erase all the bits that I don't want. But I am going to select on the leaf before I do that. I'm being careful only to erase the bits that I don't want. That's giving me one leaf here. I'm going to look at here and I think I'm going to take this leaf as well. Two leaves is probably all that I need, and they're looking pretty good. I'm going to grab these two and I'm going to copy them with edit copy. Then let's go back to our pattern. Here's the swatches panel. Here is the extra copy of the pattern we made. I'm going to double-click on it. I'm going to go back and hide my artboards. I'm going to zoom out a little bit so I can see the area I'm working in. This is my tile edge here. You can see that show tile edge is enabled. I'm just going to paste them in with Control or Command V. Now, I have my leaves and I can just move them into position to fill up empty areas in my document. I've got two leaves that I can work with. But of course, because I've got two layers here, I can just Alt or Option-drag a duplicate away to make an extra leaf and rotate it or flip it to give me a slightly different look in my leaf. When I fill some empty spaces in iPad with these layers, I'm just going to click Done. This is our previous design and let's click on this one. We have something that has a little bit more robust because it's got some loose leaves in it. Of course, we'll also want to turn our artboards back on. You won't need any of these elements up here, so it is possible to select over them and just delete them. If you want to delete that background, you'll need to locate it because remember we locked it down and I'm just going to remove it as well. Some some leaves taken from the original design will just help you fill in gaps in your pattern quite easy to do. Certainly, is a way of creating a slightly different design, yet from all the elements that we have been working with. 7. Pt 6 Vector Trace the Leaves: The second option that we have for creating this leaf pattern is to do it by creating vector lines. I'm just going to create a brand new file and I'm going to bring in that same image that we used before with File and then place. This time, however, I'm going to bring it in as a template, so I'm just going to click on Template" and click "Place". Now it is going to be locked down in the layers palettes. I'm opening up my layers palette here, you can see it's already locked down. I want it to be bigger, so I'm going to unlock it. Hold the Shift key as I just enlarge this shape. I want as big an area as I can now. If I want to, I can crop the image. I don't need to, but if I wanted to get rid of those edges, I could crop it at this stage. Again, it's not necessary, but I am going to do it. Now I'm just going to lock this template layer down. A template layer is a special layer in Illustrator. If I just double-click on it, you'll see that it is set as a template and the images themselves are deemed to 50%, that means it's going to be easier to see things on top of the image. You can see also that Illustrator has provided us with a spare layer, which is what we need because we can't add anything to this layer because it's locked and so everything will need to go on this layer here. For this, we're going to use the pen tool. Actually, even if you hate the pen tool, this is a really good exercise for learning to use it a little bit, and it's not really that difficult. I'm going to double-click on this and select Red for my color right now. I'm going to flip this so that red is my stroke. I'm going to the pen tool and I'm going to increase my stroke to about four points. I'm going to zoom into the image here. If I'm not able to lay down the pen tool, which I can't right now, that'll be because I don't have the correct layer selected, so just make sure that you have the correct layer targeted. You're going to start up here and you're going to click and drag in the direction you're going in and then let go the left mouse button. Now, I have my rubber band tool showing here so you can see where I'm headed. We're just going to click and drag, and this time I'm going to be following pretty near the drawing of the leaf. Now, once I get to the end, I can go to the direct selection tool and just adjust the look of this leaf a little bit. Well, this vein a little bit. Now to get started with the next one, I'm going to encounter a problem if I click on here and this is what's going to happen, it's that everything is going to be attached to each other and I don't really want that to be the case, so I'm just going to undo that. I'm going to click and drag here and start my leaf from here, but I'm going to move it. I haven't finished with the left mouse button and I'm going to add the space-bar and that will allow me to position the anchor point over the end of the previous line and then let go the Space bar. I still got my finger on the mouse button. I'm going to head off in the direction that I'm going and let go the left mouse button. Now I'm going to continue to draw this leaf vein. I am going to be careful that I don't put an anchor point too close to the end. I just really want a reasonable space between this next to last anchor point and the last anchor point and I'll show you why in a minute. I don't want to finish this up because I don't want to join these so I'm going to click and drag here with the left mouse button still pressed down, I'm going to hold down the Space bar as I move this back into position. Let go the Space bar, finesse this point if I need to, and let go. To stop this from happening, to stop a drawing, just press the Escape key. Going to zoom in a little bit closer so we can see a bit more clearly what we're doing. I'm going back to my pen tool. I'm going to click and drag to start my line. Hold down the Space bar to position my anchor point. Now I'm going to head in the direction I'm going in and just draw out these lines. To finish it off, I'm going to create a point that is outside here, so I'm not going to run into those too, drag it down. I still got the left mouse button pressed. I'm going to hold the Space bar down as I move my anchor point back into position and then I can finesse it, press "Escape", and go back and start the next one. Using the Space bar each time to move it into position and then just drawing in these lines, following this basic design that we have. In particular, if you're new to using the pen tool, having a pattern that you can draw off, a guide to draw off, is going to remove one of the things that you need to think about as you're creating these leaves. So here all you're concerned about is getting something that is approximately looking like the drawing. But again, it's not set in concrete, so if you miss a little bit, it just does not matter. Press "Escape" to stop drawing and then draw the next line. Again, starting in the same place as the previous ones by using that Space bar to just position yourself in that spot. I'm just going to go across here. Hold down the Space bar to bring it back in. Not really happy with this point here so I'm going to switch to the Direct Selection Tool and just finesse this point a little bit. Not going to do a lot of finessing because I'm going to show you in a minute how we can iron out these bumps without having to do it each time manually. Click and drag here. Hold down the Space bar because it's going to make this final line here. Not dragging for really big amounts, just my click and drag is a fairly small click and drag. Just positioning this back in on top of all the other lines and letting go. Now a couple of things at this stage, I think that these lines are going to be better if they have rounded ends on them, so I'm just going to select on these lines using the selection tool. I'm going to the stroke options. Now sometimes these stroke options disappear, and try as you like, they're not going to appear on the control bar. If that happens to you, just go down to Window and then Stroke and open up the stroke panel here because all of these options are still available here and this one you can force to appear. We're just going to give it rounded caps. It's going to make the ends look a little bit neater. To completely neaten this end, we're going to the direct selection tool, that's really important to select this. We're just going to select over these topmost anchor points. You can see that they're all close to each other, but not quite there. I'm going to choose Object Path and then average, click on both and click "Okay". What that does is it lines up every single one of these anchor points in exactly the same position, so we're getting this nice end to our leaf. Let's just zoom back out a little bit. I'm going to display the last palette. I'm actually going to bring it over here for the moment so that we can keep an eye on it. I'm going to turn off my template. I'm going to select over all of these lines and to smooth out some of these bumps, I'm going to select Object Path and then simplify. I'm going to click on these three buttons. Now in terms of simplify, corner point angle threshold is going to do exactly nothing, so just ignore it. It's not going to help you in this situation because we've just got lines. The only thing you're going to get value from is this simplify curve and you're going to vary between minimum which is going to simplify it a lot, and maximum which is going to simplify it not at all, and somewhere in here is going to be your sweet spot. Now you can alter individual points if you want to later on, but I wouldn't be counting on doing that a lot. I'm going to alter this one. I'm not really happy with this and if I go too low, I'm going to lose the different lines here so I don't want everything to look too neat, but I'm worried a bit about this bump. You can see the before and after here, you can see how much smoothing you're getting from this tool. I'm just going to click "Okay". Now to deal with this anchor point here, I'm going to the Direct Selection tool, this white arrow tool, I'm going to click on this anchor point, and the problem with it is that these handles are so short. If we stretch these handles out so that they're a bit longer, they're just going to be smoother. We can smoothen these bumps out just by increasing the length of the handles. Again, you don't want to do too much because you don't want to lose this interesting quality, if you like, of these leaves. Now I'm seeing that the end of this leaf is not pointing quite in the right direction. I'm going to select over all of these anchor points and I'm just going to move them. I don't think I've got all of them, but I've got enough of them that I've moved them into the correct position. The next thing is to go ahead and draw these other leaves and then we'll draw the stems. I'm going to go ahead and finish off these leaves and come back in a minute and we'll work on the stems. 8. Pt 7 Finish the Leaves and Add Stems: Right now, doing those extra leaves took me about 10 minutes. That's a guide as to if you're reasonably proficient with the pen tool and I would count myself as being reasonably proficient, that's a sort of timing it's going to take. Let's look now at adding the extra leaf stems here. I'm going to do the exact same thing, drag a point just off the edge here, place it back over the leaf stem, and this is going to be the main stem. I'm going to come all the way down here to the very end and just make it a little bit curved. I'm not putting a lot of curve in here, but I am putting some curve in here. Let's zoom into this area here. Back to the pen tool, start our line. Here I'm going to drag down from here so that I can get a nice curve on this. This one is only a very small stem. Again, I'm going to make the end point down here and just add a curve to it. I'm just looking at all the bits here and seeing if there's anything that needs to be cleaned up. Because I want to show you how you're going to go about this. Now, seeing some bumps here, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to the direct selection tool. I'm just going to click on these lines and see if anything is not in the middle. This is one of the problem as I think. I'm just going to drag it over a little bit. I'm going to click on this one. This one looks like it's centered pretty nicely. This one looks reasonably okay. Is obviously something that is less than okay. This is it. I'm just going to bring it in a little bit and perhaps just line it up a bit better to try and get rid of some of that lump there. I think this one might also be contributing. Yes, it is. You're just going to be poking around those little end points there and seeing if you can identify the one that's causing the problem and then just neaten it up. Now, this is looking really good to me. I'm really happy with this. I'm going to the layers panel. I'm going to select over everything here, and I'm just going to group it with object group. At this point, I can do things like increasing the stroke width and I can change the color. But once I've got one of these nailed down, then I'm going to go back and do the other sets. Now, I've already gone ahead and done that. We're going to be working next with those ones that I've already done. But just estimating, it's probably going to take you 15 minutes or so to do a set of leaves that have five layers on it. These others are obviously going to go a bit more quickly. 9. Pt 8 Make the Pattern: This is a set of the vectorized leaves that I made earlier. I'm going to get rid of my template because I don't need that any longer. I'm just dragging that onto the trash can. The leaves themselves are just the individual elements. I actually didn't go ahead and group these, so I am going to group them at this stage. I'm going to use the Lasso tool for this because it's going to make it easier for me to lasso around things. I don't have to draw a rectangle, but I can just drag around the elements that go together to make up one of these leaves, and I'm just going to choose Object, Group. I'm going to test this by just dragging on it and just making sure that everything that belongs to that set of leaves is going with that set of leaves. Everything looks fine there. Also dragging it out of the way, it's going to make it easier for me to select the remaining ones. Let's go for this middle set, just being really careful not to trap something from a different set of leaves. But you can see it would have been a little bit easier had I put these together into groups before I went on and created the next set of leaves. This one I can just select over using a rectangle because it's easier to identify now that all the others are out of the way and this one here is the last one I need to do. This time in the Layers panel we've got groups of objects because these are not compound shapes, they are lines. I'm going to select over all of these and let's change the color. You can see that red is the current color. Let's go to the Swatches panel. I've got a better green to use here. Now at this stage, if we want some extra leaf elements, we could create those. I'm going to grab a duplicate of this set of leaves, just Alt-drag a duplicate away, and let's hit it with the Eraser tool. Just going to erase everything but the leaf that I actually want to keep. Since this is a duplicate, it's not a really shocking thing to do to get rid of bits that we've just spent hours creating. There's one leaf and I'll grab one from here. I'll drag a duplicate away, and then just hit it with the eraser to get rid of everything that I don't want. I could obviously create more spare leaves if I wanted to. Notice that these are in groups as they should be so that they can be moved as a single object. Let's grab everything and make a pattern out of this, selecting everything, Object, Pattern, Make. Click "Okay". I'm going to hide the artboards and I'm going to zoom back out. I'm looking at the size here. These are my two spare leaves and they're going to go in the middle. Basically, I think that this is going to be way too big. At the moment it's 872, so I'm thinking of bringing it down to about 750 and the height probably 800, and then we can start moving things around. Now this is just going to be a simple grid pattern. Not very sophisticated at all, but still nice little pattern. I want to get these leaves out of the way because they're supposed to be filler objects and so they shouldn't be a priority at this stage. I'm going to make sure that things go over the edge of this tile so that it's going to remove obvious lines from the pattern. To drag a duplicate of this leaf away, just hold down the Alt key on a PC, Option on a Mac, and that will give you a second copy of this leaf. To make it a little bit different, you can rotate it. You can also choose Object, Transform, and Reflect and, for example, reflect it over the vertical and so then it will go in a different direction. Now, this leaf is not selectable because it's this one that is creating that object. Sometimes it can be a little bit tricky to work out what you need to select. I just have to say that every time I've created this three leaf object, I'm finding it really difficult to place. Next time I think I would make for lays for some reason the three-leaf ones are just to me really tricky to find a spot for where they're not running into other things. Let's go and increase the number of copies here. Let's turn off our tile edge. Let's zoom out so we can just get a look at the design. This is looking pretty good. I'm pretty happy with it. I'll click "Done". Of course, if we want a copy that has a background, we're going to make a duplicate of this pattern, so this is our new pattern here. I'm going to drag it onto the plus sign and then we'll just double-click on it to open it back up again so that we can add a background behind it. For this, I'm going to turn on my tile edge so I can see where I'm basically working. Let's zoom in here. The pattern tile is 750 by 800 so I'm going to locate my fill here. I'm going to make it a solid color, so let's choose a sort pale blue color here for it. Click on the Rectangle tool and let's make it 750 by 800. We'll move it behind everything with Object, Arrange, Send to Back, and then pick it up and move it to wherever it needs to be, that it's not blocking out other objects. Now, I just picked up the wrong place so just be aware that's really perilously easy to do. Let's just open up the Layers panel and let's go and select it down here. Might make it a bit easier for me to move the right place, not the wrong place. I'm moving it until it's not blocking anything. There's nothing cut off. Just come back and check this; the cut-off bit. Just make sure that everything is visible. Bringing it back to the right to make sure that I can see where the cut-off bits are and making sure that everything is visible. I'm really happy with that. I'll click "Done". So now let's bring back our artboards with View, Show Artboards. I'm going to grab all these objects because I don't need them anymore, move them out of the way, add a 1,000 by 1,000-pixel square or rectangle to our artboard, and align it up on the artboard. Let's target its fill and go to the Swatches panel, which I managed to close on myself, and let's grab the second of the patterns; the one that has the background behind it. Control-0 to fill the screen up with this. Let's resize it with Object, Transform, Scale. Don't want to transform the object. I do want to transform my pattern. I'm going to bring it down to 60% and that allows us to get a good look at it. To re-color it, Recolor Artwork, Advanced Options, go into the Edit option here, unlink our harmony colors, and then we can start working around and finding some nice designs to make. When you find a color combination you like click "Okay", and then you can go ahead and recolor it again, either using the current one as the one that you want to move forward from or you can go back to the original. It doesn't matter. The beauty, of course, of this system is that whatever we do here is going to be a permanent additional pattern in our pattern collection. Click "Okay". With our shapes selected, here's the previous iteration and this is the one that we made in the pattern options dialog. 10. Pt 9 Adjust the Weight of the Lines: Now, one of the benefits of creating this pattern using vector lines is that we can make adjustments to the lines themselves. Let's see how we're going to do that. I'm going to take this pattern as my starting point. Here it is, here in the swatches panel. I'm going to drag it onto the plus symbol so we get a duplicate of it. Nothing we're going to do is going to change the original patterns. We're just going to end up with a slightly different iteration of this one. I'll double-click on it to open it up, going to bring back my pattern options dialog. I do want to say my last panel probably as well, so I'm just going to bring that out here. Now, I'm going to the Group Selection Tool, which shares a toolbar position with the direct selection tool. The reason for this is that each of these leaves is inside a group. If I just expand this layers dialog here, you'll say that they are inside groups. To select something inside a group, we're going to need to use the Group Selection Tool. I'm just going to click on this one here. I'm going to increase its line weight to six points. We're getting a slightly thicker outside edge. I'm going to do that to this one as well. Now, I could go through and do each of these individually, but I could also do a number of them at the same time. I'm going to click on one of these. I'm going to hold down the Shift key and click on another. I can go around and select a few of these lines at once. I'm also going to select these lines because if I'm thickening the edges of the leaves, I'm going to want to thicken these stems as well. I've got everything selected that needs to be increased in weight. I'm just going to increase it to that six points. We're going to continue around all of these leaves doing that exact same thing, making sure to use the Shift key and to focus on what I'm doing because I don't want to move these at the same time. It's very easy for them to just skate along and end up moving when I didn't expect them to move. If you make a mistake, just click outside of the shape and start over again. This is now complete and this is going to give us a slightly different look to our design. All the lines on the outside are a little bit heavier than the ones on the inside. Let's just click Done. Let's go and select our rectangle, go to the Swatches palette and let's try out a new design and again, it's got a different sort of look to it. I'm going to duplicate this pattern yet again, and I'm going to double-click on it so we're opening it up in the pattern options dialog. I'm going to the Group Selection Tool. I'm going to click on one of these lines. This line has a different appearance to the lines in the middle of this shape. I can go to Select and then Same, and I'm going to choose Stroke Weight and every single one of these lines that has this same stroke weight can now be selected in one step. I could change the color of this, so I could make this a darker edge, for example. Now, I could select the ones in the middle, click on one of them, Select, Same, Stroke Weight, and select all the four-point lines and change their color, and then we have a different pattern. But you know, what I'm saying here is I'm saying that all of the light purple lines are on top of the dark ones. Let's just go back and select the dark ones and select Same, Stroke Weight. Let's bring them to the front, Object, Arrange, Bring to Front. That's going to move these lines forward inside the groups. It hasn't actually broken up the groups, but it's made the darker lines come forward in the groups so that the lighter lines are positioned behind them. Let's just have a look at that. Everything looks pretty good. I'm happy with that. Let's click Done. We started off with this design and then we thicken up the edges, giving it a slightly different look. Now we've been able to re-color it so that we have darker edges and lighter insides. That's one of the benefits of using lines rather than the Image Trace feature, because we can actually grab hold of the lines and recolor them independent of the rest of the artwork. 11. Pt 10 Add Fills and Remake the Pattern: Because we took the time to make these leaves as vector shapes, there are other things that we can do because they're vectors and one of them is we can use the outlines that we've just created to actually fill the leaf shapes. To do this, I'm going to double-click on the pattern and the pattern that I'm using if I select on this shape, is going to be highlighted here in the swatches panel. I'm just going to double-click on it and then I'm going to choose, Select All. These are the elements that make up the pattern. I'm going to copy them with edit, copy, cancel out of here, make a brand-new document the size that we've been working in, 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels and I'll choose edit paste. These are the elements and in the order in which they appear inside our pattern. I'm going to open up the layers panel and I'm going to lock my background down for now because I don't want to select it by accident. I'm going to target the group selection tool. I'm going to click on one of these outside lines and I'm going to select all the lines that are the same fill and stroke and stroke weight. In this case, stroke weight is probably all I'm looking for. I'm going to choose edit Copy and then edit Paste in Place. Then we'll have a look and see what we've got. In my layers panel I've got all my groups of leaves and these larger edge pieces plus the stalks have all been copied into the exact same position in the file, but they're outside the leaf groups that they belong in. Let's just go through and locked down our leaves. Then we're going to have a look at the elements we want to get rid of. For this I'm going to the selection tool and I'm just going to locate these big thick elements and just delete them because they're going to be the stalks. I can click on one and Control click on others to select them and just press Delete. When we made these shapes for a lot of them, I made sure that the anchor points at the top of each shape were in the same place, but I didn't do the same for the bottom and that's going to cause me a little bit of grief right now. I'm going to the direct selection tool. I'm going to select over this set of anchor points here. I'm choosing Object Path Average, and I'm learning the keystroke shortcut as I go. It's Alt Control J. That's going to be important. It's set to both. I'll click Okay. Now I'll go to this set of anchor points here and I'm going to use my same keystroke shortcut Alt Control J, that would be Option Command J on the Mac. I'm going to run through this leaf doing this averaging. This is important because we may not be able to put the leaf pieces together to form a solid fill if we don't make sure that these points are in the exact same place. Next, we'll go to the selection tool because the underlying leaves are already locked down, we can just select over these leaves. We can now choose Object Path and then Join and that is Control J on a PC, Command J on a Mac and if we have a look down here, this is what we've got, a joint leaf. I'm going to do the same all the way round. Once all our leaves are joined, we can select over this set of leaves. I'm just going to focus on these right now. I'm going to flip the stroke and fills, and I'm going to change the fill to a lighter color because I want to be able to use this color again, lay her on and because it's not going to be easy for me to get to because I just created it out of the blue. I'm going to swatches panel. I'm going to click the plus symbol here. It's not set as a global color, that's just fine. I'll click Okay. Adding this as a color means I'll be able to access it again in a minute. Now these leaves here are appearing in the layers panel. I want to put them in with the leaf group that they belong to, which is this group down here. I'm going to select their path here, just click on one shift, click on the other so that they actually have this color in them and then I'm just going to drag and drop them into the group that they belong in. Now they're going in on top of everything, so they're still selected. You can see them selected here, but they are appearing ahead of everything else in this group. Well, I can choose object, arrange, and then send to back, and that'll send them to the back of all the objects in this group. I'll go and close up the group and lock everything down. I'm going to do the same thing all the way around here. We're going to the direct selection tool, we're going to select over here and do our join Alt Control J on a PC, Command Option J on a Mac. Using the selection tool you're going to select over the leaves that you want to join and choose Object Path and then Join. Or you can use your Control J shortcut. We should have three whole leaves, which we do here. I'm going to select over all these whole layers. I'm going to flip the fill and stroke, go to the swatches panel and select my color. Now this need to belong in a group. Let's go and find their group that's this one here. It looks like I've got a paste that doesn't belong here. You can say it's a paste that doesn't belong, so I'm just going to remove it. I think it was probably the stem on that plant. Let's go back and select these shapes, but also select the path themselves. We need to drag and drop them into the group that they belong in. Open up the group the path is still selected, object, arrange and then send to back. Then we'll just close up the group and lock it. Now I'm going to continue and do these other layers and we'll come back in a minute and re-create our pattern. Now that everything has been recolored, I'm going to unlock everything, including the background. The background rectangle I'm going to cut at this stage, I'm going to select it and choose Edit Cut. That cuts it to the clipboard. I'm going to select over all of these shapes and I'm going to choose Object, Pattern, Make. In the pattern options dialog, you can see that the width and height are not even numbers, but they're going to be the exact size of the background that we have on the Windows clipboard. I'm going to choose Edit and then Paste, because that will paste that shape in. From the transform tool here, I can just read its height and width and its height and width are going to be what I need to put it in here. I'm working backwards at this stage. This needs to be 750 and 800. Now I can move my selected shape to the back with object arrange, send to back. I'm going to zoom out and then use the move tool to just move it into position so that I can see my entire pattern and none of my leaves are cut off. Again sometimes the easiest way to do that is to go and cut some leaves off and then just move until you know that things are not cut off. I think that's looking pretty good here. The rest of the leaves, I don't have to move because they are in the exact same place as they were in the original pattern. I'll just click Done. Let's grab everything here. Just move it to one side. I'm going to add a rectangle, 1,000 by 1,000 pixels in size. Square it up on the art board and then add my new pattern to it. Object transform scale. I'm going to scale it to about 50%. I don't want to transform my object, just my pattern I'll click Okay. Let's zoom in and of course now that we've got the various elements in our pattern, the backgrounds, the leaves, and then the leaf veins, we can go to the re-color artwork tool and do all things with these colors. I'm going to unlock my colors. This is my background. This as the background to the individual leaves and then the veins inside the leaves, and then the outside edges. You can find all different colorways here, just splitting the colors for these various elements in your artwork. As soon as you find something you like, click Okay, and then you can use either the original color scheme or this one to create other iterations from. 12. Pt 11 Image Trace to Paths: In the previous example, we saw how we could live trace a set of images that had been drawn. In that circumstance, we got filled shapes as a result. But there are some circumstances that you could actually get linework from your drawing, and we're going to see that now. I'm going to click on "New File". I'm going to create a document 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels. I'll click "Create". Now you'll probably want to be working with pretty large thumbnails in your Layers panel for this. I'll go to the flyout menu, choose Panel Options, and set it to other, something like about 50 pixels. That'll give you these large thumbnails. I'm going to place my drawing and I'm going to give you this drawing as well so that you can use it, it's called Oak leaves.jpj, and placing it in My Document. Now what I've got here are three hand-drawn oak leaves, and each one of them is drawn with a single line path, nothing is crossing over, nothing is attached to anything else. These are examples that can really easily be created as lines rather than filled shapes. Let's see how we're going to do that. We need to select our shape, and if we go ahead and click Image trace, we're going to see that same warning as we saw earlier. I am actually going to rasterize this with object rasterize, and I'm going to bring it down to 150 PPI because I know that I scanned it at over 300. Now we'll go to image trace and we won't see that same warning. We'll open up the panel here just by clicking on it, of course, you can get to it by choosing window and then Image Trace. Now in this situation we need a special kind of trace. We're going to the presets option and we're going to select line art. That's going to result in some different settings down here. Now if you need to, you can just open up your advanced panel. I'm going to disable the preview because it's going to slow things down as I make adjustments to these sliders, if I leave the preview enabled. Typically when you're in this panel, the kind of settings that you'll want is for paths and corners to be high and noise to be low. In this situation, we're going completely the other way. We want low corners, low pass, and we want high noise. That means that we're going to get a slightly more simplified design, we're not going to follow these paths exactly. Hopefully, that will also give us a slightly smoother result as well. You'll see here that we've got stroke selected, so we're not going to get fills, we're just going to get strokes. I do want obviously to ignore white. I'll click "Preview" and wait as Illustrator actually does the live trace. These are now lines. If you're finding that your lines have got gaps or you want to try and refine it, the next setting that you can adjust is this threshold value. You could go higher or lower on the threshold value just to fine-tune the result that you're saying. I'm going a bit higher and not sure that that's actually a good idea because I saw this little object appear. Maybe taking that down a bit will give me a better result. You want to wait after each change that you make to let Illustrator catch up with you. The older your machine is, the slower your machine is, the longer it's going to take to catch up. I'm relatively happy with this, I can see I've got a gap there that I might have to fix in a minute, but let's just go with that. I'll click "Expand" to expand the result. I can close the image trace panel right now. Let's go over to the Layers panel and say what we've got. Well, we've got a group that contains lots of different objects, so let's select the group and choose ungroup. The next thing we need to do is to put these pieces together because these are not entire objects. I'm going to the Selection Tool here and I'm going to select over everything that goes to make up this particular leaf. I'm just dragging over the whole of the leaf. You can see that there are lots of little bits of the leaf that are actually selected here in the layers panel. We'll choose object, path, join. Then look at what we've got here, so this is the entire leaf as a single line path. I'm happy with that, I'm going to lock it down, and I'm going to turn its visibility off so that I can concentrate on the others. Now, I know that I've got a hole here, I can see it, so let's just go in there. One of the things that you can do if you see holes that are unlikely to be able to be automatically joined is you can actually join them yourself. I'm going to Direct Selection Tool here, and I'm just going to select over these points here and do Object, Path, Join, and that will join those together. Let's zoom back out and let's go and join the whole of the rest of this shape. Here, we can see it in the last panel. I'll turn it on and off. So little bits got missed out at the top here, so let's just select over everything and see if we can include that bit now. That's worked really well. You can use this join command not only on two anchor points that you physically want to join together and you want to make that choice as to how they join, or you can use it on an entire shape. What we're doing is a combination of the two, Object, Path, and then Join. Just make sure that you've ended up with a single path, which we have, so everything is looking really good here. I'm going to zoom into this shape and we're going to have a bit of a look. You can see here that there's some bumps in the path and that was as a result of my drawing. Now we can smooth this out by selecting this shape here and choose Object, Path, and then Simplify. I'm going to adjust here on the Simplify curve option and see if I can get a slightly smoother curve. What I'm worried about is I don't want to lose the edge that I have down here, I like that edge. The more smooth I go on the actual shape, the more I'm losing this. Somewhere between these two settings of high percentage and a low percentage is going to be a sweet spot. I'll do that and click "Okay". I can come in now and have a look at the area that I want to fix. If I go to the position on the toolbar that contains the shaper tool, there's also a Smooth tool here. You can use the Smooth tool to smooth out points, but you will need to select the shape before you do that. Just by running over the points that you want to smooth out, Illustrator will smooth them for you. If you double-click on the smooth tool, you can select a fidelity from accurate all the way across to smooth. I have mine almost too smooth, but not quite all the way there. I can just draw over the areas in the drawing that I want to smooth out a little bit. If it's smoothing too much, then I will go ahead and just adjust the smoothness setting back down again. I'm going to come into the bottom here and see if I can fix up this a little bit. Firstly, try and smooth out this set of anchor points that's got a little bump in the line. But also, I can come in here and just adjust this anchor point and perhaps this one as well. Just to get a square, and in here, I'm going to go and have a better look at this. I've got a bump here too that I can just smooth out, again, just hitting it with the smooth tool. Then I'll just go around and do the other two leaves. Here, I can just place in an additional anchor point using the Pen Tool, and then I'll click the direct selection tool and that will allow me to adjust this. I think I've got some more work still to do here. If you're not a big fan of using the Pen tool, then you may appreciate this ability of being able to turn line work that is hand-drawn into actual paths in Illustrator using this Live Trace option. 13. Pt 12 Make the Pattern and Color it: Having taken our drawing of Oakley's and converting the drawing into parts, we can now look at creating these as a pattern. I'm going to select over this particular leaf. I'm going to flip the stroke and fill, and I'm going to change the color that is actually in use on this leaf. I'm going to do the same for all three of these. I'll select over them, and let's go ahead and make our pattern. I'm going to turn off my artboards. I'm going to choose Object, Pattern Make. I'm going to zoom out. Then in the pattern options dialogue, I want to show my tile edge so I can see where I'm working. I'm also going to increase the number of elements that are visible here. Of course, that has no effect on the final pattern at all. I want to set these to round numbers. I want my width to be quite a bit wider, so I'm going to take it to something like about 740. My height maybe a little bit higher, but certainly a round number. I'm going to the selection tool, and let's go and adjust these leaves. I don't want them to be unnecessarily the same sort of arrangement as I had on the page in the sense that they're not rotated. I think they look better rotated. I'll zoom back out and see what my pattern looks like. The other thing that you might consider is changing the tile type. You could choose for example brick by column, or you could also use one one the hexes, hex by column or hex by row. This hex by column design looks pretty good, but obviously the width is going to have to be increased quite considerably to fit everything in. But, you can see here that this leaf here does not repaint until over here, and so we've got this offset look to our design. When you've got a design that you like, let's go ahead and put a background into this pattern. Of course, we're going to raid off the widths and height here. I'll click on the rectangle tool, click in the document and make a document my 960 by 940. That's just the width and height of the current tile. I'm going to choose a different color for this. Let's make it a light yellow green. I'm going to choose Object, Arrange and then send to back. Then we'll move it into position. The position that it needs to go in, is the position that ensures that there are no leaves that are cut off here at all. We want to make sure that nothing is cut off. Having a good look here, I think everything's looking pretty good. I'm pretty happy with that. If I am, I can just click "Done". Of course, we're not so much worried about the colors at this point because it's really easy to change the colors. Let's choose View and show our boards, and let's move our leaves out of the way. I'll create a rectangle here that is 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels, which is the size of my art board. Let's just center everything up and let's go and add our pattern. I'm going to press "Control or Command Zero" to zoom in. I'll choose object transform scale to scale my pattern. I'm thinking down to about 50% is going to be good here, I'll deselect, transform objects and click "Okay". To go and fix the color, I'll go to the Recolor Artwork dialogue, click on "Advanced", and then go to Edit. I'm going to unlock the harmony colors, and then I can go and find some different color combinations to use. When you find a color combination you like, click "Okay" to create that as a pattern that gives you your original pattern and the recolored version. You can continue to recolor this as much as you need to create different colorways. Of course, if you are looking for some help with your colors, you can always use the color schemes that are shipped with Illustrator. In the swatches panel, I'm going to click the drop-down list here and I'm going to Nature. The obvious place to start is foliage. We've got four colors in this particular image so I could select any of these four or more color swatches, and that would give me colors that I could use in my art. It's also possible to use something that's not quite as obvious as foliage. For example, I might go again to the nature selection, but this time use something like seasons. Again, I'm going to look for four colors or more. If we've got more than four colors, that's going to be easy to use, as well as anything that is four colors itself. If you've only got a three-color color scheme, that's going to be a little bit more tricky. I've got a few here that I can use. Let's select over our pattern, go to the recolor artwork dialogue, go to Advanced Options. Here, I've got this panel open. You can open it just by clicking on the disclosure triangle here. What we'll do, is click on the actual color scheme. Don't click on the arrow because that just shows you the colors and the color scheme you'll get. You're going to click on the color scheme. Then if you want to see how it would look if these colors were remapped onto different objects, you can come down here and click this randomly change color order. What that's going to do, is take the colors that you have selected, but place them in different places in the image. As soon as you see something that you like, you're going to just click the okay option because you don't want to go any further because it's really hard to get back. I'm just going to click "Okay". You can save your changes or not, it doesn't really matter because what you're going to do is actually save the pattern. Whether the color order is what it was originally or a new order, doesn't really matter. Let's go and see some of the less traditional options here. Let's go to Spring. If I rotate this around, I might get something that is interesting. It might be something that I hadn't thought of before, but this would make us cute Easter design, for example, so let's just choose that. Again, I'm not going to change my colors this time, but you can see that my pattern has been saved. This winter color scheme is really attractive too. Now I see something I like, I'll just click "Okay". I could come back in and reuse that color scheme. Again, going back to winter and this time rotating it around to see if I can find something a little bit different. These are the color schemes that we've been able to create, in this case, using the color schemes that have been shipped with Illustrator. We're just mapping them on to our design. 14. Project and Wrapup: We've now completed the video training portion of this course, so it's over to you. Your project for this class is to create one or more leaf patterns in Adobe Illustrator using either my images or your own drawings. Post an image of your completed design as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned lots about vectorizing images in Adobe Illustrator and turning the results into seamless repeating patterns. If you did enjoy this course and when you see a prompt that asks if you would recommend this class to others, please would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you do recommend this class, and secondly, write even in just a few words, why you enjoyed the class. Your recommendations will help other students to see that this is a course that they might like to take. If you see the follow link on the screen, click it and you'll be alerted when your classes are released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your questions and comments and I look at and review all of your class projects. I'm Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for lunch, and I'll look forward to seeing you in another class here on Skillshare soon.