Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi, I'm Maja Faber and I'm a surface pattern designer from Stockholm, Sweden. In this class, we will level up our pattern designs skills. I will teach you advanced techniques such as half drop, tossed repeats, directional patterns, layered patterns, break repeats, and you will learn how to create more professional looking patterns where it's less obvious to see where your pattern repeats, starts, and ends. I will share my personal tips and tricks of how to check your pattern for flaws, and you will learn how to easily change the size of a finished pattern type. This class is for you who want to level up your pattern design skills. You already know how to create the basic repeat pattern and you want to learn techniques to make your patterns look more professional. This is an intermediate class and you need to have at least basic knowledge of Adobe Illustrator to get started.
2. Your Project: Your project in this class is to create an advanced repeat pattern using one of the techniques that you learn in class. You can choose, for example, a brick repeat, a half drop repeat, the layer pattern, a tossed repeat, or you can mix it up and create the tossed and layered half drop repeat pattern. I'm super excited to see your advanced panel designs. So be sure to share your project on the project page here in class. If you share your predict on Instagram, please feel free to tag me with Maja Faber.
3. Directional Repeat: Welcome to this first lesson in this class about advanced pattern design techniques. Just a note before we start, know that this is an intermediate class. If you feel that it's too advanced, then I suggest that you head over to my other class here on scale share from sketch to repeat pattern, where I teach you how to create a basic repeat pattern. When you've learned the basics, you can head back to this class to level up your skills to create more advanced patterns. In this class, we will start with motifs that we already drawn. If you don't have motifs, you can check out either my class from sketched to repeat pattern or my other class, sketch and draw motifs in Adobe Fresco, both here on skill share. I start with my motifs and I also have a color palette that I will use for this class. If you watched my previous classes, you know that I create my patterns in the pattern tool. I feel that is the smartest way to create repeat patterns in Illustrator so that's what we will do in this class as well. We can start with just copying one of our motifs. Hit Command C and we go to object pattern and make, I always change the size of my pattern tile to the same size as my art board. So 1000 pixels wide and then I move my pattern tile to my art board. Then I hit Command V to paste my motif. In this first lesson, we will talk about creating a directional pattern. Basically what a directional pattern means is that your motifs are faced in one direction, two direction, or it can even be four directions. Already here I have a one directional pattern. I can copy my object and move it around a bit to make some more flowers. But they are all faced in the same direction up. This is one way directional pattern. You can also create a two way directional pattern. I will just select two flowers, twist them around and here we have a two way directional pattern. I'm just going to hit Command K And type in one pixel in the keyboard increment so that I can move my objects around with the arrow key. May well go for five pixels instead. In this pattern, at the moment we have flowers that are facing down and that are facing up. So it's a two way directional pattern. You can also create a four-way directional pattern. If we just twist this flowers around. Now we have the directions up, down to the right and to the left. Let's just move our motifs around a bit to create some balance in this pattern. For this example, with directional patterns, I think that this is fine. What I do next is to select all of my objects and hit Command C to copy, hit done in the pattern tool and Command V to paste your objects to your art board. Then I will just move my other objects a bit further away so that they aren't in the way. If you have watched my previous classes here on skill share, you will recognize this technique of how I create patterns so this will just be a quick repetition of that. I will move through this quickly as I've done this many times in previous classes that are more beginner friendly. Make a square that is the same size as your art board, 1000 pixels wide and 1000 pixels high. Select background color. I will go for this light pink. Then I hit Command C to copy my box Hit Command B to paste a duplicate of the box at the back, make sure it has no fill and no stroke. Then we made our pattern tile box and also our background color. Usually I just lock those two boxes before I place my motifs. For this pattern, I will just place my flowers to the upper left corner. Then I will hit Command K, type in 1000 pixels in the keyboard increment box. Make sure that I select the flowers that are falling out at the top of my pattern tile and art board, press hold, option, key and hit down arrow to duplicate the top flowers to the bottom. Then we do the same with the ones that are falling out of the edge to the right. Select all of those, hit option and right arrow. Now we have our pattern tile. We go to object, unlock all, and then select everything and drag it into your swatches panel. Let's check out our pattern. We can go to object transform and scale. Make sure you don't have the transform of the selected, but that you have your transform patterns selected. Hit the little preview box and you can scroll in the uniform box to check out your pattern. This pattern has a few flaws. You can see the pattern tile clearly, but we will go through how to fix that later on in class. We won't mind that for this example. But this is a four way directional patterns so you have flowers to go up, down to the left and to the right. That's the basics of directional pattern. Let's head over to the next lesson where you will learn how to create a toast pattern.
4. Tossed Repeat: In this lesson, we will create a tossed pattern. If we compare the tossed pattern to our directional pattern, the directional pattern has a certain direction, up, down, left, right, or all of them together. But a tossed pattern are basically tossed around so that you can twist it all around and you can't see any up, down, left, or right in the pattern. Now, let's look at how to create a tossed pattern. I will just delete this directional pattern as we don't need that at the moment and we have our pattern in the pattern swatch and just bring down the pattern swatch a bit so that won't be in the way. Then I will fetch the pink flowers and the orange flowers just so we have a few to choose from. Hit "Command C" to copy then, "Unselect," and go to "Object pattern and make." Type in 1,000 pixels so that you get a 1,000 pixels square. Move the pattern tile to your art board, and then hit, "Command V" to paste your artwork. Then what I usually do is to drag out my pattern to outside of the copies of my pattern tile so that it won't be in the way. I will just arrange the size a bit so that it will be easier for you to see when we create this tossed pattern. Basically, what I start with doing when I create a tossed pattern is that I take some motifs. Let's take all of these pink flowers and then I twist them around so that they aren't in the same direction. I want to go a little bit up, I want to go a little bit down, I want to go the side, I want to go to the left. Usually, to make a tossed repeat, look even more seamless, it's good to have more of the same motifs that are twisted in several different directions. What I mean is that if you have several motifs that go in different directions, it will be harder to see where the tile starts and ends and it will look better when the pattern is tossed around. Let's just duplicate this little flower and toss it around and place it on different areas of your art board and maybe fill out that last little area with this one twisted around. You can, of course, even reflect the objects if you wish to do that, to create a little bit more diversity in your pattern. Let's see how that looks. If you want to get a better look, you can also change your user interface to white background, go to "Illustrator Preferences and user interface." Then hit "Cameras color white." This makes it a little bit more easy to see your repeat and you can also uncheck the box, "Dim copies." Now, if we look at this pattern, you can see that there are many different directions that these pink flower motifs are faced. Let's just move them around a bit to make it a little bit more balanced and then we bring in the orange flowers, maybe make them a little bit smaller and just place them in the pattern. This is a pretty simple tossed pattern because I don't have that many different motifs. I will just duplicate the orange flowers and you can even twist them around if you want to and adjust them so that they're evenly distributed to your pattern, maybe something like this. Let's zoom out a bit. Then the copies down so that you easily can see your pattern tile and for me it looks like this little flower is a little bit too close to that orange one. I will just bring that down. Then maybe twist that one around a bit. Let's create more of these orange flowers. Just because these are all the motifs that we have at the moment and it's just as an example to show you a tossed pattern. Hit the "Dim copies box," again, and let's see how our pattern looks. That looks pretty okay. There are some little flowers. At the moment, you can see where the pattern tile starts and ends. If you look really closely, you can see a little space here that isn't even distributed and yet a few small flowers. But as we will look to this flowers later on in the class, we will just go for this at the moment. Here comes a little trick to check if your tossed pattern really is tossed. That is to select all of your objects and then click and hit your "Shift key" and twist your objects around. In all four directions, you can zoom out and what we want here is to see that there's really no direction. Either way, I twist the pattern around and around, I don't have a direction where everything is faced up, or down, or to the left, or to the right, or diagonal. I just have tossed motifs that goes in all directions. This actually looks like we did pretty good at this first try. Let's head back to the art board and create a final pattern of this. Select all of your motifs and hit, "Command C." Then hit, "Done and command V" to paste your motifs to the art board. Then select the rectangle tool. Click one time on the art board and type in the same size as your art board and width, and height. You get a square that we can align horizontal to the center, and vertical to the center. Then I will just go ahead and select the background color, the same pink as our previous directional pattern. Hit, "Command C" to copy the box, "Command V" to paste it at the back of your background box. Select, "No fill, no stroke." Then I will just do as usual and as I did in the previous lesson, hit, "Command 2" to lock your boxes. Then I select all of my motifs, makes sure that they are arranged to the front, "Object arrange, bring to front." I will just place them so that there are some motifs that are falling out at the top and some motifs that are falling out to the left. Basically, you could place them like this so that there are some motifs to the bottom and some motifs to left and some motifs to the top. But that will just bring you one more step of duplicating the motifs to the top, to the bottom, and through the bottom to the top. If we just do it like this, some motifs at the top that are outside of the pattern tile and some motifs to the left that are outside of the pattern tile. Then we select the motifs that are at the top. Hit, "Command K" and make sure that you have 1,000 pixels typed in keyboard increment. Hold down your, "Option key," and hit your "Down arrow." Then we select all of the objects that are falling out to the left of your art board. Hold down your, "Option key," and hit, "Right arrow." There we have our pattern tile. Now, we go to, "Object, unlock all," select everything on your art board, and drag in your pattern tile to the swatches panel. Then we just make a new square by duplicating your previous pattern square and fill it with our new pattern. This is really zoomed out and if we look at it, it looks like, "Okay, pattern." There are some minor flaws to this. A little bit more space on some places than others, which makes it easy to see where the pattern tile starts and ends. But as I said, we will look at these details later on in class. What we want now is to make sure that this is a tossed pattern. We'll just go to, "Object transform and scale," and scale up our pattern a bit. Then I will do it the same as I did in the pattern tile. I will just hold down shift and twist my pattern around to see if it's really tossed. If you can't really see any directions, it means that we have succeeded with creating a tossed pattern. That's the basics of a tossed repeated pattern. Let's head over to the next lesson where we will create a half drop repeat pattern.
5. Half Drop Repeat: In this lesson, we will create a half drop repeats, which is actually one of my favorite things to do. It's so much fun and it can make such a big different. If you look at how obvious it is where your repeat starts and ends. Because a half dropped repeat can be an easy way to make it harder for your eyes to see where you are Pattern tile starts and ends. If you just join me, I will show you what I mean. Let's just delete that one and move this up there. Now, I think I have a few white objects here. I think that I will just use these flowers. I will copy them and make them green, maybe. Let's go for green and now let's jump into the pattern tool again, where I will show you how to create half drop repeat and also what half drop repeat is. I will just copy a few of my objects, hit Command C, Then go to objects pattern and change the size of your pattern tile to the same size as your art board just as before and hit Command V to paste your objects. This looks a little bit crazy. Let's move our objects outside of the pattern tiled copies. Usually, the standard setting in the pattern tool is the grid option. This is what's also called a straight repeat. To show you what that means that you have one pattern tile, which is this one and it repeats straight to the left, to the right, up and down. If you want to create a half drop repeats, you just go to tile type and click brick by column and you see that these flowers moved up a bit. Basically, a half dropped repeat means that your repeated tile is repeated to the left and then half of the size of the tile up. If you don't really understand what I mean now, this will be much more obvious when we go outside of the pattern tool. Later on, where I will show you how to create the pattern with the background tile and all of that. But for now, you can see that this is actually a basic half drop repeats. You have one motif and its repeated to decide and half up. To make a more complex half dropped repeat, we will just use all or some of these objects. To make it a little bit more complicated too, let's make half drop tossed, repeat pattern. We'll start with making sure that you have your brick by column selected. I usually just go for the half here. You can also do more advanced the drop repeats. But to learn the basics of a half drop repeat, this is the easiest way. So make sure you have brick by column and 1.5 here. Then I will just start to place my objects. Let's take some pink flowers. As you can see now, when I place something to the left side or the right side of my pattern tile, that object doesn't show up at opposite side, like you would do if we would have a straight repeat. Back to the brick by column, which is the half drop repeat. Then I just continued to place my objects. Usually when I make my half drop repeats is easier when I have my little checkbox dim copies checked in, because it can get a little bit confusing as to where this object is repeated otherwise. Dim the copies down so that you can see clearly where the object is repeated and which object is the original one. We will just continue to place our objects, maybe something like that. Then some of these orange little flowers. Let's bring in these green little flowers as well. I will just duplicate these a bit, maybe twist them around. Just as an example of how to create a little bit more complex half drop repeat. I will just continue to move my objects around of it to create a little bit more balanced pattern. If you have a tossed repeat and half drop, you can't do the thing that we did before where you move your objects around. We will check our tossed repeat in the finished patterns watch later on. We will just move out of the pattern tool now. I promise you that it will be much clearer for you, what this half drop repeat really is when we create our pattern outside of the pattern tool. Do as we did previously, hit Command C to copy all of your objects. Then hit "Done" and the pattern tool hit Command V to paste them on your art board. Now, it will be a little bit different than with the previous patterns. Just make sure that you follow along now. What I do first is that I group all of my objects together. Command G. Then I create my background box as I did before, with the background color, I align it to dartboard, hit Command C and Command B to copy it to the back. Makes sure that the box at the back have no field, no stroke and then I lock those two boxes. Then I will just move my motifs, so that they won't be in the way. Because now we will do something that you might not have done before if you have just made straight repeats. We have our objects grouped. Then to make this half drop repeat, you basically need to repeat this up or down, it doesn't matter. Then to the left and a half drop up or half drop-down. When you have your objects group, just make sure that you follow the steps exactly as I do now. Otherwise you won't get the correct half drop repeat. In your width and height value, you can also find it in the Transform panel. If you don't have your Transform panel up, you go to Window and transform. But I have mine up here and I make sure that I have the little chain that says, constrained width and height proportions checked in. Then I take either my width or my height. It really doesn't matter, and divide it by two. Hit Enter. And then your whole group of objects will be divided by two as a group. It's half of the size as the pattern tile was that you create the patterning in the pattern tool. You will know why we do this in a minute. After we did this, you will hit Command K. You make sure that you have half of the size of your art board in the keyboard increment, which is 1000 pixels divided by two. Not that hard, it's 500 pixels. Hit "Okay." Then you hold down your Option key and hit down arrow or up arrow. Create a few copies of your grouped objects. Just select all and make sure that you arrange them to the front. I will just move this to the signs so it's easier to see. Usually four copies is a good number. Next step is to create a copy of all of these that goes to the right and up half a drop. This is usually how I do it. I just hold down the option key again and hit "Option" and right arrow. This would be a straight repeat. But now I need to move all of these up half a drop. Then I hit Command K again. Half a drop of 500 pixels, you can divide it by two, but it is 250 pixels. Hit "Okay" and then up arrow. Then you have your half drop up. Then you can select all of the objects in the middle. Again, the easiest way is usually just to hit "Option" arrow key to left, then you going to half drop to the left, but we actually want the full here. I just hit the arrow key once more and then you hit the up arrow. Here we have our half drop repeat. Basically, these are the motifs and they are repeated to the left and up half a drop. Next step is to just group all of these together and align them centered to the art board. There you have your half drop repeats. Within your pattern tile, you have done a half drop repeat. If we just ungroup these, where your motifs are repeated to the left and up half a drop and to the right and up half a drop. You couldn't clean up all of these extra motifs that are outside of your patent time. We won't do that in this lesson as I will show you how to export your pattern and clean up your file in the last lesson of this class. For now, just go to object, unlock all, select all on your art board and drag it into the Searches panel. We'll just make a copy and select our new pattern. If you look really closely here, you can see that it's much harder to see where this pattern is repeated as a half drop than this pattern that is basic straight repeat. Here you can see clearly that the repeat is, here's a flower that is the same as this one and this one, and this one. This is your pattern tile. But in the half drop repeat, it's much harder to find where the pattern tile starts and ends. Let's head over to the next lesson where we will look at brick repeats.
6. Brick Repeat: In this lesson, we will create a brick repeat. As you learn how to create a half drop repeat in the previous lesson, this won't be much of a difference really. Let's just delete the artwork from our art-board, go into the pattern tool again. I'm just going to hit "Command C" and copy my motifs, go to "Object," "Pattern'" and "Make." Change the size of your pattern tile once again and move it to your art-board. Hit "Command V" to paste your objects, change the size of it, and then instead of selecting "Brick by Column," we will select "Brick by Row." Let's place an object and see what happens. Basically, you can see that the difference here is that the object is repeated up and to the side instead of, in the half drop, to the side and up. You can see the difference, "Brick by Row" and "Brick by Column." So brick repeat and half drop repeat. This is a simple brick repeat, it doesn't need to be more complicated than this, but if you want to do a more complex brick repeat, we can do as we did in the previous lesson with a half drop repeat, we can just start to add the objects and let's create a toast brick repeat as well. Really, in the pattern tool, when you work with half drop and brick repeats, it's so visual so you can see straight away when you place a motif what happens in the whole pattern. Let's just make it something like this. It's not very balanced at the moment but I won't mind that for this example. I will just place the orange flowers, twist this around a bit to make it look a little bit better, maybe something like that, and if you want to bring in another motif, let's just place these green ones. This pattern has some flaws, but I won't mind those right now as I will show you more about that in another lesson later on in class. For now, we will just copy all of our objects, hit "Done," hit "Command V" to paste them, group all of your objects together, "Command G," then divide the width or the height, doesn't matter, by two, hit "Command K" and make sure that you have half the size of your original pattern tile or art-board, it's the same for me, divided by two. For me it's 1000 divided by two is 500 pixels. Then I hold down my option key and hit the right arrow until I have four copies. Next, I hit the option key and up arrow, go back to the keyboard increments and adjust so that I have half of this size, so 250 pixels, hit "OK" and the arrow key to the right. Then I select the center objects again, hold down my option key, hit the down arrow, let go of my option key and now, I have it moved half of the height, and then I hit the arrow key once again to get a copy of it, exactly 500 pixels down. Then I hit my arrow key again. Now, I have all of my objects in a brick repeat pattern. These are my original objects and they are repeated up and down and half of the brick to the right. We group all of the objects together, make a background box the same as we did before, make a copy over the background box, make sure it has no fill, no stroke, lock that copy, and then make sure we have these grouped, make sure you have "Align to Artboard" selected and center your object to the art-board. Go to "Object," "Arrange," and "Bring to Front" to get your objects in front of the background. Now, we can "Ungroup" these and as you can see, we have one group of objects here that are repeated up and a half brick to the right and down, and the half brick to the right. Go to "Object," "Unlock all," and drag all of your objects that are on your art-board to the swatches panel. Just make a copy of your rectangle and click on your new pattern and there you can see your brick repeat pattern. Actually, the half drop repeat and the brick repeat is basically the same technique, it's just a matter of if you want it to repeat up or if you want it to repeat to the side. Now, we've created a brick repeat pattern and in the next lesson, I will teach you how to create a layered pattern, and then later on in class, we will move on to how to fix the flaws. You can see that this pattern have some flaws, and there are a few things that we would like to fix with these patterns for I would say that they look professional. But that's later on in class, so let's head over to the next lesson where we will create a layered pattern.
7. Layered Repeat: In this lesson, we will create a layered pattern and basically what that means is that your motifs are repeated on top of each other a little bit or a lot. It all depends on which style you're after. Let's just delete this on our art board and I have some white objects around here. I know I put them there before. Let's go to Illustrator, preferences and user interface and just hit "Match user interface brightness." I have the medium dark selected so that I can see all of my objects again. Here's a little fellow as well. I have this idea that I want to create white objects in the background of my colored flowers. But to do that in the pattern tool to be able to visualize where my background layer in my pattern is, I need to have the white objects in a different color. I can just go to "Select", "Same" and "Fill Color" and then I select all of the white objects. Let's just make all these flowers another color. Maybe we'll just go for this light pink color to start with and we can change that later on when we create the final repeat. It's actually not as hard as you might think to create a layered pattern and especially not if you use the pattern tool. I will just copy all of my objects and go to the pattern tool again, change the size of my pattern type, 2,000 pixels and then I will just drag my pattern tile to my art board. For now to be able to have a good look at the pattern in the pattern tool, I will change my user interface to white again and then hit Command V to paste my artwork. My vision for this pattern is that these objects that are light pink will be in the background of the other more colored objects. You can do this in different ways. You can start with placing your background objects, your first layer, if you wish, but I would actually start with creating my top layer. I'm just going to create a regular straight repeat for this. I have the grid selected and then I place my flowers. Let's start with something like that, maybe I want to make them a little bit bigger, so I'm just going to go to "Object", "Transform", and transform each. Here I can scale my objects and make them stay at the same position. Just enlarger the scale. Let's go for 120 in the horizontal and vertical may be 130. Yeah, maybe something like that. We will just try out how this will look. Then I place my other foreground flowers, some of these orange ones. How does that look? Looks okay, I guess. Then I will take my light pink flowers that I want to put in the background and I will make sure that all of these are in the background by going to "Object", "Arrangement", and sent to the back and then I will just place them at the back of my other flowers where I think that it looks good. This might take a little while to make it look balanced but basically, I just want to have some flowers in the background and some flowers in the foreground. Then I want to use this little dots. Let's just place them here. Those aren't really in the background, they can be but I will just fill out the pattern with these little dots,. Let's just copy those and move them around. It's not so obvious that they are copied and maybe I want to make all of the orange flowers a little bit bigger. I'm just going to go to "Object", "Transform" and transform each, 130 looks good. Maybe I also want to make these pink flowers a little bit bigger, maybe not that big. Yeah, something like that. Then I can just continue to place some objects. May be I want more of the orange flower. If you think that it's annoying that you might move all of the objects, you can just go and lock the background objects if you wish, go to "Select", "Same", "Fill Color" and then just hit Command 2 to lock all of your background layers and then you can work with your foreground layers. But I actually want to have access to all of my objects. I will just unlock those and let's see what we can do here to make it look a little bit more balanced. Maybe add a little more on these dots. Let's uncheck the box to dim the copies down and we can see how it all looks. I think it looks okay. There's definitely some areas that I would like to work more with. But as this is just an example of a layered pattern, I will just be satisfied for now. Basically, you can do this with many different layers. You can, for example, duplicate this flower. We'll just make it in a different color so that we're able to see and you can bring that flower to the back and there you have another layer. Basically, you can have as many layers as you wish. As I have minimalistic and Scandinavian style, I tend to create more clean and simple designs, but if you want to work with more layers, it doesn't need to be more complicated than this. Now if we are satisfied with our Pete, we can head back to our art board. Let's just copy all of our objects, hit "Done" in the pattern tool and Command V. Now I will just go back to a darker user interface because I want my background flowers to be white on a pink background. I just go to illustrator preferences"and user interface match user interface brightness and have the medium dark hit "Okay." Then once again we'll create a background box in the light pink color. Hit Command C, Command B to create a pattern type box on your background color box, make sure it has no field, no stroke and then we'll just lock those layers. This is a straight repeat. What I will do now is that I will select all objects that are in this light pink color, I just make sure that my background is locked and I select an object, go to "Select", "Same" and "Fill color" and then I hit "White." Next, I move my objects, I make sure that they are arranged to the front. Then I move all my objects to my art board and just as we did previously, I will repeat all the objects that are at the top to the bottom. Let's hit Command K and type in the size of your art board and a keyboard increment box for it's cells and pixels. Then hold down the option key and hit your down arrow. Then we select all objects that are on the left side and you hold down the option key and hit the right arrow. Now we have all of our objects repeated along the edges of the pattern tile. We go to "Object", "Unlock all", and then select all and drag into this swatches panel. Then let's check out our layered pattern. There you have a layered pattern. I see that we have done some of the white flowers are on top of the orange ones and somewhere in the back. My plan was actually to have all of the white flowers in the back of all other objects. What I will do then to fix that, a simple way is to just select all white-colored objects and then I go to "Object", "Arrange", "Sent back" and then I select both my background box and my pattern tile box and I go to "Object", "Sent to back." Let's select everything again and drag it into the swatches panel. Make a copy of your pattern square and hit the new pattern and you can see the difference that the white flowers are in the background layer or in the middle layer. We have a background color in the background and then we have a mini layer with the white objects and we have a foreground layer with all of the other colored flowers. This is a basic layered pattern and the technique is the same if you create a more complex layered pattern. As long as you can do it in the pattern tool is really easy to see how your whole pattern will turn out. Now when we have made a layered pattern, let's move on to the next lesson where we will look at tips and tricks and some techniques to check your pattern and make sure that it looks professional and that is not that obvious where your repeats starts and ends. We will also make sure that our patterns are balanced and all of those things that makes your pattern look much more professional.
8. Check and Fix Techniques 1: In this lesson we will go through some of my personal tips and tricks of how to shake your pattern for flaws, how to make your patterns look more professional, balanced. All of those things that will take your [inaudible] designs to the next level, the details of it all. I just want to mention before we start that all of these techniques are just based from my experience and I tried out different ways of checking my patterns. These are a few of the most common techniques that I use. Depending on the style of your patterns and also how you like to work, you might find that some of these technique doesn't suit you and you might want to add in different technique and you might come up with your own technique based on your experiences. All of these techniques that I showed you in this lesson are just based on my experiences and my practice with patterns. You can see them as basic techniques to make your patterns look more professional. But then you probably also need to practice a lot to get a good eye for all of these different flaws and the problems with patterns and all the things that I showed you here in class. To learn the techniques is one thing. Then you need to practice to really get a hang on how to make your patterns look more professional. In the previous lessons of this class, I left all of the patterns with some flaws. That was just because I wanted to show you how to fix these different loss. Let's get started with a first technique to check your patterns. That is a really simple one, is just to zoom out the pattern. You go to object transform and scale. Uncheck the transformed object box, check in the preview box and then zoom out your pattern. There can be many different floss in one pattern. I will go through one technique per pattern. In this pattern, I would say that one of the flaws is that it's not balanced. If you check out this area, it's much more airy than for example, this or this. How do we fix this? Well, it is a balance problem, I would say. Usually what I do is that I go back to the pattern tool. You could drag out your pattern from the swatches panel and try to, if we just ungroup the flowers, you can try to arrange the flowers so that they are more evenly distributed. But it's so hard to see the final patterns. Then you have to dragging the whole pattern to the patterns. Watch again, try it out and do it over and over again. Normally, I think that the easiest way is to go back to our original saved pattern in the pattern tool and make the changes there. [inaudible] delete that one. Hopefully, you have you original pattern in the pattern swatch. If you don't, I would suggest that you drag out your pattern from the swatches panel. Ungroup everything, delete your background layers and delete all of the copies. Then you copy this and go in to the pattern tool. If you've been following my lead, you should have your original pattern without a background in the swatches panel. Let's change the user interface to white again to make it more easy to see. When it's a balanced problem, I would say that it's easier to have more repeats, maybe even nine repeats. Then we go in and check where the balanced problem is. It's probably around here somewhere. Maybe it's this line. That's a little bit more area than that line. I hit command K, and I will just type in a few pixels in the keyboard increments so that it will be easier for me to move the objects around just a little bit. Then I think I will take these middle flowers and move them up. This is really detailed work. You just have to keep on trying until you find the pattern to be balanced. As with anything, the more you practice, the easier it will be to see these little flaws and to know what actions you need to take to make the pattern look more professional. Maybe for this pattern, you might even want to try out to make the flowers larger or smaller. Let's try out some larger flowers. Go to transform H and scale. That looks pretty nice. Let's try to make them smaller as well. Maybe even smaller. That looks pretty cute. You can make really small flowers. But I think I will go for the big ones. But sometimes when you have a balanced problem, it might be that it's easier to change the scale of your objects just a little bit to be able to make the pattern look more balanced. Let's just copy our objects and then we paste them to our art board. We make a new background, square. Fill it with pink. Make a pattern tile in the back. Lock those. Place our motifs. Then copy. Make sure you have 1000 pixels into keyboard increments. Copy was on the top and copy what's on this side. Unlock everything, and drag it into the swatches panel. Let's check out our new pattern. That looks a lot better. You can still see that there's a little bit area here. It looks a whole lot better than it did before. Let's just scale this up. We can scale the old one up as well. There you can see more balanced pattern. You might want to know why you need to go back to the original pattern [inaudible] without the background. If you try to go back to your patterns swatch in the pattern tool, you can just double-click your pattern. It says a clipping mask was created and that's fine. But then if you want to change something, there will be issues. There will be copies on the size because you're copying your motifs. You need to delete the copies. You also have this problem with the background title because even if I tried to arrange this to the front, it will be a problem with my background and it can be done by usually I find that this is much more complicated. There's a lot of more things to fix here. Sometimes you will also get a problem with the background title. You can get these small little white lines with your pattern when you try to change it in this pattern swatch. I'm just going to hit cancel here. I found that the most efficient and smart way of changing a pattern is to go back to your original pattern swatch. The first technique we looked at was balance. Now we will look at tossed patterns. I know I showed you this before, so let's have a look again at our tossed pattern. As I said before, when you have a tossed pattern that is a straight repeats, you can check your pattern directly independent tools. I'll just double-click the pattern independent swatch and then I can select all of my objects. I hold down shift and I twist my pattern around. Then I can see that it doesn't matter which direction. I twist my pattern in. There's still no up, down, left, or right. That's how you know that it's a good tossed pattern. But if you have a tossed half drop up repeat pattern, as I said before, it doesn't really work to twist your motifs around in a pattern tool. Then you can also check your tossed pattern in the pattern swatch. I mentioned this before in class, but I will just mention it again in this lesson as it's a really great way to check if your pattern is really tossed. I just hold down shift and I rotate my pattern to see if it's tossed in a good way. This pattern is tossed in a good way because I can't see any up or down or left or right direction in the pattern. All the motifs are tossed around so it doesn't matter which way I twist my pattern. All the ways can be up and all the ways can be down. That was a little repetition of how to check your tossed patterns.
9. Check and Fix Techniques 2: Now let's check out another problem and that is when your pattern are reading lines. What does that mean? Basically it means that if I zoom out, this is my break repeat. If I zoom it out, I can see that here's a really obvious line. That's the same obvious line. Here is also some line but not that obvious. You don't want to see where the pattern tile starts and ends in a pattern, and you don't want it to be reading lines like this. There are a few ways to fix this. What I would do is to check the balance of the motifs. If I zoom in, I can see that there's a lot of area around this flower, but not as much around these. If you have a lot of white area around an object, that might look like a line for your eyes. I would also check my pattern tile edges and see if I have objects that fall out of the edges. Let's check out the pattern in the pattern tool, and we can look closer at these details. This is really detailed work, and I can see that this is a really obvious line in my pattern. What you can do in a toast pattern like this, is that you can change so that your motifs aren't on the exact same horizontal or vertical line. Sometimes it works to just change a few motifs back and forth, and some times you might need to remove all the motifs and just create the pattern once again. Usually I start with trying to just arrange the motifs, and I would actually say that this pattern has another flaw. Now that we work with it, I can see that these two pink flowers are faced towards each other, which makes it much more easy to see where the pattern tile starts and ends. Because these flowers are standing alone. Instead of just trying to go in and fix the details of this pattern, I will actually drag it out of the pattern tile and the copies of the pattern tile, and then I will just try to arrange the pattern once again, to see if I can make it more balanced and not reading a line this time. A little trick to make patterns not read lines might be that if you have several different motifs, you can make sure that the same motifs aren't placed on the same line. Unless you have a pattern where you want the same motifs placed on the same line, then you should do that. Let's try something like that, maybe I want to make these flowers a little bit bigger. Actually one way of making this pattern tile less obvious where it starts and ends, is to create more of the same motif. The best way to do it is to draw the same motifs several times. Maybe you can draw this flower 10 times, so you have 10 different flowers to choose from. As I haven't done that now, I will just scale these down, and then I will just duplicate the flowers and create more of the same motif. That way it will be harder to see where the pattern tile starts and ends. Sometimes it's a matter of twisting your motifs around to make it look more balanced. Sometimes you might not want all of your motifs to be evenly distributed, but this is how you learn to make patterns balanced. Then if you want to create other types of patterns where your motifs aren't evenly distributed, you know the basics on how to balance the pattern. Then we have the pink flowers, all of this takes a little while to get good. I will just bring down the size of the orange flowers. I will try to not place the orange flowers in a straight line, because then the pattern will easily read the line, so I try to place them a little bit to the side of each other. Let's see how this goes. Maybe something like that, and when you're ready, make a copy of your pattern in the pattern tool, paste it to your art board. As this is a break repeat, I will just go on and create the break repeat just as we did in the previous lesson. That looks much better. I think that there are still some faults here. Here's a little white space and you can read a line that goes like this. Before I would be happy with this pattern, I will work a little bit more with the details. But now you know the techniques that I use to check my pattern for flaws and the techniques that I use to make my patterns look more professional.
10. Resize the Pattern: In this lesson I will show you how to resize the pattern tile. The reason why you might need to do this is because if you want to print the pattern on a certain product, maybe you want to upload it to some print on demand sites, for fabrics like spoon flowers or something like that. Or like when I made my fabric collections, I needed to have some prints that were 12 inch some were eight and some were six inch and so on. Now we will resize the pattern. For this example, we will just continue to work in pixels but you can of course change your units to whatever you wish. But let's say we want to change this pattern tile from 1,000 pixels to 500 pixels. What I'll do first is something that I usually do with my patterns before I send them off to clients or to be printed on something, and that is to clean up my pattern tiles. First step is to group everything together. Then I select the group selection arrow, and I make a copy of the background box, I paste it in front, and then I will just make that one black. Now I have a box that are separate from the rest of the pattern. Then I select everything. You need to make sure that you whole pattern is grouped and are on the background layer and that your new box are on the foreground layer. Then we go to object Clipping Mask and Make. Here we have a Clipping Mask of our pattern. I can move this outside my art boards so that you see that this technique works even if you don't have your pattern on that board. When I have my Clipping Mask, I can just change the size of the square to 500 pixels, and then you have resized your pattern. If you want to create a finished pattern tile, as I usually do before I send it off to clients, you can hit Merge, and here you have your finished pattern tile. You can drag it into the resources panel, and you can see that it repeats seamlessly if you make copies of it. But if you want to have your original pattern tile with the rest of the motifs outside of the tile, you just go to object Clipping Mask and Release. There you have all of your objects, which can be good if you need to make changes to the pattern and then you just delete your extra box that you made, the Clipping Mask of. Now you will see that this box has no fill nor stroke and it's the top box. I will just delete the Clipping Mask box, and here I have my new patterns. If I drag this into resources panel, and I drag that one out, that's 500 pixels pattern tile. If I drag the old one out, that is a 1,000 pixels pattern tile.
11. Export: Now, it's the last lesson of this class. I will just quickly show you how to export your patterns so that you can upload it as a project. In this class, I showed you several times in my previous classes here on Skillshare: how to export a pattern in many different ways. Today, we will export it as a JPEG. I would actually go on, and use my merged pattern. I can just move that to my art board, align it, and then change the size to the same size as my art board, 1,000 pixels. Now, I have two choices. I can either go to asset export. If you don't have that panel up, you can go to Window and Asset Export. This is the quick way of exporting a JPEG. I can just drag in that pattern to the Asset Export panel, and I can name it to Pattern 1, and then I can go in, and choose which type of file I want to save my panels, we will use JPEG 100, and before you save it, I will go to Format Settings, and go to your JPEG 100, and make sure you have baseline optimized as compression method, and under anti-alias, art optimized super-sampling. Then hit "Save Settings." Select your Pattern 1 in the Asset Export panel, and Export. Then I will just Choose this folder, and export. That's one way of exporting your JPEG. The other way is to go to File, Export. You could go to Export As which will give you a higher resolution JPEG. But as we will use this digitally align, I will go for Save for Web, and then I just make sure that I have JPEG selected, and maximum quality 100 percent, and hit "Save". The third way that is the same as save for web. That's the old version of saving JPEG to use digitally. But as it's the old way, most people are most comfortable with that, so you can use that one. You could also go for Export for Screens, which is the new way, and this is the way that I find it's really useful especially if you have several different art boards because here, you can choose which art boards you want to save. If you want to save all, or what range you want to save in. I'm just going to choose to same place to export to. Make sure that you have the same format, JPEG 100, and then export art board. Here is one of my finished patterns. Go ahead, and save your JPEG, and make sure that you share your project here in class. I would love to see what you create. If you want any special feedback on your project, feel free to let me know, and I will try to answer all of your questions.
12. Thank You: That's all for this class. To learn advanced techniques in Pan design is something that takes both time and practice. The more you practice, the more you'll get an eye for it. So keep practicing, and I hope that this class gave you some good basic techniques to start with. Thank you so much for watching if you liked this class, hit the Follow button by my name here below. If you have any questions at all, please ask them on the Community page and feel free to leave a review to let me know if you enjoyed this class. I would love to hear your thoughts. I would also love to see your patterns. So make sure you share your project here in class. If you post it on Instagram, feel free to tag me with @maja_faber. Thanks again for watching and have fun creating.
Maja Faber, Surface Pattern Designer
