Make Ditsy Patterns in Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ class

1. Making Ditsy Patterns in Illustrator - Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Create Ditsy Patterns in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Now today's class is on making ditsy patterns. If you don't know what ditsy patterns are, that's fine, because I didn't know either until a student asked me if I could make them. I looked into ditsy patterns and thought it was a really, really good topic for a class. We're going to create two ditsy patterns. We're going to make one with just a single object, and then we're going to make one with a lot of objects. Now, the single object 1, we're going to design that object ourself. But for the one that uses lots of objects, it's going to be quicker for us to focus on actually how to make the pattern than make the objects, and so we're going to use some downloaded objects for those. Now, the trick to making ditsy patterns is not to have to do too much work, because if you did all the work that it looks like it's involved in making them, you would be there for weeks and weeks. We're going to look at a structured and smart way of starting the pattern so that there's less work for us to do in actually making it. When we create the single object ditsy pattern, we're also going to look at a process for designing the actual color scheme for the pattern so that it can be really easily recolored to make all sorts of color designs. You're going to learn a lot in this class, and how you're going to use the ditsy patterns? Well, they're going to be great for fabric. They're also going to be appropriate for scrapbook paper and other print-on-demand projects. I think that you'll find plenty of uses for the designs that you're making. If you're ready now, let's get started making our ditsy patterns in Illustrator. 2. Ditsy Pattern #1 - Pt 1: For the first of our ditsy patterns we'll create a new document. Mine's going to be a square document 1200 pixels by 1200 pixels, I'll click "Create." We're going to create this design in shades of gray. The reason for that is it's going to give us a whole lot more color options later on. Lets start with black and we'll make that the fill color and will have no stroke at all. I'll drag out an ellipse. Now, I'm going to create my flower a whole lot bigger than it's going to be and I'm going to shrink it when I'm done. I'm going to the direct selection tool and I'll target the anchor points at the top and bottom of this ellipse to make them angles so they're not smooth any longer. Let's zoom in and let's go again to this topmost point. I'm just going to round it a little bit by making it a smaller point. This is going to be the petal for my flower, and this is going to be the center of the flower. I'll select over the shape effect, distort and transform and then transform. My flower is going to have five petal, so I need one original plus four copies for my five petals. I need to rotate this around evenly. I'll type 360 divided by five and tab away and that will make Illustrator do the math for me. Now the reason why I'm seeing something that doesn't look anything like what I want is that the rotation point is incorrect. By default, the rotation point is the center of the shape and we want to rotate around this point here. Of these nine boxes will select the one at the middle bottom, and that just creates our flower. I'll click "Okay." This is just a shape that has a rotation effect applied to it. It's not actually five individual petals. This is the petal and this is the rotation effect. To break the petals out, we'll choose object and then expand appearance. If we check the Layers panel, will say what we've got. We've got groups of group, so we've got lots of things inside those groups. It behooves us to ungroup things such as object ungroup and object ungroup again, until ungroup is no longer an option, which just gives us five petals. I'm going to add a small circle to the center of the flower. I'll hold the "Shift" key as I drag to make the size circle I want. Because I'm still drawing it, I'll hold the "Space-bar" down so I can position this pretty much over at the center of the flower. Now with the fill selective, I'm going to select a different shade of gray because I want the petals ultimately to be able to be colored to a single color. But I might want the middle of the flower to be able to be colored differently. It will need to be a different shade of gray. I'll press "Control" or "Command zero" to zoom back out, can move the flat up a little bit, and now we're going to create a stem for it. For that, I'm going to use the pencil tool. If I double click on the pencil tool you'll see that it's set to very smooth. That means the Illustrator is going to remove any of the bumps from my drawing and make it into a nice smooth shape. That's particularly handy if you use a mouse. Now because we had a fill and no stroke, we've got a line now that has no fill or no strokes. Let's target the stroke and let's target a color. But of course we want to use a different color, again, a different shade of gray. I want to increase the stroke weight so that the stroke looks pretty good on my flower. We'll also go to the stroke options and choose round cap. Just makes sure that the ends of this line are rounded. They don't look nearly as good if they're boxy. At this point, we can position the stem of the flower exactly where we want it to be. Let's go and create some lays for these. I'm going back to the Ellipse tool. I'll drag out a longish ellipse and let's flip the stroke and fill and let's choose another different color, gray if you like for our fill. Let's grab the topmost point and let's make that an angle and then grab the middle two points by just dragging over to select them. Then I can drag them down to make this a little bit more of a leaf shape. Now if I want to cut a piece out of the leaf, this is how I'll do it. I'm going to use the pen tool. It's probably the easiest tool to use for this. Let's go and get a different color fill. I'm going to drag upwards at an angle here and then anchor myself in the top part of the leaf and stretch out, just drag out to make this curve. Now as I'm still drawing this, I hold the "ALT" key option on a Mac to flip this other handle around so I can come back in this direction. I'll finish off with another anchor here. I'll just drag this out and then go back to where I started. What we're looking at doing is cutting this lighter piece out of our leaf. Before you do that, you'll probably want to shape it and position it where you want it to be. I'm not happy with my leaf shape. I'll select both of the leaf and the little stem area that I'm going to cut out of it, go to the Pathfinder palette and click here on minus front because this piece was created in front of the other one that was created last so it will always be in front. This will cut it out of the leaf itself. We just have a single leaf. Now we can size and rotate the leaf and place it in position on the stem of the flower. I'm going to use two of these, one on either side to create the duplicate. Just hold the "Alt" or "Option" key as you drag on the shape. Now I'm going to flip this with object transform and then reflect. Let me just flip it over the horizontal so that the curve goes in towards the stem, I'll click "Okay." Now this is the point at which you want to make sure that your flower looks exactly as you want it to look because this is the flower we're going to use for our ditsy pattern. Every one of these elements should be colored with a different set of colors. The petals of the flower are one gray, the center of the flower is another one. This is yet another gray and this is another gray. Now you can test this out by selecting either the entire flower, go to the swatches panel and click here on new color group. If you click "Selected artwork" and click "Okay," you should end up with four colors in here and the other four colors that are used in the piece of art. Let's select either everything and we'll group it with object group. Now that is critical. If you don't group it now, you're going to be in all sorts of trouble and I'm going to hold the "Shift" key as you size it down because you want it to be quite small. Now before you go ahead, I suggest it's a good idea to expand this line. So let's go to the Group Selection tool, let's just click on this line and choose Object, Expand. Now it doesn't have a Fill, it just has a Stroke, so we'll select Stroke and click "Okay". That means that all of these shapes are filled shapes and this one is no longer a line that has a stroke on it. It's just nice, and consistent. We'll want to check the last pallet, just make sure that we've got exactly what we want. Well, we've got path for each of the leaves, there's a group that has the stem in it, we can just drag it out of that group doesn't need to be in a group all by itself. The center of the flower and five petals and all of those are in just a single group. That's perfect arrangement. So now we've got the shape that we're going to use for our ditsy pattern, it's time to create the pattern itself. I'm just going to shrink it down, even a little bit smaller. So with this shape selective, I'm going to choose Effect, and Distort and Transform, and then Transform. I'll turn Preview on so I can see what I'm doing. I'm going to choose "Reflect Y." I'm going to start moving my shapes across the horizontal. Then I'll move them vertically as well, and increase the number of copies. What we want to say here is an arrangement of these flowers, so they're forming a zigzag pattern. Now you might want them to be a little bit closer because the closer they are, the better ditsy pattern result you're going to get. But we don't want them too close because we do need to rearrange them in a few minutes and we don't want them running into each other. I'm thinking an arrangement like this is pretty good, maybe just a little bit less on the vertical. I'll click, "Okay". Then I'll do it again. Effect, Distort and Transform, and then Transform. I'll click, "Apply new effect" because I want to now repeat this pattern down here. So let's go and turn Preview on. Let's increase the number of copies to probably about eight, which will give us one original plus eight copies. I'm going to increase the vertical. I can also increase the number of copies, shall I wish to do so? I want to square arrangement here. This grid of flowers with about this kind of spacing is pretty good. There is a little bit of spacing between them and we're going to need that in just a minute. So I'll click "Okay". Now we need to expand the shape because right now we just have a flower that's got two transformations applied to it. Let me just show you. Here is the flower selected and it's got two transformations applied to it, but it's not actually a whole series of flowers yet. So we'll choose "Object" and then "Expand Appearance". Now before you start ungrouping things, it's really critical that you don't go too far here or you are going to be in just so much trouble. So let's have a look. We've got everything selected, let's choose Object, Ungroup, and let's keep an eye on the layers palette right now we've got groups still here. So with everything still selected, will choose Object, Ungroup again. But what we don't want to do is go any further than this, because we want everything that makes up a flower to be in a group. So we want this to be a group and this to be a group and this to be a group. If you break them out then the next step is just plain not going to work for you. So just be really aware that you keep an eye on the layers palette, you break them out until you've got groups and every group is just one flower. We'll select "Diver Everything", and choose Object, Transform, and then Transform Each. Now the cycle with this Transform Each is to use the random option. I'm just going to zero everything out here because I've been in this dialogue before today. I want to show you what it's going to look like for you. It's going to be a set of a 100 percent for scale. The angle is going to be zero and the horizontal and vertical move is going to be nothing. So what we'll do is we're going to set the angle of rotation to 360. In other words, all of these flowers can be rotated 360 degrees. But if we select random, then they're going to be randomly rotated. So every one of them is going to be rotated somewhere between 0 and 360 degrees. You're starting to see this ditsy result. Now if you want your flowers to change size a little bit, you can do that too. I'm going to use 90 percent and 90 percent, which means that some of those flowers or be anything up to 90 percent of the size of the original flower. So they're going to vary between 90 and 100 percent of the original. They're going to be scale perfectly so the width and height proportions are going to be kept. At this point you may also want to increase a movement. So you may want to move this a little bit by a few pixels. Now what I'm looking for at this stage, as I'm moving, things are round, is I'm looking for a good ditsy pattern. I'm looking for the best ditsy pattern that I can get out of here because it's going to save me a whole lot of work in a minute. So you may want to experiment with different values here to see what you get and what you're not looking for, what you don't want is a lot of things that running to each other. So things that are going to be joined up like this one here and this one here. But you also want them to be pretty close. So these are problem to get exactly what you want but not what you don't want. So just work around these numbers to see as much variety as you can get in here, but with this few shapes overlapping each other as possible. When you've got, what do you think is a good thing and you can unscramble some of these, you just don't want to be doing it to all of them you can click "Okay". So when I click away from this, let's go and zoom in and let's have a look and see what we've got. What we're looking for is to then start moving around anything that's overlapping. We'll go to the Selection tool and here are two shapes that overlaps. I'm just going to grab one and move it over. So that's all you're going to do assess, run along those lines and just see anything that is overlapping, you just want to move it a little bit out of the way. Now you can move it a little bit out of the way or you could rotate the shape and maybe just rotate it around so that the paces aren't touching. So you're going to do that throughout the pattern. Now I'm going to do that and I'll come back in the next video and we'll see, how are we going to create a ditsy pattern from what we have here. 3. Ditsy Pattern #1 - Pt 2: At this point we've got a really nice arrangement of flowers that is a really good starter for our ditsy pattern. I'm going to select either all of these flowers and I'm going to shrink them so I'm going to hold the Shift key and just shrink them down so they're much smaller. I'm going to move this into the middle of my document. I'll select everything all over again and go to object and then pattern make. I'll click "Okay", well, if I see that dialogue and we'll go and grab the pattern options dialog. Now, to get the best possible mileage out of this pattern with it being almost impossible to find the repeat, you're going to choose "Brick by Column", and then you'll choose, half offset, and this is a half drop repeat. This is going to be the pattern pace and it's going to repeat over here, so the next time we're going to see it in line with this is going to be over here, makes a really big pattern, but of course right now we can say the pattern tiles, there's a space around here. I've just turned off the show tile edge, I find that helpful to do, to turn it off, so that I can say the edges and just see, when I don't have a visible pattern line. Right now the horizontal spacing looks pretty good to me, so I'm just going to concentrate on the vertical space and closing up these gaps. I'll make sure that this option here is disabled so that the height and the width will not change together, I just want to change the height. I'll come into the height dialogue and start pressing the down arrow key and that just closes the spacing up by one pixel for every tap of the down arrow key. Now, if you need to see whether you've gone too far or haven't gone far enough just squint at the screen, if you squint at the screen, you're going to see where those pattern lines are or aren't, so it just make things a little bit easier to see, you'll also see if there are gaps. Now, I'm seeing some gaps around here, but that's going to be easily fixed by turning back on this tile edge and then I'm going to fix the gaps, but I think right now I think I could make my height a little bit bigger. I'm just concerned that these flowers are jammed up a little bit too close together across this top edge, so let's check that again, yes, I think I've got a good setting there. We can zoom in here, this is one of the dialogues that you can have open and you can still zoom in to see where you're working. What we'll do at this point is start moving things around just on the edge. You can see here this shape here is not selectable, but this one is. If you want to move this shape you're going to find at the bottom of the dialog, so you just have to be a bit careful about where things are that you can move and you won't always be able to move things over the edge, that one's not selectable so if I want to move it, I have to move it down the bottom, but let's just go and fill in these gaps around where the tile edge is. Now at this point you might find that your computer struggles a bit, there are a lot of flowers here for it to keep track of and it's also repeating the pattern as it's doing this. You may want to close anything that is open that you're not actually using if you find that your computer is struggling a little. If you're not to have same lines through your pattern, you will want to make sure that at least part of some of the flowers go across this tile outline because that's going to otherwise show up as a slight same through your pattern and you don't want that to be the case. Now, here this flower that I've just moved is running up against these flowers over here. If you want to find these flowers, that might be a little bit tricky, but they're up here. They're going to be halfway through the pattern so it can be a little tricky to find the matching pairs, but if you're operating down here and you want to move something over here, chances are it's going to be in the middle of the pattern up here. I can't select this, but I can select this. If you've done a pretty good job with your random rotations and you've kept things pretty close together, but being careful not to overlap them, this is not this hard to get. I've done this pattern quite a few times and I've never really struggled with it being too close, I've just been really careful as I've developed the initial shapes and positioned them and tried to rotate them and this step has really been pretty easy to achieve. Here I've got two shapes that are actually running into each other and maybe didn't find them earlier, I want to make sure that they're not running into each other before I finish off the pattern. Now at this point, if you think you've got your pattern pretty much right, you'll go back out and view the entire document as much as you can see off it. Now I'm seeing three by three copies, you could even increase this to see more, like five by seven and just cover the whole area with your pattern. Turn show tile edge off and then squint. Have a look and see if you can see really obvious problems in this design. Now the only thing I can see as probably these three flowers here, are a little bit close but that's the only thing I'm seeing. Obviously, you're going to click on show tile edge because you need to work out where these three flowers are, you can't change those because they're outside the tile edge. You want to change them? You've got to go into these three here, and then you've got to go and pick them up and do something with them. That's how you break up that look. What you might do in terms of breaking it up as perhaps, select it and rotate it or flip it, do something that's going to break up that concept of three flowers being together and then when you've done that, go check it again, make sure that whatever you sought to do has been a positive result. Now when you're happy with what you've got, just click, "Done". You'll come back to your original arrangement of shapes, I'll just grab them and I'm going to drag them off the art board. I'll create a rectangle that is the size of the art board, that's 1,200 by 1,200 pixels in my case, and I'm going to align it to the art board. I have the fill selected so I'll click here to now fill it with my pattern tile. Now there's the ditsy pattern, we now have a grayscale ditsy pattern, we've got black petals and we've got lighter color stems and leaves. In the next video, we're going to see the reason why we created this as a grayscale image because we're going to color it in a couple of interesting ways. 4. Ditsy Pattern #1 - Pt 3: Here is our deity pattern that we've created and it's been done in gray scale. Now you want to check and make sure that the pattern is as you wanted to be before you go ahead with the re-coloring step. When you are ready to recolor it just select the filled rectangle. You'll need some colors to use. If you don't have colors already in your swatches panel that you want to use. Here's how you can find some. I'll go to Window and then Color Themes. I'll look up in the Explore area, Flowers. You could look up all sorts of things depending on what color scheme you wanted to look for. I want something that has two greens and two flat colors. I'll scroll through here and look for something that's going to help me with the variety of colors that I need. Now if I don't find exactly what I want, this one won't actually do because it's got two greens and two flower colors. I'm going to add that to the Swatches. But if I want to, I can mix and match to create a palette. I could go here and grab this one, it's just short a green. I'm looking here for a green that would go with that. Let's just go and get that. I'll close up this panel. I'm going to now remove one of these colors because I only need two greens and two flat color, I'll go and remove this one. Then I'll make up a color scheme out of what I've got here. I'll move this green into here. We're going to take these four colors and I'm going to remove these. I put those that I don't want to into a color swatch and I'll just drag that onto the trash can. I've got two sets of colors to use that have all the colors that I need in them to replace the petals and the center of the flower, the leaves and the stem. I'll go to the re-color artwork, I'm making sure I've got this rectangle selected, here my colors. Now, if you use solid black, there's a chance that you won't have a map for black. There wouldn't be a box here and there wouldn't be an arrow, there would just be a dash. You can click in this column, this new column to create a color. You can just add one in there and then make sure that this is an arrow because you need to be able to re-map the color. To use this flat color group to re-color my pattern, I'm just going to target it. Soon as I click on it, it's applied to the image. But you'll see that the greens have been applied to the darker areas which were the petals, and the pinks have been applied to the stem. If we don't want that to be the case, we can fix that. Let's go and drag the stem color up onto the green. Then this is a petal color, I'll just drag it down here. Then let's do the other two colors, will just reverse those. Now the pinks have been used for the center of the flower colors here, and the greens have been used for the stem. If we're happy with that, just click Okay. Let's zoom in to see what we've got. You can see we've got pinks on the flowers and two greens on the stems. We've got a second pattern in our pattern swatches. Whenever you re-color a pattern illustrator automatically gives you another pattern swatch. Here's the original shades of gray, and here is our newly recolored version. If you want to color again, go back to your shades of gray. Every time go back to your re-color artwork tool. Let's go and choose watercolor colors. We can again say that we've got what we want. It looks like this is pretty good. I might just reverse these greens. I think that's a better look and I'll click Okay. There's another color version of our pattern. This is a stronger version. This is more pastel. This is our original grayscale. Now there's one other option that you may want to consider and that is making this a true black and white pattern. With this grayscale version selected, let's go back to the re-color artwork tool. What I'm going to do here is double-click on this and pick up black. Well, this is solid black at 0, 0, 0, I'm just going to use that. I'm going to drag all of these colors up onto black. Because I want to create this as solid black but by default, it's not actually turning into black. The reason for that is that this has been set to scale teens. The original colors while they're being mapped onto black, are being mapped onto black as tints of black. If we want them all to be pure black will just click Exact, when I click away, everything is black. The petals, the stem and the leaves are all this solid black color. I'll click Okay. Again we've got another pattern. This is the gray scale version and this is black and white version. One single pattern correctly designed as a shades of gray, a grayscale pattern has allowed us to do a lot of things in terms of re-coloring really easily. We've got grayscale. We can color it as often as we like, with whatever colors we like. We've also got the ability to make it a solid color pattern. In this case, it's black, but it could just as easily be another color. It could be red. If you want to make it red, just go back to your grayscale again, go back to your re-color artwork tool, double-click on this color and make it whatever you want. Well, let's go for a red. Then we'll drag all the other colors up onto red. They're going to be created as tints of red by default, if you don't want them to be tints of red, if you want them to be solid red, go here and select Exact and click away. Now you've got a solid red pattern. Click Okay, and another patents being added to the Swatches panel. There is the first of our Ditsy Patterns designed for easy re-coloring. 5. Ditsy Pattern #2 - Pt 1: For the second, it's the pattern that we're going to be making. We're going to use a lot of elements and their multicolored elements to make sure that it's going to be easier and quicker for you to follow along. I'm going to be using a downloaded set of elements because we can create these elements relatively easy ourselves in Illustrator, but it's going to take a lot of time. I just want to focus on the pattern part of this. I'll give you the download link in the project section for this, you can download these vectors free from vecteezy. Click to download, then go to your downloads folder, unzip this file on a PC, you'll double-click to unzip it, and then choose Extract All, which will be up in the top of your file explorer panel. On a Mac, you just double-click and it unzips automatically. There's an SVG file and an APS, you'll open the SVG file in Illustrator. Now, I've already done that. Let's switch across to illustrator. When I opened the SVG file, I'm given a message that the font that was in use here was not available. Now just as an aside, this is not a particularly good way of distributing a far where you have a font that is in use. Typically you would expand that font into outlines so that you wouldn't encounter this error when you open the file now. It's not going to affect us because we're not using text, but just be aware if you are selling stock images, this is not a particular good way of distributing your stock images with fonts actually embedded on a file. We just going to click close because as I said, we don't care anything about this font. We need to get now to the pieces that we do want. I'm going to select the type here. Let's just go to the selection tool, I'll select it and delete it. Don't want this frame either, and I don't want any of these white dots, I'm going to select the white dots and press "Delete", and there's a whole series of dots around the edge that I've ascertained that if I just select on one of them, I can just delete all of them. What I'm left with is the background, which I'm not going to use and that's obviously in the back of the very end of the last pallets we just lock it down and turn it off. These are the elements I do want to use and this is everything that's left. You'll say that nothing appears when I turn the background on that wasn't previously visible. We've got rid of all white elements if you like. Let's select over everything and copy them with edit copy. Then select to create a brand new file. I'm going to make one 1,200 by 1,200 pixels in size, and we'll just paste this into it. We don't need a SVG file any longer, we can just close it. I'm not going to save changes to it in case I want to use it again later on. Now, if you open the APS file instead of the SVG, it should work just the same. I just wanted to show you that font error so that you could be reassured that you could just bypass that easily. Let's go into this image and let's pull out the pieces that we want. Now, the rest of this file has been well prepared. Everything is in groups. Every single one of these objects is a group and that's what we really need it to be, and they're all separate groups. When we just select an object and pull it away, it's pulling away nicely. I'm going to grab all these flowers, and I'm going to grab the big leaves, and I'm going to grab these two pieces too. The rest of this, I'm just going to tuck away to one side for now. I don't want that, but I do want these, and I'm going to start sizing and down. I'm going to hold the Shift key as I just vary the size a little bit. The green flowers are going to be quite a bit smaller. The pink flower, I want to be reasonably large. I want it to be the largest of the flowers, and this one quite a bit smaller, and let's shrink this leaf. I'm just holding the Shift key as I do this so that they're scaled in proportion, and let's shrink this one here too. We're going to focus on these being the main elements in the design. Let's just zoom back out with Control or Command 0. Let's move them up to the top of the document and zoom back in. I'm just arranging these. A little bit varied, so I don't want to everything together. Let's go and select over everything and will now choose Effect, distort, and transform and then transform the term preview on. I want a couple of copies of this and I want to move it horizontally. I'm going to take it out to about here. That'll give me a nice arrangement of the shapes. I'll click "Okay". Now at this point, if I think that these two shapes are too close together, I can come into this version and just move them around a little bit to spread them out a little bit. It's important to note that these shapes are the ones that have the transform applied to them, and none of these are actually selectable. You can only select this set of shapes here. Now, we're going to make another set of these with effect distorted and transform and then transform, I'll apply new effect. Turn preview on. I want a couple of copies cause I want to make this a square object if you like, and let's increase the vertical here. When I'm done, I'll click "Okay". Now we'll go and grab this object, this collection of objects here which have got two transforms applied to it, and we'll choose object Expand Appearance, and that expands it into its component parts. Now, before we go any further, we've got a lot of things happening here in the Layers palette, and I want to keep all of these objects selected and I'm going to add a new layer. I'm just going to click here on Create New Layer, and if we have a look at the layers palette, this layer is at the very top and it select itself. It's got this blue selection here. We don't want to actually click here, we want to leave all of these shapes selected, but we want to have this layer up here with blue on it. Just like that, and now if we choose Object, Arrange, Send to Current Layer, what we'll do is we'll take all of the shapes that we had selected and put them on a new layer all by themselves; and that just makes things a lot neater and it's going to help us in just a minute. Now, if we have a look at this flower object here, you'll see that it's got lots of flowers in it. We still need to Ungroup things, but we really need to focus on this last palette because we want to stop before we ungroup a single flower. We don't want to ungroup a flower into its component pieces, but we do want every one of these flowers and every one of these leaves to be a separate group. Let's choose object, Ungroup, and you can see here that this group still has subgroups. We're going to choose object Ungroup again. But this is where we're going to start because if we Ungroup once more, we're going to break each of these flowers, each of these elements into its component pieces, and that's just going to be a total disaster. If you do that, you'd really need to start over or wind back to undo what it is that you've just done. Let's go and move these objects around. I'm going to select over all of them. Choose Object, Transform and Transform Each, and Transform Each is your new best friend as far as trying to break up the regularity of this shape. Let's go to Preview, and we're going to turn Random on, and we're going to change the angle to 360, and we're also going to move these horizontally and vertically. We're going to try for something like a 20 pixel horizontal movement, and then I'll just say what I can do in terms of vertical movement, and what you're looking for at this point is just a broken up arrangement, and when you see it, you want to stop. I'm actually thinking this is pretty good, your values might differ, so don't worry about what the values are, but just look for something that is a broken up and irregular pattern here. What we're trying to do at this stage is create all the elements that we need for this deep-sea pattern, but without having to move everything around and position everything by hand. We're having Illustrator do the work for us. What we're asking Illustrator to do is not to change the size of any of these objects, but to move them somewhere between 20 pixels and zero pixels horizontally and zero and minus 17 pixels vertically, and to do that randomly, so not every single shape it moved, but a random amount of movement for each particular shape, and then change the angle somewhere between zero and 360 for each of the shapes. The rotations are going to be different for every single shape, and you just want to move around these values until you see something that's going to require you to do the least possible amount of work; and what you don't want to have is a lot of shapes that are overlapping each other. When you find something you like, just click "Okay". We've done with this set of objects. Let's just lock them down and let's just close up that layer so we can focus on the rest of the document, and that is these little shapes here. Let's just move them up close by and let's start working with those. What we're going to do here is pretty much the same thing. We're going to create these elements so that we can use them to fill in the spaces in a minute in these objects here. I'm going to move everything into a square shape here. I'm just arranging these pieces into a square. These dots are all a single objects. Let make some nice and easy to move around. Now if there's an object that you want more than the other objects to appear in this design, then you can just duplicate it. If I wanted quite a bit more pink in this design then I wanted green, for example, I could make a duplicate of that pink shape and put it somewhere always away from the other pink one, and this is going to build in a lot more pink into the design, than there are the other colors. I'm just looking at this shape here. Might just scale it down a little bit. I don't want to drop the size of these objects too much, but maybe just a little bit as filler objects. I'm going to drag a duplicate away, and I'll hold the Alt or Option key to make sure that this is a duplicate, and then I'm going to do the same thing here. I want to end up with roughly a square arrangement that I can put over these objects here. But before we go, let's just rotate these. We go to Object, Transform, and we'll choose Transform Each again. We're not going to move this. I don't think that there's any necessity to actually move these, but there is a necessity to rotate them. We'll choose Random, and choose Rotate, and then just click "Okay", and then we'll move these on top of this slot, and if you want to resize them, if you're okay with the size of the objects changing just a little bit, you could resize them to pretty much scale this set of objects right over the top of the original set. This is what we've got. We've got a set of objects here and another set of objects here. We're going to turn off the bottom lot and we're going to lock them down. We're just going to work with this top set right now, and what you'll do is start to move things around to separate these from each other. Anything that was overlapped, you now going to work at moving away, and this is going to be fairly straightforward, and if things are a little bit close to each other, then you can move them to break up that arrangement. You can also duplicate things. If you'd like another green leaf or green flower over here, you can bring it in. You try to break up the arrangement, but so far what we've done is saved ourselves a lot of work in placing and arranging these in the first place because this is a randomish placement, and we just want to take advantage of that, but we don't want any pieces overlapping. Generally, what I'll do with these is I'll do one run through the design. Look at everything and move things around, and then I'll come back and do a second run through the design just to make sure that I didn't miss anything the first time, and if I'm pretty happy with that, then we'll call that good and go on to the next step, and in the next video we're going to do just that. 6. Ditsy Pattern #2 - Pt 2: Now at this point it's a really good idea to have saved your file because this pattern is actually going to put quite a bit of pressure on your computer. So I suggest that you also close everything down that you don't need just to take a bit of pressure off your computer. Now at this stage, I'm going to unlock the middle set of objects and just turn them on. But the set of objects that we've already been working with, I'm going to grab them on that layer and I'm going to adjust them down to about 50 percent opacity. Now that's going to be helpful in the sense that when you look at these objects now, anything that's got 50 percent opacity is objects that you have already arranged and also that aren't the ones that you're supposed to be arranging now, which is the second version. I'm also going to move them underneath. So I'm going to switch the layers around so that the objects that we're actually working on and focusing on are on top and these 50 percent opaque ones are on the bottom. It's going to make things a little bit easier to see and to work with. Let's zoom in up the top here. What you're going to do is exactly pretty much what you've been doing up until now is moving things out of the way. But hopefully, you're going to have objects that are overlapping Because at this point, you can then start to did lead some of those overlapping object. Again, that's going to break up this pattern. We had this blue shape over here and we just deleted it. So we've broken up the pattern quite a bit by replacing it with a different object. So we're just going to start moving things around a little bit and saying to ourselves, do we really want this green flower or probably remove it, and just fill up that space with these other objects. Now because the objects are all unlocked, you can move them really easily. So I might say, I don't want this pink flower, I want my set of green dots. Instead, you won't always delete everything that's overlapping. You might be able to fit things in by just moving them around a little bit. Depending on the design elements that you're working with, you may also want to shrink them. I'm not going to do that. I want the design elements to stay the same size as they were, but that doesn't mean that you have to do it that way. You can do it whatever way you like to set your own rules for how your patents is going to be put together. But you do have or should have plenty of objects at this stage. So you should be able to move things around and delete a few objects if they're overlapping and not feel bad about deleting them because you're looking at a tight formation but you certainly want to have variety and you don't want this to look like a repeating pattern. That's not supposed to look like a repeating pattern. You're not supposed to be able to see these repeated elements see where they repeat. So this is going to take a little bit of time and you just want to work through it again. I would do it the same way as I did the first set of objects. But I'll on the layer underneath is all go through and do one run to make sure that nothing is overlapping anything, and then having done that, I'll come back and do a second run just to make sure I didn't miss anything. So this is, as I said, it's going to take me quite a while. To do so, I'm going to go ahead and do that, and we're going to come back in the next video and see where we go to from here. 7. Ditsy Pattern #2 - Pt 3: At this stage, you should have rearranged all of your pieces so that nothing is overlapping. It's a good idea right now to squint and just check to make sure that you don't have any obvious gaps in your design. You might need to move things around a little bit to cover up those gaps or fill in those gaps. Now we still have some elements that are at a lower opacity than the other, so let's go back to the last panel. The last panel can always be obtained either through the panel here or Window and Layers or you can just press F7, which I find really handy. Let's go back to the shapes and let's just make sure that everything is at 100 percent opacity. This is going to be the foundation of our pattern. At this point, before I go any further, I want everything on a layer. I'm going to create a brand new layer. I'll go and select all of these objects, click on the new layer and just choose Object, Arrange, Send to Current Layer, and that sends everything to this top-most layer. I can get rid of any of these stray layers that we inherited from the previous document and everything is nice and neat. I'll press Control or Command Zero to zoom back out. I'm going to move this into the center of the art board. I'm also going to save my file because I want to save the work that I've done to date. Now we're going to make this into a seamless repeating pattern and we're going to do exactly as we did with the previous pattern. We're going to do this as a half drop repeat so that we get the most possible mileage out of the work that we've done. Let's go over all of your shapes, choose Object, Pattern, and then Make. You're going to select Brick by Column and you'll do a half Offset, and that is your half drop repeating pattern. Now you probably have to bring these areas in a little bit closer. Let me choose Show Tile Edge. This is the tile that we're working in and we want to bring everything a little bit closer so that we close up these gaps. I'm going to make sure that I adjust the height and the width independently. At the moment, it's 276. I'll take it down to 250 and see what happens. It's easier at this point to just type values in here than try and press the up or down arrow key, because otherwise they're going to work so slowly that is going to be quite time consuming. I think that's a little bit too much of a closeup. I'm going to try 255, maybe 260. I think that's better. Now our work are closing up the width. Given that I probably only had to adjust the height by about 20 pixels, I'm going to learn that lesson. This is 297. I'm going to set it to 277 and see what that looks like. It's too close, so I am going to bring it further out. I'll try 284, something like that, and see how that looks. That looks much better. Now I'm just squinting to see if I can see lines through the image and the lines. I'm seeing in actual fact down the middle of the pattern piece itself. Any of the problems in this vertical line here that I'm seeing are not as a result of having adjusted the spacing, they're as a result of the pattern itself, so I need to fix those. It's too many green flowers in a row basically is what I'm seeing there. Now that we've got this, what I'm going to do is go and select the smallest number of copies I can work with. I'm thinking that probably three by three is going to be the smallest number, so that's a good set of values. I'm going to dim the copies to 50 percent and you're going to see in a minute why that's going to be really important. Let's just zoom in to the middle of this design and let's fix up this green flower problem that I've got. I'm going to take this pink flower here and I'm going to replace it with the green flower. I'm just going to juggle those. Now at this point, you'll probably find that your computer starts grinding pretty close to a hole so you just need to be patient with it, and I strongly suggest you turn off absolutely anything that you don't need to be running at this time. Now we're going to look at the overlapping problems. The reason why we dimmed copies to 50 percent is because it's really hard to see what's causing these problems. So if you dim the copies to 50 percent, you know that copies the elements that you can actually move around and they're going to impact the design. I can fill up these gaps here that I'm seeing by moving these pieces a little bit over the edge here, but this is an accident. There's these two pieces that are coming head to head here and I can either move the pace or I can delete it. Sometimes you might need to delete a pace because you might just have too many paces. I'm going to see if I can actually salvage it by just moving some of these other elements around to make room for it. Being patient with your computer because it will take some time probably to work with the shapes just depending on how big a pattern you're working with. Now this shape here is going to be somewhere else in the design. It's going to probably be one of these, I think it's this one over here. One of these pieces is going to have to go. There's too much happening here that I just can't fix up the issue. I can't move everything around enough, so it's going to move things in to position here and go and try and find where this leaf is if it's over here. You work around the edges. The edges are going to be where the accidents are going to happen. You're going to have paces that are going to be running into each other. You just need to look for the ones that are at 100 percent opacity. Anything that's at a dimmed opacity is not even worth looking for down here because it's not the one that you can select. It's going to be elsewhere in the design. Here's another accident here. That's it there, so I'm just going to remove this one. That saves this problem happening up here. Once you have run around the edges of your design and just made sure that there is nothing that's having an accident with anything else, that there are not pieces that are touching or worse still overlapping, once you're pretty happy with the edges, I would go back and zoom out. I'm just going to zoom all the way out. At this point, I'm also going to turn off this dimmed copies and I'm going to turn off the tile edge, because what I want to do is have a look at the design and see if I'm seeing any problems with it. The problems I'm seeing is still in that original pattern pieces, these elements here. I think that there are simply too many of them, so I'm going to come into this area and just see if I can work on it a little bit. What I'm trying to do here is lighten up this area a little bit. It seemed to be a little bit too intense. By changing some of the colors, replacing a blue flower with a pink one and quite a big set of leaves with a smaller set of leaves, I'm hopeful that that might help the pattern. Let's just zoom out and see if I've been successful. Again, testing this by turning off your dimmed copies and by turning off your tile edge. Now I think I could probably do a little bit more work here, but I'm going to call this good for now. But that's basically what you're going to be doing. As soon as you've got the pattern that you like, just click "Done". Now you don't need this pattern piece any longer, so you can just move it out to one side and let's test our pattern. Going to make a rectangle that is the size of the art board, which is 1,200 by 1,200 pixels. I'll center it on the art board, target the Fill, and click to fill it with our pattern. Now if you are looking through the pattern at this stage and if you see a mistake, and this is obviously the same with the previous pattern we made as well as this one, and I'm seeing here that there's a pink flower a little bit close. Things that I perhaps didn't see originally, I would now like to make a change to. What I'll do is either drag this shape away or I can delete it and redo it in just a minute, and I'll double-click on the new pattern. That opens up this pattern editing dialogue so we can go back to working on the pattern. Again, I'll show my tile edge and dim the copies. I'll go back into this area, just zoom into this area, and see if I can locate the things that I saw earlier that was slight problems. For example, this pink flower that really was a little bit close to the leaf. You can move things around a little bit at this stage. If you see problems, just go and fix them. When you're done, click "Done". What that does is it updates the pattern piece as well. I'm just going to zoom back out. Anytime I'm doing that, I'm just pressing Control or Command Zero. The pattern here in the rectangle has been updated with the most recent version of the pattern, so we're not seeing that clash with that small pink flower. There is another ditsy pattern. It's a pattern of really tightly placed objects. It's a really rewarding pattern to make and it is relatively easy once you see how you're going to actually get these pieces in, and you just want to make the setup as easy as possible for yourself so you're not sitting there for hours and hours on end dragging pieces into position. You just want to be making minor arrangement of the pieces rather than actually positioning them in the first place. There's your second ditsy pattern and also the method that you're going to use to edit these patterns when you see things that you want to make changes to at this point. 8. Project and wrapup: Now that we've finished all the video content for this course, it's over to you. Your project for this class will be to create a ditsy pattern of your own. Now you might choose to download a set of elements from Vecteezy. You can certainly download and use those that I have used in this class. But you may also choose to do just the single element ditsy pattern and make your own design. When you're done with your ditsy pattern, post an image of it as your class project. Now as always with the classes on Skillshare, you're going to see a prompt from time to time to review the class. If you did enjoy the class and if you did learn things from it, would you please complete the review for me? These reviews really help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from, and if you could add just a few words in the review that's also really good too. Now if you have questions and want to contact me, the community area of the class is a really good place to ask a question. If you see the follow link on the screen, click it to follow me, so you'll be alerted when new classes are released. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.