Make Simple Geometric Shapes in Adobe Illustrator CC

1. Class Trailer: Hi everyone. My name is Esther Nariyoshi. I am a surface pattern designer, a hand letterer and an Illustrator based in Michigan. In this class, we're going to learn how to make simple geometric shapes using Adobe Illustrator CC. I'm going to take you step-by-step through my process. I will walk you through the basics of shapes, custom brushes, half drop patterns and colors. By the end of this class, you will have the skills of creating a stamp collection of your own. This class is for beginners who want to get over the learning curve or veteran designers who simply just want to flex their illustrator muscles. As an added bonus, I will also share some of my thoughts on protecting your artwork legally. Without further ado, let's jump in. 2. Class Project: For a class project, make one stamp using three techniques that you have learned from this class. Be sure to post them in the student gallery. I would love to see them. 3. Workplace Setup: We'll start our project by creating a new document. Come to the left and click "Create New". Right away you will see some options from the template, but for our project, I will start with 1600 pixels by 900 pixels. Because it will straighter in the vector-based program, the size doesn't really matter at the beginning because you can always change your mind and that won't affect the quality of your graphics. I'll just click "Create". If your workspace has been cropped, you can always click "F" to fit the workspace to full screen. If you'll look on the right-hand side, your workspace may look slightly different than mine. That's probably because we have different workspace settings. What you can do is to come over to the workspace drop-down menu and click whatever workspace you prefer. For our project, I will start with Painting just because all the tools that we're going to use are available on the right already. I'd like to start with a clean palette. In terms of swatches and brushes and symbols, Illustrator does give you some default choices, but I find those really irrelevant. I will just come to Window and click "Actions". Here, there is a delete unused panel items, you just click "Play" and you'll have it taken care of. Anytime you want to expand or shrink a certain panel, you can just double-click and it will automatically make the arrangement. The next thing I would do before even designing is to save the file. You can hit Command S on your keyboard and save to a location on your computer and click "Okay". Now we're ready to go. 4. Colors: Before I start drawing, let's talk about colors. I like to start my process with a group of colors that I enjoy working with. It usually contains something cool, something warm, and something neutral. By no means, these have to be the final colors that I end up with. But I find it really easy to have a group of colors all ready so that I can focus my mind on shape making or drawing. Illustrator makes it really easy to change colors. If you want, you can always come back and tweak it. For our class, I chose this color group that is high contrasts and happy, which reflect this theme of Swedish folk art. Feel free to choose whatever colors you are feeling like. Once you are happy, you can just select them all and come over to the Swatches panel and click the folder icon. It will allow you to make a new color group. Make sure to convert process to global risks checked. It will make the tweaking colors a lot easier later on. Once you're happy with, just click "Okay". Now, we have our color group that we can work with. This class does assume that you have a very basic understanding of Adobe Illustrator. However, if anytime you have any questions, feel free to post on the discussion group, I will be very happy to bridge the gap for you. 5. Basic Shapes: All right, let's talk about basic shapes. These guys are the foundational pieces and the basic building blocks that we're going to use to build more complex shapes. Most of these shapes are nested under this little icon right here. Once you click on "Hold", you'll be able to see the Fly-out menu, and these are different options that you have. We'll go over most of these tools except the Flare Tool, which I still have no idea what it does and you can just click, select. We'll get over these guys. To make a rectangle, you can just click keyboard shortcut "M", and to click and drag. The same thing for the Elipse Tool, just click "L", and click and drag. You can shape it however you want. Anytime you want to change color, just make sure the fill is in front over here, and then click the color. If you want to add a line, you can just click the "Stroke option" and at outline. You can change the width of the stroke by click over here stroke and make it bigger or smaller. Anytime you want to get rid of the stroke, you just come over to those stroke over here and click "none", and it would be gone. The next shape we're going to draw is this little hexagon right here. You can do that by clicking this Flyout menu and select Polygon tool. By default, you will have six sides, which is a hexagon, but you can also change the number of sides by clicking up and down arrow and you can rotate by just changing the position of the cursor. To make a rectangle, you can just click and drag and change the sides to three and let go. You want to change color. Just come over here, make sure the fill is in front of stroke and click any Color. You will notice that as my cursor moves, there's little pink thing showing up once in awhile. That's because I have my smart guides turned on over here which has come to view and click "Smart Guides." These are very helpful, especially when you create geometric patterns. Next, we'll make a star. You can come over to the same Flyout menu and click "Start Tool". Right here. By default you will have five pointed star, but you can change the shape by pressing up and down arrow on your keyboard. Do this. Next, let's make just a straight line. You can always click the line tool over here but I got used to using the Forward Slash on your keyboard. Can just click and drag. Make sure the stroke color is not empty so you will actually see the line and you can change the width by changing the weight over here. At any point, if you want to give your shapes, outline or stroke, you can always just click and change the stroke color right here. Sometimes you will find yourself in need of very specific shape that cannot be achieved by just creating combination of these tools. In that case, you probably need Pen Tool over here. We'll use a little bit of that in our class. I encourage you just to just have fun with it and play with it and see how it works and maybe take some additional class if you really interested. Before we move on, I'd like to talk about the Shift key. Basically what it does is that, it will constrain your shape to a special degree or a ratio. I'll show you what I mean by that. Say that you want to create a special circle that is perfectly round. You can hold onto Shift key and click and drag. Boom. Same thing for the Rectangle Tool, click "M" and click and drag you have a perfect square over here. For Polygon Tool, you will position the shape up right. Just click and drag and hold onto Shift key. Similar things happens with Star Tool. Just hold onto shift key and drag. You will make the whatever shape that you are making perfectly sitting upright and symmetrical. If you're making a line, holding onto Shift key wall constrain your lying by 45 degree, which is a very convenient when you are making highly symmetrical and geometric shapes. Also when you are moving a shape, holding onto Shift key will constrain that movement to 45 degree horizontal and vertical, which can be really convenient when you need that accuracy. Last but not least, there's also Option key. What it does is that you will create a shape from the center instead of a corner. Say that if I want to make a rectangle while holding on to Option key, the wall, make a shape from the center of it. Depending on what your envision for your design, these keys can be very helpful. Like I mentioned at the beginning, illustrator is very flexible with resizing. However, if you do know specific dimension that you need to design within, for example, if you are creating a business cards that needs to be three inches by two inches. You can do that by clicking "Rectangle Tool" and instead of drag and click, you just do click. You will see this little window that let you set specific number. You can do inches or you can do pixels. It will translate to whatever default measurement you have for this document. So I would just do three inches for this and two inches and click "OK." You can also view the size of the document through the ruler here on top. You can turn it on and off by clicking command "R". At any point, you can change the unit number by right-clicking. For example, I'll change this one to pixels. You'll also be able to see the exact dimension by clicking transform over here, and you can also make changes. This little link means that it will constrain the ratio of your shape, you can click it just to remove that constraint. These are the basic shapes that comes with Adobe Illustrator. In our next class, we'll be going over some fun customization that we can play with using these building blocks. 6. Custom Shapes: In this class we're going for some fun exercises to make these geometric floor holes. We'll start with this simple yellow flower right here. Come over to the polygon tool and click.You can decide however many petal you want to have. In this case, I choose five. You can come to Effect, Distort & Transform, Pucker & Bloat.You can turn on the preview to see how the slider affect the shape of the flower. Can go pretty extreme. It's fun to play with it and see what it does. I'm happy with this. Click ''Okay''. Once you're happy with what you created, you want to come to the Object and click Expand Appearance. Basically Adobe Illustrator translated the shape that you created into a bunch of anchor points that you can use to interact with other shape. As you will notice we'll need a perfect circle in the middle. Press L for ellipse tool and hold onto Shift key for a perfect circle, and give it a different color. You can always manually align two objects, but I find it really easy to use Illustrator to do that, especially if I need really accurate results. For example, in this case I will select them both and come over to the align panel over here. You can choose your reference point to align everybody to the art board or to selection. In our case, we want these two objects to align to each other. I will click here. As you might have noticed in our original flower, the middle portion is actually hollow. Basically the little circle bites off the little flower at the bottom. To achieve that result you can come back to the two shape over here and come to the Pathfinder tool. If you don't have Pathfinder right away, you can come to Window and click Pathfinder. What we need here is minus font and come over here to the second option. I just call it bite tool because that's what it does. Now there's our little flower. Let's move this one aside and look at this little flower right here. Basically we have a variation of the first flower that we made. Instead of five petals we have eight over here, and the circle in the middle is a little bit bigger. I will hit Command Zero to fit the art board to view, and come over to the polygon tool and make sure I have eight sides. We can click Up and Down arrow to change shape. I'm happy with that. Give it a pink. Come here to click Effect, and Distort & Transform, Pucker & Bloat. Make sure you turn on the preview, and just to make the effect a little bit broader in this case, click ''Okay''. Next I want to make a perfect circle by hitting out and hold onto Shift and give it a different color. I can select them both and click whichever one I want to set as alignment reference and align it vertically and horizontally. You also want to expand this shape into a bunch of anchor points. Expand Appearance, you can select them both and hit Command and G to group them so that you don't actually misplace them by accident. If you want to make them smaller, but retaining the ratio you want to hold onto Shift key and just drag. Let's put it aside and come over to the next one, over here. I've made a simple guide to help you understand the structure of the flowers. The first two flowers are fairly simple, and now we look at the third one. It's basically built on what we have already known. We need to create a eight-petaled flower, and on top of that, there is a identical one. The twist is that we rotate just a little bit to create this effect over here, and then we want a little circle on top. With that in mind, let's make it. We want to make our polygon tool and get a different color. To store Transform, Pucker & Bloat, Preview. Now you want to come over to Object and click Expand Appearance. That will turn an effect into a shape. Looking at this shape over here, we will want identical, lighter green version of that on top of the original one. We can achieve that by hitting Command C for copy and Command F for paste in front. Let's give it a different color, and now we want to rotate it to maybe 30 degrees. To do that, hit keyboard Shortcut E for free transform tool, and hover over the corner and click and drag. By default, Illustrator will recognize the center of this object as a rotating center, which works great for us. If you know there's certain specific angle that you want your object to rotate, you can always right-click on the Object and come to Transform and click Rotate. You can do other transformation. For example, move, reflect, which is making a mirror image of your object in scale. Just play with these options and see what it does. Now we will want a circle in the middle. To align all these three shapes to the center, I would select them all and click the circle in the middle, come to Align and align them vertically and horizontally. Before I move on I want to group them so their relative position will not change. I want to resize and put them on the side. As we learn together in our class, I would really encourage you to play with the sliders and click different buttons and see what happens.The goal of our class is not to just reproduce what I make, but really to equip you with knowledge that you need to bring out your own creativity. That being said let's move on to this little geometric snowflake. As you can see the diagram, there is a circle in the middle, fairly simple, and this eight little clock-like little thing in the back. Let's figure out how to make it. As you look closely each one of these are identical to each other. Basically we will make one of these shape and rotate them seven times. I'll start by zooming back a little bit. Can hit Command Zero to fit the whole art board. I want ellipse, that is a perfect circle by holding on to Shift and a very tall rectangle. You want to hit M to make rectangle. Although the smart guides are very helpful visually but if you really want it to be accurate, I would select them both and click one of them to be reference and click Horizontal Align center. Now we have one of these elements. Next we just need to rotate this element a few times. To do that, you can hit R. Immediately you will discover that there's little TO mark in the center which Illustrator automatically recognize the rotating center as the center of the object, which is not our goal in this case. Now hit Command Z. To achieve our purpose, we will need to re-select the object and hit R and click the new center we wanted to rotate by. Right now if we just drag and release, it will just change this object's position instead of making a copy. If you do want to make a copy, you can just hold onto to Option key. As you can see the cursor change to double arrow instead of single one. You can just click and drag. You can also choose to hold on to Shift key to constrain the angle by 45 degree. Let go. I hope you're not super overwhelmed by how many things that you have to hold onto while drawing. Over time, these things does become kind of muscle memory. As you design, you don't even think about it. Thankfully, Illustrator does remember what you have done previously. The immediate previous step. So in this case, we can use Illustrator to finish the rest of the rotation since it's basically doing the same thing. What you can do is to click Command D, for repeating. You just keep clicking until you have everybody here. Now all you need to do is to make a perfect circle right here and you're done for this little snowflake. Next, we're moving on to this little leaf over here. If you'll look at the structure on the right, it's basically two oval, identical oval overlapping each other. We just want to have the overlapped area and get rid of the shaded area over here. Let's figure out how to do that. First, we need to free hand an oval. Just click and drag. Then we want to duplicate it by holding onto Option key. You can also hold onto Shift key to make it perfectly horizontal. But if it's too much, you can just hold on to Option key to drag it. Say, if you are way way off, over here you can always align it by one of the object, horizontally. Now, what we need is the overlapped area between the two. There are two ways to do that. One of the ways is to use Pathfinder tool and click Intersect. It will give you the overlapped area. I'll just hit Command Z to undo it. To show you another way, which is Shape Builder Tool. If you come to the menu over here, hover over the two circle. Its called Shape Builder. But I often just use Shift M. To pull it out. By default, you can drag and then make a huge shape. But that's not what we need. What we need is the middle part. What you can do is to hold on to Option key to get rid of the parts that you don't want. You are left with overlapped area over here. Right now what we need is to split this leaf into two. What I will do is to come to Scissors tool or hit C, and we click the top portion and bottom portion. What it does is that it was split this one anchor point into overlapping two. I just clicked V to select your left half leaf and give it a different color. That one is done. Let me give you another example. Say that we make a rectangle over here, and we want to cut through the shape. Almost diagonally over here. We can hit C for Scissors tool. Just remember C for cut. That helps you to memorize the keyboard shortcut. Here's my entry point. Click and here's my exit point. I'll just give this shape a different color so you will see. Basically imagine that you're holding a scissor. Here's your start. Where you start cutting and here's where you exit the paper, you're done with it. Illustrator draws a straight line between the two. So that you basically cut the shape in two. But do notice that the shape is not closed. As I drag you see that there is an open gap. To solve that problem, you can hit P and click over here and close the gap. You will see the little circle over there indicating that you're about to close the shape. Do the same thing for here. Click one side and come to another side and click. Now you have it. Now actually it's a good time for you to pause and try to make this structure on your own. I have deconstructed for you over here. In a minute, I will show you how I do it in action. But right now, just have fun and make it and come back in a minute. I'll start with two of them and use the overlapped area. Put it aside and I start. I'll start making these guys circle and tall rectangle. Align them. Maybe the rectangle is a little bit too tall. I will hit E for free transform and make it a little bit shorter. I do want another one with a taller rectangle. I'll just hit E to drag it a little taller. We need to rotate, shift to keep the angle 45 degree and option to track. Option Shift to drag vertically. Actually you know what? You can drag once and hit Command D to repeat to make the rest happen. Now I will want this to be a whole group. Command G and I want it to be symmetrical. I need you to have a symmetrical shape. Now hit Reflect. Make sure we want a copy. If I hit Okay, it will just make the original shape reflect. But we want additional copy so we'll just hit Copy and will need to reposition. Reposition the whole thing to make sure they have a little bit overlap here. But not too much. Drag to click all the parts over here. I would want to see this whole thing as a group. So Command G to group them. Click here. You know what? I can align them with Illustrator Align tool. I will click command G. Right now, I have two group. One is the side veins and another one is the middle one. I would want to align the two object together. Align to selection. Give it a different color. Make it a little bit smaller. Now, I would want to see this whole thing as a group, Command G. It's still a little bit too big. I will just make it a bit smaller and aligned. Say that I'm way off. Oops, say I'm way off over here. I'll just want to align here with each other. Now we're done with this shape. Let's look at the final flora here. The structure itself, it's very simple. But I do want to go over how I made this little leaf over here. As you can see, there are only four anchor points. It's pretty clean. Which is pretty hard to achieve that just by tracing using Pen tool. Let me show you what I did over here. Zoom back a little bit. I start with a base oval over here. If you hold onto Command key, you will be able to see the anchor points' distribution. There are four over here, but they're all smooth at this point. To make this leaf happen, I would want to convert one of them to pointy anchor points. What I did is to click A to select one anchor point, A for direct selection. To select this particular anchor point and come to the left upper side over here, to convert selected anchor points to corner. Instantly, you will see it has the leafy look already. Then I want to drag it down a little bit and just to adjust the side handle a tiny bit to make it happen. It's a lot quicker and a lot less complicated than using a Pen tool. That's all the custom shapes I want to cover in this lesson. Believe it or not, you're actually 90 percent done in terms of learning and getting over the learning curve. In the next few sections we're going over how to make custom shapes and patterns. It sounds really complicated, but it's actually a lot easier compared to what we covered over here. Pat yourself on the back and let's carry on. 7. Custom Brushes: In this lesson, we're going to cover how to make custom brushes. Long story short, custom brushes really can speed up your workflow, especially when there's a lot of repetition in your motifs. Let's look at this guy first. Of course, you can make one shape that looks like that and rotated maybe 20 times. It takes a lot of calculation to make it really perfect and a lot of alignment to make the position look great. But also you can make just one simple brush that can achieve the same visual purpose. Let's talk about repeating unit for a second. Say that we want to make a brush that draws like train track from left to right. Each one of these rectangle is called motif and we want this motif to be repeated over and over again. Then we put the rectangle inside of frame over here, then we call the entire thing repeating unit. Now we're just need Illustrator to understand that we want to make a brush out of this repeating unit. Let's move it over to here. Since we don't want a frame to be actually visible, we would want to turn off this stroke over here by clicking none. The bounding box is still there, it just not visible to us, but it's important for Illustrator to tell where do we want the repeating unit to start and end. Once you are happy with that, select them both and click new brush, select pattern brush, and then click okay. Right away you will see a preview of how the brush may look like. You may want to play with a corner to see which one you like better. I'll just leave it as it is. There are different fit options and it's pretty straightforward. When you come to the method drop-down menu, it's important to leave it as Hugh Shift instead of all other options because this will make the coloring a lot easier. Click "Okay". You will see your new brush on the brushes panel. To test it, you can just start a line. Make sure the stroke is in front of the fill and click the pattern brush. You can change the width by selecting different value. With that in mind, now we can look at this motif with fresh eyes. It's basically a circle with the new brush applied. Make sure we have the stroke in front and click the brush. Maybe a slightly thicker weight value. We draw another circle in front of it and you hit shift X to switch the fill and stroke value. Although it does appear that the pattern is a little bit too sparse compared to what we had over here and we can make that change by dragging this brush over here. Let's zoom in to take a look. First, let's ungroup this. In the middle is our original repeating unit. We don't have to care about what's on left and right, it's irrelevant for our case. Our problem was the bounding box, it's too big, we want it to be a little bit smaller, so each motif have a little bit less space between them. To do that, we want to ungroup it and click the bounding box and make it smaller. We notice that there's another bounding box, which is a little bit strange, I do not know why, you just delete it. Make sure that you have only one bounding box over here. You can click new brush, pattern brush, change the method to Hugh Shift, click "Okay". Let's test it. Come over to the outline right here and click the new brush. A lot better. Maybe we can change color and you can, of course, align the two to each other. There is that. The second and the third follows the same logic. As you can see, the great frame is the bounding box. It's okay for the stem to be bigger than the frame because it's perfectly horizontal, it won't actually affect how it looks at the end. Yeah, just try to make these and get familiar with what we have learned so far. Now let us look at this little flower over here. I want the stem between the guides to stretch, but not the flower. I'll show you what I mean. Say that I'm making a super long curve. See the stem did stretch, but the flower stayed the same. You can really use this technique to make a very flowy pattern. Now let's learn how to do this. Let's start by placing the flower over here and make sure you want to have the stem and the flower selected and come to the new brush tool. This time, we want to use alt brush. Click "Okay". Under the brush scale options, the third option says stretch between guides. That's exactly what we need. You can click and drag the guides. So what it does is to stretch between the guides but leave the ends alone. I want to change the method to Hugh Shift and click "Okay" and it's done. You can test it and give it a different color, well select it and give it a different color. It's really simple and easy. Last, let's talk about how to make this perforated effect to mimic how a stamp looks like. Of course, you can use like a strings of circle to bite off a rectangle, but it's just very time-consuming to make sure everybody is evenly placed and things look all right. It's a lot easier and quicker to just make a brush. That works for us. We can start off by making a perfect circle, and that's our repeating motif, then we will want a frame around it. This look about right? But we do not need the fill or stroke for the frame, just turn that off. Now we want to select them both to define it as a pattern brush, click New Brush and Pattern Brush. For the preview, you can see the corner kind of looks weird, and you might want to tweak that. None of these options look ideal. I'll just click whatever that looks slightly better than others, and click None Hue shift, and Okay. We can test the Pattern Brush over here by creating a rectangle and make sure the stroke is in front. You can also do that by just hitting X and click here. Yeah, the corner does look a little bit off, but we can fix that later. We want to adjust a weight to mimic the look and feel of a real stamp. You can also go really crazy like that. It's an artistic style. You can do that. Now we want identical rectangle in the back. We can do that by Command C and Command B by pasting in the back. We want to switch those stroke color and the fill color in the back by hitting Shift X. You can also give it a different color now that you can see there's more contrast. Right now everything looks great except the corners, so let's fix that. Before we mess with the blue dots that's lock this yellow rectangle so it will not move. Hit Command 2 and zoom in a little bit. Right now illustrator sees all the blue dots as one continuous line, and we want that to be translated into shapes before we do anything. Let's come over to object and expand appearance. Immediately you will see the shapes has been translated also, as well as the bounding box. However, the blue dots are what we need. Of course we can ungroup it a couple times and go around and click and delete all of these frames one by one, but it's just very time-consuming. Thankfully, there's a walk around for that. Let's zoom back out and select the whole thing and group it. Double-click. Right now we have entered into isolation mode. Basically, we can make changes only to the object or a group of objects that we selected, not the rest on art boards. I would want to lock the yellow part so it won't move. Right now, I would want to select all the blue dots, but not anything else. To do that, you can click a keyboard shortcut Y for the magic one tool, and you want double-click to make sure the tolerance is set to zero, which means that you want to pick out the exact fill color not approximate fill color. You can just click, you will see as you zoom in all the blue dots are selected but not the frame. We can temporarily keep it in the clipboard by hitting Command X, and then back out and click V to select. Now we only select the frame. Now we can delete it. Now we can click Command F to bring back all the dots. Before you use the blue dots to leave teeth mark on the rectangle, we want to fix the corners. What we need to do is to get rid of the corners and zoom in. We just Shift Control drag to make a replacement. Remember the yellow rectangle is still locked. We would want to unlock that at this point. Command Option 2 will unlock it. Now we can just select everybody and come to pathfinder tool and minus front. It's done. Before we move on, I would like to show you the advantage of using the brushes. Say that you are feeling super creative and you want to make a round stamp like that. Traditionally, of course, you can use little circles and place it really carefully around another giant circle. But once you made one brush and you can't use it for 100 million times, you can make a giant circle, and make sure the stroke is in front, and you can turn it into a brush and you can change the size on the fly to get super small or super big. It will probably save you a good hour or so. 8. Pattern: If you're feeling super adventurous, let's make a pattern. There are quite a few ways to do it, but we'll go for the quickest. Just come over to object and pattern, make. You can play with the number here. I'll just make it a little bit sparse. This is a little bit boring, so I will make it a half drop to just give it a little more texture. You can change the preview to nine by nine. This looks good enough and click done over here and you are literally done. To test that, you can make a rectangle and make sure the fill is in front because that's what the value that you are going to change and click the new pattern then you just made 9. Recolor: I hope you are super inspired and have made a 125 flowers already. If that's the case, let's talk about recolor. Remember the color group that we made at the beginning of the class? This is a great time to come back and tweak the color before your recolor. For example, I'm happy with these guys and I want to change the pink stamp to something else. I don't quite know yet, but I know I want to recolor this artwork within the color group. You can come to the color wheel over here called the "Recolor Artwork" tool and click the color group and randomly change color order. Say that I really like this combination, but I don't like the background. What we can do is to drag to exchange the color positions. I am happy with this one and you can click "Okay"and confirm again. If you liked the combination but just want to shuffle a little bit without introducing new colors, you can select the whole thing, and without clicking the color group and go directly to randomly change color order to see if you like any of those. Oh, this looks pretty happy. I'll click "Okay" and it's going to, make it rotate. I'm pretty happy with this. You may run into the scenario that you want to change one spot color, but not the rest. You can do that by using the "Magic Wand" tool, by hitting keyboard shortcut "Y." Make sure you double-click to lower the tolerance to zero so that the color selection has really high accuracy. When I select this one and just give it a different color. This looks good. Save that on our directory really loves your work, but the feedback is that your green needs to be a little greener. How do you do that? Remember at the beginning of the class, we saved all the colors as global color. You can see that indicator here, each global color has a little white corner over here. We can change all the green shades that you need, your change in one step. For example, you can just double-click and turn on the preview and tweak it on the fly. I'll just make it a little bit more extreme so you will see that will change as you tweak. It might not seem as much for our case because we only have two places that needs to be changed and we can just go in and change them individually by selecting them. But if you imagine, if you have a thousand pieces that needs to be changed to a certain value, this will save you tons of time. 10. Copyright Registration: I imagine many of you who are watching are illustrators, graphic designers, photographers, or just creatives in general. You probably already have a collection or working towards a collection of artwork or portfolio of things that you are super proud of. There's this tension between whether or not to posted it on social media. On one side, you may worry about your work get stolen. On the other side, you may worry about what if your work never get seen if you don't post them. If you're struggling with this problem, let me just be the first to say that you're not alone. Over time I've learned that if you are the creator of the artwork, automatically you own the copyright, at least in the US. However, if infringement happens, you might not have the right to enforce your copyright in court. Full disclaimer here, I'm not a lawyer, but nowadays there are a lot of resources from a legal perspective, from credible sources that you can research on your particular medium. My practice area is mainly in surface pattern design, illustration, and hand lettering. In this past year, I've worked with a lawyer on one of my collections and I've felt really relieved afterwards because you have that peace of mind that your work is going to be protected. For sure you don't have to register every single piece you've ever created, but for those pieces that you really treasure and would like to license them someday or sell them someday, I think it's really worth it to consider the option of copyright registration. For surface pattern design side of things, I register a group of designs as one collection and it's only $55 compared to the peace of mind that you will get afterwards. I think it's really worth it, especially thinking that your work will be legally protected. That really helps me to create without fear. The artworks I have used for this class came from one of my collections called Swedish folk art. It was created as an entry to one of those Spoonflower Weekly Challenges, and they won the contest that week. Then later on, I was able to register all the artwork as a collection. Depending on what is your favorite creative area to practice, you may be able to find a sweet spot between creating and posting. 11. Congrats: Congratulations, you made it. Thank you so much for following along the journey, and I can't wait to see what you make. 12. Bonus: