Transcripts
1. Master Terrazzo: The Intro: Terrazzo. Hey, I'm Rich Armstrong and I don't know much Italian, but I do know Terrazzo. What is Terrazzo, you may ask? It's this awesome Venetian look, mostly found in floors and walls. But in this class, I'm going to show you how to create it in Illustrator, in vector, in awesome colors, all natural and lovely looking. There are countless uses of the Terrazzo style, and it's certainly not limited to Italian walls or floors. In this class, we'll cover tile creation and color palettes, randomizing scale and position, semi-automatic workflows, and the concepts of perfect imperfection. Besides learning a new style, you'll learn new ways of working and have a butt-load of fun. I also cover making patterns, taking you Illustrator files into mockups. For those lazy and adventurous part, I cover a bit of coding to automate your workflow even more. Terrazzo is messy, it's awesome, and you get to have a lot of fun in creating really natural-looking artwork so let's do it or facciamolo.
2. History and Inspiration: So Terrazzo with the double R and a double Z or double zed. What is this Terrazzo? Where is it from? What can I do with it? Well, these are brilliant questions. So apparently, this Terrazzo style was made popular by these old Venetian construction workers who took shards of glass and marble and put them into their clay flooring. The word Terrazzo translates directly to Terrace in English. Terrazzo, it's a noun, flooring material consisting of chips and marble or granite set in concrete and polished to give a smooth surface, that's the official definition. Picture these beautiful floors and walls and this little Italian villa, lovingly crafted and constructed using colorful scraps of glass and marble from the island of Murano. Excuse any terrible Italian accent, that may escape my lips during a class. The Italian way is just infectious, but as I've said before, Terrazzo is not just for floors and walls. It can be used as is or as part of a design or illustration on bags, posters, stationary, backgrounds, album covers, pillows, phone cases, coffee mugs, clothing, blankets, and more. It works really well when used in conjunction with other elements like photography, typography, and iconography. We're going to be making our Terrazzo artwork with sharp and imperfect tiles, but you can also use what you learn in this class to have fun with shapes, camo prints, polka dot, squiggles, and maybe even a bit of animal print. I'll show you how I do Terrazzo in this class, but at the end of the day, this is your artwork and your design. So explore, experiment and have fun. Make something with a bit of you in it.
3. Make and Arrange Your Tiles: We begin. We're going to create our terrazzo artwork in Illustrator, so we need a document. File, New, and we get this new documents screen. I'm going to opt for a document with a width of 1,280 and a height of 1,800. This doesn't really matter unless you're designing for a particular size or a specific size. If you're going to be designing for print, you may want to use millimeters, centimeters, or inches, but if you're designing for digital stick and pixels. But what is really cool about this is it's all in vector so you can scale everything up or scale everything down if you need to. I'm going to stick with pixels and my color mode RGB because it's digital, but if you're designing in print, you may want to consider designing in CMYK, and I'm going to rename my document to terrazzo. All right, let's create this. Just like that, we have a new document. The first thing I want to do is I want to change my colors. My full color, let's change this to black. You can change it to any color you like, just not white, and then my stroke color, I'm going to press this little button or I can press "Slash" and it makes a stroke transparent. I don't have a stroke anymore, and then you press "X" to get full to the font again, and so we're ready to begin. Let's start making our tiles. This is quite a manual process, so we're going to use the Pen tool. From here, you just start making tiles. Put in as many angle points as you like. Make it really shard like. Remember, shards are sharp, edgy, and imperfect. We're going to start off by making imperfect straight line shapes, and then move on to imperfecting them even more. If you want, you should go to view and take off your Snap to Grid or Snap to Pixel, Snap to Point, we don't want any snapping. If we just zoom in, we can create some even more detailed shapes. You just keep on doing this until you get a page full of these tiles. They can be long, skinny, fat, they can be rounded, anything you like, and you'll see here that sometimes is a bit of a curve, which is perfectly natural, but most of the time, you want it to be straight. We'll get into imperfecting them a bit later, but for now, try make them edgy, try make them sharp, but the occasional curve is perfectly fine. What I'd suggest is try to make a little bit of a composition efforts, try let these things out in a way that looks nice. If you have to do nothing more than to just put these tiles on a page, it would look semi nice. You can make triangles, rectangles, all weird shapes. Have fun, go wild. How much time you spend laying out your tiles and putting them in the right place is really up to you, but don't be too precious right now, and we're going to be imperfectizing and randomizing quite a lot later on. Let's create a page full of these tiles. There we go. We have what looks like a bunch of shattered ice floating in the sea or maybe an animal print. I don't know, but this is what you want to get to. You want to get to a page full of these little tiles, or big tiles. You can change the size, you can change rotation, do whatever you want. Now we can start to imperfectize some of these tiles. What I'd like to do is I like to use the Warp Tool and I call this Play-doh technique. If we zoom in here and with our Move Tool or Selection Tool, we select one of these tiles, we can then go and press "Shift R" and then we get this Warp Tool, which would be under the Width Tool. With the Warp Tool, if we double-click on it, you can change the intensity to, let's say 100 percent. Let's change the detail right down and the simplification right up, and this is so that we get really simple and non-detailed editing going on. Then our brush is pretty small, so we hold on "Alt" to get a bigger and then hold down "Shift" to make it proportional. With a shape selected or with a tile selected, you just start manipulating it and it doesn't have to be a lot. Press your "Move" or "Selection Tool, " and select another shape. You can rotate it, you can then go for the Warp Tool just to give a little bit of imperfection. What you can also do is when you select a shape, you can use your direct selection tool to select an angle point and move it around. This is pretty helpful, and you can also select a tile and just rotate it. Like that, you can get a really nice conversation going, but remember, don't spend too much time with this. We're going to be changing a whole bunch of stuff later on. That's one way of doing it. The other way is to select all of your shapes and use the Warp Tool just to mass edit them, give them a bit of randomization, make them imperfect, like so, and I press "V" to get to my Selection Tool, and I just press "Off" or you could just, without selecting any of these shapes to start manipulating them like so. Fantastic, that looks pretty good, you can pat yourself on the back now. You've just created a bunch of shards, a bunch of tiles, basically that we're going to take into the rest of this class. Next up is Coloring our Tiles. Yeah.
4. Color Your Tiles: We have our tiles. Now let's color them. But before we do anything, please save your documents. So File, Save As or Save, let's go for Save As. I'm going to go desktop or Command Shift D. I'm going to save it as "terrazzo.ai", Save. Okay. Now there's a few options we have to choose from when coloring our tiles. Option number 1 is base our colors off an existing Terrazzo pattern or an existing image that we find some way. It could be a picture we take or it could be somewhere on Pinterest or somewhere on the Internet. I'm going to go to Google Chrome, and I'm going to go to Pinterest, and I've got this Terrazzo board of a bunch of Terrazzo patterns and Terrazzo inspiration that I have collected. I'll share it with you, it will be in your class attachments and I'm just going to find something that I like. This looks pretty interesting, some of these are a bit bland. I'm looking for something a little bit brighter. Here we go. This one looks pretty cool. Let's just open this and then right-click, Save Image As. Let's put it into our desktop folder and let's name it like "ref.jpg", save, fantastic. Let's go to finder and our desktop, we'll have a "ref.jpg" there. There's a few way to do this, but I'm just going to drag it, press Command Tab, and go to Illustrator and just pop it in there. Now we can resize this, should hold down Shift, so it's proportionate, that doesn't really matter. But from here, I can then start selecting different colors for my tiles. What I like to do is just create a few squares, hold down Shift and use these squares as my color pallets. Now instead of creating new square, I can just click one and either Command C, Command V. So copy paste or just Alt click and drag, there we go. Let's just make five or so of these. Then I'm going to use my eyedropper tool to select different colors. Let's select a new square , and press I for eyedropper. I'm going to press V to get my selection tool. Then I again, it's a really interesting colors here, like this orange. Press V again, and let's go for this pinky color. You just got to be careful which color you actually pick. When it's a JPG, they're not going to be vector, they're going to be all kinds of different colors in there. But that's actually great. So we can select a few more from here, that's a really nice one. That one's great, it's good for a brighter yellow. Maybe we want to get a brighter yellow. So that's the start, and that's one way of selecting colors. Now, I'm not going to do this way. I'm going to do it in a different way. Let's just select this image and delete, and select the squares and delete. The next way is you can make your own color up. You can just make a square like that, and then you can change the RGB values or you can change it to HSB, hue saturation, brightness and change the values like so, which is pretty cool. People love making up their own color palettes and it's really easy to change them once you have, let's say, three different colors, five different colors, 13 different colors, whatever you want. If you got a bunch of colors like this, you can edit them really easily by going Edit, Edit Colors and Recolor Artwork. Then you can change the colors really easily. I like to go to edit and then you just drag the different colors and it recolors your artwork for you. Pretty cool way. That's the custom way or the handmade way of doing it. Do it this way if you really know your colors well. But we're not going to do this. We're going to go to "coolors.co". So let's go to Google Chrome again, and let's go to coolers.co. You get here, and you just got to click "Start the Generator", it's free. Let's just close this downloads bar. Here you just press space bar and it generates some really cool colors. I'm just going to carry on generating colors until I get to some colors that I'm happy with. That looks pretty interesting, I really like this color and this color, so I'm going to lock these in. Not so sure about these three colors. Maybe I'll lock this one in and just press space now. That could work. Let's just see what it comes up with, that could be pretty interesting. I'm going to lock this one in, lock this one, unlock this ugly green, and let's see what it comes up with. That could work pretty nicely, not really sure. That purple one is pretty nice so we could just go back here, refresh. There we go, I like that. That color scheme is pretty cool, so let's lock that in as well. Now you can either copy and paste all of these hex values or you can just say export. Let's go for an SVG. So "palette.svg" goes into our Downloads folder. So let's go to downloads, there we go, and palette.svg can be opened in Illustrator, so let's just drag it into Illustrator, and zoom out a bit. Then I'm just going to select one of these strips, copy them, and paste them into our Terrazzo document. Let's resize them into squares, like so, and there we go. We have five colors to choose from, you can use white as well. Now what's really exciting is let's make some more. I don't just want five colors. Let's move this up a bit and I'm going to hold down Alt and drag these and then press shift, so I can't move it too out of line. It's going to come directly down here. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to blend the different colors between each other. I'm going to blend this white and another color and this green and another color. So let's try this out. I'm going to select this green and use my eyedropper tool and select this purple color. Then with my selection tool, select these two and go Edit or Object, go all the way down to Blend and Make. Or you could press Alt or Option Command and B, but we're going to press Make. Just like that, you get a whole bunch of squares in between one square and the other, it looks like a gradient. So the next thing we need to do is go Object, Blend, Blend Options, and instead of spacing smooth color, we want to go spacing specified steps. Instead of 245 different iterations, we're going to go for three, maybe even two, let's go for two. We go preview, and there we go, we get two extra colors now. Pretty cool. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to just Blend these two. So Edit, Object, Blend and I'm going to say Blend Options and change this to Specified Steps, two. Then go Object, Blend, Make. Now what we can do with our direct selection tool, once you've got a square selected, use the Eyedropper tool to change the color. Like so. Then we can do the same here. So we go Object, Blend, Make, and it should remember our choice from last time. Now, with our direct selection tool, the shortcut is A. We can change the color with the eyedropper tool to this green. That looks good, and then we select these two and go Command Alt-B for blend. Then with our direct selection tool, let's change this and press "I" like so. Then the one last one that I'd like to do is select these two and Command Alt-B. It's blended without direct selection tool. Let's change this to the white. All of a sudden, we've got quite a lot of colors. Select all of these with your selection tool and then when you go Object, Expand, so they're no longer blending, like so. Then we select all of them and just ungroup them. So Object, Ungroup all, Shift, Command and G. Like so, which is fantastic. Instead of just leaving these squares to be selected with the Eyedropper tool, I'm going to add them to my swatches panel. Let's go, Window, and we go down to Swatches. There we go. I like keeping mine at the bottom left here. I'm going to deselect this for now and select everything from black through to this blue color holding down ''Shift''. So it selects all the colors and then just delete the swatch selection. Yes, let's do it. Cheers. Then I select all of the squares again. I click this little button and I say, Add Selected Colors. Voila! Amazing. The other way you can do it is by selecting one square and then just dragging it through the swatch panel like that. I'm going to go to Command Z to undo that. You notice that these little triangles at the bottom right of these colors. If we double-click on this, you see that there's this Global checkbox. That's what that little triangle means, if you take it off, you press ''OK''. You don't have the little triangle anymore. But what does this Global mean? Well, I'll show you. If we've got a rectangle over here and it says blue color, and we've got a rectangle over here, it's also this blue color and we now change, say blue color to something like that, all of these will update. Let's undo. If we double-click on this and uncheck the Global setting, and then we go into our color and change color, nothing's going to update unless you actually have an object selected. Pretty cool. I'd recommend keeping everything Global for now, undo, undo, undo. Everything's Global except for the white color. So we can just make this Global. Fantastic! We now have our color palettes. When you are choosing your colors, think about the terrazzo you are wanting to create. Your colors can be earthy, they can be bright, they can be in your face! They could also be subtle, they could be calm, they could all be the same kind of colors, the same hues, the same brightnesses. They can be on a light background, they can be an on dark background, they can be on a bright background. So have fun here and try out different color options for your terrazzo. What we're going to do now is, we're going to add a background layer. If we go to our layers panel, so Window, Layers. Our layers panel is shortcutted on the side here. If we go to our Layers panel and create a new layer and call it bg or background and we drag it to the bottom. We can call layer 1 tiles for now. I want to create a background. So let's go, click on our rectangle tool and just click once, and we can specify the width and height. I know my document is 1280 by 1800. Let's change this to a white color, but maybe this light blue color. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Then we go Window. Let's bring out our Align tool or panel, and then, if you don't see these options, just click "Show Options", align to Artboard and then align to the left, align to the top, and that's our background. We can now lock the background layer. Fantastic. Now let's color our tiles. This again can be a manual process. You use your selection tool to select one tile, hold down ''Shift'' and select another. If you select a tile by mistake, just hold down ''Shift'' and select it again. Like this you can select a bunch of tiles and then either use your color palette to change the color or you can use the Eyedropper tool. So press ''I'' and you just select the color that you want to change it to. Just like that. Pretty cool. We could do this pretty manually. You could get it right fairly easily, might take some time and you have some fine control while doing this. I tend not to make tiles that are really close together at the same color. So just be aware of that. But again, this is a semi-random process. That brown's pretty nice, I think. That's coming along. Now, there's a much more easier and a much more random way of doing this. What I'd like to do is, I'd like to select all of my tiles. I'd then like to select all of my colors. So you select the first color, hold "Shift" and then select the last color. So all of your colors are selected, except for the white color, and maybe except for this color here, so I'm just going to press press ''Command'' and dislike the background color. Because you don't really want your tiles to be the same color as your background. We are then going to use a script to randomly color our tiles based on the colors that we've selected. So you go to File, Scripts, and Other Script. On the desktop is this random-swatches-fill, JavaScript file written by this guy called Yems. It's really cool. Check this out. You just go, Open and all your tiles are randomly colored. Amazing. I've added this to your class resources or your class attachments. That's all you got to do. You can also add it to your scripts library, but we won't get into that now. If you don't really like the colors that it's come up with or the random colors that it's come up with, you can change it by yourself or you could just rerun the script. So let's try it again. Random-swatches, that didn't work because we didn't have any colors selected. So you have to select a bunch of colors. If you don't want colors, just Command and select them. So let's try it again. Random-swatches-fill. That looks pretty good. Sometimes there'll be a couple of tiles that are close together that have the same color. No worries, just select it and then press '''I'' and select a new color. Any other problematic ones? Yes. Here we go. Let's select some bright color up here. I don't see too much of this blue color. So I'm going to just manually put that in there. That looks pretty good. We have a bunch of random looking tiles, they're imperfect, they've been warped and now they've got random colors. Colors that are awesome, colors that work together. This is looking pretty good so far, but we're going to take it even further now. In the next lesson, we're going to be doing some really cool randomization, we're going to be scaling, we're going to be rotating, we're going to be duplicating, we're going to be creating more tiles, and we're going to be having a lot of fun.
5. Copy, Tweak, Imperfectize: Now we're getting into the fun part. But before we do that, let's save, "Command S or Control S". Thank you very much. This is the fun part. This is the crux of this class, besides actually creating your tiles. What we're going to do here is we're going to start scaling, rotating, and moving our tiles. We're going to create a really nice terrazzo piece of artwork. It's going to be messy, it's going to be fun. Let's get into it. Now we could do this by selecting a tile, rotating it, scaling it. We could even scale it without using any proportions because they're just tiles than these little imperfect shards of marble or glass. But that will take a long time. We're not random, we have these eyes that want to fix things. We want to make things perfect. What we're going to go for is perfect imperfection. The way we do this is by transforming all of these tiles all at once. How do we do this? So a lot of people will be like let's select all of these, and let's scale. But that scales all of them, or let's rotates and that rotates all of them. Check the swatches. Once you've got everything selected, you go Objects, Transform, and you're going to Transform Each. Now this little toolbox or this little panel is amazing. Let's turn Preview on, and let's just change the scale of horizontal, for example, and vertical. If we go for 50 percent and 50 percent, you see there we get this more subtle effect. If we change these down to, let's say 20 and 20, that's really subtle. That's beautiful. What do you wanting? Are you wanting things to be like really in your face, really big tiles, or are you wanting a bit of a skewed effect? Or maybe you wanting things to be really subtle like soil. Another thing that you need to ask yourself is where do want to move this, horizontal, vertical? Do you want to give a little bit of a rotation? I really like rotating them and then maybe the horizontal can go back up to about 50, and that starts to look really interesting. We can change the angle some more, but now I just love this. Check this out, so you press "Reflect Y", and that just makes things really random. It's almost like any layout that you apply when you're placing your tiles and making your tiles out the window. It's gone. Reflect Y does it again. You have this semi-automated or semi-randomized piece of terrazzo artwork, this final checkbox, this random checkbox, check it out. What this does, it goes "Okay", let's scale up between 50 percent and 100 percent. Let's scale the vertical amount between 50 percent and 100 percent. Let's move it between zero and 52 pixels, and let's move it vertically between zero and minus 55. Every time you change a value, it re-randomizes everything. The same with the angle goes, let's randomize it between zero and 218. This becomes really fun. You can play around, you can change that, the scales to really small proportions, and you still get big tiles and small tiles. So ask yourself, what do you wanting? Are you wanting a subtle effect? Are you wanting in your face effect? Or are you wanting a mixed effect? You decide so then you go "Okay". Just like that, you have a semi-randomized terrazzo effect. Normally before I do this, so if I go "Command Z", I will just copy all these tiles, "Command C", and then I'll go to Edit, Redo so "Shift Command Z", and then I'll just paste my original tiles here. There's a reason why I do this. We have a bunch of tiles now. What we can do here is select our existing tiles or our original tiles, copy them, let's paste them on top here. Then we can say Object, Transform, Transform Each. Instead of making it random, we can change the scale to be about 15 and 13. If we just move them a little bit like that, you can see there we get these smaller tiles in between the larger tiles. But now there already all the same colors, so I can go "Command Shift Z" just to reselect everything and then go select my colors over here again. File, Scripts, Other Script go to my random swatches fill. Just like that, I've given my new tiles different colors. So that's looking really good. We may want to do this just once more. Let's select all of these tiles and put them on top here maybe you want to just rotate them, like so. You can go Objects, Transform, Transform Each, again, and let's change this input. We can change the angle, not Reflect Y, not Reflect X, "Okay". Then we can select our colors again. We just don't want the background color. I did forget to uncheck that last time. Here, File, Scripts, Other Script, random swatches fill. It looks like I have a couple of these tiles that are the same color as the background. No worries if you've done this. Select your tile, and you go to Select, Same, Fill Color, just like so we can unselect this box at the top, and maybe we just make it this cool green color. If we zoom in here, and I'll just close my Swatches box, close my Align Tool, and close my Layers Panel. You'll see that there's is a really cool effectual. There's a lot of random elements. There's different rotations, different scales. There's small tiles, big tiles. Now what's really up to you is whether you like your tiles touching or not. I'm not a big fan of this. As much as possible, I'd like to just make my tiles get off each other. Like please do not touch me, I have a personal bubble. What I also like to do is I'd like to take some of the tiles off the edge of the screen or off the edge of the art board. That's just makes it look like a continuous pattern, or it makes it look like I haven't just created it in a vacuum. It's part of something bigger. Sometimes you'll get tiles that are on top of tiles of the same color. If this is the case, you can go View, Outline or "Command Y", and you'll be able to see which ones are overlapping. If you want to rotate something not from the middle, you just press "R". We use the rotate tool, and then you'll see this little blue dots with crosses. If you just move that and drag around, you can rotate from that point. Things are looking pretty good here. So this might take a little bit of time, but I think it's worth it. But if you like your tiles to be on top of your other tiles, that's fine, just leave it. You can see how this semi-automated or semi-random way of working can be really cool. There's another one. We've used randomization. We've used a script to change our colors. We've used this transform each to rotate randomly to scale. Then if things are a bit but weird, we can change them manually. Like even these two colors are a little bit too close to each other, so I'm going to press "I". Just changed to a different color, like so. So let's zoom out. That looks pretty cool. I'm stoked with that. But now to make it even more imperfect to give it a bit more random field, we're going to use some Warp tools. I've got a whole class on the Warp tool. I call it the Play-doh technique. It's really fun. So I'm going to be using this technique and a bunch of others to just play around with this to make some of my tiles a bit more imperfect. So when I selected one tile earlier and I used the Warp tool, like so. This was pretty cool, just for one tile. This means that this tile is different. It's unique from one of the other tiles that's maybe the same. We could do this one by one, or we could select all of them and is the Warp tool. Just to shift things around a bit, you can make your tool much bigger. Here we go. That just gives it little bit of imperfection. Select everything again, and we can use the Twirl Tool. This is really fun, except if your intensity is really big, it looks like you're mixing cement or making a lollipop or something. So let's not do that. If you double-click on this, you can change your intensity to one percent. Then you just click slightly and starts to throw things around. You can make some really cool, flowing compositions using the Twirl Tool. If you double-click, you can also change the Twirl rate to a negative number, which will then twirl out the way. So that's a pretty cool tool to use. The next one is the Scallop Tool and try play around with all of these. But the Scallop Tool is pretty cool. If we zoom in here again, you just click once or once again. If you hold it down, you'll see what really happens. It looks like someone just messed up your tiles. So don't do too much, but just a little bit, just touches. You can use the same thing with the Crystallized Tool. If you want to decrease your brush size you can. Just adds some of these little like jiggers and chiggers makes it pretty cool. If we select a bunch of them here, and we use Scallop Tool. Then maybe we'll use the Crystallize Tool here. So that's how you create these random looking and really unique tiles. Although, they all come from the same master pattern or master bunch of tiles over here, they've now been rotated, they've been scaled, the colors have changed, and they've been warped. You've got this amazing set of tiles. You've got this great terrazzo pattern. Let's save it now, "Command S". The next video, we're going to get onto texturing and make it look like it's been worked on or used a bit. Make sure that it's not perfect looking, but imperfectly perfect.
6. A Subtle Texture: In this lesson we're going to get into texturing. Now, texturing just makes it look a little bit more used, a little bit more old. It gives it some feel and some warmth. Let me show you two ways. I'll show you the lazy man's way first. The lazy man's way is just using a filter, but you got to know which filter. In your layers panel, let's create a new layer, and we can select the background layer like so, and press "Command C", lock the background layer, select your layer three and press "Command F" or "Command Shift V". If you're on Windows, Control Shift V. Command F. There we go. Now, I'm going to change this and double-click my fill. I'm going to change this into a light sort of a gray. Then what I'd like to do is I'd like to change the transparency or the blend mode to let's say overlay. You won't notice much difference right now, but when we go to effect and we go to stylize texture, and we go to grain, you'll see that there's not much going on here. Let's change the intensity or the contrast. There we go. We can push up the intensity, contrast. It looks pretty good. Here we go. That almost looks like a tiny teeny little terrazzo pattern itself. All the same colors, we can change the grain type to soft or regular. Have a play with these, go for clumped if you want. But these look really weird. I like sprinkles. Something like that. That looks pretty good. Now if we go to overlay, maybe the change is to multiply. You can see that there's a really nice texture here. A really nice grain, looks pretty cool. You may not want it to be over your tiles, so we can change this grain layer to be beneath the tiles. Maybe the concrete that you're mixing it in has this slight grain and the tiles that you have on top, well, they're not grained. That's the lazy man's way of adding a bit of texture. Now the next way that we can create a bit of texture is by using the terrazzo pattern itself. Either create a whole bunch of new shapes or use your existing shapes. I'm going to copy these and off to the one side, I'm going to then change the color to the background color, all the same color. Then I'm going to go objects, transform each. By the way, when you're doing a transform each, if you've got a bunch of tiles that are grouped, it's not going to transform each of those tiles, they need to be ungrouped. You got to transform each like so. Let's make this very small like not zero percent, five percent, maybe 10 percent, five percent. Let's reflect X, reflect Y, change the angle. Now we have a bunch of these little tiles that we're now going to use as a texture. I'm going to group these. Command G, or you can go objects and group. Then I can move this over here on top. At the moment it's on tiles, so let's cut it, create a new layer and call it texture and then paste it Command F. Now it's going to be on top of your tiles and you can see that you've got this little bit of texture elements here, but it's not enough. What we're going to do here is Command C, Command F and we can just rotate it and move it up and down with our arrows or with your mouse like so. We can do this again. Just copy and paste basically, and then change the full color object, transform each. Maybe you should learn that shortcut. It is pretty long. Lots of options, command shift D. Pretty long. We do this again. We could randomize it like so or you can just change a few things, maybe change it to 10 percent. Group it, and let's put it over. We can rotate it a little bit. I can see it's starting to look pretty interesting. We can duplicate it again by holding down Alt and dragging. We can rotate it like so. Let's maybe do this one more time just to add a little bit more texture. Set the fill again, object, transform each. We could even go to 15 percent here. Change the horizontal and vertical positions, change the angles. Now if you rotate it like so, let's group it and put it over here. If you go into the group by double-clicking, we can move some of these to other places just so that they're more effective. That did nothing. It may even look like marble or it may look a little bit more real. You just got this little one here. Lets go double-click into this group. To get out of the group, you just double-click or when you're inside a group, you just click this back button here, back button again. There we have a textured terrazzo piece of artwork. It looks really nice, it's organic, it's random, it's perfectly imperfect. Let's save this Command S. Well done. Next lesson, we're going to be getting onto gradients and just doing a few extra things that may make your artwork a little bit more interesting.
7. Psychedelicness and Compound Paths: We've got an amazing looking, correct piece of artwork here. I'm really happy with it. But what happens if I just wanted to make it a little bit more psychedelic, a little bit more crazy? I wanted to have some fun, do some weird experimentation. Well, totally possible with gradients and different blend modes. Let's try it out. One thing I must do before we actually get onto that is some of these texture layers and tiles are still under the tiles layer. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to say Select Same Full Color, which will select all the texture tiles in which I'm just going to unselect that square up there. I'm going to say Command X, and then on the texture layer, I'm going to go Command F. If we hide it, you'll see that the texture disappears. We can lock that texture layer now. Next thing I'm going to do is just select all of my titles and let's just lock the grain layer too. I'm going to copy them, Command C. I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to call this gradient. You can call it psychedelic. If you know how to spell it or name it something that's pretty cool. Then I'm going to paste on top of this. So I'm going to lock my tiles layer, and then on a gradient layer, Command F and I paste in place. I'm going to put a gradient on all of these tiles. Let's go to the gradient tool. If you don't have it, go Window and go to Gradient. We're just going to select this gradient and it starts off with being black and white, which is not really cool. Maybe you don't like the left to right. So let's change this to minus 90, that's the angle of the gradient and out top to bottom. That looks pretty cool, but it's still black and white. Let's maybe change the white to this bright green and let's change the darker color to maybe a really light blue. It looks great and that can even work by itself. These gradients in tiles, it looks pretty cool. The next thing that we can do is in our layers, we just select all of the tiles on the gradient layer and then we go to this little transparency setting and change our plain mode to something like color dodge or maybe overlay. If we press "Shift" and "Up" on the keyboard, you'll see that. That starts to look pretty interesting or maybe you just want to do that and rotate it just a bit. So have some fun with that. Another thing that you can do, if we go back undo, if it's all normal and you don't want every single tile to have its own gradient, what we can do here is let's use the objects compound path, make tool or Command eight. Just like that, they'll all be the same shape or the same object. You'll get a gradient from top to bottom. That's maybe what you're going for. Try it out and then from here, you can move it up, you can move it to the left, wherever, and you can add a blend mode. Try it out, see what works. Sometimes screen is nice. You can also change the opacity. So if you go for 30 percent, they may look pretty cool. So try gradients, try blend modes, have some fun.
8. Patternize It: You've got this great pattern. Maybe you've had some fun with overlays and gradients. For now, I'm just going to hide my gradient. I'm also going to hide my texture, and hide my grain. The reason why I'm going to do this is because we're going to make a pattern. Maybe you're making a wallpaper, or maybe you're getting into textiles, maybe you're making something that needs to be looped over, and over, and over, and over, and maybe you don't want to design an entire wall or entire wrap around, or an entire sheet of material. We need to create a pattern. We're going to learn how to do it right here, right now with the terrazzo artwork that we have. Let's unlock "tiles," let's lock "gradients." Let's select all of our tiles and copy them, and let's paste them off to the side here like so. That's a fairly good-looking bunch of tiles, we select them all and then go "Window," and then we go down to "Pattern Options" like so. There's nothing happening here. What's going on? You're going to click this little menu and set, "Make Pattern," and it'll say, "The new pattern has been added to the Swatches panel. Any changes made while in Pattern Editing Mode will be applied to the swatch upon exit." This is almost like a group, or smart objects, or a symbol. You're going into the symbol, into the group, you're making changes, and when you leave it, it all updates in the rest of your document. What just happened? Why is there a whole bunch of stuff all over my screen? I'm freaking out. Calm down, don't worry. Let's name our pattern first. Small baby steps. Let's call it terrazzo, fancy that. Now, the first thing that I want you to do is go to "Copies," one-by-one. It's okay. When you go to "Copies," three-by-three, or five-by-five, or any of these, like one-by-three, you get to see that pattern on the top, on the bottom, on the left, on the right. You get to see how the patent actually works. If we change this to three-by-three, which is a pretty good indication of how it's going to work, you'll see that. As I move one object, you'll see that it updates all over the show. Also, you'll see that as you drag one of your objects to the left or perhaps to the right, it appears back inside your pattern, which is really cool. But before you do that, what I want you to do is I want you to set "Size Tile to Art" like so. It should automatically do this, but if it hasn't just check it, and then uncheck it. The width and the height, we can change that. Press "Shift" and down on your keyboard, which will bring the width in, and you'll see that there are some tiles that are getting closer and some tiles that are now starting to overlap. That's fantastic. Just keep on doing this, that's really cool. Then with your height, do the same thing. Now if you zoom out a bit, you may see that there's some weird gaps over here. The point of this is to try and make something that overlaps really well or that loops really well. As it goes out on the left, it will appear on the right here. As it goes out to the bottom, it will appear at the top. You don't want things to overlap each other, but you want them to overlap on the left and on the right, and on the top and the bottom. Again, it's just a manual process of moving things around. I find this quite fun. It's looking pretty good so far. Sometimes, you be like, "I want to select. I just went out of it." Now to go back into it, you just double-click your terrazzo pattern and your Swatches panel, and you back in. Now, what I was trying to do is select this shape here. That shape is actually at the top, over here. There we go. How is this looking? Well, it's really up to you to decide. Check that out. You can also dim your copies or choose not to dim them, which can be a bit confusing. If you want to not show the tile edge, it can be very confusing too, but it can be nice just to see how the pattern works overall. The next thing I want to show you is that you can change the Tile Type. This makes things a lot more random, it doesn't seem like something is repeating. If we double-click out of here, this is now a bunch of tiles. But if we create a rectangle and fill it with this pattern like so, it looks pretty good, but you can see that repeats, that repeats, that repeats. You can see that it's a pattern. That might be cool, but maybe you don't want that. If you double-click inside your pattern again, you can then change the Tile Type. Let's go "Brick by Row." When you double-click out of here, you click on your square that you've just made, and you just reapply your pattern. You now see that this is a little bit trickier to see the duplicates. You can see that there's a big blue guy over there, big blue guy over here. Let's see what Brick by Column does, and there. Again, things are just a little bit more random, so play around with that. You can now resize your rectangle, and things will get squashed, so you may just need to reapply your pattern. Just like that, you have an amazing pattern. If we want to create a new artboard, you go to the Artboards panel or you press "Shift+O," and you can just create a new artboard by dragging. Changing the transform properties, up here. You can go to "Artboard Options," the width and the height, change them around, or you can just delete it, and go to Artboards and press "New," and it'll create an artboard right there that you can drag around. Be careful if you're dragging. Any layers that aren't locked will take the objects on that layer with the artboard. Let's just unlock "tiles" again, and then when you're ready to put stuff on the artboard, you press "V." If we just drag our pattern to this artboard, let's go to "Window, Align," align left, and align to the top, and if we now transform this, lets change the width to 1280 and the height to 1800. It was under the constraint within high proportions, so let's change this to 1280 again and reapply our pattern. Just like that, we have a really cool pattern. Fantastic. Now, all you need to do is save, ⌘S. Then, you can also change your artboard's name. Maybe this one we'll call it pattern, and the original we call artwork. There's a bit of overlap there. What we can do is we can go into our pattern and see what the heck is going on here. This will go here. Where is he? He's down here. There's a few other anomalies that we need to sort out, but it's mostly good. Double-click to get out of there, and reapply if necessary, doesn't look like it was, and then ⌘S. Yeah.
9. Present Like a Pro: Now that Italian mamas are shouting, bellissimo! Bellissimo!, when they see your terrazzo artwork. You got to ask yourself, where does it go? How does it look in real life? What is its context? How you present your terrazzo, whether it be to a client, your mom, or your peers, it makes a massive difference. A lot of people don't understand terrazzo. They don't know why it's so cool. They don't understand what they're looking at. Your amazing designs can look terrible, if they're not presented well, and yet, seemingly, average designs can look pretty good, if they are presented well. You want to persuade and convince your audience that your design is amazing. You know it is, but how can we make them see? How you present your terrazzo can be likened to how you package your products. Think of Apple's packaging, think of Ben & Jerry's, how does their packaging influence how you think of the contents? One of the best ways of presenting your designs, especially your terrazzo designs, is by mocking it up onto a product, into a poster frame, onto a pillow, onto a wall, whatever. Also, if you are making your terrazzo, specifically for something, create a mockup of your terrazzo on that thing. If you want to create an umbrella pattern, mock it up on an umbrella, if you want to create a bikini pattern, mock it up on a bikini, and try get the dimensions and proportions right when you start. Now luckily, there's a bunch of free resources for making your work look good. If you're not keen on making or photograph on your own, there are also tons of paid resources available, so check out the project resources and assets for a bunch of different links. A lot of the graphic resource sites are really simple to use, and it's easy to download mockups. Occasionally, you'll need to sign up, enter your email address, or go through to another site in order to actually access the mockup. Googling what you're looking for is an easy place to start. Google pillow mockup, or pillow mockup PSD, if you're looking for a pillow mockup. Some are paid for, some are free, so you decide which you want to take. Let me show you two examples of creating a mockup really easily and quickly. The first mockup that I found was this tote bag, I found it on graphicburger.com, and the second one was this cream jar, I found it on blugraphic.com. Inside Photoshop, oh yeah, we're going to Photoshop, you'll see that there's a tote, and there is the cream jar. Let's do the tote one first. A lot of the time, you'll find a layer that says, your design here, pretty standard. If you double-click on it, it'll take you into a smart object. When we go back to Illustrator, we can see that we've got artwork to choose from, and then a pattern to choose from. I'm going to choose my artwork and I'm going to leave my background behind for now. Let's copy or unlock texture, unlock grain, it literally just selects everything, Command C, go into Photoshop, Command V. Copy it as smart object or as pixels. If you do it as a smart object, you can then edit it and illustrate later. Okay. Let's make it a bit bigger. Maybe you want to turn on it's side. You just press Command S for save, and let's go to our tote. That looks pretty good. So if we go back to our logo.psp, or we double-click the smart object again, we can just transform this layer Command T, and scattered while using, or holding Shift. Let's save. Okay, and you could go Command W or you can just close this if you wanted to. Now it's looks really cool. I think it looks amazing. If we double-click on this, and we double-click on the Vector Smart Object, it will take us to a Vector Smart Object.ai file. Now if we zoom out here, we've got our texture, tile and grain. We could actually unlock our background now, and copy all of this. Go into our smart objects. Maybe you just delete these all and Command F, to paste in place, and then we just go save, and we could delete the tiles and grain layers because everything's on one layer now. Press Close, go back to Photoshop, and this will have updated. So we just Command S here, save this document, close it, and there we go. Our mockup has a bit of a blue background now. It looks fantastic. Now the only other thing that I could do here is combine our terrazzo with some iconography, some typography, some photography, lots of our ographies, and this just makes it work with other elements really well. So if we go back in here, and we pump up this tote bag, save this again, you'll see that, that looks really cool. If you put a really simple logo or piece of text in there, it would look fantastic. So play around with that. Again, it depends what it's for, is it a background? Is it the main element? Is your terrazzo subtle or is it in your face? Do you want it to be the main thing that people look at? Or is it meant to be the background element? So that's one mockup. I like this. The the cream jar mockup. Where is your design here? Well, they've got this folder called your design, and there's nothing really happening when I click that eye. So let's check what's in it, top design, front design, jar color, cap color. That looks pretty easy. So we've got four smart objects that we can update. So let's go for our front design first. Double-click, comes in here, let's go to Illustrator, let's copy, and let's paste it in here. From here we can just turn it around a bit, exactly like we did for the tote. Voila! Command S, let's save it. Okay, updating, oh, wrong one. Check out that. I mean, doesn't that look just so cool? You can give your terrazzo much life like this. Let's go into the top design, and you can put logos on here, and you can put whatever you want. Let's make it big. Let's keep the placeholder text there for now. Cream jar, that looks cool. I flipping love that. Cap color. Then I want to go to cap color, so Command W, jar color, cap color. If we go into here, we can change this. If we double-click on cap color, we can change it to whatever color we want, but maybe, a really light blue. Okay, let's save that. Let's go to cream jar. Check out that. That looks amazing. So go manifest. Bring some life into your designs, or put some life into these mockups. Whatever your way of viewing it as, this just makes your work pop.
10. For The Lazy and Adventurous: In this lesson, we're going to learn how to automate our shape creation process with code. This may freak you out, but it's okay. I've written the code for you, so all you've got to do is copy, paste, and tweak some settings. Those of us who like coding, or are adventurous, or are quite lazy will be smiling at this. We're going to be using an app called Processing. It's an app which allows us to write code and generate visuals, which you can then export and bring into Illustrator. The first thing we need to do is go to processing.org/download, and we get this page over here. You don't have to make a donation now. If you use it a lot, make a donation. Click this "Download" button, and then choose your operating system, I'll go for Mac. When it's finished downloading, open it up, install it. Then open Processing. If you've got an icon, open it, you'll get a screen like this, and then you'll get a welcome message, which you can then close, and then the sketch with some funny number. Let's go file, save as, and we don't want to save it in the Processing folder, we want to save where our terrazzo project is. Mine is in desktop, and I'm going to call this terrazzo-proc, something like that, terrazzo-proc. That's cool. Save it. What this does is it creates a folder terrazzo-proc, and then inside of here is your PDE, which is your Processing file. It's blank here. What do we write? No worries, I have this sorted. Back in Chrome, navigate to this page here, the random shape generation code, it'll be in your attachments or resources, or you can just click on the link inside of the project description. We're going to copy and paste all of this, from import all the way down to this last bracket. We just copy that, Command C, and go to Processing, and then Command V. Then with one button click, we have all of these shapes, random shapes, weird shapes, fantastic. If you play it again, different shapes, amazing. The lazy person is singing. What happens to that, where does that go? Well, inside this folder, we have this random-shapes pdf. If we drag this into Illustrator, we'll see that there's a bunch of shapes, fantastic. But some of them are cut off, that's okay. If you click on it and go, object, compound path, or clipping mask and release, it releases the clipping mask. You just wanted to lead this rectangle around the border of the artboard, and then we have a bunch of shapes. You copy them, go to your terrazzo file, paste them. From here, you can make them smaller, you can change the color, you can rearrange them, you can edit them manually. There we go. We've just automated a bunch of the process, the really hard manual part, fantastical. What's actually going on in Processing? Let's just make this a little bit bigger. Scroll to the top. It says import processing.pdf. That just means we want to export it to PDF at some stage. There's a bunch of settings here, like numOfRows and shapesPerRow. If we change this to numOfRows three and shapesPerRow two, that's what happens. Change those around, the shapeSize we can change this to 50 and you'll see that the shape size decreases. We can increase that to 200, 300, whatever you want. The maxPointsInShape is the amounts of anchor points that that shape can have, so will range from three, which will mean it's a triangle, up to 10 points. If we make this four, you'll see that there's a bunch of triangles. Pretty cool. If we make this 10, you will see that there's a bunch of them with random weird shapes. The pointVariation is really important. If we decrease this to zero, you'll see that there's basically a bunch of circles. Well, not circles. This one has five points, which makes it a pentagon, but it's still in a circular shape. This one the same, the triangle the same, the square the same. What's happening here is that every shape gets drawn on a circle and every anchor point has a random variation. The x-value and the y-value varies, and that varying amount depends on the pointVariation. If we're to change this to like 400, you'll see that things are hectically misplaced. Play around with these settings. This is all you really need to do. But from here on, I'm going to explain how this actually works really quickly. If you want to copy and paste this code, change it, edit it. If you want to make your whole terrazzo pattern just using code, got for it. But it's out of the scope of this class. I have this void draw method at the bottom here. What we're going to do is for every single row, we're going to drawRow, and then we're going to stop recording. Now, the drawRow function says, okay, let's draw a row and inside that row, let's draw a random shape for the number of shapesPerRow. For every shapePerRow, we're going to draw a random shape. Then it goes, okay, drawRandomShape, creates a shape. It says this is how many points the shape must have. It gives an x and a y value, which then changes per anchor points. We then set up the shape, we begin the shape and we say, "Hey, we don't want to stroke." Then for every single anchor points, we run this. Basically it says, there's a random x position, a random y position, and then the angle, which would then work out the x and y using cos and sine would be 360 divided by the amount of points. Now the points come from the maxPointsInShape. We then end the shape off once we've added all of our anchor points. We set the fill color to black, and then we position the shape. Pretty easy, right? Have a look at it, play around with the code, and if you want to change the file name, change it up here, change the document size over here. Then this is pretty important, the noLoop and the beginRecord, this exports it to a PDF, and then that links to the endRecord down here. I will be making classes on Processing. I think it's an amazing tool for graphic designers and artists to learn how to code. That's how to automate your shape creation process.
11. Next Steps and The End: Well done, good sir. Well done, good lady. Thank you for taking the class. I really hope you've learned a bunch, and I hope you've had a super amounts of fun. Share your Tarrazzos online hashtag them, terrazzo, and mention me when you do. I'm @taptapkaboom. Then upload your Tarrazzo images and mock-ups to your project gallery. I'm looking forward to seeing your ballissimo work, and I'm pretty sure others will to. Check out other student's work and give some love and feedback. Follow me for daily experiments, new classes, updates, and general awesomeness. If you've enjoyed this class, please leave a review, give it a good rating, and share with anyone who you think would enjoy learning about Tarrazzo. That's it for me. Make some ballissimo work. I'll see you soon. Ciao, arrivederci.
Rich From TapTapKaboom, Multi-hyphenate Artist
