Multi-Color Faux Pattern in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Multi color faux patterns - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Multi-Color Faux Pattern in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at re-coloring a faux pattern in Illustrator. We're going to look at why we need to create art as a faux pattern, how to do that, and then how to recolor the various elements in it. As you're working through these videos, you may see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready, now let's get started making multi-color faux patterns in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 - Investigating patterns in Illustrator: Before we start this video, I want to take you behind the scenes of patterns in Illustrate, because there's something interesting happening behind the scenes that you may want to know about. I have a shape here, rectangle filled with a pattern, and I made the pattern by just creating a hexagon and then I use the Object Pattern Make tool in Illustrator CS6 and later. Then I went and I did exactly the same thing, creating the exact same pattern, but I created it from multiple hexagons, and I did it in the same way as you would have done it if you were using Illustrator CS5 and earlier. There's two different versions of the pattern, but essentially the pattern looks the same. Ignoring the fracture lines through this pattern, I'm now going to select this pattern filled shape and I'm going to expand it, because what you might expect to happen when you expand this pattern filled shape is that you'll get lots of little hexagons. It's certainly when I did it the first time, what I expected to get. I'm just going to now Ungroup everything that I've got until ungroup is no longer an option, and let's open up the last pallet. Now I put these shapes on two different layers, so it's going to turn this one off, we're just going to look at this shape here. What we might expect or might hope to see is a whole lot of hexagons. Well, as you can see, we're not seeing hexagons at all. We're saying lots of little bits, and in fact, there's lots and lots of little bits. What we've got in here is we've got a clipping path with a whole heap of shapes, and every single piece of this pattern is made from a clipping path and lots of little shapes. Our ability to get filled hexagons out of this is absolutely zero, it would take a lot of time and effort to get a series of hexagons like this. Let's go and do the same with the pattern that we created manually or that I created manually. I'm going to turn it on, and let's just go and turn off this green pattern, and close it all up, lock it down and turn it off. Let's have a look at this yellow pattern. Again I have the shape selected, Object, Expand, click OK, and then I'm going to ungroup it. I'll continue to ungroup it until ungroup is no longer an option, and let's open up this panel. Now this is the shapes over here, so I'm just going to turn those off and let's focus on this shape here. Again, we've got something very, very similar to what we had with the pattern that was created by illustrating using the Pattern Make tool, a whole series of hexagons all clipped with a clipping path. Again, our ability to get filled hexagon is out of this shape is very low, it would take us a lot of effort to go and extract these hexagons. If we want to be able to create a hexagon style pattern, where we can actually change individual shapes, we're going to need a different process. Let's go ahead now and see what that process will be. 3. Pt 2 - Make the Faux Pattern: For our pattern, we're going to need a documents, so I'm going to choose File and then New. My document will be 1000 by 600 pixels in size, RGB color mode. It's important that you disable, align new objects to Pixel Grid, because you want to do the alignment yourself, and you don't want illustrated to interfere, so click 'Okay'. We're going to make a hexagon, so I'm going to the polygon tool, I'll click on it: click once on the document because this allows me to specify not only the radius of my polygon, but also how many sides it has, which is important when you're looking at creating a six sided figure, so I have six sides and a radius of 50 pixels, I will click 'Okay'. Now I'm going to invert my colors, so I'm going to make sure my shape is selected, and give it a fill, and noise stroke, and just for pleasure sake, I'm going to give it a colored fill rather than a black fill. I need to rotate this so that it is standing on one of its points, so with selected, I'll choose object, transform, rotate. I'm going to rotate it 30 degrees and I'm going to click 'Okay'. In some versions of illustrating, you might find that your bounding box doesn't look like this anymore. It might look like this, if you want to reset your bounding box, you can do so by choosing 'Object', 'Transform', and 'Reset Bounding Box'. Now In later versions of Illustrated with live corners, you won't be able to do that until you first choose 'Object Shape', 'Expand Shape'. Once you've expanded your shape, you can go and choose 'Object Transform', 'Reset Bounding Box', it's a little confusing, but that's how it works. Now the way that we're going to create our pattern look to these hexagons, in a way we can extract filled hexagons from it that we can then recolor is using a transform effects, so with my shapes selected, I'm going to choose 'Effect, and then 'Distort & Transform', and then 'Transform'. I'm going to click 'Preview on', and I'm going to start moving my shape so that they move horizontally, but vertically too, because I want them to be offset, so let's just bump up these copies to about four or five for now, and I'm going to move them in a vertical direction, but because I want to move them back up the document that's going to be in a negative vertical direction. I'm going to move them in a positive horizontal direction., and right now all that's doing is moving them in an angle, so it's not really helping me, what I'd like to do is to alternate them, so I'm going to choose 'Reflect Y', and that alternates the shapes, that's going to allow me to build my pattern a whole lot more effectively. I've taken them too far horizontally, and not far enough vertically, so I'm going to adjust that, I'm going to move them up vertically and I'm going to move them back horizontally. I'm going to continue to do this until they're in exactly the right spot. Now I'm eyeballing this, you should be able to eyeball it to get a good result here in terms of the spacing. If your spacing is you think about a half a pixel out, so if you are adjusting it a little bit in one direction by one pixel isn't quite enough, then you can come in here and add a 0.5 to it, you can also use 0.25, If you think that's going to be better, I think 0.25 is going to work pretty well here, so let's go back, I seem to have lost my dialogue. Your dialogues always going to be available from the appearance panel, with your shape selected, you can click on 'Transform' to edit this effects, so I'm going to turn 'Preview' back on, and I want more copies. Once I've done that, I'll click 'Okay', and now I want to take my pattern in a vertical direction, and to do that, I'm going to need another transform effects, so I'm going to choose 'Effect', 'Distort & Transform', 'Transform', and I'll click on 'Apply New Effect'. This is important because we've already got a transform effect which creates our zigzag, all we need is a transform effect that duplicates this zigzag shape further up the documents, so I'm going to turn 'Preview' on, and I'd probably want about two copies, and I just want to move in a perfectly vertical direction, but because I'm going up the document, I will need to do that in a minus vertical direction. I'm going to keep pushing this until my pattern reappears, and when I'm happy with that, I'll just click 'Okay'. Now at this point, if you don't have enough hexagon, you can go back and make changes to this, so you can click on this 'Transform' option to adjust the initial zigzag effect, and then clicking on the bottom one allows you to adjust the second effect. I don't need to adjust mine they are fin. Now at this point if you thought that your hexagons were not the right size, if you want them to be bigger or smaller, now's the time to make them bigger or smaller. You can just select the one hexagon on which this pattern is based, and then adjust it by holding the 'Shift' key as you drag on its size. Now as you can see, probably not exactly what you thought might happen has happened to me, I'm just going to undo this 'Control'' or 'Command Z', and I'm going to edit then preferences in general. On a Mac you would choose 'Illustrator', 'Preferences', 'General'. What I want to do is to scale strokes and effects. I'll click 'Okay', and now if I go and re-size this shape, something very different happens. The spacing is kept pretty consistent, but my shape has increased or decreased in size. Quite often that scale strokes or effects option will make the difference between things scaling the way you expect them to and not, so before we finish this particular video, let's go and look at that setting: It's 'Edit,'' Preferences', General', and on the Mac it's 'Illustrator', 'Preferences', 'General', and it all has to do with the setting you have for scale strokes and effects. 4. Pt 3 - Recoloring Elements in the pattern: At this point, you want to get your faux hexagon pattern to look the way you want it to look in terms of spacing and hexagon size. If there are a few extra hexagons that you don't need, don't worry about that, that'll be fine. But it's size and spacing that are critical at this stage. You want more hexagons rather than fewer because it's easy to get rid of them, much harder to add additional ones later on. When you're satisfied with this, select the hexagon upon which the entire pattern is based and that's this one down here. Everything else is just a transform effect. With it selected choose Object, Expand Appearance. Then Object, Ungroup until ungroup is no longer an option. Now if we look in the last pallet, unlike what we saw when we expanded the Illustrator patterns. This time we've just got a whole series of single shapes. Each one of these is a single hexagon shape, it's a faux pattern, it's editable at this point. For example, I can go and select this shape and I could apply a gradient to it. I'm just selecting the color stops at either end of this gradient and creating a gradient effect. I'm actually going to reverse this one because I want it darker at the outsides. Now that I have that gradient created, I can click on individual shapes, holding the Shift key as I select shapes that I want to impact. I'm going to the eyedropper tool. I'm just going to click on the shape that has the fill associated with it that I want to borrow, and I've now filled those shapes with that fill. If I've got excess hexagons that I don't want, I can just select and remove them. If you wanted to clip this faux hexagon pattern to another shape that's perfectly possible tool. I'm going to go here and I'm going to create a large polygon. I have my polygon tool selected, I know it's still going to have six sides because it had that last time. I'm just going to make one very big polygon here. I'm holding the Shift key, so it's going to be constrained to having a perfectly horizontal base. Once I've got the shape I want, I'm going to let go of that shape. This is now at the very top here of the last stack. Now I can select all of these shapes on this layer by just clicking on the Layer. I'm going to right-click and choose Make Clipping Mask. Now that faux pattern is clipped to the hexagon shape. But it's still fully editable because I can go into this clipping group. Here is the polygon that is controlling the clipping mask. But down here are any of the polygons that are visible here, and I'm just going to grab one that actually is visible. Let's just double-click on this one to isolated, and now I can go and fill it with the same pattern that the others have been filled with. Or I could go ahead and create a separate pattern for it. There is a way of creating a faux pattern that allows you to then extract the various objects from that pattern and create something very different with them, recolor them, or even remove them from the pattern. That gives you flexibility that you don't always get when you use the pattern make tool in Illustrator. Sometimes it's worth looking beyond patterns and look for an alternate solution to a problem. Your project for this class will be to create some faux pattern, yours can be a hexagon or it can be anything that you wish. Make it using the transform effects and then go ahead and expand it and fill some of the shapes from that pattern with something different. Post the image of your completed project in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about making faux patterns in Illustrator and why you may want to make them. As you're working through this class, you will have seen a prompt to recommend it to others. Please, if you enjoy the class, give it a thumbs up and write just a few words about why you enjoy the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is the class that they too may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so, I read and respond to all of your comments. I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.