Optimize Your Design Workflow: Adobe Illustrator Libraries I

1. Class Introduction: Hi, I'm Elizabeth Silver, and I'm a freelance surface pattern designer. And running your own business is constant hustle. So I'm always looking for ways to streamline my work. And in my last class, I showed you on the total Geek for tagging my designs so that I can reuse elements from my archive. In this class, I'm going to be talking about how to build out your brush and swatch libraries in Illustrator in order to have some go to tools to use for creating your designs. I walk you through how I use brushes and swatches to give my designs personality, and then we'll talk about a few different methods of creating your own. By the end of this class, you'll have the knowledge to create different types of brushes and swatches, and you'll use those elements to illustrate your favorite snack for the class project. And then you will be prepped for part two of this class, which is coming in a few weeks, which will be all about how to organize your libraries. Teoh use them best as they get bigger, and Maura on really 2. Library Defaults & Use: I want to briefly go over the adobe brushes and swatches libraries and their defaults before talking about how I use the brushes and swatches toe add personality to my designs. So if you open a blank document in illustrator swatches and brushes, you can click on the window and check it off. If you don't see them so brushes or right here and your defaults might be different based on what type of document you've opened or what version of C uh, illustrator you're running. I'm running CC and this is a Web document I opened randomly. So just to kind of go through, I'm going to talk more about the different types of brushes in the next section when we talk about creating them, but just to kind of show you some things that they have just briefly make this really large ones. So they have these kind of charcoal. If you go to the open brush library artistic, here's where you might use some of these things. Sometimes I use the defaults not very often, but you never know. So I had this really blown up, so that's why it looks kind of crazy. So I have already opened a couple different things. But let's see here. Here's some charcoal from the artist and decorative banners and seals you never know hum. So they have all kinds of basic brushes that you condone use. But none of these really fit my style, so I don't really often use them, Which is why I create my own swatches wise. There are three different types of swatches. There's color swatches. Um, there are radiance watches and there are patterns, watches and, as you can guess, pattern is one. I mean, of course, I use the color ones, but pattern is a big part of how I add to my designs. So the defaults have actually improved. I was looking at the defaults, haven't looked in the defaults in a while, and I was looking at the defaults, and they actually have improved on day air. Kind of useful. So if you go toe opens, watch library. Most of this watch libraries here are history, color properties, earth tones, foods, these air, all colors. So foods my favorite fruit. These air supposedly fruit colors. Okay, but if you go to open swatch library patterns, basic graphics is actually kind of useful graphic dots. I opened this really big. If you go here and large thumbnail view, you can see it even better. Close this one out. So thes air, different kind of half tone dots that you can use of different sizes. And in the past, they didn't have this. And I actually created my own library that sort of similar to this. So it's nice that they actually have this really organize defaults, and you always have to go back to the original one to open new Swatch libraries. But they also have lines. You're kind of nice. And grids, it looks like and last one in the basic graphics are textures, and those textures are actually, you know, improving. So that's pretty cool. And I could see myself using some of these, but let's take a look at the patterns and brushes that I do use, and most of them are things that I've created for myself. So this is a Popsicle pattern, as you can see. And these were some of the swatches that I've made myself and added in so decorate this print. This one doesn't have a lot of pattern on it, but what it does have is metallics. So this is a glitter swatch, and then I have a copper or rose gold metallic swatch, which adds, You know, some interests and some glam to this design. This one. I used pattern swatches for the grass and the background, and then I used brushes that I created. This is a scallop brush that I used to decorate these tulip eggs, and I used a dock brush that I created and gave some certain specifications, which I'll talk about in the next section to do this Easter in line. Same kind of thing. Here. I use the dot brush here. I used a background pattern. This plate is a brush the edge of this plate. This started line is a brush, lots of brushes and lots of patterns, and finally, this one is has a textured cran look and a water color watch that I used as well. In the next section, we're going to talk about how to create your own brushes and the difference between the different types of brushes 3. Brushes: we're gonna start with brushes and there are five types of brushes. They're scatter. Calligraphy are pattern and bristle, and I've dabbled in pretty much all of these except for bristle. But for the purposes of this class and for what I use the most often we're gonna stick with talking about scatter and pattern. I want to first briefly discuss the difference between the two. Basically, scatter is scatter. Are these top squares? Usually some of them are calligraphy appear, but the ones that I've created are the squares and pattern are the longer brushes and scatter is for when you're using an icon and you don't want it to be distorted in any way. And pattern is for when you want the icon or the brush to go along with the path that you've created. So when you're doing a straight line, what I did was a star. I created a star scatter brush and a star pattern brush to show you the difference. So when you're doing a straight line, here's the scatter brush, and here's the pattern brush, and they're not really two different. There's a fewer number of stars in this one, Um, but not really that different. So when you are making a close shape, that's when the difference starts to come in. So this is the pattern brush. You see, this is highlighted. And as you can see, the stars are getting distorted in order to make this circle. It looks pretty wonky when you have these big stars, but if you make it a smaller stroke, they just slightly distort, and it's not as bad. Also, if you had a more perfect circle, it could be would probably look a lot nicer. So great for circles. There is a little bit of distortion, but you don't really notice it because you have a nice start circle now, using the same example with the scatter brush. As you can see, the stars have not changed at all, but this is not a closed path. Okay, so they are not distorted, but they're not evenly spaced either, because the original stars our space exactly as they were created. So I think this is a 0.5. So, as you can see, especially with closed shapes, you're always going to have kind of a weird overlap. That said, if you don't want your image is distorted. You can always kind of do it by fans. So, for example, this is the scatter brush. Go back to, let's say, size three and this is the pattern brush, which is not exactly the same, and husband dots on it. But let's just it is based on the same flower and that flowers kind of distorted here. So if you really wanted these perfect flowers, you can go to objects expand, and you can sort of move them on your own and just like do a slight adjusting. Depending on how geometrically perfect you needed to be. That might be enough. Not great. But if I took a little more time, could make it work. So that's the difference between scatter and pattern. And now let's take a look at how to create them. 4. Scatter Brushes: All right, so let's start with making a scatter brush. This is my document. I'm gonna be drawing for my project on ice cream cone because I do love ice cream. And in your project, we're gonna have you draw your favorite snack, and you're going to try to use all of the create a brush and swatch for all of the categories that I'm going to go over and use those to add to your design. So I already picked a palate, Um, and we're gonna start with scattered brush, so I actually use gotta rush a lot for confetti. It's great for confetti. So I'm going to show you how to do some confetti. And there are lots of other applications for scattered brushes, but I'm just going to start with something that can kind of show you how it works. So instead of doing circle confetti just so you can kind of see the range of the scatter brush I'm going to do sort of a long confetti. So here's my piece of confetti. And to make a brush, any brush you're going to do, draw a box and make it transparent by adding this, uh, dash and then you have to send it to the back. So object arrange sends back. All right, so the transparent box needs to be behind the object that you're making into a brush. So now you select both of these things and just drag it into the brushes column. And when you do that, it's going to give you some options. So we're selecting scatter brush, and now you have even more options. So let's kind of look at these sighs fixed random pressure Stylists will tilt bearing rotations. So this means if you want it to be all different sizes. If this is some confetti that you know, all all different sizes, you can make that adjustment here. So if I wanted totally random sizing and I wanted to go up to 400 see not 4400% of this original size and maybe it can go down to 75% Um, that is what I would ship Jews. I'm just gonna choose some stuff here, and then we're gonna play around with a little bit spacing. Let's stick with fix for now, just so we can kind of see what we're doing. Scatter, scatter is basically how far it is from the line that you draw. So I'm gonna say, Let's just start with something here and something here and rotation. I'll stick with fix for now, just so we can show. I'm gonna leave this as is as well. All right, So now I've made something, and here is what we get. So remember the rotation was fixed, so everything is up and down. Sizing was random, and so some are smaller than the original, and some are up to 400% bigger than the original. Scatter was random. So this is the main line in summer above and below the line. And those were the changes we made. So now, if you double click on this scatter brush, you can change those options. So for confetti, I actually really want it all to be the same size. So I'm going to go with 100% and 100% okay, and you can see it's changing in real time for spacing, so I can actually just make it fixed for spacing. I am gonna go with random because it's confetti and you never know where it's in the land. So I'm gonna do 400 down to even 40 because I don't mind if these things overlap. Scatter. I'm also gonna stick with random and rotation. I want it to be all over the place, so I'm gonna stick that with random too. And I'm just gonna do the whole thing spacing. I guess I wanted to be even much smaller so that everything can kind of come together. So now you see, this is starting to look like confetti, right? Say okay for that. Apply to strokes, and I kind of like how that looks right. But I want to see some other options. So I'm not gonna play around with this same brush because I don't want to change it. So I'm gonna drag this down to the new category That's making a new Russian. Now I'm making a second version, okay. And since everything is random, when I draw another line, you can see it's different from the verse one. Now, I'm gonna double click on this again. These are kind of big for confetti, So I decided I'm gonna make this a little bit smaller, which means I want to make the sizing a little bit smaller. Our spacing, I should say I still I'm fine with actually want the scatter to be a little bit closer to the line because I want to kind of be able to control where I'm putting it. So this is starting to look like really good confetti to me. Rotation is going to be random and colorization do hue shift? So the key color is this, And when I changed the color, it should just change. It will change the color of the confetti. So it's as you can see, If I choose a different color, I can change the color of the confetti. So now let's take this confetti and kind of put it around the edge of where I'm gonna be putting my ice cream cones. So I'm gonna take this brush here going to kind of put it around, put it around here, and it's looking a little too groups, right? So I'm going to select all of it. Double click on this, and maybe I'm going to make this scattering a little bigger. There we go. Now. I like that. Apply two strokes and I'm going to do another stroke with a different color There you go. It's kind of fun. It's like Sprinkles. Put this over here. And after you've done this, this is all random. But any time you want to kind of be a little bit more deliberate. So, like, for example, this one, You know, I don't really like, sort of a just, but I don't like where things were falling in this area. This I like these. These are kind of looking nice and random, Maybe I mean justice a little bit, but this corner isn't quite doing it for me. So I'm gonna select this object, expand experience, expand appearance, and then you have all of these little bits that you can arrange. So I'm gonna get rid of these transparent boxes by selecting my magic one tool holding down the old key and that and then clicking on the pink. And that means all the pink is taken out of selection, and the transparent is all this left. So now I'm gonna push control X and delete those You don't necessarily need to, but it just makes it a cleaner file. And I'm also gonna expand these object expanding appearance Magic Juan's subtracts click on the pink and now just the transparent is showing, and I'm deleting that. So now you can kind of move your confetti around, says, get it exactly where you want it, making it a little bit more spread out in random. That's how you use a scattered tool. 5. Pattern Brushes: Now we're gonna talk about pattern rushes and I've got a couple pulled up here. This is the actual brushstroke, and these are the sort of modules repeat modules where you can see the transparent bounding box that creates the brush. And there's two types of pattern rushes continuous pattern brushes so you can see this. You know, there's no break in this brush or this one. And then there's those that are not continuous, that our individual shapes following a brushstroke. And those are, as you can imagine, a little bit easier to put into. Repeat. But we're gonna show you how to do both, So I want to use. Since I did the confetti, I added some background and some basic shapes, and now I want to use brushes to kind of decorate the ice cream cones. And I'm gonna do that with a diamond shape. So have my diamond shape here. And if you want a very basic shape pattern rush, use your rectangle. Do a bounding box, make sure it's transparent and send to the back select both drag in pattern brush. OK, and for now we can just say OK and see what we get All right. So that is very, very basically to make a pattern rush. What? I don't love this. I think it's a little bit too far apart. So one thing I can do is just the bounding box and do it again. But a little bit more of a measured way to do it would be to line up some of these shapes. Now, in this case, I'm using the same diamond shape. But if we look back at this example where I wanted it to be a little bit more quirky, I had a lot of different sort of brushstroke e shapes that are sort of similar. Um, and I lined them all up to make them to make one brush stroke that looks a little bit more buried. So it's the same kind of concept here. My line up your 45 just how far apart I want them. And then I go to a line horizontal distribute center, and we can see that now they're all equally spaced. Now I can drag this and I'm gonna do it right between I do it by I You can definitely do this in a very, you know, numerical way by copying things at a exact distance. But I just kind of do it by I for these kind of projects. So, as you can see, if I move this to hear in here, it's like the very tip of these diamonds. And now I'm gonna put Arrange sends back now because this is the same diamonds and not all different diamonds. I really don't need to capture all four, but let's just see what happens when I do that. I can see all right. I think it's including these extra ones, and that's why they're six. If I delete these that are outside the bounding box, here we go. So it creates for there's always gonna be four or eight or some, you know, division of that, and it gets kind of squished or expanded as needed to fit some division of four diamonds, so that can sometimes, depending on, you know, the scale of your Russian work can kind of make things look wonky, Which is why I like to stick toe one or two. If the motif itself is not different, it doesn't need to be longer. So excuse me. I mean, it's like all of these back to this. And this time I'm going to change the colorization to hue shift so that I can change the color of the brush as needed. So right now I have a dark yellow. But if I wanted it to be blue, I could have it. I like dark yellow. Something is stick with that. But so add a couple more of these starting to look pretty cool. Maybe I'm gonna make it a little smaller. Remember, Everything is gonna be divisible by two. Since I used in the end the founding box room to so clean. This one is three. I'm not quite sure. Still, the original Russian never changed. So there we go. All right. I think that looks pretty good. This one is still a little squished. Sometimes I stretched them or contract them to get the size I want. And if necessary, you can always expand the brush and do your own arranging. So if you can't get it quite right, object, expand appearance. And then I can take this extra one out and spread it out as I want to or, you know, widen things as needed. So next I'm gonna show you how to do a continuous brush. This time I'm going to start with a specific size bounding box. So let's do 1.5 height. Uh, 0.5. Okay. And now I'm gonna make, um I'll do it great for now. Just so we can kind of see where it is. And I'm gonna create a layer above here. Use this yellow, even though it doesn't really matter. And I'm going to do a six eggs. So even though I'm going to make it line up after I kind of tried to do it so that the point was approximately in the same spot. All right, now, all right. You can't really see this yellow on Grace, so let's go a little darker. And now this original box was 1.5. So I'm gonna click on the object. I just expanded that brush. Gonna push, enter, and then I'm gonna go 1.5 inches forward, vertical, nothing and copy. And now, as you can see, a new peace copied over so we can see that this is pretty close, but not perfect. So what I'm gonna do is select the first piece, change the color so you can see a little better here. Okay, So I'm selecting the first zigzag, and I'm going to just use the eraser tool and erase really close to this line. You can be exacting and kind of Clip it perfectly if you want, Teoh. But I'm just gonna kind of go for it. Now I'm going to delete this and copy it again the same way. 1.5 copy. And the reason I did that is so that this second piece also is already sheared. So now I'm gonna do that same thing on this son cut off that part, and now we start to see where the, you know, repeat isn't gonna line up so una just this just kind of pulled the points together in a way that makes it work. It's a little bit wide. See if I can live this up a little bit. There we go. Still, I'm gonna get rid of a little bit of these other warned and just kind of finesse it as you need to. There we go. Now, what I usually do is join these two pieces and move it over just a little bit so that we know that this is the same as this because we copied it. And now I race. The very edges of this changes to transparent, and it's on the layer below already. So we don't have to worry about that. And then pattern brush. I'm gonna changes a few shifts, okay? And silly. Get here. That's Grace. Let's do yellow. This is okay, but the edges air kind of jagged. So I'm going. Teoh, do that. See how it works out Now, looking at the bounding box in light be a little bit higher We go, Let's pull this. Let's try again. There we go less jagged. You know this a little bit smaller Pulis across and again. I think it's kind of weird that these little edges air coming out so I might rework this brush and might maybe not shifted over before I cut it off. You know, they're different things you can do to sort of adjust after the fact. Um, but for the purposes of this demonstration, I think you get the idea and got something precious 6. Swatches: All right, now we're gonna talk about swatches. As I said in the beginning, there are three types of swatches. There are colors, watches, ingredient swatches and patterns, watches. And we're gonna be discussing patterns watches. Today I've found that for as faras pattern goes, I usually use three different types of approaches. So the first is an actual pattern of vector pattern repeating hearts, repeating flowers, repeating shapes, whatever needs to be done. And that's taking a shape, which, you know, I'm gonna go into more detail. But that's taking your shape and putting it into re p and using abounding months. The next type of pattern swatch that I use is bit maps, watches, and I've found that I like to use bit maps for textures, and I like them because they kind of had that real nous, their roster rised So they are pixelated, and that gives him a quality that I do like. But you have to remember that they don't scale very well. So if you're pattern might end up being scaled really large, it's not gonna look amazing. I have done some greeting card designs that I've used bit maps for, and I love how it looks. But then it's gotten picked up by license sirs for greeting cards and wall are and it's been expanded. And then when I get the final samples, they are a bit pixelated in certain areas. So it's not my favorite. So you do have to keep that in mind when use bit map swatches and the final type of swatch that we're gonna talk about our glitter and metallic embellishment types watches. 7. Vector Repeats: All right, so now we have our ice cream, and I'm gonna be doing a pattern swatch to jazz up the actual ice cream part of this design . So many times when I'm doing a pattern Swatch, I just kind of freehand it. I don't use, you know, numbers and math to make the technical repeat because I've been doing patterns for a long time, and sometimes it's just faster. But for this pattern, let's be precise. It might be easier. So I'm gonna make a square, Let's say three inches by three inches. Okay, so this is the bounding box. I'm going to give it a little bit of an outline for now so that we know where it iss, and I'm gonna lock that layer at a new layer and start to draw my design. I'm gonna pick this color. I can always change it after, but right now, do a bit of ah, swirl. So when I did that, I, you know, aimed to sort of get the dip in the same spot. But it looks just looking at this before I even, you know, move it over. I can kind of see that it's not gonna quite work out because the lowest part of the dip is like right here, and this is already on the upswing. So I'm going to stretch it out a little bit, because in this case, I'm fine with it being a little stretched out. And I hate this yellow layer color, so let's change that by double clicking. All right, so that's pretty close, but let's see what we have. So I'm gonna select this and push center. And I'm unclear King preview, because that is distracting for me. And I will put three inches and zero and copy and see what we get. Okay, so this, remember is where the repeat is gonna be. And actually, it does line up pretty good. Obviously, we have some extra stuff coming out here, but it's pretty close. So what I'm gonna do is expand this object expand so that it's a flat shape object expand. And again, I'm just going to kind of erase this extra spot and see what we have here. Okay, so this is a little bit higher, Reese, this and what I like to do to make these kind of things when it's really close even is I select both of them. I go down to Pathfinder, which if you don't have it down here, you can click your Pathfinder tab and I joined them. So now this is all one shape. I'm just kind of smooth this part out and kind of just so now this part is smooth. And if I move it over, the parts that weren't quite lining up here in here are no longer in the bounding box. So it's OK, see what I'm saying? Now, I want this to kind of repeat. So I'm just going Teoh, I already know that this is a three inch repeat Aiken double check that by selecting the whole shape, pushing, enter with three copy and you can see that right here you can't see any. You know, it's totally smoothies ends or not Quite right. But that's OK, because it's not inside the bounding box. It's not part of the actual design. So do a couple of these. I don't see here. Maybe I'll put this one over here and again. We're still within the thing. Now I'm gonna kind of line it up. And now we're gonna do the vertical, so I'm gonna push, Enter horizontal zero. But vertical is gonna be three copy, and it's actually relatively even. But we can make sure it's extra even by selecting all four going to align and distribute objects here. There we go. Now it's exactly even. So that is going to work. Let's see how it goes. Gonna change this back to transparent. Select all of these and the bounding box and see what we get. Here we go. So we have a nice swirl. But as you can see, first of all, it's really big for this ice cream. And second of all, the color is not great. So let's do a little work first. I'm gonna actually take the shape of this and going to control copy control F f pace it exactly in front in the sex exact same spot. So now I know that it's right on top of my ice cream. But as we said, the color is not great and the size isn't great. So I'm going to select it. Click on the scale and preview. We're not gonna transform the objects because we don't want the scoop to be smaller. We're just gonna transform the pattern and 50%. Looks pretty good. What do you think? Let's see what? 30% looks like just for kicks. A little busy, right? How about 70? A little big, maybe 50 is good. Okay. Hmm. Maybe 60. All right. I like that. If you want to rotate this pattern, you can do the rotate tool and again just transformed patterns. E like that. Actually, that sort of fun. So I'm actually gonna rotate it. And finally, I want to re color so we could own too quick actions. Re color. Double click. I can change this main color. See what we're gonna do. Here, Try this. Yeah. Okay, so this is C. C. I think this is the 2017 version is right here. But if you're working with an older version up in the top, there's like, a little kind of palette icon, or like a circle icon. That's the re color re color, but and I actually missed that. But I have to say, I can't always find this re color, but it's not always where I wanted to be. So that is how you do a patterns watch 8. Bitmap Textures: All right, Now we're gonna talk about how to create bit maps, watches. So you're gonna actually start in photo shopped for this process, and you can make anything a bit map, any sort of texture, and he sort of drawing. But the thing you have to remember about it is it's only one color. So I have a scan of some fabric. I have a skin of some grand drawing, and I have a skin of a random page from an atlas to kind of illustrate how to do this. So you start with fabric image adjustment threshold. Now, I made it a shortcut because I do this a lot, but adjustment threshold. And that is gonna make this a black boy image. And you can sort of adjust the darkness or the lightness. And remember that what is black is gonna be your color or your texture. And what is white is going to be transparent. So I kind of want a light weight look, So I'm gonna bring it all the way here. Impress. Okay. Now, if you want this to be seamless, I don't know that this pattern is it looks like it's a little heavier on this side than this side. So you're going to have to put it into repeat and that's another class in itself. But you don't have to have things in repeat in order to make this work. So I I'm just gonna go forward as is. But if you know how to put things in, repeat and you want to make them seamless. That is a good practice. And it's gonna make things a little bit easier down the road if you do know how to do that . So using this s is I'm gonna go to image mode, gray scale, discard. And then I'm going to go to image mode Bit map. You have to go gray scale first, then bit map. I'm gonna go with 300 d. P. I and diffusion dither. There's some other options here. And for the next one I'll try the 50% threshold, which basically skips the last step that I did in threshold. But I wanted to make an adjustment. I didn't want to do just the standard 50%. So I'm gonna do diffusion dithered. Okay? And now I'm gonna go file save as I put it on my desktop and make sure that bit map is selected. Okay, I usually just go with. All right, so that's one. All right. And we're going to see what it looks like. Open, I think so. We confined here. Now there's different ways to address watches. You can place this and everything, but I like to open it separately, copy and then paste into my document. This is pretty huge. It depends on file size and all that kind of stuff. But this means that you always have it. You don't need to have any linked files. And that turned gray. But if you go to your color, it's still in grayscale. So turn it to RGB. And now you have a blue textured I'm gonna take that blue texture bit map, and I'm just going to drag it right into swatches. And now I have a textures. Watch now, as you can see, this wasn't seamless, so it's not perfect here, but depending on what you're using it for, this can be totally fine If you're using it for a small area. Didn't say gonna circle here. You can see the seam here, but if I move this up and click it kind of falls in the middle of the pattern, and then it's not a problem. So if you don't know how to make a technical repeat, just make sure you have a big enough swatch and you can sort of move things around and try toe hit the center of this watch. Okay, so that's the first example. Second example is this cran that I did? So I'm going to crop this first of all to kind of get it all over texture again. I'm not gonna put it in. Repeat, um, I can check to see how it's gonna look a 50% threshold and change it as I'd like. Or I can do the 50% bit map and just kind of see what happens. But I do like Teoh have my own adjustments. So I'm gonna do this super dark one where the dark is the color and the white is transparent. And when I zoom in, it seems like there's a lot looks a lot darker. But then there are a lot of small pixels, so we'll see how that comes out. So then we're going to go to mode gray scale, mode bit map and file. Save as I have the same doesn't action. So all these steps are a lot quicker for me. But if you're just getting started, just do it manually and play around with it. So now I have this and I'll see how that looks An illustrator in a minute. But while I'm in photo shop, I'm gonna go. So this design, I think I'm gonna just crop it so that it's only this kind of background wording. I'm going to go image adjustments, grayscale. Now let's see what happens when I goto. We'll see how it goes. Let's do 50% threshold and see what happens. Okay, so that actually worked. Sometimes if you have something that's a lighter grey, it's gonna make it a little bit more Dottie, and it might not be ideal. So sometimes you have to dark in your original work to make it, you know, look the way you want it to look. OK, so now I've got a couple different patterns and I will open them and we'll take a look at them. So we have yes, this one and again, huh? That worked. I didn't need to even change the color thing from grayscale. Here's my ice cream. We're gonna come back to that in a minute, and then let's see here. So we're just looking at these These air colored bit maps. I'm making it into a swatch by just simply dragging it in and let's see what we've got. That's a nice background texture. This is kind of cool hands. No need. Teoh do extra work. I'm going to copy all three of these and just bring it right into my ice cream pattern with this on the top layer for now. Okay, So what I want Oh, add a bit map. Our pattern to is gonna be my back. Back. Clear. So do you copy this layer? I have two copies When the select the top one, and just try this. So that's nice. Obviously, the color is not gonna work, but it could be cool. So let's try re coloring and see if this is gonna be a good. So usually what I do is select the original color. So, like the original color. And copy the code because re color could be a little fussy as selecting colors if you don't have them. All right, so I'm putting in this. So now this exactly matches. But for now, I'm gonna try a lighter version. Looks pretty cool. Looks pretty cool. Let's see about I wanted to try something like this. So in this case, I had made this one a lot darker. So now the background color that coral shows through just a little bit and this bit mapped color is the main becomes the 1,000,000 background color. So if I wanted this to be orange coral, I could change that color. This is kind of cool, but I'm really interested in seeing with that, um watched writing thing is, so let's try recovering this one. I still have that copied code. So I'm gonna stick that there, and then maybe I'm gonna go a little darker and see what we get. That's kind of cool. I'm gonna try a rotation here. Now. The only thing is, sometimes the bit maps don't rent. Your final file will work. But sometimes your preview in Illustrator, When you're turning around bit maps and things, they it looks kind of wonky. So that's kind of fun. I think I'm gonna leave this one. I don't usually do kind of text in the background, but not so. See, when I zoomed out, I'm not seeing the bit map here. When I save this file and open it in something else, you're going to see it. But sometimes the preview is not great. So that is a bit maps, watches. Next up is gonna be metallics. 9. Photographic Swatches: Now we're gonna talk about the final type of pattern brush that I use the most, which is essentially photographic. J pegs PNG's tiffs, and this is best for things like Foyle's glitters watercolor and I'm gonna show you how we make that work. First, I pulled up a few different things, but let's talk about where you can find some of these textures were in photo shop. To start this one, I think I found online. You have to make sure when you're taking things from online sources that they say it's a free texture. It's free for use, you know, no copyrights and your, you know, anyone can use it. And I have done different versions of this boil over time. So I have different layers and I haven't saved so that I can use it. This waas I scanned a old phone case that had a glitter texture, and I played with some of the levels and the curves to kind of give it the pop of the break break litter spots. This watercolor, obviously I just painted it myself. Eso let's see how this all works. I'm going to select this whole canvas control copy just gonna go right into my ice cream. It's to layer here and just pretty much dragged in. It's really all there is to it. Now. There's other ways Teoh. Add these things, and you can kind of place them. But I like to just cut copy and paste, because then it's not a linked file. It's right in your file. It can make the file size larger. But if you only have a few kind of accents, which is usually what I have, it isn't really a problem. If every single color you have is a glitter color or metallic color or something, you know, a tiff, JPEG. Then your files are gonna get kind of crazy and might take a long time to save. But if you're just having a few accents two or three swatches, it doesn't. It's not really a problem, so this is already pretty seamless. You can see a little bit of a line, but not a big deal can go back to this, Um, select this whole layer copy, but in here, this is enormous. So skilling it down. And when it's just dragged that in, see what we get here? No. All right, so this one isn't quite seamless. It looks like it's pretty good Top to bottom, but left to right. It's not great. But just like I showed you for the bit maps. If you kind of move things over, you can, depending on how big. Um, you know what? You're what you're going to be using this watch for is you can you can make it work even if you don't know how to put things into. Repeat, finally, for the hombre. I'm gonna crop this year. Select copy and pace. All right again, this is pretty big. So let's do that in a drag. That and of course, this is not in repeat, even a little bit, so the seams are not going to great. But let's try the ice cream scoop as a water color that works out perfectly. It's right in the spot it needs to be. But, you know, it's a little bit dark. I'm gonna actually see if moving it up. You can get it closer to that light blue color, and that works, and I'm gonna bring it down. Now this watch that's on top looks kind of not plate, right. So I'm gonna go back to that blue that I had before and maybe even light. Not a little bit good. That looks kind of nice. And I am going to do some gold confetti, So I'm gonna goto my confetti later and I had picked out some random confetti is to turn white. But now let's see if we want to turn those gold to see how that looks. Looks OK. Some of the darker shades of gold kind of blend into the corals, so it's not my favorite, but you could kind of work around it if you again move your peace down, which I do do this sometimes this is a group, so let me object Group. I see that I like these colors. So I'm gonna move this too, right there and then that makes that lighter. And then I bring it back up Another way you can play with the position of the pattern. If you don't have a perfect repeat is to select the motif that has a swatch that's a little bit off, and then press enter and you're gonna get that same kind of menu that you get when you do rotator size. And if you do transform patterns? Um, you can you can switch things around in a very like New Miracle way. I like to drag things around because you don't exactly always know where the best position is. So by doing that two inches and one inch, I see that now it's kind of in a position, and it got so preview. You can see it's a little bit later, so that is another way to do it. All right, there we go. That's our design. 10. Pre-made Libraries: so the methods I have outlined to create brushes and swatches are really great for when you're in the midst of creating something new and you find yourself doing something over and over again lining up stripes, you know, adding leaves to a vine, etcetera. But sometimes you just need to get right down to business, and you want you know, some inspiration from other places. You know, you don't want to search out that glitter texture that you might have a piece of paper for somewhere in your house. You just want to get right to it. So that is where pre made stuff can be really awesome. And it's a great way to jump start, you know, your library collection. So the first place that I recommend and have gotten, you know, a few libraries from is creative market, as you can just search brushes illustrate Russia's illustrators watches, and the really great thing about creative market is if you sign up for their newsletter every week, they give away six free downloads, and not all of them are useful. But some of them are great. This week it looks like two awesome fonts. This is some sort of texture, watercolor thing. So in the past, I've gotten swatches and brushes from this free download. I'm gonna put a link in in the notes here below, so you can click on that to go to creative market and sign up. And if you use that link then and buying some stuff, there is Simon affiliate, so I could get a few pennies on that one. Um, the other place that you can get some free options is adobe stock. Um, I have not explored it fully, But if you have C c and maybe even see a six, I don't really know and you click new document. Um, they have some things just kind of showing up. So, like when I pushed put in print, these were some things that just say free lemon floor, a wedding invitation. Um, Mosaic mood board, etcetera. So these air kind of layouts for different things, but signs and symbols set and get that for free. So a couple of the things that I got was distressed patterns. I'm gonna open that right now, So these are all you know, available and they're already made in swatches, so that's pretty cool. You could re color those to your to your needs. And I don't see what was the other one. Paint brush strokes patterns. So let's see what that one waas and that's free through Adobe stock if you have a DUI program. So okay, this is pretty cool splatter paintings, all kinds of different stuff, and it's all made in swatches already, so that's really helpful. All right, we're going to talk about the project a little bit more and best practices in the next section, so I'll see you there. 11. Best Practices, Project and Next Up: just to wrap up. I wanted to say for best practices, I don't necessarily recommend you go out and try to design 45 brushes and swatches. Just toe. Have a library. I do recommend it. Take the extra 123 minutes as you work to create useful swatches and brushes that will end up speeding your process up. So you're not redoing the same element over and over. You can have illustrator do that work for you. I want to talk about the project briefly. And then I want to talk about follow ups. So you saw me create this and your project for this class is going to be to design your own illustration of your favorite snack and try to use all five different types of brushes and patterns. Watches that I discussed, the scatter brush, the pattern brush, the vector swatch, the bit maps, watches and the photographic swatches. See if you can make a delicious looking snack with all of those elements and definitely upload it so we can check it out because I love to see what you guys come up with. So that's it for creating your illustrator libraries and in my next course, which is coming out in a couple weeks. I'm going to talk about organizing these libraries, and as you start to design and make brushes and makes watches, things can easily get out of hands. And there are some really great ways that I used to keep things organized, and I'm really looking forward to showing you some of those tricks. So follow me on skill share and you will be the first to be notified as to when that class debuts.