Transcripts
1. Pattern Camp Introduction: Hi, I'm Jessica Swift, and I'm a Surface Designer in Portland, Oregon. A Surface Designer is somebody who creates repeating patterns for a variety of different types of surfaces. For example, fabric wallpaper, stationery, greeting cards sometimes, bedding, tech accessories like iPhone cases, rugs. Basically the sky is limit. Anything you can put a pattern on a surface designer is behind that creation. My love of surface design began when I was a small child. Some of my earliest creative memories are creating bubble letter posters for every holiday and family birthday. Within each bubble letter on the poster, I filled it in with a different handwriting pattern with my trusty cradle that I love so dearly as a child, which I still love if I'm being quite honest. I remember drawing at my grandma's kitchen table. She was an artist, a watercolor painter, and a pulcher as well and a fabric hoarder. She said to me at one point that I should be a fabric designer when I grew up. So, my letter pattern with me for a long time. In this class, I'll walk you through the process of creating your very own repeating pattern in Illustrator from start to finish, from opening up the program and setting up your workspace to completing your finished contractile which you will be able to use in a variety of application for website and blog backgrounds, uploading to a screen file shop to print your own fiber, to fit in your own products on site 6 society 6 and more. So let's get started.
2. Welcome to Pattern Camp!: Hello and welcome to Pattern Camp. I am really excited that you decided to take this class, and I can't wait to teach you how to make your very own repeating patterns in Illustrator, but before we begin, I just wanted to talk about a few important things, and also tell you a bit about my story as a surface designer, and then we'll go from there, we'll dive right in. So, a few things to keep in mind before we start are that keeping it simple in the beginning especially if you're new to Illustrator in addition to being new to designing patterns, keeping things simple working with like one shape at a time, one motif at a time, is really going to serve you well. Not getting too precious with your work, and by that, I mean not getting too perfect, not taking too much time working on perfectly detailed sketches in the beginning. That kind of thing is also really going to work in your favor. So, just keep that in mind as you working just move quickly. The way that I really like to instruct students in how to create patterns is to get the techniques down first, the actual skills and then you can embellish, and get more complex, and more creative, and more artful later. So, in the beginning, focus on just the concepts and how the whole process works. Then once you got that nailed down, you can move on to making things a bit more elaborate. The other thing that I wanted to mention is that there are a lot of surface designers out there making beautiful patterns as I'm sure you are well aware. So, I just really want to encourage you to not let that feel intimidating, or defeating, or like it's your competition or anything like that. There is room for all of us. There is room for everybody doing the thing that lights them up in this world. I truly believe that. So, if pattern design is what lights you up, and if you become as addicted as I did when I first learned how to do this, there's going to be room for you and I don't know exactly what that means or what path your career or your designing might take. I don't have a crystal ball sadly, but I do know that there's room for everybody. So, just try as best you can to not compare yourself to other people. Please remember that everyone is in a different spot on they're on a creative journey, so you may be in the very beginning of yours, and that's amazing, and it's never too late to start. It's always the perfect time to start learning something new, right? So, you may be somewhere, you may be a little bit more skilled than some other people who are following along on this class, and we'll be creating our projects and sharing our projects, and I know it's easy to fall into that comparison mode, but I just want you to really set an intention at the beginning to do your own work. Let flow out of you whatever is meant to flow out of you not in comparison to what other people have flowing out of them, or what you think you should be creating. All of that stuff, just please leave that at the door, just drop it and focus on whatever it is you're meant to be creating as you learn how to create your own patterns. So, that said, those were my important details that I wanted to mention before we begin. I wanted to just tell you a little bit about my story so it will hopefully, inspire you a little bit because I, like maybe you are, I started basically from zero. So, I went to Ithica College in upstate New York, a liberal arts college, and I got a degree in painting, a BFA, but I didn't study any of this digital art stuff. This textile design, pattern design, surface designing any of this stuff in school. In fact, I didn't actually even know that it existed as a path that I could follow. Looking back I always think now, "Why didn't somebody tell me?" But that all of our paths are perfect and exactly how they're supposed to be and we make the decisions that are right for us at the right time. So, I got a degree in painting, and after I graduated from college, I had never actually intended to be a working artist. It really occurred to me that I could do that which is sort of funny as somebody going to school to get a art degree. So, I moved back to my hometown, Boulder, Colorado, and I started working in a restaurant because I didn't know what I was going to do. I was painting here and there in my bedroom, on the floor. I didn't have a fancy studio space or anything like that. My mom worked at a gallery at the time and she gave me a flyer for a juried show, an outdoor art festival type of show that she thought I might be interested in which I don't know why she thought I would have been interested in it because I was barely making art at that point. But I ended up entering the show and getting in by a some weird fluke, and, fast forward, a few months, I feverishly painted for several months because I had to fill a whole booth with paintings, had an amazingly successful weekend, more successful than I possibly could have imagined, and I was surrounded by people who were working artists, who were doing this for a living, and I thought this is what I want to do. So, when I was 22 or 23, I think I was almost 23, that's when I started my business as a sole proprietorship. So, I did that for several years and I got a studio space in Boulder, and I had part-time jobs here there to supplement my income. But for all intents and purposes, I was a working artist, and it was very exciting. Then in about 2006 or 2007, I discovered design blogs and that changed my whole world. I saw people who call themselves surface designers online who are partnering with really cool companies like Urban Outfitters, and Target, and just cool companies and making cool products out of their patterns and I thought, "How in the world are they doing this?" It was just this deep soul calling that I just couldn't deny. So, it was pretty clear to me that that was going to be my path or part of my path or it was just the direction that I was meant to go at that point. So, I didn't know how to use a computer really, I could check my e-mail, that was basically about it. I had no Illustrator skills. I had never opened the program. I think I had opened Photoshop a few times when you had to scan an image in and that was about it. So, I set about the task of teaching myself how to design patterns with basically no skills at all. So, as you can imagine, it was a long process. A decade ago, or a little more than a decade ago, the resources that we have now like SkillShare for example, or all the tutorials online, all the classes that people have taught, those didn't really exist. I had a really hard time actually finding resources online that would help me learn the process. There were some blog post that I found at [inaudible] , but it took me a really long time, and I was learning how to use Illustrator in the process and it was really tricky. So, it took me probably about, I don't know, maybe nine months or so until I got really comfortable using the program and finally made a repeat that worked. That was like my label magic moment. I was just addicted from that time forward. As you can see, it was not a beautiful repeat, here it is. But it's my first one, so it's near and dear to my heart. So, that was the beginning for me. I furiously created patterns after that and in a strange series of events, I was invited to exhibit a print source, a surface designed trade show in New York City which I leaped into that opportunity even though I had no idea what I was doing. I had never exhibited at a trade show, I had never even been to a trade show before but I said yes, and that show happened about six or seven months after I created my first pattern. I went to the show with probably about 80 patterns, none of them were in collections, my display as you can see was not amazing, but I jumped in, I dived in, that's always been kind of my MO, just dive in and figure it out as I go, and it was awesome. I sold some patterns. I got my first fabric licensing deal with a company that no longer exists actually. That was the beginning for me. Then shortly thereafter, I got my first big licensing deal with T-Mobile which was pretty crazy, and that was just a real confidence builder, kind of like that first art show was where I sold a bunch of paintings and had a really successful weekend. It made me realize that, "Hey, what I'm doing is catching the people's eye and I think I can do this. I can make a career out of this." So, I also exhibited at Surtex in New York City three times in 2010, 2011, and 2013 all of which helped me build my contacts, get some licensing collaborations under my belt, meet people in the industry, that kind of thing. As you can see, my booths got a little bit better each year I think and it was all a really wonderful learning experience. I made a lot of mistakes, but I also learned a ton. So, that's always been my thought process as I've taught myself basically everything that I've needed to know about designing repeating patterns, and being a surface designer as a career is that I'm going to make mistakes, but I'm going to learn a lot. So, I might as well just as well dive in. Ever since then it's just been an obsessive, addictive, passionate ride really. I've made lots of mistakes. I've worked with lots of really cool companies. I've made products that I'm really proud of. I manufactured my own rain-boots in 2011 which was a really fun project and one that I quickly realized I loved designing rain-boots, and making the patterns for those, and getting them all ready, and the selling of them was not my foot in, and not what I was interested in. I collaborated on a line of Christmas ornaments, and gifts, and home decor and rugs, and I partnered with another fabric company, and just things just sort of snowballed. One thing led to another and here we are now. Now, I am so thrilled to teach you these skills and, hopefully, you will pick them up a lot more quickly than I did. I can't wait to see what you create and where this whole surface design journey takes you. So, onward we go, dive in, remember to keep it simple, and keep your eyes on your own paper, and tuned to your own heart, to your own self. That will serve you really well as we move forward, and let's dive in.
3. Finding Inspiration: So, let's talk about inspiration and how to get inspiration for your patterned designs, where to the inspiration for your pattern designs. We have a special visitor. So, there are lots of different ways that you can get inspired as an artist, as a designer. It's really a personal preference depending on how you like to take in imagery and input for your art making. So, one of my favorite ways to gather inspiration is simply to go outside and keep my eyes open for interesting things that I see. I love being in nature, looking at the shapes of trees and plants and flowers and leaves, and I love walking in my neighborhood and looking at people's houses, the interesting colored doors that they pair with their siding, that thing. Inspiration, especially color inspiration can come from an odd variety of sources sometimes. I remember one of my favorite pattern collections was inspired by a scarf that I saw a woman wearing at a craft show, where I was exhibiting a number of years ago. I asked her to take a photo because I just loved the colors in her scarf so much and it inspired a whole collection, a whole floral collection, which was fun and unexpected. So, inspiration can come from a lot of different places. One really great way to gather inspiration, to get all of your ideas into one place is to create a mood board. You can do that in a variety of ways, you can do it actually on paper, in a sketchbook or just on a big piece of poster board or something like that, tearing up images from magazines or taking photos and printing them out and putting them onto a mood board that thing. You can also create a digital collage in illustrator or photoshop or a super easy way to do it is to use the site Pinterest, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with already and probably already use. But it's a great way to gather inspiration from around the Internet and images that you upload yourself to add to your mood board to gather your ideas and keep them all neat and tidy in one spot. So, you can easily reference back as you're designing and make sure that you're keeping on track with what you originally intended to design. So, I do want to mention also that this is not often the way that I work to be totally honest. When I'm designing pattern collections for fabric, I do use a mood board just so I can stick to a theme. But the thing that inspires me the very most, which may feel weird and potentially scary, is actually just sitting down at my computer or my sketchbook or my iPad these days and just starting to do. Just the act of beginning, is enough to cause the inspiration to happen for me. I learned long ago that if I was going to wait for inspiration to strike, like lightning of inspiration coming down and you forget to eat and you stay up all night and all of that, that doesn't really happen for me. Maybe it happens for other creative people, but for me what is the most inspiring is to just say that I'm going to start and to sit down and start and to see what happens. So gather up your inspirational images before moving on to the next segment. It doesn't have to be too complicated at this point. I want you to just really focus on getting these skills down first before you get really perfect or precious or complicated with your ideas. So, if you want to focus on one motif for now, one leaf shape that you really love for example, that would be great. One flower, something like that. So, gather a simple reasonable amount of inspiration, whatever that means for you at this point and in the next segments to come, you'll be learning how to set up your work space in Illustrator and then we'll dive right into learning how to create motifs and then designing your patterns. So, I will see you soon.
4. Getting Started – Setting Up Your Workspace in Illustrator: Okay. Let's get started. Now that you've gathered some inspiration and have hopefully done some sketches that you'd like to bring into Illustrator, let's talk about how to set up your workspace. So, I'm going to go ahead and open Illustrator, and we'll go over here to the left to create new. You'll see that mine automatically pops up with eight by eight inches that's simply because that's the size that I most often design at so my computer, my version of Illustrator has gotten very smart, and just knows that that's probably what I'm going to want to use. So you can set this to whatever you'd like. I suggest a square in the beginning while you're learning but a pattern tile does not have to be a square, it can be a rectangle. We'll talk about that a little bit later in the course. I use inches because I'm in the United States and that's our measurement that we use. But if you're are more comfortable with centimeters, or pixels, or something like that, by all means, please, feel free to use whatever is the easiest for you. Eight by eight inches is not a rule at all or any sort of standard, it's just my own personal preference for my design space. So you can use that as you get started and continue to use that, or use something totally different depending on whatever you would like to do. So, let's go ahead and click Create. You can see how I intend to have my workspace set up, and I'll just go through a little bit about each of these panels that I have open here, and why I have them open. You may find that you like to have different panels open as well, or that some of these aren't as necessary for you as they are for me. That's just going to be something you discover as you go along and as you practice making patterns. So, first things first, all of these panels, when you first opened Illustrator especially if you're new to Illustrator, your screen probably looks a lot different than mine does. So, all of these panels can be found right here under the window menu, and you can toggle them on and off. You can see this color went over here on the right just went away. I can toggle that back on. You might also be wondering why your version of Illustrator is showing up in a really dark like charcoal gray. That can be changed over here under the preferences menu user interface. You can choose which color you'd like. I tend to find I like the lightest grey the best but again, that's a personal preference. So, your tools panel will show up. You can toggle it on and off here or you can narrow the width I guess by clicking these little arrows off to the right. I like to have mine like this, so I find the tools are a little bit easier to get to in this double column format. I, of course like to have my swatches panel open, so I can make custom color palettes. Work with my colors within my pattern pretty easily that way. This is another color tool that I use sometimes. You can see when I hover over this bar here, this colored bar, an eyedropper tool appears so when I click on that, you can see over here on the left that my color is changing so that can be a fun and quick way to choose colors as well. I'd like to have my layers panel open. I don't often work in layers when I'm designing a pattern. You'll learn that with Illustrator, it's really easy to have everything all on one layer, and have it be very easy editable. It's different from Photoshop in that way. You don't really need to work with layers, but I like to have that panel open just in case I might want to put something on its own layer and lock it down. I like to have this artboard panel open as well because if I double click on here, you can see that this is where I could change the width and the height if I needed to, which I do sometimes need to depending on what type of pattern I'm creating so that can be useful. I like to have this align panel open because sometimes I find that I might like to make sure that every motif within my pattern is exactly lined up horizontally, or vertically, or something like that, or left aligned or right aligned. I find that I use that one a lot and right under this or right within the same panel, I guess, is the Pathfinder tool which can sometimes be useful as well for joining two different shapes and turning them into one shape. There are some fun options that you can play with right down here as well. I find that I also like to have the character or the text panel open. I don't usually use fonts or text write within my patterns but oftentimes, I'll write notes to myself off to the left side here is something that I may want to try, or something that I don't want to forget, or just some note to myself. You may find that to be useful as well, and you may not. It's totally up to you. One thing that I do like to make sure that I have opened just so I can have full customization possibility, I guess, is this control panel which again is up here in the window menu. You can see that will go away if I toggle it on and off. This becomes really important if you are image tracing your line drawings that you've scanned in. For example, if you want to vectorize something, image tracing is something we'll go over and one of the next lessons, and this control panel will allow you to customize how you're doing that. The last thing that I should mention about your workspace is that the white area here is your artword, and something that I see students run into sometimes is wondering how to get rid of this black line. You can't get rid of that black line, and that's just shows you where the balance of your art board are. So don't worry about that black line, it's invisible. It won't print. It won't be in your final pattern. It's just there as the boundary of your art board. So, everything in this white square here is what's actually in your file. Everything that is in this grey area surrounding the white square, you can think of that as your storage space. So, everything that overlaps the white edges of your, or the edges of your white square. Everything that's overlapping is not actually in your file. So this is often where I will put my color palette over here which we're going to do next. I often store illustrations or motifs that I haven't included in my pattern yet but that I might want to include, and as I mentioned a minute ago, sometimes I will write notes to myself over here. This is my area where things just stay that I might need, or that I want to remember, or reference. Sometimes, I'll have photos over here if there's a particular style that I'm trying to adhere to, or something like that, or if I'm working on a collection, sometimes I'll have images of the other patterns within the collection off to the left in this storage space so I can make sure that what I'm creating is going to fit in with the rest of the collection, that kind of thing. So, this can be a useful area and just know that if I were to print this for example, all that would print would be that white. Everything that's within that white square. Everything on the grey outsides is not going to print. So, that's a good overview of how I set up my workspace in Illustrator and next, we will be talking about color, and how to create your own custom color palette. So, I will see you back here in a minute for that.
5. Creating a Custom Color Palette: Now that we've talked about inspiration and have gotten our workspaces set up, let's talk about color. So, I like to get some kind of color palette set up before I actually start working with my illustrations and motifs. That just helps me feel more confident going into my pattern design for whatever reason. You may find that you like working in black and white first then coloring later, but I like to have colors set in the beginning. That's not to say that they won't change because they often do either midway through the process or when the pattern is all complete, but I like having something to start with. So, the first thing that I actually like to do is remove these default colors from the swatches palette. So these will show up when you first open the illustrator. They'll open every time you open a new file. So, since I like to create my own custom color palettes, I don't like these muddying up my swatch area. I like to be able to just see the colors that I'm using. So, to get rid of these default lines, oftentimes I leave the white because I tend to use that one pretty regularly. So I'll click on this first one, the black, and then if I hold down my shift key and go down and click on this purple one, you'll see that all of those colors get highlighted, and then I can click hold and drag it down to that trash can here and let go and you'll see all that I'm left with is my white which is pretty handy. It's nice and blank and ready for me to add my own colors, too. So, the next thing that I like to do is make a little line of squares down the left side of my workspace. So, here we've got the color picker and you'll see there's a fill and a stroke, a stroke is just that outline color. This little box here is the 'no color' box. So if I click on that, that will either get rid of my fill color or my stroke color depending on which one I have on top. I don't want my squares to have any strokes on them so I'm going to make that 'no color.' If you need to switch these easily back and forth for any reason, that's what this little arrow thingy is for. So that can be pretty handy. Okay, so to make this little line of squares that I was talking about, you'll use your rectangle tool and hold on your shift key and click hold and drag to draw a little square. Holding down the shift key keeps it in proportion so it's a square rather than a rectangle. So you can either go up to that edit, copy and then edit, paste in front. That just copied my square and put a copy directly on top of that and then use your keyboard. I'm holding my shift key and using the arrow keys on my keyboard to move that square down, and then continue doing the same thing. Or It might be hard to see, but I'm pressing my option key on my keyboard and you can see this black arrow turns into a little double arrow, that means I'm about to make a copy. So if I hold down the option key, hold and drag that, and then if I hold down the shift key at the same time, that I'll make sure that it's aligned. Then, if I do command D, I can copy that as many times as I want. So, a few different ways that you can do that. I've got eight little squares here and that's a pretty good place to start. Sometimes I'll have less colors than a pattern, sometimes I'll end up having more but eight is a good place to start, six, 10, somewhere in there just so you have a nice variety of colors to work with. So, the easiest way to create a color palette is to simply click on one square, double click on your color picker and choose a color. Once you have something that you like, you can click okay. Click on the next square, double click on the color picker, choose another color, click okay, and you can do that all the way down through all of these squares. So, I'm going to change these back to black actually. I'm going to just use my eyedropper tool for that in case you're wondering what I just did. One thing that I sometimes like to do is use a photograph to choose colors directly from. So, let's see, where do I have these saved? Here it is. So I was looking back through photos of a trip to Morocco that I took a few years ago, and I'm going to choose this photo. So I just went to file, place, and then the photo will show up and you click once and then it ends up on your art board. You can shrink that down. So I just hold down the shift key, and I'm dragging a corner, that makes it smaller and keeps it proportional. The other option is to use your scale tool right here over in the tool bar. If you double click that, you can shrink it or increase the size by a certain percentage, that's very handy. Then we're simply going to use the eyedropper tool to choose colors directly from this photo. So, I have my first square selected, I'll click on my eyedropper tool, you'll see that it stayed selected, and then I can choose colors. You can see as I click with my eyedropper tool it's choosing different colors from my photo. Then, when you're finished, you can simply go back to the black arrow tool, click outside of the box and that deselects it and you can continue the process with all the other squares. There's also a keyboard shortcut. So, if you want to deselect quickly rather than having to go to the black arrow tool every single time, you can go to deselect right here up in the select menu or the keyboard shortcut is shift command A. So I'm going to do that, shift command A, that deselects it. There are keyboard shortcuts for all of these actually so the eyedropper tool keyboard shortcut is I and you can see what all of those are if you just hover over each tool. So, once you get used to these it can make your workflow actually quite fast. So, you'll see, if I click I on my keyboard, it goes to the eyedropper tool and I can simply choose another color. Let's go with kind of a grayish white. Then the keyboard shortcut to get back to my black arrow tool to select my next square is V. So I can simply toggle between I and V on my keyboard and move through all of these squares. So I just clicked on V, clicked on this new square, I'm going to click back on my I key to choose my next color. I'm going to push the V key again. Choose my next square, go back to I for the eyedropper. Choose another color here. There we go. Click V again. Click on my next square. Click I again. Let's see if we go do that. Click V again. Click on my next square, I. Let's get something nice and dark, there we go. Click V again, my last square, I again. Let's do something on the lighter side not quite that intense. Something that I'll also do sometimes is if I get close to a color that I like but I want to change it a little bit is just go to the fill, double click and change the color there. So, that looks pretty good to me. That's how you choose a color palette from a photo. There is a proper way and an improper way to get your colors over here into the swatches palette. You may be wondering, you said you wanted to put your custom colors into the swatches palette but there not there yet, there just on the left side of your screen. So, there's a really important step here that if you do it correctly you will not run into any problems when you're trying to define your pattern later, but if you do it incorrectly, it can cause a lot of headache when an annoying pop up box shows up that says, "Patterns cannot contain anything painted with patterns." So, to get these colors into your swatches palette, the proper place to drag them from is from the color picker tool over here in the toolbar bar, not from your actual square. So let me show you the difference. If I click hold and drag this color all the way over here and let go, you'll see it shows up here. When I hover over it, it has an R, a G and a B color value there in numbers. If I click hold and drag this over from my art word, when I hover over it, it says new pattern swatch one, and that is not what you want. You don't want any of your colors to say, pattern swatch, when you hover over them. So I'm going to actually take that to the trash. So, with each color you're going to want to click on it, go over to the color picker and drag it from there. Click, go to the color picker, drag it from there. You can do that all the way down the line, and I'll show you another way actually to get your colors into the swatches palette as well. That one didn't make it. There we go. Two more. Last one. Okay, so you can see all my colors are there. When I hover over, they all have number color values. None of them say 'pattern swatch,' so that's exactly what I want. The other way that you can easily get all of these colors into your swatches palette is to use your black arrow tool, draw a box around all of them by click, holding, and dragging around and then let go so all of them are selected. Then, if you go down here to this little folder at the bottom of your swatches pallete, you'll see it says new color group and if you click on it, you can either give it a name or just leave it named color group one it doesn't really matter. You can leave all of these the way that they are, click okay. You'll see it shows up as this folder of colors. If you hover over these you can see they have the same color values. So, two different ways to get your color palette into your swatches palette. Then a question that I run into pretty often is, how can I access this color palette in a different illustrator document? You can't do that unless you save your palette in a specific way. So, this custom color palette that you created within this file, within this document lives only in this document. So you can always open up this illustrator file later and grab these line of colors and copy and paste it into a new file, that's one way to get a color palette from one document to another, or If you click on this little menu, this drop down menu right here on the bottom left of your swatches palette, and go to save swatches, you can give it a name, let's just call it Morocco palette. It'll save it in the swatches menu here and click save. Then, if you go to the same little dropdown and go to user defined, you can see my palette shows up there. So if I click on it, it shows up in its own little popup panel here, and you can change the way that it shows up as well so you can see the colors a little bit bigger. So this way, if I wanted to open a new document, a brand new document eight by eight or whatever size, you can see that is still open since I had that panel open, but I could also just go back to user defined. So you'll see it's not in my regular swatches pallete, it went back to that default color palette that I was telling you would happen. But I can easily access that file from my user defined menu. So hopefully that makes sense. So, now that we've got our colors set, let's start talking about illustrations and motifs and move on to actually starting to make our pattern.
6. Creating Motifs – Hand-Drawing and Scanning Your Illustrations: In this segment, we'll be talking about how to create motifs for your pattern design. So a motif is simply an element or a drawing or an illustration, something that you create that will be a part of your pattern design. So there are multiple ways that you can create motifs from drawing your illustrations, your elements on paper and scanning them into your computer to drawing on an iPad Pro which many creative people are using these days as part of their design process and then transferring those drawings from the iPad over to your computer and into Illustrator, or simply drawing directly into Illustrator using a WACOM tablet or the pen tool or even simply the brush tool with your mouse which is kind of a rudimentary way of doing things but I suppose it is possible. So the first way that we'll talk about is drawing on paper and scanning your image into your computer to bring into Illustrator. So as you can imagine, this technique is pretty straightforward. You'll want to draw on some kind of white paper either a sketchbook or a looseleaf paper with a nice thick dark black lines. So you potentially could have success using a pencil. I find that I get the best results with transferring my images into Illustrator. If I use some kind of nice thick black pen like a thin black Sharpie is nice, a felt tip pen, a Pilot G2 is a pen that I often use for a nice dark solid line that transfers nicely into Illustrator, a Pentel pocket brush, whatever your favorite patterns are. The key is to just make sure that your lines are nice and thick. You don't want a lot of shading or little teeny tiny details that might be hard to pick up. So big, bold, flat lines and shapes work really well with this process that will be going over. So once you've got your drawings on paper, there are a couple of ways that you can get them into your computer. The first way is simply scanning your paper or your drawings into your computer and I'm not going to go over a lot of detail about how that works because every scanner is a bit different but you'll just want to know that scanning in your images at 300 dpi or higher which is high quality is a good idea, that will give you a nice good trace which will go over in a lesson to come when you get your images into Illustrator. With this method, you may need to do some brightening and adding more contrast to your images, editing any stray lines or bits of dust or anything that might be on your scanner bed in Photoshop before you bring it into Illustrator. My personal favorite way to get my images from my sketchbook or paper onto my computer these days is with an app from my iPhone called Camscanner and it's a free app and it works exactly the same as a scanner but it does pretty much all of the cleanup for you which is really awesome, so you don't even have to bring your image into Photoshop before bringing it into Illustrator. You simply take a photo of it with this app. It brightens it up and makes it totally black and white for you and then you can save the image right to your phone and then email it to yourself or air drop it or however you get your images from your phone to your computer. So that's a really quick and easy and useful way to do that. You can also simply, this is something that I've done before when I'm in a bind or my scanner isn't hooked up. I remember doing this when I first moved to Portland and all of our stuff was yet to arrive except I had brought my computer in the car with me and I had this project that was due and I set my computer up on the living room floor on the computer box as my desk and I was drawing in my sketchbook and I just took a photo with my phone and then emailed the photo to myself and then brought that photo into Photoshop and cleaned it up that way and then brought it into Illustrator. So there are a few ways that you can do that using a simple scanner, using Camscanner or simply taking a photo.
7. Creating Motifs – Drawing on the iPad Pro: The next way that you can create motifs and get them onto your computer to use an illustrator is by using the iPad Pro, which if you have one you probably know how amazing it is and if you don't have one, I encourage you to go play around with them at the Apple store, because it's quite an amazing piece of technology that is really transforming creative people's design processes, really it's transformed mine for sure. So, I created most of my motifs for patterns on the iPad these days and then bring them into the illustrator to work with them there, to finish off my patterns. I personally love using an app called procreate which is not a vector app. So, everything that I create there needs to be digitized and turned into a vector in illustrator in order to work with it and be able to edit colors and things like that. A lot of designers like to use Adobe draw an Adobe sketch which if you're using the latest version of illustrator and Photoshop they sync up really nicely, you can save things into your library, your Creative Cloud library and have things open up right in illustrator and Photoshop, it's pretty seamless. So, which app you use to draw your motifs is really up to you and whether you want your motifs to be vectors already. Using Adobe draw is a very popular program for that or another one is called the ink pad. Those you would bring directly into illustrator and you could color them right on your iPad and have them be ready to work with right in illustrator which is pretty handy. If you use an app like procreate or Adobe draw, you'll need to do some work to digitize and turn your motifs into vectors once you get them into illustrator, but really again it's just going to be a personal preference with which program you like to use and how you like to make your motifs, but basically it's very simple, you create your motifs on the iPad and send them over to yourself either via email or via airdrop or however you get them transferred from one place to another, you could text message them I suppose, if that's feeling easy and then open them up save them to your computer. Open them up in illustrator and work with them there.
8. Creating Motifs – Using a Wacom Tablet and Using the Pen Tool: There's one distinct advantage to using Wacom tablet and using the Pen Tool in Illustrator to create motifs. That is that everything that you create in this way will already be a vector in Illustrator, which means that you'll be able to scale it infinitely up and down without losing any quality. You will also be able to easily recolor your images in Illustrator, which as you'll see in coming lessons, is very fun and very important and adds for a lot of variety within your work. So, let's first start with the Wacom tablet. As you can see, my tablet is very old. It's from about 2007. Like I said before, the pen is not fancy, it's been chewed up a cat, it has a piece of tape around it. I could upgrade to a new one but this one is still going strong and I just, at this point, I'm waiting to see how long it's going to last. It's already been over a decade, so you don't need anything fancy, that's basically what I'm getting at. So, to use the Wacom tablet, it's a little bit funny to get used to if you've never used one before. Because in traditional drawing, on paper, you are obviously looking at what your hand is drawing. The difference with the Wacom tablet is that you're drawing with your hand on the tablet but you're looking at your computer screen. So, as you can imagine, that can take some getting used to and your initial drawings can look a little bit funny. So, I'm just going to go ahead and get started here. I've got my Paintbrush tool selected and everything you'll be drawing with the Paintbrush tool will be with this stroke color. So, I'll just stick with black since that's pretty easy. You can basically just go for it. I'm just going to drop a very simple shape here, just a little flower. Every line that you draw will be connected to itself. So, as you can see, when I take my black arrow tool, I click on the circle that I do first, that's its own shape. These petals are its own shape and these are vectors already, these blue ink points are showing me that it's a vector shape. So, I can double click on the Fill are on the Color Picker tool to choose a color. I think I might like to add, I fill the colors, so it's a solid circle and there you go. To deselect, remember, you can always just, with the black arrow tool, select it, you can always just click right outside your shape to deselect it. So, let's make this a different color. Let's use one of my colors that I chose in my palette from earlier and there we go. So, you can see now, since I drew this one second, it's covering over the pink circle that I drew first. So, in Illustrator, it's really important to think of images that you create in this way as stacks of shapes basically. So, whatever you drew first is at the bottom of the stock and whatever you drew last is at the top of the stock. But, you can always rearrange those by selecting going to object, object arrange and then send that code or send it back, that'll send it to the very bottom or back of the stock and the select. There you can see I've got my very beautiful rudimentary little flower shape. So, if you have a Wacom tablet or if you've been thinking about getting one, this can be a really fun thing to play around with. We go a head and delete that. Next, we're going to talk about the Pen Tool, which is notoriously the most difficult tool to learn how to use in Illustrator. But, once you get the hang of it, it can actually be quite useful and really fun to use and a great way to make precise shapes or to just create vector shapes in general. So, the way that I like to use this the most is to trace over my drawings basically. So, let me shrink this down a little. Basically, I'm going to use this as a guide or as a template. So, I'm going to want to change the opacity here. I want to be able to see my shape but also to be able to see clearly what I'm drawing over it with the Pen Tool. So, that is why we change the opacity. So, I'm going to go ahead and lock that, so I'll just going to go to Object Lock. The keyboard shortcut is Command two and zoom in here. I want to choose over this leaf shape right here and I'll go back to black, since that'll be easy to see, and the Pen Tools are right over here in the toolbar. I'm basically simply going to try to trace around this shape. I'm going to start right here at the bottom. You can see with the Pen Tool, now that I've clicked once, I'm dragging this line around with me. So, this can be pretty confusing right from the start. What do I do with this line? So, what I'm going to do next is go up to this point, I'm going to try to trace from the bottom of this leaf shape. So, I'm going to actually click and hold this time and when you hold now, and drag that line around, you can see that it turns into a curve. Then, once, you've got that curve where you want it, then you let go. I'm actually going to get lid of this pic, there we go. So, you can see, now that I've let go, I'm dragging that line around again. But now it's this weird curvy line and what do you do with that curvy line next? So, I'm just going to keep continuing to trace this leaf. So, remember that every segment of this path that you're creating, you can edit to be exactly the shape that you want it to. So, this will get easier as you practice with it and you'll know intuitively where to place the next point and the next point and the next point. But for now, I'm going to go right here. So, I'm going to click once, and I let go, I didn't hold at that time. The next thing that you'll do is you'll see right now I'm holding down my Option key, I'm toggling my Option key on and off. When I hold down the Option key, you can see that line goes away and it turns into this open backed arrow. This is what will allow you to actually change this one, this last segment of this line that you created. So, hold on my Option, click Hold and drag on that segment and you can see, now it's dragging it right to wherever I want it to be. Then, when I let go, that line is now changed and I'm dragging around that line again. When I toggle on and off, the Option again, that line goes away. So, but for right now, I want to finish this next portion of my leaf, so I'm clicking, holding, and dragging, and then I let go, and that looks pretty good. Now, I'm dragging my line around again, and I'm going to go ahead and make this next leaf shape now, so I'm going to click and hold and you can see that curve is not correct, so I'm going to hold down my option key, grab this little handle here. Keep holding down my option key while I try to move it, and place it right where I want it to be. That's not perfect but for our purposes, it's good enough for right now. Then, when I let go of my option key, that line comes back, and then I'm just going to simply continue following that leaf shape, I'm clicking, holding, and dragging into place, let go. Now, I just want to finish this shape, so, I'm going to click here. You can see that curve is not right, so I'm holding down my option key, and I'm going to drag that little handle into place where I want it, and there we go. So now, my shape is complete. So, to get out of that, I can either use a keyboard shortcut, shift-command-a, which is deselect up here, shift-command-a, or you can simply, let me back it up, command-z is undo. You can simply go to your black arrow tool and click outside. So now, you can see I've got one leaf shape. So, next, I'm going to just do basically the exact same thing for all of these leaf shapes. I'm going to click hold and drag, let go, get rid of that fill again, so we can see what we're doing. Let's see, I'm going to click and not hold, and then hold on my option key and grab that handle. Maybe I'll just finish that shape. Now, that doesn't look so good, so I'm going to undo that. When you undo, it just goes right back to where you were before when you're still dragging that line around. So, I'm going to click and hold and just drag that line a little bit. You can also always go back and edit these. If there's like a funny little bump or something, you can always do that later too by going to your white arrow tool. Let me zoom in a little, so we can really see this. It's hard to tell, but that one little bumpy bump right there is the only one that's blue, the others are white. So, that tells me that, only that one specific anchor point is selected. When I click and hold and drag, it moves only that one point, rather than the whole shape. So, this can be really useful if you want to grab another one of these handles, hold down the option key again with the pen tool selected, and change how that line is behaving. So, you can see now, when I deselect, that made it a lot straighter. Then again, I could fill this with black, zoom out, one thing that the pen tool often does is, it makes these pointy edges where you may not want them. So, this can be changed. I'm going to select both of these. So, this can be changed in the stroke panel, which I do not have open, which I should. Show options here. So, you can see this cap and corner, these cap and corner options here, if I go to this middle one which says a round cap and round joint, you can see that that changed, that ends of my leaf to be a little bit more leaf like. So, those are some cool options to play around with if your lines are not behaving exactly the way that you anticipate that they might, or if you just want to change them for some reason. So, that's kind of a general overview of how to use the pen tool. I'll just quickly finish the shape and then show you, how I will hook it all together to be able to work with it as one whole motif. Okay, and the last thing that I need to do is just make this leaf line here and then we'll join the whole thing up. So, I'm just going to try to follow that shape somewhat. Okay, let's make that a little bit thicker, so you can change the stroke up here or in the stroke pallet over here. There are often a couple of different ways to do things in Illustrator, and there we go. So, what you would want to do, as you can see, these are all still separate little shapes. But, you can select everything. So, with your black arrow tool, just draw a box around it, click hold and drag and let go, and then go up to object group. Once you've created all the motifs that you want to with the pen tool using this method, tracing over the images that you brought in to use as a template, you can unlock that template by going to object, unlock all, and then simply delete it, and you are left with your motif or motifs if you did more than one, that are vectors and are ready to color and use in your patterns. So, that's a basic overview of the pen tool. The more you play with it and practice with it, the more comfortable you'll get. It can be frustrating in the beginning like I said, but it's a really fun and useful tool and has a lot of applications within the pattern design world. So, it's definitely a good one to know how to use, but it can be intimidating. In the next segment, we'll be talking about how to get your sketches and other images into Illustrator and digitize them if they are not already vectors like these ones that we just created directly into Illustrator-R. I'll still be learning how to image trace, how to live paint, how to color your images, your motifs, how to edit colors all of that good stuff. So, I will see you there.
9. Digitizing Your Motifs – Using Image Trace: In this segment I'm going to show you how to digitize and color your illustrations, your motifs, so you can start laying them out in your repeating pattern design. So, if at this point you haven't created any drawings, any motifs, pause this video, and take just a few minutes to draw something in a sketchbook or on loose leaf paper or use your Wacom tablet or a pen tool if that's feeling good and fun, however you decide you'd like to create some illustrations that you might want to work with for this first pattern. So, at this point I'd really like to encourage you also especially if you're brand new to this process, to not get over complicated or fussy in your illustrations. Don't try to make them too perfect at this point. Big, bold, shapes with not a ton of detail are really going to be your friend as you learn how this all works, and you're going to have plenty of time as you practice these techniques after this course is finished, to get more detailed and more perfect, and more complicated with your illustrations. So, for now just keep it simple, and that's really going to be the best way. So, again, pause this video if you don't have any motifs to work with yet, and then come back whenever you are ready. So, the first thing that we're going to do, I've got my leaf shape that I created here with the pen tool. I'm just going to go ahead and leave that over here, off to the side. I might end up working with that, but I'm going to show you how to place some of your drawings that you've scanned in either with your scanner or with the cam scanner app or by taking a photo. However, you've gotten them into your computer or you know brought them over from your iPad. Saving things as JPEG's is always a good idea. A PNG file will also work. So, I've got a whole bunch of JPEG's saved here that you can see, and I'll just scroll through, and let's see, that looks pretty good. So, I just went to file, place, and I chose the file and clicked okay, and then you can see this funny little thing pops up. That I'm dragging around, and when I click my mouse one time it will place that file for me. So, these are just some drawings that I did on my iPad, and saved as JPEG, and sent over to my computer. So, right now you can see these are all hooked together and they have this blue X through them. So, right now they are still a JPEG, and what we want to do is turn these shapes into vectors. I'm going to teach you a process right now, called Image Tracing. So, this is the way that you turn a JPEG image or a PNG image, a pixel based image if you will, into a vector based image, which is the best to work with in illustrator because it will give you the most flexibility. You'll be able to scale these images up and down without losing any quality, and you'll be able to easily change the colors, which as you'll find out in a coming lesson is maybe pretty much the most fun part of this whole, this whole process is recording the artwork. So, you can see this button up here, which says image trace. You can also find it under the object menu here. Go down to object, image trace, make. If you do it from this button up here, there's a little arrow to the right, and if you hover over it it says tracing presets, and if you click on that there are some different options that you can choose, and to be honest I'm not super crazy about any of these options that the most recent version of Creative Cloud gives you for image tracing. But the one that I've found that works the best, is this sketched art option. So, if you click on sketched art. And give it a minute. You can see that it still has this blue X through it, so it's not quite a vector yet. It traced my shapes, but we still have one more step to do in order to turn it into a vector, but I want to show you one more thing. So, if you go to the window menu, and go down to image trace. This opens an image trace panel, which gives you some more options for customizing the way that your trace is turning out. So, this threshold slider is one that can often make a difference. So, if you slide it up and down you can see that my shapes are changing a little bit. So, if it's traced in a way that you're not quite happy with, going and moving these sliders around, is a good first step in trying to make it look a little bit more true to your original drawings. So, that's looking pretty good to me. Depending on what your drawings look like moving these sliders around may or may not make much of a difference, but it's worth going in and playing and just seeing kind of what they do to your drawings. Another important thing to note in this image trace panel is this ignore white button. So, I've got mine checked which means that when I trace my shapes, it's going to trace each of them separately, and turn them into their own vector, but there will be a big white box around it, if I don't have this ignore white option checked. So, if I do have it checked, all everything that was white in my JPEG, will end up being transparent. So, let's see. So, you can see it turned white when I un-checked it, so that I'll stay white in the trace, and when I check it again, it went transparent. So, that panel is very useful, and the last step in turning it into a vector is to go to this expand button at the top. You can also get to that from the object menu, object, expand. So, when I click that you can see now every shape is surrounded by these blue lines. So, when something is surrounded in the blue lines like that, that is telling you that it is indeed a vector shape. So, the problem still is that these are still all hooked together, and we want these separated obviously, so we can work with them individually. So, to do that, you can go up to object ungroup, and sometimes you'll have to do this more than once, for some reason I'm not really sure, but this one seemed to work pretty well. Just doing it one time, and then you can see that it actually separated everything out. So, for example these little raindrops are all separate, I might want to hook those back together. So, I can just with my black arrow tool selected, I can click hold and drag around all those shapes and then group those back together by going to object group. So, that when I click on one, it's actually selecting all of them. So, any shapes that you have that aren't connected like this one here, I'll select all of those, and go to object group. There's also a keyboard shortcut if you're into that kind of thing, which is command G, that can just make things work a little more quickly. So, I'll select all those, command G. Now, you can see those are all hooked together as one shape. The rest of them I think seem pretty good. I don't think there are any shapes that are disconnected. So, now, delete those little straight points. Now, I've got all these different shapes to work with, and I can easily change the colors, and work with them very easily. So, what I like to do next, to just to kind of prepare myself for starting to make my pattern. Is to actually get everything off of the art board, and move it over to the left side of my art board. You can put it on the right, you can put it on top. It doesn't really matter. I'm just in the habit of moving everything over to the left. That's what I've been doing for ages now. Oops! That looks like it's not fully connected. So, let's hook that all together, command G for group. There we go, and move these last ones, and that is how you turn your drawings from a JPEG or from a pixel based image into a vector using the image trace method. Next up, we'll be talking about how to actually add color to these, and how to start placing them into a pleasing arrangement for your pattern.
10. Digitizing Your Motifs – Using Live Paint: One of my very favorite parts of creating repeating patterns is the coloring part. So, that is what we're going to do next. I'm going to show you how to actually add color to these wonderful drones that you've created. So, the first step that I always like to do is to create a background color. So, again like I mentioned before, my colors often change and the background color might change, but it just gives me a nice starting place. For some reason I don't know if you feel this way, but there can be something intimidating about a big blank white square or a blank white canvas or a blank white piece of paper. So, just putting down an initial color does something for me mentally that really makes it less of a barrier to actually get started on my designing. So, to do that, I'm going to use my rectangle tool over here and I'm going to make my background square the exact same size as my artwork. So, you can simply line it up with the corner here, click one time and this dialog box comes up where you can assign the size of the rectangle that you'd like. So, I'm going to simply do eight by eight inches, click Okay. You can see it made a black rectangle there. So, now, I can either use my Eyedropper tool to choose one of the colors in my color palette or with the square still selected, I can just choose my color from over here since I have all of my colors in my Swatches palette too. So, let's do something kind of dramatic with a dark background. So, the next thing that I like to do is lock that background square, lock that selection. The keyboard shortcut for that is Command two and that just is going to help me make sure that I'm not going to move that square around. Some people like to put the background square on a separate layer and lock that layer. I don't really ever bother doing that. I like having everything on one layer so I can easily access everything that I need. But if you want to put that on a separate layer, that's totally fine. Just make sure that it's locked so it doesn't move around at all. Okay. So, let's get started. There are a couple of different ways that we can actually color these images and which way you use really will just depend on what you want your final pattern to look like and you may actually use a combination of these techniques. So, the first way is you can simply select your image and you can see that everything in my image is filled with this black in the fill box of the color picker. So, when I choose different colors here in my Swatches palette, you can see that my shape, we move it over here, is actually changing color. So, that can be pretty handy. Another way that you can do that is to select it and then use the Eyedropper tool like we just did with the background color. There we go. When you want to deselect, you can either go back to your Black Arrow tool, click on that and then just click outside of it or the key word shortcut is Shift, Command A. So, that's an easy one. Then I'm noticing that since I vectorized, digitized my shapes first and I drew the background for a second, the background square is actually on top, so I'm going to need to move this shape up to the front. So, I'm going to Object, Arrange, Bring to front, and that'll bring my flower on top of my background. Okay. So, that's one way. So, this will fill in everything that was black, everything in your initial drawing. Changing the color this way will change those lines to that color, but you can't fill in any of these areas. See, like if I click on here, I can't select just that center pedal area and change that color. You're basically able to change whatever your initial drawing was with this method. So, let's do the next one. Let's go here. So, we're going to have to actually move this to the front to Object, Arrange, Bring to front and let's change the color of that one just so we can see it a little bit better. So, I actually want to try to fill in the pedals of this one as well. So, I'm going to select it and then we'll change this into a live paint object which is going to allow us to basically use the paint bucket tool to fill in every area of these shapes. So, the paint bucket tool can be tricky to find. It's nested under this sheet builder tool for some reason. So, if you click and hold you'll see this other little menu fanned out in the live paint bucket is right underneath the shape of their tools. So, if you just scroll on to that one and let go now I'm on my paint bucket tool. With my shape selected, I can simply, it's hard to see but it says, "click to make a live paint group" and it shows up in red. So, that's what you want and then if you click one time on any part of this shape and then I'm going to deselect by doing Shift, Command A, you can see that it filled in that paddle with that color that I was using. You can do that as many times as you want. You can change the color, fill in those pedals with a different color, change the color as many times as you want. You can change this outline color of course. One thing that trips people up is in the previous versions of Illustrator and different painting programs, you would point the paint bucket rather where the paint is actually dumping out of the bucket onto where you wanted to change the color, but with this version of Illustrator you actually point this little arrow where you want to fill. So, that still just doesn't quite work for me for some reason, I think I'm just stuck in my old ways of pouring the paint into the section that you want. But just remember that if it's not filling the way you want it to, make sure you're actually pointing the arrow where you want to fill with color instead of the paint bucket. So, another cool trick is you can fill areas with no color. So, you can see I can take that color out if I want to. I can actually fill that outline with no color which can create some kind of interesting effects and then you can go around and fill maybe just the pedals and see how that looks. Lots and lots and lots of options here with this technique. Another thing that you can do which is kind of fun to play around with, let's start with a different shape is, bringing that to the front, is choose a color here and then turn it into a live paint group by selecting it with the paint bucket clicking one time there we go and Shift, Command A the deselect. When you go to the paint bucket I'm just going to Fill in all of these shapes here. Then, I'm going to copy it, edit, copy. The keyboard shortcut for that is Command C. Edit, paste in front, keyboard shortcut is Command F for that one. I just made a direct copy of that right in front of the initial shapes. I'm going to change the color of that one and then use my no fill to go back over these leaves here and take out that color. Then, you can move this top one around to give it a cool effect like that. Lots of different options with the live paint tool. Then, you can simply just go through all of your shapes and colorize them and we'll be one step closer to creating our actual pattern. I'm going to move all of these at the same time up to the front so I don't have to keep doing it one at a time. Now, I just want to object arrange bring the front. Every one of these motifs now, these little drawings, is going to be in front of the background which is right where I need them to be. So let's see. Not loving how that is going with my pattern yet. What I intend to do when I'm working on coloring motifs is I'll bring them onto the background, I'll color them there all, start arranging things. Again, this is just an intuitive process and as you go through this you'll learn what your own process is going to be like. You might like coloring them all before you actually even start placing them into your background. You might like placing everything first and arranging your pattern and then coloring it afterwards. There's not really any right or wrong method here. It really is just personal preference. I tend to arrange and color at the same time which is what you can watch me do now. I'm just going to do this really quickly. I'm going to go through the same method for each shape. This one I probably will not image or I won't turn it into a live paint group since it's just one shape, I can easily just select it and choose a different color. Hopefully that makes sense. I'll just quickly finish this up and you guys can watch as I arrange and color and get a feel for the way that I tend to make this all happen. There, I've got some colored motifs. You can see I have a couple over here that I didn't use, that's pretty normal. I may or may not use those at some point during this pattern for now I'm just going to leave them over there because they don't seem to fit quite right with these other leaf and flower shapes. But now I've got all my images colored and this will definitely change as I create the pattern, and as I repeat elements and copy and paste and shift things around, but this is a really good starting point for me. This makes me feel like now I can start actually arranging the pattern. Again, you may like to have these shapes off to the side first as your coloring them. That's totally cool. I like being able to see what they look like on my background color that I've chosen just so I can start to get a feel for what my pattern might end up looking like. But take some time now and color your motifs and in the next segment we are going to talk about how to easily edit and change these colors. Recolor your artwork in a really fun and cool way and come up with color combinations that you may not have initially thought of. We will start actually arranging our pattern as well. I'll see you there.
11. Editing Colors with the Recolor Artwork Tool: Oftentimes what happens to me is midway through a pattern I realize I'm not really very crazy about the colors that I've actually chosen and I want to change them. So, this I think might be one of the very favorite things that you learn in this course. This is the recolor artwork tool, and it is so fun to play with and so addictive, and so hard to restrain yourself from creating 100 different varieties of every pattern that you create. So, get ready for some fun. The first thing that I'm going to do is actually unlock my background layer so I can change that color as well. Then, with my block arrow tool selected, I'm going to draw a big box around everything including my color palette, because I want to change those colors to my new color palette as well. Whatever I end up creating, it will be a big, good surprise. There are a couple of ways that you can get there. You can see this little black and white color wheel looking thing up at the top here, and if you hover over it, it says to recolor artwork. You can also get to it from the edit menu. Going to "Edit," "Edit Colors," and "Recolor artwork." So I like to just click on this little wheel, and it shows up over here. There are a lot of different things that you can do with this tool. The first thing, maybe you like your colors, but you just want to see what they might look like in some kind of different arrangement,. So if you click this button here, which says randomly change color order, you can see it'll just move those colors around for you, and you may get to something that you really love. That will be how you want to move forward with your pattern, and that's awesome. Let's cancel that out, and we're going to try again. So I clicked it again. There's also this randomly change saturation and brightness, which can be a fun way also to get some combinations that you may not have initially been able to plan. This is not one that I personally use very often, but it may be useful for you. It's at least fun to just play around with to see what it does. Sometimes what using this tool does for me too is combinations that I just have never seen before pop up, and I can take a screenshot and save that for a future pattern or some future works. It's a fun way to be inspired by color in a new way is, I guess, what I'm trying to say. So let me cancel that out and show you this other fun way. I just clicked on it again. Right now it's on assign. So this means you can assign each color a new specific color. If you click on this "Edit," you can actually move each of these colors around on this wheel. So you can see right now I'm changing that rust color. You can choose whichever new color you would like. You can do that with every single color. Another way that you can do this is to click on this link. Then when you move one, you're actually moving all of them. So you can move them around the color wheel and get to some really cool combinations. I would have trouble putting these colors together maybe if I were just trying to put a palette together from scratch. So this can be a really, really, really fun and inspiring way to try to make your color palettes feel really fresh and interesting. So let's see. I'm digging that one for right now. I'm going to show you one more thing. Let's click on that recolor artwork tool again, and it pops up. Now, it's got my new colors. If you want to change, for example, say, I wanted to switch this dusty rose and this cream-ish color, you can click and hold on one and drag it to where you want to switch it, and it'll just switch those colors. You can do that with as many as you want. If you want to eliminate one color, for example, if I wanted to get rid of this violet, lavendery hue, and replace it with this pink instead, I can drag the color from over here on the left into that spot on the right. Now, everything that was that purple color, that lavendery color is now the pink color. So if I click "OK," keep everything selected and click on that recolor artwork tool again. You can see that that lavender color is no longer in my palette at all. I actually liked that lavender color, so I'm going to go back and keep that color. There is my new palette. I can select those colors there like I did before when we were creating our initial palette, and go over here to the Swatches palette and click on "New Color Group" again. You can give it its own name if you want or just leave it as is. Click "OK," and you can see my new palette showed up. Now, I've got my old palette, my new palette, and I'll show you one more cool thing with the recolor artwork tool now that I've got those two color groups there in the Swatches panel. So if I select everything, click on "Recolor Artwork" again, you can actually change your colors based on which color group you want to use from your palette. So if I wanted to go back to that first one, I could do that, and then click around on randomly changing the colors. I could keep those linked and move it around. I could unlink it and move just the one color around. That's pretty. Maybe that's how I want to have my palette be now. So lots of different options here. Excuse me. It can be tricky too. Like I said before, restrain yourself from creating just endless options for what your pattern could look like. But it's just a really inspiring tool, and a fun, and easy, and quick way to change your colors rather than having to change this color to something different in your palette, and then taking your paint bucket tool and going through and changing every place that has that color in it. It's just to find and easy way to change it instead. So another way that you can use the recolor artwork tool is if you did just want to change that one color, and you know specifically what color you'd like to change that fuchsia color to is you can create that new color, select that, and then if you hold down the shift key and draw a box around your whole pattern here. So you have your pattern, and just that red square selected, and click on the recolor artwork tool, again, you can simply take that red and drag it from the left over to the right where that fuchsia is. You can see it changed all over the fuchsia to that red color. Then click "OK," and there you go. I'm actually going to undo that, Command-Z, because I don't like that red very much actually. I'll just undo that, and now I'm back to the fuchsia. I'll save that, and that's it. So I hope that feels really fun and inspiring. Take some time just playing around with that, seeing if you can get to a color palette that feels a little bit more like the one that you might like to work with as you continue to make your pattern. This is a process that I personally use pretty much throughout the pattern design creation process. There is no rule on when to change colors or how many times you can change colors. Again, it's just going to be an intuitive thing that you'll discover as you figure out what your own process looks like, and it's sometimes different for every pattern too. So if you're not happy with the colors, you can do this at any point during your creation process. You can lay everything out in black and white first and color everything at the end, and then just recolor it at the end. It's really up to you. So take some time to just play around with that tool, and then I will meet you back here to start laying out our pattern and actually creating the repeat.
12. Creating Your Pattern – Laying Out Your Pattern Tile: So, we are now at the portion of class that you've probably been waiting for the most and that is actually putting our repeating pattern together. So let's get started. The first thing that I always like to do at this point is make sure that my background square Is locked because I don't want to move this around at all as I'm moving around my motifs. So you'll just go up to object lock selection and again that's command two for your keyboard shortcut and I'm just going to move all of this stuff over off to the left side a little bit more. I'm going to have some things overlapping this left edge here and I just like to have everything in the immediate area surrounding my art board nice and free of extraneous stuff. So, the basic idea here is that everything that's overlapping on this left edge is going to be repeated exactly in the same spot over on the right side and everything that's overlapping on the top edge here will be copied and repeated down to the bottom at exactly the same spot and that will create our repeating pattern tile. So, as you can see I don't have anything actually overlapping any of my edges right now. So I'm going to just move these over a little bit. This is my personal preference for how I start my own patterns. I start kind of in the top left corner and I have motifs overlapping on the left side and on the top but I leave the right side and the bottom free of anything overlapping them for now because as you'll see once you start copying things over from the left to the right and from the top to the bottom, things can start sitting on top of one another and then you have to do a lot of moving around and I find that this just makes it a little bit easier to make sure that everything is placed properly and copied properly. That kind of thing. So, from here I generally like to think about creating a pattern as putting a puzzle together, basically. So, you're just trying to find the right place for each motif in a way that feels pleasing to your eye and there aren't really any rules for how to do that or any real techniques that I can teach you. It's a very intuitive process and it's going to be different for every person. So, the best way to figure out what's going to feel best to you and what's going to look best to your eye is to make a lot of patterns. I'll teach you a few little tricks for how to add some visual interest to your designs with copying motifs, changing colors, rotating, shrinking things down, reflecting them, that sort of thing and then you can just take it from there. So, I'm just going to start moving things around and fitting them together. Again, I don't really have a plan here, I'm just moving things around until I find some pleasing configuration. As you can see I've got my black arrow tool selected and I'm simply clicking holding and dragging things around. If I hover over or hover close to one of these corners rather you can see that this little curved arrow shows up and it might be hard to see but I'm not clicking my mouse or anything here. I'm just hovering over that spot and if I click hold and drag when I see that little curvy arrow you can actually pull and rotate this shape around. So I do a lot of that as well and then you can just click, hold and drag right on the shape to get it into position. Another way to do that is to use the rotate tool which is over here in the toolbar. If you click on that tool while your shape is selected, you don't have to look for that curvy arrow you can just twist it around just like that. So that can be pretty handy as well. Then go back to your black arrow tool and click outside of it to deselect and you'll probably just be kind of flip flopping back and forth between different tools at this point, the black arrow tool, the selection tool. So you can move things around that way, the rotate tool. Nested underneath the rotate tool here is the reflect tool which if you double click it, you can see that there's a vertical reflect and a horizontal reflect. So, if I choose a vertical, it will reflect my shape over a vertical axis and I'm just going to command Z and undo that. Do that again and this will flip it horizontally. So that is a pretty handy one that I end up using pretty much all the time. There's a keyboard shortcut for that of course also and that's O. So if you click O on your keyboard, you can easily get to that tool. The rotate tool, keyboard shortcut is the letter R, your R key. So once you get more familiar with this process and you have things, it's a little bit more second nature. Those keyboard shortcuts will become more handy but if you're brand new to this and that kind of freaks you out do not worry about it, there are plenty of other ways to do it without the keyboard shortcuts at this point. So, something else that I like to do to prevent my designs from looking too blocky or for the repeat to be very noticeable is I like to repeat shapes and put them in different sections of the actual design of this, this is the pattern tile that we're creating, so in different sections of the pattern tile. So, there are of course a couple of ways that you can do that. I'm going to copy the shape that I've got selected here, so I have a second instance of it. I'm holding down the option key right now and you can see that my black arrow turns into a little double arrow, a black arrow and a white arrow and that means that if I click, hold and drag I'm going to drag a copy of that shape. So now I've got two. Another way that you can easily do it of course is to go up to edit copy, edit, paste, that I'll make another one. I' find a trick that I like is to have the same shapes but just make them in a little bit of a different position. So I just reflected that one, maybe I'll change the positioning a little and maybe change the size slightly. So, right now I'm holding down the shift key, I'm going to shrink this down a little bit and if I hold down the shift key and click hold and drag on one of these corners, that will shrink it down proportionally. If I don't hold down the shift key while I'm shrinking it down you can see it does this funny like weird stretching stuff and I don't really want that to happen. So I'm going to command Z, undo that. Another way that you can always shrink things down or enlarge things is to use the scale tool, which the keyboard shortcut for that is the letter S, your S key and if you'd like to use that you can either click on it and then if you click your return key, this dialog box will come up and you can shrink that down to whatever percentage you would like or you can simply double-click on it and the same box will show up and you can do it like that. So, I'm going to keep just playing around here. I'm going to hold down my option key and copy those little raindrops and go to my reflect tool, click the return key, click okay, move those around, then I think I'll copy those again by holding down the option key. I'm going to do that again, hold in the option key. I'm going to go to I just hit my O key which is the reflect shortcut, return and then vertical reflection, maybe I'll make that one a little bit bigger, hold down my shift key and just simply drag that. Then to move this around, you can either just click hold and drag on it with your black arrow tool selected like I have or you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard. So, you got a couple of options there as well. Always multiple options in Illustrator. It's a very useful program and that it gives you a lot of different ways to do things depending, and you can choose your favorite depending on how your brain works and what feels easiest. So that's kind of cool. As you become more experienced in this process and you've made a lot of patterns and you see the way that they're repeating, certain motifs will start to stand out to you as the ones that may not cause problems in your designs but that may make your repeat look a little bit more obvious. So I'm noticing that this flower here, I don't really have anything else in here that looks quite like that. So, this would be repeated in a very obvious way if I were to just have this one flower here. So, this is one that would seem like a good one for me to repeat and put somewhere else in my design. So, I'm going to hold down my option key, click hold and drag and let go and then just rotate that around a little bit. Another fun trick that I like to use just to make things feel a little bit different is, maybe I'll move that over here actually, is to change these colors, I'm going to keep that selected and click on the recolor artwork tool and then just change these three colors. I'm going to keep the same colors but change the configuration a little bit. So, lets see, it looks somewhat the same but also different enough that it just adds a little bit of interest and I'm actually going to do that again and copy this one by holding down the option key and let's reflect this one and turn it a little bit. So, this I think will repeat a little bit more. It'll look a little bit more natural I guess. I'm also going to repeat this one. I'm basically just trying to fill up the space at this point and you can see that I'm still not overlapping anything on the bottom or the right edge. So, things are starting to overlap more and more along the left side and the top edge. So, in just a few minutes here I'm actually going to start copying those down to the right or down to the bottom and over to the right, so you can see how that's going to start coming together in my square. Let's see and you can overlap things as much as you want, you can keep everything separate. Again, there are no rules here. The name of the game is just coming up with some kind of design that you love. That's what we're after here. Let's see, let's copy some more of those reflect shapes, I'll put the O key to reflect it. That's not quite right. So, you can see I'm just kind of intuitively going along, no real plan, moving things around. Oftentimes, once you've placed one motif that will inform where the next ones go or it will show you which one needs to be moved that you just put somewhere, it's all an intuitive flow really. So, let's see, I'm going to copy some of these, hold down the option key, all reflected vertically, we go. Okay, let's see. Reflect to that one, O key, and I'm just using my return key here. Pretty simple. Okay. Let's see. Let's do this one, hold down my option key, click hold and drag, and I think I'll put this one here, but I'll make it a lot smaller and reflect it. Hit my O key and return and return. Okay, so you can see this one is overlapping the bottom, so this one could potentially create some problems and may have to be moved, but we will just see. Okay, so I've got my square pretty well filled up now, while also leaving the bottom and the right sides free and clear of motif. So, let's start copying some of this stuff over. Let's do one more thing actually. Holding down my option key and then let's reflect this one as well. Okay, I just filled in that space a little bit more. All right. So, what I'm going to do is select everything that's overlapping on this left sides, I've got my black arrow tool on my selection tool, I'm going to click hold and drag it just kind of right over this edge to make sure I grab everything. If you double click on the selection tool, this brings up the move tool, and let me show you another place that you can get to that as well actually, so if you go to object, transform, move, that will bring up the same dialog box. So, what we're going to do here is copy these illustrations, these motifs that are on left side over to exactly the spot that we need them to be on the right side. So, my art word is eight inches wide by eight inches long. So, my horizontal movement is going to be eight inches over to the right, my vertical is going to be zero because I don't want to move these up and down at all I just want to move them over to the right, and then we will copy them. So those, now you can see are in exactly the right spot where I need them to be for my pattern. I'm going to do the same thing here I'm going to click hold and drag and grab everything that's overlapping on the top, and then I'm going to double click here on the selection tool, and this time, we don't want to move things to the right or the left at all so that horizontal number will be zero. The vertical number now, we're going to be moving down eight inches the size of my art board, moving down or to the right is a positive number, if you need to move something up or to the left that would be a negative number so you would be moving it negatively, for example. But since we're moving things down vertically, so that's my positive eight and we'll copy, and there we go. Okay. So, now that we've got these shapes placed you can see a little bit more how the pattern is starting to come together. So, now is the time where I may like to start kind of moving things around a little bit, making sure everything is overlapping in a nice way that nothing is looking funky, filling in these areas that still need filling in. So, I'm just copying that, I'm going to rotate it like this, just filling in my areas. Copy that by holding down my option key, and I zoomed in a little too much. So to zoom out I'm just doing command and the minus key here. A handy little tool if you end up doing that and end up in a funny place in your screen or something, you can use this grabber tool, the hand tool, and that will just, you can click hold and drag and grab your screen around like that. Nice little keyboard trick is that if you hold down your space bar key that makes the hand show up so you can simply hold down your space bar key drag it around to where you need it and work with it like that. To get your art word in centered in your screen wherever you need it. All right, so, let's finish this up here and then we will make our repeat. Very exciting. I actually think I want this behind, so I'm going to cut this command X, and I'm going to select this one because I want to put those little raindrops behind this one. So, then I'll go to edit, paste in back, and that places it in the same spot, the same position within my pattern tile but just behind that shape. Hopefully that makes sense. I use edit, paste in front and edit paste in back all the time. It's like one of my best friend kind of tools. Okay, so just a little bit more to do here, let's copy this one and I think, maybe change the color of this one, and that did something a little bit funky because I've got this line here and it filled in this line. So, if there is ever something that happens like that you need to change just a little portion of your design, you can go to your white arrow tool which is the direct selection tool, and I can click right on that line and you'll see that it shows up with my fill and my stroke the same color, I can just put no color into that fill so it just turns right back into my line. Let's copy this one as well. Hold down my option key, click hold and drag, and I'll reflect that one, make that fit a little bit better, maybe I'll rotate that one a little. Okay. We're getting very close here. Want to move this, let's see. I need one. Something to put up there, how about this one again, but we'll change the color and shrink it down. So again, I'm holding my shift keys so I can shrink and enlarge that proportionally and I'll make that maybe this blue color, and I don't actually have much of that blue color in here, do I? So, I think I might change a couple of other things to that color as well just to add a little bit more in there. Use my paint bucket tool. There we go. See I can also maybe add it in here a little bit. Something happened in my recoloring that made some of my colors disappear, I think. Okay. I think we are ready to make the final repeat. All right, my puzzle is looking pretty good to me. See one last little thing, as you could tell I can get a little bit of obsessive with filling in every blank area. One thing that I did just do that you'll notice is I placed it this here and it's overlapping on the bottom a little bit, the bottom edge. So, anything that you add after you have done that initial copying from the left to the right and from the top to the bottom, anything that you add after that will also need to be copied. So, I will simply double click to bring up the move tool, and I don't want to move it horizontally at all so that number will stay zero, and now I want to move it up so that's what we were talking about it would be a negative number rather than a positive. So, that's going to be negative eight, the length of my art board, and then I'll copy it, and it goes right up to the top. I think we are ready. So, get yourself to this point, your pattern tile does not have to be nearly as complex as mine. You could copy one shape over, and over, and over just to get used to this process, just to kind of figure out how it works. Don't get too complicated yet, you'll have plenty of time for that later. So get your design to this point and then I will meet you back in the next segment to show you how to actually make your pattern tile work.
13. Creating Your Pattern – Making the Repeating Pattern Swatch: All right. Let's dive right into turning this into a fully functioning repeating pattern. Very exciting. This is what we've all been waiting for. So, the first thing that you'll want to do is make sure that your background square and anything else that you may have locked for some reason, make sure that everything is unlocked. So, you go to Object and Unlock All. I'm going to show you two different ways to create your patterned Swatch. So, basically, you're going to be creating a little square that will go, it'll end up over here in your Swatch's palette right with your color palettes that will consist of this design. So, the first way is the manual way. The second way is actually using a feature within the Creative Cloud version of Illustrator, the pattern feature which kind of helps to make the pattern for you. So, in both ways of creating your pattern, there is one crucial step that cannot be missed, and that is creating a blank square that's exactly the size of your art board that sits at the very back or the very bottom of your pattern, and this is what actually defines the area of your design that will be your repeating pattern tile. I'd like to add the square at the very end, just so I know that it's in the right place, that I haven't added any weird extraneous squares or moved anything around. I like it to be my very last step. So, the way that I do this is I select my background layer square, I go to Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste in Back. So, what I just did is I created an exact copy of my background square and I put it immediately behind my background square. So, I have two background squares now. I'm going to take the color out of the fill and stroke. There should be no color in either one of that bottom square that I just created. Just for good measure, this is just a step that I've gotten in the habit of doing every single time is to go to Object, Arrange, Send to Back, just to make absolutely sure that that blank square is all the way in the back. That is the magic step; your pattern will not work if you don't do that. So, let me be clear. You have to make the magic square. It has to be blank, it has to be all the way in the back; your pattern will not work if it's not there. So, now that I know that it is there, I'm ready to make my pattern Swatch. So, what I'm going to do is with my selection tool, my black arrow, I'm going to click hold and drag and just select everything in my pattern. All the motifs, the background square, the magic square, everything. Then, I'm going to click hold and drag somewhere on my design. It doesn't matter where as long as you're grabbing somewhere. Click hold and drag this over to the Swatches palette. You'll see this little green plus signs show up and that means it's about to go in there when I let go of my mouse. When I let go, you'll see a little swatch pop up and that is my pattern. If you hover over it, it says New Pattern Swatch 1. So, that's exactly what it should say. So, the next thing that I'm going to do is test this. So, I'm going to just hold down my spacebar key to make that little grabber hands show up, so I can scroll over next to my design, and I'll zoom out a little by doing command and my minus sign will scroll over a little bit more. So, what I like to do is just make big square. So, my design is eight by eight inches. I like to usually make it at least twice that big, just so I can really see how the pattern is looking when it's repeating. So, a good size might be 20 by 20 or 25 by 25 inches, something like that. Let's do 25 by 25, just so it's nice and big. Click okay. So, now I've got this big blank square. So, with that square still selected, I'll just go over here and click on my pattern Swatch, and you can see that it filled the square with my Swatch. I can zoom in to check the repeat to make sure that everything is repeating properly on those seams. I know that I placed everything perfectly because I used the move tool to do and placed it a specific amount. So, my pattern is looking pretty darn good. So, that is very exciting. All right. So, that's method one. I'm going to delete that big square, use my little hand grabber to come back here. Okay. So, the next way that we're going to create our swatch, is we'll create a swatch over here in the Swatch's palette just the same as we just did it manually by selecting everything and dragging it over. But in this case, Illustrator has a command that you can actually use to make your pattern for you. So, we'll click hold and drag and select everything, and go to Object, Pattern, Make. This is where it can get a little bit funky because this preview of what your pattern is going to look like shows up and you're in pattern preview mode right now, so you can actually move things around in this mode and it'll show you how your pattern would look if you moved it in that way. So, it can be useful, but I feel like this is more confusing than it needs to be especially in the beginning when you're just trying to figure out how this process works. If you do use this method, my suggestion, in the beginning at least is to just ignore this whole thing, ignore the preview, ignore the fact that your design has shifted off of the art world, like everything just looks weird and crazy and like something went wrong, and to just go up here you, have three commands here. Save a copy, done, and cancel. If and when I use this object pattern to make a function, I just click done, and that's what will get my swatch into the Swatches palette. So, you see now it just says New Pattern and it's exactly the same thing. Once I clicked done, it went back to my original artwork, back to my original design. Nothing shifted or copied in a weird way, everything is the same as it was. Then, if I zoom out again and use my grabber hand to move over and I will make a big square again, so that you can see is filled with my first swatch that I made. Now, I'm just going to click on the second one, and you can see it's exactly the same. It's slightly different because I moved that leaf within Pattern editing mode, but it's generally the same. So, those are the two ways that you can create your pattern tile. Let me go ahead and delete that and zoom back in here. So, that's how you make your pattern tile. So, remember, remember, remember the most important thing is that your magic square is there. If something funny happens and your pattern doesn't work properly, it doesn't repeat properly, it just means that either you're magic square isn't actually there at all. You've got to leave it somehow or never got made. Maybe it's not blank, you may have forgotten to take all of the color out of it, or it's in the wrong position; it might not be all the way at the back. So, if any of those things happen and your Swatch just isn't working properly, my suggestion is to delete the magic square, delete the background, remake your background square, send it to the back of your design and then remake your magic square by copying your background square, pasting it behind your background square and then taking out all the color and remaking your swatch. So, I hope that that makes sense, and I hope that feels like a really fun and empowering process to start playing with. In the next segment, we'll start talking about how to resize your pattern if and when you might need to do that. So, I will see you there.
14. Sizing and Scaling Your Finished Pattern: There might be some times where you'd like to change the size of your pattern, and there can be a variety of reasons for that. Perhaps a client wants to use your pattern at a different size than how you originally designed it, and you want to shrink it or blow it up, according to what they want and need, or you might be trying to create a larger swath of your pattern to use as the background of your website or blog, or something at a smaller scale, or you'd like to show more of your pattern right within a square and post it to Instagram or Facebook, something like that. There can be lots of reasons for wanting to change the size of your pattern, and there are a couple of different ways that you can do that. So, the first way is, you can simply change the size of your Artboard. So, over here, I've got my Artboards panel open. If you don't have that open, you can get to that from the Window menu right here. So, if you double click on this spot here, you can see that my Artboard now is eight by eight inches. Why don't we just shrink that down by 50 percent? So, I'll make it four by four inches instead. So, now, you can see that my artwork is much bigger than my Artboard. So, we need to shrink that down accordingly. So, we'll select everything, double click on the Scale tool, and shrink that down also by 50 percent. You can see now it's the same size and just needs to be put back into place there. So, that looks pretty good. You may need to zoom in on a corner or an edge just to make sure that it's placed in the right spot, but that looks pretty good to me. Then, let's turn this into its own pattern swatch. So, I'll just with my Selection tool, my black arrow tool, I just selected everything, and I'm going to click, hold, and drag it over to my Swatches palette till I see that little plus sign there, let go, and use my hand grabber tool to scroll over here. Let's make another square. Let's make it 20 by 20 inches this time just so it's a little bit smaller and more manageable. There we go. So, here is my original pattern swatch that I made, the eight by eight inch square, and here is the new pattern swatch that I made at the new size, four by four inches. So, you can see it's much smaller. I think that looks quite pretty at that small size. Feel like that looks like wrapping paper, or something maybe. So, anyway, that's one way. Then, I wouldn't save the file like this, I would do a Save As. So, you'll always want to save your original file the way that you designed it so you can get back and work from that original file and save new versions that you've created from that file, if that makes sense. So, what I would do is, go to File, Save As, and then, give that some sort of name that tells me it's a 50 percent smaller version of that design, something like that, or give it a new name altogether, whatever works for your naming and numbering systems. I don't want to keep this though. I'm just going to actually do command Z to get to my eight by eight inch square. I'll just double click that, just to make sure. We're back to where we started. So, that was the first way. The next way is that you can simply, let's make another square. Let's make this one eight by eight inches, same as the Artboard, same size as the original design. So, we'll go ahead and just fill it with that design. Then, if I double click the Scale tool again with that new square selected, let's shrink it down by 50 percent again. But this time, I want to keep the size of the square the same and just shrink the size of the design within the square. So, to do that, I'm going to uncheck Transform Objects. So, this means, I'm not shrinking the object, the square, but I am shrinking, I'm transforming the pattern within it. So, when I click OK, you can see that that made my pattern smaller, and my square stayed the same size. So, let me do command Z to undo that. We can do it the opposite way too. So, rather than shrinking it, we could make it larger. So, let's try 150 percent, and we'll just transform the pattern. You can see that really blows it up and brings it into a bigger size right within that square. So, then, if you wanted to use that for posting on Instagram, or something like that, you could simply export that square. There's a little Collect For Export button here that if you click it, let's see, let's bring that up a little bit. You can choose how you want it exported, and then, just click this Export button. You can also get to that same thing from the File menu, File, Export Selection. That is a great way to save something straight from your Illustrator file to use in a different format that's a different size. That can be really useful. So, I hope that's helpful. It's fun to play around with seeing what your designs look like at different sizes. Just for fun, let's do this one last time and shrink it down really small, maybe 25 percent, and click OK. Let's do 50 percent of that. So, you can see it's endless fun that you can do. So, that's cool, looks like a totally different design. So, that's that, sizing and scaling your patterns.
15. Saving Your Files: Before we finish up, let's talk about how to save your files and which files you should actually be saving, and how to save them in a way that's clean and professional, and easy to work with in the future. So, the first thing I want to mention is how important it is to save your working files. So, this file that you've been creating your design in, that's your working file. So, since I've already saved this file, I'm just actually going to create a new one really quick and show you how to save it. So, pretend that I have a new pattern that I've just created in here. So, if you go to File Save, this dialog box will pop up. You'll see that the ending of this file name is.ai. So, anything that ends in a.ai is an illustrator file that you can open up and work on again in Illustrator. So, I'm just going to close this up because we don't really need that. You can see here, might be tricky to see. If you can see that my pattern has that.ai ending. This is really important because if you think you may like to use this file in the future, then it might be something you would like to try to sell, or license, or something like that, you will need this working file to give to your client, or if you think you might like to change the colors of this down the road or use it in some other format or change the size, you will need this working file. So, always, always, always, always save your.ai files. You can save many other versions of this file from that file by doing File, Save As. So, you can save it as an EPS, which is similar to an ai file. You can save it as a PDF, you can save it and any variety of ways. You can also export it from this version, File, Export, and export as a PNG file or a JPEG or a TIFF file or whatever, whatever you might need for whatever application you are using it for. But, the ai file is the most important file to have saved. Every other file is just extra and you can always recreate any new file type from your ai file. So, that said, let's talk about what you should have in your pattern file. I like to delete anything extra that I may have put around on the edges of my file in my storage space, like this photo is going to go bye-bye. These motifs that I didn't end up using are going to get deleted. I like to leave my color palette over here just because I find that it's useful to be able to see visually what colors are there right next to my pattern rather than just looking in the swatches palette. So, I can tell right now that this is not quite right. So, what I'm going to do, is delete these color groups that I need In earlier lessons. I'm going to delete all of this stuff actually and I'm just going to remake everything. So, I'm going to pull down the shift key and select all of those and click hold and drag them into the trash and then select my pattern. So, this, now that I've got that selected, I know that I have every color that's in my pattern in there and I can make a color group out of that, and all of those colors will show up. So, you can see I somehow, in all of my funny recoloring ended up with a lot more colors than I have over here in my palette. So, I'm just going to simply go through these and make sure that these colors match up just by clicking on one square after another, and matching up those colors that one is the same. It looks like I'll have to add three more squares. So, lets just copy, command C, paste in front, command F, then move those down, and finished those up. Okay and you can have those anywhere, next to your file, on the left, on the right, wherever. This is just kind of my personal preference. Then you'll want to remake that pattern swatch, make sure that the one and only pattern swatch is in your swatches panel, you saw that I had a couple there. So, let's just have one that's all you need. So, I just selected all of that using my black arrow tool and I'll click, hold and drag that over. So, I see that plus sign and let go. There is my pattern swatch. So, you can see I've got my colors, my pattern swatch, I could name this layer if I wanted to. Double click and name it, artwork or the name of the pattern or whatever. I've got my patterned tile and I've got my color palette over here. This is the way that I set up my files. Working with specific clients you may need to set your files up in a different way and that will be specified once you start working together, for example, if I'm creating a pattern for fabric, sometimes I need to have my background color on a separate layer, the motifs side on a separate layer, the colors on their own separate layer. This is just because the particular company that I work with requires them this way. But I've also, the fabric company that I worked with previously, this file setup was totally fine. So, everybody that you end up working with, if that's the direction you might like to go, working with clients licensing or selling your patterns, there might be different requirements. But, this is a perfectly fine and professional set up for your patterns that anyone will be easily able to work with should they have their hands on your files. So, that's that. I hope that was helpful.
16. Final Thoughts and Your Assignment: In this final segment of class, the first thing that I want to do is give you a huge high five, a huge round of applause. You've made it to the end. I hope that you are loving this process so far even if it might feel a bit challenging and tricky right now. I hope the obsession and the addiction is starting to set in. So, I want to talk a little bit about your class, project. Your assignment is to create a repeating pattern that you upload here so that we can all admire it and tell you how amazing it is, and so we can all get inspired by what everybody else is creating, and your inspiration can be whatever you choose, whether it'd be from nature. Maybe you'd like to go out for a walk and gather up inspiring leaves and petals, and flowers, or take photos while you're out on a walk. Or maybe you want to just do a little bit of internet searching and gather things up in a secret Pinterest board, or in a folder on your computer. Or perhaps you'd like to sit down with a pile of magazines and tear out inspiring images and actually, have an actual real life folder rather than just a folder on your computer. So, whatever it is, gather up your inspiration and start designing. I cannot wait to see what you're going to create. I'm so excited. I also wanted to tell you about my private Pattern Camp Facebook group that you are welcome to join as a student of this class, and in the group each week there's a pattern design weekly challenge. So, you get a new theme every week that you're invited to design a pattern around, and oftentimes patterns are featured on the Pattern Camp Instagram account and on the Facebook page, and that kind of thing. So, it's not only a good practice, it's also potentially some promotion for yourself if you're wanting to share your patterns with the world. The weekly challenge is really great because the themes are often themes that you might not have thought of on your own or they might stretch you in some direction that you're afraid to try drawing the motifs, or you think you're not going to like it, or something like that, but it's really fun and it's always really awesome to see what everybody else in the group is creating, and how they're interpreting the theme. So, I really invite you to join that group. It's super fun and really active,. I also wanted to tell you that there will be future Pattern Camp courses here in Skillshare courses that will take your skills to the next level. We're talking about collections, how to make your patterns, more intricate, more textural, that thing, designing half of the repeats, all of that. So, stay tuned for that, and you can always keep in touch with me over on Instagram or Facebook, or check out my blog. Those are great places to see what's going on in my colorful pattern design world. I also wanted to mention that I run a group for creatives called Campfire, which is Pattern Camp's sister program, which has a monthly membership, and I interview people from our creative world, other pattern designers, art licensing agents, lawyers for creatives, that thing. So, it's a wide variety of stuff that we talk about in the group. I also create tutorials for you on the iPad, in Illustrator, in Photoshop, and all other things. So, you can check that out over on the Pattern Camp website if that's something you might be interested in as well. So, that's it. I can't wait to see what you create and I will see you in our colorful pattern design world. Bye.
Jessica Swift, Artist, Surface+Fabric Designer, Author
