Pattern Camp – Level II: Create Complex Repeating Patterns in Illustrator

1. Pattern Camp Level 2 Introduction: My name is Jessica Swift, and I'm a surface pattern designer in Portland, Oregon. A surface pattern designer is somebody who creates repeating patterns for all types of products that you see out in the world. Clothing, rugs, bedding, fabric in fabric stores, tech accessories, stationery, you name it, if it has a pattern on it, a surface pattern designer is behind it. In this class, I'm going to expand on Pattern Camp level one, which taught the basics and go into how to make more complex and visually interesting repeating patterns to use on all types of products in your own pattern design endeavors. Putting together a more complex pattern is like putting together a puzzle. That's why I like to think of it in my own mind, and I'm really excited to teach you some fun and interesting ways to take your pattern designs to the next level. Let's get started. 2. Refresher: Create a Straight Repeating Pattern: Before we dive into creating complex repeating patterns, I'm going to give you just a quick overview of the design process for how to create a simple, basic, straight repeating pattern in Illustrator for anybody who may need a refresher, or you are new to the process and you're diving into this course for the first time. That said, do remember that in Pattern Camp Level 1, another Skillshare class that I've got available. I go into this process in a lot of detail and a lot of different ways. Definitely go back to that one if you haven't checked it out yet. But in this course we'll do just a quick overview since we'll be diving into some more advanced techniques and different kinds of repeats and that kind of thing. Let's get started. I've created a file here that is 8 by 8 inches. That's my standard art board size. Yours doesn't have to be that size. It can be whatever you choose, but 8 by 8, I feel like is a nice size to work with. I've got that created and I chose some colors already for my color palette that I'll be working with. I'm going to bring in, I have some sketches here that I've already scanned and image traced and brought into Illustrator. Again, I go into a lot of detail in Pattern Camp Level 1 about how and why to do that. Go back to that if you have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm just going to choose one motif here and I'm going to copy it and paste it over. For our purposes, I'm just going to show you again as a quick refresher, how to make a straight repeat using just this one floral motif. The first thing that I'll do is move this off to the side and then I'm going to make my background square. I'll just want to line it up in the top left corner. Click once, this is with my rectangle tool selected and make that square the same size as my art board, which is 8 by 8 and click okay. It made it white, I don't really want my background to be white, so I'm going to choose one of these colors from my color palette, which I've already brought over here into my swatches palette. If that's not open for you for whatever reason you can get to that in the Window menu here. I'm going to make my background this light turquoise color. It looks like that is behind my square. I am going to go to object, arrange, bring to front to bring that up so I can see it again. I can change the color of that either by selecting my motif and simply clicking on any of these colors over in my color palette, or I can use my paint bucket tool, which if you can't see that in your tool palette, it is nested under the shape builder tool. It's a little bit tricky and confusing to find it if you don't know where it is to begin with. But it's under the shape builder tool, here. You can just click and hold and then select that one instead. I've turned this shape into a live paint area already. Again, if you don't know what I'm talking about, I go into a lot of detail in Pattern Camp Level 1 about how and why to do this. You can go back and check that out for all those details. I can simply choose colors here and once it's highlighted here, that tells me that, that's the area that I'm about to fill. I can just use my paint bucket tool to go around and fill all of those areas. In my opinion, it's easier just to select it and choose a color from here, but it depends on what feels easier and more appropriate for you. What I'm going to do next is just copy and paste this motif, this design, a bunch of times to fill up my squares. I tend to start in the top left corner when I'm designing because everything that's here on the left edge is going to need to overlap on the right edge and everything that's at the top, will need to overlap on the bottom. All in exactly the same spot on each side and each edge. I like to stay away from the right edge and the bottom edge for now. I worked my way diagonally down, if that makes sense. I'm just going to hold down my Option key. You'll see that makes this little double arrow show up. If I hold it down and click hold and drag, that is an easy way to copy. You can also of course just go to: Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste, and that will make a new copy. There are always a couple of ways to do things and illustrator, so I'm just going to do the keyboard shortcut easy way and hold down my Option key. Click hold and drag. Simple. In Pattern Camp Level 1, I showed you a bunch of different ways that you can just make this look a little more visually interesting, with a couple of really simple tricks. For example, what I'm doing now is just rotating these so they're not all in exactly the same direction. Which just adds a little bit of visual interest. I'm going to hold down the option key and keep clicking. I'll make some more overlap these edges here. If I just hover over this corner without holding down any keys, you'll see that little curvy arrow show up and that means I can rotate. There's also the rotate tool over here in the tool palette. If you select that, you don't have to wait for that curvy arrow to show up. It's just when you click, hold and drag it will rotate it automatically. You'll see I have a couple of things overlapping on the left and a couple of things overlapping on the top, and one thing overlapping in the corner. Now that my square is getting to be full, you can always adjust where these are later so it doesn't have to be perfect. I'm going to select everything over on my left edge. First I'm going to lock this. I'm going to: Object, Lock, Selection, because you don't want your background to move. I'll click hold and drag. This is with my black arrow tool selected to select everything was overlapping on the left edge here. When I double-click on my black arrow tool, my selection tool, this move panel shows up, which is one of the most handy things that you can use or that you will use in designing patterns. They use this all the time to make sure that everything is moved into precisely the exact position I want it to be. My art board is 8 by 8 inches. To Move things over to the right, we're going to be moving horizontally, but not at all vertically. We'll be going 8 inches horizontally to the right, 0 vertically and copy. Okay, now we're going to do the same thing on the top. So I'll select everything that's overlapping on the top. You'll see now I've got the two top corners. You'll want to make sure that both of those are selected. We'll do the same thing double-click on the black arrow tool, and this time we're not moving horizontally at all. So that number will be zero, vertically will be moving down eight inches. We'll copy that, and there we go. So for all intents and purposes that repeat will work properly. It doesn't look great. Some of these things will have to be moved around. Another trick that I like to use is to hold down my shift key and I can scale things up or down just again to add a little bit more visual interest, a little bit of difference between motifs. You'll want to remember that if you change anything that's overlapping and edge like for example, I just changed this one on the left, but this one is not corresponding because I only changed the one. I'll need to delete that one, copy this one over to the right again, so eight inches horizontally, vertically zero, and copy. Now it'll work properly again. Just remember as you're moving things around and testing your repeat that if it doesn't work and things look a little bit cut off or strange for some reason, that might be why. There's our basic repeat it's not going to be the most beautiful but, it's going to work and that's what's most important in this lesson. The next step will be to unlock the background and select it, and then we're going to copy, paste in back. So now we have a copy of this turquoise square that's old way in the back. This is the most important step. If you don't do this step, your pattern will not work. So that back square, the one at the very back to the very bottom of your stack, is selected and it's still trackways. You want this square to be totally blank. You want your fill here to have no fill transparent. You want your stroke here to be transparent also, no stroke, no color at all. That's step. Again, that is the most important step in your pattern design process. Aside from making sure everything is lined up properly of course, is making sure that, that magic bagun square is there, otherwise your pattern will not work. Let's make this patterns swatch. I'm going to click hold and drag with my black arrow tool selected and select everything in my pattern tile. This is your pattern tile and there are two different ways that you can do this, which I'll show you. The first way is the manual way, which is the way that I learned to do it and the way that I still do it to this day. With everything selected, I will click hold and just simply drag this over to my swatches palette and you'll see that little green plus sign. That means it's about to be added. When I let go, you'll see that pattern swatches there. If I have it already, it says new pattern swatch one. The second method is with everything selected, I can go to object, pattern, make, and you'll see this crazy looking preview show up. There we go, took its time there. This can be really confusing if you don't know what's happening. Basically in a straight repeat, the way that this pattern options panel shows up is essentially how you're going to leave it. You don't need to mess with the tile type, you don't need to really mess with anything. All you need to know is that these buttons up here are the most important. When you click done this crazy looking like grayed out preview of your pattern and this strange shifting that it did will go away and over here, your patterns swatch will be created. I'm going to go ahead and click done. You can see new pattern. I'm going to use make upper hand to shift over here and I'll show you how these patterns are repeating. Make a big square, say 20 by 20 inches, click ''ok''. Let's zoom out a little and then I'm just going to fill it with my pattern swatches then I mean, so this is the first one, done manually. This is the second one, done with the pattern object, pattern make tool, the pattern tool. They are pretty much exactly the same. One of those is little bit darker for some reason, I'm not sure why, but both of those processes will work. So whichever way feels easier to you, it's totally fine and appropriate. Going back, there is our pattern tile. Everything is overlapping properly on the edges. My blank magic square is all the way at the back or the bottom of my stack. To save this, I would simply go to File, Save or Save As given a name, I always save my dot AI files. So you'll see when I do Save As I've already named mine, but you can name yours whatever you want and then it's got this dot AI. That's really important, that's your working pattern file. If you ever wanted to go back and change the colors or create a smaller version or anything like that that you wanted to edit this pattern, this is the file that you would use. You can also export different file types from here by going to file export, Export as all of these different options, JPEG, PNG, TIFF file, whatever you might need, and then save that but always remember to save your AI file, your illustrator working file. It's taking its time. That is the basic process that we're going to be using in this course. Getting more complex with layers and textures and that kind of thing. And then also talking about half drop repeats which work kind of in the same way and kind of not in the same way. Stay tuned in a lesson to come for that and I hope this refresher was helpful. Again, if that didn't make sense or if you just want to know a bit more about how this works, why this works different ways that you can make this work. Checkout pattern camp level one and other costs here on skillshare. That should you all set up for working through this course here. 3. Using Multiple Motifs in a Straight Repeat: Let's get started by talking about some simple yet very effective ways to add visual complexity to your pattern designs. I've got a file started here. I set up my art board at eight by eight inches, just like I normally do. Yours can be whatever size you like. It doesn't have to be eight by eight, but that's my preferred size for whatever reason that I've been using for years. What I always do first is create my background square, just so I have some color that I'm working on. It can be white. It doesn't have to be a color white is totally fine too, but I like just having this starting point. Then we will lock it so we can't accidentally move it around. We want it to stay put. Then these are the sketches that I'm going to be working with in this course so I just copied those and I'm pasting them in the keyboard shortcuts. For copy and paste are Command C and Command V, in case you are not aware of that, very useful. Okay, so let me shrink this down a little and I always just move these off to the side so they're not in my way as I'm actually setting up my pattern. I can just kind of move things over as needed and I'll just start with one. What I'm going to do is just quickly go through and color these. If you have any questions about how I'm actually coloring these, I'll go into a lot of detail on how to image trace and live paint and actually color your motifs in pattern camp Label 1, so you can check that out as you please or as you need. For now you can watch me do some quick coloring, I've got my color palette in my swatches palette already. I'm just going to go through and color some of these motifs and then we'll get to the business of making it more complex. You can always fill areas with no color, so that'll make it transparent. If you didn't want that white there, you didn't want an outline, that's a trick that I often use. Before I continue, the most obvious way to make a pattern more complex is just to actually have more going on within the patterns. if you watched the last video, the refresher about how to create a straight repeat, you would have seen that I created a very simple straight repeat with just this one flower motif over here, repeated over and over. While that can make a nice simple design, it's not very complex because it's just one shape repeated over and over. Obviously, the more shapes and the more motifs you've got going on within your pattern title here, the more complex it's actually going to be. Then there are ways to add complexity with those shapes and motifs that you've put in by rotating and reflecting things, which is what we're going to do next. I'm just going to keep moving these over and coloring them with my paint bucket tool and other tools here. For some reason when I image trace the shapes that I've drawn, some of these I drew on the iPad Pro, it traces them, image traces them in funny ways rather than them being all stuck together. It's got these little bits that have to be colored in separately. Not sure why, but anyway, that can all be fixed later as well if there are little struggling block bits or something like that. Okay, and then I will select this. I've got my motif and my dark blue selected here. I'm going to go up to the color wheel. This is my favorite, favorite thing in Illustrator, and I'm actually just going to change all of the black to this dark blue by taking the dark blue and dragging it onto the black there. Sometimes that takes a couple of tries and I'm not actually loving how that looks. I might try that yellow. I don't love that either. That'll work for now. We'll deselect the dark blue and pulling down my shift key to deselect just that. Let's select this red here. I'm going to change the white. Sometimes it takes two drags for some reason to make it actually work. There we go. Let's keep going. Another quick, easy way to recolor motifs is to simply select it and then click on a color in your color palette. All right, moving right along. This one, I've got the white here and the black. If I select all of it and just click color, it fills in the whole thing which can be very useful. Actually as we're adding complexity, it can be very useful. But for now what I'm going to do that I find the quickest and easiest way rather than using my paint bucket tool to go and fill those individual petals one at a time, is to select the two colors over here that I want to use about those two. With all three of those things selected, I'll click on my "Recolor artwork tool". You can click here, add those colors and for some reason black and white don't show up, and then drag these colors onto the black and white and see how that looks. I don't love that. Another fun trick is to select it and change or choose the color wheel again, and you can just drag these colors to switch them. That's a little bit better. Click ''Okay'' so we've got everything colored. Let's start making this pattern complex and visually beautiful. The first way that you can add complexity in a really simple way is to copy motifs and make them a different color. Again, you can just keep it selected, choose a color in your color palette, deselect, and that's that and you can do that with every single motif if you want to. This is a really quick and easy way to make it look like there's a lot more going on than there might actually necessarily be. Let's change, I want to add more of that orange in. I'm going to change the blue or the turquoise to that orange instead. Again, to copy these, I'm just pulling down my Option key and clicking, holding and dragging, and then changing the color. This one will be a little bit trickier. Again, with your paint bucket tool selected, you can go around and do the same thing again, just clicking on each area that you want to fill. You can also select it and then select all the colors that you want to use in your changes and click the color wheel tool and then simply drag the colors from the left to where you want them to be instead on the right. Hopefully that makes sense. It can be a little bit tricky if you're trying to change a bunch of colors at the same time, just trying to keep track of what's actually going on. But, I just made a mistake, the more you practice with this, the easier it will get to see what you're actually doing. So that's almost the way I want it. I'm going to select that. I'm going to just switch around a couple of colors, maybe these two and see how that looks. Don't want that either. Let's try. There we go, that'll work. You can see how fun this recolor artwork tool is and how easy it is to actually make it look like you're creating new motifs, when in reality you're just doing a couple of clicks of your mouse and changing some colors around. Everything is kind of copied and recolored, so now we're going to start adding some complexity in different ways. I just copied that one again, I'll change the color. If you hover over these corners, you can see I can click, hold and, drag to rotate and if I hold down my shift key, I can click, hold, and drag that shape to become larger or smaller. Those are the shortcuts. The other way that you can do something like that, let me copy this one, is to come over here and choose the rotate tool in the tool bar, and then you don't have to look for that little curvy arrow. You can just simply drag it around or the scale tool here, which if you click on that, it will scale or shrink your design. However, you move your mouse, if you hold down,let me undo that command Z. If you hold down your shift key while you're doing that, it will scale it up or down proportionally. You can also double-click on scale tool and shrink or expand or shrink or enlarge something a specific amount. Perhaps I want that to be 80 percent of the size that it currently is. I can just type in that percentage and it'll shrink it right down for me. Then again, you can just rotate, move things around. I'm going to copy this one, pull up my Option key, change the color, let me do that again. You can see at this point, I'm just trying to fill up the space and then we'll get to the finessing part and moving things around. Another fun trick for adding complexity is the Reflect tool, which is hidden here under the rotate tool. If you hold on that a little menu fans out and you can choose the Reflect tool. Then if you double-click on it, you have these options where you can reflect something vertically or horizontally or at some other angle, I'll just show you how the vertical reflect works. Basically just if you picture it being a mirror image across the vertical axis, that's what that does. Maybe it'll be more obvious actually with a different shape. Let's see. Maybe this one. So we'll shrink that down. Then I will copy it, paste it in front, double-click here on the Reflect tool, we'll reflect it vertically, click okay. You can see now I've got a couple of mirror imaged motifs there. That can be really useful if you want to do more than rotate it, but actually want to reflect your shape so it's facing a different direction. Those I'm actually just going to delete. This, I feel like it could be a useful shape for that. I could just, let's see, copy command C, paste in front command F, and then we'll reflect that. You can see that's a fun way to, instead of having to draw this stem and make it perfectly symmetrical, you can just draw the one side and then reflect it and it looks perfect. That's a fun trick, we'll go like that. You can also group those together. So they're stuck together, command G. Let's keep going, just filling up this space and using these basic ideas of copying, pasting, reflecting, rotating, scaling, that kind of thing to make our design look pretty complex. You can see, once this is done, it's going to feel like there's a lot more going on than there might actually be, when you go to count motifs or I'll try to figure out how the repeat is actually put together. I'll just finish this up quickly. Not every motif has to be different either. It can be helpful if you put the same motif in the same color way in or in the same color in different parts of the design to, for example, once you get more seasoned at this and you've created a lot of repeats, you'll notice when something in your design might stick out in a funny way, for example, I've got only one of these light grayish stem or leaf shapes floating by itself. I might want to copy that. Hold on my Option key there and reflect it, and then put it somewhere else so it's not all by its lonesome, and that'll just help with the general flow of the pattern. You'll see as I'm designing, I'm just shifting things around as I put new shapes in different places. With this tossed design, that's what I would call this type of design, that's going to be something that you find yourself doing very, very often. One thing that I'm also noticing that I'm doing since I'm not paying as much attention as I do if I'm designing, just without talking through what I'm doing is in the last video, I talked about how when I design, I stick to the left side and the top edge, I have a couple of things overlapping over the right edge here. I'm just going to start to move these over and wiggle things around a little bit, so I can show you the right way or the way that I typically do my designing. We'll move these over here. That might work out a little bit better. Now that this is mostly fall, I'm just going to copy everything over here. These shapes are overlapping, I'm going to move them horizontally over eight, vertically zero and copy them. You can see I already have this overlapping in a funny way, I can just move that into a different area and I'll select these and do the same thing, but I'll move them horizontally zero and vertically eight, copy those down. Again, I have some funny overlaps, so I'll just do a little bit of moving things around so they nicely. Then this one I'd like to move up, but I've already copied it over, so I want to actually move both of those at the same time. Here we go. Let's move. Let's do the same thing here. Anything that you're moving on the left side, you want to be moving on the right side also. Otherwise your pattern won't match up from edge to edge and it won't repeat seamlessly, which is obviously what we're after. Let's see, we're getting close. This isn't going to be the most beautiful design, but it's going to work for our purposes here. Again, what I was saying before about having designs that are standing by themselves, that might end up looking a little obvious ones are repeat is finished and we're testing it out. This one is a pretty bold floral design that's all by itself. I'm actually going to copy that one too. It's not all by itself. Having one or two or three of a design within your pattern tile can often help with just the spacing and the visual flow of a design if that makes sense. You'll see what I'm talking about once we finish this guy up. As you can see, I'm just moving things around till they look and feel the way that I want them to. It's hard to describe how to know when a design is actually finished. It's just a feeling that you'll get as you improve your skills and as you practice a lot, you'll just get that feeling like, "Oh, that's in the right spot." It's like putting together a puzzle that's always how I think about designing patterns. You'll notice as you move things around, that colors are not looking quite right. You might want to shift some colors around, move things, just to do that until you get to that aha moment where everything looks looks like it's in the right place. This guy is looking a little bit lonely, so I might just copy that. Shouldn't get down, rotate it. You'll see this has become second nature for me. I've done this so many times, but don't worry if you're having trouble with the keyboard shortcuts are which keys to push. Just go slowly and it'll get easier and faster over time, I promise. I think what I might do is let me copy this one too and I'm going to go ahead and delete that. Let's put this one up here. The other thing that I didn't do is rotate that one. You'll see I'm just making these decisions on the fly as I go. I'm going to copy this down. Hit copy. That might make that this design look a little bit better and then I need some more of this maroon color and thinking. Let's maybe change that one. We're getting close to being able to test this out. Let's do it. It's not going to be the most stunning pattern, but it's going to be something more complex than the one in the last video. The first thing we'll need to do is unlock that background square. We will copy it, paste it in back, take out all the colors. It's that magical blank magic square that we need just for good measure. I often just make sure that it's all the way in the back by going to object arrange, send to back. Because if it's not all the way in the back, your design will not work. Then we will select everything by clicking, holding and dragging with the black arrow tool selected, and drag it over and drop it into the Swatches palette. Alternatively, with everything selected, you can also go to object, pattern make, and that will work as well. Then let's move over here a little bit and test it out and see what we've got going on. I make a big square and fill it with my pattern swatch that I just made. There is our complex pattern. You can see I only started with a handful of motifs. It was five motifs or something, but it looks like there is more going on just because the shapes are all recolored and this isn't ultimately how I would leave this pattern where I trying to finish it at the repeat looks a little bit too obvious to me with that bold maroon and the flower and that one blue stem shape, I think that would need to be repeated somewhere. But this is a good example for how to troubleshoot and figure out how to make your complex design work. I would go back, I would just delete this. I'm not going to do it right now. But just for not your own personal knowledge, what I would probably do at this point since I didn't love how it was repeating, would be to just shift things around, move things around, maybe change these colors a little bit so the maroon isn't quite so prominent. Maybe something like that, or maybe like that. Add another one of these blue stems somewhere, maybe like in there. Move these around somehow, something like that. Again, I'm not going to go into all that detail right now because we have more important things to do than making the perfect repeat right now. For now, I just want you to practice copying repeats, changing their colors, rotating them, reflecting them, changing their scale, arranging them into some complex repeat. Then seeing how that repeat actually works once you're looking at it in a larger square. Then we will move on. 4. Layering Motifs in a Straight Repeat: Now that we've got this pattern created with a bunch of different motifs and things going on within the pattern tile, let's talk about some ways that we can begin to make this more complex than it already is. Because as you can see, while there are a lot of different motifs and colors and things going on, everything feels kind of flat, so everything is evenly spaced on the same level. It's like a shallow depth so this may seem obvious, but the first way that I like to try to start playing around with my designs if they feel like they need to be just a little bit more visually engaging or have something more going on, is to just start overlapping motifs. So that will just take some playing around and one thing that I would probably do as I start moving things around, is just delete all this stuff from the right side and delete everything that's overlapping on the bottom because if you don't remember to move everything that's overlapping on the top and the bottom and the left and the right in the same spot, if you don't move everything, things can just get shifted and things will get off in your pattern and won't end up working. So I like to just delete things, start moving things around and then copy things over as I go creating this new version of the pattern. So hopefully that makes sense. I'm just to prevent any future headaches when you're testing your [inaudible] and it's not working for some reason. So let's just start overlapping some things and you might find that things need to be shifted around in your stack a little bit like for example, maybe I want this one to be in front of, well, that one actually, let's leave it there. Let's find one that I'm talking about. So maybe while this is overlapping or it's underneath this flower here, it's also on top of the blue one, so I might want that to be underneath both the flower and the blue leaf so I can simply cut this and select this and paste in that. This is a trick that I use all the time to make sure that whatever I am selecting is exactly where I want it to go. Hopefully that made sense. I'm sure I'll show you again over the course of this video lesson. So another way to make things within your pattern more visually engaging or interesting is to play with the spacing. So that's something that I often do as well as I'm starting to overlap things. So before you could see that my motifs were all pretty evenly spaced. What I'm going to do now is create something that feels maybe a little bit more organic and the spacing is not the same between all of the motifs that I'm using just to make it feel a little bit more unexpected, perhaps. Sometimes I'll just simply move things out of the way that I'm not sure where I'm going to use yet and bring those back in later or sometimes they simply just get deleted. So we'll see what happens with those. It's fun to just play around with how things might fit together in new and unexpected ways, like that's fun. So you can see I'm leaving some bigger, lock that, some bigger blank spaces than I had before so not everything is quite so evenly spaced and I might play around with the scale, liking this overlapping flower leaf situation. So I might do a little bit more of that and possibly change the color on that one. We're getting somewhere. You can always group things together too. Like you can see that I put all these together into this little bouquetish type shape, but they're actually all still their own separate motifs. So if I want those to move all as one, I can simply select that and go up to object group and then when I click anywhere on it, it selects the whole thing. So I can easily move that in one little chunk, which can be helpful. You can always ungroup that later too. See like for example, I had just moved to that, I intended to move both. I just did command z for undo. So I'm actually going to group those together too, so I can move those. See here and I'm going to copy this one. Oop, so I'm going to hold down my option key and click hold and drag and I'll change the color of that. You can see I'm doing a lot of what we did in the last video, just rotating, shrinking, increasing the size of certain things, copying, pasting, maybe I'll do a little reflecting here. If you're into keyboard shortcuts, there are keyboard shortcuts for all of these things. Like if you quickly want to get to the reflect tool without actually having to go over here and click and hold in the tool menu here, you can simply click the O key, so the keyboard shortcuts will be shown right there. You can see right next to their reflect tool it says O, so if I've hit my O key, it goes right to that, which can be pretty handy. Those will just come more naturally too as you become more familiar with Illustrator. Let's see. Let's maybe try to put these back in somehow. Overlap them again. So you can see how different motifs are starting to form into brand new motifs, even though they're all made up of just a variety of shapes that I drew all on their own. So I'm going to cut this, select that, and paste what I just cut behind that leaf.Another thing that you can do to move things around is just go to object arrange and bring forward or sent backward, that'll send things forward or backward one step at a time. So usually I think for people, one of those options tends to make more sense in your mind. So if you don't like the way that I was doing it with cutting and pasting and in and back or pasting in front, you are more than welcome to try the other way as well. I've just arranging sending forward, sending back. Let's see, let's change that color. Okay, let's actually switch the orange and the blue here. So I selected both of those and clicking on the color wheel, I'm just going to change those two colors. That way I've got a repeat of, what is that shape called? Like a pod, a bud kind of floral shape. So that'll look a little bit more natural and organic hopefully when it's repeating. Another fun trick that I like to use is taking a whole motif like, let's use this one for example. Let's hook that along with it and group that together and copying that. So I'm just going to hold down my option key. I'm going to drag it out here to the side just so you can see it really easily and change the whole thing to one color. So you can see that it's all that yellow color now. So that can be a really fun way. You can layer this behind. So I'll show you this other way now. So I will just go object arrange, send backwards, so that just sent it behind that shape. So that can be a really fun way to add some visual interest to your pattern as well and then you can play around with which color is going to end up looking the best. That might work. One trick that I have found is that it often works well. This trick works well if you're either using like white or some kind of light color or some color that's close to the background color, but either a little bit lighter or a little bit darker. So we might just do that and add another color into our palate. So that's fun. Then we'll just drag that color over so we can easily remember it. Then you can do that with really any shapes. So copy that by holding down my option key and just rotate that a little bit and change the color. We'll send it backward, there we go. It's like a shadow effect to that can be really fun, especially if you do it on a lot of the motifs that can end up just adding a cool layer and some are depth to your pattern. Let's do that a little bit more. Let's group those together, hold down my option key, click, hold and drag. Change that color, rotate it a little bit and send it backward. There we go and then I want to bring that to the front. So you can see it's just a lot of arranging in various ways in my stack at this point and I've got some bigger spaces. I might shrink some of these down a little bit, maybe add another one of those just to make it repeat a little bit more organically, if that makes sense. That's looking pretty good. So the last thing that we'll need to do is repeat everything from the left over to the right again. So I've selected everything. We'll double-click, we'll go to the right eight, vertical zero and copy. I think I'll move this stuff over just a little bit. You like that, just so those aren't touching quite as much. Then we'll move everything that's overlapping on the top down. So vertical or horizontal zero, vertical down eight and copy. I think I'll move these a little bit on that one. Okay, so there is our new, slightly more complex and interesting repeat. I'm actually going to do that trick one more time, the little shadow trick. Send backward. Looks like we need to send it backward again. Now that's not really going to where I want, I'm just going to cut it command X and select all of these. I want it behind that whole thing pasting back, now it's where I want it. I think we are in business for the purposes of this video. So let's test this out. So I'm going to unlock that background square and I deleted the blank square before. So I'm actually going to remake that. So I'm going to copy, paste it back, take all the color out of that square so it's a blank, blank, blank magic square. I'm going to send it to the back just for good measure to make sure it's all the way in the back of my stack, select everything with my black arrow tool, click hold and drag over here to my swatches palette and alternatively again, you could also go to object pattern make. That will work just as well to get your pattern swatch into the swatches palette. Let's test this. I'm going to deselect, shift command A is the keyboard shortcut for that and we'll make a big square, 25 by 25 inches or so, should be good for seeing how the pattern repeats. Here's our original pattern, here's the new one. So you can see it added just a little bit of visual interest to the pattern, made it a little bit more engaging, a little bit more interesting, a little bit more complex. So let's just click back again. I could have played with the scale of some of these flowers more and there's a lot more that I could have done, but we'll go over some of that in the next lesson. 5. Geometric-esque Background Layers: A fun way to add yet another dimension to your patterns or another layer or more depth is to actually add some other subtle pattern in the background of your pattern, that adds just a little bit more visual interest and makes your pattern feel more engaging and more interesting. Let's talk about a couple of different ways that we can do that. One way is to create some subtle geometric pattern like a grid or a repeating hexagon pattern or diamonds or something like that, or a stripes even in the background of your design. That can be very simple. When I'm creating some subtle texture for my background, just to make sure that it doesn't get too insane and busy for your eyes, is to use some color that's close to your background. Like for example, I might choose either the same color that I used for these shadows or something, you know, slightly lighter than the background color is something maybe in-between. I'm not sure yet, but let's try a few things and we will see what we think. I'm going to use my rectangle tool here and just make some horizontal stripes and see how that goes. I'm actually going to cut this. I want it to be behind all of the motif. What I'm going to do is select everything and then go to paste in back. Now I can see that it's behind all of my motifs exactly where I want it to be. Now I can simply copy and paste this line and know that it's just going to copy right on top of that line and still be behind all the motifs. I'm just going to go ahead and do this quickly and use my keyboard shortcuts. Command C for copy, command F for paste in front. That'll paste it right in front of that line rather than pasting it in some funny spot, which often happens if you just do regular paste, which is Command V or up here just the regular paste. I like to paste in front or pasting back because I know exactly where it's going to end up. Command C, Command F, and then I'm just simply moving it down a couple of clicks with my keyboard arrows command C command F. Then sometimes, just so it doesn't take forever, you can copy a bunch at the same time. Command C, command F, move all those down and then select all those but not the flower. To do that just by the way, to deselect something that I don't want selected, you just hold down the shift key and click right on that shape that you don't want in your selection. Then that'll deselect only that one thing. Command C, command F. Again, I'm just using my keyboard arrows to move those down command C command F. When you're creating a background pattern like this, it's important to remember that it needs to repeat in the exact same way that your motifs already repeat. If there is something overlapping on the top or the bottom, which I feel like I should add one more. Like this one is overlapping on the top here, it also needs to overlap in exactly the same spot on the bottom. I'll go ahead and select that, move it down 8, copy. Now that repeats in exactly the same way that the rest of my pattern does. Since it's just a rectangle, I already know it's horizontally aligned from left to right. I just want to make sure that I've overlapped it on both edges to make sure that that'll repeat seamlessly as well. Then, and that's looking kind of fun. I like that. Let's see what it's going to look like if I make it into a grid instead. I'm going to select all these lines and then hold down my shift key and just deselect these flowers. Because I don't want to move those. Then I'm going to, lets see, copy this, paste in front. Now I have a copy of all those lines. I'm going to go to my rotate tool, double-click, rotate it 90 degrees, and click okay. That is a little bit crazy. One thing that I might do if I have been liking the idea of the grid, which I am, but it's just like that's a little bit too busy. One thing that I should have done or could have done is group all of these together, so I don't have to select them all at the same time. I can just now click on one and it selects the whole thing. I'll do that here as well. Group, command G is the keyboard shortcut for that. Just try a different color. Let's just choose something that's maybe a little bit lighter than the background. That's maybe a little bit better. Let's go with this dark one again and maybe just try to choose something that's in-between the background and the shadow color. That's sort of fun. I'm liking that. Let's see how that repeats. Let's go ahead and unlock that and we'll make a new swatch, so I selected everything and my background screen, my magic square are still there from my previous lesson, so you don't have to make those again. Then we'll move over and make a big square, and fill it. Here's the one from the last lesson, and here is our new version. You can see it just adds a new kind of really cool and fun dimension that wasn't there before. I'll click between the two again. That can be really fun to play with. You can do, I mean, really anything that you want, so I'm going to hide these and try something different. Let's go with a hexagon and we'll make it 0.3 inch radius, we'll see. See how that's going to look. Maybe a little bit smaller is probably going to be better. Then maybe we'll make it a little bit thicker, so I'll up the stroke here. Then I can either slack those, re-lock them. I can either just hold down my command, or hold down my option key rather, and click hold and drag and just repeat that hexagon and put it wherever I want, just adds a subtle like geometric pattern. But that's also still random in the background. That could be potentially fun. They are not repeating in the background though, because I have not pasted them behind everything. There we go. That could be fun. You could also make like a honeycomb pattern, make it actually repeat properly. I'm going to do command C, command F to paste a copy in front and make like a little hexagon, repeat that, command C command F. Get that in position. It's not lining up totally fine, so I could always use my align tool as well. There are easier ways to make this repeat exactly, right, but I'm just doing the quick and dirty way. Then you could copy that, hold down my option key and just keep repeating that pattern like a honeycomb pattern behind the rest of your motifs. Let me go ahead and group that together. You don't have to fill the whole background. Cut that, paste and back. Now it's behind my motifs. You can, just make a few different instances of this honeycomb shape and then have pieces of that overlapping behind your motifs. That can be interesting. There are lots of ways that you can just add like a subtle texture to your pattern. Just by adding repeated shapes, either across the whole design or just in little pieces like this. It can be really fun to just do it this way, but then take out an element here and there just to make it look not quite so obvious that you've been just repeating the same shape over and over. That can be useful. Let's bring these forward. You can see I'm just doing a lot of arranging, bringing things forward, bringing things back, spring that one forward too. I'm not loving this one as much as I liked the grid, but command X, command B, that's the shortcut for pasting back. We'll see, it might end up looking cool once it's repeated. It's just that these are fun things to play around with just to see if you can come up with something in your pattern that just is a little bit unexpected and fun. Let's bring that forward. There are keyboard shortcuts for all of this of course, but it can be useful to watch where things are located in the Illustrator especially when you're just learning this stuff. Again, you'll just want to make sure that anything that is overlapping on the left is also overlapping in the same spot on the right and the same goes for top and bottom, of course. Let's paste that in the back. I don't think I have anything overlapping on the left. I do have this on the top, so let's move that down 8, copy. It looks like we're going to have to move this a little bit, which is fine. You can see putting a pattern together is just like putting a puzzle together, you just move things around until they seemed to fit correctly. Negative 8 is moving to the left. I'm copying over from the right to the left now, so that's a negative number. Vertical is 0, there we go. We're almost done here. Let's just make a couple more little hexagons here. You could also change the shape of these hexagons, just for a little bit extra variety. Let's unlock everything, and my magic square is still there. I haven't deleted that, so I don't need to make that again. We'll click, hold and drag. There's my new swatch right next to my other swatches. We'll go back to the rectangle tool here, make a big square, and here is our grid from the last one. There's our hexagon. You can see that it's a totally different feel now, so something fun to play around with. In the next video we will talk about textures rather than geometric patterns, which can be another fun way to add some subtle depth to your patterns. I will see you there. 6. Creating Background Texture: Another fun way to make your pattern designs look a little more interesting and visually engaging, is to add a subtle grunge organic texture either to the background of your design or over the top of your motifs, which can sometimes give a subtle vintagey or weathered effect which can be fun or even within certain motifs in your pattern just depending on what look you're after. Let me show you what I mean. One of my favorite ways is, I'm going to use this one here. There are lots of different grunge textures that you can find online, many available for free download. You can also find them easily for purchase at places like Creative Market, if you just do a simple Google search like, grunge texture for illustrator or grunge texture for Photoshop, that thing. I'm going to just drag this JPEG over to illustrator. Then what you're going to want to do is turn this into a vector. Right now this is just a JPEG and I can't change any of the colors or edit this in any way. I'm going to image trace this, which we'll turn it into a vector. Again, if you don't know what this means, I go over this in detail in pattern camp level 1, so check that out if you need to. Sketched art seems to be the option that I find I like the best for image tracing and then expand. There we go. Now you can see when I overlap it that white background is gone. I can also click on any color and it will change the color of my splatter and grungy shape. Let's go ahead and change it to that darker, shadowy gray. I'm just going to cut this. It looks like I need to lock that again, of course. Then select everything, all of those motifs and then we'll paste it in back. Now I know that it's behind all of my motifs. What I would do from here is simply put on my Option key and click and hold and drag it and just start repeating that texture. You can rotate it. You can reflect it. You can make it horizontal instead. Another thing that you can do is drag a copy out here and just select portions of it to copy. I would use my white arrow tool for that. You can simply select portion of it and move it away. Then it's doing some funny line things because I only selected part of it. You can always use your white arrow tool to just delete portions of whatever you're trying to select and then it looks like that's all grouped together. Let me ungroup it and now you can see it's all separate. I'll just group that one little piece back together and then I can use that in my design just in case I didn't want to use the whole motif. Because that might look a little bit too obvious or just not repeat quite the way that I want it to. For example, that's looking a little bit too much. I'm just going to delete that one and maybe you just use this one again. You can just overlap it really in whatever fashion you want. Increase the size, rotate it, what have you. Let's see. Then again, it'll just be important to remember that anything that's overlapping on the left, will need to overlap on the right as well. Delete that and let's just move this group it command G, so it's all stuck together. Anyway, anything that's overlapping on the left, will need to overlap on the right. Anything that's overlapping on the top will need to overlap on the bottom. I'll just select all of this grungy stuff on the left, move it over to the right, at vertical zero and copy. The nice thing about these grungy textures is that it's so organic and random that the repeat shouldn't be very obvious, when you're copying and pasting it up and over to the left and the right. If you overlap pieces that you have placed in various places, for lack of a better way of describing that, the overlap shouldn't be noticeable at all. Let's move this up. I just selected everything that's on the bottom. I want to move it up to the top. Moving up is a negative number, negative eight, okay? Then this one needs to be copied down, so that's a positive eight. Then I made this little confusing for myself because I copied things over or I placed things on both sides and the top and the bottom. I think this will be everything. Moving something from the right to the left is a negative number, negative eight, vertical zero and copy. I think we've got everything there. You can see that that added yet another type of dimensions. Let's check it out and see how that led us. My blink magic square is still there, so I'll just click hold and drag everything selected and test it out. There we go. Again, here's our last one with our hexagons. You can see it's yet another way to make our pattern feel a little bit different. I'm going to delete that and then let me show you, there's a quick way. If I just select all of these, sometimes you can go to Select, Same, Fill Color. It just selected all of those for me. I was afraid it might select the leaves as well that are that same color, but it didn't for whatever reasons. I'm going to group all of those together and then bring them all to the front. They're now sitting on top of my designs and I'm going to change that color. Let's change it first to the background color and see how that looks. You can see how that makes things feel a little vintage in a way. Some of these splatter and grungy things are a little bit intense. But again, since this is repeating properly, you can also just move this around to place all this grunge in different spots. That can be interesting and let's see. Let's see how that looks when it's repeated. I'll select everything, click ''Hold'' and drag. We'll make that big square again. Here's the one that we made before with the grungy texture in the background. Here's the new one. You can see it's just another way of making your pattern feel like there's a little bit of something more going on. 7. More Ways To Create Background Texture: There's one more way that I want to show you how to add texture to your designs. This is not a way that I personally use very often but you may find that you love this for whatever reason. I wanted to definitely make sure to show you this. Illustrator has a whole bunch of patterns that are actually already built into the program. Repeating patterns that you can use as is so that you can build into your designs. What I'm going to do is select my background square and I'm going to add another texture just as a seamless background, a background texture, right on top of my background colors. I'm going to do "Command C" and "Command F" to make a direct copy on top of my background color. Then over in the swatches palette, if you click on this little drop-down menu right here at the bottom left and scroll down to patterns, you'll see there are a few different options. I encourage you to check out all of these, but I'm specifically going to go down to textures right now. If yours show up a little bit smaller than mine, you can click on this menu to the right here and choose your thumbnail view. I think the default is small and it's hard to see what's going on, so I always change mine to large. Just a quick little tip there. With that new background square selected, I'm just going to scroll through these to show you what Illustrator has created for you that's available for you to use right in your designs. Your surface designs, your repeating patterns, your illustrations, whatever, these can be used in a whole variety of ways. Once you settle on one that you like, like that's kind of fun but let's just keep scrolling through just to see. That's pretty. I think I might do that one. You can see that it's black right now and you might be wondering if it's possible to change the color and, yes, it absolutely is. There are a couple of different ways that you can do that. If you click on the color wheel here, the recolor artwork tool, it can be really tricky for some reason to change the color of black or white, so you'll see it does this half thing and it's hard to figure out how to actually make a change. The way that I like to do this the most is to, I'm going to make a little square that's that dark shadow color since I don't have that in my palette. I'll select that background, that new background texture, hold on my "Shift key", select that darker shadowy gray color, click on my recolor artwork tool, and then if I click right here and it says, do I want to add a new color to the current harmony? Yes. Then I can simply drag that gray onto the black. Sometimes it takes two tries and that is a very subtle. I might actually make that little bit darker and see how that looks. That is not much better. The black might actually work the best for me or that might just not be the right pattern. Let's try a different one actually, just so I can make it. It's a little bit more noticeable. What's actually going on? That one is fine. Let's do the same thing. I'm going to hold on my "Shift key", select that dark gray color, add that black color to my current harmony, and then drag that same gray color. You can see it just changed. Now it's the same color as those shadowy flowers. You can also change that to whatever color you want. If I wanted, for example, the turquoise, I could do the same thing. Just select both, drag the turquoise onto the gray, that's pretty. There's one more trick that I should show you though that can cause some frustration if you don't know why it's happening. Illustrator doesn't like it when you use a pattern within a pattern like this, it won't actually let you make the swatch. I'm going to select everything. My blink magic square is still in the back. I haven't deleted that. I know that's still there. I've selected everything and I'm going to click hold and drag it over. It says that it's going to drop my new swatch there, but when I drop it, nothing happens. It's not making a new swatch. If I go to Object, Pattern, Make, this pop-up will show up. Patterns cannot contain anything painted with a pattern. This is not allowed in Illustrator. The way around this is to select your pattern and expand it. You would go to Object, Expand, and try it again. Now it made the swatch. It just showed up right over here. Let me test that out just to make sure it is looking the way that I want it to. There we go. Let me zoom in a little. It's kind of subtle. There we go. If you run into that, pattern cannot contain anything painted with a pattern problem, that can cause so much frustration. Let me tell you if you don't know why that's happening, it can be really frustrating to figure out what's going on. It just means that you have something that's technically a pattern swatch, like another pattern that you've filled something with or something like that in your pattern, and the way around that is to simply expand it. Let me delete that and show you one more thing. These patterns that Illustrator has created for you are also editable. You can drag any swatch that you've created onto your art board, including swatches that you've created yourself. For example, there's the first version of my pattern, can be kind of handy to take that out and work with it again if you need to. But say you really like this texture or this pattern but you want it to be a little bit bigger, you can always drag it out of your Swatches palette hold on your "Shift key", make it a little bit bigger, you can even change the color here if you wanted to. Let's select the color there and you could just do it that way. We will scroll back over. Now I've got my bigger swatch, different color, and then you would simply click hold, drag it over to create that new swatch. Let's just delete that one since it's not a pattern anymore that could cause some problems. We'll just copy the spectrum color again, "Command C", "Command F" to paint it, paste it in front, and select that new one, and there we go. Again, you can just click around through all the different ones that you've created that you want to try. Then don't forget that whenever you're happy with it, you want to go to Object, Expand, click "OK". Then you would just simply make your new swatch and it shows up right there. If you do the object pattern make method, you'll see that patterns cannot contain anything painted with a pattern pop-up box doesn't show up. That will tell you that your pattern is functioning properly. Then you would just click "Done". All that crazy business will go away and your swatch is here. For good measure we'll just test that out, just to see how it looks. There we go. Those are exactly the same. Okay. I have one more thing to show you, with regard to that texture. Something that can be fun is to use those textures on parts of your design that are not just the background, but like for a shadow. For example, maybe I'd like to use that same texture that I was using. Let me group that together, "Command G" as the shadow shape instead of that solid gray colors. Okay, it's already that color, so that's fine. You can play around with the color of course, changing maybe to that turquoise. That's sort of fun, I actually really like that. We can do the same thing here, so there's not a shadow already here. Let's just create one will hold the "Option" key and we'll cut, paste in back, and let's fill it with something different. Looks like I pasted it in the wrong spot. I'm going to do "Command X" for cut, and we'll just do pasting back there and maybe that's what I did wrong. There we go. Okay. Part of the fun of recording these videos is making mistakes. So you guys can see that, I still make mistakes when I'm doing this as well. Always learning. Okay, that's kind of cool. Let me change it to that same turquoise. We'll need to add that color in. I don't know why black and white don't show up when you use the recolor artwork tool. But if they don't you can always just click there and it'll make that color show up, and kind of like that. You can move things around as needed. I don't like that one as much though is that one. You can always use your eyedropper tool to get back to or to choose something within your pattern, a color or a texture or something like that. I'm actually really liking how that looks. I'm going to do the same thing here. I'm going to hold down my "Option" key and drag that down to make a copy and fill it with that turquoise texture. You can see it's on top there, so I'm going to "Command X", cut, "Command B," pasting back. There we go. Okay, move that to the front "Command Shift", Bracket key is the shortcut for that, and so you could go on with that method as much as you wanted. You can also make little shapes like that that don't even overlap. Like they're not a shadowy shape or anything at all, if you wanted to. But let's "Command X", "Command B" for pasting back. That can be a really fun way to add yet another dimension to your designs. Let's do just a little bit more, and then we'll test it out to see how that's looking. Let's do, I like that one overlapping the blue leaf there. Just for something a little bit different. You can see it's all about just repeating shapes, and yet making them feel different somehow. You can do a lot within a design with just a few motifs, It's fascinating. Okay, let's do one more right here, and we'll do "Command X", "Command B" for pasting back. Okay, let's test this one out. We'll select a, oh, I'm forgetting my important step. I need to select everything that I filled with this pattern and go to Object, Expand. Okay, I'm going to do that again just for good measure. Let's select everything. Click Hold and Drag over to the swatches palette, and there is my new swatch. If it doesn't work for whatever reason, you just saw me expand it twice. If you expand it once and it doesn't work, try expanding and again and then try remaking the swatch for some reason that sometimes does the trick. Let's test out that last swatch that we made. There we go, let me zoom in a little bit. It's tricky to see some of it. There we go. I hope that was helpful. These things are really fun play around with. You can make your own textures like that, that you can either save right to this basic graphics texture palette if you want to do that, or you can just save them on their own. You can always use your own patterns within patterns in the same manner as long as you remember to expand them so you don't run into that patterns within patterns problem. This is super fun to play around with. You can end up with some really fun, unique, and often really surprising results by using these techniques. I hope you'll give it a try and I can't wait to see what you come up with. 8. Creating Motifs w/ Different Colored Outlines: Something you might be wondering about at this point is whether or not you can change the outline colors within a motif that you've imaged, traced, and turned into a live paint groups. You have different colored outlines within the same motif. What I mean by that is, for example, perhaps on this blue flower here, you might like the stem to be this orange color instead and these little bits here, the stamen or whatever they're called, maybe you'd like those to be dark blue instead of this light whitish colors. Let's just select this and I'll hold down my option key and drag it over here to make a copy. Okay, we'll zoom back in. While it's not possible to fill your shape with different colored outlines, there is a way that you can create the illusion of it by stacking different pieces of the shape on top of each other to create the illusion of different colored outline. I forgot these were grouped together, so I'm just going to delete this. To make this a little bit easier to see, I'm actually going to change the light blue to a dark blue. Okay. That's going to be easier to see. Basically what we're going to do is use the eraser tool to copy and paste and then erase different portions of this flower and stack it all back together so it looks like it's one shape again. The eraser tool is a little bit different in Illustrator than it is in Photoshop. If you're familiar with the eraser tool in Photoshop, you'll see that it just works a little bit differently. It's not quite as precise, it's just kind of odd the way that it works. What we're going to do is copy this, so we'll do "Command C" and then "Command F" to paste in front and again you can always get to those commands up here in the Edit menu. Then I'm just going to move this over, basically what we want to do now is erase everything except this stem here. So I'm going to select the eraser tool over here in the toolbar and zoom in and simply get really close to that stem and just start erasing. Basically, I just want to disconnect to the stem at this point, so that nothing else is touching it, then I can use my white arrow tool to select all of this and just delete everything that I don't need anymore. There might be some stray, that's there. Let me zoom in somewhere. You can see that's not quite as precise as it could be. I can just go back in with my eraser tool. If it does something that you don't like, you can do "Command Z" or edit undo. You can shrink or expand the size of your eraser tool by clicking the bracket keys on your keyboard, hopefully you can see that getting bigger, I'm clicking the right bracket key and now the left replicate and make it smaller. So that can be useful if you're really trying to zoom in on something. Okay. So I'll zoom back out and now you can see I'm left with just that stem. Let's change that stem to this orange color instead, and then we'll just go ahead and stack it, stack it right on top, right there, and click away. If I really wanted to be precise, you can kind of see a little bit of that blue outline still in the background. Let me hide this. I could actually do the same thing on this one and use my eraser tool to just delete the stem. Then show all, some odd things showed up over here, we'll just hide those again. So now you can see I've got my orange stem. I might want to move that to the back, so it's actually layered behind the flower rather than sitting on top of it. There we go. While it looks like one shape with two different colored outlines, it is actually two different shapes now. You can do the same thing with these little bubbles up here. We'll just go ahead and copy and paste in front and then we'll just move this over and use our Eraser tool to just kind of detach this. You can see the Eraser tool, I'm not sure if that was a little too subtle to see or not, but it kind of changed the shape of my eraser. It doesn't erase the actual pixels that you're trying to erase the way that it does in Photoshop, since it's, we're working with vectors, it's just a little bit different. You can also double-click on the eraser tool to change the size, changed the roundness of Eraser tool, change the angle, to try to make it a little bit more precise in the way that you might want it to be. But for our purposes right now, this is going to work just fine. No w that that's detached, you can just erase all of this using your white arrow tool. Here we go. Then we can, looks like we've got some funny stray bit stone here. All right. We can just move this back over and change the color and I'll zoom out. There you go. So again we could do the same thing and hide this and use the eraser tool to erase this portion on the flower. We'll use the white arrow tool to just delete all that and show all. Again that weirdness showed up. Okay. So let's just move that to the back so it's layered behind the flower now, and there we go. That's just a very simple example and that for some reason got brought to the front again. There we go. So that's just a very simple example. But if you have a complex drawing that you are working with and you realize, oh no, I should have not connected those lines because I actually wanted those two pieces of this drawing to be different colors and now that it's image traced, I can't do it. This is kind of a quick, cool, easy workaround for making it look like it has different colored outlines within the same shape. When actually you just sort of broken the shape apart into a few different bits and pieces and put it back together as a group of shapes. Hopefully, that makes sense and will be a useful tool to add to your pattern design toolbox. 9. Creating and Using Grids: Let's switch gears a little bit now and talk about how to make patterns there that are a little bit more precise, maybe not the kind of tossed-like puzzle putting together type of patterns that we've been working on so far. You might want to make a more precise geometric pattern, for example. Grids can be a really useful way to make that happen. So lets start a new document here. [inaudible] as usual. So the most basic type of grid that you could create is just like a checkerboard grid. So we'll turn on our rulers here which is up in the View menu if you're looking for that right here. Command R is the keyboard shortcut. So if you don't know how to make a guide, the way to do that is to click, hold, and drag from either this left ruler over here. You can drag it right into the middle or wherever you want to place it and then just let go. Same thing you can drag down from the top and place it where you want and let go. So this is the most basic grid really that you can make. So if you can picture it which actually adjusts, we'll make a couple of squares here. So 4 by 4 is the size that each square will be. We'll fill it with a color here. We can copy that over 4 and down 4. Okay and then let's do copy Command C, Command F to paste in front. If we rotate these 90 degrees and then fill them with different color. Okay. So that is not beautiful at all, but it'll give you the ideas. So if we turn that into a repeating pattern, then it would repeat as this checkerboard grid design. So that's the most basic type of grid that you can use. You could fill each of these 4 quadrants with a different shape. So let's delete those, and let's just go ahead and open this up. We'll copy these over. Okay. I'm going to lock these actually so I don't move them. If you've got onto guides and lock and you can't select them and move them by accident. So I could put one of these shapes in each quadrant and turn that into a repeating pattern. That would repeat in that kind of grid formation. Fill this up. Okay and how about another leaf. So then the trick with this is if there's nothing overlapping the edges, we've been working on making the magic square. Here we go. If nothing is overlapping the edges, you can actually just turn this into the repeat, just like this and it'll repeat properly the way you want. So let's test that out, and I'll just show you how that works. So that's a simple and basic way to make a very precise grid. So you know that everything is repeating exactly where you want it to lined up in its proper quadrant. Alternatively, you could make your quadrants smaller. So effectively they won't be quadrants anymore. Let's unlock the guides and move this over so you can make more guides. For example, turning this into, instead of just 4, we could turn this into 16. Drag down from the top. So each of these squares now will be 2 by 2 inches instead of 4 by 4. So I'll lock those again. Right here, let's shrink this down with this scale tool by 50 percent. You can see now my pattern tile is the same size, but I've shrunken my motifs down to be smaller. I can move them over to the right for up and down 0, copy. If you wanted to really get fancy, you could start to rotate so everything looks a little bit different. You could now copy all of these down So left and right 0 down 4, copy. Maybe you want to rotate those so they're upside down so 180 degrees. Okay and again I don't really have anything overlapping the edges necessarily. So I can just grab all these, drag them over to my swatches palette. You can see my swatch showed up right there and let's just scoot on over and test it out. So here's the first one we made, and here is the next smaller version. So that can be kind of just a fun, quick, and easy way to create a more precise pattern where you're not kind of eyeballing where things should go. Let's just go ahead and move all of that over to the side again. We'll delete these guides. So unlock, delete. Okay. So what if you want to make a grid that's not just a like checkerboard, square kind of grid? There's a way that you can do that, too. So we'll drive over our regular guides that we started with, just one over into the center and then one down into the center. What you can actually do is select these, and you can rotate these grids just the same way or these guides rather, just the same way that you would rotate a shape or a motif. So if you go to the Rotate tool and double-click, if you rotate 45 degrees, click OK. Now you can see we're getting somewhere interesting. So now we're working on a diamond repeat. So this is one-half of the diamond and the other half, bottom of the diamond, the top half. So you could stick a motif here overlapping halfway and then repeat it over to the right, same for the top and the bottom. That would create a diamond repeating shape. So you can also make this a little bit more complex by copying. Same way that you can repeat and move or copy and move over a motif to a specific place on your art board. You can do the same thing with the guides so I've got them selected, and I'll double-click my black arrow tool. Let's move them over to the right for up and down 0, and click Copy. So you can see now I'm making an even smaller diamond grid. We can do the same thing here, so I'll double-click again. Let's move these over to the left this time. So that's a negative number and we'll copy. You can see now I've got a cool diamond grid that I can lock these and start placing motifs in here instead to create a different kind of repeating shape. So I'll just kind of quickly fill some of these in. This can be really great. Again, you could fill this with really whatever kind of shapes you want. They can overlap the edges or not. You can make them actual diamonds. So it's more of a geometric repeat. I'm obviously putting in just kind of whatever shape at this point, just so you can see that there are a variety of ways that you can make this work. Then the only thing you'll want to remember with this one is that you definitely will have shapes overlapping the left and the right. So whatever is overlapping the edges will need to be repeated over to the other side. So let's put another one here. Then we'll move those over from the left to the right and copy them over. Let's select both of those and we'll move them over, to the right, 8, vertical 0, and copy. Then we'll shrink that down a little to make it fit a little better. We'll just quickly put in a couple of more shapes here. It'll be the same thing. These are just starting to overlap on the top now. We'll, move those or copy those down. We'll go horizontally, 0, vertically, 8 and copy. Maybe we'll make that one a little bit bigger. This one, since we do have motifs overlapping the edges, we will most definitely want to make that magic squares. We'll click there with our rectangle tool and make our square 8 by 8 because that's the size of the art board. Send to back. Select everything and click hold and drag it over. Then let's test that out, and make a big square. There is our diamond repeat. You can see all I was doing, was placing shapes within a precisely placed diamond, so everything is right where it needs to be. I'm going to delete this and show you how you can make this geometric design instead. I'm not totally sure how big those squares actually are, or those diamonds are. The diamonds are basically just squares that are rotated 45 degrees. Let's try that and we'll just fill that out with a color instead and rotate that 45 degrees to see how close we are. It's not quite big enough, so I'm just going to hold down my shift key and drag that. It looks like 2.83 is the size of my square. Now, I've got that filled in and I can just leave it that way to create a diagonal diamond checkerboard type design. I can also, let's do Command+C, Command+F to make a copyright in the front and shrink that down, maybe 70 percent. Command+C, Command+F. Let's do that again. Make that a different color. Command+C, Command+F to make a copy right in front, let me shrink it down and change that color. Now, I can select this and all I really have to do is copy and paste this over and down and around into the different diamond shapes. Let's double-click that and we'll be moving. Let's move horizontally to the left. That's a negative number. Negative four, because we're halfway in the center and 0 vertically and copy. This one is overlapping the left edge. Let's go ahead and move that all the way over to the right edge, so that's 8 and vertically 0 and copy. Then, we can leave them as is, you can change the colors whatever you like. The next thing we'll need to do is just copy these down four, so let's select all of those and, and going horizontally 0 and vertically 4 and copy. Next what we'll have to do, is just fill in those white areas, the white diamond shapes and we'll change the colors once we do move these. For now, we'll select everything. Now if you can picture it, the math can be a little bit tricky to visualize the numbers that are appropriate for how you'll be moving things. It may take just a little bit of trial and error. But basically we're moving half the amount that we were before. Let's move up vertically and to the right. We'll double-click. To the right is two. Half of 4 is 2. Vertically is always a negative number. We'll do that and it will copy. Let's leave those selected. You could leave it like that if you like how it looks or we could go to the recolor artwork tool and just move these around so they're in different positions. Maybe like that. Click ''OK''. Then we just have two more spots to fill in. It looks like these need to go down to the bottom. Horizontally 0 all the way down is a positive 8 and copy. There is our diamond repeat. You can get fancy by changing the shape of the edges of your diamonds by making those a more of like an orgy shape, an onion, the kind of that onion repeat that you may be familiar with or making it like a wavy diamond or just overlapping in different ways. You could put an outline, maybe like dots on the vertical or on the diagonal lines of the diamonds, whatever you want, you can get as fancy or not fancy as you want using this grid. Then to turn that into a repeating pattern, of course, you'll want to make that blink magic square. Right now it's in the front. Let's move it all the way to the back, and we'll select everything. Move it over. Let's test it out. There we go. It repeats perfectly. Then you can always unlock those guides. Either, you can leave them, they won't ever print, so you can just leave those. You can hide them right here. You can delete them whatever you want. You don't really need them once your repeat is finished. It's really up to you. Hopefully, that is useful and fun to play around with. It can be a really nice way to just create some more precise geometric repeats, rather than just putting everything together in a lovely little jumble like we have been doing so far. I can't wait to see what you make with this technique. 10. Creating Diagonal Repeats: In this video, I'm going to show you how to create a diagonal repeat pattern in Illustrator, and we'll do it a couple of different ways. The first way is we're going to start with a square, and we're going to do a simple repeat, a simple diagonal repeat that uses a 45 degree diagonal so basically, exactly from corner to corner in this square. We're going to be using the pen tool. Let's choose a color other than black just to make it a little more fun about dark color. So you're going to want to make sure that your guides are turned on, your smart guides rather. What that'll do is, if you see once I hover over the corner, then you'll see that it says intersect there. That tells you basically that you're hovering right over the corner. When you see that little intersect you'll go ahead and click one time. Drag your pen tool down to the bottom until you get to the next corner that also says intersect, click, and then you can simply go to the black arrow tool and click away, or you can do the keyboard shortcut, which is Shift Command A and that will deselect everything. Now you can see; let me zoom out a little. I've got this line, so let's make it a little bit thicker. We'll change the stroke on it right now. It's just one point. Where is my Stroke panel? There it is. Let's make it something more like 10 to make it a little bit thicker. You'll see in the Stroke panel you've got these different choices for the caps in the corners. If you go ahead and choose this projecting cap, that is going to make your line overlap over those corners a little bit. When you repeat your diagonal line from edge to edge, from top to bottom, you'll know that it's going to intersect or it's going to overlap those corners in the right way, so you're repeat will work properly. What we're going to do is copy and paste in front, and then we'll double-click on the black arrow tool, and we're going to move this over to the right horizontally. My square is eight by eight inches, so we'll move it over to the right eight inches, and vertically zero, and click ''Okay''. Now you can see it's intersecting in the top two corners, but it's still not intersecting in the bottom. We'll go ahead and do the same thing, and I'm going to use a keyboard shortcut this time, which is command C for copy and command F for paste in front, and double-click. Now we're going to be going to the left, so that'll be a negative number, then click ''Okay''. Now I've got my line intersecting properly in all four corners, so now what I can do is simply take these lines. I'm going to take these two, and I'm going to do the same thing. I'm just going to copy and paste in front, and then I can just use my arrow keys on my keyboard to move these over to wherever I want them to be. Maybe I'll make this line a little bit thicker or maybe we'll make it 20 points and change this color, and then I can just continue doing that. I'll just do command C for copy and command F for paste in front, and just go ahead and move these lines. Maybe we'll make these ones even thicker, maybe like 35, 39, then we will choose some other color. You might be wondering are these really repeating properly? One way that you can check is to turn on your rulers, which is the keyboard shortcut for that is command R. You can also find that app in the View menu right here; rulers, hide rulers and show rulers, and then I like to just to prove to myself that it's actually working. You can click and hold over here, and drag to drag a guide over. If you drag it to the edge of each diagonal, you'll see that they do match up from top to bottom perfectly. Again, if I drag one down from the top, I'm working on this bluish line, by the way you can see that again. They match up perfectly. So you know that those lines are right where they need to be. If you forget to select both lines and copy them; let's say I just selected this one and copy and paste in front and just move this line. I'm just using the arrow keys on my keyboard to move that; change that color. You can easily just either copy it down or copy it over from the right to the left; let's do that. I'll double-click. We'll need to go negative eight vertically zero and copy. You'll see now it's copied from top to bottom, and right to left. Let's just fill in this diagonal a bit more. I'm going to do Command C, Command F to paste in front, and we'll just move that over maybe to right there, then let's add in an unexpected color. Let's do Command C, Command F, then maybe we'll make a couple of thin lines. As you can see, I'm just making this up as I go along, and then I'm not totally sure what my repeat will look like when it's done, but Command C, Command F, just make a couple of these lines all in a row, then I can copy all three of these; Command C, Command F will move these over, change the color. How about something like that? Then you can either Command C, Command F again before you double-click on your block arrow tool to move it negative eight over to the left and click ''Okay'' or if you forget to copy it and paste it in front first, you can always double-click that, move it, and then click this copy button instead of the okay button, then it will cancel that out. Let's just do a couple more here; Command C, Command F, then smooth that. Let's make this one a little bit thicker 15, change the color slightly. Let's Command C and Command F, and just fill in some of these areas here. We'll do that one on one more time Command C, Command F, and using my arrow keys again. Let's make that one a little bit thicker, maybe 25, and then we've got one little area that I could fill in. Let's do so. You see how I'm selecting both of these orange lines because these are the intersecting lines on either side. If I select both of them at the same time and do Command C, Command F, I'm moving them both right to where they need to be on both sides, and the top and the bottom of the square. That's pretty good. The next thing that I'm going to do is choose a background color. we'll do just a grayish color, and we'll line it up with the corner and make an eight by eight same as the art work, then we'll go to, object-arrange-send to back, and then we will copy paste in back, and take all the color out of that square. This is now transparent fill, and transparent stroke and just for good measure, I'm going to make sure that it's all the way in the back, send to back, then I will select everything, and drag it over to the Swatches Palette, and then I'm going to use my hand tool to grab my screen and scroll it over, then we'll test it out and see if it works. Let's make a big square. Let's make it say 30 by 30 inches. Zoom-out a little bit. That's pretty big, and fill it with the pattern we made and till now you'll see it works just great. That's how you make a simple 45 degree diagonal. Let's go ahead and delete that. You might be wondering, what if I want to make a diagonal repeat that's at a 30 degree angle or a 50 degree angle or something that's different than a 45 degree, like regular diagonal. To do that, I am going to go to my Artboard, double-click this. Instead of working with a square, in this case, you will work with a rectangle. Let's make it have about eight inches wide and let's say five inches high. Zoom-in a little bit. The principles here are exactly the same. We'll choose some color and go to our pen tool and intersect at the top left and the bottom right and then I'm going to do Shift Command A to deselect. Let's make this a little bit thicker. Let's make it 15 points, and make sure that my projecting caps are chosen over here in the stroke panel to make sure that my lines go a little bit outside the edges of my corners. Alternatively, you don't have to start at the top left. You can start at the top right, you can start in any corner, really I just always happen to start creating patterns from the top-left just because that's the habit that I've gotten myself into it. You can make your diagonals going the other direction, that's totally fine. You can already see, this is not a 45 degree angle if you're looking at this right triangle here. If you want to figure out the math of it and figure out what that angle is, I'm sure that you can go back to your high school geometry or trigonometry or whatever it is. I am not going to embarrass myself by trying to figure that out on the fly here. But that is some angle that's other than 45 degrees. Again, you can just do Command C, Command F. We'll move it over to the right first, so that's eight, click "Okay." We'll do the same thing here, but I'll just do it the other way just to show you. We'll double-click, we'll move it negative and then click "Copy" this time since I didn't copy it beforehand. Then we'll move some of these over to the right. Let's do Command C to copy, Command F to paste in front, and then use my arrow keys to just move those right over. Let's change the color, and we'll make them a little thicker, just for fun. You can see that now these pink lines are intersecting the top and bottom in a little bit of a funny way, like it's not projecting all the way out. To fix that, I would copy Command C, paste in front Command F, and then double-click your "Black Arrow Tool." We're going to move vertically up this time. Horizontal is going to be zero. Vertical, if you want to move something up, it's a negative number. A little bit confusing. The height of our rectangle is five. We're not working with eight anymore since we squished it down to a rectangle. Negative five, and you can see that that just completed that line. Then you can do the same thing with this one. Command C, Command F. This time we'll move it down, so that's a positive number. Click "Okay," and now we've got those completed line. What I would do next just to make sure that they stick together is just select both of them and group them. So object group. The keyboard shortcut for that is Command G. We'll do that on these two as well, Command G. Now when you click on that, it will select everything rather than having it be two pieces. Let's just fill this in with some more lines. We'll do copy, paste in front and we'll just go ahead and move those over, change the color. I will just choose something from over here. Command C, Command F and let's make this one thinner, let's do 10. There we go. Change that color. Command C, Command F, let me use my keyboard, arrow keys to just Command C, Command F to just make some copies of those lines. Now when I'm looking at this, I'm noticing that these pink ones on the corners are actually not overlapping in quite the right way either. What I'm going to do is copy this middle pink line, Command C, Command F. I'm going to double-click my "Black Arrow Tool." Move that horizontally zero, negative five, which will move it up. That completed that line, and then I will Command G, group those together. I'm going to do the same thing here. I'm going to Command C, Command F to copy and paste in front, double-click. Now we'll move it down, which is a positive number. Command G to group those together. Now we're in good shape. Let's make a few more lines. Let's work on this one here. I'm going to Command C, Command F. Move this here. Let's change the color and let's make this a really wide 140. You'll see I only copied that one. Now I'm going to need to go ahead and copy this from the left to the right because there's no matching gray line over there. So double-click. Now we're back to moving horizontally. That'll be eight, positive numbers moving it to the right. Vertical will be zero. Oops, and I forgot to copy, so I'm going to undo that Command Z. Let's try that again. We'll move it eight to the right vertical and then we'll click "Copy" instead of Okay. There we go. You'll see that funny thing is happening again. So I'm going to go ahead and copy this line up. That'll be back to the negative five, copy and we'll group these two together. It might be a little tricky to grab both of those, and Command G. Let's make a few more of these lines here. Select all those Aqua lines, Command C, Command F. There we go. Let's change that color to how about that. Then let's do Command Z, Command F, we'll just add one more line here, we'll leave at that pink. Then we need to copy it over eight vertical zero copy. We need to fix that one line up here that's not intersecting quite right. We'll copy this one up, negative five to move it up and copy and Command G to group those two. Now that looks pretty good. Now we'll pick a background color and let's make it some very light pink cowbell. Go to our rectangle tool and we'll make our background rectangle, which is eight inches wide, five inches tall, and send that to the back. Object, Arrange, Sent To Back. Then we'll copy, pasting back this time. That means you're making an exact copy of that rectangle immediately behind it and we'll take all the color out of that one to make our magic square that will make our patterns work. Then just for good measure, make sure it's all the way in the back, by going to Object, Sent To Back again, Arrange, Sent To Back and we'll select everything. I will do it rather than dragging this watch over this time, I'll show you this other way which many of you probably already know. If you go to Object, Pattern, Make. This will actually make your swatch for you and it does this funny weird overlapping thing. But if you just go up here and click "Done," it'll go back to your original and you'll see your swatch shows up in the swatches palette. Let's grab our hand again to move our screen over and we'll make a square and we'll fill that square with our diagonal. You'll see it works just great. Now we've got our 45 and our 30 or whatever that is. That is how you make a diagonal repeat. If you want a more dramatic diagonal, you could just make the height of your rectangle shorter. You could do eight inches by three inches or 10 inches by two inches or whatever. There's no rule there. But every different rectangle shape will make a different shaped or differently angled diagonal. You can also make the width of your rectangle shorter than your height, and that will make your diagonal angled in the opposite direction. Just a fun thing to play with. I hope this is useful. I know there are lots of questions about diagonal repeats, so I hope that this clears up some of the mystery. 11. An Introduction to Half-Drop Repeats: Now we're going to enter the world of half-drop repeats. You may know what a half-drop repeat is, you may not, you may have heard the term before and wondered about it, what it is? Why you would want to design a half-drop repeat? What are there for? When it's appropriate to create one? All of those types of things. Let's talk about all that. To get us started, I'm going to give you a quick visual lesson. To get us started, I'm going to show you just some symbol grids of the different types of repeats and how they actually work within a patterned tiles. We'll be talking about straight repeats, half-drop repeats, and brick repeats which are another type of repeat that are basically a half-drop repeat but rotated 90 degrees. First I'll show you just the basic grid or straight repeat which is what we've been designing up until now. Motifs are placed within the pattern tile and they repeat at the same place to right to left, top to bottom just the way we've learned. That is our straight repeat. A half-drop repeat is different because the motifs in a half-drop repeat, repeat in columns that shift down half a step the length of a square or a motif from column to column. As you can see in this example, starting with the left-hand column along the left edge of the square, that column is where it is and then the next column right next to it to the right, drops down half a step exactly the length of that square and sits right there. Then the third column goes back to its original placement, the next column drops down that half-step again. You can see it forms this nice zigzag formation, I guess. The way that's laid out within a pattern tile is a bit different than the way that a straight repeater or grid repeat is laid out. That's a half-drop repeat, little visual example. A brick repeat, if you can picture that exact same thing just rotating either to the right or to the left, 90 degrees, a brick repeat is the same thing, but instead of columns shifting a half-step, its rows that are shifting a half-step to either the right or the left. The top row is where it is, and then the next column down shifts over half a step, half the width of that square, and then the column below that is back to its original placement. Again, it does this nice zigzag pattern, but the zigzag is going the other direction. Hopefully that little visual example will help you become a little more clear about what we're doing as we were putting this together because it can get a little bit tricky and confusing especially as we're creating more complex half-drop repeats which we will get into in just a few short minutes. 12. Create A Simple Half-Drop Repeat: Let's start our adventures in creating half drop repeats by creating something very simple using just one Motif. We'll create a new document, eight by eight is just fine as usual, and I just don't like seeing all those extra swatches over there. So we'll get rid of those and then make sure that our rulers are turned on. Command R is the keyboard shortcut for that. Let's drag over some guides to the center here at four inches, both directions and let's get ourselves a Motif. That'll work. I just copied and pasted that in and here's just a handy little trick that you might find useful from time to time. My Bounding box, this blue box with the little handles here, is more of a diamond and less of a square. If you go to Object transform and reset the Bounding box, that'll actually square that up. It just, makes it easier to line it up where you want it and drag things to the size that you want. Can get into a little annoying are tricky to try to resize things that have a funny, funnily angled Bounding box. If I were to create a repeat from just this, it would create a straight grid repeat using this flower design. Everything would repeat in just straight lines, straight roads, straight columns. What we want to do is turn this Pattern tile, this Art board, this one Motif into a pattern that repeats in a half drop formations. How will do that, is to move this over, it's just on the left side of the Art board. Normally what we would do is, copy this over in a straight repeat from the left to the right so it's an exactly the same spot. We would go horizontally, eight, vertically 0. That's what we would normally do. In a half drop repeat what we want to do is move the Motif from the left side to the right side, but up half a step, and down half a step. Half of eight is four, so we'll copy that, and now we are starting to get somewhere. Everything needs to be repeated from the left to the right, half a step down and half a step up. Everything on the top and the bottom still need to repeat straight up and down the way we normally do. You can see now that I moved to this from left to right in that half step, it's now intersecting the bottom edge, which means I need to also intersect it on the top edge at exactly the same spot. We'll do that by going horizontal 0, no movement left to right, and then, to move up as a negative number. We'll go all the way up negative eight, and voila, that is essentially our half drop pattern tile. To make this work, let's make our blank magic square, and we will put it in the back. The way that we normally do things, we would, one way, my preferred way, I should say is to select everything, click, hold and drag over to the Swatches Palette. With a half drop repeat or break repeat, that will not work. That only works with a straight repeat. Let me show you what happens. Illustrator doesn't know to treat this as a half drop repeat, to repeat it in that formation, so it does this funky thing. It's just repeating our pattern tile as a straight repeat. The way around that, is to select everything, go to object, pattern make, and then, you'll see this funky thing happen. It looks totally weird. Don't get scared. This tile type, so the pattern options palette will automatically pop up. If you click this tile type drop down, there are a few different options, and if you choose brick by column, that's the same thing as a half drop, exactly the same. You'll see now, it's telling illustrator to repeat it in that formation. You can just go ahead and click done at the top, goes back to exactly the way you designed it and you have this new beautiful swatch over here. Let's test that out. There's the one that we made before, the one that didn't work by dragging it in, and here is the new one, Illustrator magically knows to just repeat it in that formation automatically. That is pretty handy, CS6 and the most recent versions of the Creative Cloud illustrator all work this way. Earlier versions of illustrator like CS5, CS4, anything earlier than that, you do not have this option for illustrator to know to lay out your half drop patterns in this formation. You have to actually lay things out, manually, let me delete that. The way that you would do that, is you don't actually create a swatch. This can be a useful exercise just so you can visually see how your pattern is laid out. If you're so maybe a little bit confused about how half drops actually work and fit together, you don't need to make the blank magic square. What you do need to do is make a Clipping mask. To do that you want a blank square in the very front rather than the very back. I just moved that to the front, select everything, go to object, clipping, mask and make or commands seven, is the keyboard shortcut. What I would do, if I for example, wanted to save a larger Swathe of this pattern rather than just this one, close in pattern tile, would be to copy this. Command C or edit copy. I'm going to open a new document command N, let's make it, say 20 by 20. We'll paste Command V, and we know that this is eight by eight inches, so we'll just place it in the top corner there and will simply start copying it down. Everything vertically in those columns needs to be lined up exactly straight. We'll just move that down eight horizontally zero will do the same thing again to finish out that square. Then, we'll select everything and this is where things get a little fancy with the half drop. We'll double-click there. Now, we'll be going horizontally eight to move it over to that next column, but we'll also, we want to move everything up half, a half-step, so four, and to move things up is a negative number, so negative four, copy. You can see now everything is being placed exactly where we want it. We'll select those, will do the same thing, so we're gonna go horizontally eight, and now we'll move things down so you can see it just goes up, down, up, down. Now since we're moving down, that's positive number, and we'll copy. That's that. I could save this as an Illustrator file, that's fine. You can also export, say you wanted to save a JPEG to put on Instagram or something like that, you can just export rate from the File menu here, export as JPEG, and then save it to wherever. It will save only the Art board and not these extra little bits and pieces that are on the outside. You'll have a larger swathe of your half drop pattern that you've laid out manually. That is another way to do it if you are not currently using the most recent, the most up-to-date version of Illustrator. It can also, I highly recommend just trying that anyway, just to give you a better sense of how things are put together in a half drop repeat. It will really help you as we move into the next video, where we'll be putting together the same kind of repeat, but with more than one Motif happening. Things can get slightly chaotic and confusing if you're not quite sure how it actually works. Try that out and I'll see you in the next video. 13. Creating Complex Half-Drop Repeats: Now we're going to take our half-drop skills to the next level. This is where things start to get really, really fun. Let's grab our sketches from before and we will command C, copy and command V for paste. I'm going to go ahead and delete those, zoom in a bit. Let's shrink that back down because we're going to be putting a bunch of different motifs in here this time and arranging them all half drop-like and I brought in our color palette from previous videos, that's ready and here for us to use. Let's create a background color just to make it a little prettier to work with. Let's make it a dark one. We will lock that. Selection command 2 is the keyboard shortcut for that. I know since I just made my square after I brought these shapes and that'll be in front. Let's make sure all these motifs are red at the front. Object arrange, bring to front. When you're arranging a half-drop, what you want to do is make sure that you stay away from a good chunk of the right edge because if you remember from the last video, we'll be bringing everything over from the left to the right and copying it half a step up and half a step down. Stay away from the right edge and also the bottom. Since we'll be copying everything down from the top to the bottom in exactly the same spot, that just makes it easier so you're not copying things in both directions. I'm going to work pretty quickly here and recolor things in some fashion and get a bunch of motifs in here, we have something to arrange and work with. I'll start just spinning things around. At this point, I'm not too concerned with where things are. I'll start arranging things shortly. Let's see. Just to make things go a little bit faster, I'm going to make this all one color here. That'll be fine for now. You can shrink that down a little bit. How about that color. Let's Just delete that one because I don't feel like dealing with it. I'm going to bring in a new color as well. I'll drag that over so I've got it in my palette. I'm already doing what I said not to do so I overlapped that on the bottom. Let's overlap that on the top instead. You can get as fancy as you want here with overlapping shapes of course. You can put the leaves underneath the flower shapes, command-X, command-B for pasting back. You can copy and paste these and again to copy and paste, the quick way, I'm just holding down my Option key as I click, hold, and drag. Will move that to the front. You can see how things can start to get complex pretty quickly here. I don't have any of this light color, so let's do that. Shrink that down. Let's delete that because it doesn't look great. Shrink that down, rotate. Let's copy this one. I'm getting close to that right edge, I'm just going to steer clear of that and make a couple of more copies of various things. Let's copy that. You can see once you know what you're doing and everything starts to be a little bit more second nature, it goes pretty quickly actually placing these things. Mix some more things in that new teal color. Funny trick to make new shapes is to just layer things that are all the same color together, so it can look like that was drawn as one shape when in fact it's a few different things put together. We need some more of that pink. You can use any of the techniques that we used before when we were learning how to make more complex straight repeats. When you are putting half drop repeats together too adding texture, adding patterns in the background or within your shapes. All that stuff applies here as well, of course. Let's do some more copies of this petally shape. One more over here. That's looking good enough for right now I think. Of course now that I said that, I'm probably going to keep going for another minute. I'm moving things around, copying, pasting, oops, rotating. Let's start with that and just see what happens. So the first thing that I'll do is copy these motifs that are overlapping on the top, we'll move those down to the bottom. Actually the first thing I'll do is lock my background. Then we will select these and we will move them horizontally eight. We want them to go straight down just like normal. Vertically eight and copy. As you can see, I will need to do some shifting around of shapes, but no biggie. Add another one here just to fill in that little area. So now here is where the important half drop piece comes in. So we're going to take everything that's overlapping on the left here, and we'll double-click our black arrow tool, and let me move this over here, we'll move it over horizontally eight, just like normal. But now instead of vertically zero, which we normally do for a straight repeat, let's start by going down. So that'll be, half of eight is four, and copy. Now we've got everything from the left placed where it needs to be placed on the right. Let's move that a little bit since it's overlapping. So once you do this, if you have things that are too close to the right edge, you may just need to do a little bit of moving and wiggling things around, which is okay. Then we'll do the same thing again from the left side. Double-click, we'll move horizontally eight again. This time we're going to go up, which is a negative number up that half-step. So negative four, copy, and there we go. So now you can that half drop formation, beginning. Everything is placed where it needs to be properly on the right side. Some of these shapes are not overlapping anywhere, so you can actually just delete those. This orange shape is the only one that ended up overlapping top to bottom, but those are lined up nice and straight, so that's perfect. Then you can see we ended up with this funny hole here. So we can just go ahead and fill that in with whatever we want. Let's put a leaf there, and maybe another one of these, and how more of this. So I'll show you a trick. This is something that can be a little confusing if you're not paying attention to what you're doing. So I just copied this over and it's actually overlapping on the right edge. So it's not overlapping anywhere on the left edge. So since I just added that, I'm going to need to copy that over to the proper place on the left side now. So the way that I'll do that is exactly the same, just in the opposite direction. So we'll be moving negative eight to the left as a negative number. Vertically down, half a step, four, copy. It looks like that's going to be enough. It's not overlapping the bottom edge at all, so we don't need to copy it up as well. If we did copy it up, I'll show you what will happen just so you have a visual. So we'll move that up, which is a negative number, so it's not overlapping our art board at all. So that one, you just don't actually need to do. So let's unlock everything and test this out. So this is our pattern tile our half-drop pattern tile. So the first thing we'll want to do is copy, pasting back our background square, take out all the color, there's our blink magic square, which we absolutely need. Make sure it's in the back. Select everything. Remember for the half-drop method, you cannot drag it over to the swatches palette the way that I've been showing you how to do with the street, repeat that won't work. The only way that it will work in the Creative Cloud version of Illustrator, which I am currently using, is to go to object, pattern, make, and choose Brick by Column, which is the exact same thing as half drop, and click Done. Everything will turn back to normal. Then you can test your swatch by, let's make it really big, filling your big square, with your new swatch that you made. So you can see it's working perfectly. So the nice thing about half drops is it's a really nice way to make where that repeat is actually happening in your pattern a bit less obvious. So you can see that if you saw this in a store or in a fabric store or something, and you were trying to pick out where the repeat is and how it actually works and is put together, It would be harder to figure out than if for example, all of the flowers were just repeating in straight lines, that thing. So it's just a little bit more visually complex and interesting for the eye and harder to pick out where the repeat is. So that can just be a really handy and useful way to design and elevate what you're doing and just make yourself look like more of a pro. There are also ways that you can fake this. You can do like a faux-half-drop and I will show you how to do that in the next video. To be perfectly honest, I don't actually make proper half drop repeats very often anymore. I tend to make faux-half-drop repeats if I'm going to do something like this. So for whatever that's worth, I think it's very important to understand this process and understand how it's laid out and how a half drop is actually put together. That said, you don't actually have to do it if you don't want to. I think it was Picasso who said, you have to know the rules in order to break them, and that's I think the philosophy that applies here. So learn this technique, figure it out. It's really fun, it's like putting together a really complicated puzzle, and then you can break all the rules and do it the faux way, that's coming next. 14. Creating Faux Half-Drop Repeats: In the last lesson, you learned how to make a complex half drop repeat, and you may remember that I mentioned, I don't actually make, proper half drop repeats very often at all. What I tend to do is make a full half drop repeat, which is, a pattern that looks like it's repeating like a half drop, but it's actually repeating like a straight repeats. Let me show you what I mean. We'll start simply, like we always do when we're learning something new, just so I can, illustrate it clearly and then you can always make things more complex as you get the hang of it. We'll, Command C to copy that red flower and let's open a new document, Command N is the keyboard shortcut for that. Eight by eight, sounds good to me as usual, and Command V for pasting that red flower in. I usually start in the top left corner, I should say. There are always exceptions. What we're going to do is, let's start by copying over to the right. Double-click your black arrow tool and we'll be doing exactly what we did with our straight repeats at the beginning of this class. Over to the right horizontally, eight, vertically zero, and copy. Let's also copy this down because this top edge is overlapping, so we'll go, horizontally zero, rather, vertically eight and copy. Then it looks like we've got enough space to put one right in between, so let's go Command C, Command F for pasting front. That just made a direct copy right in front of those flowers. I'm just using my keyboard, arrow keys to move those into position. Then the next step, you can select everything on the left or the right. It doesn't really matter. I'll just do the left because that's kind of how my brain works. Hold down the option key to copy all three of these flowers. Click, hold and drag. You'll see I'm just dragging these into that half drop formation. It's not mathematically correct necessarily, the way that it is in a proper, half drop repeat, but you'll see it looks like a half drop repeat, even though it's repeating like a straight repeat. I did not make a background color, so let's do that. You can do that first. You can add a background, square at any point during your design process. It does not have to happen at the beginning. It could be the very last thing you do, before the magic square. That's totally fine. Object, Arrange, Send to Back. Now let's copy, Commands C, paste in back, Command B, and take out all the color, so we're making that vital, essential magic square right now and we'll send that to the back just for good measure to make sure it's all the way at the back where it needs to be. If you remember, I told you in the last lesson that with a half drop repeat, you can't select everything and drag your swatch into the swatches palette and have a swatch that repeats in a half drop formation, because Illustrator just doesn't know, but with a full half drop repeat, since it's repeating as a straight repeat, you can do that. I'll click hold and drag it over, and there's my new swatch. Let's test it out. Big square, and we'll fill it with our design, and there you go. Of course you can also select everything and go to Object, Pattern, Make, and the pattern options palette will pop up, and you'll just simply choose Grid, that'll be what pops up automatically. Click "Done", goes back to normal and you'll see a new swatch. If I select my big square, it's currently filled with the first swatch that we made by dragging it over. If I click on this new one, you'll see it looks exactly the same, so both of those methods will work for full half drop repeats. You can make this as complex as you want. It doesn't matter if you're using one shape or a bunch of shapes. What just matters is that you're faking that zigzag repeat, within your pattern tiles. I'll just copy a few things over from our design here. Command C, Command V for paste. Make those bigger. You can just fill things in as you please. You can overlap things within. That can be fun if one shape is repeating as a half drop, but each motif has something a little bit different going on, so let's do command X, select that, command B for pasting back. That is a little too crazy. Let's make that white. Command X, Command B. Again, I'm just doing exactly the same things. I'm just rotating, moving things around. Let's see. Let's change that color a little bit. I don't have my color palette from before, so I'm just winging it now. I'll hold down my Option key and make, maybe another copy of that on top. You get another one up here, and maybe rotate that one. You'll see this is just the same stuff that we've been doing. Let's copy that. Rotate it. The more you fake that half drop formation, the more it'll look like a complex half drop repeat, even though, it will simply be a straight repeat, like we've been making. We will make maybe one more of those. Let's reflect that one, and rotate it. You'll see I've also overlapped a few things on the bottom here. Those all need to move up. Double click my black arrow tool, horizontal zero, up is a negative number, negative eight and copy. It placed it on top of my flowers, which I don't want, so I'll just select those and go to Object, Arrange, Bring to Front, to bring those to the top of my stack instead. This one is also overlapping the right edge, so I need to move that over to the left. This one also. I'll select both of those, double click, to the left to the negative number, so negative eight vertically zero and copy. Again now I'll need to bring this flower to the front. You can see it's just a puzzle and moving things around in the stack. I broke my rules, that I've taught you before about, not overlapping things on the right edge, or the bottom, but you can see it works exactly the same whether you overlap it on the top or the bottom, you just need to make sure it's on the other side in the same spot. Let's test this out. I'm pretty sure that my blank magic square's still up there in the correct spot, so, let's just click hold and drag it over, and make a big square. We will test it out. Here's the one that we made before. Here's our new one. You can see it's really easy to add complexity and have it still function in this exact same way. I hope you'll play around with that. It's really fun. It's less complicated than making an actual half drop repeat. You just need to make sure that your pattern tile has space for three rows to do that initial zigzag and then it will repeat like a half drop repeat, visually. But be a lot easier to manage as you're designing. Hopefully that makes sense and opens up some new design opportunities for you. 15. Final Thoughts and Your Assignment: Congratulations, you've made it through all of the lessons in Pattern Camp Level 2. Now your job is to create your very own complex half drop repeating pattern in Illustrator, using all of the techniques that we've gone over in the course. First, I'm going to just show you some of my complex repeats. You can see the variety of types of designs that you could think about creating. Some of these are half jobs, some of these are straight repeat, some are full half drops. If you want, you can even pause it and try to figure out what repeat each design is just to get your eye a little more use to the different types of repeats. I also wanted to invite you to our private Facebook group or private Pattern Camp Facebook group, which is really fun and active. We have a weekly theme that I share every week just to get your creative juices flowing if you're not sure what to design. The themes are really different every week. That's a fun way to build your portfolio and just make sure you're continuing to practice your skills and your different techniques. I also wanted to tell you about my group that I run online called Campfire, which is a sister program to Pattern Camp. It's for creatives of all levels, from beginner up through more seasoned professionals and everywhere in between we've got pattern designers, painters, illustrators, people who sow, ceramic artists, paper mache artists, all kinds of different creatives in the group. You don't have to only be a pattern designer to join the group and you don't even have to have a business, you can be right at the very beginning. There are no rules for who can join Campfire. It's just for people who want to grow themselves, grow their creativity, grow their creative businesses, if that's what you are looking to do. We talk about everything under the sun as far as creativity goes. It's a very real group, which is everyone's favorite part of the group actually, is just the real conversation that we have about things that are hard, things that are stopping us, how we get in our own way, that kind of thing. If you're looking for some creative support, this could be the perfect group for you. Registration is open just once a year at the end of December for about two weeks through early to mid January, so keep your eye out for that if that's something that you're interested in. Registration will be open at the end of December. I just want to say congratulations again. I hope that you have really enjoyed this class and if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. I cannot wait to see your amazing designs that you're going to create and have fun and may the pattern addiction strike you and light you up and just enjoy and have fun.