Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm [inaudible] Beck and I'm a Surface Pattern Designer from Sweden. In this class, I'm going to show you my way of creating a repeated pattern. We will start with ideas and sketching, moving onto drawing on the iPad in Adobe Draw, and then finally make the repeat in Adobe Illustrator. You will learn all of the basics and I will show you my techniques which makes the whole process much more fun and efficient. After I experienced getting stuck in the creative process a few times, I developed a few techniques which makes it easier for me to move forward. On top of all of the basics on how to make your repeat a pattern. I will also give you my tips on how to release the pressure of perfection and how to move forward, and how to prevent to getting stuck when you create. If you want to learn how to make a repeated pattern my way, if you ever experienced getting stuck in the creative process, or simply if you think it's too complicated and frustrating to make pattern then this class is for you.
2. Supplies : Let's start with the supplies that you need to take this class. For the first part, you need paper and pens. Any kind of paper will do, and some colored pens or water colors or crayons or whatever you feel comfortable to draw with. I use sharpie markers because I really like the feeling when you draw with them and I also like the colors. I prefer to sketch in colors because it makes me visualize what the final pattern might become. The second thing you need is an iPad or some kind of drawing pad and some touch pen to draw with. I use the iPad Pro and the Apple pencil. The app we will use in this class is Adobe Draw. The last thing that you need is Adobe Illustrator on your computer.
3. Inspiration & ideas: To make a panel you need ideas and inspiration. I collect a lot of inspiration from my everyday life. I love long walks in the forest and I love to travel. I try to collect things wherever I go and I always keep my eyes open. When I'm out walking in the forest, I often bring leaves and berries and plants home with me as inspiration. I also take a lot of pictures with my phone of things that inspire me. I collect things like this little box of postcards with lovely patterns or this book with a lot of fun flowers and plants to get inspired. Sometimes when I know that I want to draw something, for example, lingon berries, I can Google some images to see how they look. I then studied a picture, or if I'm lucky and it's the same for it, the real life lingon berry for a bit and then I draw from my imagination. In my style, I hardly ever use reference images and tried to draw a lingonberry exactly like the look. My style is more loose and free and imaginary. For me, it's part of my styles to get inspiration from something that I see, but then I draw from my imagination. Pinterest is also a great source of inspiration. I use Pinterest a lot for color inspiration, where I look up images with colors that I like and get inspired from them when I create color palettes in my own palettes. If I don't know what I want to draw and haven't decided as subject yet, I often do a brainstorming sketch. This is a method where I just start to draw whatever comes up in my mind, after a while I usually end up drawing the same motifs over and over again and that is when I figured out what I want to draw. In this class is part of the process to not know exactly what you want to draw and let the pattern develop as we create. Then to make it easier to start, you can decide at least subjects. I decided that I wanted to draw some lurons, so let's go on with the sketching.
4. Sketch: Let's start to sketch up our patterns. If you haven't already, then decide on a subject to draw like flowers or animals to make it easier to start. In this class, we will start with a rough brainstorming sketch and continue with the pattern sketch. This is my way of sketching that I developed through practice and trying out different methods to see what works for me. I think that it's good to try out different techniques to see what you prefer. How you sketch for your pattern isn't the most important part of this class. I'm showing you my way of doing this as I think that the most important part is to not get stuck in the creative process because you are afraid of a blank paper. My sketching process include to let go of the pressure that what you draw needs to be perfect and to let the sketch just be a starting point in the creative process of making a pattern. So that you can let the pattern develop as you create. Let's start with a rough sketch. I just start with some flowers and leaves and see where it takes me. The secret here is not to think too much and to not being afraid to draw something that you don't like. Just see it as a brainstorming process and get everything out of your head and just draw freely. Here's my result and my rough brainstorming sketch. From here, I could go directly to draw on the iPad if I already got a good idea of how the pattern could develop. Sometimes I do, but in this class, we're going to create a second sketch. This is where I got an idea of the motifs that I want to draw, but I don't really know how they could work together. I usually choose to make the second sketch when I can't visualize my motifs in the pattern yet. To prevent to not getting stuck in next step of the process, drawing on the iPad and vectorizing my sketch I'll do a second sketch here. When I do this second sketch, I still keep an open mind and I know that I can change my mind later if it turns out that I don't like this idea fully or that something just doesn't work out when I do a repeated pattern of this. I'm done sketching, here are my sketches and you can see they are really rough and not at all a finished pattern. Your sketches can be as rough or as tidy in this step. The most important part is that you have a first idea of the pattern that you want to create. Let's go on with the next step, which is drawing on the iPad.
5. Draw on the iPad in Adobe Draw: It's time to digitize our sketch. In this lesson, I will walk you through the basics of drawing in Adobe Draw, so that you can create the vector drawing for your pattern. I will show you my way of drawing on the iPad. I will share my tips on how to move forward and to not get stuck when you create. The first thing we need to do is to open Adobe Draw and make a new artboard. I usually work with squares, but you can choose any format you want. The size I use is 200 times 200 millimeters, which I feel is a good size to be able to draw both fine and thick lines with a brush. When I start with a drawing, I usually prepare my artboard with the brush settings and a color palette. Let's start with that. To change the brush settings, tap on a brush. Long press the brush and choose the tip you want. I usually work with a basic round tip. Drag up and down to change the size of the brush and to change the opacity. I always use 100 percent opacity as it's part of my personal style to draw flat design. But even if you work with opacity or other effects, I would say that it's better to make those details in Illustrator. Tap on the little dots to change the attribute of the brush. I usually turn off the velocity dynamics and take down the pressure dynamics a bit. I keep the other attributes as it is. These settings matches my way of drawing. Try out the different settings and see what you prefer. Let's pick our color palette. Remember that you can change all of the colors in Illustrator in the next step. But I prefer to draw with the palette that works well together even if I might change the whole palette later on. This makes me visualize what the pattern might become. For me, the color affects how I feel about what I draw. To change the color of a brush, tap on color and you see a picker. Choose the color you want and try it out on your artboard. You can save your colors in your Creative Cloud Library by tapping the little plus in the picker. To pick a color from your drawing, press hold on color and drag over the color that you want to choose. If you need color inspiration, have a look at, for example, Pinterest. Swipe up your dock menu, press hold, and drag up Pinterest on top of your Adobe Draw window. I have a few images here that I will use for inspiration. I go to the picker and choose colors that match the feeling in my inspiration images. Sometimes I keep this color palette in the final pattern. But just remember that you can change the colors in Illustrator later, so try not to get stuck here too long choosing colors. The eraser tool is a really efficient tool. You can use it, of course, to erase something. But you can also use it to fix details, such as to get sharper edges when you draw. Here are an example. I sometimes use the eraser when I want to get that paper cup design feeling in my drawings. Now that we've prepared our artboard, it's time to start our drawing. The first thing we need to do is to add our sketch as the reference image to our artboard. To do this, take a photo of your sketch with your iPad. To add your image, tap on the little plus in the layers panel, image layer on my iPad and place the sketch on your artboard. Change the size of your image and rotate it so that you have a good fit. It doesn't matter if the image are falling out of the artboard as we are using it more as a reference image rather than to retrace the whole sketch. We will use the sketch as a background image, so tap on the image layer and turn down the opacity so that you can see what you draw on top of the image. Let's start to draw. Tap the plus layer in layers panel and add a drawing layer on top of the image layer. I will start with this pink flower. As you can see, I do a rough trace on the sketch. I usually trace some motifs in the beginning to get a good feeling of the form of the motifs and how I want to draw them. After a while, I usually turn off the background layer, and draw by free hand the rest of the motifs. If you're new to drawing on the iPad or with the Apple Pencil, it might take a little practice to get used to. But once you're used to it, it's a really efficient tool as it makes vector drawing much more fun and easy. You will notice that you will be able to experiment more in a less time consuming way as you can change your mind and try new things all the time while you draw. If you want to be able to move around your objects, you need to use one drawing layer for each object. Working in different layers is also good if you want to be able to change your objects to the foreground and background. If you want to do that, add a new layer, press hold on that layer and drag it under the other layer. Tap the layer and transform to be able to move around your object on your artboard. Remember that everything that you have drawn on that layer will move. To hide the layer, double-tap on it. Now you've learned all of the basics that you need to know to create your iPad drawing. Let's continue to draw out all of the motifs that we want our pattern to include. My motifs are coming together pretty nicely. This is part of my process where I try positions of the objects at the same time as I draw them. This is so that I will be able to visualize how they will work together in a pattern. I still haven't decided how my final pattern will look, but it's a part of my way to develop the pattern as you create. I'm happy with my drawing and I think I can make something interesting with this in Illustrator in the next step. To export to Illustrator, you tap the little square with the arrow and you can either open it directly in Illustrator. But I like to export my drawings to Creative Cloud as PDF so that I can save all of my original drawings for later use. I hope that you enjoyed this little bit more technical part of the class and had a good time drawing. Let's dive into another technical but really fun part of the pattern making process, creating the repeat in Illustrator.
6. Make the repeat in Adobe Illustrator: In this lesson, you will learn how to fix the details of a sketch in Adobe Illustrator and make a repeated pattern. I will show you my way of creating a repeat using the pattern tool. I will go through all of the basics that you need to know in Adobe Illustrator to be able to make a pattern. Let's open Adobe Illustrator and our sketch from Adobe Draw. As you can see, the motifs that we draw outside of the edges are dartboard on showing. Tap on "View" and "Outline" and you can see that they are all there. They just doesn't show because a Clipping Mask has been made. Click on "Object," "Clipping Mask," and "Release". I don't really know why this Clipping Mask is there. It has something to do with the Export from Adobe Draw. But the only thing you need to know is how to release it so that we can continue to make our pattern. Next, we will copy the whole sketch and paste it in a new document. Select the black arrow, click and drag to select all objects and press "Command C" to copy. Go to File and New to make a new document. To make it simple, choose the same size of your new document as the size of your artboard in Adobe Draw. I use 200 times 200 millimeters. Paste your copied artwork to the new document by clicking on "Command" and "V". I work in layers where I save the different versions of my sketch and pattern to save time and energy for later if I need to make changes to the artwork. I always save this original sketch in the first layer. Click on "Layer" in the right tool panel. Double-click your "Layer" and rename it to "Original Sketch." Duplicate the Layer and rename the new Layer to Sketch. I locked the bottom Layer and turn off the eye symbol so that I only see the top Layer. The next thing I usually do is to clean up the Swatch panel. I usually delete all of the Swatches except black and white, and then add the colors on my Sketch as a color group in my Swatch panel, which we will use later when we recolor our pattern. To do this, select your artwork and click on the folder symbol in your Swatch panel and then just click "Okay". Now, we will start to fix the details of our Sketch. The first thing I do is to delete the background Layer and all of the hidden layers that are empty. As you can see, I have a few squares around my artwork that are just empty layers. Delete all of these so that they won't get in the way when we start to work with our sketch. You can click on "View" and "Outline" to see if you have deleted all of the hidden layers. What do I mean with fixing the details? Well, when you draw an Adobe Draw on the iPad, the drawing might look great on the first view, but if you zoom in, you can see that there are probably some details that didn't turn out as you want them to. For example, there might be a sharp edge where you wanted around it. For this, you can use the Smooth Tool. Select your object under Smooth Tool in the left tool panel, and click and drag over the parts that you want to make smoother. You can also simplify all of the paths in one or several objects by selecting your object. Click "Object," "Path," and "Simplify." As you can see, you can change the whole look if you simplify it too much. I usually just type in 99 or 98% percent. You can also move details of your objects if you aren't quite happy with how they turned out in your drawing. To move objects with the arrow keys, click "Command K," and then in the box for keyboard increment, type in how far you want the arrow key to move an object. My settings are 0.1 millimeters so that I can work really detailed. I also make sure that I unite all of the objects that are in the same color in one motif. For example, look at this pink flower. If you click on "New" and "Outline," you can see that this motif is actually made out of several objects that aren't united. To fix this and make one object of the pink parts of the flower, click on the "Lasso Tool" and drag around your object to select all. Then press "Command G" to group the whole flower. Double click to edit the objects within your group. Select a pink object and click on "Select," "Same," and "Fill color." Now, that you have all of your pink objects selected, go to Pathfinder and Unite. If you zoom in, you can see that there may be some details and paths that should be a part of the pink object but aren't filled. To fix these details, choose the Shape Builder Tool in the left tool panel and click and drag over the paths that you want to include in the pink object. To go back to edit all of your motifs and out of your isolated group, double-click. Let's go over all of our motifs and fix the details. Remember to group together all of the objects that are included in one motif. This will make it easier to move around our motifs in the pattern later on. I've speeded this app for you because this part of the process might take a little while, but it's important here to clean up your sketch. If we do this detailed work now, it will be much easier to make the pattern in the next step of the process. If you don't fix the details, you also might get problems with, for example, unwanted white lines soviet pattern when you print it. When you think that you're done with the details, take a last look in that Outline Mode to see if all of your objects are filled as they should be. Finally, we're done with the details and now it's time for the most fun part of the whole process, making the pattern. There are several ways you can make a repeat pattern in Adobe Illustrator. This is my way of doing this. This method is really efficient and it saves you a lot of headache and I think it's the best way to make patterns. The first thing we do is to select all of our objects and copy them, unselect, and then go to Object, Pattern, and Make. Change the size of your pad and tile to the same size as your art board. Select the Pattern Type Tool and drag your tile to your artboard. Paste your artwork by pressing "Command V". Now, you see your artwork in the pattern tile and around are copies of your tile so that you can see how your pattern will look. I think that this is the best thing with the Pattern Tool. Then you can visualize your pattern right away and see all of the changes that you make in your pattern at the same time as you make them. If you ever made a pattern in a more manual way, you will know what I mean and if you haven't, I would say that you really don't need to learn that as this way of making patterns. At least in Adobe Illustrator, is so much easier than the more manual ways. You can choose to dim the copies of your artwork so that it will be easier to know which objects to work with, where we move them around and place them to make our pattern. I usually dim the copies down to 70 percent. Let's start to work with creating our repeat. I'm pretty happy with my overall look of the pattern here. There is some nice movement and flow going on. I just start to move around objects to see how I can make them work together. What we're after here is a nice balance in the pattern and between the object Here you can see the great thing about making a pattern in the pattern tool. When you move an object in the pattern tile, you can see right away how it affects your whole pattern. You also don't need to worry about the edges that makes the repeat, because the basics of creating a pattern is that what you place on one edge of the tile needs to have an exact same copy on the opposite side of the tile. We will have a look at this more in the next step of the process. In this step where we work in the pattern tool, you don't need to think about it as the tool creates this for you. It takes a little practice to make a pattern balanced. If you're a complete beginner, try out to make a simpler pattern with a few motifs that you repeat using the pattern tool. I will continue to carefully move around and place my objects to make a nicely balanced pattern. What you see here is speeded up short version of my process. One fun thing you can try out is different sizes of your motifs. To change the size of our motifs, select all, and then go to Objects Transform and transform it. Tap the little PV box and try out different settings in this game boxes. Here I made my motifs smaller, which makes our pattern feel more airy. The creative process of making a pattern is all about experimenting and trying things out and see what works and not. When I create a pattern, I constantly change my mind and try new things out to finally get an end result that I'm happy with. When you're happy with how your pattern look in the pattern tool, we will take it to the next step. Select all objects, copy them, and then tap on Down in the pattern tool. Next, we make a new layer and name it pattern. Press Command V to paste your art work to your new layer. The reason that we copy our artwork from the pattern tool to the Artboard instead of using the pattern that we made in the pattern tool, is because we want to be able to have a background layer in the pattern. My experience is that the pattern tool is limited when it comes to background layers and the ability to edit a pattern made with a background layer directly in the pattern tool. To make a background layer, click on the Rectangle tool and click once on your Artboard. Type in the size of your Artboard, and click Okay. Align your rectangle center to your Artboard with the align tool. This square that you made is the background of your pattern. The next step is to create square without fail or stroke and place it behind your background. This will cut the edges of your pattern tile when we later drag the tile into the swatches panel. It will make a perfectly repeated pattern of your tile. To make this copy your background square by pressing Command C, then press Command B to place the copied square at the back. Remove that fill and stroke from the square on the back. Then select both squares and locked layers by pressing Command 2. Select all of your artwork, group them together and align centered with your Artboard. Go to Object Arrange and bring to front. Now we have our artwork centered on our Artboard. To make the pattern tile, we need to ungroup the objects. Right-click and select ungroup. This is where we fix the edges of the tile so that it will become a repeat pattern. As I mentioned before, the basics of making a pattern is that all of the objects that are falling out of 100 edges needs to have an exact copy on the opposite side of the tile. The easiest way to do this is to press command K and type in the size of your Artboard under keyboard increment. Press Okay, then select all of the objects that are falling out of 100 edges. Hold down the alt key and press the arrow key that goes to the opposite side of the tile. Left to right, right to left, up to down and down to up. I usually lock the objects that I have moved by pressing command 2 to make sure that I don't copy them twice. When you have copied all of the objects to all of the edges of a tile, go to object, unlock all. Select everything on your Artboard, and drag it into the swatches panel. Finally, we have our finished pattern. Make a rectangle and fill it with your new patterns watch to take a look at your pattern. Make sure that everything looks good and that you're happy with it. If you want to change anything, I would recommend to double-click on the pattern into swatches panel that you made in the pattern tool, the one without the background. Make your changes, and then do the process of copying the artwork to Artboard and make the pattern tile again. When you are happy with your pattern, move on to the next lesson, which is re-coloring the pattern.
7. Recolor the pattern: I think that colors are one of the most fun parts of design and it's super important for the overlook your pattern. In this lesson, I will show you how to change the colors of your pattern, both using the recolor artwork tool and manually. First make a copy of your patterns so that you can compare with the original when you change the colors. Next, go to "Edit", "Edit Colors" and "Recolor Artwork". This is the recolor artwork tool. It's really hand tool where you can experiment with colors of your patterns in an easy and fun way. To change the colors of your pattern within your existing color palette, click on the little box that is called randomly changed color order. This changes the colors of your pattern but within the color palette that you already use. To change the colors to a completely new palettes, one way is to create a new color group with the new color palette. If you need color inspiration, have a look at, for example, Pinterest and you can make the same process in Illustrator as we did on the iPad in the previous lesson. Open your Pinterest color board in a new window and place it on the side of your illustrator window. Make a few squares with the rectangle tool by making one square and copy it to the side then press "Command D" to repeat your last move. When you have a few squares filled them with colors that matches your color inspiration board. When you have chosen your colors, you can make a new color group by selecting all of your squares and click on the little folder symbol and the swatch panel. Go to the recolor artwork to once again, but this time click on the new color group in the right panel in the tool, and then click on the little box to randomly change color order once again. When you find a colorway you like click "Okay" and then on "No", when you're asked if you want to save the changes to the swatch group. We still have a white background layer on this colorway. If you want to change the background to another color, go to the recolor artwork tool and in the left panel, you see that the white color is left out when you change the colors. Click on the "White color" and on "Yes", when you're asked if you want to add the color, then click on randomly change color order once again. Now the white background layer is also changing colors. You can also manually change the colors in a pattern by dragging out the patterns swatch to your artboard. Double-click to get into the isolated group mode. Choose the white arrow, select an object in your pattern and click on a color in your color group. Here i'm changing the background color of my pattern. To select all of the objects in one colors, click on the object and then unselect Same Fill color. Now you have all of the objects in that field color selected. Click on a color in your color group, and all of the objects that are selected will change to that color. I usually make a lot of variations and put the different versions next to each other to be able to compare and see which one of the colorways I liked the most. When you're happy with your colorway, you can try to scale up and down the pattern to see how the colors will look in different scales. To do this, make a copy of your pattern, and then go to object transform and scale. I'm happy with this re-coloring. When you are, you can go on to the next lesson, which is finalize the file.
8. Finalize the file: We have almost reached the finish line to make a repeated pattern. In this last step, you will learn how to finalize the file so that you're good to go if you want to print the pattern or send it to a client. You will learn how to layer your file, make a clipping mask, and merge your pattern tile. The first thing we will do, is to duplicate our pattern layer, rename the first pattern layer to original pattern, and clean up our new layers so that it only includes the final pattern with the new colors. Rename the new layer to pattern clipping mask. Zoom in a bit and choose the white plus arrow to select only your field background layer. Copy it by pressing "Command C", and select it, and then pass it in front by clicking "Command F". Change the color of the square so that you can see it clearly. Select both the pattern and a new square and click on "Object Clipping Mask Make". This makes a clipping mask around your pattern. It's only visual, so, all of the objects that are falling out of a tile are still there. You just can't see them because of the clipping mask. We will save this layer with the clipping mask to save time and energy for later if we need to make changes to the original pattern. The next thing we will do is to duplicate this layer and rename the new layer to merged. In the merged layer, we will remove all of the objects that are falling out of the tile and make the finished pattern block. To do this, select your pattern with a clipping mask and go to the Pathfinder tool and click on "Merge". As you can see, we have now removed all of the objects that were falling out of the tile and we have created our final pattern block. You can try out your new pattern block by dragging it into the swatch panel and try it out in a swatch. You can also press "Command K", type in the size of your tile, and then press "Alt" and an arrow to make a copy of your tile. I make a few copies here and zoom in to see that everything looks good. If everything looks good, it's time for the very last step, saving the file as an AI file, and save as a JPEG so that you can share your class project. To save the file, click "File", and "Save As", choose a name and save it as an AI file. To save as a JPEG, you can do in one of these two ways. It all depends on how big you want your file to be. When I work with digital files to share online, I save it in small file sizes so that the file will load quickly. The first way to save a JPEG, is to choose File, Export and Export S. Choose JPEG and choose Use Art Board and type in art board 1. Hit "Save". This will give you a high resolution JPEG. The second way is to go to File, Export, and Save for Web. This gives you a smaller sized JPEG, which is good when you're going to share your image online. Click in "JPEG Quality a 100%", and then hit "Save". When you have saved your pattern as a JPEG, it's ready to upload in the class projects.
9. You made it!: Congratulations, you have completed making a pattern from sketch to repeated pattern type. Be sure to post your class project when it's finished. I'm super excited to see what you've created, and if you have any questions, please ask them on the Community Page. Thank you so much for taking this class. I really hope you enjoyed it and that you had a lot of fun and learn a lot of new things.
Maja Faber, Surface Pattern Designer
