Pattern Design in Illustrator Masterclass - A - Graphic Design for Lunch™ class

1. Welcome to Pattern Design in Illustrator Masterclass : Hello and welcome to this Pattern Design in Illustrator Masterclass. In this class you'll learn to make patterns in Illustrator, the kind of patterns that you see around you everyday. These are patterns that are used for clothing fabric and for home furnishings. They're also used for things like wallpaper and gift wrap and even for carpets. This pattern design class is suitable for anybody who has had some experience in Illustrator, so you want to be able to open and save documents, for example, and be a bit familiar with moving around the Illustrator interface. I'm going to be focusing on the technical aspects, how you can make your designs and your art into seamless repeating patterns in Illustrator. Who am I? I'm Helen Bradley and I've been teaching Photoshop and Illustrator to designers for over 15 years. I teach large groups of people face-to-face.I also work with individuals on a one-to-one basis. Of course, I teach online. Now, in terms of what you'll be able to do once you've finished this class, let's have a quick look at your class project. Because your class project is going to be to create four individual patterns and to recolor them two different ways so that you'll end up with eight patterns in total. These are going to create a solid foundation for building your own pattern collection. You'll also know exactly what to do to upload your files to an online site for printing. In particular to sites like Spoonflower, which is a fabric wallpaper and gift wrapping printing site, because they have special requirements for how you upload your files. Think about it. The very next gift that you give might be wrapped in paper that you've designed yourself. Or what about gifting a quotient from fabric that you've printed or protecting your new smartphone with a smartphone case that features a pattern you've designed. There are so many amazing ways that you can use the patterns that you've designed in Illustrator and of course, you can monetize them by selling them online. If you're excited to get started creating patterns in Illustrator, let's move forward to the very next video and get started with our first pattern. 2. Make Your First Pattern: Let's get started with the first pattern we'll create in Illustrator. We'll need a new file, so I'll choose file and new. My documents going to be screened size 1920 by 1080. You can make yours pretty much whatever size you like. I am working in RGB color mode and I will be throughout this class. I'll click create. For our pattern, we're going to make a pattern of squares. I'll choose the rectangle tool, hold shift as I drag out a small rectangle, it's a square. I'm going to fill it with a pale blue. Let's go and get a blue from my swatches panel. I'm going to make the surrounds of it a slightly darker blue. I'll increase the stroke weight so that we can see the stroke a little more clearly. My pattern is going to be made up of shapes just like this. To make the pattern, select over the shape with the selection tool, choose object, pattern, make. You'll be told that a new pattern swatch has been added to the swatches panel. Just click okay, if you see that dialogue. If you don't see that dialogue, that's just fine too, you'll still see the swatch in your swatches panel. The pattern options dialogue will open and this is where we can set up the settings for our pattern. It's important to note that the things below this line in the pattern options dialogue have nothing to do with the finished pattern. They only have something to do with what you're seeing on the screen as you're making your pattern. You can select a different number of copies. But ultimately your pattern is going to grow as big as you need it to be. This has got nothing to do with how far it's going to extend when it's actually in use. Dim copies allows you to see the original pattern piece and the copies if that's of interest to you. I prefer to work at a 100 percent. There are other options for things like show the tile edge and show the swatch bounds, neither of which is going to be particularly helpful to us right now. This is a grid style pattern. You can see that the type is set to grid. We're seeing these rectangles or these squares pretty much stacked up as if they were boxes on a shelf. That's a grid pattern. What we could do at this point is to increase the space between successive squares. I've got this option here selected. You can see when I click on it, it becomes a darker gray color. This will allow me to increase the spacing around that they square equally for both the width and height. I'll hold the shift key and click upward. I can add ten pixels at a time, or the up arrow key, and that just adds one extra pixel at a time. I want this pattern to be nice and regular so I'll add extra pixels to both the width and the height to add a little bit of spacing around the shapes. Now there are other options for the type of pattern. You could, for example, select brick by row. In this case the join or where these two shapes here intersect is halfway through the square above. That's because it's set to a brick offset of one half. If we were to set it to one quarter, then the join here will be a quarter of the way across this shape. There are lots of other options here for your offset. Brick by column, line things up column wise, we've got a quarter offset here. They join between these two shapes as appearing about a quarter of the way through this particular brick. You wanted something a little more regular, you could choose an offset of one half. There are only offsets here for the brick pattern, brick by column and brick by row. But there are two other styles that you could use, hex by column, which overlaps this slightly and arranges them in a column format. Hex by row, which arranges them in a row format. Again, there's some overlap here. We're going to use the grid options. This is going to be my final pattern. I'm happy with it. When I am happy with it, all I need to do is to click here on done. That will exit out of the dialogue and it changes or updates the pattern swatch here to be what it is that I have designed. You'll be left with your pattern starting object on the screen here in your document. You don't need that any longer so you can just delete it. We've now created our first pattern swatch in Illustrator. In the next video, we'll see how we can actually put that to use. 3. Fill a Shape with a Pattern: Once you've created your pattern, you're ready to use it. We'll see now how we can apply a pattern to shapes. There is one thing that is really crucial to understand before you do this. I'm still working in the original document that I created, the square in and then created the pattern from. That's important because until we know how we can save patterns to re-use them, this pattern will not be available for any other documents. If I was to close this document without saving it, then I would lose this pattern paste. You need to be still working on that original document. That said, let's go ahead and create a couple of shapes. I'll drag out a square, and now I'll go to the pencil tool and create a more organic shape as well. Now, any of these shapes and indeed any shape in Illustrator can be filled with our pattern. I'll select the shape. I'm going to remove the stroke from it and I'll target the fill here. To fill it with a pattern, I'll open the swatches panel and simply click on the pattern. The shape has now been filled with the pattern. Let's have a look and see how a shape that is created by the pencil tool can be filled. Again, if you want a stroke, you can leave it in place. If you just want a fill, then apply the fill and you can remove the stroke. It's also possible to apply patterns to lines. For example, I'll drag out a line and I'll also create a more organic shape here. Let's select over both of these and let's increase the stroke weight. I'm just going to increase that here and we are giving the line right now a dark blue stroke. But that could just as easily be a pattern. I've got both shapes selected right now. I've got my stroke targeted. Let's go to the swatches panel and click on our pattern. Here the stroke has been filled with a pattern rather than the shape itself. 4. Resize, Rotate, and Move a Pattern: We're now ready to have a look at re-sizing, rotating, and even moving patterns inside the shapes that they're in. Let's focus on this square here. I'll just zoom in so you can see what I'm seeing as the problem. Inside the shapes, this pattern has been placed so that this edge of the pattern is right along the edge of the shape. It's not giving us a particularly good-looking result. So one of the things that we can do is to move the pattern into a better position. To do this with the "Selection " tool, I'll make sure I have the "Shape" selected, and then "Object Transform", and then "Move". Now I want to move the pattern but not the objects. I'm going to disable "Transform Objects". I'm going to turn "Preview" on because I want to see what's happening. Illustrator has just taken off with my pattern. Let's just put it somewhere completely different. When you're using this dialog, you'll probably find that exactly same thing will happen for you. So what I'd like to do is to just zero out the horizontal and vertical to make the design look like it looked when I came into this dialogue. All I want to do is to move this horizontally. So I'll go to the horizontal area here, and I need to move it in a negative direction. So I'll just press the "Down" arrow key to head in a negative direction. I'm just looking to square up this pattern inside this shape. I might also want to move it down vertically, maybe just one or two pixels. You'll find that moving to the left in a horizontal direction is moving to a negative value. Moving to the right is a positive value. When you're working with vertical, moving up is negative and moving down is positive. When you've got your pattern looking the way you want it to look, just click "Okay". So that's moving a pattern within a shape. Sometimes you may want to scale a pattern. Let's have a look with this particular shape. I'll select the shape. If I want the pattern to be larger or smaller, I'll choose "Object Transform", and then scale. Exactly as we did with the other dialog, we'll want to make sure that preview is turned on and that transform objects is turned off. Because we want this shape to stay the same, exactly the same size, we just want the pattern to be different. I can click here in "Uniform" and scale the pattern up, so it's bigger inside the shape, or I could take it down so it's smaller inside the shape. It's really whatever you want to happen to the pattern. Click "Okay" when you're done. It's also possible to rotate a pattern. So with this shape still selected, let's choose "Object Transform" and then rotate. The same thing, turn "Preview" on, turn "Transform Objects" off, and then you can just adjust the rotation. If you hold the "Shift" key as you increase the rotation, you'll be taken 10 degrees at a time. I'm going to rotate this round 45 degrees. So I'm just pressing the "Up" arrow key or the "Shift up" arrow key until I get 45 degrees, and then I'll click "Okay". Let's zoom back I'm pressing "Control" or " Command zero" to do that. So we have resized our pattern. We've also rotated it here. Here, we just moved it. You can use any combination of these techniques to get your pattern to look exactly the way you want it to look. 5. Save and Reuse a Pattern: It's time now to have a look at saving our pattern. Because if I was to close this file without saving it I would lose all the work that I've done in designing the pattern. While this is a fairly simple pattern, your patterns won't always be so simple and you won't want to lose your work. Well, simply saving this file, will save the pattern within the file, it doesn't make it easily accessible to other documents in future. So let's have a look at how we would save this pattern so that we can reuse it in another file in future really easily, and we'll do that from the swatches panel. Going to open up the swatches panel, and I want to get rid of absolutely everything that is not this pattern. So I'll go and select this color group and shift click on this color group as well, and click the Delete swatch icon here and click yes, and then I'll go and select this particular pattern all the way up to this white swatch here and again, delete that. I won't be able to delete this none or the registration swatch. So I want to live in place none registration and my Pattern paste and that absolutely all I need in this document right now to go ahead and save this swatch so I can use it again in future. I'll click the fly out menu and choose Save Swatch Library as AI. There are two options here, but the first one, the ASE option, doesn't save patents swatches. So you will want to select Save at Swatch Library, as I illustrated well, open automatically in the place where your patterns need to be saved. So you'll see here that I'm in the swatches panel, so you don't want to move from where you are right now. I'll call this pattern square click Save. So now, even if I were to close this file without saving at my pattern Swatch has been saved so I can use it again in future. Let's see how we would do this. I'll choose File and then New and create a brand new document. If I open the swatches panel, you'll see that my square pattern is not in the swatches panel, so it's not accessible to this document yet. To go and find it. I'll click the fly out menu and choose Open Swatch Library and then go to use the define because this is where the patterns and other swatches that I've created for my own use are stored and up here is the square pattern. There's only one swatch here and that is my patterns swatch our click on it and you'll see that it's added automatically to the Swatches palette for this document. So I can now go ahead and close this swatch. I'll just press the letter day to go back to my default settings. Let's go and create another square. Will remove the stroke from it, target the fill, go to the swatches panel, and now we can fill it with the patent that we created. It's a really important step for you to be aware of that you need to save your patterns in a place where you can easily access them. You may also of course want to save this file and that makes good sense. But to make sure that your patents swatch will be easily accessible to other documents in future, it is imperative that you go through the process of saving it as an AI file using the options from the flyout menu here in the swatches panel. 6. Learn to Edit a Pattern: Often when you've created a pattern in Illustrator, you want to go ahead and edit that pattern. For example, you might look at this pattern, and say it would look a whole lot better if it actually had a circle inside the square. What I want to do is edit the pattern, and overwrite the original with this new pattern. Let's see how to do this. To start off with, we'll go to the Swatches Panel. Open up the Swatches Panel, double-click on the new pattern that you created. I'll zoom into the pattern pace and I've already dimed the copies to 30 percent, so it's very clear which area I'll be working in. To add a circle to my pattern I'll go to the Ellipse Tool, drag out a circle, and I want to sample the look and feel off the rectangle behind it. I'll go to the Eyedropper Tool and click once on that square. I'll show you in a minute what happened if that doesn't work for you, I'm going to show you a solution for it. But let's continue. I'll go to the Selection tool, I'll click on the square and then hold the ''Shift Key'' as I click on the circle so that both of these are now selected, and I'll go back and click on the square again. This is really important, because this defines the square as being the K object, so when I align things, the circle will move, but the square being a key object, will not move. I'll go to the Align Panel. If you don't see these options here, click this icon here. Look you'll see Align panel is also available through ''Window'' and then ''Align''. I'll click on ''Horizontal Align Center'' and ''Vertical Align Center''. Now if you think something should move and it doesn't, just click these icons again because sometimes the first click just doesn't work. I'll click away from the shape, I can close down the Pathfinder Window. I've made the required edit to my pattern, so I'll go ahead and click ''Done''. This is my pattern that has been edited, and you'll see I have only one pattern in the Swatches Panel here, the one that I just edited. Let's go and edit it again because I want to show you something that might happen to you. In some instances, you won't be able to take the Eyedropper and sample the options here and actually get them showing, and this will be the reason why. I'm going to make an edit to this shape. At the moment the stroke is over the center, so if I go to the Strike Panel here you'll see that the stroke is aligned to the center. If I align it, for example, to the outside or the inside, I'm going to choose the inside here, then something's going to happen when I create my pattern. I'll just click ''Done'' to make a change to my pattern. Now because I'm editing the pattern, I'm getting this error message or this warning message. What it's saying is that because this stroke is set to be on the inside or the outside basically and not the center, then Illustrator's going to expand this shape, so I'm going to end up with a shape that is a stroke and a shape that is the circle. It's not going to be a circle with a stroke, it's going to be two individual shapes when I edit my pattern. Illustrator won't tell you that when you first create your pattern, but it's going to do that as well. That's going to be a got you because when I come back into edit this pattern, when I click on this inside circle with the Eyedropper Tool, you'll see that I'm only able to sample the inside color because this is true shapes in here now. It was broken apart into two separate shapes, so there's a shape here for the stroke and a shape here for the circle in the middle. Just be aware of that, when you're creating patterns in Illustrator if there's any question about using strokes on shapes, you're best to always make sure that the stroke is centered over the edge of the line, and if that's not the case, just be aware that Illustrator's going to break this out into two separate shapes making it sometimes just a little bit difficult to be able to go to the Eyedropper Tool and sample. When I click on the square, you can see that I'm getting the look and feel of the square, when I click on the circle, it's two different shapes and it's going to behave very differently. That's just a heads up for editing patterns in Illustrator. You won't be told the first time it happens, but you will be confronted with that issue when you go to edit a pattern if that's the case. 7. Create Pattern Color Ways: Once you've created your initial pattern, you can get extra mileage out of it by creating different color waves, different color combinations within the single pattern design. That way you could, for example, make a scrapbook pack of a single pattern, but with multiple different color blocks. You may also want to recolor your patterns to match other elements. For example, if you're putting it in a pattern collection that has some leaves and some dots and some stripes, you may want to use a single color theme throughout. We're going to look at both those applications here. Don't need my original pattern piece. I just wanted to show you what I created this pattern from. I'm using black and white for a specific reason because they're going to recover a little bit differently. Now before we go into the recolor artwork dialogue, let's go and create a color scheme that we can use. I'm going to get one from the Internet, so I'll go to Window and then Color Themes. This gives me access to color themes that are available through the Adobe color themes option. I've just look through here and I really like this neutral blue one. I'm going to click the three dots here and choose Add to Swatches, and that will be added to my swatches palette here. You need these colors to be in a specific color group. They need to be in a color group to be able to be accessed through the tool we're about to use. Now I've got everything set up. I've got my pattern filled object. I'll select it with the selection tool and go here to the recolor artwork tool. You can get to that also by choosing Edit and then Edit Colors, Recolor Artwork. The dialogue is the same however you get there. For now, let's just close this panel and let's focus on the dialogue itself. Two colors, green and blue are currently editable. You can edit them in a number of ways. You could double-click here and choose a different color. Let's go and get a purple, and the green is going to be replaced with purple. What was green will now be purple. We could do the same with blue and choose a different color. For example, a darker purple. Right now, black and white can't be altered because there's no spot to alter them. Well, you can click here and click "Yes" to add that as an editable color. Let's do that for white as well. Just make sure you have these little arrows here. If you get just a bar, click on it to make sure it's an arrow. Now, black and white can also be edited. At any stage, if you get to something in this dialogue that you don't like, you can go back to your original colors by clicking get colors from selected art. We're back to the way they art used to look. You can recolor using this same colors but in different orders by clicking here on randomly change color order. This case the colors are being applied to the design but just in different places. Here what was blue is now going to be white and what was black will still be black. But what was white will be blue. You can get mileage out of a single color scheme by just rearranging the colors. You can also go to the edit option, which allows you to adjust the colors on the color wheel so you can drag the colors to different positions. Right now, white and black are a little hard to find. This is most likely to be white. Yes, it is. You can just drag white to wherever you like. Now, whether this is black or not, sometimes you can get two circles here and you just need to experiment with which one really is black. To re-color our black, we're going to need to come down here to the hue saturation brightness area, increase the brightness, increase the saturation. Then we'll get access to the hue slider to actually make a change to our black or what was black. You just need to experiment with these values here to get the colors that you want. If you come closer in with a color, it's going to be more pastel. If you go further out, it's going to be more saturated. For any color, you can decrease the brightness, saturation and adjust the hue also using these sliders. Let's just click "Okay", and let's see what we're getting. When we use the recolor artwork dialogue, we end up with not only the original pattern colors, but we also end up with a second pattern. This one has those recolored colors in it. We're creating patterns automatically. Illustrator is taking care of doing that for us. Before we finish, let's go and have a look and see how we would apply this particular set of colors to our artwork. Go back to the recolor artwork dialogue. Let's open up this panel now and let's select this as the colors we want to use. Now they're mapped onto our pattern. We can of course, randomly change those colors should we wish to do so. Now I'm assuming that you're using a tool like this because you really like the colors, so you probably won't want to go into the edit dialogue. You'll just want to be working around the colors that you have access to. If you want to re-color to a specific color, you can double-click here, and then go to color swatches and down the bottom because they're at the bottom of this swatches palette, will be the colors that you had in that color scheme. You could go and select one of them here. Click "Okay" and now that's applied to your pattern. Of course you can have two colors, the green and the pink here, what were the green and the pink in this particular pattern, recolor to the exact same color that's possible as well. When you're finished with this dialogue, just click "Okay". I don't want to save changes to my neutral blooms. I'm going to leave it as it is, but I still get this pattern swatch. Here are the three different pattern swatches that I've created, the original, my recolored version, and this one is colored to a specific set of colors that I selected. 8. Removing Hairlines from Patterns: It's time now to have a look at perhaps the most frustrating and confusing part about creating patterns in Illustrator. That is when you end up with things like I have here. These are white lines. They're also called fracture lines or hair lines that will appear inside your patterns in Illustrator. Sometimes it will happen and sometimes it won't happen. I'm just going to zoom into this pattern here, and you can see that the closer I zoom in, these lines are going to disappear, so provided I get in close enough, the lines disappear. I'm at 1600 percent zoom and I need to get in that close to make sure that the fracture lines or the hair lines that I was seeing are actually not part of this pattern. I'll press control or command zero. Now, you can't sell or give away or use a pattern that has these fracture lines in it. But typically what you'll be doing is exporting these patterns into file such as JPEG files that could be used for printing or scrapbook paper or whatever. If I'm going to save this particular document as a JPEG, I prefer to use file and then export saved for Web Legacy. Now this legacy save for web as soon as I see this image at 100 percent, I'm seeing that those fracture lines just aren't there. I'm not seeing them at all so I feel safe in saving this documents. I go ahead and click save, but before I sell it or before I put it on an online site, I would always open it up, probably in Photoshop and zoom in and have a really good look to make sure that those fracture lines or those hair lines aren't there. Because if they're there, you're going to have to find another solution. Now there are a couple of other ways that you can try and get rid of these lines. One of them is to just re-scale a pattern, so go to object, transform scale, turn the transform objects off, and go back to your starting point, which would have been 100 percent. You can now try to increase that percentage scale by one or 2 percent or even decrease it and see if some minor increase in the scale of the pattern will remove those fracture lines. Now it looks like that's being fairly successful for me at 102 percent, 100 percent fracture line, 102 percent I'm not seeing them there so that's one of your options. I'm going to undo that because another option is what is called anti-aliasing that is happening in the Illustrator screen. Sometimes that can solve the problem for you too. To do that you'll choose edit preferences on the Mac, that would be Illustrator preferences and you go to general, there's this option here for anti-aliased artwork. I'm going to click okay. The artwork is now going to be quite pixelated, so you are going to see pixelated edges around your shapes, but the fracture lines have disappeared. Let's go and see what it looks like if we're going to save it for the web and a 100 percent scaling, I'm not seeing those pixelated edges, so that might be an option as well. You go ahead and click save. I'm just going to cancel out of here because I don't need to do that right now. Just be aware that if you do turn anti aliasing artwork off, you're going to see the pixelated edges on your art from now on. You may want to once you've saved your pattern, checked it, really happy with it. Go back and turn anti-aliased artwork back on again so that you do get these smoother edges in your patterns. If you do a search online, a Google search for hair lines in illustrated patterns, you will see that this has been a problem for years. It still hasn't been fixed. It's something that we learn to live with and learn to find ways around. There are a couple of the ways that you might want to use to make sure that you get rid of these fracture or hair lines in your patterns. You certainly don't want to be selling or giving away designs that have those lines in them. 9. Extract a Pattern Swatch for Spoonflower: Once you've created a pattern in Illustrator, you might want to take it to a site like Spoonflower for printing onto fabric. Now some online sites will print things like iPhone cases, computers, skins, notepad, covers, and so on, and in that case, you would generally send up a document that is the exact size that you want to print already filled with the pattern that you want to use. But when you're printing fabric, things are very different. Because you don't know ahead of time exactly how much fabric you want printed. The way that sites like Spoonflower operate is that they don't want an object that's filled with a pattern. They want the swatch itself. Let's see how to prepare a pattern exactly like this one ready for Spoonflower. I'll just delete this rectangle because we don't need that. What we want is the pattern's watch itself. I'll drag the pattern swatch out of the swatches panel. You can see it's not actually removed. It's just a copy of it that we're able to now access inside the Illustrator interface and what we need to do from here is to extract the actual pattern swatch, which is not all of these pieces. Let's have a look in the last panel to see what it is that we have. Inside this group are a series of subgroups, each of which has one of these squares in it, and at the very bottom of the group is no historic rectangles, I am going to target that. This marks out the area of our pattern swatch and we're going to use it as a cutting guide. I need to put this at the very top. I can do that by choosing object arrange and then bring to front that sends it to the very top or I could have just dragged it up here in the last panel. To use it as a cropping guide, it has to be at the very top and we can use it using the Pathfinder palette that would be accessible by choosing window and then Pathfinder. Click here on crop and that uses that no filled, no historic rectangle to crop away everything that is not required for a pattern swatch and the pattern swatch is what's left. At this point, we need to do a little bit of mathematics because we need to make sure that we create a document for our pattern swatch that's large enough to be useful at Spoonflower. Now Spoonflower minimum resolution is a 150 dpi. If I want this pattern swatch area to print at about four inches, then I need to send a document that is four times a 150. You look at the pattern swatch and say, I want this swatch area to be about X number of inches, whatever you want it to be and then just multiply that by 150, which will be the minimum size document that you can upload to Spoonflower. You can go larger, you could multiply by 200 or 300. You don't want to go overly large, but you do want to make sure that you've got plenty of document descenders, Spoonflower. My mathematics, that's going to be four by 150, that 600, I want this to be a nice round figure. With my pattern swatch selected, making sure that this icon here is clicked so that if I make a change to the width the height is going to be changed appropriately. I'm going to make it 600 and it's going to be changed in height to 600 as well. Now I need to get things ready to export and to do that, I want to make my artboard the exact same size as my selected art. I've got my pattern swatch selected, that's really important. Click on the artboard tool to target it. Then double-click to get the artboard options. At the very top of this drop-down list is the option fit to selected art. I'll click it and you can see that the width and height of the artboard and are going to be 600 and 600 which is exactly the same size as my pattern pace. I'll click "Okay". Click the selection tool just to exit out of the artboard mode. Now we're ready to export this, ready for Spoonflower File, Export, Export as I'm going to call this Spoonflower pattern 1, I need it to be a JPEG. That's one of the file formats that's acceptable at Spoonflower. I'm going to click "Use Artboards" because that will allow me to make sure that the document is exactly the size of the artboard and there's no extra edge around the edge of my pattern, which would be a big disaster. I'll go ahead click "Export". In the export dialogue color model will be RGB, that's fine at Spoonflower, the quality is going to be the highest I can, I'll set it to maximum, which is 10. The resolution is going to be whatever I just multiplied my inch measurements by. I want the resolution to be 150 PPI. You can say that if you had saved yours at 300, you could have set 300 or you could select a different value. For anti-aliasing, I'm using art optimized. There's an option for text, but this is not a text object, I'm just going to choose art optimized. Anti-aliasing is a smoothing of edges. That should give me a nice-looking pattern paste our click "Okay". The pattern swatch is now exported and ready for uploading to Spoonflower. Let's go to Spoonflower, I've already logged into Spoonflower. I'm going to the design area and click "Upload" because here I can upload my design. I'll click "Choose Files" and go and finds the swatch file we just saved, which is here, click "Open". I need to confirm that I own the rights to the image, which I do, and I'll click "Upload". Once the file has been processed and uploaded, you're going to say it in the pattern area. You've got a number of options for your pattern, of course, will be just using basic because any of these others is going to break your pattern really badly. Just choose basic because that's the way that the patterns have been designed in Illustrator. Now you could size is smaller if you like. The current document that we're saying is about 8 and a half, just a bit below 8 and a half by 8 and a half. We could make the patterns smaller within that size document and we can make it bigger up to the 8 in a bit by eight in a bit, but we won't be able to take it any larger because we were using just 150 dpi. If you want to be able to scale your document up larger when you get to Spoonflower, then make sure that you're saving at ever higher dpi out of Illustrator, which will mean that your mathematics will be different. For example, if you wanted to use 300 dpi, then four by 300 would be 1200. You make your design 1200 by 1200 pixels and then save it as 300 dpi, then you would be able to enlarge at once you get it to Spoonflowers. There's a little bit of thinking size-wise that you'll need to do to make sure that you upload a large enough image to be able to do what you want to do with it once you get to the online site that you are using. There's how to prepare a pattern swatch for a site like Spoonflower and how to get an up there ready for printing. 10. Three Circle Patterns: Now that you've learned the basics of working with patents in illustrated, it's time to have a look at some types of patterns that you may want to create and look at the skills that you'll need to do that. We're going to start with some polka dots. I'll choose ''File'' and then ''New,'' I'm going to use a document that's 1920 by 1080 in size, that's the size of my screen, but I do want to art board, so I'm going to select two art boards here, and click ''Create.'' Let's just zoom into one of these art boards for now and click on it and press ''Ctrl or Command 0'' just to size up my screen to the size of this art board. Now for the first of our polka dots will go to the Ellipse tool. Just hold the Shift key as you drag out an ellipse. I don't want it to have a stroke, so I'm going to remove that. I do want it to have a fill color. Let's go and find a fill color to use. We're going to use this turquoise color, to create our polka dot pattern select the shape, choose object, and then pattern, make click ''Okay''. This is our shape and this is what the pattern looks like. I'm going to spread this apart quite a bit, making sure that maintain width and height proportions is enabled. You can see a little gray area around it. That's really important because I want to increase the width and height the same amount. I'm holding the Shift key as I press the up arrow key, just to increase this at a nice speed. If you're happy with this pattern that it is a basic grid layout. You could click ''Done'', but I want to create two patterns. Let's go ahead and click ''Save copy,'' and let's call this grid polka dots. I'll click ''Okay''. That patents being added to the Swatches palette. But I can continue and make another pattern. For this, I'm going to decrease the size of my dot quite a bit. I have just held this Shift key, as I size it down, and I also want to offset it. From the tile type drop-down list, I'll choose brick by row and I'm going to offset it by one half. This is giving me a different pattern towel. I'll click, ''Save a copy'' and we'll call this offset polka dots. I'll click ''Okay''. Now that I'm done, I can click ''Done.'' Don't need the shape any longer I could just remove it. Let's go to the second art board. I'm going to add a rectangle to it. It's going to be the size of the ball, which is 1920 by 1080. I'll select it. I'll go to the ''Align tool,'' and make sure that a line is set to align to artboard. I'm going to align it to the very center of this second art board. This is going to be the staging area, where I can look at my patterns. I've got the filled targeted here. Let's go to the Swatches list and let's have a look at are patterns. Well here is at grid polka dot pattern, and here it is a offset polka dot pattern. There are two polka dot patterns that we've created already. Let's go back to our main work area. Click on the ''Artboard ''Ctrl or ''Command 0''. Let's create a second polka dot pattern that this one's going to be where the colors are varied. We're going to use a two-color polka dot pattern. This one's a little bit of a challenge. I'll select the Ellipse tool, drag out a small circle. Let's go and find a color for it. I'm going to color it a dusty pink color. Again, it has no stroke. With the shapes selected, I'll choose object and then pattern make. I'm going to increase the spacing here. That's pretty much the pattern that we had previously, but for this pattern, I want it to be multi-color. To do this, we're going to start by clicking on ''Show tile edge.'' I'm going to make sure that I have deselected move tile with art, so that the tile edge is going to stay in place. It's 160 pixels by 160 pixels. I'll make a duplicate of this shape so I'll go to the selection tool and Alt or option drag a duplicate away. I'm going to put this at the very edge of this tile. We now have two shapes that are making this pattern, one here and one here. Well, we can color one of them a different color, so I'll select this one and let's go and find a different color for this one. This has created that offset polka dot pattern look, but this time we've got two colors, and to do that we have to have two shapes because one has to be one color, the other has to be the other color. These shapes are totally independent of each other. This could be a square, it could be a different size. You still get this look to your pattern. If you're happy with that, we can rename it and then we'll click ''Done''. Here is our multicolor polka dot pattern in the Swatches palette. Let's target our shape here and let's apply our polka dot pattern to it. The final pattern we're going to create is going to be a series of overlapping circles. I'll take this circle as a starting point, Alt or option drag another circle away from it. This one I want to increase in size by 50 percent so I'll choose object and then transform scale. I want to scale it uniformly to 150 percent of its original size, and I'll click ''Okay''. I'll drag another one away, and this one, again, I want to increase by a further 50 percent. Let's go to scale, make it 150 percent, and click ''Okay''. Now I'm going to re-color these. I'm going to color each of them a slightly different color. Going to make this one a darker version of the color and this one darker again. Now want to stack these up, but you'll say that right now they're not stacking on top of each other. The reason for this is that this was created first sorts further down the stacking order. Let me just go and get my layers palette. One way of changing the ordering of these shapes is simply to drag the object into a different position in the last pallet. Now I'm going from light to dark. The lightest is at the top of the layers palette. It's on top of all of the other shapes. Let's align these by selecting over them going to the ''Align panel,'' let's open up the aligned to options we want to align to selection. We don't want to align them to the art board just relative to each other, and horizontal align center and vertical aligned center. There are the shapes that we're going to use for our patents, so with them selected, will choose object and then pattern, and then make, I'll click ''Okay''. Now for this pattern that I want my circles to overlap, but I also want them to be offset. We'll start by selecting ''Brick by row''and then set it to a 1.5 offset. I want to move them closer together. Let's start by clicking this icon, so that they're going to move together at least initially. I'll start closing up the space. Now as I close up the space, you'll see that they're overlapped in a predetermined way. This is the only shape that we're seeing all of and underneath here with a shape that is our foundation shape it's tucked in under the one to its left, it's over the top of the one to its right and it's underneath the row above. Well, I want it to be above the row above. These little icons here allow us to change the overlaps and this one will bring this circle above everything else. Now I liked that look, but I want the circles to be butted up against each other to the side. Let's deselect this option and let's start increasing the width, increasing the spacing between the objects on the same row to just push them apart a little bit. At this point we might close up the height a little bit just to get rid of what I'm saying here, I just want to see the whole circle, but not that little bit. You may also want to increase the number of copies that you're saying just, so that you can see that the design is what you want. If you're happy with that, let's call this overlap, and I'll click ''Don e''. I'll click on the other ''Art board ''Ctrl or Command 0'' to zoom into it, we've got the fill already selected and let's have a look at our overlapping circles pattern. So we've been able to create a whole series of patterns from a simple grid of polka dots through to offset grid, a multi-colored polka dot pattern and overlapping circles, and every one of those has used different features of the patent make dialog. 11. Patterns of Horizontal Vertical and Diagonal stripes: The next type of pattern that we'll create will be horizontal and vertical stripes and some diagonals as well. I'll choose file and new, and for this document, I don't want it to be very big, so I'm going to make it 600 pixels by 400 pixels. I'm going to set my art boards to two, so I can have one as a work area and one as my pattern area. I'll click Create. Now onto this art board, I'm going to add a rectangle that is, 600 by 400. That's going to be the rectangle in which I'll put my pattern eventually. I'm just going to align that nicely to the art board, and we'll fill it with a color for now so that we can see that clearly. Let's just fill it with a pink color and let's remove the stroke from it and leave the fill color at the fore. Now let's target this art board here, and I'll press Control or Command zero just to zoom right in. Now for this art board, I'm going to draw out my first rectangle, which is going to be one of my stripes, so let's just drag out a nice horizontal stripe. Now for this, let's make it black, but we could make it any color that we like. For the horizontal stripe, we're just going to select over the shape and choose object and then pattern make, click Okay. Now at the moment our pattern doesn't look right, and all we need to do is to increase the spacing. We'll increase the height here. I'm just going to increase the height and look and see the stripe that I want. At this stage, it might be useful to turn off the show tile edge and not to dim any copies, so that you can see what your stripes are going to look like. If you want them to be separated further, then you're just going to increase this height value. Now if they don't join up, for example, if they look like this, then you're just going to decrease the width value until they join up. When you get what you want, and I'd like a narrower stripe so let's just narrow this up, a little bit, just click Done and you're done with that particular stripe. I'll target my rectangle over here, press Control or Command zero so that we've got this art board visible, and let's go and add our stripes. There's the first of our stripe patterns. Going back to this other art board, let's now change the fill color and let's make this a vertical stripe. Now you could re-draw your rectangle, or you could just rotate it around. Rotating it round with the shift key held down will make sure that you constrain it to a perfect 90 degree rotation. For this stripe pattern, select it and choose object pattern make. Now this one's going to work exactly the same as the last one, except in this case, if you want them to be spaced, you're going to increase the width value. I'm making sure here that this option is not selected. I'm not adjusting the width and the height at the same time, I just want to be able to adjust them individually. Of course, if my shapes don't line up. If it looks a bit like this, then I'm going to reduce the height so that they do line up. The width value is going to give me the spacing, so for this one, let's increase the spacing quite a bit and I'll click Done. Let's go back over here to our rectangle and let's apply our new pattern to it. Now these patterns are transparent in the sense that there's nothing apart from the red stripes. If we had something else behind this pattern, it would show through, it is possible to create a two-stripe pattern. Let's go and select this red stripe and I'll Alt or option drag another stripe away, and I'm going to increase its width a little bit, and let's make it a blue color. Let's make a pattern of red and blue stripes. We'll select over both shapes, choose object and then pattern make. Click Okay. We're just going to be looking at how these stripes are lined up and of course, we want them to be spaced evenly and joined up. If we were to increase the width, we would start getting some white or in actual fact, transparency through here. We want to make sure that we reduce the width so that their shapes just spot up alongside each other nicely. Of course, again, adjusting the height. If you see that there's a space between them, you'll want to reduce the height until they are overlapping. When you're done, click Done. Let's go back to the shape over here and let's fill it now with our multicolored stripe. Now the last pattern that we're going to create is a diagonal stripe. I'm just going to remove one of these stripes, let's rotate this one around 45 degrees. To do that, I'll start rotating it and add the shift key to constrain that rotation to 45 degrees. Let's give it a different color again. If I don't want it to be quite so wide, then I can narrow it at this point. To make our diagonal stripe patterns, select your shape and choose object, and then pattern make. For this one, we're going to select brick by row because that allows us to create this diagonal pattern very easily. There rough rule of thumb that will at least get you started here, and that is to set the width and height with a known ratio to each other. I'm going to set my width at 40 and my height is going to be one and a half times that, so that would be 60. That's going to give me a good stripe pattern. You may want to disable dim copies and show tile edge, simply so that you can see your pattern more clearly. Now, other values of height and width may work just fine here, but they may not work as well. But you will find that that one to one and a half ratio will always work. Let's try 20 and 30. That again is giving us a diagonal stripe pattern. We just need to determine what our stripe is going to look like and when we're happy with that, we'll click Done. Returning to our work area, let's click on the New pattern and save the diagonal stripe applied to our shape. There's how to create diagonal stripes, as well as horizontal and vertical stripes in illustrator. 12. Create Block and Half Drop Repeat Patterns: The next set of patterns we're going to look at is a block repeat and a half drop repeat. This is what is called a simple block repeat. Let's see how it repeats. If we look at this green star element, the next time we say the green start in a horizontal direction is this one here. Then if we go vertically, the next time we see it, it's directly below where it was previously. This green stars form a square. That's a very simple block repeat. Now, a half drop repeat is very different. Let's have a look at the half drop repeat, and let's have a look at the repeats for this. We'll go back to our green star. When we look at the first green star, the next one horizontally we say is directly opposite it. But if we go down, we start seeing green stars that are offset from the original. We have what is called a half drop repeat here, it's a more sophisticated pattern. It looks not only a little bit more complex, but it's also a little bit more difficult to see where the repeated elements are because the distance between this green star and the next one horizontally is quite a lot further than we saw in the simple block repeat. I'm going to show you how to create both these types of patterns now. To help you create your block repeat and your half drop repeat. I'm going to give you these elements that I've designed. Now you're free to use some for your own personal purposes. You'll select over all of the shapes in this ice cream vectors pack and just re-size them. I holding the "Shift" and the "Option" key to re-size them. Each one of those ice creams is in a group by itself, so they are very easy to select and move. For example, these little elements are all inside a group, so you will need the group selection tool to actually select on a shape and then move it around and then you'll need to select on the next shape and move it around. If you find that things are going a little bit highway, just go to the selection tool, click away from everything and then go back with the group selection tool. To create our pattern will select over all of these elements, object, pattern, make. We're going to start with this very simple block repeat. For the block repeat, we don't have to do anything other than just set the pattern type to grid. But we will need to spice things out a little bit more because the vertical alignment is not correct. The horizontal spacing looks pretty good across this. It's very hard to say any difference in horizontal spacing, so I think that's fine. But the vertical spacing does need to be adjusted. I'll disable, maintain height and width proportions because I want to adjust the height individually. Just going to push this away a little bit to evenly space them out. You want to see your tile edge or not. Click on "Show Tile Edge" or "Disable It". You can either delete these little elements or you can use them as fillers. To use them as a filler, we'll zoom into the main area of the pattern, go to the group selection tool and click on one of these shapes and then just move it. You'll just use them to fill the spaces. They just add a little bit of an interesting dimension to the pattern. Any of these that you drop over the edge will be repeated on the other side, but only one of these will be selectable. This one's selectable, this one you can't select. Just be aware of that. If you want to make a duplicate, just Alt or Option, Drag the original away and that will make a duplicate. I'm just going to fill in the spaces between this ice creams with some of these little shapes. You got these little wiggly shapes that you can use as well, or you can just remove them if you prefer. To recheck your pattern, disable, Show Tile Edge, press "Control" or "Command 0" so that you can zoom back out and just check to make sure that everything looks good and nothing is too close to anything else. Now you can also rotate the shapes. I'm not going to spend time doing that right now, but you will get a little bit more of a dynamic look to your pattern if you go through and just rotate the shape slightly. Just be aware of that. But I don't want to spend a lot of time doing that at this stage. Of course, be aware that only one set of shapes is actually selectable. If something doesn't select when you think it should, for example, this one, well, this one, if I don't select, then one of the others will be the one that is selectable. As soon as you've created this pattern and you're happy with it, then you can go ahead and click "Done" and there is your block repeat created. It's up here in the swatches panel. From here, you can also create your half drop repeat. What I'm going to do to do that is I'm just going to double-click on this particular pattern that we've already created and use it as a basis for our half drop repeat. With this pattern selected, I'm going to click "Save a Copy" because that's going to allow me to save a duplicate of this and I'm going to call this half drop repeat. Then I'm going to double-click on it so I make sure that it's the half dropped repeat that I'm actually editing. It's really important that it's name coincides with the pattern that you're actually working on. Now we're going to choose brick by column because that's what we need for a half dropped repeat. Now we've got a much bigger repeat. This ice cream here is not repeated until we set over here, but it's offset down here. This is a more sophisticated pattern, let's say a tile ages so we can just say if anything needs to be adjusted, well, I might just flip this one because it seems to be the only one that still upright. Let's make sure that everything looks fine, which it does. Now it's also possible to break up this grid a little bit by, for example, moving these shapes up a little bit. If you move the shapes up, you could move these shapes down a little bit. Then you are getting a little bit less of a grid look to the pattern and it's a little bit more organic. Again, turn show tile edge off so you can just double check and make sure that everything looks fine. When you're happy with that, just click "Done". Let's go now and have a look at our final pattern. I'm just going to move these shapes out of the way here. Let's go create a rectangle that is the size of the art boards. I'm just going to drag that over the art board here. This first pattern is our block repeat, this ice cream. Here it is over here, here it is down here, here it is there. A simple little block repeat design, and click on our half drop repeat. This is much more sophisticated. You can see where there's ice creams up here. It's a much bigger pattern that's got a lot more elements in it, a lot more going on. It looks a lot more complex, although basically it's the same number of elements. It's just the way that they've been offset that gives this more sophisticated pattern look. 13. Create Themed Pattern Sets: Let's have a look now at how we could create a set of themed patterns. I like my ice cream pattern here, and I've got three other patterns that I've created during this class. I want to recolor them to match the ice cream pattern. Select the rectangle that has the ice cream pattern in it, go to the Swatches panel. Click here on the New Color Group icon. I'm going to create a color group from these selected artworks. I'll click "OK". This color group here contains all the colors that are in use, in my ice cream pattern. I want to make a duplicate of this color group, so I'll hold the Alt or Option key as I drag a duplicate away. I just drag on the New Color Group little icon here, and I create a duplicate. Now, I need to get rid of two of those colors. The two colors that I used in the ice cream base. Because I don't want to recolor these patterns, using the colors from the sticks in the ice cream. Let me click on this color and delete it, I'm going to select this brown color as well, and delete it. I have a color screen with all the colors in it, and one with just the colors I want to use to recolor these three patterns. I'll select over all of those patterns, and I'll click on the Recolor Artwork tool. I'm going to make sure that this panel is open here because it gives me access to the color group that I just created. I'll click on it, and that immediately recolors all of these patterns to that color scheme. You can see that everything's looking a whole lot better. Now, if I like these, I'll just click "OK". If I like some of them, but not all of them, I'll do the same thing and click "OK". If there's one or two that I still want to change, I'll select just that particular pattern, and go back to the Recolor Artwork tool, and make sure that I'm choosing colors from this color group. I can now rotate the colors around, so I can look for some other color combinations for this set of uneven stripes to see if I can find something else that will work particularly well with these other patterns. I'll just go through until I find something I like. If I want to choose a specific color, for example, if I wanted this to be the blue, I would double click on it, and go to Color Swatches. At the very end of my color swatches list, is going to be this set of colors, and this is going to be the blue. I could just apply that blue should I wish to do so, and click "OK". I don't want to save changes to the color group, I'm just going to click away. There is a set of colors for this pattern set and that would make a nice little set of patterns. Let's go and make a second set. I'm going to select over all four patterns, and Alt or Option drag, I duplicate away. Now I'm going to find some colors to use. I'm going to the Adobe Color Themes application, and I've typed in ice cream, I really like this ice cream color. I'm going to make sure that nothing is selected here. I'll click this set of three dots here and choose, Add to Swatches. That adds that color scheme to my Swatches panel. It's up here in the Swatches panel. We know what we can do with colors in the Swatches panel, we can use them to color our art. Now, if I want to color this art, with these colors, I've got one too many colors. At this stage, I can determine which color I don't want. I think I'll remove this one. I just dragged on it to delete it, and now I can use this color scheme to recolor this art. I'll select over the main pattern because I want to recolor it, I'll go to the Recolor Artwork dialog. I'm going to deselect these two browns, because I don't want to be able to recolor those, I'll click here on the Neapolitan Ice cream colors. You can see that these colors are now remapped onto the original colors from the pattern, but not onto the sticks or the cones in the ice cream. I can click here on this icon to randomly change the color order. I'm just looking for something that I like. When I find something I like, I'll click "OK". Don't want to save changes to the Color Swatches, I just want to apply those to that particular swatch. Now, I'm going to select this three and do the same thing with those. I'll go to the Recolor Artwork tool, Make sure that I've got the Neapolitan Ice cream colors in use, and just start rotating them around to say if I can see something I like. When I do see something I like, I like these two patterns, so I'll just click "OK". I'll go back to this one, which I still don't like and let's try again. I'm pretty happy with this one here, I'll click "OK". There are two very different color wise for this set of patterns. We've got two very different looks to the pattern sets. Because we use the Recolor Artwork tool, you see here in the top of the Swatches panel, that we've got swatches for every single iteration of these patterns. To work out which of these patterns here match the patterns in use, just click on a pattern in use, and it will be highlighted in the Swatches panel. You can see very clearly the ones that you want to keep, and also those that you might want to discard. 14. Now it's your turn - Complete Your Project: Now it's over to you, and it's time for you to complete your class project. Your class project, will be to do as I've done here and create a large pattern. You'll use either a block repeat or a half drop repeat. You can go to vecteasy dot com and I'll give you a link in the class project area, that's a really good place to source, vector images if you want to use somebody else art. You're also, most welcome to use my ice cream art for this purpose. Then you'll create three other patterns that are ancillary patterns, patterns that would go with this pattern and of course they're all going to be colored in a single color theme. Once you've done that, take a copy of all of these patterns, and recover them with a totally different color theme to give the entire pattern a totally different look and feel. Post an image of your two complete sets of patterns as your class project. If you have any questions, or need any assistance, you can contact me through the community area just write me a note there, I'll see it and I'll be able to help. I can't wait to see, all the wonderful patterns and ideas that you come up with. 15. Class Wrap up: Congratulations, you've now finished all the video content that goes with this course. Now what you need to do is to complete your class project, go and make your four patterns and re-color them, and then upload your project to the class project area. Once you've completed your class project, you're ready to take your pattern-making skills to the real world and design patterns for a range of users. If you are interested in taking your pattern-making skills a step further, then I have a series of classes here at Skillshare that takes specific patterns. These might be patterns like argyle, checks, plaids. They might also be things like Moroccan trellis patterns or 3D cubes. Look out for my pattern making classes here at Skillshare if you want to pursue how to make specific patterns. Now before you go, a couple of things. Firstly, if you see the follow link, click it, and you'll be alerted by Skillshare when I release new classes. This is also a really good time to complete your review. These reviews help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now, I will also be able to see the review, but I'm afraid I'm not able through the Skillshare interface to reply to it. If you have any questions, the best place for those is in the community area or alongside your class project where you can ask a question there too. I'll be able to see that question and answer and help you with any problems that you might have. To wrap up, thank you so much for joining me for this pattern design in Illustrator masterclass. I wish you all the very best with designing patterns in Illustrator, and I'll look forward to seeing you too perhaps in an upcoming class.