Pattern in Pattern & Irregular Patterns in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Super large Repeating Patterns - Introduction A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, pattern in pattern and irregular patterns in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we'll look at creating large size pattern on pattern effects in Illustrator. Something that you can't actually do, you can't do a pattern in a pattern. But I'm going to show you how you can forge it, and also will create large irregular repeating patterns. I've done whimsical pattern classes in the past, but they've been four patterns, they haven't repeated. Well, these are going to repeat. I'm going to show you how to make sure that they too are seamless repeating patterns, even though the objects in the pattern are highly irregular in their placement. Now, this class can be done regardless of what version of Illustrator you're using, we're going to split at one point into those people who are using CS6 and CC, and those people who are using CS5 and CS4. But one of the patterns can be done the same way in any version of Illustrator, so don't worry if you're using an older version, I've got you covered here. Now, as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which asks if you would recommend this class to others, please, if you're enjoying the class, would you do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend the class. Secondly, write even in just a few words why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is the class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you see the follow link on the screen, click it to keep up to date with new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started creating a pattern in pattern effect in Illustrator and then a large irregular repeating pattern. 2. Pt 1 Make the elements to use: We're going to start with making a large pattern in pattern effect and it's going to be a regular pattern. There's not anything that is irregular in this pattern. We're going to start by making the motifs because we need those regardless of what version of Illustrator you're using. So let's get started on the motifs we'll be using. I'll click "Create New." I'm going to create a fairly small document. It's going to be 200 pixels by 200 pixels in size. I am working in RGB color mode. I'll click "Create." We're going to create a flower and also the starting element for AGM backgrounds. So the effect that we're ultimately looking for is a large pace of getting with a flower in the middle. That's going to be our pattern pace. But we're going to have to create that so that we can use it. So let's start with the flower. For the flower, I'm using a polygon, click on the document and make a five-sided figure. Let's give it a fill and no stroke. To create a flower from this effect, distort and transform and choose pucker and bloat. Turn preview on. If you drag to the right, you get a flower. If you drag all the way to the right, you get this very interesting flower. I'm going for a very simple one. So I want it to look something like about that. This is a shape that has an effect on it. If we go to the appearance panel, the underlying shape is still a pentagon and it's just got pucker and bloat effect on the top of it. We're going to expand that with object Expand Appearance. What that does is turn it from a pentagon with an effect applied to it, to a shape that has anchor points. So let's go the direct selection tool, you can see the anchor points that are making the shape for us. I'll fill it at this point with a color that I plan to use. So let's go for this color here. We're going to make a center in the flower for this. We'll use a ellipse. So to strike out an ellipse, it can be a circle, it can be just an oval. Let's fill it with a color so you can see what I'm doing here. To make edges for this, I'm used a roughen effect, effect distort and transform, and we'll choose roughen, turn preview on, increase the detail so you get lots of little edges and perhaps the sides so you get interesting edges. You can choose smooth or corner as you wish. You can also choose absolute if you prefer. You just looking for something that's interesting to bay in the middle of the flower, click "Okay." Again, we have a oval here that has an effect applied to it. So we want to break this out. We'll choose object Expand Appearance. Now we'll put another oval in the middle of this. Let's drag out the oval. I want to fill it with a different color so that we can actually see it. Let's go and put it in the middle. It's just going to block out some of this edge effects so that we get the sense of the center of the flower bend in there and of course you can experiment with different colors here. I'm just going to use a different version of the blue that we've been working with. To finish this flower off I will a edge around it. So I'm going to do that with the pencil tool. I'll select the pencil tool, then double-click on it. I'm setting the fidelity to smooth. So any bumps in the way I draw it are going to be smoothed out nicely, but still going to have a uneven edge which I like. I'm also choosing closed paths when ends are within, and I've set that to 20 pixels. So that's going to create a closed path provided I can end up within 20 pixels of where I started. I'll click "Okay." In some earlier versions of Illustrating your pencil tool options may not look like this, but just go for closing your path and a smoothing effect. So let's get started and just draw around the flower. When I come back within 20 pixels of where I started, I get this little zero or little o in the bottom right corner of my pencil tool telling me if I let go now, I'm going to join this up to a joined paths. So I'm going to do that. I've lost my path because it doesn't have a stroke or fill. So let's just apply a fill to it. Let's move it behind everything was sent back. Let's go and fix it so that it's a much lighter color. This is going to be my flask. I'll select over it and choose object group so everything is grouped together. So the flask going to move as a single object and I'll scale it down holding the shift key because I want to scale it to the size that I want it to appear in my document. The other element we need to create is the gingham heck for this. We'll use the Rectangle tool. I'll click once in the document I'm going to create a fixed size square. So it's going to be 50 pixels by 50 pixels. That's huge. Let's take it down to 15 by 15. Much better. This has got all corner rounding options in it because I'm using Illustrator CC 2018. In earlier versions of Illustrator, you may not have this if you're working with this Illustrator CC versions. I suggest you choose object, shape, expand shape just to get rid of those, because they're absolutely of no use to you at all in this effect. So we'll need some colors for add gingham. I'm going to select this color as gingham main color for the gingham. I'll alter option drag a duplicate of this rectangle away. I just need to line this up. We'll do that in just a minute. I made a lighter version of this color, but to be able to pick up a tint, I'm going to need to make this color a global color. So let's double-click on it and choose global. We'll select diver both shapes and make sure that we've applied this global color to them. Now when I click on this shape, I can create a tint of this color if I choose window and then color. If you're not seeing your tint panel at this stage, go to Show Options. So that's on the fly out menu click "Show Options." This gives you the tint slider. So we can create, for example, a 50 percent tint of our global color. We're going to need another one of these down here. We're going to need one over here. I'm just Alt or Option dragging a rectangle away. Now this one needs to be light or white. I'm going to make it just about a 9 percent tint. So it's got some color in it, but it's not a lot. Let's zoom in here and just make sure that these squares are doing what they're supposed to do. If they were 15 pixels by 15 pixels square, then selecting all four of them should give me a final shape that's 30 pixels by 30 pixels. That's correct. This is nicely lined up. If those were not so nicely lined up, you're going to need to move them into position so that they are just a single shape that's 30 pixels by 30 pixels or whatever is double the size of the squares that you created. We'll create a group from that object group. We now have the elements that we need to create a pattern in pattern effect, we've got the square for the gingham background and we've got the flower that's going over the top of it. Because this pattern will be a regular pattern, there is no reason to make it using the pattern make tool because pretty much all the work you have to do will be done outside the patent make tool anyway. So I'm going to do it in a way that can be done in Illustrator CS 6 and 16, but also in earlier versions of Illustrator. It's very simple to do. So I would suggest you go ahead and save those elements at this stage so you don't lose them. Come back in the next video and we'll go ahead and make our pattern. 3. Pt 2 Pattern in pattern effect: To make this pattern in pattern effect using whatever version of Illustrator you're using, you'd want to start with a fixed size Artboard. For example, if you've grabbed some elements from another file that you've been working on or something, you're going to need to first make sure that your artboard is the right size. Go to the Artboard tool, select the Artboard, and just set it to something that is a known width. Now for mine, I'm a little concerned that this 30 by 30 set of boxes is not going to repeat across this artboard without having some bits hanging over the end. At this point, I'm going to increase the size. I'm going to make this 210 by 210 because 30 will divide into that, leaving no remainders. However you do it, you want to make sure that this set of objects we'll divide or place evenly across your artboard, vertically and horizontally. I've already done that. Let's go and place this set of objects in the top corner of the artboard. It wants to be jammed right in the top corner. We can check that by selecting these objects, clicking this top left icon up here, this little reference points. We're referring to this point here, and make sure that the x and y are 00. These measurements are just critical, get this wrong, and the whole thing is going to go west. Select over these shapes. We want to repeat it across the document. We'll choose effect, distort, and transform and then transform. Turn preview on. We know these shapes are 30 pixels by 30 pixels in size. We need to move them 30 pixels horizontally and then we just need to increase the copies to six so we have an original plus seven copies. That's just the mathematics of 30 going into 210. But whatever size document you're using, you want to make sure that your check is going across correctly. I'll click "Okay". Now I'll come down with effect, distort and transform and then transform. Apply new effect. We're going to do exactly the same thing in a downwards direction, again, moving 30 pixels, six copies, filling the document, click "Okay". We've got a grid that is all associated with this group up here. It's got two transforms on it. We'll want to break it out of that. We'll choose object, expand, appearance. We'll keep an eye on the layers palette because things can go haywire really really quickly at this point. Right now we've got groups and groups. We'll choose object ungroup. We still got groups and groups, object ungroup. But now, we've got groups of these four objects and I don't want to break those out that far. Usually, I say to keep using object ungroup until it's no longer available. Well, this time it's way not. We're stopping short of breaking these squares out one extra amount. This time we'll just choose object group because we're going to put them back in but in a neat group that's full of these smaller groups. Add flowers at the back, so we are going move it to the top. All we need to do now is to determine where our flower is going. I'm going to do a simple repeat where the flower is going to be up in the corner here in the middle, and that's going to be my repeats. I'm just going to zoom out and I'll take my flower motif, I'll Alt or option drag a copy of it and just center it in the top corner of the document and we know the top corner here is at 00, so we'll go to the middle of our flag group, select that and set this to 00. We're going to move it across to here or copy it across to here or drag it across. We know our document is 210 pixels wide so it's going to be 0 pixels in a y-direction and 210 pixels in the x-direction. Let's go and get this shape now, alt or option, drag it down. Its midpoint needs to be at 0 and 210 which it is. Let's go and Alt-drag this one down, and its midpoint needs to be at 210 to 210, so that's perfect. The midpoint of the one in the very middle needs to be halfway through our document. 210 divided by 2 is a 105. It needs to be positioned at 105 and 105. That's why it's really handy to be working with a document of an Artboard of known size. It just makes life a whole lot easier. To make this into a pattern, we're going to need a bounding box because we don't want to take everything that's here, we only want to take what's actually on the Artboard, and to do that, we create a bounding box that is the exact size of the Artboard. I'll select the Rectangle tool click once in the document. My Artboard is 210 by 210. We'll make a rectangle that size. We'll line it up so it's centered over the Artboard. I'll use the Align panel. You can get to that by choosing window and align. You'll click out here and choose show options because you want to align it to the Artboard. You need it centered exactly over the Artboard. This is critical. If it's out by a pixel, it's going to be really really bad. We'll make it no fill, no stroke because that's what bounding boxes are. They have no fill and no stroke and they must be behind everything. We'll choose object, arrange, send to back. Just confirm in the last pallet that the no fill, no stroke rectangle is at the back of absolutely everything. Now quick aside for Illustrator CC users who are having problems with these bounding boxes not working. It is an intermittent problem with Illustrator CC. You probably already know that you've got the problem. This is how to solve it. Just select on this rectangle, go to the Appearance panel and double-check that reduced to basic appearance is not clickable. If it is clickable, you need to click it right now because that means that something's gone wrong in your version of Illustrator. I don't know what the answer is. We're waiting for Adobe to come up with a solution. If you know that you've got that problem, of bounding boxes is not working, that's how to solve it. Everybody else who hasn't had those problems, that's fine. If it doesn't affect you, you don't need to make those choices. You'll go and select everything. Use the selection tool, drag over absolutely everything and drop it into the swatches panel here. There's our pattern. Let's go out here and we'll create a brand new Artboard. Click on the Artboard tool, click to start drawing. If I set the reference point to the top right corner, I can make an Artboard the exact size of the screen, which is 1920 by 1080. If you peg the reference point before you make a change in size, this point doesn't change. The Artboard just gets bigger and the opposite direction goes bigger out the left and to the bottom. Let's just zoom out to see our Artboard. We'll add a rectangle the size of the Artboard, which is 1920 by 1080, or whatever size your Artboard is. We'll center it on the Artboard using the options here. It looks like I've lost align to Artboard. Just make sure it's their. Target the fill, and let's go and get our pattern's swatch. This is our pattern in pattern effect. In Illustrator, you cannot put a pattern in a pattern. If you want this pattern in pattern effect, you need to solve at some way and in this example, what we've done is, we've built up our pattern in pattern effect by creating a large piece of [inaudible] that is going to seamlessly repeat over which we have placed these flowers which are also seamlessly repeating. 4. Pt 3 Large Irregular repeat in CS6 and CC: This next pattern we're going to make is one that has some irregularity built into it. This shapes are going to move. They're not going to form a typical grid shape. When we're creating it in Illustrator CS6 and CC we have a bit more flexibility. We need to be a little bit more constrained in what we do in Illustrator CS5 and CS4. Let's start assuming that you're working in CS6 or CC. I'll click "Create New." We're going to start with a large document, because we want to get lots of these elements onto the screen simply so that we can get this irregular lock. 2,000 by 2,000 pixels in size, RGB color mode, I'll click "Create." I'll use a teardrop shape. Drag out a vertical line using a line tool, increase the stroke white quite a bit on this and go and choose a brush profile. The brush profile I'm choosing is this one here. I'm going to increase the line width a little bit further so that I get a tear drop shape. I'll expand that with object Expand Appearance. Zoom into the top of this document. Let's just see what we've got. We've got a lot of anchor points on this shape. I'll simplify it before I proceed with object path simplify, I started with 28 points, if I adjust the angle threshold and the curve precision, I'm ending up with basically the same shape but a lot less points. I'm pretty happy with that. I'll click "Okay" and we'll fill it with a color. I'm going to make it a deep red color. I'll resize it down so it's much smaller because I want lots of these across my pattern. Control or Command zero to zoom back out. If you want to add a strike around your shape, that's fine, but just don't do it yet. We want the stroke to actually stick to the shape and not move. It's best to leave that till the very end. With our shapes selected, we're going to transform it. I'll choose Effect Distort and Transform and then Transform, turn Preview on and increase the horizontal value and the number of copies to just transform this across the document. You can do whatever you like here. This is just not set in concrete at all. I'll click "Okay." We'll create a vertical transformation now, with the shape still selectable, choose Effect Distort and Transform and then Transform. Click, "Apply New Effect," turn Preview On. This time we're going in a vertical direction and let's increase our number of copies so we fill in our document. But again, you don't need to be strict about this. You just need to get quite a few shapes on the screen so click "Okay." Right now we have a single shape that's got transformations applied to it, so it's not actually a series of shapes, well we need a series of shapes. With the shape selected will choose Object and then Expand Appearance. Keeping an eye on the last pallet, we'll say that we've got groups and groups. We're going to start breaking lays out with object ungroup and continue in this case until ungroup is no longer an option. You should have individual paths here in the last panel and that's what's really important, that these paths didn't have strikes on them because there's a risk that you'll have expanded out the strokes as well. We just want to keep things fairly simple. Now we are ready to make our pattern so with everything selected will choose Object, Pattern, Make. I'm looking here at this issue because my patent is too close together. I'm just using a basic grid, I'm going to make sure that this option here is not enabled so I can adjust the width and height independently of each other. I'll just tap to increase the width and eyeball is to make sure that it looks pretty good. Then let's look down the bottom here, you can say that these spaces are too close to each other. Again, we're going to increase that value until we get something that looks pretty good here. Right now our settings look good, but we don't have a pattern that shows any irregularity. What we'll do is we'll choose, Select All and that selects only the objects that are part of this pattern. Everything else is just a visual representation of what your patent is going to look like later on, but it's not actually part of the pattern. This point we can also zoom out, so that will allow us to see things a little bit more clearly. I've got all of these objects selected. I'll choose Object Transform, Transform each. Let me just zero out this dialogue so that you can see what it's going to look like. Your dialogue is probably going to start looking like this. The first thing we'll do is turn on random because we want our movement to be random, and we're going to do it relative to a corner points. Just click on one of the boxes here in these set of nine boxes that is at the corner, it doesn't matter which corner you choose. We're going to start increasing the angle because we want our bases to be rotated at interesting angles. You probably won't want to go all the way over and have them looking like this, but just some subtle wiggling looks pretty good so I'm choosing about 48 degrees as an angle. To move this, I'll use the horizontal and vertical values so I can move them a little bit using horizontal and vertical. I use vertical were it's starting to break them out of this grid format. Now, you might find that things are starting to run into each other. There's a couple of possible solutions to that. One of them is to change this vertical value, the other thing is to change it and then change it back again because every time you adjust it, Illustrator goes and re-randomizes everything. The random value that you're left with might be different and the results might be different to what it was a second ago when you had these exact same values use. Even just turning random On and Off will result in a different look to your shapes. Just work out something that gives you what it is that you want. I'm just looking for pretty much no shapes running into each other, when I think I'm good, I'll just click "Okay." Now these are still individual shapes, so I'm just going to click away from here, if I see a shape that's running into another shape, let's just zoom in here these two a bit close here. I'll go to the Selection Tool, target the shape I want to move, and then just move it a little bit. You can break up any sticking together shapes if you need to at this point, because every one of these is still an independent shape. You don't want to do too much here because we actually came here to create something that was a bit irregular. But if you don't want the shapes actually sticking to each other, you can break them apart here. You might want to go through and do this now. Once you've done that and you're happy, you can zoom back out just to check how the overall design is looking. I'm pretty happy with this design, so I'll click "Done." I'll add a new art board, let's just drag out a new art board here. Let's make it the same 2,000 by 2,000 of our document. We'll add a rectangle to it that's 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels, center it up in the document. Here I'm using the Align Panel. I'll click "Show Options," choose aligned to art board and just center it. I have my fill selected so I'll target my patent in the swatches panel, and this is now applied to the rectangle object transform scale, allows us to re-scale it. I'm going to scale my pattern down to 50 percent. I don't want to transform the object obviously and click "Okay," and so there is our patent filled object. Now there are a couple of things here that way could do differently. Let's select this pattern here and drag it onto the new icon so we get two copies of it. I'll double-click this version of it because this allows me to make some changes to my pattern. I've got grayed out the copies so I could bring them back to a 100 percent should I wish to do so. In Illustrator CC and CS6, we've got the ability to very easily create patterns, for example, Brick by Column or Brick by Row. I'm going to suggest you look at Brick by Column, and then choose an Offset value. Now the best Offset value to use, actually the one that's going to give you the biggest repeat on this pattern is four-fifths. I'm going to select select four-fifths, and if I'm happy with that, I'll click "Done." Now let's go back to this document here and when I click on this pattern, then I'm going to get a much larger repeat. This pattern repeat is huge, if you were to use this for fabric, for example, a dress, it's going to not be really obvious that this is a repeating pattern, it's going to look a whole lot more like it was just created at the sides that it actually is appearing. It's going to be really hard to see the repeats. Let's go ahead and again, take a duplicate of this. I'm just going to drag this onto the new icon, lets go and double-click on this because I want to show you something else that you can do. Now, I've downloaded a script from Scriptapedia and it's a random select script. This is a script that allows me to randomly select objects, and you could run scripts inside the Pattern Make Tool. You'll click to download it, you're going to expand the file that you get. On a PC, on a Mac, it's probably already going to be done for you and this file will be and as you move it in your downloads folder. Let's go and run it from here. Again, I'm going to select everything with select all and that just select the objects that are actually the patent objects here. Got them selected. I'll choose File and then Scripts, and I'm going to run random select now, I've already actually Installed it in my Illustrator, but if you haven't Installed it, you can just go to other script. Then you'll go to your Downloads folder. I have my Downloads folder coming up here. Here is my random select stripped. I'm going to use the JavaScript version because it runs on Windows or Mac. Just going to select that and it runs automatically. Now because I've got all my shaped selected that's asking me how bigger percentage of these shapes do I want to randomly select. I wanted to recolor just a few of them so I'm going to select just 5 percent and click "Okay." Now 5 percent of this shapes are still selected, so I'm going to change the color of them. I've just targeted blue and you'll say blue starting to appear throughout the pattern. I've done that, I'll just click "Done" and here in our sample that we're working on, let me just scale this for you. We can see this repeat pattern, it looks really, really organic. There's a lot of variety here in this pattern and it also got these elements which are different colors. But if we go and look at this element here, there's two pieces here, we can go all the way across the document and we're just not seeing that repeat again and because we created it using that Brick repeat, it's a huge pattern paces. It's just enormous and it's going to be really difficult to see the repeated elements. Yet it's got a whole lot of movement in it, there's not an obvious grid here. We've created something that is very irregular, but it still is a repeating pattern and you can use it anywhere. You would use a repeating pattern. 5. Pt 4 Irregular pattern in Illustrator CS5 and CS4 repeat: Let's see now how we would create this irregular repeating pattern in Illustrator CS5 and CS4, and I'm using CS5 here. I'll choose File, New and I'm going to create a really large document, let's start with 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels in size. The larger you make it, the more repeat elements you can get in your document. I'm going to zoom into the top corner here so I can create my starting shape, and I'm going to draw just a very small line here. I'll apply a brush profile to it, if you don't have brush profiles here available to you in your version of Illustrator, then you can just make a teardrop shape, it's just fine. I'll choose Object, Expand Appearance to turn this into a regular shape. Then to simplify it, I'll choose Object, Path, Simplify. Let's see how many points we have, we started with 13, I'm down to three, I don't think that's enough because this has gone skew on me, so let's just increase the angle threshold. Probably so I get about five or six points would be perfect, that looks pretty good to me, I'll click "OK". I'm going to fill it with a color that I want to us, so I'm going to choose a sort of blue color, but let's make it a bit more of a blue gray. What's really important with this document because we're going to have to do everything by hand is that our starting artboard at 2,000 by 2,000 pixels means that we can divide that by all numbers like 50 or 100 or 20, and we're not going to have any remainders, and we're really going to have to do that mathematics on it, so we need to know how big the artboard is and we need to be able to do that math. We're going to start with this shape here, centered right over the top corner up here. With it's selected, we're going to select the middle point here as a reference point and check to see that its x and y are zero, zero. They are, that's perfect. I'm going to zoom back out with Control or Command zero. Now this is really good because my pace up here is just tiny and that's going to work really well, but you know what, it might be a bit easier for us to see if I just made ours a bit bigger today, but if you can work at a really small size, that's going to be really good for you. I'm just working at a slightly larger size so we can see things. But again, ensuring that before I start, the center reference point of this shape is at 0, 0. We're going to use a Transform Effect with effect Distort & Transform, and then Transform. I'll turn Preview on. I need to have a number of copies, so I'm thinking if I moved each of these 25 pixels over, I'm working in pixels here, 25 pixels over, if I divide 2,000 by 25, I get 80, so I've got one original and 79 copies. Let's go and do a horizontal movement of 25 and just see how that looks. Well, this is perfect. What I want to do is stop short of this edge, but if I took this up to 80, this last shape would be exactly over that point, that's what you need to see. Then you back off one because you don't want that one there, you want a empty line all the way down the side of the document, that's critical. That's a good measurement, 25 pixels of space divided into 2,000 gives you 80, we've got one original and 79 copies, Click "OK". We're going to use the exact same math going down, Effect, Distort & Transform, Transform, so we're doing a second effect. Click to Apply a New Effect. This time we'll do a 25 pixel move vertically, 79 copies, let's turn Preview on and let's see how it looks, looks awesome. If I were able to scroll down, we would see the end of the document. The end of the artboard doesn't have anything over it, let's just click "OK" and let's scroll. You can see that it's just not getting over the edge of the artboard, that's exactly what we want to be the case. Right now, we have a single little hand-drawn teardrop shape that has two transforms applied to it. What we want to do is break this out, so with that shaped selected, Object, Expand Appearance. Let's go to the Layers palette, and we've got groups and groups and groups, Object, Ungroup, keep going, Object, Ungroup. Go back again, Object, Ungroup, and now we have individual paths. Now it is crucial that at this stage of designing this pattern that you have paths that do not have strokes on them because the next step is going to break that apart, so you don't want to have strokes at this stage, you can add strokes later, but just don't do it yet, so we've got individual paths here. I'm going to turn the Edges off because I don't want to see all those little dots because it's going to make life a bit difficult for me to show you, so I'm going to choose View, Hide Edges. Let's just zoom into the top part of the document here so we can see what's going on, but just be aware that everything is still selected even though we can't see the selection points. I'll choose Object, Transform, Transform Each. I'll turn Preview on and I'm going to transform everything around about 49 or 50 degrees, but I'm going to turn Random on. What that does is it transforms every single one of these shapes somewhere between zero and 49 degrees, and every single one of them is going to be transformed at different amount, so it's very small transformation, but we're getting plenty of variety here, and you can just choose what value works best for you. I'm going to click here to select a reference point that is not the center, so I'm going to choose an outside point, so either of the four corner points is a good one to choose. Now let's start increasing the horizontal and vertical movement a bit because we want to break up the look of this pattern. Now at some point, there's going to be too much movement and you'll want to back it off a bit. I don't want a lot of my shapes overlapping, so I don't want too much of that happening. You can force Illustrator to redraw this effect by just turning Random on and off and then you get a different redrawing of the effect, but I'm going to back this off just a little bit. Then when I'm happy with what I've got, I'll just click "OK". This is our sort of random look to our pattern. I'll choose Object, Transform, Reset Bounding Box, so that the bounding box around those shapes is squared up. It's not happening here, let's try that again. Let's select over everything and again, Object, Transform, Reset Bounding Box, so now I've got a square bounding box. Now at this point, I would save this project. The reason for this is that we've got the irregularity built in, but we don't have any fancy features, we don't have any multicolors, we don't have any strokes. If you want the flexibility of being able to add those later on, then you want to be able to come back to this point to do that, so I'll choose File and then Save, and I'm going to save this just as my starting point. Now we can decide what we want to do and there are few options. One of them is just to make the patent as it is. Another one is to add a stroke to the shapes. Once you've done this much now you can add a stroke, select either all of shapes and click and add a stroke color. I'm going to add a greenie blue stroke. But a very pale color. Let's zoom in and just say what that looks like. Because we're working at such a small size, we're going to need to make sure that it's working okay. I'm pretty happy with that. That's one option that we have. Another option is to make a selection of some random objects and re-color them again, we need to do that before we go any further. I have a script here that I'm going to give you the link to. It's called random select, and it allows you to randomly select objects in Illustrator. What you're going to do is download this on a Windows machine. You'll need to extract it on a Mac. It should happen automatically. Just leave it in your downloads folder for now, that will be just fine. What we'll do is go back to our document here. We're going to select everything with, Select all that's really important. If I want to, I can choose to show my edges again. That's just fine. I'll choose file and then scripts. I'm going to need to choose other script because I haven't installed my script. I'll go to my downloads folder and I've just got this stored in my Downloads folder. It's called random select v02. I'll choose the JavaScript version because it runs on Windows and Mac, who just double-click on random select JSX to run it. You're asked how many of the shapes that you currently have selected do you want to have still selected once the script has run? I only want a few, so I'm going to type five for percent. Add up all of these selected objects only 5 percent are going to remain selected. I'll click Okay to run the script. I'm left here with just 5 percent of these objects selected. What I could do is change the color of these objects. I'm going to select a red color as they fill. choose this dark red color and I'll choose a lighter orange color as they stroke. I've just recolored some of the objects in this pattern. I'll click away from this now. Now, whatever you want to do with your pattern paces, you need to have done them now before we actually make the pattern out of them. You might choose to just make the set of irregular shapes, or you might choose to do one or other of those techniques that I've just shown you. One of them was to add a stroke around the shapes and the other one was to re-color a range of the shapes, but not all of them. Here's how we're going to make this into an actual pattern. We're going to the selection tool and we're going to make a generous selection over the edge of the art board. We need to select the shapes that are actually over the edge of the art board because we want to make sure that we get everything. We're actually going to go into the art board a little bit in making our selection. We'll choose object transform move. We're going to move horizontally 2,000 pixels, because that's the width of our board and we're going to move vertically 0 pixels because we don't want any vertical movement. Let's turn preview on. You can say that the shapes are now moved all the way across here. But we want still the original sets. We're actually going to click Copy and that gives us our originals and new copies. We're going to do the same from the top here. We're going to make a big selection, generous selection over the top of the art board, object transform move. We don't want any horizontal movement, so we'll type 0. In terms of vertical movement, we need to move down to the very bottom of the art board so that the movement of 2,000 pixels. Click Copy because we want the original and the duplicate. This is now going to be a perfect repeating pattern, as soon as we make it a perfect repeating pattern. To do that, we're going to the rectangle tool will click once in the document, make a rectangle that is 2,000 by 2,000 pixels in size, the size of the art board. We'll center this on the art board. I'm going to make sure I have aligned to art board selected and I'll center it. You can also do that from the Align panel over here, just click to show your options. Then click on aligned to art board so you can center. It's critical that it is centered. Now with this shapes selected, we're going to give it no fill in no stroke. That's really critical again, because a bounding box for a patent has no fill and no stroke. The other thing it needs to be is behind everything. We'll choose object, arrange, send to back. If we were to check the last pallet which has just walked on me, let me just check the layer's palette. Down the very bottom of the last pallet is this no fill, no strike rectangle. We have everything we need for a seamless repeating pattern. We'll select over absolutely everything. Open up the swatches panel, we're going to drag and drop it into the swatches panel. Now it's going to look like it's not a pattern because this looks like it's just a blue color. It's because we've got so many objects here that just gets evened out into one blue color, but trust me, it is a pattern. Let's go to the art board tool, we'll click and drag a art board, or the start of an art board. I'm clicking the top right corner as a reference point. I'll make my art board 2,000 by 2,000 pixels in size. I'll create a rectangle that is the size of the art board. I'll just fill it for now so we can say it. I need it to be positioned just over the art board here that's not totally necessary, just looks a bit nature that way. With the fill selected, let's go and target the pattern that we created. To prove that it is a seamless repeating pattern, object transform scale. We're not going to scale the object, but we will scale a pattern. We'll take it down to 50 percent and click Okay. Then we'll zoom in here. This is a seamless repeating irregular pattern. This pattern could be used for all sorts of things like fabric and scrapbook paper. It's going to be really difficult for you to say where the repeaters in this pattern, because it just is so big. You have plenty of options for creating this large, irregular, seamless repeating pattern. You can create objects that have strokes on them. You can create objects that are variety of colors. You've got the process that you need to now go through to create these very, very large, irregular repeating patterns in Illustrator says five, and of course, insert for two. 6. Project and wrapup: Your project for this class will be to create one or other of the patterns that you've seen created in this class. The pattern on pattern effect or the large irregular repeating pattern. Post an image of your completed pattern as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned things about Illustrator of which you were previously unaware. Now as you are watching these videos, you would have seen a prompt which asked if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend this class. Secondly, write even in just a few words, why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now if you see the follow link on the screen, click it and you'll be kept up-to-date with new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.