Pattern Know-how in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Pattern Know-how - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Pattern Know-how 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're looking at working with patterns in Illustrator. We'll start by looking at the patterns that come shipped with Illustrator. We'll learn how to save and use a downloaded pattern file in Illustrator. You'll see how to scale, move, and rotate patterns, and how to recolor them. This class will give you great skills when you're working with either your own patterns or other people's. Now, as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people just like you who want to learn more about Illustrator. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready, now, let's get started working with patterns in Illustrator. 2. Pattern Know-how - Part 1: To begin, I look at patterns in Illustrator, I'm going to choose File and New. I'm going to create a new document that we're working with, minus 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels in RGB color mode. Now what we're not going to do in this particular video is work on patterns that we're creating ourselves. We're going to recolor some to make them our own patterns, but we aren't going to make brand new ones. I have a class already on that, and I'll link to that in the project description just so you can quick start that if that's what you want to do. What we're going to be doing is looking at how to work with patterns, however they happen to be created. We're going to start by looking at the patterns that are shipped with Illustrator. I'll open up the Swatches panel here, and if you have the Swatches panel set to show all swatches, you'll find that there are a few patterns already in here, there are two in here already. But you can find more that are shipped with illustrator. You do so by clicking this down pointing arrow and choose Open Swatch Library. Here are access to a number of different types of Swatches, there are color Swatches, there are patterns Swatches, there are a gradient Swatches. Here are the patterns and you'll see that they're grouped into basic graphics, which is some dots lines and textures, some decorative ones, decorative legacy and vonster patterns and then some nature ones as well, which are animal skins and foliage. We're going to look first of all at some of the basic graphics, just so you can get an idea of what is included with illustrator. So these are the basic graphics dots. Now of course, to be able to use a pattern, you need a shape. So I'm just going to the rectangle tool here, I'm just going to drag out a rectangle in my document, I don't want it to have a stroke, so I'm going to turn that off. I'll bring the fill to the fore and now I'm just going to click on a Pattern to apply it to my rectangle. This is one of the dot patterns from the basic dots group. Now if we have a look at the Swatches panel, which of course we could get to if it wasn't visible there by choosing Window and then Swatches, you will see that the dot pattern that I just applied to this image, has been added here to the Swatches panel. Any one of these dot patterns that I applied to this shape will, as I apply them be added to the Swatches panel for this particular document. Now the Swatches panel is saved with the document, but of course these Swatches won't be available for any new documents. They're just peculiar to this particular document, because they've been used in this document. I'm just going to add a few here. The lines through this we'll have a chat about later on. Now as we were looking at the patterns that are shipped with Illustrator, there were also some decorative ones, so let's go and see those. Open Swatch Library Patterns, Decorative, I'm going to choose the Vonster Patterns here, because we're going to use one or two of these as well later on in this video. These are more decorative patterns that are shipped with illustrator. Again, as I select any one of these to add it to this rectangle as its fill, these are automatically added to the Swatches panel for this document. 3. Pattern Know-how - Part 2: Now, in addition to the patterns that come ship with Illustrator, you can also find patterns online to use. You can buy them at regular stock sites and you'll also find that some people provide free for download swatches. In this case, we're going to use a set from a site called Design For It. I'll give you the download link, you'll just roll down the site here so that you can have a look at what the patterns are and then click to download the Illustrator swatch patterns. The swatch patterns will be downloaded and they'll appear in your downloads folder. I'm being pretty careful in these videos to download where I can zip files. They're a whole lot easier to unzip than RAR files. If you're working on Windows and if you work on the Mac, should be able to see these in your Downloads folder and just double-click on the folder to unzip it. Once we've double-clicked on the folder, we get a link here to extract all files. I'm just going to click to extract them into my Downloads folder. Now, these files will appear in my Downloads folder in a sub-folder called Design Fruit Swatch Patterns. On the Mac it's probably going to be done automatically for you. Now if you're later going and looking for patterns to use just be aware if you're a Mac user, RAR is a fine format to use. If you're a Windows user, you may have a little bit more difficulty working with RAR files. Zip ones are very easy to manage just as I've shown you here. The RAR files you may need to download and unzip utility. I'm going to include links to a couple of those in the project description just in case you need that to work with our RAR files. Just be aware that most of these will come down in some compressed format that you will need to extract them from. That said, let's go and grab this particular set we're going to go for the Design fruit swatch patterns RAR file. I'm just going to double-click it to open it in Illustrator here. This is what the file looks like when you open it in Illustrator. There's nothing in here, all the action is in the swatches panel. You want to go to Window, and then Swatches to open up the swatches panel because these are the swatches that are shipped with this particular file. Now, if you want to have access to these patterns later on, the first thing that you should do is go and save this and you'll do that this way, you'll click this down, pointing arrow, the fly-out menu on the swatches panel. You'll choose Save Swatch Library as AI. It's really important that you save this as an AI file. When you click on this, you'll find that illustrate automatically opens up the location where it expects to find saved swatches. These are user-defined swatches. They might be defined by you or they might be ones that you've downloaded and you want to install so that they're accessible easily inside Illustrator. I've already got a few because I've been creating my own pattern files, I'm just going to save this set in the same place. I'm just going to click Save, that's it. Now I'm going to close this file because I don't need it any longer open in Illustrator, what I need is access to the patterns in it, and I've now set it up so that I can get to those patterns at any time. Back in the document that we're working on, let's see how we'd get access to the pattern file that we've just stored ready inside Illustrator. We'll do that by going to this swatches panel, click the fly-out menu, you'll choose Open Swatch Library, and this time we'll go down to User Defined. This gives us access to any swatch files that we've saved the way I just showed you how to save these patterns. Here is our designed fruit swatch pattern, so I'm going to click it to open it, and what happens is that we get a little swatches panel with the Design fruit patterns swatches in it. I'm just going to click on one of them and you can see it's applied to my shape. This is how you work with swatch files that you download from the web, first open them up, save them into your patterns swatches area in Illustrator, and then you can get access to them anytime just exactly the same way as you would get access to Illustrator's on Swatches or Swatches that you've created yourself. 4. Pattern Know-how - Part 3: Now when you apply swatches to a shape in Illustrator it won't always look exactly the way you want it to look. We're going to look now at some of the techniques for scaling, moving, and rotating patterns in Illustrator. We're going to do it with this shape. The first thing we're going to look at is scaling it, making it bigger or smaller. To do that with the shape selected, so I'm going to make sure that I have this pattern filled shape selected. I'm going to select object and then transform and in this instance to make it bigger or smaller, I'll choose scale. This opens up the scale dialogue. There are two options that are of considerable importance here, and that is the transform object and transform patterns. What we want to do is we want to make the pattern a different size, but we don't want to change the object that it's in the rectangle. So we're going to deselect transform objects, making sure that transform patterns is still selected. I'm going to turn preview on, and now I'm going to increase this scale of this pattern to 300 percent and tab away. Now the pattern inside the shape has enlarged by 300 percent. The object itself has not been changed because I had transform objects deselected. Now you can go much smaller too, so I'm going down to 50 percent. I'll type 50 and then hit the tab key to move away and is now filled with the pattern at a 50 percent size. If you want to adjust by smaller values, you can just click in the uniform box here and press the up arrow key that will take it up 1 percent at a time. If you press shift up arrow, it's going to go in 10 percent at a time, so you can increase in large amounts or in small very granular amounts. That can be really helpful when you get those weird lines through your pattern, which Illustrator is notorious for. If you see white lines through your pattern just increasing it or decreasing it by 1 percent can often remove those lines. I'm going to click okay because I'm done with scaling this pattern. But what if I want to move it? What if I don't want this place to be in the top corner? I want it to look a little bit different. Well, with the shape still selected, I'm going to choose object transform move. I'm going to make sure that preview is turned on. I'm going to make sure transform pattern is turned on, but not objects because I don't want to move the rectangle I just want to move the pattern inside it, and now I can click here and increase the horizontal value. As I do, you can see that the pattern is shifting inside the rectangle here. I can hold the shift key down as I press the up arrow, or I can just press the up arrow or the down arrow to increase or decrease this horizontal amount and then I can go to vertical and do something different there, just going to push it down a little bit. I can make sure that whatever is appearing in the top corner of this shape, or indeed anywhere in this shape is exactly the element that I want to see in that top corner. I'm just going to move it down a little bit, and when I'm happy with what the top corner looks like, I can just press okay. You can also rotate the pattern and you do that not unsurprisingly by choosing object transform rotate. Same deal here we want transform objects deselect it we want transform pattern selected. We want to preview things as we go and I'm just going to type in here 45 degrees. When I taught 45 degrees, the pattern is rotated 45 degrees, giving us a very different look to the original pattern. If I'm happy with that, I'll click okay. You now know how to move a pattern inside a shape, how to scale it up or down, and how to rotate it. 5. Pattern Know-how - Part 4: Next up we're going to look at recoloring patterns, first of all, we're going to investigate just exactly what is available for us to recolor. So I'm going to start with one of the pattern that is shaped with illustrator, just going to click on it to apply it to this shape. Now this pattern is showing there's tilted lines through it that indicate that there is a slight problem with illustrator. I'm going to choose object, transform, and then scale. I'm going to deselect, transform, objects, I'm going to say if by increasing or decreasing this pattern by a small amount, I can make a change to those lines. I want to take it back to 100 percent, and I'm saying the line. So I'm going to increase it by just one percent, and that seems to have removed those lines. So I'm pretty happy with that. I'll click Okay. Now before we go ahead and look at recoloring this pattern, let's have a look at exactly what's in it. I'm going to select the rectangle tool, I'm going to drag out a rectangle here, I'm going to fill it with a solid color, I'm going to place it behind the pattern, object, arrange, send to back. You can say that the white places in this pattern really aren't white. What they are is nothing at all. So we're saying through the pattern to this object behind. Now that's fairly important to note because it means that we can't change the white in the pattern, because there is no white in this pattern. If I go back to the shape that we were working with here, and if I add one of the patterns that we downloaded from designfruit, you'll see that's not the case with this pattern, the white in the pattern is really white, because we're not saying this purple rectangle underneath this pattern, it's a fully filled pattern. So just be aware that before you go ahead and try and recolor patterns, you just establish whether there really is white in there that can be recolored or whether it's just see through, and then you can't recolor it in the way that you can the other colors that are actually in the pattern. Having established that the white in this pattern is truly white, not a see through element. I'm going to remove this colored rectangle from behind the pattern filled shape. I'm going to the selection tool. I'm going to select on the shape, and to recolor the pattern, I'm going to click here on the re-color artwork icon. This opens the re-color artwork dialogue. Now your dialogue might look bigger than this, but I'm just closing mine down, so I have a little bit more room on the screen to work. Here in the edit panel, you'll see the colors that are in the pattern; the brown, blue, red and white. Brown, blue and red are mapped onto themselves. So this is the original color in the pattern and this is a mapped color. So effectively we're saying no change in the pattern at all, but white is not mapped onto anything and because there's this whole bar here rather than an arrow, that's telling us that white will not be changed. So if we go and change the colors in this pattern, white is going to remain white. Let's see how that's going to work. I'm going to the edit panel here. I'm going to make sure that these colors are locked so that the relationship between them is going to stay the same, and I'm just going to roll this set of sliders around the color wheel. As I do the colors and the pattern are going to change, but you can say that the relationship between the colors is unchanged. You'll also say that white remains white. If we want to be able to make a point something different, let's go back to the assigned dialogue, and let's double-click here, and choose to add a new color, and I'll choose yes. White is now mapped onto white, because there is this arrow, it's telling me that I can now change white. So let's go back to the edit options and inside here is white. So I've just dragged white out into the orange area, you can say that the white in the image has now changed. Now as I role these colors around, everything is changing, including white. If you've not been in this dialogue before, just be aware that this option here allows you to unlink the colors. If you unlink the colors, you can take the colors into any area that you want, the relationship between them is broken, so you can color this object to whatever you want it to be. If you find something that you like, you can just click "Okay" and the color will be applied to your pattern pace. Now let's remove this rectangle. Let's go back to the pattern that had hollow paces in it, so we'd see what we would do with that. I'm just going to select this rectangle and delete it. Now I'm going to click on the pattern that I want to add to my rectangle. So it's my new fill color. I'll go to the rectangle tool. I'm going to just drag out my pattern filled rectangle. We know from the last time we looked at this pattern that this white areas are actually see through. So we can change the colors of the blue's here in the pattern, but right now we can't change the white. Well, let's look and see how we would replace the white with something else. I'm going to open up the appearance panel. You can get to this of cause by choosing window, and then appearance if it's not visible. Now in the appearance panel for this shape, we already have a fill which is the pattern and we have no stroke at all. That's just agreeing with the selectors over here. Well, let's add a new fill. I'm going to click here on add new fill. This adds a fill at the very top of this stack of films, and the fill that it adds is identical to the one that's already in the shapes. I'm actually quite happy to leave that one at the top. Let's go to the one at the bottom because what I want to do is replace it with a solid color. So I'm just going to click on here, and I'm going to add a solid color behind this pattern. Lets for now do a yellow colored so that we can see it. You can say that that's effectively filling in the transparent parts of this pattern, you can click and choose any color that you like, then we're going to settle for this purple right now. Now that we've got a shape that's filled with a pattern as well as a solid fill. We could recolor this in exact the same way as we recolored the other pattern with the shape selected. Let's go to the recolor artwork dialogue. As expected we are saying all the colors that were in this pattern, that's the top three here, as well as the solid fill color that we put behind the pattern. All of these colors are currently mapped onto themselves, because we've got little arrows here. They are all going to change if we go to the edit dialogue. So let's just click on "Edit." Here are all the colors in relationship to each other. I'm going to click to lock down that relationship, and now I'm just going to drag around here. I can change the entire color of this pattern by just dragging the colors elsewhere. If I don't want something quite so monochromatic, I can break the link here, and breaking the link allows me to move any one of these four little color indicators anywhere I like. This one is the background, the color that we added. These are the three colors in the original pattern. So we could take one of the colors from the original pattern for example, and take it into the green area. You can say that there's a significant difference in the pattern when we do so. We can break the link if you like, between the colors and create something that is a more robust and more interesting pattern color. Again, if we're happy with this, we'll just click "Okay." 6. Pattern Know-how - Part 5: Before we finish up with our recoloring, let's just go and have a look at how we would recolor some of those dot patterns that get shipped with Illustrator. I'm just deleting the rectangle. I'm going back to selecting one of my dot patterns. I'm going to drag out a dot pattern-filled rectangle. Now, I want to enlarge this pattern a little bit. I'll choose "Object", "Transform", "Scale". I have transform objects deselected. I have a much larger pattern size selected. I'm going to make sure that I enlarge it so that those little white lines through the pattern have disappeared and I'll click "Okay". Now, with the shape selected, I'm going to select the "Recolor Artwork" dialogue. In here you'll see that black has been mapped onto itself. But if we go to the Edit option, we're not actually able to change the black. To do it let's go back into the "Assign" area and let's click on here to make this an arrow. Now, there's an arrow, we can do something with it. I'm going back into Edit. Now, this is a very dark color wheel here. What I'm going to do is just wind up the brightness on it so that it looks more like the color wheel that way used to seeing. Now, we can start dragging this color selector around and we can change the pattern of dots very easily. When we find a look that we're happy with, I'll just click "Okay". Just be aware when you're in the recolor dialogue that from time to time, some colors might be locked down and you're going to have to unlock them by making sure that they are linked with an arrow, so that you can successfully remap them. Of course, the opposite will apply too. Lets us get out of here and let's apply a pattern to this shape. Let's go back into the recolor dialogue. Let's say we want to remap white in this pattern, but say we don't want to remap the red, say we want to keep this red. What I'm going to do is to turn the arrow into a bar. Now, we can recolor brown, blue, and white, but red is going to stay fixed. Whatever I do with this color wheel, you can say that the colors in the pattern are changing all except for red. Red is locked down so it can't be altered. Sometimes that's useful. I had a student in one of my classes who wanted to recolor an image that included a person's features. She needed to lock down the skin color so that that wouldn't change, but she could change everything else. This is how you would do it. You just come into the Assign area and just lock down the colors that you don't want to change, allowing you to easily change all the other colors. Your project for this class is to create a document that has two rectangles in it. In the topmost rectangle, put the pattern that you have, either opened from Illustrator, downloaded, or pattern that you've created yourself, and just put it in there at its regular size. Make a duplicate of that rectangle, and then go ahead and adjust the pattern. You want to move it, rotate it, scale it, do something different with it, and then go ahead and recolor it. When you're done, post the original pattern piece and your edited pattern as your project. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned lots about working with patterns in Illustrator. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps others to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look and respond to all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.