Pattern of Lines and Dots in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Dots and Waves Pattern in Illustrator - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design For Lunch class, create a pattern of lines and dots 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 going to be creating a semi-organic style wave and dot pattern. You'll learn how to turn lines into filled shapes, and how to make sure that a pattern piece is going to line up perfectly. Now, as you're watching these videos, you'll see a prompt, which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me; Firstly, give it a thumbs-up, and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. 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, let's get started with our wave and dot pattern in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 Create the lines: To create our wave and dot pattern, we're going to create a new file. It's important that it's a fixed known width. I'm going to make my artboard 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels, just so that we know exactly what it measures. I'll click the "Line Segment" tool. I'm going to make a line, 1000 pixels in length that is at an angle of zero degrees. It's going to stretch the full width of the artboard. We need to make sure everything lines up very carefully here because it is a pattern. I'm going to open my align options and I'm going to click "Show Options" and do align to artboard. I'm just going to line this line up, so that it is lined up to the very edge of the artboard here. We're going to turn it into a wavy line with Effect, Distort & Transform, and then Zig Zag. I'll turn Preview on, I'm going to put my Ridges per segment to 1 and I'll click smooth. You can say that this is giving us a smooth, shallow curve. I'm going to increase the curve a little bit up to about 35. You want to make sure that you have the curve above the line at either end, because these are going to join up later in the pattern. So click "OK". I'll choose Object, Expand Appearance, to turn this into a regular line. Now I want to drag away a duplicate by pressing the "Alt or Option" key, as I drag a duplicate away, I don't want to move it very far, this one's going to be pretty close. Then I'm going to do that again and again and again. I end up with five lines, if you want to make sure that these three last sets of lines are evenly spaced, select over them from the Aligned Tool options, select "Align to Selection", and then click here on "Vertical Distribute Center" and that will make sure that there's even spacing between all of them. I'm going to close up this gap just a little bit. You want to get your spacing pretty much sorted out before you go to the next step. The next step involves taking these three middle lines and making a duplicate of them. You want to select over all three of these lines and you can open up the last panel if need be to make sure that you've got those three lines selected. You'll choose Edit, Copy and then Edit, Paste in Place. You don't want to move them, but you do want to make some duplicates because we're going to use those to join up your lines. You'll also need some colors to use. I'm going open up my swatches panel here. I'm going to turn some of my colors into global swatches. That's going to make it a little bit easier to adjust them later on. I'll double-click on each of the colors I want to use and make it global. I don't have to get the colors right, right now, I just need to make sure that they're global and that I only use the global swatches in my design. I'm going to select the four colors at this stage. Now let's go back to the layers lines here. I'm going to select either this bottom most one and then one of the ones immediately above it, and checking in the Layers palette that there are only two paths selected. I'll choose Object, Path and then Join. Now I'm going to flip the Fill and Stroke so it's a filled shape but with no stroke. I'm going to apply one of my global colors. At this point, I can just hide that shape because it's been created. Let's go and get the next two sets of lines and we'll join those with Object, Path, Join. Again, we're going to apply a global color to this set as well. Let's just hide it for now. Now we'll go to the next set of two lines, Object, Path, Join. Flip the Fill and Stroke and apply a global color to it and hide it. We've got two more paths left and we're going to do the exact same with those. At this point, you can turn all your lines back on again. You should have four sets of lines that are all filled with global colors. You can double-check to make sure that they're aligned to the very edge of the artboard. You want to make sure that you have align to artboard selected and just align them to the very edge of the artboard. Now we're ready to make some duplicates. We'll choose Object, Transform, Reflect. I want to transform it horizontally. I've Preview turned on and I want to make a duplicate, so I'll click "Copy". That gives me two sets of lines. One of these sets of four lines I want to send to the top of the document, but if I try and send them right now, they're all going to land at the top of the document. I really want them grouped before I do that. I'm going to select over these four lines and I'll choose Object, Group. I'll send the group to the very top of the document. Going to group this set of lines with Object, Group and I'll move them up so that they're just butted up against the one above. Make sure that everything is perfectly aligned to the edge of the artboard here. I want another copy of this set of lines, so I'll select both sets. I'll choose Object, Transform, Move. I'm not sure exactly how far I need to move them, but I don't want to move them horizontally at all. I do want to move them vertically. Let's just try 200 for now. I want to make a duplicate, so I'll just click "Copy". If they're not in the exact right place and you probably won't get them right the first time, you can just move them down using the arrow keys. You just want an overlap here, just a slight overlap. Now that we've got the basic lines ready to go, in the next video we're going to create the dots and then we'll create our repeating pattern. 3. Pt 2 Add the dots: The way that we're making this pattern is we're going to actually make the Bounding Box for the pattern. We can do ourselves just a few small favors right now. One of them will be to set the size of these shapes here. If I select over the shapes, each one of them is 1000 pixels wide, but their height is not an even number. But we can make them an even number by just typing in the even number. My more of a 132 unchanged, well, I'm just going to make mine a 132 pixels. I'm going to select over each of these and just round them off. Now each of them is the exact same size and the height of them is a nice even number. Now, I'm also going to space them out so that they butt up against each other very evenly, so I've selected however all four groups of lines. I'm going to the Align to dialog and I'm going to select to "Align to Key Object". I'm going to make this top object, my key object by clicking on it. What I want to do is to click here on vertical Distribute space, but I want to make sure that the value is zero and that will just butt these up against each other so that they just touch perfectly. Now I'm going to select all of these shapes and I'm going to group them with "Object", "Group". Then I'm going to do one final check, which is to click "Vertical Align Top". That just makes sure that they are aligned perfectly to the top of this document. If each of these shapes is a 132 pixels in height then the overall size of the grouped set of shapes should be four times a 132 pixels, which it is, it's 528. I can do the mathematics here and I know that everything is perfectly, perfectly aligned. That's really going to help me in a few minutes when I come to make my Bounding Box. Now we're on to making some circles. I am going to the Ellipse Tool. I'm going to click once in the document, I'm going to make a circle that's a 100 pixels by a 100 pixels. I'm just using one of my global colors. But if you didn't want to use one of the colors that you've already used, you could go ahead and set up another set of global colors. Essentially, what I'm saying is I'm happy that this circle is going to be the same color as this wave is in the final pattern. I'm just going to do a 100 pixels shape here. I'm going to add a second one in over here. I'm going to drag one down to here. Now this one, because of its position, I'm going to make sure it's lined up perfectly to the very edge of this artboard. I want to make sure that it's middle here is at x value of 1000, which it is, it's exactly at 1000, just going to adjust its y value to a known value here, I'll just make it 250. That's going to allow me to check it in a minute. Now I need to copy this over to here. I'll choose "Object", "Transform", "Move". I don't want to move it vertically at all, so I'll type zero in there. I want to move it minus 1000 horizontally. I'll just tab away. Because I've got previous selected, you can see that the copy is going into the exact correct position, so I'll click "Copy". Next up, I'm going to fill this space with some additional circles. I am going back to the Ellipse tool this time, I'm going to choose a different color to work with. I'm going to click once in the document, I'm going to make some 50 pixel circles. Let's just make sure that that is a different color. I'm going to move these around inside these waves. I'm doing the duplicates by just holding the Alt key on a PC, Option key on a Mac and just dragging the extra shape away. Now I want some circles that are smallest still so I'm just going to click here and make some of that at 25 pixels around. I'm going to change the color on this to another one of my global colors. I'll move this shape into position and again, duplicate it to fill in the gaps. I do want to be careful that I don't put anything over this edge. I've already got a shape over the edge and I don't want more. Or if I did put another one over the edge, I would have to copy it to the other side as well. It's just easier to keep to a minimum of overlaps, but you will want one overlapping or else you're going to get a sort of funny-looking pattern that's going to have a big gap down the middle of it. You want to be also mindful that this dot here is going to appear over here in the final image. You want to make sure that there is not another dot too close to it. Now I'm going to fill in this area up here by borrowing the shapes from the one below. Again, holding the Alt or Option key is I just drag my shapes into position. I'm working on about five or six of these mid-size shapes. I've got two largest shapes here. Probably don't need quite as many of the mid-size ones as I had for this element here. Then I'm going to borrow some of the smaller ones. Now this set of shapes is going to have to be moved down to this position. We already know that an element here is twice 132 pixels in size. What we have to do is take all of these and just move them twice 132 pixels down. I'm just going to select over all over these shapes, so I'm going to move. I'm going to click on one and then shift click on the others to select them making sure that I don't include the lines with these. Now I'm going to choose "Object", "Transform"," Move". I've got Preview turned on. I don't want to move them horizontally, so I'll type zero in here. What I want to do is to move them down to 164 pixels. You can see that they're going into position perfectly. But again, this has all got to do with the math that we did earlier. Because each of these blocks here is a 132 pixels in height, the movement here has to be twice that amount. I'll click "Copy". At this point, you don't want to make any additional changes to your design unless you're prepared to go and do all the copying again. Moving any of these shapes would require you to copy them down to here. You could change these because they are not duplicates of each other except for the ones that are over the border here. Now we're ready to create our Bounding Box and create our pattern and we'll do that in the next video. 4. Pt 3 Create the pattern: We're now ready to create a bounding box that's going to define the area that contains our pattern swatch. The area is going to go from over here all the way across the artboard, down here to this point here and across. We've already determined that one of these pieces is a 132 pixels deep, so twice that amount is 264 pixels, that's going to be the size of our bounding box. I'll click once on the document, I'm going to make a rectangle, there's 1000 pixels by 264, and I'll click "OK". Now this bounding box needs to have no fill and no stroke, but I'm going to move it into position first. It doesn't really matter too much vertically exactly where it goes, but it must be within the area defined by these top and bottom sets of curved lines, so you couldn't put it down here, for example, because that would be outside that area but it can be offset a little bit here, it really doesn't matter. It doesn't need to be aligned up against the left-hand side of the artboard however, so you will want to go to your Align option to just make sure that Align to Artboard is selected and make sure that it's lined perfectly to the edge of the artboard. With it selected, you're going to give it no fill and no stroke. As it's a bounding box, it also needs to appear behind everything on this artboard, needs to be behind all of these pattern pieces, or it won't be treated as a bounding box. The quickest way to get it to the back of everything is to select it and choose Object, Arrange, Send to Back, and that sends it right to the very back here. Now we'll select everything on the artboard, I open up the Swatches panel and just drag and drop our new patterns swatch into the Swatches panel. I'm going to create a second artboard her, so I'm going to click away from the first artboard, click the artboard tool, and I'm just going to drag out a second artboard. The second artboard is exactly the same size as the first, I'll create a rectangle that is the size of this artboard. I'm going to use the Align tool to center it on the artboard. I'll bring the fill to the foreground, target the fill, and now I can click to fill the artboard and that rectangle with my pattern. Now I've got fracture lines in my pattern, that's not unusual in Illustrator. There are a couple of things that you can do to get rid of these fracture lines, and one of them is to try and rescale your pattern with Object, Transform, Scale. I'll turn Transform Objects off, going to reset this to a 100 percent. I'm just going to decrease it a little bit and see if just one or two percent is sufficient to get rid of those fracture lines, those faint white hair lines. Now, if the fracture lines don't disappear and if they always appear in the exact same place, then they're not fracture lines, they're problems in your pattern. But because these disappeared, it means that there are an Illustrator problem, not a pattern swatch problem. We still need to fix it because they are going to appear anywhere where you use this rectangle that's filled with the pattern. Another option you have for getting rid of those fracture lines is to change your Illustrator preferences. You can do that by choosing Edit and then Preferences and then General and deselect Anti-aliased Artwork and click "OK". Now your artwork is going to end up with some pretty hairy edges here, but generally that will solve the problem. On a Mac you would be choosing Illustrator Preferences to get to that dialogue. Now, I don't need to do that with mine because it seems like my fracture lines have pretty much disappeared here. Now at this point, if you see things in your pattern that you don't like, you can go back and make changes to it. I'm not really happy with this dots here, so I'm going to get rid of this set. I'm going to move things around just a little bit, what I have to be careful about is that I copy my design here once I've finished moving things around. The easiest way to solve this for me is to find these lines, and they're here in the Layers palette down here. I'm going to lock them so they don't move, which is going to allow me to select these elements in here and delete them because they're no longer valid for my pattern. Now I have to select these elements up here and go and do my copy again, so I'll choose Object, Transform, Move. I don't want to move them horizontally, so press Zero for horizontal, I want to move them 264 pixels vertically, make sure it's going in a minus 90 degrees direction, click "Copy". Now, this is a good pattern again. I'm going to unlock my lines, it looks like I've lost my no fill no stroke rectangle, so let's go and put that back. Now I'm going to select off everything on this artboard including my no fill no stroke rectangle. I'll drag this into the Swatches panel. If I add the Alto Option key, I can drop this over the original pattern pace, which is going to replace that pattern inside my rectangle, so this is a nicer version of the pattern I'm thinking. Now because we use global colors, we can recolor this pattern swatch by just double clicking on a global color and making changes to it. Because global colors have been used, it's going to change inside the pattern in use as well as inside the pattern design, so I might want to make a second pattern by recoloring it this way. It's also possible to recolor this pattern here by selecting this shape and clicking the Recolor option, check to make sure that there are arrows against each of these colors and then go to the Edit dialogue. Make sure that this is unlocked and you can now drag these color points around to a new position to recolor your artwork. When you get a design that you like, click here on the New Color Group and click "OK". You'll find that you get two patterns in your pattern Swatches, the original pattern that you created and now this new one that has the recoloring applied to it. 5. Pt 4 Project and Wrap up: Your project for this class will be to create a pattern of waves and dots similar to what we've done in this class, and to post an image of your completed pattern in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned things about making patterns in Illustrator, that you didn't know before you started. As you're watching this video, you will have been asked if you would have recommended this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learned something from it, do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes to the fact that you would recommend it to others, and secondly, write just a few words about 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. 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, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.